Split (33 page)

 

Between classes, fifteen hours a week, I worked as a clerk at the anatomy-department office, typing up invoices for white mice, monkey food, and human legs. And there I did a bit of research into the mind/body question.

One door over, Benny, the mortician, received the cadavers that had been donated to science. Benny was a dapper man with a belly as round as a medicine ball and a graceful walk. He was responsible for draining the corpses, pumping them full of formaldehyde, and, sometimes, cutting them into parts. Very few people donate their bodies to science, and those who do are often chopped up in order to get the most use out of them: heads to the eye surgeons, legs to the orthopedists, and so on. Benny often wore a blood-spattered smock, its active pattern of russet drops making my stomach turn when I passed him in the hall. Underneath the white coat, he wore expensive suits, and when there was downtime—there seemed to be lots of downtime, between deliveries or while the bodies drained—he played poker in the office with his assistant, a doleful Italian man who rarely spoke. I was in awe of these men, their droll, efficient handling of triplicate forms and death. On Benny's desk was a paperweight—a cross section of a human arm encased in Lucite—which I studied with mild horror whenever I came in for his signature. It bothered me that the bone was off center—a white round near one edge, with the marrow showing. I knew so little of what went on beneath my skin.

Now and then a body arrived when Benny was out of the office, and I would guide the delivery man and the covered gurney down the hall and let him into the morgue. There was an anteroom with steel tables and sinks, a wall of windows that let onto the anatomy labs where the medical students did their dissections, and at the back of the room a massive door that led to a walk-in freezer. I felt a nervy fascination when I entered that room. I examined the scrubbed tables, the tubing and pumps against one wall. Everything looked tidy and sterile, yet I had the feeling that if I stayed long enough in that place, some mystery of life would be revealed. But before I could reach any conclusions, the smell of formaldehyde would overwhelm me and I'd hurry out, yanking the door shut behind me.

Of course, it had to happen sooner or later. A body came; Benny was out; I took the key from my desk and let the delivery man in. Normally they walked out with me, but this man was in a rush, fumbling with his clipboard and pen, and after I signed he left me in the eerie quiet. Usually the tables were empty, but that day there was a body on a table near the freezer door. I could make out the jut of feet and a head beneath the plastic sheet. I walked toward it and paused, then passed on, drawn toward the giant door of the cold storage.

I pulled on the silver handle, half expecting it to be locked, and the sealing popped. A stinking waft of cold air hit my face. There in front of me, hanging from giant hooks in their ears, were thirty or so naked bodies. They dangled limply, toes pointed toward the floor, their skin pale as bread dough. On carts against the wall were a few others, limbs sprawled this way and that, their genitals exposed. I had the urge to cover them. And because there was no sheet, no privacy, I shut the door.

I took a few heaving breaths with my back against the stainless steel, then walked closer to the lone body and lifted the sheet. I wanted to see everything. I knew I wouldn't go back there again. Underneath was a woman—an old woman, I was relieved to see. She was unmarked, except for a shunt coming out of her neck. The faint whirring sound that I had heard without noting was a pump on the side of the table draining her blood.

Perhaps it was something about the surroundings—the chemical smell and machine hum—but I felt nothing of the frisson, the faint charge in the air around a living person. Whatever animated her had gone. I felt it in my chest and fingers—an absence of feeling—and I thought,
This is just a husk.
What hopefulness, though, that I imagined her intact somewhere, as if the integrity of the self couldn't be dismantled, but only evicted from its housing. And perhaps she was intact in a way, held for a while in the minds of those who'd known her, loved her. With a pang I saw that her fingernails, curled against the steel pan of the table, still bore a fresh coat of polish.

I dropped the sheet, feeling guilty. The dead are so helpless. But I knew one thing about this woman, or the woman she had been: she had willed her body to science. She had signed papers that described how her corpse would be embalmed and then slowly defleshed by anatomy students. She had offered up her unique case—the tendons gnarled by use, the organs swollen or misshapen—a body quite apart from the clean diagrams of the textbook. I thought a woman like that might have forgiven my curious stare.

I spent the rest of the afternoon typing up invoices as I normally did—100 white mice, 2 human heads—except the words no longer seemed rhetorical. Those were individual heads, the detritus of individual lives. I took comfort from the thought that whatever mattered of those lives had long since slipped free.

 

When I showed signs of interest in the life of the mind, Leslie began treating me like a fellow scholar. She was in the middle of her architecture Ph.D., and her thesis took her into realms of theory where few people were inclined to follow. It must have been a lonely thing, to work so hard at something you couldn't usefully discuss outside a small group of colleagues. I knew she longed for more people with whom to worry the kinks out loud, but she had become accustomed to the idea that most of the jokes weren't worth explaining. Once in a while, I'd ask her to decode some term I'd heard batted from the lectern, and gratitude would break across her face. After that, she began to tell me a little about her work.

"It's about—well, you'll understand this—it's about the pedagogy of design." She talked then of Hegel, Gramsci, and Derrida, and in fact I didn't understand most of it. Still, I was grateful that she considered me worthy of real conversation, and I tried to pay attention and keep my head clear.

I remember Leslie once talking about a theater of ideas—a mental theater, in which the seating chart reflected the relationship of different schools of thought. We were sitting in the breakfast room, a narrow room with a bay window, and she spread her hands out across the sunlit panes as if she could see that theater before her. The oldest ideas had orchestra seats, and as things got more complicated you moved toward the mezzanine and wings, until finally, at the far-flung reaches of the balcony, there were the poststructuralists, postmodernists, and their ilk. Her mental organization left me in awe. In the theater of my mind, there were whole rows of empty seats, important members were unaccounted for, and at times—when I got in a panic—there was a headlong stampede for the doors.

But it was a relief to see things becoming easier between us. Once I moved out of the house, the bad business about the closet and borrowed clothes faded into the background, and meantime my sisters were getting old enough to do some trespassing of their own. "I guess I'm doomed to have my closet raided for another fifteen years," Leslie said, and we managed to laugh about it.

Now and then she and I would run into each other on campus, and Leslie, who had always looked young for her age, looked younger when I saw her on those brick-lined paths. She was buoyed up by the chance to steep herself in research, theory, academic intrigue. She was still a Marxist. I understood that much. But now that she had left off working on the line, I couldn't imagine how she stayed at it all those years.

 

I spent most of my free time on campus at Kerckoff Hall, a Gothic building overlooking the center of campus. My friend Wendy managed a coffee bar housed in the east wing, so I was treated to endless cups of free espresso. I drank mochas and lattes, cappuccinos and straight shots with lemon peel. Then I went upstairs to sit under a leaded-glass window and try to read, my heart yammering in my chest.

One afternoon, I was in Kerkoff's second-floor bathroom, which gave out onto the roof of a side wing, when on a whim I hoisted myself to the windowsill and out to the gravel-lined rooftop. There wasn't much to see, just ventilator shafts and the tops of nearby buildings, but I felt a small surge of triumph, and when I saw a nook cut into the main tower, which rose up another two stories, I decided to sit there for a while. I was filled then, as I often was in those days, with a sense of pregnant confusion, as if I were on the brink of discovering something that would change my life. This promise was ever receding before me, and the pursuit led me out of windows and onto cigarette-strewn rooftops, where I lost the trail and got muddled.

This feeling may have had something to do with caffeine. In addition to the four or five espressos Wendy slipped me over the counter, she and I took five No-Doz a day—two with breakfast, one with lunch, and two with dinner, as if they were vitamins. We figured that in order to compete among students of the highest caliber, it was of primary importance to be alert.

So I must have been fresh off a double espresso and my lunchtime supplement when I sat on that rooftop, confusing an exploration of the campus architecture with getting an education. By chance I looked up and saw that the nook in which I sat was in fact the bottom of a narrow stone chute. Along one wall, receding up into the darkness, was a metal ladder. I took hold of the cold rungs, and began to ascend into the dark. The sunlight shrank to a distant square below me, and my eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, until I bumped my head on what seemed to be a trap door. For a moment I imagined myself popping up in the chancellor's office in the middle of a meeting or, more likely, into some steamy boiler room filled with bare wiring and rats. Then I pushed up on the door. A crack of sunlight. I had reached another roof, this one small, perhaps thirty feet square, and bounded on all sides by high parapets. It was the top of the tower, a sort of useless open-air room, but jutting into this space was a structure housing the final leg of the building's stairway, a clapboard wedge with a glass-windowed door. Someone had braced a plank against its roof, and when I climbed up there I could see over the parapets: a 360-degree view of the campus, the city, the hazy Bel-Air hills.

I took my mother up there once, when she came to visit the campus. Jim waited in the courtyard with Alice and my baby brother in a stroller. When I showed her how to step on the sink, my mother hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and clambered up, laughing as she slipped sideways through the narrow window.

Together we climbed through the dark chute and up the plank, and when we reached the top she turned in a full circle, hands on her hips. Then she broke into an incredulous grin. Now that I lived far away, nothing pleased her more than my confidences.

The two of us leaned over the wall and watched students moving in streams across the courtyard, eddying at the path-side tables. It was late May. The lavender crowns of the jacarandas seemed to float above the flagstones, their trunks obscured from above.

By her misty-eyed quiet, I knew my mother was full of her days at Cornell. She was nostalgic for stonework and ivy, for musty libraries and carillon bells. To her, those were the textures and sounds of a young mind cut from its leash. And I saw then how much of my pleasure in college life had been prepared by her descriptions. Her stories shaped the air of certain places, so I walked under the columned portico of Royce Hall with her delight slipping around me like an invisible current.

"Look at that sloped lawn," she said, nodding toward the smooth waterfall of green at the edge of the courtyard. "There was a lawn like that in front of Grandma Wood's house in Great Neck. It was so steep, the gardener tied a rope to the mower and pushed it off the hill."

Suddenly my mother spotted her husband among the foreshortened bodies below: "Hey, there's Jim!" I could hear in her voice that pleasant shock of coming to his familiar shape and not knowing it for an instant, so that to recognize him was to be plunged back into his dearness.

I stared at my mother—leaning over a gargoyled parapet, three flights up and miles from her country home—and was swept by a similar sense of wonderment. That she didn't ask where I was taking her. That she was willing to hoist up her skirt and follow me.

 

In the years since I had left home, I had made a fiction of her: sensible earth mother, raising her kids without fuss or decorum, shoveling manure to make her plot thick with greenery. In the sculpture garden at the north end of campus was a statue by Gaston Lachaise, a towering ur-female with enormous hips and breasts, and I once bought a postcard of the piece at the campus art gallery and wrote my mother a note on the back: "This woman makes me think of you." No doubt she was less than flattered. When I mentioned the statue a few months later she looked blank.

What I failed to say was that the resemblance wasn't so much physical as symbolic. My love of that sculpture had everything to do with how I saw my mother: figure of bounty and unabashed strength, feet planted wide, hands on her hips. It was my mother of the Spring Street garden blown up to mythic size. What I had seen in Lachaise's
Standing Woman,
and what I wanted to see in my mother, were the shapes of motherly nurturance.

All that year I wrote her ardent letters, one of which turned up not long ago in a box of family photos: "It is a very quiet night, I can hear the city crickets. I have been looking around my house and thinking of the transience of all this—I will move from this place, these people will pass out of my life—and it all seems so simple, so logical, the evolution of each of our lives, and doesn't make me feel sad as it sometimes does.

"I love you so terribly much, because you are Ann, and I think the fact that you are my mother must be some cosmic coincidence, because not all daughters love their mothers like this. We are kindred spirits, I would know you if I found you anywhere, but instead, we are living at the same time, linked by blood, one sprung out from the other. Tonight this seems a small miracle, and if you think about it maybe it will seem such to you also."