Fiction from The Literary Review

Lynne Tillman

Excerpt from AMERICAN GENIUS, A Comedy

My parents sent me to a sleepaway summer camp when I was six. I didn't understand where I was, I had no idea what I was doing there, like my dog, who didn't understand why she was suddenly unable to walk the city's streets without her paws hurting. I couldn't understand why I was thrust into a gray bunk, constructed of wood, somewhere in the country, sitting on a cot covered by a rough wool blanket, which tortured my sensitive skin, with seven other little girls I didn't know, who were not my brother, who, like him, didn't pay much attention to me when I was that age or any other. He disappeared when I was 11. I didn't know these strange, little girls, I didn't know what strangers were, and the little girls in my gray bunk were not sensitive to me. But strangers have potential. I didn't know the two women who were our counselors, I didn't know what a counselor was, and, melancholy, I sat on the bed, observing this unfamiliar place, and miserably awaited letters from my mother who never wrote, because, she told me later, I didn't write her.
        I don't remember the food at camp, but I remember walking to the cafeteria every day, passing the infirmary whose name was frightening, where I was told a girl of eight was being kept because she was very, very sick and wasn't allowed medicine by her parents, who were Christian Scientists. She might die without the medicine her parents refused her. All summer long, every day for eight weeks, we seven little girls walked in a straggling line past the infirmary to the cafeteria to eat our meals. I was the youngest, no one else was turning six at the end of that summer, so I was five, the youngest child in camp, where another little girl was very ill and might die because her parents did not believe in medicine, though it might cure her. I disdain religion, which some sensitive people believe can heal and redeem them, but I have no faith, though I was born into one, which I abandoned, although people can't abandon and be entirely through with anything into which they were born.
        I didn't write my mother when I was away, because I didn't know what away was, I had only recently learned to print, and I didn't know I was supposed to write her since she was supposed to be with me. I also wasn't supposed to be in a gray bunk with small strangers and larger ones, counselors, who asked me to do incomprehensible things, like steal the pin from the other team in Color War. I didn't understand what Color War was, I had no idea what it was, and even though my older cousin was also in the same camp, but we were not in the same bunk, she never spoke to me about it, no one explained it. I didn't know Color War wasn't real, just as I didn't know that I wouldn't have to live in a gray bunk for the rest of my life, sent there by my parents who believed I should be there, the way the sick girl's parents believed she shouldn't take medicine and die instead.
        I was afraid of dying and had many fears, like my father who never appeared afraid. He and my mother visited me once during the eight weeks, a visit I hardly remember, but there were photographs of the event in one of several shopping bags kept in a closet in the house where I grew up and which I loved but that was sold by my parents against my youthful protests. The photographs were meant to be pasted neatly into albums; for all those years, my parents said they should be pasted into albums, but they weren't and still aren't, though my father is long dead and my mother is old. My parents arrived at the camp with my father's brother, my favorite uncle, and his wife, whom he divorced shortly afterward, to visit their daughter, my older cousin, who was supposed to be looking after me, but whom I rarely saw. Ever since her father died, I have not seen her; I never saw her again after my favorite uncle's funeral. My uncle's psychiatrist told him that the chest pains he complained of in the last week of his life were neurotic symptoms. Later, her family accused my father of not handing over all the money my uncle had in the business, owned by the two brothers. There was no other money in their textile business, none that was my uncle's, who liked to gamble, knew gangsters and fast women, and who had spent all of his own money, as well as money that was not his, since my father, incapable of denying his adored, neurotic younger brother anything, had lent him money from the business. My favorite uncle's family, only weeks after he was buried, turned against my father and treated him like a thief, but some years later, when my father was in Penn Station, his dead brother's son spotted him walking to the train, went over and offered an apology, which would never have been given if they hadn't been in Penn Station, by chance, at the same time near the same track. Penn Station may have been in the process of being destroyed then, to clear way for an ugly building that will also be temporary, and, unlike the previous building, it has nothing of beauty, grandeur, history, or maybe hope, and while the significant station, with its history, was obliterated and lost, my father and his nephew were likely oblivious to its demise, especially in that instance, when something of grave and appalling dimensions transpired between them. My father was being apologized to by his nephew, the son of his beloved brother, for something he had never done but of which he had been accused and that had caused him great distress, even despair, in the months and years following his brother's death. Without this accidental meeting, there would have been no letter or telephone call, no genuine consideration of my father who loved his brother and who was blameless in this situation, but not in all others. His brother's family, like most, believed they were right, sensitive, and caring, because of their religion and skin, and their need to feed, clothe, shelter and protect themselves.
        Textiles is an ancient craft and one of the earliest manufacturing industries, and, in America, in the 19th century and later, many of the mills were situated in the north, in New England, especially Connecticut and Massachusetts, notably the city of Lowell. Cotton was shipped from the South to Lowell and other northern cities, but in the mid-to-late 20th century the mills began to disappear, many small manufacturers disappeared, and textiles again came from the East, where they had originally come and where now labor was much cheaper. My father often drove his gray Buick far away or traveled by train to the mills to speak to other men, other owners, about the material he and his brother designed, whose threads they selected, whose weight they decided, which would be transported to their office by truck, many bolts, all smelling of dyes and other natural and unnatural substances. My father loved his brother.

At breakfast, like the young married man, I would prefer not to talk, to ignore people, sit quietly, and eat my fried eggs, which are sometimes prepared over easy when I asked for medium, but I don't say anything. I would like to be still, or just quiet, and chew the eggs without a sound, because I dislike many sounds associated with eating, and sop up the too-runny part of the yolk with dark, dry wheat toast. Then I would prefer to sip my coffee and slowly, look out of the generous window and contemplate a spacious field where deer might be grazing. Seeing deer is always a happy surprise, though they usually run away, especially when you approach them, but if they feel safe and are in the distance, they might continue to eat grass or stand dumbly, with dark brown eyes, limpid and soulful as pathetic fallacies. Sometimes they leap across the field and over paths into the woods, their bushy white tails quickly disappearing into foliage, and the deer are always a welcome surprise. I have also, in that same field or near it, spied a mole, entirely unexpectedly, it was pointed out by another resident, who stood still and motioned me over to her, to witness this exceptionally rare sight. A mole has a tiny, well-articulated face, a longish snout, thick fur, like mink, that covers its small body, and it's not supposed to be walking on paths, but was lost or confused by an unseasonably mild winter, until finally it found its way back to its hole, though sometimes it scuttled around in circles. The hole was covered by earth, bits of wire, and a piece of thick, black denim, and I wondered where the moles had found it. Denim is often close to an American's skin, and once I wore it, but these days, unless pressed and unable to think of anything else, I don't, because it's heavy, and only the oldest jeans are soft and wearable, but I no longer have the pair I wore for years, which finally felt good. Many people around the world wear denim jeans, maybe because they're durable and also because they constitute a uniform, a classic, which has stood the test of time, though one day it may fail that. Denim is a stout, serviceable, twilled fabric made from coarse singles yarns. The standard denim is made with indigo blue dyed warp yarn and gray filling yarn, and denim is the most important fabric of the work clothing group, extensively used for overalls, coats, caps, but sports denim, also called faded denim, is lighter weight, made also in pastels and white and colored stripings, used for leisure wear, which is how most people wear it, though its association with work remains, since supposedly Americans play and work hard and have marketed this idea to the world. There is also upholstery and furniture denim.

I join the conversation at breakfast, especially when it's entertaining, distracting, provocative, or annoying, and afterwards, I might feel soiled and wish for night, the end of any long day, when nothing was expected from me and I expected nothing and could lie in bed, on top or under the sheets, surrounded by books and magazines, and ugly brown furniture, which I didn't choose, but which has become a sort of friend, or at least harmless, though I'm aware that some people couldn't tolerate this furniture and would request or demand another room or buy themselves other furniture, rather than adjust to its design and atmosphere, since an adjustment to these objects might impugn or indict them to themselves or in the eyes of others. The man who has a sodden smell, whose source I don't want to identify, especially when eating breakfast, though I believe it's vodka, and whose skin has large pores, usually wears jeans and a T-shirt, whatever the weather, though this morning his T- shirt is wordless, the way I wish he were. Gesticulating and scowling, he demands attention every morning and begins conversations from which I leave the breakfast room sullied, smelling sour to myself the way he does to me, and longing for night, that near future, which is one I can easily imagine. When there are no sounds in the house where I sleep, except for the toilet flushing and the heat rising in the old pipes, I know I should apply cream to my face, but I usually don't, even though the Polish woman will admonish me when I return to the cramped, dingy salon and will be disappointed in me because I have not listened to her. But I'm stubborn, my mother is stubborn, many people are, no one likes to apologize, no one likes to listen, no one wants to be wrong, yet everyone is and has been, but few people will admit they are wrong and will rarely admit their errors or their farts, in public or in private. People need to be protected from others, who may hurt them, as I need to be protected, but I don't listen to everyone, though I'm a good listener, and I'm curious, though curiosity killed the cat, my mother would say, but she had the cat killed. I listen to others more than most people, sometimes at my peril, though I hope to learn something, but often I don't or what I learn is of no consequence, though it might be to the person who spoke, yet many people tell the same stories again and again, which represent them best or are in some way significant and come to define them, but if they didn't repeat them, they wouldn't in any way define them, or matter, or be of any discernible consequence, since often it is what is not said that is of consequence. I try not to repeat myself, I attempt to be cognizant, not retell stories, I refrain often, but sometimes, when I'm bored by others' stories, I tell an old one, or if I feel I must enter the conversation, rather than withdraw from it or betray my impatience or brusqueness, my lack of concern for others, I trot out a tried but not necessarily true tale, sometimes just to entertain myself, and I don't care which it is. Many people think they are good listeners, many more than who actually listen, since someone has to be doing the talking, and most people will say they're good listeners before they'll say they're good talkers, though most aren't good talkers or listeners, but persons who tell stories that fill time, and many explain how they were hurt by others, because they are sensitive, but never admit they hurt others. People tell stories, often indignantly and without discrimination, including others' secrets, sometimes in minute detail, and then, later, when they have finished their orations, they admit, occasionally cross or with astonishment, that they don't understand why they went on like that. When it happens in my presence, even before those precise words are spoken, I see the formulation of the sentence and nearly say it too, but resist, guarding my tongue where words are dry and glued to the mucous membrane lining of my mouth, otherwise it would appear that I was mimicking or in some way trivializing their discovery. In this instance, as in others, I was merely being quiet, paying attention in an undivided manner, looking into their eyes, never wavering in my belief that she or he could tell me something I'd never heard before; because when a person really tells the story, the one he or she must tell, even to a stranger, and usually I am a stranger, then no matter what that story is, it is generally interesting if not illuminating or unique, though its manner of expression could be unique, and the story in some way special or different; for it must've been lived differently to have been articulated unusually or inventively, or that is my hope. On many occasions the story is dull and flat, and, like reading a bad book, since listening is similar to reading, you want to stop listening, especially if it is about a career failure or for that matter success or a monotonous love life, or the monotonous lack of a love life, or a deficient one, when the speaker is obsessed by a particular man or woman and needs to recite every pain or insult that person has inflicted, so then I, and many others, become bored, almost outraged at the wanton disregard of themselves, the speaker's dinner companions. One night at dinner, a woman whom I had just met talked incessantly about a man she loved who had mistreated her repeatedly, and though I had just that night met her, a recent arrival who fortunately became another, quick departee, she consumed all of the dinner-table time, at which I usually hope to be drawn away from myself in an arresting manner, with ideas that quicken the mind or provide solace because they spring from mindful solitaries. Instead, she regaled me with episodes of unrelenting romantic agonies and expected instant counsel, which, to be polite, since for all I knew she might also turn out to be interested in someone other than herself, I reluctantly gave, until I couldn't, and reaching my limit, I rose from the table, after she thanked me for listening, and said, too evenly, I suppose you needed to talk. Then the stranger closed her mouth tightly, even murderously, and glared at me with the ferocity of my mad cat who had stalked and attacked me, and I was sorry not to have left the table sooner and wished I hadn't said a word, since it's often better not to say anything. The stranger metamorphosed into an insignificant enemy, when moments before she'd been revealing the most intimate parts of her life to me, also a stranger, but one she needed to listen to her. I wondered at her sanity. I wondered about the man she loved, whose every sentence to do with her she could recite, with his inflections, and whose every touch still scalded her like a hot stove, those were her words, and into whose hands she was only too happy to offer her febrile body, but he might have been the victim of her murderous glances, too, often enough that he needed to escape her as much as I did my deranged cat. I was also insensitive to her.
         Other people's stories can mollify and soothe, like a few capfuls of bath oil in a hot tub are supposed to do, and how-to and grammar books, along with biographies of philosophers and criminals, generally bring relief and a sense of safety, safety is a reasonable amount of risk, since a philosopher's life includes contemplation and a criminal's is at least not my own. These books facilitate sleep or delay sleeplessness, with its onslaught of nameless hurts, when I listen to steam belch through the pipes and other noises that don't occur during the day. When I'm in the other room assigned to me that is not for sleeping but has a cot on which I never rest, because for rest I can return to the bedroom, which I'd rather do, I can look at the photographs of friends on a wall. I tacked them on a white wall, careful not to pierce their images, including ones of me and my mother, who can't live too much longer, because no one lives forever, and several of my dead father, and friends, dead and alive, and also scenes I relish or postcards that have recently been sent to me. My collection is growing. Often I think about my dead friends and wonder why people who complain about the unfairness of life want to live forever anyway, since most do want to live forever. Many people complain about how hard life is, but no one wants to die, or very few people want to die. My uncle died before his time, my father never recovered from his brother's death, or his son's furious flight, some of my friends died before their time, and I may not recover, because there are some things you don't recover from. The past can't be recovered or changed.
        Billy never told me his real name, I never knew it, just the one he gave himself, and I didn't push him, I thought there was time, and his reticence or shyness about his given name, which named his past, was a curiosity but didn't bother me, since I thought one day he'd tell me. Melvin was his given name, a stranger beat and murdered him, and was never caught, which is not unusual. A stranger to whom my existence is nothing, and who would not listen to me, could end my life, and I wonder if, when the two young women are my age and start to piss frequently, they will remember me and the sound of the toilet flushing in the middle of the night, which must wake them. But one told me it doesn't, that she can sleep through anything, even my machinations, I thought, and I might remember her for that, something I don't exactly believe, or I might remember both of them because they slept in rooms near mine, crept into and out of their bedrooms, one had short hair cropped to her head, the other long, curly hair she brushed from her face like flies, and they didn't make much noise or play their radio late at night, the way I did during this certain, momentous period of my life, when I was sequestered with strangers in a place not unlike the one where I was sent to summer camp when I was too young to know that I wouldn't always be there. The two take fewer baths than I do, they prefer showers, I also like showers, but want the slowness of a bath, and though I never stay in a bath long, the idea of slowness draws me to it, and the wonder of near-total immersion, which I'm advised relaxes the body, as well as the mind, along with the salubrious oils liberally poured into it that also could help my mood and moisturize my skin, restoring the precise oils that a good, hot bath depletes. But I must take care, my heart is a problem, there is often a pressure or a weight on it, a tightness that has no discernible organic cause, my internist tells me, still I'm careful about immersing myself in extremely hot water and let cold water run, to reduce the temperature. Maybe their skin is less dry than mine, not only because they are younger but also because they take showers. Still, bathing is salubrious, a luxurious waste of water, though it is plentiful here, so I don't have to worry about it now.
        I won't always be here, and if I consider that, and regularly remind myself that I only have to be in a particular situation for an hour or two, whether I'm unhappy or not, I can manage it. An hour is a short unit of time, unless you are being tortured or are in some other terrible situation, like starving in a refugee camp. I can imagine myself in almost any situation for an hour, except awaiting execution, being slowly suffocated, being chased and hunted down like a fox, or being tortured, and if I am able or allowed to leave or even escape a situation, since almost anything can be managed for an hour, I'm reassured. I've been cold and miserable; I've been lost; deceived; I've been bored silly; drunk; my underpants have been wet from nervous agitation; the skin on my inner thighs has chafed to a fiery red from rubbing against wool; I've been robbed; fainted from shock; and I've been alarmed beyond words or stricken with fear hearing bitter words flare between friends in freakish eruptions of hatred in bizarre locations, since most sites are not right for confrontation, and when I have no right to speak and no involvement, except self-protection, I have become itchy, my skin a plane of heat, as if a match had been struck against it and my entire body set ablaze. But I was able to withstand it, only because I knew it would end. I have, since leaving home, cast from it like the carrier of a deadly virus, been the object of virulent words and some violent acts. It is when you're a child and dependent and have no sense of time and don't know that things will end -- your parents will die, you don't have to stay in school, the kids you hate won't always live near you -- that it is sometimes impossible not to cling to old things and places, because what might come and who could be there and take their place could be worse.

The two young women often looked disconsolate, the way they did this morning, and as usual I didn't want to become involved in and acquainted with their deepest fears, familial or romantic problems, and so I avoided them, walking directly into the kitchen to order two eggs over medium from a woman who has worked in the kitchen most of her life and whom time, in whatever dimension it dwells, if it does, has not treated well. Her thin skin was wrinkled, having lost its elasticity, and she had probably never had a facial, certainly not with any regularity nor does she apply rich moisturizers to her desert-like skin. I couldn't help but notice also how everyone who ordered breakfast spoke to her beseechingly, their voices pitched higher, the women almost squeaking in deference, the men suddenly sopranos, all awaiting a sign that she was aware of their presence and, more, that she liked them and would feed them munificently, but the head cook, who has been here many years, was often moody, tired, or overwhelmed by her outside life, about which none of us was privy, and avoided their eyes and gestural entreaties for easy affection, sympathy, or love. I wrote down my order and, instead of begging for notice, kept my head low and eyes fixed on a notepad upon which I scrawled 2 Fried Eggs Over Medium in block letters, but with gusto, after finishing, said: Thank you. The cook reminded me of the Polish woman, because she served people, as the Polish woman served me, for a price, one I could pay, though the cook couldn't or wouldn't have a facial, never having cared much about her skin, never wanting to spend the money, or never having been told she was sensitive and so was her skin. The Polish woman might be insensitive, I've sometimes considered.
        After I sat down to wait for my eggs, while the dining room clamored with more near-latecomers, I avoided the eyes of the others at our table, which was near the toaster and convenient, but the man in his T-shirt who always began conversations that annoyed me assaulted us with his longing. He said he couldn't eat his eggs and poked their yolks with disgust, which bothered Violet, a mysterious woman, whose light brown skin suggested biraciality, or a mulatto, as she preferred to call herself, who averted her eyes to ignore his agitations, but whose lips twitched, as she refrained from eating her meal. Violet, I soon named her Contesa, paused when she brought the yellow eggs to her mouth and her mottled gray eyes, which could have been laughing, metamorphosed into titanium, but he went on, the demanding man. He hadn't slept because his dream, which he annotated with his arms whirling like a miniature windmill, while he also alluded to Don Quixote, simultaneously, to underscore his relationship to his mother and mother country, had disturbed him, and none of this mattered to me, yet I listened. He rubbed his beard and forehead repeatedly, so his oily skin shone even when weak sunlight hit it. I had learned, in another breakfast discourse, that he'd had impetigo as a child, which left no trace, except the type that is invisible and most immutable, but maybe his early surroundings were unclean, his mother inattentive when he was an infant, perhaps he lay in his own urine for hours, dependent on others for the care he never received and now seeks in strangers. Yet he tells us his mother doted on him, that she did everything for him, that he was spoiled, which he proclaims proudly, as Violet, or Contesa, smiles, nearly laughing, I think, but this is conjecture. Impetigo is not unusual. It is a staph infection that occurs most often in childhood, when its prognosis is best, since it's worse in adulthood and usually occurs in hot humid climates or during the summer. His mother may have adored him, as he insists daily, and still he caught a staph infection. Impetigo occurs most frequently on the exposed parts of the body, the face, hands, neck, and extremities. There's impetigo of the scalp, too. The lesions rupture and a thin, straw-colored seropurulent discharge appears. That exudate dries to form loosely stratified crusts that accumulate layer upon layer until they are thick and friable. The crusts can be easily removed, though, and what's left is a smooth, red, moist surface that soon collects new discharge or exudate, and this spreads to other parts of the body, through fingers, and by towels, or household utensils. But, in the history of the disease, it is an extremely superficial inflammation. The demanding man had been born in a hot climate, though he no longer lives there, but instead resides in a cold, midwestern city, about which, though he's well dressed and fed, boasting a burgher's belly, and claims to lead the good life, he voices voluminous complaints: its climate, especially, bothers him, raw cold shoots through him like a spear, as he puts it, and also he is so far from his mother. His dependence is interminable, his complaints unassuagable, and I have known many such people.

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 book, 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, born when she was just twenty-one, while I came late, when my mother was 40, and the second child, or baby, and certainly the last she brought into the world.