It’s around 10:00 p.m. when I get into bed to read. But for some reason, I’m still thinking about gender, about Hit and Miss, what it means to identify as male or female.
When we were in college together, Nick and I saw an old animated film supposedly made by Walt Disney and shown in the Student Center. I don’t recall if the short film, a ten-minute clip, was shown with other films or was part of a series. But I do remember that the film was black and white, very grainy, made perhaps in the 1920s, and featured two characters—a male mouse with such a long penis that he could skip rope with it, and a female mouse, who before she has intercourse with the male mouse, needs to empty her vagina. And as she does, out come old shoes, jewelry, plates, and cups, a car tire—an endless assortment of junk. The male mouse, of course, can’t enter her until she’s emptied.
The archetypical quality of the clip—the male’s exaggerated organ, so long that it facilitates and prohibits movement—becomes mythic and the defining feature to which the male self is subservient. For the female, the vagina becomes the endless repository, the well of self, holder of all things, literal and metaphorical. The vagina is subversive, mysterious, object of fascination, holder of secrets, source of power.
I pick up Anna Karenina, the novel I’m reading, and think about Anna’s longing for romance. What part does gender play in that? Is romance both giving and receiving equally for men and women? Or are women receiving more than giving—an acting out of our biology?
k
I awake with my book still open on the bed and my bedside light still on. I check the clock, but the illuminated numbers don’t register. It’s late Thursday before midnight or early Friday morning. I close the book, careful to place a bookmark between its pages, switch off the light, and fall into a dream—or more accurately, a memory of a dream—where I’m a young girl swimming at Rockaway Beach.
The orange sun illuminates the lower sky and bleeds into the Atlantic. The horizon has surrendered to its magnet and is yanking the sun to some impossible, invisible place. Someone is calling to me, and as I raise my head, I see my mother on the beach sweep her arm toward me, gesturing to get out of the water. I will ride the next wave closer to shore, then the next one, and the next one, until I land on the beach. I duck beneath the approaching foam crest and feel myself forced forward among seaweed and salt. The water is warm, but as I break through the surface into air, I’m cold, very cold.
My bed is wet. I’ve had a dream. I’m in Queens, it’s the middle of the night, and Dennis is snoring in his bed, against the opposite wall. He’s a mouth-breather with a deviated septum, so when he tries to breathe through his nose, he makes an awful sound. The cold wet I feel is urine; my bed is soaked.
I get up quietly, feel my tears come. I’m too old to pee my bed. I enter my parents’ dark room and go over to my father’s side of the bed. “Daddy,” I whisper, shaking him gently. He turns toward me, opens his eyes. Everything rests in softest shadow, but for a streak of slanted streetlight entering through the window and marking the wood floor near my mother’s bedside.
“What do you need, sweetie? My father’s voice is thick, smooth.
“I’m wet,” I say. “I need help.”
My father nods and swings into action. Covers off, feet on the floor, he wears only his boxer shorts. We walk from the room into Dennis’s and my shared bedroom. My father goes to my bed, lifts off all the wet linen and the blanket—which is dry. He puts the blanket on our nearby toy-chest and balls up the wet sheet and stuffs it into the large hamper in our bedroom closet. Next, he opens my dresser drawer and pulls out a fresh nightgown. He lifts off my old nightgown, and, while my arms are still raised, lowers the fresh new one over me. It smells good. I feel soft, dry, comfortable.
Standing by the toy-chest, I feel my pink winter quilt, grateful that it isn’t wet. In the hall, my father turns on a light and finds fresh sheets. He also finds a waterproof liner—not a sheet exactly, but it’s a rubbery plastic thing, covered in flannel—that he’s used before.
I wait on the side as he makes up my bed. He says nothing, but he’s not full of judgment. He won’t punish me, tell me that I’m a bad girl, or that I’m too old for such accidents. His motions are generous, kind. There’s no sharpness, no incriminating shame or subtext to the way he tucks in the sheet corners or opens the closet. Only the soft shadows of my father’s gentle love.
“I was swimming at the beach,” I whisper, standing by him. “In a dream.”
My father lifts me onto the cool, dry bed. He’s placed the rubber sheet beneath the fresh cotton one.
“At first, the water was warm, but then Mommy called me, and it happened.”
He kisses my forehead. His lips are warm. “Go back to sleep, sweetie. I love you.”
I wrap my grateful arms around his neck, put my cheek against his scratchy cheek. “I love you too, Daddy.”
In bed after my father leaves, I try to stay awake because every time I close my eyes, I’m swimming at Rockaway Beach. I slip from my lovely bed, the rubber sheet feeling a little stiff, and pad barefoot, quietly to the bathroom, to sit on the toilet to pee. Which I do, and then close the door before I flush. In bed again, I try to have a different dream, but the ocean persists.
I pray to God to keep me dry. If Dennis knows that I have peed my bed, he’ll tease me until I cry. My father, I know, will tell my mother not to reprimand me, so it is only Dennis I must worry about.
I sit up in bed, watching the shadow animals on the wall as each passing car on Francis Lewis Boulevard throws shapes against it. They look prehistoric, large crane-necked creatures with huge eyes. They move across the wall, then disappear. I count them, give them names like Jekyll, Star-Face, Mister Monster…
By morning, I’m asleep. It’s Saturday. Dennis has rolled the portable TV on its cart from our parents’ room into our room. He’s set it up by his bed, and the sound is very low.
“Can I watch, too?” I ask, coming awake.
Dennis smiles, pats his bed. I wrap my pink quilt around me, carefully getting up from my bed so as not to crinkle the rubber sheet, and join Dennis. We sit together, backs against the wall, and watch the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
k
Morning. Friday. As the memory of my dream starts to fade, I rise, do my morning routine, and go upstairs to my study to write. My dream has taken me to a creative place.
Turning on Morning Edition in the bedroom, mostly for some noise in the silent house, I’m now writing about my dream—enjoying myself, fingers tapping out words, the screen filling with gray-black, simple-bodied Calibri.
Then the phone rings. I turn around to see my screen: Mom; I think of not taking the call, letting her leave a message, postponing whatever bad news awaits me. This call will ruin my day, I think selfishly but then answer.
“Hey, Mom. Good morning. What’s up?”
“Caught you at a bad time?” she asks, but this courtesy, I recognize, will likely be the preamble for another request for money.
“Writing, Mom. Just working on stuff.” I hit Control Save and lean back in my chair, no longer looking at the screen but instead out the window, blinds open, to see the top of our Bradford Pear, a tree we planted as a family when the boys were small.
I drift back. We’d driven Jethro, our large Chevy van, to a commercial nursery in Angier, NC, about forty-five minutes up Ramsey Street, and put this and a second Bradford Pear sapling into the back on a sky-blue tarp. Our two boys sang old Beatles songs on the way home.
“You want me to call you later?” My mother asks. And I realize my silence.
“No,” I say, “it’s okay. We can talk. What’s up?”
“Long story, Rae,” my mom begins and pauses.
I don’t encourage her; a few seconds follow, perfectly timed for a drag on the cigarette she no longer smokes.
“Dennis,” she begins, pauses again. “He went back for his post-op check-up, and they found that his lungs weren’t clear. Blood clots—in his lungs. They went in again, had to. I almost can’t take it. But it was a procedure rather than surgery. And the good news is that they got them out. Dennis is okay. Recovering at home. On new medication.” Pause yet again. I look at the computer screen, distracting myself by looking at the subject, verb, prepositional phrases, and other grammatical elements of the last sentence on the screen.
“You there?” my mother asks.
“Of course.”
“I thought I lost you. Dropped call. Anyway, you know that I asked you for money last time, Rae?”
“I remember, Mom.”
“Well, it wasn’t enough. I hate to ask this. You know I do.”
I don’t jump in but rather check out a sentence I’ve typed on the screen: There the boy slept, unconscious of the scene around him. “There” is used as an adverb. It can never be the subject of the sentence. I don’t like the sentence and tell myself I’ll have to revise it. It puts me a bad mood, in fact, suggesting other bad sentences that will need revision.
I get up and begin pacing—first my study, then into the hall to Cal’s old bedroom, to Will’s old bedroom, and into the master. Jake is on the rug, open-eyed, alert, but not moving.
“I need $500, Rae. We have no money for food, gas. Could you lend us that? Aunt Lena—I’ve spoken with her—has her own problems. I have no one, no one to ask. I didn’t want to make this call, Rae. But I have no one.”
“I don’t have that kind of money, Mom. I can’t help.” This is what falls from my mouth. Two simple sentences: subject-verb, with a contracted verb and the adverb “not” used twice. Both sentences are lies.
I’ve taken off my slippers, and I’m doing a sort of slow Buddhist-style walking meditation, painstakingly planting each foot—toes, balls of the feet, arches, heel—on the hardwood floor. My walk is like a sentence, I think.
“But I can’t get to work, Rae. You don’t understand. I need to buy food and gas to get to work.”
I sigh. And quickly in that single breath, relent. “Mom,” I say, “I’ll wire you $200. You don’t have to pay me back. But that’s it.”
“Make it $300; I’ll pay it back,” my mother’s voice insists.
“No,” I say firmly. “$200. No loan. I’ll get dressed, go to Western Union. The same deal as last time, yes? Any location in Tamarac—they’ll call when the money arrives, yes?”
Silence for a moment. I hear my mother thinking, then, “Thank you. If it’s all you can afford. Thanks, Rae. I appreciate your help.”
I take a very slow step and struggle to find my balance. “Call me in two hours if you don’t receive the money.”
“Okay, Rae. I’m sure I’ll get the money, and yes, we’ll speak again soon. You know I love you. Very much. I always appreciate your help. We all do.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” I slow-walk back to my laptop, save without reading over what I’ve written, and close down the machine. I’m done writing for now. I go to the bathroom for a quick shower, then dress. In a few minutes, I’m backing Ruby out of the driveway, off to the Western Union counter.
Returning within a half-hour—no glitches, money taken off my debit card, forms completed in triplicate, receipt in hand—I realize that I’m pretty beat, even though it’s still early. I unlock the front door, Jake greets me, and we both go out into the sunroom, where I collapse on the couch. Jake sprawls on the carpeted floor by me; the morning is cool, but already the day’s heat is beginning to intrude. I feel my heart race, a pressure, a tightness in my chest, a shortness of breath. I close my eyes, expecting tears, but nothing comes.
I think of my mother’s suffering, her desperation. Why didn’t I give her the entire $500? Why did I lie? Yet why did I give her anything when I’d promised myself never again to give her money? I feel horrible, guilty, and there’s no one to talk to. So, I just sit.