The Rowing Lesson (22 page)

Can’t help remembering when I was just a candidate, before I was inducted into the third degree. Gosh, those were the early days, weren’t they? You were just learning the ancient mysteries of the Craft and you were never sure whether to laugh or not, watching the jeweller, the land surveyor, the car dealer, the wine farmer, in their dinner jackets and Masonic aprons, acting out their parts. It wasn’t so funny when it was your turn to be blindfolded, hit on the head and rolled up in the canvas, three Brothers playing the roles of ruffians in the muffled dark. Easy with the heavy maul, you told Brother Lategan before the proceedings began.
Versigtig, asseblief.

Later, it was your turn to be one of the ruffians, and you practised and practised so much that you could say, “. . . My tongue torn out by its roots, and buried in the rough sands of the sea, at low-water mark, where the tide ebbs and flows in twenty-four hours . . .” quietly to yourself, as you scrubbed up before going into theatre, “. . . My breast torn open, my heart plucked out . . .” whispering as you tied off an artery, “. . . My body severed in two, my bowels taken from thence and burned to ashes, the ashes scattered to the four winds of heaven . . .” delicately closing up the incision, hoping for the best.

Downstroke, upstroke, downstroke, backpedal, backpedal. The water is so high that the lower branches of the trees are submerged, long fronds of moss under the water, the hair of a green girl pulled backwards by the tide. Each stroke hurts your right shoulder, the pain travelling across and down into your lumbar region where the vertebrae are thickening, turning into bamboo. Paget’s Disease. Paget’s Disease!

But it doesn’t have the same ring as porphyria, or trichotillamania. It isn’t as salacious as Luetic Disease, as grotesque as acromegaly. Each dip of the oars in the water is an initiation into the exquisite mysteries of the spine, an invitation to count the rings of the ancient yellowwood tree.

The green girl is shifting, slowly spreading her legs so that you take your mind off the pain in your back, and you turn your attention to her. The surface of the water is the silky skin of her breasts and her hair catches the blade of your oars as you row. You stop to take a breath, and you almost fall overboard with longing. Gertrude’s floating under the water, an Afrikaans Ophelia, along with Dorothy May in her spotted bathing costume. Your aunties are taking off their brassieres all over again. Nurses are rising out of the water, mermaids in wet white uniforms, their capes and hats drifting on the water’s surface, like giant black lilies. Now it’s the heavy fabric that’s sucking on the oars, making them hard to lift.

As you breathe, the river empties. The boat drifts into the hissing of the afternoon, insect noise and monkey echo. Your oars are up finally, and still, except for the delicious plink-plink of water dripping from the blades.

Just as the breasts, long legs and wet bodies begin to fade, the patients float towards you, upended leaves turned into boats, an armada of naked women flat on their backs with their legs crooked, their vaginas open wide. Here are all the women you could have had, you might have had, you wanted to have had. Here is your undoing.
Grootouma
and Koeka are sitting on the rocks, laughing and cackling obscenities.
Grootouma
is in one piece again, as she crouches forward and points at the water, her breasts hidden by her knees. Koeka’s a blur of faded colours, her dressing gown so thin you can see her jagged hip bones, her low-slung belly. She’s less distinct than
Grootouma
, a figment of the dappled shadows, a girly whirl.

Koeka’s smoking, the air fuzzy above her head. Ash dribbles into the water from the glowing tip of her cigarette. There’s a lost girl holding her breath beneath the surface. She’s younger than the other patients. She’s too
skaam
to get out, to show her nakedness. Koeka offers her a Lucky but the girl won’t move. Her face is blood red. She looks like she’s going to burst or die. Come on,
meisi-etjie
, Koeka is whispering, I’ll help you. She drops her cigarette into the river and unties her gown. This is the cruelest cut of all. In all your years of practising medicine, you have never seen breasts so perfectly formed, a waist so supple, legs that curve and bend and twist in all the right places. Koeka’s nipples are miniature roses and there’s a green, mossy beard between her legs. Wait a minute, you’re thinking, That’s not her!

They’re going to get me. They’re all in it together, the whole bloody lot of them. Go away! You pick up the oar and try to smack Koeka with it. She disappears and all that’s left on the rock is a rainbow stain, burnt into the stone. The girl under the water bursts through the surface, her face the colour of Cabernet. She’s going to fight you because you scared away her only friend. Koeka was waiting for her, ready to cover the girl’s nakedness with her very own dressing gown.

I am that green girl, swaying with the tide, drifting up the river with you, now and forever. It was me holding my breath like that, reddening my red face. It’s me, Betsy, standing at the prow of the boat. I’m not going to hurt you. Just sit back and relax. You don’t have to row anymore. I’ll do all the work.

I climb into the boat and sit right next to you. Your hands are still on the oars, as I take them up. My hands cover yours, my fingers slightly longer, gripping for both of us. I can feel you tensing. Remember, catch and pull? Catch and pull?

That’s better.

Look! The other patients are capsizing all around us. There goes Ma, both her sails buggered. Mrs. Boshof is face down, just the small of her back showing, the last hump of her before she sinks to the bottom. Lizzie April is waving at you, trying to ask you something but it’s too late. You can’t help her anymore. You can’t help anyone. She’s asking you if you know what’s wrong with her blood but all you can see are her brown breasts, two holy places.

Your breasts are killing me, you whisper to her as you float past, inches away from plucking them out of the water. How many times have you touched but not kissed, palpated but not fondled, fondled but not squeezed, decades of feeling for lumps, your cool hands rubbing and smoothing the flesh like a baker, looking for the tiniest crumb of a tumour, the briefest wink of disease buried in all that softness. It’s agony when you find what you’re looking for, and it’s agony when you don’t because the examination is over and Mrs. So-and-so turns away from you and snaps her brassiere in the back, three clasps and the prison gate slams shut.
Baie dankie en totsiens
. Thank you and goodbye.

The girls today don’t care anymore. They burned their bras and then they put them back on again but in smaller sizes, in brighter colours, with lace and flowers and mesh all over them, throbbing black, howling pink, juicy green. You don’t know what someone’s going to do to you behind the row of buttons, underneath the zip of a jersey, what maddening trick they’ve got up their sleeves, looped over their shoulders, what little bomb strapped to their heart is about to blow up in your face.

I’m not going to save you. You have to save me, Dr. Dad. Isn’t that why you became a doctor? Leave the women in the river behind. Leave your wife and your mother, Maisie and the girls with their purple bras, their purple hair, their candida, cystitis, spastic colons, the Afrikaans ladies in their foundation garments, the farmers’ wives with their nerves and their pills, all the nurses you have ever loved and hated. Leave them soaking in the cooling water of the lagoon until their skin wrinkles and becomes old.

Duck when the branches come at you, threatening to poke out your eyes. You’re going to need to see between the bushes, through the web of creeper and tree trunk. You have to see through my face into the world below. I want you to take this river stone, roughened with fossils, and rub my white-faced shame with it, sanding it down so that the skin sloughs off. Underneath the topmost layer, the stratum corneum, you’ll find the stratum lucidum, with its closely packed scales. You’ll know them like the back of your own hand. Keep rubbing through the stratum lucidum until you penetrate the granulosum. Glide through the eleidin all the way to the stratum Malpighii. Push on through the stratum germi-nativum until you reach the prickle cells.

That’s where the truth is, woven into the violet and red grass of the epidermic fibrils, buried deep under my shameful cheeks. Remove me from my skin. Peel me like a banana.

The boat is filling up with water. Scoop it out with your hands. Don’t go down with the ship. You’re not even listening to me anymore. You’re looking for
loeries
, your eyes glued to the tops of the trees. We’re here. This is the crack in the mountain that feeds the river. This is the source. You’ve got to keep breathing. Downstroke, upstroke, downstroke, rounded wave. You can’t stop at the top. Downstroke, backpedal. Watch out for that
gogga’s
nest. You don’t want to choke on a mouthful of spider’s web. Upstroke! Upstroke! We’ve got to finish before the sun comes up.

I’m putting the stone into your hand, closing your fingers around it. I am your very last patient. Remember when that chappie passed out during his wife’s delivery? Remember how you stepped over him? You said you wanted to die in the middle of seeing a patient. You wanted to be the one on the floor, out like a light, everyone waiting for you to give the injection, stitch up the jagged wound, shaped like a smile gone wrong. Cut me with this stone, and we can both rest. Look, I’ve got your hand in mine. I’m doing all the work for you. There’s blood all over us, all over the white sheets, all over your rocky face. The morning nurse is going to be as mad as a snake.

I’m basting you with my liquor sanguinis, coloring you with my heart. There are red tears streaming down your cheeks. I can’t stop now. I’m wading in the river, pulling the broken boat up through the carotid artery and it’s choked up with paper and wine bottles, all the mess that’s collected in every corner of your body. The only way to keep moving is to cut through the undergrowth, to let all the solids flow. There. It wasn’t so hard to find the right place, the only way through. Now you’re anointing me with your history, the fountain of old salts, metals, nitrogenous extracts. All the old doctors are riding the waves, Hippocrates, Galen and even an old witch doctor in Zimbabwe, who cured a rapid heartbeat by putting a locust on a cut in the chest, and let it drink up the bad blood and fly away.

I’m soaking your pillow and you’re spraying my face, my hair, my breasts. Death is fierce after all. It’s not a muddy river but a volcano. You’re not sinking anymore. You’re blowing your stack. We’re walking up the old road together, and the sunlight is divine.

The End

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the medical and mental health professionals who helped me in the course of writing this book: David Goldblatt, Trevor Kaye, Morris Karnovsky, Alan Katz, Anne Katz, Jack Katz, Jeffrey Katz, Carol Keohane, Samuel Kennedy, Cynthia McDermott, Jerry Pomerantz, Samuel Shapiro, Mel Singer, Joel Wagman, Gerry Wein, Steven Wein and Neil Zilberg. Further thanks to my mother, Ruth Landsman, my brother, David Landsman and my aunt, Lillah Phillips, for providing details of life in South Africa. My thanks also to those who read the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions, Melanie Fleishman, Cheryl Sucher, Jill Bialosky, Carola Luther, Nancy Greystone, as well as Maria Massie, my agent, for her unflagging support and Laura Hruska, my editor, for the depth of her editorial insights. Thanks also to the Ucross Foundation, for the gift of peace and time, and to the Writers Room, where much of this book was written.

And finally, an enormous debt of gratitude to my husband, James Wagman, and children, Tess and Adam, whose love means everything to me.