"I’ll Take You There" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

5

You! You are capable of any thing. My brother Hendrick once told me.

Any thing. How strange these words: any thing and not anything. As if that of which I was capable was a thing, a palpable thing, and not an action.

It was at my grandfather's funeral that Hendrick told me this. Yet my brother had no idea what I was capable of, nor did anyone in my family. They distrusted me; around me there glimmered a dark, mysterious aura; I carried both the fact and the possibility of doom. He blames her. We all do. For Ida's death. I escaped from them, yet I bore their condemnation. Perhaps I accepted it. I was so lonely! Yet I thought Loneliness is my due. It's only just.

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes. At nineteen, to my disgust, I continued to look much younger. I would be mistaken for a high school student through my undergraduate years. I went in my winter boots (not of the leather of a kind worn by my better-dressed classmates but clumsy rubberized boots from Sears, wonderfully practical for deep snows and torrential spring rains.) I stood about five feet three inches. I never weighed myself but, at the time of my "crisis," when I departed the Kappa Gamma Pi house, I was put on a scale by a nurse in the university infirmary, and my weight noted as ninety-six pounds. "Have you stopped eating? Do you vomit up your food? This isn't your normal weight, is it?" the woman asked disapprovingly. I told her I didn't know what my "normal" weight was; I wasn't interested in my "normal" weight; I had other things on my mind, matters of pressing significance. The meaning of life. The possibility of truth. The analysis of consciousness as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids. I did not wish to consider that I was a body, and that I was in some way responsible for this body. (And what in fact is a body? Descartes had hypothesized that a mysterious and unknowable substance constituted mind, and an entirely other mysterious and unknowable substance constituted body.) In the infirmary I was forced to look at myself as an act of penance. I avoided the sunken eyes in the face, but looked frankly at the rest of myself: the papery-thin tallow-colored skin stretched tight upon slender bones, breasts the size of Dixie cups and hard as unripe pears, nipples the size of wizened peas and nothing at all like the warm roseate aureole of those girls' breasts I presumed to be "normal"; the heavy, full breasts of other girls which looked as if already they held liquid, sweet milky precious liquid, the shy elixir of life. I remembered how in junior high I saw older girls in locker room laughingly peeling off their outer clothes, yanking sweaters over their heads in a single quick gesture that exposed their boobs even as their heads and faces were obscured; you could see that these girls were sisters; these girls were "female"; standing defiant or proud or indifferent in their burgeoning bodies while I turned away in embarrassment, not that I felt inadequate or inferior in my spindly body, but of another species altogether. I stood outside their category entirely, a marginal sub-species, girl.

When I was growing up, there were relatives who, at a distance, felt sorry for me. Feeling sorry was their permanent attitude toward me. The women would admonish If you'd smile more often, not frown. (What then? I'd be loved, as I wasn't loved for myself?) Such remarks cut me to the quick, though I showed not a ripple. But I am smiling, smiling constantly. Laughing in your faces!

I wanted none of their pity, sympathy, or solicitude. They felt sorry for me because they took a certain pleasure in feeling sorry for one so deprived, so disfigured; because I had no mother, alone of the girls of my generation in Strykersville I had no mother; sometimes it seemed to my horror that my mother had actually died before I was born, not after; if such a fairy tale could be, it would apply to me as the cruellest of curses: The Girl Whose Mother Died Before She Was Born.

No: I remembered Ida. I did remember Ida. More than just the snapshots. I did.

My three older brothers. I was intimidated by them, and I feared them, and my secret may have been that I adored them, at a distance. Always I looked up to them: literally! Up at their handsome faces. Up at their unreadable eyes. They fascinated me even as I dreaded them. "You? What do you know? We know." They were custodians of memories; Dietrich had been twelve when our mother died, Fritz had been eleven, Hendrick eight; I'd been a baby, and helpless.

By the time I went away to college, both Dietrich and Fritz were married, and had become fathers; they'd inherited our grandparents' farm, and were specializing, like many small farmers in Niagara County, in pears, apples, and peaches; Hendrick was more of a loner like myself, though never easy with me, resentful of me, my high school success, my college scholarship, for he'd gone to a vocational school in

Olean to study electrical engineering, and he'd had to pay his own way. Now he boasted of a good job with a division of General Motors in Lackawanna. I most keenly remembered my brothers when they were growing up: their crude, derisive talk of girls and women, which invariably involved jokes; as if girls and women were jokes; from my brothers I learned that the male is all eyes; his sexuality is fueled through the eyes; he assesses through the eyes; judges swiftly and without mercy through the eyes. Sometimes, laughing coarsely, speaking of a girl or a woman of their acquaintance, my brothers would rub their crotches gleefully. You could see that the male's eyes and his penis are connected, perhaps identical; except the one is hidden from view.

I understood that even when a man is alone, his sympathies are with other men, and with maleness. He doesn't feel himself alone as a woman might. His swift, unerring judgments are forged in boyhood and are a collective judgment. He has the power to see with others' eyes, not just his own.

I did not expect mercy from those eyes. By the age of thirteen I'd been trained to shrink from their pitiless gaze.

I understood that my body was not a body to be loved; and so I was not a girl to be loved. Had not my own father shrunk from me, with a look of faint revulsion? When I was thirteen, overnight it seemed to happen that brown tufts of hair fine as cornsilk sprouted in my armpits and in tight curls at my groin; my slender but hard-muscled legs, disproportionately long for my torso, were covered in a feathery down which, through high school and while living with the Kappas, I'd scorned to shave off, as other girls made such a fuss of doing. When I sweated, my smell was sharp and rank; there was something secret about it, and satisfying; I liked it that I could turn into a foxy little creature, with a creature-smell. After I left Strykersville and learned what it was to be alone, no family to define me, amid thousands of strangers who knew neither my name nor my face, let alone where I lived, whose daughter or granddaughter I was, I came to think of my body as invisible; a body to hide inside clothing; a body that was a continuous shrinking from being seen, defined; a body my brothers and other men could not jeer at, for they could not see it; a body from which, I believed, the great dead male philosophers -whom I revered would not turn in disgust. A body in the service of Mind.

Impulsively I cut off my hair when I was eighteen. The summer following high school graduation and my valedictory speech; the week after my father, only just returned home after years of absence, had departed again abruptly with a vague promise of "keeping in touch." My hair was thick and wiry and inclined to snarl; it had become an animal-hair, a kind of pelt; a drab-dark brown enlivened here and there by streaks of lighter brown or dark red; heavy and inert it pressed against my back; heavy and inert it pressed against my soul; when I tried to comb it, my eyes filled with tears of annoyed pain; when I ran a brush through it, the brush sprang out of my hand and clattered to the floor. On the street, men looked at my hair; boys looked at my hair; women and girls looked at my hair; I was vain about my hair, at the same time I was deeply ashamed of my hair, and one hot-humid summer day I took my grandmother's sewing shears, the big shears used for cutting thick fabrics like felt, and I ran off to my room and began cutting; slowly at first and then with mounting glee, almost a kind of gloating, click! click! just missing my ears, and with each greedy click! of the shears I felt lighter, freer. And with each greedy click! I laughed aloud as a rebellious child might laugh. I threw away the clipped-off strands of hair like trash. I had no sentiment, I vowed I would never be so burdened again.

As it happened, I had to attend my grandfather's funeral in a few days. He'd been driving a tractor in hot sunshine and had keeled over with a heart attack; he'd died almost immediately; it was shock more than grid the family felt; he and my grandmother had been emotionally estranged for some time, though of course they'd continued to live together and even to share a bed; my grandmother's reaction to me, to my Jagged cut hair, at such a public time, when others would see us, and comment upon us, was Isn't that just like you.

The funeral was held at the Lutheran church. My grandparents, particularly my grandmother, had begun attending services there; she was a stoic with an unsentimental vision of life, and no doubt death, and yet she wanted to "be" a Christian, like her neighbors; like most Americans; in addition to being a Christian, you had to "be" some denomination, and the Lutheran church was the most logical choice, for those of German descent. And there was the fact that her daughter-in-law Ida was buried in the churchyard, as a kind of pledge that the rest of us would find our ways back there, too. I was made to wear black; a lumpy black nylon dress borrowed from an aunt; it was several sizes too large for me, which suited me; a sullen-faced brat who might have been thirteen, not eighteen; frightened of what had happened to my grandfather, and not wanting to think about it; not wanting to think about death, dying; not wanting to think about the burial in a grave site close by Ida's, in the cemetery that was only just a field, a place suited for tall grass and weeds. My female relatives stared at me appalled. Oh how could you! Your hair. The aunt who'd lent me the dress said At least let me trim it for you? I turned coldly away. I wasn't about to defend myself. My brothers looked at me and shrugged. This only confirmed their suspicions of me: I was weird, I was a freak, I would only get worse when I went away to college. Until leaving the cemetery my brother Hendrick nudged me saying in an undertone, almost admiringly You!--you are capable of any thing. Now you really are ugly, that must make you feel just great, right?