Lynne Tillman - American Genius - A Comedy

My mother doesn't refer to herself as sensitive. She has beautiful skin that is still unlined and smooth, to which, during the majority of her life, she applied nothing but cold cream, though regularly, and to which medicinal creams must now be applied daily, because her skin has become more dry and sensitive with age, but she can no longer apply it herself. Her hands, once capable, tremble and sometimes shake. The cold cream jar was milk glass, large, with a wide mouth and black metal top, and sat on a shelf in my parents' bathroom, smelling of sweet dreams that might fragrantly coat not only skin but the whole body of existence. I often watched my mother apply the cream and rub it rapidly and efficiently onto her face and neck, which she appeared to do without any significant pleasure, as if in the act of replenishing her skin she was also denying it, but I can't remember if, afterward, she washed her hands, rubbed the cream onto them thoroughly, or wiped the cream off her hands onto a soft cloth or towel. Her only sister, and the oldest in her family, there were four brothers younger than her, had skin as slippery as butter, like my father's cottons and silks, smoother and softer even than my mother's supple skin. Her sister used ordinary Jergen's Lotion, my mother explained, that was her secret. Still, if I apply cream now, when I didn't for years and years, in the vise of a perverse vanity, it's because of the Polish woman and her concerned, attentive expression when she tenderly pats and caresses my face. It is this picture of her and the thought of her future admonishments, when she clucks her tongue slightly, a sound I dislike and associate with eating habits I also dislike, that arouses me and makes me uncomfortable enough to close my hook, get off the bed, walk to the dark wood dresser, a piece of furniture I would never have bought, but which is appropriate for this old-fashioned room, open a large jar of moisturizer and rub the expensive cream upward on my cheeks, careful not to rub it under my eyes where the skin is more delicate and might become damaged by vigorous motion. I've never understood why. Still, I'm cautious, having been warned of the possible damage many times before, and when I became aware that skin could be damaged by use, as I did at the age of ten and a friend's mother strenuously warned us not to laugh too much or too freely, because lines would form around our mouths, I heard her words with worry, since I loved my friend's mother better than my own. She was pretty and young, unlike my mother who had waited years to marry, whose prospects with my father had always bordered on failure, but who finally claimed victory or success with a man she would then find undemonstrative. My friend was her mother's first child, horn when she was just twenty-one, while I came late, when my mother was forty, and the second child, or baby, and certainly the last she brought into the world.

I rub any excess cream onto my hands and then onto a towel, chiding myself that I shouldn't use the towel, but instead wash the cream off my hands, but that would mean trespassing through the halls, treading on old floorboards to the bathroom and running the water through the old pipes that make noise, even at the faucets, merely turning them, no matter how studied my effort, and waking the two women near me on the floor. Across the floor, at the opposite end, there are two more people, a man and a woman, who sleep separately, but who also may not, and whom I never see in the house, and I don't believe I wake them. I carefully wipe off most of the cream onto a towel, which I'm not required to launder, since I'm not responsible for washing my sheets and towels while I'm here, but I also rub off the cream carefully, because I don't want to ruin the pages of the hooks I'm reading and because I dislike the feeling of grease on my face and body. The cream might prevent my skin from breathing, and I could feel suffocated, but I try to do what I'm told is good for me, though often it is contradictory.

I don't want to think about the two young women or the Polish woman, whom I hardly know, but who has made as strong an impression upon me as people I know better and see more. The Polish woman plays a part in my life, unimportant to anyone but me, one of many unacknowledged relationships of which I never speak, since the relationship between the person who gives you a facial and yourself is assumed to be insignificant and would not become an account I would offer people, even close friends, who have busy lives. Everyone has a busy life, and generally I don't want to make others listen to me. People don't usually want to listen, and often only wait for their opportunity to speak, generally about themselves, and most don't know how to listen, especially about matters that to them are insignificant and about which they will silently protest, Why did he or she mention something of no interest to me. To me, the importance of the Polish woman is clear. No one else applies cream to my face or tells me how sensitive my skin is, no one else regularly admonishes me and appears to worry about my skin, and, when I am with the polish woman, I experience feelings that are remarkably different from feelings I have with anyone else. I feel entirely relaxed and comforted, and have thoughts I don't often have elsewhere, like thinking that she, a Polish woman, is there to serve me, though she is unhappy, and her unhappiness has to be masked in order to serve me properly. She tends to my skin and me, a woman of Jewish origin, a faith in which I have no faith and feel no spiritual kinship, but into which I was born, and tells me how sensitive my skin is, when not many years ago Polish people, possibly her parents or grandparents, might have made skin like mine into lampshades, and it is the only time I ever have that particular, almost wry thought, which occurs fleetingly in the cramped, dingy salon.

I entertain that abhorrent and impermissible idea wholly for myself, amusing myself with its horror, as she goes about her work. She cares for my skin, having different thoughts from those required by the job she is doing, her hands performing routine actions which leave her mind free, and she may not want anyone, especially her clients, to know what she is thinking, maybe about the glowering man waiting outside this small room for her, wanting to date and fuck her, or she may be reliving carnal scenes in which she dominates the strong man, sits astride him, her well-tended skin glistening with sweat, or she may be concocting a plan for her future, since people often desire a future different from their present, which may be painful or lackluster. It's better not to complain in many situations, servants know this, and everyone is sometimes a servant, even the very wealthy can become servants, insecure in love and fearful of rejection. Louis-Ferdinand Celine said that ten percent of galley slaves were volunteers, because people want masters, since existence is painful, though no one wants to die, or very few want to die, and it's often better not to say anything at all. I don't remember mentioning my dread and anxiety of the gray camp and bunk to my counselors, though I might have after lunch, when I tried but couldn't nap on the rough brown woolen blanket, which irritated my skin, desperately waiting for the amnesia of sleep, sorrowfully longing for mail from my mother who didn't write, because she expected letters from me first. I had learned to write but had no familiarity with the protocols of correspondence and didn't answer her initial letter, and I didn't think about it, or I can't remember what I thought, since I didn't know what to think, and didn't know the dangers of unawareness. But when I was asked to steal the howling pin of the enemy team on the last day of Color War by the head counselor of the team to which I was assigned and which, like my family, religion, and sex I didn't choose, having heard that anyone who is captured in enemy territory will be thrown into jail, I dropped to the ground and wailed, No, please, I don't want to go to jail, please don't make me, please. The head counselor suddenly, and only then, comprehended my chronic, active distress and said, to quiet me, that she'd ask my cousin, the one I haven't seen since my favorite uncle died, to do it. Soon my cousin sneaked across enemy territory, risking capture and jail, and succeeded, making her the hero and me the coward. But her cowardly, brutal older brother didn't go into the textile business, as mine didn't, and I didn't, though I often wish I had, because I would like to be around fabrics, examine patterns, and study threads rather than be around many other things, in an endeavor at which my uncle and father were successes, then they weren't, and which compounded my father's sense of innate failure and made it nearly perfect. I can remember my uncle trying to cheer him up, urging him to accompany him on vacations, to lose himself far away from the bolts of beautiful fabrics of their own design that increasingly lay unsold on the deep shelves in their stockroom. The stockboy, Junior, whose skin was a deep brown, who was muscular and short, shorter than my father-my father often rested his arm around junior's shoulders-had taken the bolts off the truck, unpacked and set them on the long, deep shelves in the stockroom, and when potential customers visited, when business was good, a phrase I heard often, a few words belying their heft-business is good-Junior stalwartly carried the bolts to the showroom, and my father would sometimes slap him on the back and joke with him, but I don't know where Junior went after the business failed. I remember him, indistinctly and distinctly, especially that he was called a stockboy, had an impressively compact body, a round, brown face, a seemingly cheerful demeanor, and wore colorful shirts, maybe of my father's material, when he was not wearing a T-shirt, denim jeans, or some other uniform for manual labor. I wondered what he thought of my father, his boss, when I was young, but I never asked, and then he disappeared, so I suspected my father and uncle of giving him away, like our cat and dog, but instead my father said, We had to let junior go, because business is bad.