CHAPTER NINE
Perfectly Empty
The enemas began as so many events in our household did, with my father’s body. If mechanical objects were prone to breakage, and rendered untrustworthy ever afterward for having revealed their true propensity for ruin, how much more so the body. The body—an indecipherable trickster whose recovery from even the slightest injury could never be assumed.
So Ira was not surprised when he did not recover from what should have been a temporary gastrointestinal affliction, and found himself with what he described as a “paralyzed gut.” For most of my childhood, my father had relieved himself with ease, often with the bathroom door open so he could converse about the morning newspaper’s account of the state of the world. But now he struggled to produce and could not. This was no ordinary case of constipation, Ira said. His gut was dead. Dead. Part of your body could be dead even while you were still living, death beginning its stealthy invasion, organ by organ, piece by piece.
Ira spun theories of causation. Like any good scientist, he could hold competing hypotheses in his mind. Unlike a scientist, Ira felt no need to resolve the contradictions. He traced his illness to a foray into Mexico with my cousin Stewart, who had come to visit. Stewart found his uncle Ira a fearless flaunter of convention, master orchestrator of fun—fun being something his immediate family did not go out of their way to have. To live up to this reputation, Ira—though terrified of the food, the water, the air, the people (and the germs they carried)—took Stewart over the border to Tijuana, where they attended a bullfight, drank bottled Coke, and used a public restroom.
A week later, Ira lay on the couch, holding his abdomen, beset by diarrhea, fevered and writhing and regretting. I sat at his feet, vigilant.
“It must have been the Coke,” he said. “They must have made it with water right out of the tap. Swimming with bacteria.” One finger stroked his eyebrow as he mentally revisited each stop on their tour. “The ticket taker at the bullfight had probably wiped his ass with his hand. He had a look on his face like a man who had just wiped his ass with his hand.” I wondered: how exactly did a man who had just wiped his ass with his hand look?
The doctor prescribed a bowel relaxant to stop the diarrhea. It abated, but normal bowel function did not resume. Ira collected his stool in a foil pie pan, and the doctors cultured it. They found no parasites. They X-rayed his intestinal tract after he drank a tall glass of chalky gray barium; they gave him barium enemas to visualize the other end; they stuck a scope inside his colon. They found no explanation for his problem but could not cure it either. He began to rely on daily enemas administered by my mother to move his bowels.
His alternate theory of causation revolved around a Sunday afternoon when Uncle Nathan—my father’s brother—and his family had come to visit. I was excited to see my first cousin Joey. We spoke nearly every day on the phone, but that wasn’t the same as being together. When he came over, we’d retreat to my room and only emerge for dinner. As we waited for their arrival, Ira lay on the living room couch catching a brief anticipatory nap. Meanwhile, my mother asked Paul to dust the furniture. Eager to please her, he knelt by the cocktail table in front of the sofa, armed with a can of Pledge. As soon as the fumes entered my father’s olfactory awareness, he rose up coughing and spewing phlegm. Once he caught his breath, shouting ensued.
“You sprayed that down my throat. Are you trying to kill me?”
“I didn’t spray it down your throat. I sprayed it on the table.”
“You know my system can’t tolerate sprays like that.”
“It was a mile away from you. Mom told me to do it. Mom!” Paul screamed. “Tell him I was just doing what you asked.”
“I did ask him to dust, Ira. I’m sure the spray was nowhere near you.”
I stood on the sidelines, heart pounding, watching.
“He sprayed it deliberately into my throat. I can taste it. You think it’s okay for a son to torture his father. You encourage his sabotage.”
My father began to hack again in an attempt to bring up the Pledge. My mother tried to move him out of the room.
“Let’s go wash out your mouth,” she said.
“What’s wrong with you, Paul,” I said. “Why did you try to hurt my daddy.” My parents were halfway out of the room when Paul started to shout.
“Your daddy, your daddy. You can have him. He’s probably not even my real father. Do you hear me, Ira? Uncle Nathan is probably my father. Let’s ask him when he gets here. Where do you think I got my blue eyes, Ira? And my light-colored hair? Do I look like your son, Ira? Isn’t that the truth, Eva? Huh? Huh? Tell him you shtupped Nathan. Tell him Uncle Nathan is a real man with real hands, and a real dick to go with them.”
“Paul, you know that’s ridiculous,” my mother said. “Why do you want to bait your father this way?” Paul ignored her.
“Have you seen how she looks at him, Ira? She likes him better than you, just like your own mother does.”
“Paul, stop. Just stop,” my mother said.
Ira threw my mother off him and lunged for Paul. “You goddamned fairy, mother-loving bastard. Why don’t you go home with Nathan and see if he treats you any better? Wait’ll he takes his belt to you. Somebody should have taken their belt to you a long time ago. Wait’ll he takes out his gun.”
Paul put his elbow up in defense, and then retreated again behind my mother.
“Stop!” she shouted at the top of her lungs and began to sob. Everyone froze. I felt dizzy and nauseous.
“A little Pledge isn’t going to hurt you, Ira. Let’s just go wash out your mouth,” she said.
“You’re refusing to see that your son did this on purpose to make me sick.”
“Maybe I should have,” Paul said.
“You better sleep with one eye open,” Ira said.
The doorbell rang.
“You better too,” Paul said.
Nathan and his family’s arrival curtailed the fight. I grabbed Joey, and we made it to my room and slammed the door.
When Ira wasn’t blaming the ticket taker in Mexico, or Stewart for seducing him into going, or himself for giving in to impulse, or his own thirst for making him drink the Coke, he would be blaming Paul and saying that the Pledge in his system led to the freezing of his bowel.
Constipation was not an entirely foreign visitor to our doorstep. It had plagued my grandmother Rebecca, Ira’s mother, all her life. Open a cupboard in her house, and boxes of prunes, bottles of milk of magnesia, and giant canisters of Metamucil would tumble out. And I suffered too, intermittently, perhaps having inherited my grandmother’s problem, and also having been born with an abnormally small, tight rectum that no amount of manual stretching from our pediatrician had opened.
Though no one ever determined that my father’s illness had resulted from a contagious agent, I caught what he had. Or so he asserted. And so I believed. Within weeks of his return from Mexico, I developed a similar illness with a spiking fever, searing diarrhea, and abdominal cramps so bad they made me crawl across the floor, unable to stand up. The diarrhea and fever persisted for more than a week, and then constipation arrived in their place. Intractable constipation, as if nothing inside would ever move again. I heard my father’s words: frozen, paralyzed, dead. Death had made its way into my body.
How much of the problem was physical and how much psychological? After years of consulting experts, two rectal surgeries, and continued struggle with the problem, I’ll never know the answer to that question, or even if that distinction has any meaning. Perhaps I had channeled into one organ all my father’s free-floating anxiety and negative energy devoted to the body. All my own conflict over holding on like my mother, or letting go like my father. Only, now, the irony was that my father was the one who could not let go. Perhaps all his exhibitionistic displays of gorging and performing simply covered up a deeper rooted refusal to let go.
“Let your mother give you an enema,” my father said.
“It’s just to get you started,” Eva said.
And so a ritual began: in the dark of night, while other parents in our neighborhood had sex, while our neighbor Mrs. Finch prayed, and other children dreamed in the sanctity of their twin beds, my mother and father and I did this. There was something vaguely vampirish about our nocturnal activities, something incestuous about fluid flowing from the conduit of my mother, first up my father’s ass, and then up my own.
Every night, after my brothers went to bed, my mother gave my father and me each an enema. We had matching enema kits. White enamel cans, heavy red rubber tubing, pale yellow rectal tips. A giant shared jar of Vaseline.
Every night, in my too-pale pink bedroom, I lay on my side, on a towel, on my bed, my nightgown pulled up, my lower body naked, as my mother stood beside me, holding the can aloft. I looked away from the can, the tube, my mother’s face, and stared up at the dark outlines of the moths that had gotten trapped inside my overhead light fixture. I pretended that what was happening wasn’t. I pretended that what was happening to me had nothing to do with my father. Otherwise, it would feel intolerably incestuous.
My mother wore a long sheer nightgown and hoisted the heavy can up over her head. She shifted its weight from one arm to the other, and complained about how hard it was to hold it up, how late the hour, how tired she was. I felt the warm water rush in, meet an impediment, surge past it.
The longer the enemas went on, the more shameful they became, the more rules I developed about the surrounding ritual. Ira had to get his first. My brothers had to be asleep or feign sleep so they would not witness the act, could not hear the mortifying sound of all that water rushing out of me. I had to have a movie magazine to read in the bathroom. The first year I read about Liz Taylor stealing Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds, and Rock Hudson, the handsome bachelor who would not settle down with any one woman, and Suzanne Pleshette, the rising star!
My enema might begin at 11:00 p.m. or not until 1:00 a.m. if I was too anxious or upset or if Ira insisted on watching The Tonight Show first. Sometimes my mother would go to sleep, and I would fall asleep and then wake up panicked, realizing I hadn’t had an enema and would have to go to school the next day feeling plugged. I’d wake her, and she would refuse to get up and tell me to wait till the next day, and I would scream and cry and lock myself in her bathroom, her only sanctum, and pound on its door, and take her eyebrow pencil and draw ugly black streaks on her mirror. After my enema, filled with shame, I would clean her mirror until it shined.
Eleven p.m. on what should have been a school night for a fifth grader. I had stopped going to school, too exhausted and ashamed and devastated about what was happening to face my classmates. Ashamed that my body failed to perform even this most basic function, ashamed to be tied to my mother when other girls were achieving independence.
The school sent a tutor several times a week to teach me at home. Home tutors also came for Paul, who already had found attending high school in La Crescenta impossible. A few weeks after I stopped being able to move my bowels, my mother, who had advocated the enemas at first, now saw that the habit must not continue. She and I were in my bedroom with the door closed. She had made me get under the covers, and she sat at the foot of my bed. Against my protestations, she had turned out the overhead light and was speaking to me in her gentlest, quietest, most reasonable voice. Still no match for my father’s.
“Shut your eyes and go to sleep,” she said. “If you just wait, your body will get back to normal. Let’s see if you go to the bathroom tomorrow on your own.”
It had been two nights since I’d had an enema; my abdomen hurt with a solid ache at its center. I felt nauseous and panicky. When I shut my eyes I could feel the hard stool pushing against my rectum. I could see it. The line between feeling and seeing, in my head and in my body, in my father’s head or in mine, had gotten ever muddier.
“I’ll get impacted,” I said. “Daddy says I could get impacted.” Impaction and obstruction: the double-headed monster of my father’s intestinal horror tales.
“A child became so impacted they had to dig it out with a spoon,” he’d told me. Now I could imagine Dr. Hoffington, the rectal stretcher, coming at me with a giant spoon.
Outside the bedroom door, my father hovered, agitated.
“My stomach hurts,” I said. “How do you know I’ll ever go without an enema? I can feel how hard it already is in my bottom. It’s stuck. It’s already stuck in me. Daddy says my bowel is dead. It’s never going to come out on its own.”
“It’ll get better if you just wait,” my mother said.
I realized that I was at a crossroads, my well-being resting on which parent I chose to believe. She said I would go if I just waited, and he said that my bowel was permanently paralyzed. My mother’s “wait and see” felt perilously akin to her usual denial: Just pretend nothing bad is happening and it won’t be. Just be nice to the other children, and they’ll be nice back. But they weren’t. Just think pleasant thoughts, and the shot won’t hurt so much. But it did.
My mother’s frequent instruction to ignore my body had the paradoxical effect of driving me inward to focus on its every sensation. And that focus only increased the intensity of those sensations and sent me into an unbreakable feedback loop.
An earlier time in the bathroom, age four: Captive on the toilet. Eva on the rim of the bathtub across from me, Paul leaning against the white wicker hamper. All in the bathroom together, Eva and Paul on a mission to help me conquer my own rectum. I was too young to read, to distract myself, to fool myself into believing I was there for some other purpose. I could feel the stool in my rectum, but I couldn’t get it out. It seemed as if I had been sitting on the toilet for hours, sinking into the hole of the seat, the sides of the seat carving a sharp red ring around my bottom.
“It won’t come out,” I said. A familiar lament.
“Shhhh,” my mother said. “If you stop thinking about it, it will come out when it’s ready.” When my mother said “it” I pictured a “he.” My stool was a boy who wore shorts, a checked jacket, and a bowler hat. He was on his way out when his mother called him back; he’d forgotten his lunch. Or he needed to put on a different hat. The “he” inside me might have felt benign at first, but the lon ger I was stuck on the toilet, the more I felt as if we were at war. He was gaining power. The longer he stayed inside me, the bigger and harder and stronger he would get.
“Let’s play a game to get your mind off it,” my mother said. Getting your mind off anything would make whatever it was better, she believed. The mind dwelling on the body, rather than the body’s own defects, were what caused problems, she thought. If I were just not so intent on trying to go to the bathroom, it would magically slip out, she said, as if shit didn’t like being watched. But my father had taught me already that an unwatched body is apt to go astray.
“Let’s play, ‘I’m thinking of a color,’” my mother suggested. One of us had to think of a color found in the bathroom, and then the other two had to guess it. There was not a huge palette to choose from: the pink and maroon tile, the speckled linoleum floor, the silver-colored stainless steel wall heater, the colored inks on a newspaper on the counter nearby. And when I got really creative, I remembered the blue and yellow and green toothbrushes hanging near the sink. My mother let Paul in on her choice which I would have to guess by whispering the color she’d picked to him.
“Is it pink?” I said. They both shook their heads.
When it was his turn, Paul thought the funniest thing to do was to pick brown, the color of what we were playing “I’m thinking of a color” to avoid thinking about.
Back in the too-pale-pink bedroom, fifth grade, the hour approaching midnight. “I can’t stand it!” I said. “Give me an enema.” I was crying, working myself up into the state my mother called “hysterical,” sobbing and panicked, too anxious to stay in the bed, wanting out—of the bed, of the room, of my body. I jumped out of bed, eluded my mother’s grasp, opened the bedroom door, and ran smack into my father.
“Ev, you’ve got to help her out; just give her the enema. Her bowel is frozen like mine.”
Paul stood just behind him in the hall. “Those enemas can’t be good for her,” Paul said. “She’s going to curse you later for going along with this,” he said to my mother. “Take her out of this house, get her away from him, there’s got to be some other cure.”
My father glared. “This is none of your business,” he said. “Troublemaker!”
“Does this have to turn into a knock-down, drag-out? How can I work with her on this problem when everything turns into a fight?” my mother said. “Ira, why do you always make her more hysterical? Both of you, get out of here,” she screamed.
“Daddy,” I cried. “Help me!”
My mother gave me an enema. The stool was hard, unyielding. It would never have just come out on its own the next day. My father had been right. My mother could not be trusted. My body could not be trusted. Something irremediable had happened to it.
Soon the enemas had become a regular part of my life. I would try to remember what it felt like to have an uneventful bowel movement, and I couldn’t. I still can’t. In the morning I would try to forget what had happened the night before. I would tell myself that this was a temporary problem; we would find the right food, the right medicine, the miracle cure.
That day I would have a bowel movement on my own. That day . . . I heard an echo from the Torah, his name shall be one. That day all things would be made right again, that day, all that had been lost would be restored. “When the Mashiach comes . . .” Rebecca would begin a sentence and then describe a future when all the problems of our current life would magically be resolved. When the Messiah came, he would restore the movement in my bowel.
Other times, I would feel a sense of bleak finality, of deep sorrow at what I’d lost. One day I took my mother’s sewing shears and amputated my bangs at nearly the root. Some part of me needed to proclaim my grief with a visible mark on my body. My mother told me not to worry, that my hair would grow back. My hair complied and renewed itself. My bowel did not.
Though I might not have been able to put it in exactly these terms, I felt that I had gotten too close to Ira, had chosen him over my mother, and that this bodily affliction was my just punishment. Hadn’t I recited a poem about wanting to be him? Hadn’t I lain in the bed next to him when my mother pleaded for me to get out? I struggled to differentiate my illness from his. If this was punishment for my Oedipal sins, I knew I would never recover from it. If I had ever wanted to be my Daddy, I did not want to be him now. To take enemas was to have my father too close to me, and yet paradoxically the enemas promised to wash everything bad out of me, my father-as-invader included.
I finished fifth grade at home with a tutor. Our final project that year was to pick a state and write a report about it. I picked a place as far away from La Crescenta as I could find. As I grieved the loss of my bowel function, I cut pictures of New York City skyscrapers out from magazines, conjured its Native American past from accounts in the World Book Encyclopedia, and made my own rendition of the New York skyline out of construction paper. New York was where Broadway shows happened, where writers and artists and lots of Jews lived. It was Ellis Island where my immigrant forebears arrived after escaping the pogroms. In my New York future, there would be no enemas.
At night, when my mother in her long flowing nightgown held up the can, I couldn’t help but think of the Statue of Liberty holding up her torch. But there was no freedom in this for either of us. My mother felt herself a martyr to the enemas, which she regarded as the way my father and I were using our shared mishegoss to punish her. They were something my father and I were doing to her, rather than something that she and my father were doing to me.
In the fall I returned to school for sixth grade. In class, I day dreamed, making a secret, sorrowful comparison. I’d look down the rows and stop at each of my classmates in turn, and imagine his or her bowel function. I’d think: She goes to the bathroom by herself. Even the least popular or least academically successful child in the room had it on me; even that kid could take a dump without a parent’s assistance. I’d go further, imagining what kinds of bowel movements each had, whether the process was effortless, fast or slow, whether they worried about it ever, or felt any embarrassment, or preferred doing it at home. There’s no one else in this room who can’t go to the bathroom by herself, I concluded, imagining how destroyed I would feel if my classmates found out what happened at my house every night.
After school one day I was standing on our porch and watching a neighborhood dog, a fluffy white terrier crouch and poop obliviously, right in the middle of our front yard. The dog relieved himself of two ample movements and then kicked the dirt and grass gleefully behind him, seemingly proud of what he had produced.
“Look, Paul,” I said sadly. “Even a dog can go to the bathroom without an enema.”
Paul shrugged, “If you want to go like a dog, eat kibble.”
I was nearly desperate enough to try it.
Present, Dining Room, Saturday, 2:00 p.m.
At a distance, and from some angles, my brother Paul still looks to me like a boy. He retains the same shock of honey brown hair only now beginning to gray, still gives off the same air of total concentration when absorbed in a task. I’ve asked him over to replace a fuse in the chandelier in my dining room; his uncanny ability to understand how things work has only increased with age. He’s staring into my fixture intently, holding a screwdriver.
Even as he helps me, I suspect what he is thinking—that I have put money into having a gold chandelier in my house when I could have put that money into saving the house on Teasley Street after my mother died. Though we remain close, Paul has not forgiven me for letting the bank foreclose. When my mother died I did not regard the house on Teasley Street as the holy repository of all the relics of our childhood, the only remaining physical manifestation of sacred memories.
I left that house, got out as quickly as I could go, and could not comprehend why he had not done the same, why he had chosen to stay in it, living with my mother until she died.
Although I fled to Boston after college, my father’s cataclysmic stroke a few years later lured me back. In Los Angeles I have remained, residing now about forty miles away from where we grew up, close to the ocean at which my father liked to gaze. There are a fair number of Jews and leftists in our community; mezuzahs adorn many doorposts. Like the house on Teasley Street, my home is on a corner with a neighbor on only one side. As with my father, living on the corner with a view does little to alleviate my inner restlessness.
The small apartment where Paul lives is crammed full not only with things from our childhood but with many other objects to which Paul attaches meaning—newspapers and magazines, binoculars, tape recorders, Polaroid cameras, and flashlights. Means of observing, illuminating, recording, documenting.
We are talking about childhood again. My brother remembers times when Ira and Eva were young and optimistic. He doesn’t need to tell me that his best memories of childhood are from before I was born. “When I think about her then, she was still so lovely,” he says.
“Do you think it had to turn out the way it did?” I ask him. I keep looking for the moment when it turned so decisively that there was no going back.
“It was doomed from the beginning. He was a lunatic. And she wouldn’t let herself see it, so she sacrificed her children to him.”
“She loved him. Don’t you believe she loved him? And he loved her. To the extent that he was capable.”
“He only cared about himself.”
“They shouldn’t have moved to La Crescenta. We should have lived somewhere where we didn’t feel like outcasts.”
My brother shrugs. He hasn’t moved far from La Crescenta. He continues to talk to some of the old neighbors. He never blamed the neighborhood the way I did or attributed our status as “other” to our Jewishness. He’s ambivalent about his own Jewish identity, attracted to a number of other spiritual practices. Ben has been Buddhist for years. Of the three children, I am the only one who defines herself as Jewish. Paul sometimes talks about Jewishness the way the Jews of La Crescenta did, as a sort of amazing anomaly, marveling that some movie star or public figure is actually Jewish. Can you believe that Harrison Ford is part Jewish?
“The remodel has always felt like a turning point to me,” I say. “She was at the height of her impulses for remediation. She was so hopeful about it, and he was . . . just perverse.”
“Well, he was perverse all right, but mostly sadistic. He was just cruel.”
“He wasn’t cruel to me.”
“No, he adored you.”
Paul and I have had this conversation before—many times before. His insinuation is always that I got out, was able to make more of a life for myself because I received a larger dose of my father’s love.
“And what about her? Didn’t she love you more?”
“We understood each other. We were similar. We were introverts. A little depressive. You liked to be the center of attention, like he did.”
“She loved you more. Just say it.”
“She always said you rejected her. Even when you were little.”
“I rejected her? As a three-year-old? Does that make sense to you? I worshipped her but I didn’t know how to be like her. Or please her. She pushed me away.”
“You always took his side.”
“She gave me to him. And you two shut me out. What happened when I got back from Boston and had nowhere to stay other than the house on Teasley Street?”
I’ve jumped ahead to a time two years before my father’s death. I know that Paul will be able to follow the movement of this battle; we’ve had it so many times before. I’d come home from Boston to see my father, who was presumed to be dying. Paul had moved his cats into my old bedroom. Litter boxes lined the perimeter of the room; litter spilled into the boxes of papers and books I’d left behind.
“You let your cats shit all over my bedroom. All over my stuff.”
“It wasn’t your room anymore. You abandoned it. Were we supposed to keep your room a shrine to you forever? How come you think your stuff is so much more valuable than my stuff?”
“She never wanted me to stay the way she did you. She pushed me out of the house.” Even as I say it, I realize that I didn’t want to stay in the house; I imagine the scenario: both of us living with my mother into our own middle age. Of course it was natural that I leave the house on Teasley Street. People are supposed to grow up, have adult lives, aren’t they? Isn’t that a sign of health? To leave even if they can’t quite grow up internally? Even if, despite years of therapy, their childhoods still remain at the emotional center of their psyches? I can’t help it, I’m still jealous that she wanted him more.
Paul puts down the screwdriver.
“This thing needs another part I don’t have,” Paul says.
He can’t fix my chandelier today. I can’t let go of the fight.
“I didn’t get the better deal of it,” I say. “At least your body works.” I am screaming now. “They didn’t fuck with your body like they did mine. That was the turning point for me. How was I supposed to recover from that?”
“You can thank your father for that. Not her. She tried to stop it.”
“It doesn’t work, and I can’t even tell what’s physical and what’s psychological.”
“They didn’t have to fuck with my body. I can’t poop much better than you can. I’m a physical disaster.”
I’ve calmed down. We start to laugh. “Bad genes for nervous systems and gastrointestinal tracts,” I say. “Rebecca could never poop either. Remember?”
We both laugh some more, shaking our heads and remembering our poor dead grandmother’s daily struggles to make what she called a “job.”
“At least it’ll mostly end with us,” I say. “At least we didn’t have children; we knew enough not to pass any of it on to another generation.”
“Ben’s the only one who had the guts to have children,” Paul says.
“That’s because he doesn’t remember any of it.”