Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

My small, elegant mother took the steps to the pulpit carefully but without difficulty, and once she had adjusted her feet and reading glasses, she leaned toward her listeners. “Abigail was many things,” she said, her voice quavering, hoarse, emphatic. “But she was not a generous and gentle spirit. She was funny, outspoken, smart, and if the truth be told, angry and irritable a lot of the time.” I heard a couple of women laugh behind me. My mother went on and with each sentence I could feel her warming to her subject. They had met in the book club the day Abigail shocked her fellow members by denouncing a novel they were reading that had won the PULITZER Prize as “a complete load of stinking crap,” a verdict my mother had not opposed but would have worded differently, and she went on to praise Abigail’s creative ability and the many works of art she had produced over the years. She called what Abigail had made art, and she called Abigail an artist, and Daisy and I were proud to have such a grandmother and such a mother. I knew Mama wouldn’t weep for Abigail. I don’t think she wept for Father. She was a true stoic; if there’s nothing to be done about it, away with it. The Swans were dying, one by one. We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can’t wash it off. There is nothing we can do about it except perhaps burst into song.

We must leave us for a while, leave me and Daisy and the brght Peg, too, sitting beside Daisy, leave my mother as she stands there giving testimony to her friend. We are going to leave her even though she shone that day and later she was congratulated heartily by many for telling what was generally agreed to be something true because it is well known that the dead often go to their graves wrapped up in lies. But we are going to leave us there at a funeral as it rains hard beyond the stained glass windows, and we’ll let it unfold just as it did then, but without mention.

Time confounds us, doesn’t it? The physicists know how to play with it, but the rest of us must make due with a speeding present that becomes an uncertain past and, however jumbled that past may be in our heads, we are always moving inexorably toward an end. In our minds, however, while we are still alive and our brains can still make connections, we may leap from childhood to middle age and back again and loot from any time we choose, a savory tidbit here and a sour one there. It can never return as it was, only as a later incarnation. What once was the future is now the past, but the past comes back as a present memory, is here and now in the time of writing. Again, I am writing myself elsewhere. Nothing prevents that from happening, does it?

Bea and I have been skating on the rink over by Lincoln school, and we are waiting for our father to pick us up, and we see him coming in the green station wagon. On the way home, he whistles “The Erie Canal,” and Bea and I smile at each other in the back seat. At home, Mama is lying on the bed reading a book in French. We jump on the bed, and she feels our feet. They are so cold. Ice, she says the word ice. Then she strips off our four socks and takes our naked skating feet and puts them under her sweater on the warm skin of her stomach. Paradise Found.

Stefan is sitting on the sofa, gesticulating as he makes his points. As I look at him, I worry. He is too alive. His thoughts are pressing ahead too quickly, and yet I am ignorant then of what will happen. I am innocent of the future, and that state, that cloud of unknowing, is impossible for me to retrieve.

Dr. F. tells me to push. Push now! And I push with all my might and later I discover I have broken blood vessels all over my face, but what do I know about it then, nothing, and I push, and I feel her head, and then voices cry out that her head is coming out of me, and it does, and there is the sudden slide of her body from mine, me/she, two in one, and between my open legs I see a red, slimy foreigner, with a little bit of black hair, my daughter. I remember nothing of the umbilical cord, do I? Nothing of the cutting. Boris is there, and he is weeping. I don’t shed a tear. He does. Now I remember! I said that he had never bawled in real life, but that’s wrong. I had forgotten! He is standing there right now in my mind crying after his daughter is born.

I am walking into the AIM gallery, a women’s cooperative in Brooklyn, to attend the opening of a show called The Secret Amusements.

I am standing beside Boris in our apartment on Tompkins Place. Do you promise to love him, comfort him, honor and keep him in sickness and in health; and forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, as long as ye both shall live?

Well, do you? Speak up, you redheaded numbskull. That was then. I said yes. I said, I do. I said something in the affirmative.

My mother has turned ninety, and we are celebrating in Bonden. Her knees are giving her problems, but she is lucid and doesn’t use a walker. Peg is there, and my mother introduces me to Irene. I have heard a lot about Irene on the telephone lately, and I pump her hand to show my enthusiasm. She is ninety-five. “Your mother and I,” she tells me, “have had some really fun times together.”

Mama Mia is writing poems at the kitchen table. The little Daisy girl is stirring in her crib.

Mia is in the hospital now, diagnosed with a brief psychosis, a transitory alienation of her reason, a brain glitch. She is officially une folle . She is writing in the notebook BRAIN SHARDS.

7.

An insistent thing—

but speechless,

not identity,

a waking dream that leaves no image,

only agonies. I need a name.

I need a word in this white world.

I need to call it something, not nothing.

Choose a picture from nowhere,

from a hole in a mind

and look, there on the ledge:

A flowering bone.

11.

I blibe and bleeb on rovsty hobe

With Sentecrate, Bilt, and Frobe,

My buddles down from Iberbean,

The durkerst toon in Freen.

21.

Once over easy, love,

Twice over tough,

Piss and vinegar.

Turds and stout.

What’s this all about?

She is sane again, and she is in the Burdas’ living room reading a biography of that coy but passionate genius, the Danish philosopher who has been irking and unsettling and bewildering her for years. The date is August 19, 2009.

* * *

I have come round to myself, as you can see. Only a few days have passed since the funeral. I have come round to who I was then, during that summer I spent with my mother and the Swans and Lola and Flora and Simon and the young witches of Bonden. Abigail is lying in her grave on the outskirts of town. There is no stone yet. That will come later. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, and my memory of that time is sharp. Daisy was still with me. In the days previous, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, Boris Izcovich had been wooing me in a steady, earnest manner and had even sent me an egregious but touching poem that began: “I knew a girl named Mia / who knew her rhyme and meter / And onomatopoeia.” It fell off badly after that, but what can one expect from a world-renowned neuroscientist? The sentiment expressed after those introductory lines was, as described by Daisy, “total mush.” That said, only the most hard-hearted among us have no use for mush or blarney or those old ballads about lost and dead lovers, and only bona fide dunces are unable to take pleasure in the stories of ghostly figures who wander across moors or fields or out in the open air. And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should not get back together at the end of The Awful Truth ? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren’t there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.