Fear of Flying (5 page)

“You act as if writing is the most important thing in the world!” she screamed.

I was trying to be rational and calm and well-analyzed about my family that week so I was painfully withholding the explosion I felt coming.

“Randy,” I pleaded, “I
have
to think writing is the most important thing in the world in order to go on
doing
it, but nothing says that
you
have to share my obsession, so why should I have to share
yours?
”

“Well I won’t have you putting me and my husband and my children in your filthy writing—do you hear me? I’ll kill you if you mention me in any way at all. And if I don’t kill you myself, then Pierre will. Do you understand?”

There ensued a long and fear-splitting discussion of autobiography versus fiction, in which I mentioned Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Boswell, Proust, and James Joyce—all apparently to no avail.

“You can damned well publish your filthy books posthumously,” Randy screeched, “if they contain a
word
about any character who ever
remotely
resembles me!”

“And I assume that you are going to kill me so as not to delay publication.”

“I mean after
we
die, not after you die.”

“Is that an invitation to a beheading?”

“Stuff your literary allusions up your ass. You think you’re so goddamned clever don’t you? Just because you were a grub and a grind and did well in school. Just because you’re ambitious and go fucking around with creepy intellectuals and phonies. I had as much talent to write as you and you know it, only I wouldn’t
stoop
to revealing myself in public the way you do. I wouldn’t
want
people to know my secret fantasies. I’m not a stinking
exhibitionist
like you, that’s all. … Now get the hell out of here! Get out! Do you hear me?”

“This happens to be Jude’s and Daddy’s house—not yours.”

“Get out! You’ve
already
given me a splitting headache!” Holding her temples, Randy ran into the bathroom.

It was the old psychosomatic side-step. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You’ve given me a splitting headache! You’ve given me indigestion! You’ve given me crotch rot! You’ve given me auditory hallucinations! You’ve given me a heart attack! You’ve given me cancer!

Randy emerged from the bathroom with a pained look on her face. She had pulled herself together. Now she was trying to be tolerant.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” she said.

“Hah.”

“No, really. It’s just that you’re still my little sister and I really think you’ve gotten off on the wrong track! I mean you really ought to stop writing and have a baby. You’ll find it
so
much more fulfilling than writing. …”

“Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, Randy, it may seem absurd to someone with nine children, but I really don’t
miss
having children. I mean I
love
your kids and Chloe’s and Lalah’s, but I’m really happy with my work for the moment and I don’t
want
any more fulfillment just now. It took me
years
to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it … now that I can finally do it … I’m realty raring to go. I don’t
want
anything to interfere right now. Jesus Christ! It took me so long to get to
this
point. …”

“Is that really how you expect to spend the rest of your life? Sitting in a room and writing poetry?”

“Well why not? What makes it any worse than having nine kids?”

She looked at me with contempt. “You don’t know a thing about having kids.”

“And you don’t know a thing about writing.” I was really disgusted with myself for sounding so infantile. Randy always made me feel like five again.

“But you’d love having kids,” she persisted, “you really would.”

“For God’s sake, you’re probably right! But you’re enough of an Ethel Kennedy for one family—why the hell do we need any
more?
And why should I do it if I have so many doubts about it? Why should I
force
myself? For whose good? Yours? Mine? The nonexistent kids? It’s not as if the human race is about to die out if I don’t have kids!”

“But aren’t you even curious to have the experience?”

“I guess … but the curiosity isn’t exactly killing me. Besides, I have time. …”

“You’re almost thirty. You don’t have as much time as you think.”

“Oh, God,” I said, “you really can’t
stand
anyone to do anything but what you’ve done. Why do I have to copy your life and your mistakes? Can’t I even make my
own
damned mistakes?”

“What mistakes?”

“Like bringing up your children to think they’re Catholics, like lying about your religion, like denying who you are …”

“I’ll kill you!” Randy shrieked, coming at me with her arms raised. I ducked into the hall closet as I had so many times in childhood. There were days when Randy used to beat me up regularly. (At least if I have kids I’ll never make the mistake of having more than one. Being an only child is supposed to be such a psychological hardship, but it was all
I
ever wished for as a child.)

“
PIERRE!
” I heard Randy Screaming outside the door. I turned the lock and pulled the light cord. Then I backed into my mother’s sable coat (smelling of old
Joy
and stale
Dioris-simo
) and sat beneath it cross-legged among the boots. Above me were two more racks of coats going up high into the ceiling. Old fur coats, English children’s coats with leather leggings, ski parkas, rain capes, trench coats, autographed slickers from our camp days, school blazers with name tapes in the necks and forgotten skate keys in the pockets, velvet evening coats, brocade coats, polo coats, mink coats … thirty-five years of changing fashions and four grown daughters … thirty-five years of buying and spending and raising kids and screaming … and what did my mother have to show for it? Her sable, her mink, and her resentment?

“Isadora!” It was Pierre now. He rapped at the door.

I sat on the floor and rocked my knees. I had no intention of getting up. Such a lovely smell of mothballs and
Joy.

“Isadora!”

Really, I thought, sometimes I
would
like to have a child. A very wise and witty little girl who’d grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche. With no toadying servility and no ingratiating seductiveness. A little girl who said what she meant and meant what she said. A little girl who was neither bitchy nor mealy-mouthed because she didn’t hate her mother or herself.

“Isadora!”

What I really wanted was to give birth to
myself
—the little girl I might have been in a different family, a different world. I hugged my knees. I felt strangely safe there, under my mother’s fur coat

“Isadora!”

Why did they have to keep rushing me and trying to cram me into the same molds that had made them so unhappy? I would have a child when I was ready. Or if I wasn’t ever ready, then I wouldn’t. Was a child any guarantee against loneliness or pain? Was anything? If they were so happy with their lives, why did they have to proselytize all the time? Why did they insist that everyone do as they did? Why were they such goddamned missionaries?

“Isadora!”

Why did my sisters and my mother all seem to be in a conspiracy to mock my accomplishments and make me feel they were liabilities? I had published a book which even I could still stand to read. Six years of writing and discarding, writing and changing, trying to get deeper and deeper into myself. And readers had sent me letters and called me in the middle of the night to tell me that the book mattered, that it was brave and honest, that I was brave and honest. Brave! Here I was in a closet hugging my knees! But to my family I was a failure because I had no children. It was absurd. I knew it was absurd. But something in me repeated the catechism. Something in me apologized to all the people who complimented my poems: something in me said: “
Oh but remember, I have no children.
”

“Isadora!”

Almost thirty. Strangers sometimes take me for twenty-five, but I can see the relentless beginnings of age, the beginnings of death, the gradual preparation for nonexistence. Already there are light furrows in my forehead. I can spread them with my fingers, but they fall back into creases immediately. Under the eyes, a fine network of lines is beginning: tiny canals, the markings of a miniature moon. In the corners of my eyes are one, two, three fine lines, as if made with a Rapidograph pen using invisible ink. Hardly perceptible—except to the artist herself. And the mouth is more set in its ways than it used to be. The smile takes longer to fade. As if aging were, above all, rigidity. The jetting of the face into prearranged patterns; a faint foreshadowing of the rigidity which comes after death. Oh the chin is still firm enough … but isn’t there a fine, almost invisible chain around the midpoint of the neck? And the breasts are still high, but for how long? And the cunt? That will be the last to go. It will still be going strong when nobody wants the rest of me at all.

It’s funny how in spite of my reluctance to get pregnant, I seem to live inside my own cunt. I seem to be involved with all the changes of my body. They never pass unnoticed. I seem to know exactly when I ovulate. In the second week of the cycle, I feel a tiny
ping
and then a sort of tingling ache in my lower belly. A few days later I’ll often find a tiny spot of blood in the rubber
yarmulke
of the diaphragm. A bright red smear, the only visible trace of the egg that might have become a baby. I feel a wave of sadness then which is almost indescribable. Sadness and relief. Is it really better never to be born?

The diaphragm has become a kind of fetish for me. A holy object, a barrier between my womb and men. Somehow the idea of bearing
his
baby angers me. Let him bear his own baby! If I have a baby I want it to be all
mine.
A girl like me, but better. A girl who’ll also be able to have her own babies. It is not having babies in itself which seems unfair, but having babies for men. Babies who get
their
names. Babies who lock you by means of love to a man you have to please and serve on pain of abandonment. And love, after all, is the strongest lock. The one that chafes hardest and wears longest. And then I would be trapped for good. The hostage of my own feelings and my own child.

“Isadora!”

But maybe I was already a hostage. The hostage of my fantasies. The hostage of my fears. The hostage of my false definitions. What did it mean to be a woman, anyway? If it meant being what Randy was or what my mother was, then I didn’t want it. If it meant seething resentment and giving lectures on the joys of childbearing, then I didn’t want it. Far better to be an intellectual nun than
that.

But the intellectual nun was no fun either. She had no juice. And what were the alternatives? Why didn’t someone show me some alternatives? I looked up and grazed my chin on the hem of my mother’s sable coat.

“Isadora!”

“OK. I’m coming.”

I walked out of the closet and confronted Pierre.

“Apologize to Randy!” he demanded.

“What for?”

“For all the bitchy disgusting things you said about me!” Randy yelled. “Apologize!”

“I only said that you deny who you are and that I don’t want to be like you. Why does that require an apology?”

“Apologize!” she screamed.

“Why?”

“Since when do you care so fucking much about being Jewish? Since when are you so goddamned holy?”

“I’m not so holy,” I said.

“Then why are you making such an issue?” Pierre was now using his sweetest Middle-Eastern French accent.

“I never started this holy crusade to multiply the true believers—
you
did. I’m not trying to convert
you
to anything. I’m just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to
find
it in all this confusion.”

“But Isadora,” Pierre wheedled, “that’s exactly it—we’re trying to
help
you.”

4

Near the Black Forest

 
 
Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. … Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.

—Affidavit of S.S.-Oberstürmführer Rudolph Hess, April 5, 1946, Nürnberg

The 8:29 to Frankfurt

Europe is dusty plush,

first-class carriages

with first-class dust.

And the conductor

resembles a pink

marzipan pig

and goose steps

down the corridor.

FRÄULEIN!

He says it with four umlauts

and his red patent-leather

chest strap zings the air

like a snapped rubber band.

And his cap peaks and peaks,

a papal crown

reaching heavenward to claim

an absolute authority,

the divine right

of
Bundesbahn
conductors.

FRÄULEIN!

E pericoloso sporgersi.

Nicht hinauslehnen.

II est dangereux …

the wheels repeat.

But I am not so dumb.

I know where the tracks end

and the train rolls on

into silence.

I know the station

won’t be marked.

My hair’s as Aryan

as anything.

My name is heather.

My passport, eyes

bluer than Bavarian skies.

But he can see

the Star of David

in my navel.

Bump. Grind.

I wear it for

the last striptease.

FRÄULEIN!

Someone nudges me awake.

My coward of a hand

almost salutes

this bristling little

uniform of a man.

Schönes Wetter heute,

he is saying

with a nod

toward the blurry farms

beyond the window.

Crisply he notches

my ticket, then

his dumpling face smiles down

in sunlight which is

suddenly benign

as chicken soup.