One Secret Thing (3 page)

I sat in the noonday sun, no hat,

no comb, no braces, my teeth reaching out buck

naked toward food and drink, no breasts,

no fat—my first Finals by myself—

in front of us, as in the language of a dream,

grown men danced and rushed the net.

And something was building in my belly, some scaffold,

an edifice where the flesh of those half-bare

kings could sing, a green bleachers

of desire. One of them was elder, I rooted for his

shapely legs, their straight hair black—

my heart in the stands had a fierce fixation,

like a secret ownership, on him,

for his pins and his face, and his name which held

some key to knowledge, Vic Seixas. But when

the younger, big and tawny, would serve

with his back to me, then I could be

the ace, the golden tiger, the Schräber

Apollo, the Tony Trabert. I baked,

on the bleachers’ slats, Arden bench

of cooked Arcadian wood, beside

a grown-up I did not know, and when he

came back, once, with a beer, he brought back

a Coke, for me—the varicose

brown-emerald bottle I had seen the magazine

pictures of, forbidden drink with

cocaine and dead men’s fingers in it, I

drank, and cracked a sepia sweat—

Diana racing through the forest, the V of her

legs, at the top, as beautiful

as the power of a man, the nipples on her chest

pointing her to the hunt that makes death

worth it, Love/Nothing, Advantage In,

Let Ball, Take Two, the hush fell over us.

A Commanding Officer, after The War,

had given it to someone’s father, who had

anchored it in the lake, a square

aluminum pontoon, seamed with solder.

I was a little postindustrial

water rat in a one-piece suit with the

Blue Willow pattern from a dinner plate on it,

the man on the left nipple going

away forever, the woman on the right

forever waiting. I would dive into the lake

—immediate, its cobalt reach and

silence—slide down, into the rich,

closed, icy book, blue lipped

in a white rubber cabbage-roses

headdress, and a coral rubber nose-clip,

slow-flitting like an agate-eating

swallow, floating sideways in

the indigo pressure. The grown-ups said we must

not, swim, under, the float,

we might get tangled in the anchor chain, I

swam, under the float, and saw

the slant of the chain, its mottled eel. And you must

never go up, under the raft, to its

recessed chamber where there’s poison ether.

I would soar supine on my back, looking up

at the bulk, I’d rush up slowly closer

to the antilife, holding my breath,

finally dipping up into it,

putting my face up into it

a second or two, then shove down

and water-sprint for home. But of course

I felt I had to inhale that stuff

and live. I left no note, the woman on my

right chest would always long for

the man on my left, and never touch him, I

came up, between those boiler-plated

bulges, and breathed. It was more an unguent

than air, it smelled like myrrh gone bad,

I’d go and sip it up all summer,

and live. Sip, sip, sip,

first the left, then the right

nipple faintly puffed, almost

chartreuse with silvery newness, the lover

on the left pushed out his mouth, and on the right

she puckered hers—if they grew enough,

they could kiss, or some resuscitator could be

begged to give them mouth to mouth to mouth.

When I think of people who kill and eat people,

I think of how lonely my mother was.

She would come to me for comfort, in the night,

she’d lie down on me and pray. And I could say

she fattened me, until it was time

to cook me, but she did not know,

she’d been robbed of a moral sense that way.

How soft she was, how unearthly her beauty, how

terrestrial the weight of her flesh

on the constellation of my joints and pouting

points. I like to have in the apartment,

shut in a drawer, in another room,

the magazine with the murder-cannibal,

it comforts me that the story is available

at any moment, accounted for, not

dangerously unthought-of. I think he kept

ankles in the freezer. My mother was such a good kisser.

From where I sat in the tub, her body,

between her legs, looked a little

like a mouth, a youthfully bearded mouth

with blood on it. From one hour to the next on earth

no one knew what would happen.

It happened, with me, on the left side, first,

I would look down, and the soft skin of the

nipple had become like a blister, as if it had been

lifted by slow puffs of breath

from underneath. It took weeks, months,

a year. And those white harnesses,

like contagion masks for conjoined twins

—if you saw a strap showing, on someone

you knew well enough, you could whisper, in her ear,

It’s Snowing Up North. There were bowers to walk through

home from school, trellis arches

like aboveground tunnels, froths of leaves—

that spring, no one was in them, except,

sometimes, a glimpse of police. They found

her body in the summer, the girl in our class

missing since winter, in the paper they printed

the word in French,
brassiere
, I felt a little

glad she had still been wearing it,

as if a covering, of any

kind, could be a hopeless dignity

But now they are saying that her bra was buried

in the basement of his house—when she was pulled down into

the ground, she was naked. For a moment I am almost half

glad they tore him apart with Actaeon

electric savaging. In the photo,

the shoulder straps seem to be making

wavering O’s, and the sorrow’s cups

are O’s, and the bands around to the hook

and eye in the back make a broken O.

It looks like something taken down

to the bones—God’s apron—God eviscerated—

its plain, cotton ribbons rubbed

with earth. When he said, In as much as ye have

done it unto one of the least

of these my brethren, ye have done it unto

me, he meant girls—or if he’d known better

he would have meant girls.

And then, one day, though my mother had sent me

upstairs to prepare, my thumbs were no longer

opposable, they would not hook into

the waistband, they swung, limp—under my

underpants was the Y of elastic, its

metal teeth gripping the pad,

I couldn’t be punished, unless I was bare, but I

couldn’t be bare, unless I took off my

Young Lady’s First Sanitary Belt,

my cat’s cradle, my goddess girdle,

and she couldn’t want me to do that,

could she? But when she walked in, and saw me still

clothed, her face lit up with sarcastic

wonder, and combat. I did not speak, she came

toward me, I bolted, threw open her door,

slamming my brother to the floor with a keyhole

shiner, I poured down the staircase and through

some rooms, and got my back against

a wall, I would hurt her before the last scene

of this long-running act could be played out

to its completion. When she got there, maybe she could see that,

we faced off, dressed in our dresses and our

secret straps and pulleys, and then

I walked away—and for the year I remained

in that house, each month our bodies called

to each other, brought each other bleeding off in the

waste of the power of creation.

They weren’t armadillos, or sow bugs,

or nautili, the animals printed on the

seersucker cotton of my nightie, maybe they were

rabbits, or deer. There was a new style,

that year, the shortie nightie, no longer

than the hem of its matching panties—and on its

cloth no eels, no trilobites,

no oviraptors, but goldfish and pigs

placed in rows like sown seeds.

That night, what was supposed to be

inside our father’s head—the arterial

red—had emerged and cooled on his brow,

cheeks, mouth, into a Comus mask,

and the police were there, and our mother was not. It was

like a Greek play, in a stone

amphitheater, with very few characters—

first the one in blood disguise,

then the elder daughter who

had called the two officers

to our home—they were not much older than she, they were

dressed for the hour in midnight blue.

And my sister’s torso, in its shortie, in the kitchen,

seemed to be almost rippling,

swaying like an upright snake still

half in its basket. Then, for an instant,

I thought I saw the younger cop just

glance at my legs and away, once

and away, and for a second, the little

critters on my nightie seemed to me to be

romping as if in an advertisement.

Soon after our father had struck himself down,

there had risen up these bachelors

beside the sink and stove, and the tiny

mastodons, and bison, and elk, the

beasts on my front and back, began,

atonal, as if around an early fire, to chant.

In the evenings, during the cocktail hour,

my mother’s new husband would sometimes inspect

the troops. Your mother has the best damn fanny

in the house, he would say to my sister and me—in our

teens, then twenties, thirties, forties. Turn

around! he’d cry out, Turn around! We wouldn’t

turn around, and he’d say, Your mother has the nicest little

ass in the house. And let’s look at those legs,

he’d shout, and she’d flash her gams. Your mother

has the only decent legs in the house,

he’d growl. And when I’d pass him next,

he’d bear-hug me, as if to say

No hard feelings, and hit me hard

on the rear, and laugh very loud, and his eyes seemed to

shine as I otherwise never saw them shine,

like eyes of devils and fascists in horror

comic books. Then he’d freshen his Scotch, and just

top hers up, a little, and then

he’d show us his backwards-curled, decurved

Hohenzollern thumb—Go on,

touch it! Touch it! They were people who almost

did not know any better, who, once

they found each other, were happy, and felt,

for the first time, as if they belonged

on earth—maybe owned it, and every creature on it.

The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his

first rotation in the emergency room.

On the ancient boarding-school radio,

in the attic hall, the announcer had given my

boyfriend’s name as one of two

brought to the hospital after the sunrise

service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them

critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the

stairwell banisters, at their lathing,

the necks and knobs like joints and bones,

the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said

Which one of them died
, and now the world was

an ant’s world: the huge crumb of each

second thrown, somehow, up onto

my back, and the young, tired voice

said my fresh love’s name. It would have been

nice to tear out the balusters, and rail, and the

stairs, like a big backbone out of a

brontosaur, to take some action,

to do, and do, and do, as a done-to, and

dear one to a done-to-death-to, to have run, on a

treadmill, all night, to light the dorm,

the entire school, with my hate of fate,

and blow its wiring, and the town’s wiring,

pull the wires of Massachusetts

out of the switchboard of the country. I went back to my

room, I did not know how to get

out of the world, or how to stay—

I sat on the floor with the Sunday
Times

and read the columns of the first page down,

and then the next, and then the next.

I can still see how every
a
,

initiator of his given name,

looked eager—it hadn’t heard, yet, that its

boy was gone—and every
f

hung down its head on its broken neck,

its little arms held out, as if to

say,
You see me, this is what I am.

When she was first in the air, upside down,

it linked us, the stem on which she had blossomed.

And they tied a knot in it, finishing

the work of her making. The limp remnant—

vein, and arteries, and Jelly of Wharton—had

lived as it would shrivel, by its own laws,

in a week it would wither away, while the normal

fetal holes in her heart closed,

the foramen ovale shutting the passage

the placental blood had swept, when her lungs,

flat in their dog-eared wet, had slept.

I was in shock, my life as I had known it

over. When they sent us home, they said

to bathe the stump in alcohol

twice a day. I was stone afraid,

and yet she was so interesting—

moist, doubled-up, wondering, undersea

being. And the death-nose at the belly-center wizened

and pizzled and ginsenged and wicked-witch’d until

the morning I undid her pajamas, and there, in the

night’s cereus petals, lay her stamen,

in its place on her the folded tent,

imbliu, nabhila, nafli
, at last

purely hers, toward the womb an eye now

sightless, now safe in moated memory.