Saving St. Germ (2 page)

Ollie stops to stare at one of the photographs and suddenly her small figure looks iconlike, framed by the plaster window. Once, as a college student, hosteling through Brittany, I came across one of those seaside churches (Perros-Guirec?) built on a cliff above the water. It was a village haunted by the Black Madonna. A local artist had sculpted his own faux assemblage, renderings of the famous dark patroness, whose likeness stood ensconced in a side chapel of the local church—where one wan ray of sunlight banded her forehead between four and five every day in the afternoon. The artist placed his imitations on the rock outcroppings that jutted from the natural stone colonnades marching to the sea. Inside each tiny parapet was a black madonna, each slightly different: a progression in the chalky stone. Some had smeared eyes; some had godly fear in their faces, some a sunflower’s idolatrous cheer. I stayed a day or two in the town and I kept coming back to the church, haunted by those small dark figures, and then one portentous day, the Feast of the Assumption, August fifteenth—all the madonnas were gone. Just like that. The eye searched frantically but found just a series of absences suggesting ... what? The artist must have known that until the madonnas returned, it would be impossible
not
to see them. And not as obvious
versions
of an “original”—or shadows of a white madonna. No, they were, standing there, mounted on their parapets above the regular shudder and hiss of the sea, intricate representations of the unexpressed—mockeries of the representational. It was simple, the eye had to explode pattern, try to answer the riddle of the unseen without thinking of it as the
missing.
That absence was part of the way to see them, to see what wasn’t there, unchartable through set visual fields, the compass, the laser, the electronic simulator. I realized that was what I wanted to do: to see that moment of invisibility more and more clearly.

Ollie tugs my arm. “Mom. Go. Go now. This light is too
loud.
”

In the posh waiting room, Ollie spun around silently, like a top, emitting a high wavery sound and I paged through
A Mother’s Guide to Child Development:

Your baby is five! Do you believe it, Mom? Most child-development experts believe that at five your child should be capable of using words in comprehensible sentences. (That means putting key “subject” words in an order that makes sense!) They also believe that at five the child should be capable of an expanded attention span—he should be able to sit and play by himself for extended periods.
And
he should be able to recognize and identify correctly most primary colors, as well as a number of familiar shapes!

Read to your five-year-old, then “quiz” him gently about what you just read together. You can actually
improve
your child’s educational potential!

Beyond the door is a Kiddie Doctor of some renown. We’ve been to see him just once before this visit. As a famous child specialist, he is confident in his judgments; he leans back in his executive adjustable lounge chair, lacing his long slender fingers, contemplating the ceiling, talking about the behavioral habits of developing human beings. This doctor and I argue: I’ve been outspoken in my reactions to his analysis of Ollie. Ollie’s “problems,” though they sometimes seem like involuntary withdrawal or hyperactivity, are not, in my opinion, these states.

This doctor has suggested to me that my daughter has been exhibiting signs of emotional dysfunction, with hints of (but not) autism—because her silences are long and peculiarly stimulating to her, because her sudden flights of words and activity are inappropriate, often without context. I differed with his interpretation of these “signs.” I had many reasons for disagreeing, but I had trouble explaining them to this person who mumbled into a bar-of-soap-sized tape recorder in his vest pocket as he interviewed patients. Once, as he began earnestly murmuring to his pocket in front of us, I reached over, pulled the tape recorder out of his vest, and clicked it off. His hands flew to his breast as if I’d stabbed him. His mouth fell open.

I sat, shaking, in front of him, holding up the tape recorder like a prize.

“When you whisper to this tape recorder, it makes me feel as if you’re not listening to me.”

He kept his hand, Napoleon-like, over his heart. He blinked once, twice.

“I
was
listening to you, Mrs. Tallich.”

He slid his hand across his vest, then held it out, tentatively. I placed the tape recorder in his palm.

“I don’t want to put my child on medication for as you put it, ‘occasional symptoms.’”

He raised his eyebrows, which were silver, sculpted as his hair, and shook his head. The tape recorder sat, silenced, on the gleaming desktop between us. In the time-honored pose of shrinks, judges, or actors demonstrating a studious remove, he sat slowly back in his chair. He cuffed the side of his nose with his fist and stared at me.

He said nothing.

I said nothing.

Ollie said: “Blue blue blue ... walk walk waves the shark.”

His eyes, the brows above frozen in a spasm of disbelief, wandered to Ollie, swinging her legs from the tall chair. Eventually, they slid back to rest on me.

Now, as I drove out of the Valley, her humming beside me, I considered Ollie, the way Ollie fit into the world. When I wore my red glass beads, Ollie would crawl into my lap and finger them one by one. “Hot,” she would say, “the beads are hot.” Other kids might have pointed out more immediately apparent qualities of the beads. They were pretty, red, one could see through them—but I could follow Ollie’s logic. The beads
were
hot, from resting against the jugular pulse, against the heat at the curve of the neck. Now she smiled at me, chattering about the bumps in the road as if they were alive.

Ollie said the odd thing, the unexpected thing. Ollie looked away from people as she spoke, she stared up at the ceiling, she stared at her sneakers. Sometimes she covered one ear and cocked her head as if she were intercepting a message from a satellite. She laughed occasionally, and she threw her whole body into laughing—making no sound at all. Sometimes she rocked back and forth on her heels in silence (this was the crucial behavior in the diagnosis of possible autism) but I saw that Ollie was not in a pathological trance, I saw that Ollie was thinking hard. Ollie was (for the purposes of being Ollie) functional. And what else matters? I thought hotly, as I changed lanes, remembering that day at the specialist’s. The kind of kid she is, she is. I’ll protect her, her different way of looking at the goddam storybook, the goddam model galaxy. I thought, burning, of Sillitoe’s “qualifying” test—each child was asked to parrot back a mindless narrative, some computer-generated “listening text,” verbatim.

I swung the wheel too forcefully and she slid sideways in the seat and looked up at me. I smiled reassuringly at her.

At times like this, I longed for the lab. I was calm there, when I was making calculations or working on soundless, endlessly reconstructible sequencing patterns. Glass beakers in sun, polymer ladders, dot-matrix readouts ... dust motes in the slow dim fluorescent air, a scribbled page of equations next to a
CATS
coffee mug. Peace. Dreams. I rubbed the headache in my left temple, looking in the rearview mirror, driving south out of the Valley on the Hollywood Freeway and over the hill, exiting on Gower, following it past the drive-ins (“Home of the Whopper”), then the lots and studios where the sitcom taping signs were up:
ALF, FULL HOUSE, DESIGNING WOMEN,
and the studio-audience lines, long as Soviet food lines, wrapped around the buildings.

The crowds were in sweats, Rambo headbands, and neon spandex tights, spilling over the curb. I eased the car around a heavy woman with a “Roseanne” haircut, who stood in the street, laughing and gesturing to her companions on the sidewalk. A friend was photographing her. She put her hands at her studded belt and executed a kind of bump and roll with her hips. I honked once at her, gently, and she gave me the finger.

I glanced nervously at Ollie and she coughed and sank lower in the passenger seat.

“Are you sick? Do you have a temperature?” I reached across the seat and held my right palm against her brow.

Ollie turned her head away to look out the window. A bright red spot had appeared in the center of each cheek.

I stared glumly through the windshield at the thin brownish haze on the horizon. A toxic stew boiled in my head: formaldehyde, sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons, acrolein, nitrogen oxides.

“Daddy,” said Ollie suddenly, sitting up. “Daddy.” She pointed at the bright metal bas-relief globe turning on top of the Paramount building.

I attempted a feeble stand: “You’re sick, we should go
home
”—then, against my better judgment swung a quick left on Melrose and another through the rococo gates and into the Paramount lot, braking at the guard booth. There was a young guard at the gate, a small man who was working on resembling Paul Newman.

“We’re here to see Jay Tallich. He’s T.D. on
Drastic Measures
.”

The guard cocked his head at me and slowly smiled. He shifted his weight, hooked a hand in his belt, looked up to the heavens, arched an eyebrow, then scratched his upper lip. “Did he call your name up?”

“No, but I’m his wife. I think I remember what soundstage he’s on.”

The guard leaned out the other side of his booth and waved a van through.

He turned back to me with a dreamy look, humming a little. The hair under his cap was the color of clotting blood, as if his scalp had vacuumed up all the plasma from the capillaries in his face.

“Sorry, I can’t just let you on. I have to call
up.
See if they left you a
pass
.”

I smiled sweetly and ran one hand back and forth on the leather wheel cover.

“You don’t
have
to call up. It’s really no big deal.”

The guard smiled too and hung his head a little. “Sure I have to. What am
I
here for then? It
is
a big deal. I’d say, in fact, it’s kind of a
huge
deal.”

His smile disappeared. I watched him work at a daunting expression. “People try to get in here all the time. But they don’t get far.”

I leaned out of the car window in a confidential attitude. I knew what I was going to do and I was shocked at myself, but not enough to change my approach.

Still smiling, I felt behind me on the backseat for my bag, pulled out my wallet, and flipped it open to a fan of ID cards. I held up my UGC Research Laboratories clearance badge and a card identifying me as a professor of biochemistry.

“Look, my friend, you got me. You’re too savvy to try and bullshit. I’m going to tell you the real, frightening story. I’m a biochemist, an underground operative, in effect, a
spy
for Superfund Toxic Dump Cleanup.”

I sighed and shook my head sadly, staring through the windshield. I could feel his eyes on me.

“Oh God, where to begin? Did you know that there are giant, illegal liposuction dump sites all over Los Angeles? Think about it for a second—have you
ever
wondered where all that fat they suck from jiggling thighs and bellies and buttocks actually
goes
?”

I looked around furtively, then leaned out the window, speaking sotto voce. “I’ll
tell
you where it goes. You may not wanna look at it, my friend, but the reason we’ve been having so many earth tremors lately is because they’re piping blubber by the pound under the ground surface of L.A.—soon we’ll all be skateboarding on a layer of subcutaneous (subterraneous)
fat.
Hey,
don’t laugh
!”

He shook his head, pawing the ground like a pony, his expression scornful. But he did look a little shaken. I saw him glance again, furtively, at my ID.

“Hey, I’ll tell you
more.
The La Brea Tar Pits are an adipose swamp, a seething mass of old love handles, eyelids, and saddlebags—and
nobody knows.
I’m here today, posing as a visitor, but the fact is, you’ve got one of the biggest Blubber Depots in the city, right here on the lot, outside your Executive Offices, and my orders are to
check it out
.”

We looked straight into each other’s eyes. He moved his lips but no sound came.

“Do you think,” I said, staring into the back of his head, “I’d be here at all unless the situation was really grave? Do you think I’d bring my
kid
into this?”

Then he got mad.

“This is not funny, lady. And you’re not intimidating me.”

As he spoke, I covered my mouth with my fist and pumped out the background music from
Jaws,
which Jay had recently gotten me to watch.

“Jesus. You’re
weird,
” he said. He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Why do I do it? Why do I put up with this kind of treatment?”

“Because you’re a whopper,” said Ollie suddenly from the passenger seat. “You’re a whopper in the sky with diamonds whopper little Lucy.” She began humming atonally and kicking the glove compartment in front of her.

“Soundstage Thirty-two,” I threw this out quickly, dropping my hand. “Ask for Paloma.”

The guard stuck his head a little way into the car, glaring at Ollie, who crossed her eyes at him. I noticed, belatedly, that his nameplate read
S. LUCY
, and I suddenly got Ollie’s joke. I’d been playing my old Beatles records for her lately.

“Your kid’s real funny. You
train
her to do that?”

I shrugged.

“I don’t care if people don’t say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ to me—
that
I don’t mind. I
do
mind when people insult me outright.”

His face had turned as brick-colored as his hair. Too late that face reminded me of dumb mistakes I’ve made my whole life, going too far with people who, as I should have been able to tell, didn’t want to
get it,
or who didn’t think my humor was funny. I would find myself blundering into sudden hostile depths awash in wreckage: missed punch lines, solemnly answered rhetorical questions, fundamentalist interpretation of my smartass one-liners.