HUMOR
Going back to school happened the same way every year. Two weeks before the end of summer vacation, Mom would take me shopping for new clothes and a new pair of shoes, and then, on the first day, I’d make an initial assessment of the classroom in an attempt to get the lay of the land. In Mr. Samuels’s class, our desks were arranged in six-person clusters, like cans of soda.
Fifth grade was the year I started squinting at the chalkboard and getting headaches after school—like a white-hot ball stuck behind my eyes that sent me to my bed for hours at a time. The glasses I was eventually prescribed solved both problems, a pair with wire frames and plastic nose pads that kept me from having to push them up continually.
Fifth grade was also the year of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The TellTale Heart” and Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf, of O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” We configured ourselves, cross-legged, into a big oval on the rug at the head of the classroom and answered Mr. Samuels’s questions about the previous night’s reading. Sometimes, we’d take turns reading passages aloud, so the story reached us as a chorus of familiar voices.
From the moment I saw it, sitting toward the bottom of a page in our reader, I couldn’t help but memorize a poem whose meter had worked upon me quickly and in a way I didn’t quite yet understand. Its rhyme scheme cemented, for me, a new sense of inevitability, allowing the lines to slip easily into my ear and stay there:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
Every now and then, when I was thinking about something altogether different, the first stanza of this poem, by Emily Dickinson, would pop into the front of my mind, drawing me into mischievous collusion with the speaker: Then there’s a pair of us! / Don’t tell! I liked the sense of privacy the poem seemed to urge, as if there is some part of everyone—like the imagination, the spirit, or whatever it is that gravitates toward the language of poetry—worth protecting from the world. It made me feel special, privy to magic, as if whoever was speaking had sought me out, discerning an affinity.
When I came across The Diaries of Adam and Eve, a slim paperback with Mark Twain’s photo on the cover, I spent most of an afternoon in my bedroom reading. It was funny. I laughed in several places (mostly Adam’s complaints about Eve), but in a great many others (moments where Eve’s beautiful, childlike explanations of the world emerge), I felt a satisfaction that surpassed laughter. I loved that Twain gave the characters of Adam and Eve such modern sensibilities; I was amused by the light in which each saw the other. In a way that was completely distinct from Dickinson, Twain had also led me into a realm that felt deeply private and yet inhabited by someone with whom I recognized instant kinship. Was it words that made such a thing happen or the person behind the words? I didn’t know much about either writer, but it wasn’t at all a curiosity about them as people that their work had awakened in me. Rather, I wanted to become a part of the thing Twain and Dickinson had found a way of tapping into. Like them, I wanted to be able to say things that were moving and funny and true—things so original that they might even keep on being said and being heard.
The first thing I wrote in the wake of that feeling was a poem called “Humor.” It was short and deliberately unfunny, what I later learned to call a persona poem, in which humor itself was speaking. As far as I was concerned, what it had to say was no laughing matter. After all, humor was what helped us get through the parts of life that hurt, something we ought to revere, respect. I hadn’t known I felt that way until my own poem—the first one I’d ever written that wasn’t just a silly singsongy rhyme—showed me that I did, and that made me feel wise, as if my message was important for all of mankind. The poem ended with a high-handed directive to the reader: Treat me with respect, for I shall do you good / in years to come. I put down my pencil, satisfied with what I had just written. Sensing that the poem marked a personal milestone, I decided to place it inside the front cover of an oversized illustrated Bible (another of Mrs. Nussbaum’s gifts to me) for safekeeping. Thinking again, I pulled it back out and wrote out a second copy, one I could bring with me to school the next day.
“Hmm,” said Mr. Samuels when he read “Humor,” adding that he found it “very interesting.” He told me I should keep writing poems. That little nod of encouragement bolstered my own sense of having found the weight of my talent. Often after school, I’d finish my homework and then work on filling the pages of an old green stenographer’s notebook with poems, certain that what guided me was nothing short of genuine Calling. Sometimes, I sat still, gaze tilted up toward the ceiling as if awaiting an audible voice. I was one of them, I told myself. A writer. Then there’s a pair of us! / Don’t tell!
My ease in that interior realm arrived just in time to offset some of the less-welcome external changes that had crept upon me. Jean, now twenty-three, had moved back home from Sacramento, where she’d been in college. She’d never fully warmed to life away from our mother. Her return was a thrill for me, and I think it was a relief for her. It brought her back into the habit of soaking up Mom’s company, talking and laughing like friends instead of like mother and child. I liked being caught up in their closeness. One evening, when the three of us sat talking in the family room after dinner, I demonstrated how another girl and I had learned to hold our forearms close to our chests in order not to bounce too much while we ran. It was shortly afterward that the three of us went to J.C. Penney and picked out several white training bras, packaged in discreet cardboard boxes, like Old Maid cards or individual-sized portions of breakfast cereal.
In the fitting room, Jean showed me how to put the bra on. “Hook it in the front, then spin it around and put your arms through the straps,” she told me. She added that eventually I might need to lean over and “situate” myself fully into the cups. That last bit of advice didn’t make much difference just then, but I filed it away for future reference.
The bras did make a difference at school. I could run around again without feeling conspicuous. Before, I’d felt envious of the girls who still had flat chests and didn’t have to think about what was going on up top while they jumped rope or ran laps during PE, but the bras reined in both my chest and my envy. Apart from noticing which girls were still wearing undershirts and which had followed suit in “taking the first step into womanhood,” as Jean had said with mock decorum, my concern over breasts (my own and everyone else’s) faded.
One morning before school, Mom regarded me differently than usual, sizing me up and then nodding to herself. Just the two of us were at home. Jean was already on her way to Walnut Creek, where she worked in the human resources division of a bank.
“Remind me that I need to talk to you about something tonight,” Mom said.
I froze. I had an idea of what she might be about to tell me—I’d picked up bits and pieces here and there and had not liked the sound of them—and all morning I found myself bowled over by a leaden dread. The Talk. What else could it have been?
From what I’d already heard, The Talk spelled out a whole series of disturbing but necessary actions that, eventually, led to babies being born. It sickened me to think of men and women—my parents and neighbors and teachers—allowing themselves to do such things to one another. Sometimes, during early-morning band practice in the auditorium, I’d be playing along contentedly enough with the other woodwinds when the thought of it would surprise me. Suddenly, the reed in my mouth seemed to go all fleshy, and I’d find myself thinking, Is this what it’s like? And then, because I knew I ought not to be thinking such things let alone trying to imagine how they felt, I got embarrassed and terrified that one day I’d be a woman with no choice but to want to do such things with some man. That was the worst of it. The fact that one day I would likely choose to do a thing like that. It made me feel like I didn’t know myself at all.
During a several-measure rest in the theme song to Superman, I whispered to my friend Kira what my mom had said. “Just don’t bring it up again,” she suggested. “Forget to remind her.”
I didn’t bring it up. Not that night or the next morning, and neither did my mother. We went on like that for the better part of a week, before she finally sat down with me at the table. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that if you should start to bleed”—at that point, she made it clear that she meant down there—“sometime in the next few months or in the next year, you shouldn’t be worried.”
She explained the ins and outs of menstruation, which I’d mostly heard about already (I had, after all, read through that contraband copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in the second grade), but the thought of all that going on inside my body was another matter. Detecting the horror in my eyes, Mom tried to offer assurance: “You aren’t the first person it’ll happen to, and you surely won’t be the last.” I did find a certain balm in the sentiment.
Kira was relieved for me. She also felt pity, since the worst part of The Talk still loomed out there in the distance, inevitable as the earthquake that we’d grown up hearing would either make California an island or send it toppling into the sea.
At Christmastime, Mom enlisted Conrad to bring home some of his premed anatomy books and take me through the ins and outs of human reproduction the way a doctor would. In all the photos, the men and women stood with their arms at their sides and their palms facing the camera just beside their hips, as if their bodies were prizes being demonstrated to game show contestants. It was funny. When I felt myself getting flushed or embarrassed, I focused on the subjects’ hands, and it relaxed me.
We sat on two chairs next to the sliding glass door in the family room. Outside, it was sunny and cool but not cold, a bright California December morning, with dewdrops still on the grass and trees that clung to their leaves. Conrad did a good job of explaining how the sperm and egg meet without eliciting too much embarrassment. But he told me more than I wanted to know about a thing called foreplay.
“Why would anyone want to do that?” I asked, no longer able to suppress the question.
He thought a moment. Out of discomfort, I focused on the collar of his polo shirt sticking up out of the neck of a wool sweater. I stared until the tiny loops of thread woven together to make the fabric of the shirt came into focus.
He paused, his large eyes widening. He must not have been taught the answer to that question in medical school. Then he shrugged his shoulders and, nodding his head only slightly, answered, “Because it feels…really good.”
After that, the lesson was over.
But a few afternoons later, while Mom and I were driving down Cherry Glen Road on our way back from the grocery store, she asked, “Did you understand everything from your talk with Conrad?”
There was tall wheat-colored grass on either side of the road, and cows grazed in oblivious clusters behind a low barbed wire fence that stretched on for miles.
“Yes.” The old anxiety returned.
Doing her part to pick up from where the biological facts left off, she told me that God created sex as a gift to mankind. She told me that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin, which meant she had never had sex, and that she was chosen by God to be Jesus’s mother precisely because she was pure.
“Yes.” I’d heard of the Virgin Birth all my life, but this was the first time the phrase succeeded in disconcerting me.
“And do you know what it means to be able to wear white on your wedding day?”
“No.”
“It means you are pure,” she told me, adding that she hoped I’d be able to wear white when that day came.
She looked away from the road to lock eyes with me and smiled. I smiled back uncomfortably. I was sure my mother believed what she was saying. I knew she believed convincing me of this might ensure that life would reserve good things for me. But there was something with us in the car that hadn’t been there just a few turns ago. The backseat was full of groceries for the holiday meal. A turkey and a ham. Pecans and lemons and jars of mincemeat for pies. Green beans and collard greens. Dozens of eggs and bacon and loaves of bread. Cardboard cylinders of orange juice concentrate. All the things we’d gobble up in our togetherness as a family. I stared into my lap, letting the road outside fade into the periphery. I could tell where we were by the different stops and turns the car made. It was lunchtime. There were potato chips in one of the bags, and sandwich fixings, but I wasn’t hungry. And I had no appetite that I knew of for sex, though if Conrad was as credible as I believed him to be, I understood that my body would eventually give me no choice but to develop one.
As the pasture gave way to houses and lawns, it dawned on me that there might come a time when, to protect my mother, I would learn to keep some things secret.
One February morning during band practice, I developed a discomfort in my stomach so excruciating I had to put away my instrument and lie down on some of the vacant chairs in the woodwinds section. I stopped short of going to the nurse because I hadn’t gotten sick at school since third grade, and I was certain whatever the feeling was would soon pass. It felt digestive, like I must have eaten some morsel of food that was about to send me rushing to the bathroom, but the urge didn’t come. When the bell rang, I walked to class, not feeling great, but hopeful that the worst of it was over.
In Mr. Samuels’s classroom, seated in our circle on the big rug beneath the chalkboard for reading, I felt noticeably better. My main concern was whether the rug itself was clean, because I was wearing a brand-new pair of white corduroy pants. I held my book in my lap and hoped for the best, and soon enough, I was lost in our conversation about the assigned reading, so much so that when the pain came back, it caught me off guard. And this time, it was stronger, a surge in my lower abdomen that felt as if something was trying to take root there.
“May I go to the bathroom?” I asked, thinking I could escape the feeling by fleeing the room.
The walk down the corridor felt ceaseless. I hugged myself, instinctively clenching my knees together. I was sure that when I got to the bathroom, I’d sit down and soon enough whatever had tied me up in knots would be gone. Only, when I got there, I didn’t have the wherewithal even to unfasten my pants or to sit in the stall or to do anything but lean over the sink for a moment and think. Was I sweating? I faced myself in the mirror trying to discern who this new person was and what her body wanted from her. From the stalls behind me came the sound of some other girl straining to relieve herself. Soon enough, she went silent, and the smell that filled the room chased me back into the hall.
The feeling came and went in waves. Sometimes I forgot to notice it. I played hopscotch and Chinese jump rope at recess with the other girls, distracting myself, hoping that if I ignored whatever it was, it might consent to go away, but I did feel observed in a new way, as if the other kids were studying me differently. Even Mr. Samuels seemed to sense something about me, and whatever it was caused him to smile—or was it blush?
At home, the first thing I did was head to the bathroom, thinking to get to the bottom of the situation once and for all. When I finally did unfasten my pants and pull them down, the dark stain that had covered the entire inside of my pants and seeped through to the other side, like a new continent, shocked me. I was mortified. Everyone else must have thought I knew.
My mother took the pants and managed to get them clean. “You’ll need to remember this in the future,” she told me. “You can get bloodstains out of your clothing with cold water and salt. Don’t use hot; that will set the stain and it will never come out.”
“How does it feel?” my friend Terry asked me the next day at school. The way she asked confirmed my suspicion that the arrival of my period had become a scrap of gossip.
“Gross,” I told her. And then, deciding I might as well try to convince her that it had caught me unawares, “I had no idea what was happening until I got home.”
Fifth grade was the year when the first promised changes began to arrive, like relatives from an old country. They brought secrets. The worry they carried was the worst kind, based as it was on evidence, history. Alone in my body, I found myself at the center of a bewildering crowd. There was the self I felt like, which was different from the self others saw. And, thanks to changes my body had wrought, there was the self I had been made to expect, which was different, still, another transitory state that would last only as long as it lasted. There was the self my mother had urged me to embrace, in a spotless white dress for the world to see. And the potential self to which that virginal bride stood in contrast: the self I’d be when, according to Conrad, my body began to desire what it didn’t yet know how to desire; the self that might choose to act upon what it wanted, then try to hide it. Is the self that is hidden different from the self that hides? What about the one sequestered in the imagination, no less real for lacking form? How many was I? How many were here for good, and how many were merely passing through?
My head started to feel like a Volkswagen Beetle into which had been crammed a hundred clowns. That must have been part of it, too: staring life down until it teaches you to laugh.
I could feel myself sliding over to the far side of a line, standing beside my mother and sisters, where before I’d only been facing them from a distance. My mother had taught Jean and Wanda to help her in the kitchen, something she believed a woman ought to know how to do, and sometimes when they did, they’d talk to one another not like mother and daughters but like peers. More and more, I was allowed to hear and know these things, too.
There was the story of an older Japanese man living in Fairfield with his daughter and her husband. My mother saw him almost every day on her daily morning walk. They greeted one another with smiles or waved from across the street. But one evening, with a troubled face, Mom told Jean and me that just that morning the old man had reached out and squeezed one of her breasts as they passed one another. Mom was upset. She already carried the walking stick my father had made for her, to scare away the neighborhood dogs that would sometimes appear from out of nowhere, defending what they viewed as their territory Was she now supposed to raise it against an old man? Should she change her walking route? The man lived in our neighborhood. How could she realistically avoid him? Hearing her dilemma, I knew I was no longer a child. I understood the physical things a person must attend to, guard against, and protect from others when that person is a woman.
Mom did see the old man again on other of her walks—walks where he had waved and smiled broadly, even stepped in close and reached out as if to grab at her again, though she knew by then to cross her arms over her chest and hurry past. One day, weeks later and quite reluctantly, she knocked on the old man’s door and, without being asked in, told his daughter what had been going on.
The daughter grew distressed. “Wait here,” she’d told my mother. Then she disappeared from the doorway and returned with the old man, speaking to him in Japanese. He had shaken his head, looking surprised, staring at my mother as though she were crazy, as though he’d never seen her before.
“Tell him I’d rather not have to go to the police,” Mom had said.
At word of the police the woman grew pleading. “Papa-san does not even know what ‘breast’ means! Please, please don’t call the police!”
“Tell him,” my mother had repeated.
The woman turned to her father and said something else in Japanese, and the old man nodded and dropped his gaze to the floor. Then, quickly, he had looked up at my mother with an expression she interpreted to mean, Okay, you win.
“He won’t bother you,” the daughter had said right before closing the door.
After that, when Mom saw Papa-san on walks, he stared straight ahead, though more than once she caught him shooting her an angry sidelong expression that told her he was upset at having been ratted out.
Hearing the resolution to my mother’s story, I was reminded once again that I was no longer a child; again, I understood the choices a person must weigh in her mind and live with when that person is a woman.
Outside, everything seemed full. The hills were still that barren straw brown, but so much else was heavy with blossoms, birds, and butterflies—an abundance so exuberant and, I understood for the first time, so female, converged upon by a thousand demands. Some evenings, when the sky was still shimmering with that nearly invincible spring light, we’d sit up in the kitchen and joke together, the women in the family, about things only women understand.