Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

When Ben broods over his blocks or puzzle pieces, when he manipulates the domestic action figures you carved of him and his sister, or when he rotates the birds in his model aviary to reflect a religious system where birds act as transport vehicles for wind and prayer, I cannot help feeling I am watching a man who has, for some reason, based himself on a dead person. (Is it childish to believe that the more easily killable things of this world, most notably the birds, as delicate as lightbulbs, and seemingly randomly tossed aloft, have any agency? Is it childish to attach power to supposed objects of beauty? I only mean to establish whether Ben’s nostalgia for birds might be useful in our ultimate plan for him.)

The goal, lest your exile has promoted yet further dementia in your defeated person, is still for him to launch into the greater Ohio — and whatever failing world lies beyond — with an unprecedented persona. I am not ashamed to want to make a boy who will one day set the mold for what might be called — if we gain any say over the conduct styles of our time — the New Behavior. If your goal is otherwise, or if, upon scrutiny of your strategies as an apparent man of Akron, you find that your fatherhood impulses have gone girlish along with your body — your trembling hands, your failing back, your dizziness and frequent wobbling, your sulking response when a conversation veers from your topic, exceeding your imagination or intelligence, your whimpering in your sleep, a list that barely touches on your array of feeble traits, which tempts me to create an entire other document cataloging your failures, a critical edition of my husband, an anthology of disappointments, a kind of best of the worst of the man I used to walk with, back when affection toward another person seemed like an answer to my own mediocrity, when a husband was just another blame hole — Ben will soon be removed from your part-time care and you might stop your reading here, pack your smart little bag, as if being ready for your journey will matter, and sit still until the quiet sisters knock on your door to remove you for all time from the visible world.

Knock, knock.

To the point: Things are getting worse with Ben, and I will soon overwhelm you with examples of his steady slide from excellence, his conspiracy against originality. Aside from a small, vanishing father, a difficult nutrition system meant to suppress or surface specific emotions, and an arsenal of equipment even two grown men would have trouble hauling around (helmets, packs, sleds, mouth-guards, grief biscuits, etc.), there are behavioral errors registering from our boy that were not in our forecast, wildly unchecked emotional displays that embarrass our household (though I would suggest that there can be no other kind of emotional display, and even the word “display,” which in one of the major foreign languages means to spread one’s ass cheeks as wide as possible without tearing the skin, should suggest the value of having emotions at all). These are detours of his person that we failed to map in advance. What is unknown about Plan Ben, or previously unpredicted, is unacceptable. It bespeaks an imprecise launch, and, as such, invites our quickest mastery. “To parent,” in Greek, means “to know.” I think. In German, it means “to cut trees, clear a path, and invite people into the space you have made.” The French use the word “father” for “failure.” “Dad” means “an underwater passage to the afterlife, a constricted tube, a drowning pipe.” Access is difficult. There will be water everywhere. You could drown midway. “Ben” means “never; not on your life; you’re out of your mind.” “Ben” means “the best I could do.” In some cultures, the word serves as an apology.

Let’s examine how well we’ve lived up to these terms.

On those difficult evenings when the parenting schedule requires me to touch our young man’s head in a Mothering Action before putting him to sleep, under the labored shushing sounds of the Ideal Breathing tape broadcast into his bedroom, hissing, hissing, hissing, rendering his room like a wind tunnel, I sense his skull to be smaller than that of other boys, softer and shapeless and altogether too fragile for my liking.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but his head should not conform to his mother’s hand, even a hand that could once repel an advancing, trouserless husband, a man who deployed actual military circlings on his approach to our shared bed, techniques from an actual book, requiring me to be similarly strategic in resisting his attempts at the aggression he called intimacy, the chafing lurches into my body that caused his face to collapse with relief. Yet to battle this man (you) was also to accidentally touch his bare legs and bottom and crotch as he conducted his wagon circle of my overtired person, leaving me to effectively only fight the top half of him, the clothed half, or else possibly incite his arousal even further, a handicap that resulted in a woman (myself) who learned how to beat a man’s trunk, his arms, his face, while avoiding all that lay below.

Case in point: The neighboring Smith children, when they pile over the south fence, and commence to lower their heads and charge the wall that encircles the listening hole, seem only temporarily stunned by the collision. Apart from questioning their aim in such a pursuit (namely, why would a young Smith risk what is arguably its best asset — its head — in order to knock down a wall that it could easily surmount with a ladder; what could be the launch objective of the Smith parents in allowing such a battery to occur, particularly on someone else’s property?), one must observe that there are no blackouts among that bunch of youngsters, no fainting, no discernible concussions, contusions, or spells. Just a white cloud stunned from the wall by the ramming of their heads, rendering the Smiths as dark shapes inside a haze, blaring like foghorns as they wait for clear air (a bluster that must challenge the decoding tactics of our young listeners laboring in the hole). The Smiths roughhouse as though they were smash puppets, and one observes no resulting decay in their persons, whereas our Ben, let us confess, flinches if his own hand comes too near his face, as with eating, for example (he is too facially cautious to feed himself soup; we have lately resorted to a blindfold), or grooming (I observed him fastening his hairbrush to the wall, his arms keeled back while he burrowed his head against it, as though truffling for some message in the bristles that might rub off on his face). He is so shy of himself that he often ducks his own motions while leaving the house or carrying seeds to the Storm Needle, as if a bee were dive-bombing his face and his hands had produced a sign language to ward it off. If he continues to smother his own actions, he will simply be a boy who spins in place, erasing every gesture he makes until he is busily still, a kind of hummingbird person at best, fascinating to watch, but in the end just another curiosity, merely pitiable. While such a repertoire might suffice if he were a dancer, parodying the way people sabotage their own progress, a palsy meant to ridicule the very idea of motion, as a person it is not acceptable for his actions to symbolize, even satirically, the failures of others. The parallels are too chancy, and our Akron neighbors should not be expected to supply all of their own irony, to comprehend that Ben represents something other than himself, which was never our intention for him. We seek to put people in mind of absolutely nothing when they observe him. We desire primary behavior from our boy. Let him be new, or let us remove him from the yard, the house, the world.

Okay, problem articulated. Now, Ben’s mania toward his own head is evidence of something, but what? He is either afraid of himself (not exactly irrational, and in some sense impressively shrewd of the boy to identify his own self as a threat, a discovery that takes other people years, if they make it at all), or he’s instinctually protecting his head from harm, which is one more boring way he is just like All Other People to This Date, not just weak and death-prone but glaringly, theatrically weak, almost asking to be killed. My feeling? Do not, do not, do not fuck around and ask for something like that. It is too damn tempting. At least pretend to want to live.