Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism Read online

  After the sunny dazzlement of the open water and its scenic flock of boats and its fringe of shingled condominiums, the train takes a dark plunge into the earth beneath Salem, depriving us of the sight of the town’s handsome old heart—the pillared brick mansions the China trade financed, and the civic buildings that have succeeded to the Old Custom House, which gave employment to Hawthorne and a starting point to The Scarlet Letter. Perhaps the ominous darkness fittingly memorializes Hawthorne and his ancestor Judge Hathorne, who sat in on the notorious witchcraft trials of 1692. The tunnel ends in a graffiti-rich concrete trough which was, until recently, the Salem waiting platform—now mercifully replaced by a tidy pair of postmodern pavilions on the side of the tunnel toward Beverly.

  Salem’s outskirts shudder into those of Swampscott, a city of dentists, which until recently boasted the most dilapidated station on the line. Then the train takes wing into Lynn, which it enters on high, on an elevated iron platform at the level of the upper windows of the boarded-up factories. So desolate, so scratched and rusted and spray-painted is this spot that one might be in the gutted sections of the Bronx; yet between here and Boston intervenes a spacious prairie of marsh grass and winding saltwater inlet. Nothing—not the car dumps or the gravel yards of Revere, not the swamped sand barges or the skeletal carcasses of abandoned dories—can quite hide the basic grandeur of this amphibious domain, which in summer puts on a dress of shimmering green and in winter entertains a glittering clash of ice and tide. It seems ages until the Chelsea stop, which some trains ignore, and ages more of sidling superhighway stanchions and factory flanks (one advertises ARISE FUTON, The Original Futon Company) before the train slows its swaying glide through the multiplying tracks and comes to a stop, with a tremendous shout from the conductor, in North Station.

  I am always astonished, disembarking from the train, by how many others have accompanied me on the trip, which seems such a solitary, meditative hour of shifting scenery. We are a multitude, all marching in the same direction alongside the train, like a sleeve that floppily follows the direction of a halted fist. We are motley, of all hairdos and ages; at peak hours there are plenty of men in gray suits, but also sturdy working women wearing white socks and sneakers and carrying their heels in their briefcases. Two-tone L. L. Bean rubbers are not uncommon, nor tatty collegiate parkas festooned with dead ski-lift tickets. The train-shed roofs are usually dripping rain or melted snow, and there is always the same red-faced man selling paper cones of roses, and another peddling soft pretzels à la moutarde. When a trestle bridge nearer the city burned, in that era of burning bridges, and the short and happy ride ended in a dusty improvised parking lot in easternmost Cambridge, these two small merchants appeared with their carts, without missing (to my knowledge) a single day. We avoid their importunities expertly, walking with a stride simultaneously brisk, wary, and bored; we have become, by a miracle of transportation, city folk.

  ESSAYS ON ASSIGNED TOPICS

  Women

  THE TOPIC appeals, appalls, dizzies, delights. It dwarfs the male pen by much the same scale as the human ovum dwarfs the spermatozoon; that is, by 1,400,000 cubic microns to seventeen, or over eighty thousand to one. If life is a forest, women are the trees. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, teachers, classmates, playmates, dates, mates, daughters, editors, reviewers both hostile and friendly—my goodness, how can one generalize about faces and voices whose sum leaves almost nothing of one’s earthly existence unaccounted for? Further, the topic is not only vast but hot, and any word a male ventures upon it will be as inevitably suspect as an accused murderer’s testimony in his own behalf.

  Let me, testing the thin ice, begin as far back in time as my memory can reach, with my maternal grandmother, whose beautiful full name was Katherine Ziemer Kramer Hoyer. I grew up in the house she kept. Always serving, serving others: that was the image she projected. She cooked the meals and then herself ate standing up, while the rest of us sat at the table. Her very shape had become bent by slaving; she was a small thin woman in a cotton dress bent over as if constantly peering into a pot. I still remember the strain on her sharp-nosed face as she stared upward at me while I crouched on a lower branch of a tree. That was one of the things women did, I early concluded: they tried to get you to come down out of a tree. She was afraid I would fall, and that possibility had occurred to me also, so I was half grateful to be called down. But the other half, it seemed, needed to climb higher and higher, in defiance of the danger. Society and God wanted me to keep climbing, however much my heart was on the ground with my grandmother. This ambiguity is with me yet. Dare it, don’t dare it. What do women want? Some of the girls I grew up with climbed higher than I dared, showing their underpants as they ascended.

  The girls at school both did and did not want attention—to be teased, chased, bumped, have their pigtails pulled, and all the rude clumsy rest up through kissing to the fabled ultimate discourtesy over the horizon, from whence only pornographic comic books returned to tell the tale. I, timid and thin-skinned, hung back waiting for a moment of unambiguously signalled receptivity, which never came. It was the boy’s duty to project and act, it seemed, and the girl’s privilege to select from the circumambient field of disorganized male activity and thrustingness those instances which it pleased her to cultivate, to take into herself. She was desired, he the desirer. She was the center, he the arrow; by this formulation motionlessness was her essence, and part of the male job was, through dazzling and bemusing display, to reduce her to the stillness that permits possession. And indeed, now, thanks to the miracles of nature photography whereby educational television fills what little of its program time is not consumed by borrowings from the BBC, we can see that this is just how, say, the male spider fulfills his biological assignment. With his eight-legged antics and ticklings he hypnotizes the great female at the center of her web, then skitters away before, fertilized and hungry, the betranced wench awakens.

  Sometimes I do wonder if women are not more territorial than men. Perhaps I have just happened to know women who took comfort in acreage; but I have known a number, who have clung to their piece of weed-infested land even when circumstances conspired to make their tenacity quixotic. More vulnerable on the road than men and less well trained by society for the free-lance life, women must make their assets out of what they can hold. Men, with the superior earning ability they have bestowed upon themselves, are territory of a kind, and a cocktail party is threaded with invisible trip-wires and barbed demarcation lines. Like birds chirping their friendly-sounding songs, like impala marking bushes with scent rubbed off their dear faces, women subtly signal a turf, and become fierce in defense of it. “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow,” the Lord said to Eve upon expelling her from the turf called Eden. Adam doubtless took it less hard; he was about to mosey out the gate into the wilderness anyway.

  It’s a man’s world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women. Men dress to please women, and women dress for women also. Our furniture and cuisine, our gardens and carpets and wallpaper are selected and tended by the eyes and hands, generally, of women. Even such an originally masculine artifact as the automobile has been progressively feminized in its shape and tint and in the silky way it “handles.” In a movie theatre, scientific tests have shown, the eyes of men and women both are attracted to the giant silver face of the actress; a woman does not look like a half of the human race but a more refined and animated, more magnetic version of it. In a female face, the things that can open, the eyes and the mouth, open wider. Women talk, women see. Men, comparatively, are laced shut. They inhabit a world too delicate and finely tuned for them, where they miss many of the signals and blunder through cunning patterns of fabric and ornament as through a tinted fog.

  I fancy myself a not untypical male in feeling that, when there is no woman in the room, the effort of making conversation is quite unnecessary; a few grunts will do. Social cohesion and civilization, mundane safety and comfort ar
e female inventions. Basically, men fear other men—competitive killers, sadistic louts whose idea of a good time is to squat in some icy reeds and blast away with shotguns at downy goslings.

  But when a woman comes into the room, or the cave or teepee, the possibilities of law, mercy, wit, and affection arise. One’s stutter melts, one’s blood takes on a champagne simmer and sets the brain to scintillating. This is, I will be told, male-chauvinist romanticism. Women can be just as brutal and murderous as men. They are in the hunt, too, as we can see with just a glance at Cosmopolitan. There is, I learned from Donald Barthelme’s great early story “Me and Miss Mandible,” something called “woman’s disguised aggression.” The phrase made me stop, years ago, in my innocence. Women? Aggressive? Think of Lizzie Borden. Of Martina Navratilova. Of Ulrike Meinhof. Of Sally Ride. Women are no stationary bull’s-eye, painted red; they are on the move, and their trim hard figures express it, and their roller skates, and their punk haircuts and parachute pants.

  My grandmother, as a matter of fact, was also on the move, between the stove and the table, and the back door and the chicken yard. My mother’s theory, now and then expressed aloud, went that her mother had waited upon her father until he was helpless without her; thus she had enslaved him. This was woman’s aggression in its old-fashioned form.

  A woman of my acquaintance wrote her doctoral thesis on female masochism. She was a young woman, young enough to take nothing about womanhood for granted, and had concluded on the basis of statistical and laboratory studies that female masochism did indeed exist. Under some grilling from me as to gritty details of the case, she went on to say that women, these same studies reveal, are not perverse. They just aren’t. She shrugged, and batted her lashes, like “stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men / Look’d at each other with a wild surmise.”

  Women are not perverse. What can that mean? It rings oddly true: women, though invited to be partners in so-called perversity every minute all over the turning globe, are themselves exempt from being perverse, which the dictionary defines as “obstinate in opposing what is right, reasonable, or accepted.” Perversity must be, then, an exclusively male protest against the given, the unavoidable, the Nature which is so free with death and whose atrocities the Marquis de Sade claimed he was merely palely imitating. The love of killing (vide Hemingway) springs from the fear of being killed: a counterblow, as it were, delivered against the encircling dark. Perhaps women have not traditionally been allowed the luxury of cosmic protest. Perhaps they deflect it inward, and make it into suicide or churchgoing or anorexia. Perhaps in their bones and wombs they feel no need to go against the larger grain, to do more than battle against mismanagement in the immediate vicinity, against invasions of the territory at hand. If women are not perverse, then by definition they are right and reasonable. So I have, in my three and fifty years of suckling and listening, adoring and cohabiting, found them. Women are reasonable and right. More power to them.

  Mother

  ANY PREGNANT WOMAN, be she young or old, silly or wise, is very apt, in nine months’ time or less, to become a mother. When I see girls in the supermarket pushing their swaddled tots along in wire grocery carts, I remind myself with difficulty that in the groggy eyes of these infants what looms above them is not a gum-chewing ex-adolescent but Mother. For the undoubted feat of achieving a biological split women receive much praise and some flak. The solemn infant psyche brings a terrible focus upon the psychological matrix—the alma or saeva mater, as the case may be; the dawning psyche’s first and everlastingly internalized encounter; “The Most Unforgettable,” to quote Alexander Portnoy’s autobiography, “Character I’ve Met.” The first sentence of that notorious confession runs, you will remember, “She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.” Men succeed, Freud tells us, because their mothers love them; men become homosexuals, some lesser psychologists have theorized, because they cannot bear to betray their mothers with another woman. Such a powerful personage must shoulder, like God, a lot of blame. Prince Hamlet greatly resents that his mother is anything but a mother, and feels entitled to scold her and commit murder in her boudoir. The largeness of our mother-myth has a paradoxically dwindling effect upon the women concerned: they must be in all things motherly and become therefore natural processes rather than people. Few things are harder, in this era so preoccupied with the monitoring of human relations, than to get to know one’s mother as a person—to forgive her, in effect, for being one’s mother.

  My own is now eighty. She has just renewed her driver’s license and has upwards of twenty cats to feed—to feed and to kill, for, in motherly fashion, her responsibilities toward her adopted dependents are conflicted. She began feeding a stray cat to spare the birds around the place; more and more cats appeared at her back door; and now the perplexities of mercy ask that she keep their feline herd thinned. It is a bind, and not the first she has been in. She was, for the twenty-one years in which she and I shared the same address, not only a mother but a daughter. We lived, my mother and father, her parents, and me, in a household with a strong undertow of Depression, a historical event that had happened to hit both my father and grandfather hard. One lost his job, the other his money. She helped out by working in a department store three miles away, in the fabrics department, for fourteen dollars a week. Later, in the war, she worked in parachute factories. But most of the time she was home writing, sitting in the front bedroom, with its view of horse-chestnut trees and telephone wires, and tapping out pages to send to New York magazines in brown envelopes. The brown envelopes always came back. Ours was a big white brick house but much cramped by worry and need. At its center, squeezed from all sides, my mother held forth and held out, and pulled us through. Or maybe we pulled her through. In any case, she and I are now the only survivors of that five-sided family, and these last twelve years, in which she has been a widow, have been pleasant ones for me, of getting to know her, of tuning her in without the static of kindred broadcasting stations.

  Her intelligence and humor, as she fends off the perils of old age, are startling. Though with a son’s luck I have reaped most of the benefits, it was she who made the great leap of imagination up, out of the rural Pennsylvania countryside—German in accent and practical in emphasis—into the ethereal realm of art. I glimpse now how bright that little girl must have been to skip all those grades in her one-room schoolhouse and head off to normal school so painfully young. At college, she was four years younger than her classmates, of whom my father was one. This simple brightness comes in handy, as in solitude she calculates her taxes, administers her acres, operates her machinery, retypes her manuscripts, and entertains her grandchildren as they breeze in, not always unaccompanied, from their strange new world. She and I used to write letters; now, grown spendthrift and lazy, we talk on the telephone, and I hear how festive and limpid her wit is, and with what graceful, modest irony she illuminates every corner of her brave life. All this for decades was muffled for me behind the giant mask of motherhood.

  When I try to pull “mother” from my childhood memories, I come up with two images, both of them, I fear, already embedded in some work of fiction or another. In one, my mother, young and rather formally dressed, is sitting opposite me on the floor, coloring at the same page of a coloring book. I marvel at how neatly she does it, even though from her vantage the page is upside down. She seems calm and comely and I am so proud it makes me shy. In the other, we are both somewhat older, and I see her, while standing at the ironing board, jump slightly and touch her jaw with her hand: a twinge of toothache, and my first unsolicited empathy into the pain of another human being. And this vision merges with the pathetic remedy our family used to apply to aches of all sorts, toothaches and earaches and eye-aches—a folded dishtowel, warmed by the iron. How many, in those pre-antibiotic years, sugar pills and dabs of ointment and spoonfuls of syr
up went into the nurture of a sickly child, like those little pats of wind and rain that reassure a seedling and embolden it to lengthen its roots.

  As I get older, her genes keep sprouting in me. We eat alike, with a steady, enchanted absorption in the food. We laugh alike, and evade awkward questions with similar flurries of fancy; I hear her voice flirtatiously pop from my mouth. My hair, fine like my father’s, went gray early like hers. Her old hobbies, which I thought eccentric—organic gardening, natural foods, conservation—now seem to me simple good sense. More deeply than any patriarchal religion, I believe what she instilled: the notions that we should live as close to nature as we can, and that in matters of diet and behavior alike we should look to the animals for guidance.

  She can name all the trees and flowers and birds in her woods; I wish I could, and try to learn the names from her now, since I paid scant attention when young. As we walk carefully through these woods, with their treacherous footing of boulders and mossy logs (both of us grown too brittle to relish a tumble), the biological event that linked our two bodies seems further and further away—the mere beginning of a precious companionship.