Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

* * *

There were houses on either side of my rental — new development domiciles — but the view from the back window was unobstructed. It consisted of a small backyard with a swing set and behind it a cornfield, and beyond that an alfalfa field. In the distance was a copse of trees, the outlines of a barn, a silo, and above them the big, restless sky. I liked the view, but the interior of the house disturbed me, not because it was ugly but because it was dense with the lives of its owners, a pair of young professors with two children who had absconded to Geneva for the summer on some kind of research grant. When I put down my bag and boxes of books and looked around, I wondered how I would fit myself into this place, with its family photographs and decorative pillows of unknown Asian origin, its rows of books on government and world courts and diplomacy, its boxes of toys, and the lingering smell of cats, blessedly not in residence. I had the grim thought that there had seldom been room for me and mine, that I had been a scribbler of the stolen interval. I had worked at the kitchen table in the early days and run to Daisy when she woke from her nap. Teaching and the poetry of my students — poems without urgency, poems dressed up in “literary” curlicues and ribbons — had run away with countless hours. But then, I hadn’t fought for myself or, rather, I hadn’t fought in the right way. Some people just take the room they need, elbowing out intruders to take possession of a space. Boris could do it without moving a muscle. All he had to do was stand there “quiet as a mouse.” I was a noisy mouse, one of those that scratched in the walls and made a ruckus, but somehow it made no difference. The magic of authority, money, penises.

I put every framed picture carefully into a box, noting on a small piece of tape where each one belonged. I folded up several rugs and stored them with about twenty superfluous pillows and children’s games, and then I methodically cleaned the house, excavating clumps of dust to which paper clips, burnt matchsticks, grains of cat litter, several smashed M&Ms, and unidentifiable bits of debris had adhered themselves. I bleached the three sinks, the two toilets, the bathtub, and the shower. I scoured the kitchen floor, dusted and washed the ceiling lamps, which were thick with grime. The purge lasted two days and left me with sore limbs and several cuts on my hands, but the savage activity left the rooms sharpened. The musty, indefinite edges of every object in my visual field had taken on a precision and clarity that cheered me, at least momentarily. I unpacked my books, set myself up in what appeared to be the husband’s study (clue: pipe paraphernalia), sat down, and wrote:

Loss.

A known absence.

If you did not know it,

it would be nothing,

which it is, of course,

a nothing of another kind,

as acutely felt as a blister,

but a tumult, too,

in the region of the heart and lungs,

an emptiness with a name: You.

* * *

My mother and her friends were widows. Their husbands had mostly been dead for years, but they had lived on and during that living on had not forgotten their departed men, though they didn’t appear to clutch at memories of their buried spouses, either. In fact, time had made the old ladies formidable. Privately, I called them the Five Swans, the elite of Rolling Meadows East, women who had earned their status, not through mere durability or a lack of physical problems (they all ailed in one way or the other), but because the Five shared a mental toughness and autonomy that gave them a veneer of enviable freedom. George (Georgiana), the oldest, acknowledged that the Swans had been lucky. “We’ve all kept our marbles so far,” she quipped. “Of course, you never know — we always say that anything can happen at any moment.” The woman had lifted her right hand from her walker and snapped her fingers. The friction was feeble, however, and generated no sound, a fact she seemed to recognize because her face wrinkled into an asymmetrical smile.

I did not tell George that my marbles had been lost and found, that losing them had scared me witless, or that as I stood chatting with her in the long hallway a line from another George, Georg Trakl, came to me: In kühlen Zimmern ohne Sinn . In cool rooms without sense. In cool senseless rooms.

“Do you know how old I am?” she continued.

“One hundred and two years old.”

She owned a century.

“And Mia, how old are you?”

“Fifty-five.”

“Just a child.”

Just a child .

There was Regina, eighty-eight. She had grown up in Bonden but fled the provinces and married a diplomat. She had lived in several countries, and her diction had an estranged quality — overly enunciated perhaps — the result both of repeated dips in foreign environs and, I suspected, pretension, but that self-conscious additive had aged along with the speaker until it could no longer be separated from her lips or tongue or teeth. Regina exuded an operatic mixture of vulnerability and charm. Since her husband’s death, she had been married twice — both men dropped dead — and thereafter followed several entanglements with men, including a dashing Englishman ten years younger than she was. Regina relied on my mother as confidante and fellow sampler of local cultural events — concerts, art shows, and the occasional play. There was Peg, eighty-four, who was born and raised in Lee, a town even smaller than Bonden, met her husband in high school, had six children with him, and had acquired multitudes of grandchildren she managed to keep track of in infinitesimal detail, a sign of striking neuronal health. And finally there was Abigail, ninety-four. Though she’d once been tall, her spine had given way to osteoporosis, and the woman hunched badly. On top of that, she was nearly deaf, but from my first glimpse of her, I had felt admiration. She dressed in neat pants and sweaters of her own handiwork, appliquéd or embroidered with apples or horses or dancing children. Her husband was long gone — dead, some said; others maintained it was divorce. Whichever it was, Private Gardener had vanished during or just after the Second World War, and his widow or divorcée had acquired a teaching degree and become a grade school art teacher. “Crooked and deaf, but not dumb,” she had said emphatically upon our first meeting. “Don’t hesitate to visit. I like the company. It’s three-two-oh-four. Repeat after me, three-two-oh-four.”

The five were all readers and met for a book club with a few other women once a month, a gathering that had, I gleaned from various sources, a somewhat competitive edge to it. During the time my mother had lived in Rolling Meadows, any number of characters in the theater of her everyday life had left the stage for “Care,” never to return. My mother told me frankly that once a person left the premises, she vanished into “a black hole.” Grief was minimal. The Five lived in a ferocious present because unlike the young, who entertain their finality in a remote, philosophical way, these women knew that death was not abstract.

* * *

Had it been possible to keep my ugly disintegration from my mother, I would have done it, but when one family member is hauled off and locked up in the bin, the others surge forth with their concern and pity. What I had wanted terribly to hide from Mama I was able freely to show my sister, Beatrice. She received the news and, two days after my admission to the South Unit, hopped a plane to New York. I didn’t see them open the glass doors for her. My attention must have wandered for an instant because I had been waiting and watching for her arrival. I think she spotted me right away because I looked up when I heard the determined clicking of her high heels she marched toward me, sat down on the oddly slippery sofa in the common area, and put her arms around me. As soon as I felt her fingers squeeze my arms, the choking dryness of the antipsychotic cocoon I had been living in broke to pieces, and I sobbed loudly. Bea rocked me and stroked my head. Mia, she said, my Mia. By the time Daisy returned for a second visit, I was sane. The ruin had been at least partially rebuilt, and I did not wail in front of her.