The Best American Essays 2014 (28 page)

 

Enormous suitcases, jade and beige and navy, jammed together in a rattling bulwark smelling of sunstruck plastic, shade a narrow canyon lined with a flannel sleeping bag whose hunters and retrievers alternate with flushed pheasants. The fact that the pheasants are bigger than the hunters and their dogs and if they flew at them instead of away could crush them with a few decisive wingbeats arouses an aesthetic revulsion intense to the point of nausea: I need to correct this, to write a letter to the sleeping-bag people, enclosing a pheasant-setter-hunter drawing so piercingly
right
they would wonder who this girl is and resolve to find her to hire her to design all future sleeping-bag-flannel vignettes. My forehead sweats, the roots of my hair sweat; sweat runs from between my shoulder blades down my spine with a feeling like being crawled on and not minding, and I close my eyes and coax that sensation to the center, where it's the war of slow-sliding creepy arousal versus pain. If you have three children in the back seat, one is always in the middle, nudged and bothered and whisper-taunted from the left and from the right. The answer is always no, but every trip begins with someone begging to ride in the rear of the station wagon, called in our family the Wayfarback, sweet as a vacant house is sweet, as only unclaimed spaces ever are, carpeted in clean scratchiness, offering what can be found nowhere else in our life, the ambiguity of being close yet unseen: a child in the Wayfarback can't be surveilled by glances in the rearview mirror. Can't be seat-belted in, either, making it appealingly dangerous. So why is it mine, this hot rumpled hidey-hole? Attuned to injustice—savage keeners of
No fair!
—my little brother and sister are quiet in the face of this travesty, gratified by their own quietness, which seems grownup and inexplicable. Mother-and-father silence followed my saying plaintively, two or three times before we left the hotel room this morning,
Something's wrong.
With my left arm, with the little finger and the fourth finger and the thumb of my left hand—
Something's wrong it feels really strange.
To which no one said even
It'll be all right in a little while.
Wearing the same clothes as yesterday, I was standing there saying
Look
with my whole incredulous body. My mother who didn't like to touch me helped me work my swollen arm out of the sleeve of my T-shirt, but even then she didn't do the thing I wanted, she didn't look, and because she didn't look it changed into something not quite mine, my arm, and I got a little divorce from it, like getting distance from a lie you're going to disown before long. I couldn't knot the cowboy bandanna I was obsessed with, so she did, though she hated it and was always trying to talk me out of it on the grounds that girls didn't look good with rags around their necks. Then astounding license:
You can ride in the very back.
With the smashing of strictness, the air in the station wagon brightens, my father calls my mother
honey
, which makes everyone feel as if they've been called
honey
, my brother and sister trade the Etch-a-Sketch back and forth, and I lie on my stomach in the Wayfarback, turning the pages of
Smoky the Cowhorse.
It was my rope-callused hand Smoky snatched the apple from, my sunburnt neck the bandanna circled, only now (I suddenly saw) the bandanna could be used to wrap my forearm—a feverish cowboy would do that if he was shot with an arrow. When the wrapping seemed to help, I found the rag used to wipe condensation from the back window and swaddled my hand, figuring out how to encompass the outsize, yammering fingers too, although the thumb remained an orphan with a big, throbbing heartbeat. I wished I had a scrap for it. Eternity could be broken into bearable slabs by the ritual of loosening the bindings and winding them tighter, the baseball game fading and reviving on the radio and my father calling the glorious salute
Attaboy!
and the sun lasering between suitcases to ignite hot stripes on my legs while I slept, and I slept a lot, and when I woke there was a fraction of an instant when my old life was back and all was well, and that was snatched away. How wrong I'd been not to have loved my unbroken arm more. My mother unfolded the map of America with every Howard Johnson's on it. My father said
Shoes on, kids.
The back door swung up, me blinking at the loss of my cave, clambering out to the asphalt where the bare-legged beauty of the other four struck me sharply. Glass doors opened into the mercy of air conditioning in a circus-bright barrage of orange and turquoise, the gauze bow in the small of the waitress's back led us in single file between tables of families, and I held my scarecrow arm close to my body, but more than one waitress raised her eyebrows and would have inquired if she hadn't, in time, registered my parents' unwillingness to engage. There was another hotel-room night; there was bacon and eggs and Tang that astronauts drank.
Look, kids, the Cumberland Gap, your great-great-grandpa rode home through here after he lost his leg at The Wilderness, we'll go there sometime. Rode home one-legged? He could get a prit good hold, his stump was long enough, down to the knee. Bill! Don't go into details!
There was
prit
to evoke the ghost's voice and prove the Civil War had happened; there was fog, the headlights' shafts filled with rolling plumes, the dented guardrail the only thing between us and the abyss; there was my father's tale of the Model A he first learned to drive and the red mud it foundered in, and how it was pulled out with a neighbor's mule who could count and do tricks and would neatly, with its big mule lips peeled back, take an apple from between its owner's wife's teeth; there was my father imitating the mule's grimace, and when my mother didn't laugh, doing it again; there was my mother's Yankee reticence and delicacy and irony, about to become drawbacks in the encounter with my father's family. She was hard to make sense of, in Tennessee.

 

The fraying, dirty mummification of my arm enchanted my cousins as if I had carried a filthy stray cat into their house and then refused to give it up. This was seen as boldness on my part: the lawlessness they imagined for me was an outline I would have poured myself into if I could. They wanted to touch and poke and unwrap, and since that would earn me more reverent attention of the kind boys pay only to what slightly sickens them, I would have let them. But my aunt said
Boys. Now you leave it alone.
My cousins stuck close, honoring the leprous
it
ness of my arm. Asked by my aunt about the pain, I don't think I was constrained by loyalty to my parents' version, which was that nothing was broken. The doubleness of my vantage point—aware that they were wrong but sure they were perfect—wrecked my awareness of them; where
what they want
belonged, there was a blank, so I was honest with my aunt, and relieved by the distress she let show. Reined in only by my aunt's southern-lady-ness, that distress verged on an indictment of my parents, especially my mother; but my aunt held her tongue and didn't accuse her of anything, not where I could hear, and I think not to anyone, because it wouldn't have served any purpose, not really, or made it any easier to accomplish what she right away determined to do, which was get me to a doctor. My aunt had brown eyes so dark they were often described as black, enviable eyes, as hers was an enviable high-cheekboned black-haired drawling beauty that hadn't gotten her into too much trouble, either because she was naturally sensible or had set out to cultivate happiness. She'd married my father's droll, soft-spoken, easygoing little brother, and their household seemed miraculous to me, so much so that on previous annual visits I had insisted on watching my aunt do every little thing, spellbound by her gentleness and determined to attract as much of it as I could to myself. This greed of mine for my aunt's company didn't go unremarked, and it embarrassed my mother. If she'd liked my aunt less, she might have held it against her, or conjectured to my father late at night when they were finally alone that my aunt was egging me on in my ridiculous infatuation, with the secret aim of making Bill's Yankee wife look bad. My aunt's nature was equable and warm and self-effacing, qualities my restless hypercritical mother did not possess but religiously impersonated. As sometimes happens, two women who seem exactly positioned for mutual loathing ended up forging a spirited conspiracy, whose great staple was discussion of their men, those very different brothers.

 

At the hospital I was
sugah
ed and
sweetheart
ed, endearments good as opium. The dream of benevolence was pierced by my fear when the doctor bent close. I hadn't bathed since the accident and my skin radiated the stench of fever and chlorine, but the possibility that he would be repelled by me did not concern me—that wasn't it, though what I was afraid of was
like
smelling bad: it was present, like a taint, when the doctor leaned in. It was the possibility of being deeply shamed. With his mannerly Tennessee-slow slightly formal inquisitiveness the doctor might assent to my parents' view that nothing real was wrong, and attention-lover that I was, I would be seen as having impersonated brokenness and spun a fable of pain. Could that be, could I have done that? Across a wall, at adult eye level, ran the sequence of black X-ray sheets, and I gazed up at the frail light of my bones while grownup voices took polite turns, the longest, southernest turn belonging to the doctor.
You know how if you take a little stick and give it a good twist, it will splinter out with the strain but not snap clear through? What's called a greenstick fracture. Fractures here, here, and here too.
The truth of X-rayed bone, the lifted-up feeling of rescue, the sensuousness of the expert winding of plaster-soaked gauze, spindly as layers of papier-mâché, around and around until the hurt arm vanished.

 

The opposite of hospital order and clarity and decisiveness is the velvet passivity of sinking into the high-backed seats of a darkening theater, but whose whim was this? Down at the thrilling level where children piece together rumors of what adults find
dirty
, this movie was a source of joking and awe and back-yard reenactment:
This bad guy kills women by sneaking in while they're sleeping and painting them gold, all over so their skin can't breathe. They die? If a person's skin can't breathe they die. Wouldn't it wake you up to be painted—you'd feel it? They're just in real deep sleep. The painting happens fast. They used real gold. This one woman, while they were painting they forgot to leave her a patch of bare skin to breathe through and she died. In real life, died, and you get to see her.
For my aunt and uncle as evangelicals, the corruption that could attend moviegoing wasn't taken lightly; how did they ever agree to Bond? I can't explain it, unless the movie was meant as reckless compensation for the ordeal of the hospital, which had left the grownups in a dangerous state of disenchantment with each other. Maybe some unprecedented enchantment was needed, which could embrace them in its scandalous arms—maybe it had to be scandalous or it wouldn't constitute enough of a break, it wouldn't do the trick. Neither can the adults' decision to sit apart from us children be explained, unless their apartness seemed the route to undistracted calm and unity. So: to the gilding and velvet and shushing of southern audience voices, to five cousins in thrall to each other's nearness, alert to every flicker of an eyelid in a cousin's profile. The troubling parts
are going to go right over their heads
, the grownups had decided, a satisfying conclusion all round, for them because it guaranteed them a respite from the strained aura of mutual apology that had overtaken them at the hospital, for us because we fully intended to absorb every bit of sex and violence. In the downfalling twilight I rested my brand-new cast on the armrest and admired its luminous whiteness, the separate aluminum splint that shielded my thumb, the cute pawlike entrapment of my other fingertips showing at the cast's end. Then it was dark. For music there was a moaningly erotic blare of trumpets whose notes were prolonged with a
nyaaaah nyaaaaaah
obnoxiousness well known to children. Bond too was gloriously obvious: he did whatever he wanted. We understood! How beguiled we were to find ourselves surfing the shockwaves of a movie for grownups. We grew bolder, also for some reason indifferent to each other, staring without whispering. Deep in the movie, in the silk sheets where Bond had left her the night before, a woman lay on her side, her hair swerving across a pillow, her back to us, what my dad called
the cheeks of her ass
exposed, just a little string running down between them. Bond came in. Bond sat on the edge of the bed. She was bare bright overpowering gold, the tilt of shoulder declining to the tuck of waist, the hip the high point of a luminous dune tapering to rigid feet. Had she slept through her own death? Or wakened to feel consciousness beat its wings against suffocating skin? How long did it take? What came next? In his white pajamas, his back straight, Bond extended his fingertips to the glazed throat. No thudding, no pulse, only calm metal
thing
ness like a tin can's, a car fender's. We sat there hushed and oppressed and sorry. My cousins hadn't moved a fraction of an inch, but they had gotten farther away. Maybe to my cousins, maybe to something else, I directed an inarticulate wish along the lines of
Come back, come back.
The wish could do nothing. It was a trammeled, locked-in wish beating against other people's unknownness. It wasn't going to work. Aloneness wasn't going anywhere. While my soul hung waiting for the next part of my life, I looked down at my arm, emerging into visibility as the lights came up. Under plaster and gauze was the ghost of the
X
where I had once bled into somebody and she had bled into me, and it worked, that
X
, and if it worked once, it could work again, or something like it could, the
X
of one body held to the
X
of another, and this notion stirred me, though I didn't know enough about bodies to make the desire any more authoritative or detailed than that, I didn't know this was sex. But I knew it was a way out.
Find Jenny and ask her if she loves you and when she says yes say good because I do too.
And like magic, I did. Love her.