Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [82]
“A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air,” says Thoreau. “It has new life and motion. It is intermediate between earth and sky.”
At the edge of my pond, on the edge of the universe, I came to know that certain gates open only to solitude and certain palaces are unlocked only by tears.
Sometimes the death of a june bug would move me as deeply as the death of my own mother, and I would weep. Sometimes the dance of the molecules would make itself manifest to me, and without drugs I would join that dance, the intoxication becoming all the more powerful for my having come to it straight. My arm, throwing a pebble into the water to break its surface of sky blue, would become one with the air it moved through, one with the rock it cradled. The molecules of sky, flesh, stone, all interconnected, dancing together in a primal dance, whirling together in a primal whirl.
I understood that arm, sky, and rock were all one, that flesh was sky and sky was flesh, that stone was no more solid than water or air, and that there was nothing to mourn, because death was just another part of the dance, and the dance went on forever.
I sat at the edge of my pond, gazing at the surface of the water, the surface of eternity, and my mother came back to me.
She arrived through the leafy woods, stomping over rotting logs, wearing a crazy red hat. She looked like a meshuggener out of a Singer story.
“Louise,” she said, “you’re a rotten mother and a rotten daughter. When was the last fucking time you visited my grave? Flowers. I don’t even expect flowers. Or a phone call. That’s right, you never call me. Ma, Mother, Mommy. The words never pass your lips. You go to Emmie, to Sybille, to Lily. How the hell do you think that makes me feel? Like when you went to your father’s floozie on Eighth Street and told her your problems. How the hell did you think that made me feel? Huh? Answer me, Louise—excuse me—Leila, Ms. Sand. You’re such a big shot now, I can’t even get you on the phone without talking to your assistant. ‘Leila Sand’s residence.’ I remember when I used to wipe your ass!”
We are sitting together in a Chinese restaurant near Dyckman Street. The Fortune Dragon, it’s called. Theda is getting drunker and drunker on daiquiris (she keeps ordering them with her lemon chicken and sweet-and-sour pork). She is grilling me about my father and Max. I don’t want to answer. I don’t want to be in the middle.
“Do they fight a lot?” she’s asking. I just sit there sullenly.
“Answer me! Do they fight?”
“I don’t know, Ma.”
“You rotten kid! Answer me!”
“Ma—I don’t know.” (I am perhaps sixteen, my ovaries always in an uproar over Snack, my life out of control between Dyckman Street and Eighth Street, my life a subway ride between two lives.)
Suddenly, out of the blue, she brings her pocketbook down on my head and bashes me. Then she sweeps the lemon chicken onto the floor and starts smashing plates and glasses, screaming, “Answer me! Answer me!”
I get up, grab my green book bag, and run home, hoping to pack my stuff before she comes back.
I am in my room, cramming a suitcase, when the door opens and Theda rushes in, brandishing an umbrella.
“You love your father more than me!” she screams. “Admit it! Admit it!”
“I do not, Ma.”
“Admit it!” she yells, clobbering me with the umbrella. “You love him best!”
“I love you, Ma,” I mumble, “but you can’t hear!”
“You don’t love me!” she screams. “You’re a rotten lousy kid!”
I shut my suitcase, grab it, and race out of the house.
Down into the bowels of the subway, the hot-popcorn and candy-wrapper mouth of subterranean New York. The rush of the trains, the people swaying together in sweat, the unwashed, the poor, the muttering, the miserable, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Miss Subways is a beautician but wants to be a model. She’ll never make it. The Wrigley twins want to “Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun.” Speedwriting is proffered as the answer