Страница 22 из 55
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 Lackawa
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 a
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?
6
VERNOR MATHEIUS.
How many times in a trance that winter writing VERNOR MATHEIUS VERNOR MATHEIUS on sheets of notebook paper, in midnight-blue ink. VERNOR MATHEIUS traced with a fingernail in my flesh, the soft inside of a forearm, the palm of a hand. VERNOR MATHEIUS the mere sound of the syllables, like a melody distantly heard, immediately memorized if not understood. VERNOR MATHEIUS VERNOR MATHEIUS spoken in an interior voice in the presence of others, even as I was smiling, nodding, speaking quite normally with others who could have had no idea how distracted I was, how indifferent to them and even to myself. VERNOR MATHEIUS: what a strange, wonderful name! a beautiful name! a name like no other! VERNOR MATHEIUS like one of those riddle-names in a fairy tale, you had to guess the name, or what it might mean, to save your life; to become the fair young princess, his bride.
I hadn't the courage to ask others in our Ethics class about him. The articulate and argumentative graduate student at the back of the room. He was clearly a "personality"-everyone knew him, or was aware of him. I dreaded strangers reporting my interest to him. They'd smile in my direction. See that girl? She's been asking about you.
Now when our professor spoke his name-"Mr. Matheius?" -I heard the name perfectly. I could not comprehend how I'd ever misheard.
I looked up the name in a university directory, and so noted the Chambers Street address. Never would I be so reckless as to visit that address I told myself.