(Well, first of all, it's far too early for a slug-a-bed like me to be sitting upright, let alone in a lighted room, dressed in God knows what, and hoping to make at least grammatical sense on an orange-colored computer...
But... the cats were hungry, poor despotic dears. And I'm trying to switch their diet, to include some canned food, as well as the kibble they've eaten exclusively, for years. Big Silas just sucks that canned food up like the treat it is. Buster, our red head, sniffs at the carefully-engineered-for-maximum-taste chicken-and-tuna pate, and then starts pawing at the kitchen floor, trying to bury whatever is befouling his little oval dish. I'd like to think that I'm far cleverer and more devious than a mere, apparently witless feline foundling, but I'm beginning to have my doubts.
More, you can be assured, to follow...)
But as I am awake, and it's still dark outside, this mere twelve days before Christmas, and the house is quiet, I find myself thinking of the dead body I alluded to at the end of yesterday's blogue (sic). And about the woman I've chosen to call (with much justification, I think) my Horrid Grandmother. And about grilled cheese sandwiches, and other things. (Ah, the coffee machine has begun its chugging labor. Caffeine to follow...)
As I was winding up yesterday's semi-desperate attempt at keeping my blogue-a-day regimen afloat, I teasingly asked you, dear reader, when you had seen your first dead body. Said body not having been in a movie, or on television, that is, or drawn in a comic book, or described, in whatever level of detail, in a crime novel, that is. (Literary dead bodies, I find, can be as awful as the more three-dimensional ones -- I recall reading a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, that he'd set in Southeast Asia, and he set up a scene where some captured Americans were being used as living chess pieces by some jungle despot. As casually as one might mention having lost one's car keys again, the author despatched several of these characters, when they'd been 'captured' in this fatal game. As I often do, I read the passage over and over again, certain that I'd gotten it wrong. How could someone, even a literary device composed of, at most, a dozen words, be killed with such ease?)
In my case, I think that, in my entire life, I've seen (in the context of the funeral parlor, I mean) seven dead bodies, or roughly one for every ten years of my life, plus an extra. (I did visit a gross anatomy lab once, in the basement of one of U Penn's twin Louis Kahn towers, but I'm not counting that) For today, I want to consider the first one.
In a way, it sounds like a dream. There's a darkened room, with palm trees in the corners, and a few sprays of gladiolus in vases on the floor. Behind one vase, two old, sour-looking women seem to be standing guard. The other tall pale flowers are arranged in front of a long narrow box that is half closed and half opened. The opened part, where the guardians are posted, reveals that the box is lined with shiny white fabric, ruffled at the edges. Inside, lying quietly (like Snow White, after she'd bitten the apple, it occurs to me) is a waxy-looking woman, with her hands crossed across the bosom of her plain, pastel dress.
I don't know who she is -- she's a stranger to me. But there I am anyway, in line with the other boys, instructed to look at this dead woman for a moment, and then get in line again, to get back on the bus.
I'd only been living in that place I didn't yet know, for sure, was an orphanage, for about a week, perhaps. It all still seemed like some horrible sleep-over, or a visit to relatives I'd rather never have met. (Surely, I stubbornly kept telling myself, my daddy would come back for us, tomorrow) And anyway, what choices did a skinny, confused nine-year-old boy have, in such a place? I had already learned that resistance was futile.
So I was obediently standing in that line of strange boys, and walking at a slow shuffle, oppressed a little by this place with its strange smell, like too much bad perfume on something dirty. And as usual, I was looking around at everything except what I was supposed to be paying attention to. By now, almost sixty years later, I can see that it was only coincidence -- perhaps the result of my having been a bit tall for my age, and having that predisposition to look around at things, and not paying attention -- but as it came to be my turn to stand there by the half-open box, and look at the dead woman, that the fiercer of the two living guardians looked me in the eye and bitterly said to her companion, 'They killed her, these boys did. They killed her."
Someone else might have objected, or laughed it off, or at least applied logic in rebuttal to this accusation. But I was a skinny, disoriented nine-year-old boy, standing -- for no reason he could comprehend -- in a dimly-lit, hypnotically scented room, where a strange woman lay in a box. After all, hadn't the world that I'd been carefully and cautiously trying to navigate for the whole of my young life just inverted itself, leaving me... where? The fact that these stern words, that grim accusation, might be addressed to me in particular seemed, well, consistent -- the way nightmares often are. It's not even as though this was, by any means, the worst of what I experienced in that place -- but it did make an impression. The first application of a bit of formative heat, if you will.
I met another woman some two years later. At the time, I didn't know who she was either. She was alive, and standing up at the top of a short flight of wooden stairs, on the back porch of a large cinder-block building. My father had just parked the car in a wide, open gravel-covered parking lot next to the building, in among some giant delivery trucks. We had just finished a long drive from the large dark house on a hill near Butler PA. My clothes and few possessions were stowed the trunk. We'll get them later, he said. First, come with me.
And we walked up the stairs, toward this stocky, dark-haired woman, who might have been Loretta Young's less attractive older sister. She was wearing the same kind of featureless cotton print dress that all the women in the orphanage seemed to like, and her little black lace-up shoes, with the open toes, were exactly like the ones the grinning woman wore as she stalked around the Junior Boys' Department, looking for a reason to get the strap. "This is your new grandmother," my father said, and the woman reached over to...
I winced and pulled away.
Years and years later, by which time the malign energies fueling a succession of brutal domestic dramas had dwindled to nearly nothing (dramas in which this woman had featured prominently), she told me, almost cozily, "You know, I never could forgive you for not hugging me, that first day..."
And now, the grilled cheese sandwiches. This woman, my Horrid Grandmother (a relation only by marriage, I am always quick to explain), had grown up during the Great Depression, and I suppose it's no wonder that its imprint remained with her until she died. There was always a tense watchfulness about her, and she carried with her a constant need to grasp, and hold on. Every December, when a few wrapped gift boxes made their appearance under the decorated tree, we would hear her holiday recital, about the lone orange she'd once gotten -- and was grateful for -- for Christmas. When she died, one of her more notable heirlooms was the tall, narrow two-doored metal cabinet in the basement, stuffed to the limit of its maximum holding capacity with folded brown paper bags. That upending experience in her youth, the cultural disaster through which she and her contemporaries had lived, seared her, I believe. It had an impact that, I believe, proved inescapable for her, and which in turn determined, to a large extent, the way she shaped not only her own life, but the lives of those around her.
Of course, I had my own, perhaps less-extensive, but no less impactful version of this searing. Perhaps each of us does? The way in which my first family began to wrench and tear itself apart; the time in the orphanage, with its repetitive brutality and uncertainties (am I an orphan? Will someone take me away?); the subsequent seven years of more particular, personalized abuse which, even now, I find difficult to confront... It continues to amaze me that, as I walk about, buying a newspaper here, picking up a gallon of milk there, riding a train, or trying to have a relationship, the long series of seemingly ancient impacts still determines, in part, how I address these very mundane activities, today. (I discovered, for instance, just the other night, when I'd sliced up an apple and a bit of cheddar cheese as a snack, that I am actually still afraid to let my partner of 25 years see me eating anything -- as though, by having an apple and some cheese, I'm breaking some rule, and inviting sure punishment)
It may be a lack of compassion, to suggest that my Horrid Grandmother was never able to see the contours of her own life, and the forces that had shaped them -- or that, living beneath a sort of exoskeleton formed for her by these unexamined pressures, she in turn tended, more often than not, to recreate, for those around her, the very things that had so damaged her. But I think that more than fifteen years of exposure to another's temperament gives me some latitude.
Nor am I saying that such self-knowledge is either easy or pleasant. It's painful, frankly, to discover -- over a sliced apple, perhaps -- that I'm still encased in my own shell. I do pray though -- and please believe me -- that little by little, I can crack through the residue of all these unsought experiences, and live a bit of a genuine life, before my subscription runs out. And please, whatever power there may be, let me never be the stern, unpliant, accusing one, standing at the coffin.
© 2011 Walter Zimmerman
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