Jincy Willett - Winner of the National Book Award

Business reverses, the protracted death of ambition, perhaps even the postwar anxiety which afflicted most Americans on a subliminal level…these are at least some of the possible causes of Jabez’s perceptible withdrawal from Abigail just at that time of her life when she most needed him. At the age of ten, at the brink of womanhood, she sensed a growing coldness in him. “He didn’t want me to be affectionate with him anymore,” she says, with sorrow surviving in her voice. “I felt as though I had done something unforgivable, so bad that no one would tell me what it was.”

Abigail Mather’s great sin was, of course, in growing up. Her father, likely out of his own inchoate sense of guilt, precognizant of his own incestuous desires, withheld from Abigail the male approval necessary to her erotic self-esteem. Just when she had the greatest need of him, he declined to validate her sexuality….

…with

I’m staring at the wall in front of me. I have been reduced to that already. Happily, the wall is not blank. There’s a black and white poster on it spelling out the Heimlich maneuver in a series of cartoon vignettes. The Board made me put it up. T. R. thinks it’s a Good Idea. T. R. is one of those people who apparently believe that if you are sufficiently cautious you stand a real chance of living forever. A hypothetical disaster—“I could have been killed!”—is as horrible to her as a real one would be, has been, to me.

The centerpiece of the poster is the central metaphor for our times. A middle-aged woman, mute, imploring, grimacing, clutches her own throat with one panicky hand. Underneath is the caption:

T. R. doesn’t think this is funny. I had seen these posters before in restaurants, but had never studied one closely until T. R. put it up across from my desk. We had just the one conversation about it, which became absurdly heated and hateful, and I have not mentioned it since.

“You can laugh,” she had said as she taped down the last corner, “but I personally can’t think of anything worse than choking to death. I’m haunted by the idea of asphyxiation.”

“You’re haunted by the idea of death,” I said. “Last week you said you couldn’t think of anything worse than Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Alzheimer’s can’t be avoided. Choking can.”

“Well, now that we have this poster, anyway.” T. R. blushed and zipped her lip. She is a resentful youngish woman, unfunctionally fat, and will do just about anything to throw a fight in her opponent’s favor. She was not born to lose: She has been conditioned to prefer it, the disadvantaged position, like so many of her generation. (She is a child of the sixties; I am a child of the fifties.) She is happiest when sullen, most assured when outnumbered, most peaceful in defeat. The high point of her life came and went long ago, when a policeman’s horse stepped on her foot and smashed her big toe during a peace demonstration in South Kingstown.

She was busy now figuring out ways to lose her argument with me. “All right,” she said, “tell me what’s wrong with showing people how to perform the Heimlich maneuver. It’s not intuitive, you know. If you plant your fist in the wrong place you can break the guy’s ribs.”

“I’m not talking about the Heimlich maneuver. I’m talking about the damn sign. What is the point, T. R., of this picture? Is it supposed to familiarize us with the appearance of a choking person? So that the next time we see someone turning purple and grabbing his throat and gagging we won’t assume he has a tension headache and pass by in discreet silence? Or… maybe it’s to give us some idea of how to act when we ourselves are choking to death, so that we won’t make the common mistake of doing nothing and waiting for people to guess?”

“You’re always making fun, Dorcas. Well, it’s easy to make fun.”

“I’m not having fun here. I’m serious.”

T. R. was slightly mollified. “Of course you’re right,” she said, “that ninety-nine out of a hundred people don’t need to be reminded of what a choking person looks like. Probably nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand. But think about that exception, that one in a thousand, and the life he could have saved if he’d seen this poster.”

“I am thinking about him. I can’t stop thinking about him. Where’s he from, Neptune?”

“What harm does it do, for God’s sake?” T. R. whined. “Even if it doesn’t actually save anybody, you’re totally disregarding the spirit in which it was conceived—”

“No, no, no. The spirit of the thing is exactly what I’m complaining about. This…artifact,” I waved my hand at the poster, “is not a flash in the pan, or the work of a single demented soul.

“Committees turn these things out. They probably had some kind of poster contest, and this won . A group of educated adults decided how many tens of thousands of these things to create, and how to disseminate them, and of course the government’s in on it, and it’s a federal offense not to put this up on a restaurant wall, and every day millions of people look at it, whether they realize it or not, and the real message comes through, sinks in, we absorb it like trees absorb carbon dioxide, and the message is:

T. R. surrendered then, needlessly of course, as I was just flailing around, and she smiled her triumphant loser’s smile. “I’m not going to go through this again with you,” she said. “You’re just going to start trashing Ralph Nader.”

“It’s sinful to treat adults like children. It’s sinful to insult the intelligence of any sentient human being. It’s unpardonably sinful to do these things for the person’s own good.” Every time I said “sinful” T. R.’s smile grew thinner and more obnoxious. First off, the antique notion of “sin” amuses her, and secondly, she knows that when I stop wisecracking she’s got me, and I had gotten onto a subject about which I have very little sense of humor, because willful stupidity on this scale is criminal, abominable, and giggling at it is an act of capitulation.

The Universal Choking Sign is not funny, it is tragic, the product of a culture in extremis, choking in a moral vacuum, and I will not laugh at Hilda DeVilbiss either, and poke easy cowardly fun at her psychobabble, except to make the obvious, yes, brain-numbingly obvious point that if Father had failed to “withdraw” from Abigail when she entered “that time of life when she most needed him”—that is, when she started to sweat like a bad rose, carry herself like a tubful of liquid gold, thicken the air around her into honey, menace the innocent world with her delirious, half-lidded stare—if, that is, Father had undertaken to

he would have ended up at the

doing

I tiptoed, or belly-crawled, past the fifth chapter, the one about Mother. It is entitled, unless I am hallucinating, “The Third Sister,” and the term “role model” pops up on every page. I assume that Mother is shown to be deficient in the role model department with the inevitable tragic results . “Child-bride” and “child-woman” also pop up a lot, along with “dream world” and “denial mechanism.” The stark, minimalist beauty of this sort of writing is best revealed when we highlight the clichés and blank out the lines connecting them, which are just filler anyway. Only the clichés themselves, particularly spaced, are required. It’s like those children’s connect-the-dot puzzles. The dots alone reveal their true configuration to the patient, discerning eye. You don’t have to connect them at all.