Queen of me
Queen of my father’s family …
THERE IS NOTHING SPECIAL about the dead weaving the story—their voices being the loom that pulls together what the living can tell only in bits and pieces. In life sometimes I saw myself as the weaver Ariadne who possessed the spun thread that lead Theseus to the center of the labyrinth of her half-brother the Minotaur to slay him and then safely out again. As I have said, I would have liked to have done such things for my family—kill, however metaphorically, “the monster” in some of my relatives. In death, I know all I can offer is our stories. As object lessons? Hardly. But to give them some amount of clarity, yes. Souls still living cannot help but slant, exaggerate, or embellish the facts of their lives. They do not necessarily mean to do this—to sew bias into their words—but they are still too busy, busy living life with all its manifold distractions and misdirected emphases and they do not have access to the full and ongoing adventure. They also depend so much on rumor—on gossip—and that troubles me too, especially when it is about the Slaughter family, both past and present.
Here, no one and no disease can interrupt—stop me short from what I have to say—and that is a good thing for I can tell you some facts not only about the family above, but about the family beneath.
There are many relatives already where I am now. Aunt Lettie, Cecilia’s mother, who mostly prefers to sleep—all sounds to her still have no music, just the march of German soldiers with their black boots slamming onto concrete—and Aunt Esther, Celie’s mother, who is shocked by her troubled sister Adele’s recent arrival and Adele’s—now forever—proximity to her. I felt Esther’s agitation even though she is graves away from mine and I understand her concern, for in life Adele was the cause of great misery to both herself and to others. I could hear the twist of their mother, Eva’s, bones as she turned away from Adele’s, as Eva ultimately turned herself away from this daughter in life.
Great Aunt Eva never wanted her daughter Esther to date, let alone marry, Uncle Benjamin—one of my mother’s brothers. She did not want her to be part of the Slaughter family or anywhere near them. She remembered Cecil and Idyth from down the hall of her first apartment in this country, when both she and Idyth were young wives and mothers. Even before Grandfather Cecil suddenly died, Eva found Idyth too strange—too unable to adjust to America and Eva wanted so much—too much—to fit in, to appear comfortable, and to be successful in her new surroundings. She certainly did not want to add the Slaughters to her list of burdens.
Eva had watched from her door as the men in white coats forcibly took the kicking, shrieking Idyth out of her apartment. She watched from her window as they put her in the white car to be hauled off to the asylum and she carried this whole scenario with her always, forever afraid that if she did not adhere to her rigid concerns—the carefully planned paths she took—it could be she who would be carted away. So it was understandable that when her gifted Esther became infatuated with Benjamin Slaughter it just added to her many fears.
The two women’s separate journeys across the ocean had saved their lives, unlike the families they left behind, but once they arrived both women’s misery proved large. Though Eva, however much she was unhappy, would concede Idyth’s fate was far worse than hers. And Eva rarely felt her own grief could be surpassed.
Grandfather Cecil left many debts since he was not good with his accounts. There was no money to pay anyone after he was lowered into the earth, and the people he owed arrived at Idyth and her frightened children’s small apartment to collect something—anything. They took the precious books Cecil carried in his satchel from Europe—his beloved Tolstoy, Zhukovsky, and Pushkin. They carried away the cheap furniture he and Idyth had bought in this country—their used, discolored pots and pans, even his worn, tweed winter coat and his one black hat that Idyth had carefully patched from the inside.
Idyth screamed hysterically and could not be quieted. Even years later in the mental hospital this was so, though by then she had given up almost all talk—her voice a sporadic, guttural howl, her mind a siege of paranoia with unending images rising up of people arriving, constantly arriving, to take something from her. No pills they ever found could stop the tumult—you could see the terror in her searing stare, see it in how she backed away when anyone approached, even my mother. I actually experienced this directly once and heard my mother speak of it a lot, but only to my father and her brothers, when she thought I was not near.
My mother had wanted to bring her mother closer to where the rest of the family lived—to have her in a small, private house where they took individual care of a few sick people. My father, however, preferred his mother-in-law a three-hour drive away. They would spend hours circling the close-by, innocent looking white brick house with half-drawn, fringe-tipped shades that made the windows look like sleepy eyes, and an arched, white wooden entrance with vines of healthy green leaves laced through it, which was attached to a white picket fence with flowers painted on it, perhaps by the people who lived inside.
I was in the back seat, listening to their too-loud voices with my father repeatedly saying, “It’s safer, much safer the way it is, Rose.” Which really meant safer for him, for his style of living—the pomp of it. Having a crazy relative nearby—that threat—could turn out to be bad for the image he had slowly, conscientiously created and continued to nurture until his death.
“What if she caused a commotion, Rose, or perhaps even ran away?” he would continue. Eventually my mother’s pleas and all high-pitched, tense conversations on this subject stopped, my mother finally saying, with a large sigh, “Okay, Emil. Okay.” So my grandmother stayed put—held in by large, thick, brick walls of a public institution with its dank smells and cold, unending, paint-chipped halls, a heavy, eight foot iron fence locking in the square block it haunted.
When I was six, my mother took me to visit her mother. I do not know what my mother was thinking by doing this—maybe she thought my presence would have a calming effect on my grandmother. I would like to believe this. She dressed me in a polished-cotton flowered dress with large pockets—my summer best. She said the three of us would go out for ice cream. I was excited. It seemed a great adventure—that long ride alone with my mother to see her mother.
I remember leaping out of the car, thinking that my grandmother’s enthusiasm would match mine—to see me, her neatly dressed and properly behaved little granddaughter. Then, I saw her standing there outside the building’s huge steel door. A man dressed in white had a grip on her shoulder. She wore a dark blue smock and her hair was short and gray with a too-blunt cut. To me it almost looked like it had been hacked off with an axe. At the time, reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to children was the fashion and Grandmother Idyth looked like someone who belonged in that scary book.
Yet, however strange and strained she looked, I could not but help run toward her and say “Hi, Grandma, I’m Ceci!” When I did this, she looked at me with great alarm and backed away. Then suddenly she lurched at me, focusing on the pockets of my dress, and stuck a hand into each, grabbing at their insides as if searching for something and upon finding nothing, screamed. She had half-torn the left one from its seams—I remember its droop.
Of course, after this there was no outing for ice cream. My mother and I followed her back to her room. Now, there were two men dressed in white flanking her, each with an even tighter grip on her shoulders. The inside of the building had the odor of a kennel I had been to twice with my father to look at dogs. It made me hold my breath as long as I possibly could, until I had to either breathe in the air or choke. The men stopped us at the door to her room. I never saw where she lived—whether she had books to read, a television, a radio, or even a window from which she could look out.
When my mother kissed her mother goodbye, she did not seem outwardly bothered that my grandmother stood there stiffly with no reaction. I guess she was used to this. I, however, was left quite agitated and on the way home asked my mother too many questions—too many whys. I did not understand why my grandmother pulled at the pockets of my dress, why she did not want to look at me, why she had to live in such a “smelly” place. My mother just kept driving, looking straight forward, and finally said, “That’s the way it is. That’s just the way it is.” And when my questions would not stop, she yelled at me just one word—“Enough!” At that moment I thought of my grandmother tearing at my empty pockets and her wail when she found nothing. That was the feeling I was left with that day too, only I stayed silent, my scream internal. It was my first powerful memory of how little I would receive from my mother and, of course, I was never taken to see my grandmother again.
After Grandmother Idyth was taken away, my mother and her four brothers, Emmanuel (Manny), Samuel, Benjamin, and Abraham were parceled out to distant relatives across the Midwest, each considered the “poor thing” in the family who took them in.
When they reunited as adults, they publicly deified their father and spoke only among themselves about their mother, all the while binding themselves to each other with a unified, enormous dream of possessing all things material—property that they clearly owned and that no one would dare to steal. My father had a staff of lawyers to make sure.
My mother, the oldest, was thirteen, her brothers twelve, ten, nine, and seven, when they witnessed all that had been grabbed from them and my father learned how to use what he knew of their history to be in charge of them. He used this always to be in control of everyone.
Although Grandfather Cecil and Grandmother Idyth are buried miles away, their sons and my father are here and soon my mother will be. Right now she is in a private health care facility with around-the-clock staff taking care of her every need, plus two private nurses she has had at her house for well over a year. My mother’s money saves her—prolongs her unbearably long days on the earth’s thin, broken crust. Perhaps being poorer at this point in the life cycle would be better.
She is oblivious to the horrific news that frequently breaks through the television set, yet no one would want to live as she does now, not able to move without help or get nourishment without a feeding tube. Not that she ever cared that much about the larger world, although she spent much time raising money for good causes at charity events. Everyone wanted to have her and my father at their table. My mother definitely knew how to make an entrance. It is her exit with which she is having trouble.
In her present state she can still recognize people when she chooses to open her eyes—the gift of sight is a faculty she has not yet lost. She can still glance at the anxious faces of her extended family. She has become their entire focus. The mandala of their lives. She smiles at them as they file by and tell her about their daily lives. Everyone arrives at specifically assigned times—her nieces and nephews, Celine, Cecily, Celie, Joshua, and Jeremy, and the twins they married, Joyce and Jocelyn. Everyone, that is, except Cecilia. She sends my mother flowers every two weeks. The flowers are gorgeous and arrive in a glass vase. Her cards are kind and she signs them “with love”—always in the lowercase.
Right before I died, I went blind. I could not recognize faces, just voices. My mother and I had a code. She would ask me a question and I would blink once for yes and twice for no. Mostly I blinked once, for convenience. Then, after years of being sick, then well, then sick again, this cycle stopped and I left suddenly, in the blink of an eye.
Cecilia told me as I lay beneath the ground that the sicker her mother became the more clearly and more vividly she saw things. Unlike myself, the cancer never reached Aunt Lettie’s brain, and her eyes became her most powerful guide through the final months of her life, as if they could see in each finite thing the detailing of the infinite. In late autumn—the last season she went outside for a little enjoyment—she and Cecilia ended up at a local beach. There, Aunt Lettie pointed out the yellow leaves on an oak tree and said with a dazzling smile, “Look, Cecilia, I have found the Golden Fleece. Perhaps Aeetes placed it there for me.”
Aunt Lettie liked the Greek myths because they were far away from real time, real history. When Cecilia as a child would beg her mother to tell her about her own mother and father—“Grandma Miriam” and “Grandpa Joseph”—and what exactly had happened to them, Aunt Lettie would divert her by opening Bulfinch’s Mythology.
I do believe that day at the beach—where the water meets the sky—Aunt Lettie saw the subtle astral colors, which are usually hidden from humans—except perhaps from the greatest painters, who can pick up such vibrations. After I died my own sight returned in such a way.
Here, if I choose, I am able to take in so much from many spheres. It can, if I am not careful, become a buzz a million times worse than the noise of all the cicadas that rise from the ground every seventeen years. When the dialects and the clamor become too much, I travel to a place where the music is choral—the Nada Brahma, the Anahata Nad-am, the Saute Surmad—the original tones of the world, all voices in universal hum. Or I go to the single, pure sound of one delicate bell softly tinkling in a faraway background. Being dead can be quite lovely if one can just let go of body and ego.
I think my mother will have a hard time with this, because of the beauty she was born with and that stayed with her well into her late seventies. She wanted to believe she had no rivals, that she was mythic, and the Slaughter family continuously reinforced this. Now, she has become the extreme image of beauty’s always sad-end story.
Cecilia would snuggle against me when she was almost eight and I was ten and softly—and with much glee—chant “Queen Bee, Queen of Me, Queen of My Father’s Family.” How we would giggle. Even then Cecilia seemed so privileged with the permissions she gave herself for sacrilege—at least on the surface.
After I died, she began limiting herself, becoming strange—in a quiet way, not at all like Grandmother Idyth. She would wash her hair repeatedly, never able in her mind to get it clean enough, while Michael was forever washing towels, then handing her the newly cleaned ones. However, if one touched anything—the handle of a door or just the wood of its frame—Cecilia considered it soiled. She could not wash away the fact of my death, no matter how hard she scrubbed at it. (Similar issues flared up inside her after her horrific encounter with Herr M.)
Michael would visit my grave often and pray to me to help Cecilia. I stayed silent—letting his own good soul speak for itself. It was the beginning of my learning that it is impossible for the dead to instruct the living. It is what we leave them with—their memories of us (yes, I know this is cliché) that can possibly help. With Cecilia I know I was her first audience. How hard I would laugh at her comments on all the folly that surrounded us, and I do believe her memories of this were a part of what protected her from falling into complete darkness.
“Not quite crazy, but definitely mind sick,” is what Michael would say to me. He was right. It took many months for her to pick up a pen and some paper and find an outlet for her grief that eventually would become her above-the-ground bell music. Then the washings, all the tiny tearings at herself, began to slowly disappear—except for the small tonsure she created long ago on the top of her head, which she still carefully maintains, actually prunes, and someday will die with. I am sure the undertaker will find it quite curious.
It is a legacy from her mother, Lettie—an outlet for Lettie, those hair tearings, from her own grief story. Cecilia began to wound herself in such way, too, at the age of eight, as she strained to hear what her mother was saying to the adults. She would open her bedroom door just an inch and try hard to string together the words that were being said, her long hair loosened and swirled around her like a coat of fur, with her fingers pulling at a single strand.
When Lettie would whisper to the relatives in the living room about the soldiers, the train, the camp, only her husband, Samuel, would leave the room. He wanted to forget about all of it. How he hated his wife’s repeated returns to her story. It is a small mystery as to why he chose Lettie to marry, for no one brought with her a sadder or more complex history. Perhaps it was because he suddenly found himself to be the last unmarried Slaughter brother, so when Aunt Esther introduced him to Lettie—her young, docile, pretty neighbor—she seemed so right. The terror-stricken, gouged-out pieces of Lettie’s soul were not obvious. She had not yet allowed them to rise up to her surface.
When I began my large journey beneath the ground and my parents again began their own grand trips, Cecilia was the only one who entirely stopped—sitting in her chair for well over a year with her strange thoughts about loss and death and cleanliness and then getting up and going through her carefully created rituals to keep her fragile center together.
Initially, I tried to communicate with her that I was doing okay—actually better than she—and not to worry, that there was another side, that the Reform Judaism we were taught in Sunday school had left out a lot, which I have to admit still leaves me a bit angry. The dead are not necessarily serene. (I guess that is already obvious, given my earlier mentions of Aunt Lettie, Great Aunt Eva and, of course, myself.) We bring with us our unfinished business—our angers about being treated badly, our unfulfilled ambitions, our unrequited longings about love—the innumerable hungers and unresolved issues of the flesh. Of course, some do this more than others. I am on the side of the ones who do this more than less.
Some things definitely are not yet finished for me—maybe never will be—like the impulses to fix, explain, and protect my family. Surprisingly, unconcluded business is okay here—it is the norm. You can imagine when the psychiatrists arrive here how appalled they are, actually stunned, by this fact and it makes the more thoughtful ones doubt doubly what real use they were in life, and rush to seek out Freud and Jung to talk about it and find out what they think.
Here, I have started traveling to Lao Tzu—the Chinese philosopher born five hundred years before Christ, because I need some lessons in the letting go of ego—that which Freud thought to strengthen, as he did with his construct of superego and, of course, there was also his mission to weaken the id. Lao Tzu believes the opposite, that our true nature when left unfettered—untethered by society’s aggressive competitions and demands—is quite lovely, gentle, and kind and should be nurtured. (I know this way of thinking is problematic when considering the behavior of a man such as Herr M, so I am left somewhat confused. Probably because I am only at the beginning of an authentic understanding of this new way of thinking.)
Recently a specialist has been hired to carefully move my mother’s arms and legs. While he is doing this, he sings Hungarian lullabies to her. This knowledge especially touches me, because I imagine it is reminding my mother of her mother singing to her when she was an infant—a time when Grandmother Idyth was at her calmest, when she had only one child to care for and Grandfather Cecil was very much alive. I picture him reading his books, his head bent over, his frameless spectacles on, with a smile on his face, as Grandmother Idyth sings to their baby Rose in their native language. A rare, almost singular, above-the-ground moment where everything peacefully and naturally connected for the Slaughter family, when it was at its smallest and, perhaps, at its best.
Because my mother cannot move the right side of her body at all, her private caregivers prop up her in a chair and comb her waist-length hair. There, she watches herself in the mirror, wasting away. Cecilia’s hair, too, is almost waist-length. And yes, I did—still do—envy Cecilia a bit—her longer life, her distinctive beauty, her high-spiritedness, her explosions of talent. But for all of it this, I am forever aware she pays a large price.
With her auburn hair, deep violet eyes, and pale skin Cecilia is almost a rainbow of contrasts. My mother’s eyes have no depth, almost look like cheap blue glass, but coupled with her long blond hair, the result had a striking effect—that is, for a Jew. “The Golden Calf Effect” was what Cecilia called it, and my father made sure his “jewel” was bejeweled with emeralds, diamonds, sapphires, couture clothes—her favorite, Dior—and a white Mercedes—a car which Aunt Lettie always made excuses not to ride in, would not go near, as she would not anything German.
I was the plainest plain—not quite ugly, just rather poorly defined. I looked like my father, with imprecise jelly features, a nose with too much cartilage at the tip, so that when I would smile it would bump into my upper lip and make my face look almost cartoonish. When I wore lipstick, which was not often, there would always be a smudge of it on my nose stem between my nostrils. I was forever scrubbing it off. Early on I gave up on makeup. The most I ever had on was when I was embalmed.
I was, however, highly accomplished with a PhD in English from Princeton “no less.” My father would tag on the “no less” every time he said Princeton. When my sickness reappeared the final time, I had been the associate editor of a journal entitled Contemporary Philology for well over six years. My parents would brag about this, too, and it always made me queasy. My face would grow hot and I would start to sweat. I had no grace.
My most distinctive feature was enormous breasts with huge areolas and long nipples—everything about them felt and looked cowish to me. Only one man obsessed on them. I was, however, quite taken by the whole of him. He was a mechanic—all hands that moved with quick precision. I found his rough, scabby skin and his dirty nails quite sensual—quite reptilian. When he touched me I always felt I was experimenting with the forbidden. I became Eve after the knowledge of all the trouble this could cause, and I did not care.
I loved the soiling stimulation. Our house was kept so antiseptic spotless and intact, filled with furniture made in England and France, rugs flown in from the Orient, and crystal from Waterford and Baccarat. If the smallest figurine collected a bit of dust, it was quickly wiped off by a housekeeper, or if an object were for some reason moved from its place, it was upon my parents’ notice, immediately set right according to their rules and taste.
I met Wyatt—a high school dropout—when I was sixteen and he eighteen. My mother’s car was in the shop a lot and one day, after I got my driver’s license, she asked me to pick it up. I bicycled over there and it was Wyatt who lifted my bike with one arm, as if it weighed nothing, and put it in the trunk for me. I saw the curves of his muscles—their flex—and the strength in his huge hands. I thought, “If it had been a motorcycle he could have done it with equal ease.” Soon after, he started putting those powerful, greasy hands on my breasts and eventually on the rest of me.
He nicknamed me “CT,” a play on “Ceci.” It was for what he called my “cow teats,” which he would milk forcibly with great prowess. The pain I would feel from this was at once excruciating and exhilarating, like continuously being annihilated and then brought back to life. Afterward I would look in the mirror and study how my areolas flamed to a blood red and my nipples further elongated and were cracked from small cuts made by his teeth. Of course, at the time I would have never used such descriptiveness. The seasoning of being here has made me freer.
It is true, sometimes in the physical life there is a convergence between over-excitement and humiliation. Even early on I felt this. Had I lived longer I would have written an in-depth essay or, perhaps, a book on it, connecting it to the classical myths with their own seductions, strange conversions, abuses, and exaltations—Zeus as the swan and Leda opening up wider and wider to him, needing to swallow him inside her as much as He needed to enter her, no matter the pain. I had many incidents with Wyatt to draw on.
One winter Sunday afternoon when we thought my house was empty, we curled into each other in the library on the wine color leather couch, naked, covering ourselves with the thickly braided, ecru cashmere afghan that my mother had knitted. All the family agreed it was so absolutely plush and gorgeous, which, in fact, it was. Under its beauty, Wyatt and I made a tent of baseness—quite the opposite of the dignified decor of the room.
The library’s walls were lined with photographs of my parents with the newly rich and, sometimes, truly famous. Over the couch there was a large photograph of my father shaking hands with Eleanor Roosevelt and next to it my mother solicitously bending over Carl Sandburg—her décolletage revealing more than a hint of breasts—offering him another helping of beef as he sat at our dining room table for dinner. He had a polite, but quizzical expression on his face as if saying to himself, “Who are these people and what in the world am I doing here?” When the day of that dinner arrived, Cecilia, at ten, told me almost prophetically, “I’m never cooking for Carl Sandburg. I’ll just be him and then your mother can cook for me.”
Wyatt had abruptly spread my knees apart with his muscular thighs—as he always did—and was about to jam himself into me, when my father and my uncles stormed into the room. I still remember how the air smelled with that unexpected burst of old, winter soot. They yanked at Wyatt—pulled us apart—and threw him out of the house. I do not think anyone except Uncle Emmanuel saw my naked body. He focused on my breasts. I saw his long pause and he knew I saw it.
Everyone knew Emmanuel Slaughter to be a smutty man, knew he caused his brother Abraham, Abraham’s daughter Cecily, and his own wife Sonya, great unhappiness. After his death Aunt Sonya bleached her gray hair blond again, bought stylish clothes, and put an ad in the personals and, of course, cut her age by fifteen years. Obviously, this did not sit well with the family, but it did give them a lot to talk about. Celine, her daughter, never acknowledged this. In her mind her mother will always remain “that dowdy, beaten-down, long-suffering broken woman”—something Celine has vowed never to become. After Celine put Aunt Sonya into the ground, she turned away, never looking back, never returning to her mother’s grave. And although Cecily promised Celine never to write about her, she is putting Aunt Sonya’s “man-packed” grave scene into one of her plays—the men being part of Celine’s ever-increasing collection.
Cecily loves to write about our family. The only person she never writes about is her father, Uncle Abraham. While fighting in World War II, he was captured for well over a year, returning to this country a prisoner of his own mind. He was the only person who could brighten Grandmother Idyth’s eyes, give them a little life. She would even take his hand. Maybe because he was her youngest—her baby—or maybe because she could tell he understood what it meant to have, if not a broken mind, at least one badly cut into—something Cecily believes she, too, understands well.
When Uncle Abraham returned after the war, as an outpatient in the rehabilitation hospital, he made a bracelet for Cecily. It was a strip of pliable tin with her name carved into it with open delicate spaces around each letter and small, carefully hammered pinpoint indentations in the shapes of two flowers at both ends. She was just a baby then, but as she grew up and grew into it, she has never taken the bracelet off. Because it is so tarnished now and oddly bent, it goes well with the stained look she has costumed for herself—“the stain” first put there by Uncle Emmanuel.
When Uncle Abraham died he left Cecily his Purple Heart. She feels it is the color of her own heart gone bloodless and when the anger and isolation she experiences grows too large, it is then she takes out her pen to fill the festering emptiness. I do understand this—to a point.
Unlike Aunt Lettie, Uncle Abraham never spoke about the war. About what it was like being held by the Japanese for so long. About what exactly had been done to him; what he saw being done to others. Yet he always listened intently to Aunt Lettie’s stories, his face crimson, while everyone waited and hoped that he, too, would say something. That never happened. He took all those experiences into the ground with him.
If you go deep enough into most family histories in this cemetery you will find a gulag, a stalag, a pogrom, a concentration camp, and the souls who stayed so silent in their lives about what happened to them in such places talk freely to each other here. Sometimes the dead historians are allowed to listen. They then find out that their writings, their books, are so incomplete because the many voices who knew so much chose silence and it is also then that the dead historians worry that is why these horrors keep happening over and over again, which indicates an over-thinking of the power of themselves and their writings.
In the weeks and months after Wyatt left, I would pull hard at my nipples, not just for the excitement it would bring, but for how much I needed to remember that he had once been there—in my life, in me. That he truly had existed and how he had the power to make me feel—feel wonderfully wild. When I would tell Cecilia, “He Was My Greek God, My Satyr, My Myth,” she would laugh with such joy, and when she quieted, she would take both my hands in hers and whisper the most melancholy, “yes, yes, Ceci, oh yes.” She never tired of how many times I needed to say this and needed to hear her response. I can still hear her sweet girlish voice.
I often wondered if money were involved—if my father gave Wyatt money to leave me alone—for he never called again, and eventually I learned he had left town. I know it was then that the cells in my body began their slow mutations into an unrelenting grief that would chew at me piece by piece and eventually swallow my life. Of course, there were other factors that conspired with this. I had put myself on birth control pills when they were filled with mega-doses of hormones, which I continued taking for over seven years, always hoping for Wyatt’s return. Celine knew a doctor to whom I quite eagerly, boldly, and naively went and came away with a large prescription. Having such a beautiful mother also did not help my anguish, especially as I grew older. I would see the alarm in people’s eyes when they first met me, as if I were an alien, a mutation, a mutt, not just a physically unattractive person.
Alan Gross did not help either. He was the editor of Contemporary Philology. At first we got along quite well, but when I started getting published in places where his work had been rejected, he became quite cruel—verbally abusive—called me awkward, ugly, fat, and stupid. One day I taped a bulky recorder to my chest and put on a loose-fitting sweater to cover it. When I saw him, I ran into the ladies’ room and in a stall, I clicked it on. It was perfect. I caught all his meanness on that tape. However, when I went to Human Resources at the university, the woman there said my evidence was not good enough. I did see her eyes tear up as she listened to his words—she did feel how they burned, how they branded. But, she then composed herself and said, “There is nothing I can do with this, no matter how terrible it truly is. There has to be proof of physical abuse or that he has stolen something personal from your office or your purse for you to file a complaint.” I remember her voice. The tremble of it.
I found out that day that legally you could say such things to women in the early 1980s and easily get away with them. Alan Gross’s just verbal assaults, however, did have a terrible effect on my still living body and soul. He did, in fact, steal something from me. I cannot blame him for my illness, but I will forever believe he helped put a halt to its remission.
I remember the day he told me, “Look it, if there’s to be one star in this office, it’s going to be me.” He always used too many words when he spoke. Throwaway ones like look it, you know, and like maybe. He loved himself much more than any affection he had for language. However, I thought it so odd when he claimed one-star status. His perception was so off, his vision so narrowed, as if he were trying to shine a lit matchstick on himself. Philologists are never famous in the larger world of fast food, wide Technicolor movie screens, television sitcoms, easily accessible pornography, and missiles that can take out cities far away.
Everything about him I found repulsive and ridiculous, although I loved his last name because of how well it fit him. He had a bulbous nose, with at least a double layer of cartilage—far worse than mine. Sometimes when I looked at him I thought this might be why he was always so angry. I obviously had my own longstanding issues with unattractive excess, so I could almost understand his problems with Gross homeliness. Though he did not lack for sexual favors from women—mostly his students. In the eighties you could also easily get away with this. They bought into his cachet because they were so young and thought that they, too, could become famous philologists.
In Greek philos means “love” and logos means “word.” I loved the ancient texts, the myths—the study of grammar, the classical traditions associated with a given language. For this I had a passion even larger than when Wyatt long ago had so deftly—and ferally—manipulated my breasts. Of course, looking at all the Greek god statues, especially in their nakedness, did remind me of him and the glory of his body, which always resulted in reigniting my despondency.
I would take out Frank Sinatra’s “Only the Lonely” record album and play the music over and over, while staring at its cover—Sinatra with that one tear running down his cheek, looking like a sad clown—looking like Perriot.
Secret references to my obsession with Wyatt and my memories of his sculpted image can be found in the papers I wrote, and writing these did give me some amount of pleasure—as does the fact that they are still being discussed in tiny circles along with the one book I published. I do admit to still liking a small amount of polish on my own ego—something I continue to work on.
Alan Gross is never talked about except by he, himself to his most naive students, although having sex with them is far more problematic because of recent university rules and the fact that he is now old. Soon he will die and the stars will stare down on him in all his anonymity. He will never have even a moment of the twinkle and shine he still hungers after, unlike my mother, who has enjoyed a long stay in the spotlight of a small space—center stage.
I am readying myself for her arrival. She will lie between my father and me. My father exhausted himself in life from all his bloat about himself, causing not only his ego but also his soul to fragment from the fatigue of needing to work so hard to keep itself whole, and he remains quite scattered and quiet. I, however, have spoiled well—that awful, thick makeup they smothered me with is long gone and I am left with just sleek bones and a few fibers of the white silk chemise that was slipped onto whatever the doctors did not cut from me—and I have also been quite spoiled by the richness I have found in all the worlds I can now enter and the freedom they bring to my words.
Here, no one cares to—or can—yank from me my story.