My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (36 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Other than the sofa, Hans’s apartment was replete with artificial flowers of every denomination. In the mornings, he would tend to these thousands with a translucent spray bottle, which would take a full hour. I could not shake the feeling that these flowers were about to speak, that there was more to them than twists of colored plastic or, in some cases, starched fabric. The cluster of pink ranunculus that sat stiffly on the coffee table in front of the sofa on which I slept seemed always about to discourse about psychology. The narcissist, they always seemed about to say, is generally a happier person than the comparatively hysterical borderline personality. Here they seemed to nod pointedly toward the daffodils, and I of course was reminded of my encounter with my friend at Borders bookstore when we each held those books on personality disorders only to abandon them (thankfully) for fiction. The tulips, I thought, seemed about to agree with me that the idea of personality disorders was kind of creepy and attractive at the same time, the notion that something surprising lurks under the surface of a person always a thrill, but perhaps, at times, an unwelcome thrill. On and on, the flowers seemed about to yak, and I admired their stamina. The fact that they all persisted in a season of profound winter was, I suppose, cause for celebration of some sort—or perhaps they were merely stir crazy, as was I.
Even so, I rarely left the apartment, but settled myself by the window where I indulged in an on-and-off sprightly communication with the crow. The crow would bring me news of my son, not welcome news, and much as I tried to dissuade him (or her) from these reports, she seemed to insist upon delivering them. You never know about the sensibilities of other species that are possibly impervious to that which we hold dear as humans. In this case, I was holding dear the absence of my son from my life. I cherished this absence as some might cherish inhabiting the premises of one who collected artificial flowers of every denomination and harbored a spotted cat.
The cat was not a communicator and, aside from our sleep time, kept its distance. There were times when I felt it was “giving me a look,” but many feel this way about cats on account of the shapes of their eyes and the fact that they rarely blink. Perhaps, though, they have the capacity to stare into the soul; if this one had been able to gaze into mine, I doubt it would have insisted on sleeping with me. It would have discovered a clotted mess of conflicting desires and repugnancies, all of which I hid behind my usual sangfroid.
Hans and I spoke rarely, and when we did our conversation tended to get caught up in snarls of misunderstanding. He was, as I’ve said, blind in one eye, and this was the central fact of his life, to hear him talk about it. Once I tried to tell him that being blind in one eye was not all that disabling and he nearly bit my head off. You have no idea, do you? he said incredulously, and we went on from there, back and forth, like a Ping-Pong tournament I remember participating in (and losing) as a ten-year-old. Nerve-wracking to see that little white ball—innocuous as it may have been—barreling toward you, as if it might cripple you for life, which is the spirit in which we fought, Hans and I. You are the most self-indulgent person I’ve ever met, he shouted, and I shouted, At least I’m not deluded, and he shouted, You could at least tidy up a little around here, and I shouted, I can’t hear myself think around here!
This last was a mean-spirited reference to Hans’s incessant theremin playing, the spooky sounds reminiscent of bad sci-fi or a copulating cat or, less frequently, a flock of warbling mourning doves. Hans had not yet mastered the instrument, which was a difficult instrument to master, though if you asked me, anyone with a decent soprano could mime the sounds pretty accurately by intoning
ooooo
and
eeeee
to the tune of something plaintive.
When he played
O mio bambino cara
, though, in spite of myself, I was moved. There he would stand, at the helm of his peculiar instrument, a lumpen figure of a man with a large square head, his mouth pressed in a grim line, his hands like big roast beefs paddling the air—and the tender spectacle of this sad, blind-in-one-eye man, along with the Puccini—all the more poignant for being a little off-key—would unfailingly bring tears to my eyes.
I was settling in like a cat settles in, surrendering myself to unfamiliar surroundings, marking my own tiny territory, as it were, which consisted of the sofa and a plastic chair I had moved to the window for the purpose of looking outside. It was always snowing or about to snow and it fascinated me to watch the snowflakes, which resembled swarms of large white bees.
I began to dread the crow’s visits, however, the news of my son always discouraging—he was caught scoring heroin and the police had broken his nose; he was contemplating injecting bleach into his arm, so despondent was he; he had checked himself into detox units, rehab programs, hospital psych wards; he was cohabiting with a Mormon bishop, a blond meth freak, a black cat who subsequently died in an alley. I had to cover my ears.
V
There came the day, as I knew it would, when I neglected to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub while taking my shower. Hans had gone for the afternoon—god knows where he went for hours at a time (I used to speculate that he had a woman stashed somewhere, a person who tended to his physical needs and complimented him on his taste in reading, his formidable intellect, and his sense of humor)—and when I had finished with my ablutions, I heard the angry pounding on the apartment door. Wearing only a towel, I peered through the little eyehole and perceived a tiny, misshapen woman with a large nose looking back at me.
You have some nerve, she said when I opened the door. My entire apartment is flooded, thanks to you. She was not as tiny as I’d thought, nor as misshapen. She was actually quite attractive in a cheerleaderish way—a certain type of big girl with crisp incisors renowned for a lack of irony. Permit me to help you clean up the mess, I said. Which is how I came to know Rita and her various boyfriends, one of whom was perched on top of a ladder reading a book on that first visit, where, for the rest of this tale, we will leave him.
Rita was a hairdresser with her own business, which had been recently revamped by a TV personality who went around revamping hairdresser salons. She was immensely grateful to this personage, claiming that her sales went up exponentially and her employees were far more respectful than before. All this was divulged after I’d done a fair job of sopping up the small lake in Rita’s bedroom with two bath towels. When I’d wrung the last of my shower effluent from the towel into a large bucket, Rita was frowning over me. Your hair needs attention, she said.
This is how I happened to become a regular patron of Rita’s Hair Salon. I’d been cooped up in Hans’s small rooms for so long, I’d forgotten the sheer gleam of the outside world—its rivets and whorls, its dizzying frontal assault when, on my first time out, the snow bees attacked me. Bigger and bigger they grew until they transformed to giant chickens in front of my eyes, squawking and revving up their wings like jet engines, but silent (paradoxically), perfectly silent, so that the squawks and the revving were only in imagination (nevertheless loud).
And this is a curiosity—how the mind creates its own disturbances and how there is almost a kind of synesthesia involved when it comes to the workings of the imagination, a kind of leakage among compartments. Indeed, in imagination everything connects and overlaps—a disturbing vision is capable of hurting the ear and vice versa, and what was past returns uncannily to infect our present moments. Not only memories but stories, even the stories we held most dear as children, and the thought of who we were as children reading those stories, or listening to them, our mothers’ warm breath on our necks . . .
Which is why I tried to banish all thoughts of my son.
Thankfully, Rita’s salon did not entail much of a trek. It was a pleasant enough place with purple walls and elderly women sitting under hair driers with pink curlers and Rita running around snapping her precision scissors, which she ultimately employed on my own coif, cutting, shaping, and spraying to such an extent that I did not recognize the severe and helmeted visage—like a Roman foot soldier!—that looked back at me from her mirror.
An old woman to whom Rita applied her energetic ministrations, from I believe Finland or Lapland, engaged me in conversation; she talked about her children and her abilities as a fortune-teller, a little diminished, she admitted, with her great age. Her children and her children’s children and even their children were getting on, she said, and the whole business made her feel very ancient, which in fact she was, displaying the ropy veins on her old hands with pride. Fabulous, no? she said. I am lucky to have made it so far as the world is endlessly—here she searched for the right word, then shook her head. The world is endlessly, she repeated, then laughed. Rita was teasing her hair into two towers, then situating tiny plastic windows in each. I like to do my part, said the old woman.
Then she took my hand in both of hers and read my palm. Ah, but you, she said. You have just been away on a, shall we say, sojourn, during which you completed a great deal of work. It is difficult, almost impossible, to judge this work—I’m not sure why. Then you wandered, looking for that which no longer exists. Then you happened upon a friend, not noted for his warmth and kindness, who took you in. Listen to the crow, she said. Follow the snow bees. Your son awaits you. At this the old woman began to weep so profusely that Rita gently escorted her to the restroom and I made my departure.
VI
“The Snow Queen,” written by an unattractive, socially inept Dane, said Hans, is a sort of coming-of-age story. There are two children, a boy and a girl, who through a twist of fate become separated. The twist of fate is the Snow Queen herself, an enigmatic personage, beautiful and dangerous—“slender and dazzling”—who entrances the boy, invites him to ride on her sled, wraps him in her fur—“creep into my fur,” she entreats seductively—and takes him to her ice palace. We know she is dangerous because on the way to the ice palace, the Snow Queen says, “And now you will have no more kisses . . . or else I shall kiss you to death!”
But the best part of the story, said Hans, is that before any of the above occurred, the devils dropped a special mirror which smashed into millions of pieces and became lodged in people’s eyes and hearts, causing distorted views of the world. For some reason, don’t ask me why, I love the idea of that mirror. You love contradictions, I pointed out, and calamities. No, said Hans, I love the idea of lost souls.
The story is a ludicrously obvious tale of sexual seduction, piped up the iris. The beautiful queen, the “fur” that “envelopes” the boy, the sleigh ride to “another land,” even the palace with its postlapsarian, postcoital chill . . . who among us wants to surrender his penchant for enchantment?
We are all lost souls, Hans went on mournfully, and then he went mournfully to his theremin to play a version of “Over the Rainbow,” which sounded like a duck quacking. But I was still thinking about the Snow Queen, who had always reminded me of my mother, who also was given to furs and a cold house and, for years in my young life, inhabited a place of mystery. And this made me think of my son, which I did not want to do, so I changed the course of my thinking and instead thought of the power of the imagination . . .
So though we cannot exactly envision the matter of “beyond our wildest dreams” (I reflected) since it has not yet been revealed, we can nonetheless attach to this imaginary empty place an ecstatic feeling; it can occupy all our thoughts and direct our smallest actions . . .
As if reading my mind, a chorus of violets seemed about to chant
obsessive compulsive disorder
a few times until interrupted by a single rose who seemed about to discourse on that personality disorder, claiming that Gerda demonstrated all the signs of OCD in her persistent quest, her inability to banish little Kay (who was no longer little) from her mind. In a way, the roses seemed about to say, Gerda was obsessed with the irrecoverable past, with childhood in all its one-dimensionality. One could say, the roses seemed about to continue, that she was unable to deal with the complexities of adulthood, especially her own impending adulthood.
Just then the crow appeared at the window, surrounded by its customary band of snow bees, looking a little worn out, as if it had been through an even fiercer blizzard than usual. You are both wrong, said the crow, the SQ is a gothic story, if you will, wherein a girl has an adventure—becomes, for the moment, the agent of her fate—and in the end discovers the prize wasn’t worth it. Ha, added the crow cynically, as if this were the case with pursuits of any kind.
Or, said the cat, who for the first time in our acquaintance seemed to have an opinion, it is the story of incest. That story reminds me of the film
Psycho
, only it has a different outcome. The boy escapes the suffocating clutches of the girl and the grandmother and returns to this vale of tears, inevitably resigned. The Freudian drama to a T.
Lost souls! interjected Hans, after which we all fell silent.
VII
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that Hans’s love of lost souls might have explained his kindness to me.
I was on my way to Rita’s Hair Salon in an even worse blizzard than usual. I could not see one foot in front of me as I walked; I proceeded, therefore, in blind faith, hoping not to fall into an open manhole or walk in front of a truck. The wind howled and buffeted and finally tore my umbrella from my hands and tossed it god-knows-where. I was quite cold and I was enacting that trick where you allow the cold into your body in order to nullify it.

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