Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

You have always known that I am him, the one to father you home.

Let it happen. Say good-bye to the old. Forget Ben Marcus and his world of lies. I am not the father of such a one, but I am yours, and yours, and yours. Come to me. We’re family. There there. All will forever be all right.

Your father,

Michael Marcus

I DO NOT RECALL THAT Pal ever resorted to words. Mostly, he just ran and jumped and ate the brown behavior cakes, much like I did, but better and harder. When Pal swam in the learning pond, he dog-paddled with his head up and his tongue hanging from his mouth, as though he had shouted up a thick, dark syrup that froze between his lips.

Pal was a black friend and he growled deeper than an animal. When I growled like him, we made a booming forest sound, enough to bother the women into throwing their listening cloth at us. His hair was one length all over his body, clusters of fine needles on my skin that set me shivering and needing to pee. I had to run to the shrubs and squeeze at myself in private until the terrible itchiness was gone. I wanted to tear him apart to see what exactly he made me feel — to put pieces of him on a table and understand his insides. His hard black head was mostly all I ever saw, a spot of nothing that I wanted to follow. Whatever I couldn’t grab and hold and keep was Pal. He was the only thing that wasn’t mine, which made me as angry at him as if he were my brother.

I first met him in the arms of the great Jane Dark, who appeared at our house, to a black-carpet reception, along with her army of listening assistants: full-sized girls with stethoscopes and notebooks, wearing streamlined beige hearing suits. The girls stood outside our house that day and looked at our street in grim fascination, as though they had read somewhere it would soon be destroyed. From my window, I watched them, and they never flinched. Our big fake white house could hardly withstand so much staring; it did nothing but die in place as they stood there. Each girl looked almost the same. Sharp hair in a chunk of bang just over her eyes, a body buried under cloth, white shoes shining against the soil like spilled paint. An embarrassing amount of sunlight glowed on the cups the girls all held in their white-gloved hands. It was enough to blind someone who might be trying to figure out who they were.

Later into Dark’s residency, the girls performed fine outdoor spectacles that reminded us how little we had done in our yard. You see someone using your own house better than you’ve ever used it, and you go to your room and close the door. Sometimes the girls linked their arms in a human chain on the lawn while Dark worked her behavior removals inside, rendering my mother a perfectly quiet American citizen, teaching her the new silence. The girls would form a line and slice through the air like the arm of a carnival ride. A heavyset young lady anchored the unit, while an eggy little handful of a girl flew in the windy end position. If she lifted high enough on the swinging limb of bodies, she twirled her rope and created vocalizations up there in the air, grabbing leaves and singing, often catching scratches about her face from tree branches that didn’t much abide her kind of flight. Sometimes she zoomed by my window and I would reach out and try to touch her, like sticking my fingers into a fan. At night, I could hear the hum of bodies whipping through the air as the girls waited outside for instructions from Dark.

Except Dark did not speak at night because the darkness lowered her voice so much, it frightened her women. She slept in a sentry harness outside my mother’s bedroom door, her hands dangling like roots, wrapped in the translucent linen that was starting to fill our house, baffling every sound-making thing until nothing more than the smallest whimpers could escape from it. She rested and kept watch. Even sleeping, she muted our house with her long, soft body, a silence that lasted well into the morning.

Ms. Dark came into our house like an animal who owned something. She walked upright and carried a scary cloth. When she approached some of our furniture or pottery— including old bowls my sister had made, which held her private smelling salts — Dark held the cloth to her mouth, swallowing and coughing at once in a gesture of inventory. For each piece of our property, she raised the cloth to her lips and worked her mouth into it, as though it were a radio she could talk to. I tried to hide from her, but her girls set up so many picks and body barriers that she found me at once and the cloth rose again to her mouth — a dirty white linen, like a rag from my father’s shed. All I could see of her face were her flat eyes, puddles of oily color in her head. My mother accompanied her, held the hem of her shirt, and whispered a mouth-straining message into Dark’s hood that sounded like the end of a sick animal’s breath. I felt sorry for my mother, whose neck wrinkled up in back like an old man’s face. From behind, she looked like someone else’s father. I had not heard her whisper before, and it sounded as though she might be in trouble, wheezing at the high, desperate end of her breath, where words sound like a failing engine. Dark stuffed the cloth between her lips as she listened, and for a moment it sounded as though she were sobbing, because a heaving arose from within the hood, a stuttering intake of breath seizing her shoulders as if she were feeding from her hands. But when the cloth finally revealed her face and she moved once again among our furnishings, Dark’s mouth was dry and bloodless, rimmed with a powdery saliva, and she herself seemed as much without feeling as anyone ever had been in our house.

I stood still as the retinue continued to survey the objects of our home. Two girls slid toward me and pinned a small tag to my pajama top. Their fingers were buttery on my neck and their hair scratched at me like wire. The tag was fastened just under my chin, and I had to scrunch up to see the long code embedded on it, a set of numbers and letters spelling nothing I had read before. I touched the symbols, and they made more sense under my fingers, but before I could figure out a message, my hand was slapped away. Dark lowered her arms as she passed me, and for a second I could smell the cloth go by my face.

The reception carried on in this manner for far too long. When Dark arrived at a window, she took slow postures there in the light — reducing herself so much in space that another woman could have been tarped around her — and we were all supposed to wait there as though we were looking at a painting that might suddenly prove interesting. My mother crouched nearby and squinted at Dark. She tried the postures that Dark had struck, but my mother was too tall and she kept losing her balance, giggling loudly as she toppled, exaggerating her embarrassment, upon which Dark was polite enough not to remark. Some of the assistants stood by my mother and braced her from falling over. I had not seen her allow herself to be handled so freely before. People were actually touching my mother. Other girls made writing gestures in their notebooks, their hands dipping and looping into the paper as if they were sewing up someone’s body. I did not need to stand like a fragile old lady while people massaged my arms and held me upright, but standing upright at all seemed difficult in that company, as the women around me did everything but that: crouching, lunging, going airless in their bodies as they draped themselves like pelts over our furniture. Standing made me feel too tall, in charge of something. I thought I should issue a command or make a ruling, but I could only look at one thing, at the man they had brought with them, who hadn’t hit the floor yet, who was too perfect for me to see, who would not look at me at all.