Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

“Stop pinching me.”

No expression on Julia’s face. “What’s wrong with you? I didn’t touch you. You’re crazy.”

More surreptitious pinches, my “imagination,” in the girls’ locker room.

Tears in the toilet stall.

Then, mostly, I don’t exist.

To reject, exclude, ignore, excommunicate, exile, push out. The cold shoulder. The silent treatment. Solitary confinement. Time out.

In Athens, they formalized ostracism to rid themselves of those suspected of having accumulated too much power, from ostrakon, the word for “shard.” They wrote down the names of the threats on broken pieces of crockery. Word Shards. The Pathan tribes in Pakistan exile renegade members, sending them into a dusty nowhere. The Apache ignore widows. They fear the paroxysms of grief and pretend those who suffer from them do not exist. Chimpanzees, lions, wolves all have forms of ostracism, forcing out one of their own, either too weak or too obstreperous to be tolerated by the group. Scientists describe this as an “innate and adaptive” method of social control. Lester the chimpanzee lusted after power above his rank, tried to hump females out of his league. He didn’t know his place and, finally, was expelled. Without the others, he starved to death. The researchers found his emaciated body under a tree. The Amish call it Meidung . When a member breaks a law, he or she is shunned. All interactions cease, and the one they have turned against falls into destitution or worse. A man bought a car to take his sick child to a doctor, but the Amish are not allowed to drive cars. After that breach, the powers that be declared him anathema. No one recognized him. Old friends and neighbors looked through him. He no longer existed among them, and so he lost himself to himself. He cringed at the blank faces. His posture changed; he folded inward; and he found he couldn’t eat. His eyes lost their focus, and when he spoke to his son, he realized he was whispering. He found a lawyer and filed suit against the elders. Not long after, his boy died. A month later, he died. Meidung is also known as “the slow death.” Two of the elders who had approved the Meidung also died. There were bodies all over the stage.

It seemed to me at the time that I had fallen under an evil enchantment, the source of which could not be proven, only guessed at, because the crimes were small and mostly hidden: pinches that didn’t happen, hurtful notes written by no one: “You are a big fake,” the mysterious destruction of my English paper, the drawing I had left on my desk — found scribbled over — jeers and whispers, anonymous telephone calls, the silence of not being answered. We find ourselves in the faces of others, and so for a time every mirror reflected a foreigner, a despised outsider unworthy of being alive. Mia. I rescrambled it. I am. I wrote it over and over in my notebook. I am. I am Mia. Among my mother’s books I found an anthology of poems and in it, John Clare’s poem, “I Am.”

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows

My friends forsake me like a memory lost,

I am the self-consumer of my woes—

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied, stifled throes—

And yet, I am, and live — like vapors tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise …

I had no idea what “self-consumer of my s tossedx201D; meant. It might have helped. A little irony, child, a little distance, a little humor, a little indifference. Indifference was the cure, but I couldn’t find it in myself. The actual cure was escape. That simple. My mother arranged it. St. John’s Academy in St. Paul, a boarding school. There I was smiled upon, recognized, befriended. There I found Rita, co-conspirator with long black braids and Mad magazine, fan of Ella, Piaf, and Tom Lehrer. Lying each in a bunk, we crooned out in faltering harmony every verse of “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” (I felt bad for the fictional pigeons, actually, but the sweet camaraderie of Rita far outweighed the pinch of pity.) Her pale brown legs. My white ones with a few freckles. My bad poems. Her good cartoons.

I remember my mother as she stood in the doorway to our room on the first day. She was so much younger, and I can’t summon the precise features of her face as it was then. I do recall the worried but hopeful look in her eyes before she left me, and that when I hugged her I smashed my face into the shoulder of her jacket and told myself to inhale. I wanted to keep the smell of her with me — that mingled odor of loose powder and Shalimar and wool.

* * *

It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shapeless; an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank: We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes. And yet, as I sit here at my desk and try to bring it back, that summer not so long ago, I know turns were made that affected what followed. Some of them stand out like bumps on a relief map, but then I was unable to perceive them because my view of things was lost in the undifferentiated flatness of living one moment after another. Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia. Consciousness is the product of delay. Sometime in early June, during the second week of my stay, I made a small turn without being aware of it, and I think it began with the secret amusements.

* * *

Abigail had arranged for me to see her handicrafts. Her apartment was smaller than my mother’s and, at first glance, I felt inundated by the shelves of tiny glass figurines, the embroidered pillows and wall signs (“Home Sweet Home”), and the multicolored quilts folded over furniture. Various artworks covered most of the walls and Abigail herself, who was decked out in a long loose dress embellished with what appeared to be an alligator and other creatures. Despite the dense arrangements, the room had that neat, newly dusted, proud feeling I had come to expect from the swans of Rolling Meadows. Because she could no longer stand upright, Abigail used a walker to deftly propel herself around in the doubled-over position. She opened the door, shifted her head sideways to eye me, and, fingering her hearing aid with her free hand, looked intently in my direction. The auditory devices were not like the ones my mother wore; they were much larger and protruded from her ears like great dark flowers. Thick cords dangled from them, and I wondered whether these were extra technology for her extreme deafness or a throwback to an earlier era. Although not nearly so big, the contraptions reminded me of ear trumpets in the nineteenth century. She settled me into a chair, offered me cookies and a glass of milk, as if I were seven, and then, without any preliminaries, she brought forth the two works she had selected for me to examine and placed one on top of the other on my lap. Then she slowly made her way to the green sofa and carefully deposited herself in a position that was painful to look at, but her cheerful, direct expression mitigated my discomfort, and I picked up the top piece.

“That’s an old one,” she said. “Doesn’t bother me. That’s the best I can say. At least that one doesn’t bother me. After I put them up, some of them get to bothering me, and then I have to put them away, go right in the closet. Well, what do you think?”

After taking out my reading glasses, I looked down at an elaborate scene of what appeared to be a cliché: In the foreground a cherubic blond boy made of felt cutouts danced with a bear against a background of riotous flower patterns. Over him was a yellow sun with a smiling face. Happy-wappy, I thought. The derisive expression was Bea’s. But then as I continued to look, I noticed that behind the dull boy, nearly hidden by leaf patterns, was a tiny girl embroidered into fabric, her form rendered in threads of muted colors. Wielding an oversized open pair of scissors as a weapon, she grinned malevolently at a sleeping cat. Then I noticed a set of pale pink winged dentures above her that, without scrutiny, could have been mistaken for petals, and a gray-green skeleton key. As I continued to investigate the shapes in the foliage, I saw what appeared to be a pair of naked breasts in a little window and soon after some words, the letters of which were so small I had to hold them away from me to read: O remember that my life is wind. I knew I had read those words but couldn’t place them.