Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  I was preparing the sweet and sour chicken for the parents of a Barnard student from Cleveland for whom I was acting as a big sister. They were visiting their daughter in New York City for the first time; I was not much older than the student myself and I wanted to do everything just right. Months earlier, before I met the student who was to be my little sister, a friend in the alumnae office had called to say, I just want to let you know your sister is black, so when she appears at your door you don’t look surprised. Her warning was unsettling, even offensive to me as well as to the student. But things were in such turmoil then, thirty-odd years ago, that people of good will often behaved with astounding clumsiness. No doubt my friend was trying to protect the student from my possible surprise. That was unnecessary, I thought; I wouldn’t have shown any surprise, or so I hoped. I would never know for sure. Anyway, I was determined to make the evening go smoothly.

  I said to the kid, What do you want? and he said, I came to tell you your house is on fire, the hall is full of smoke. I didn’t believe him but I had to be sure, so I walked toward him with the slotted spoon raised like a weapon, and past his skinny tense body, to open the door and see. Those two seconds when I passed him, when we were inches apart, I thought, Goodbye, life. He didn’t touch me, but now he was closer than I was to the room with the baby. The hall was not full of smoke. I stood at the open door, and if I’d been alone I would have run out, but I couldn’t leave the baby. My daily life was full of reminders that everything was different, more fraught with consequence, when you had a baby to think about, but this was the most potent reminder yet.

  The boy came toward me, a shuffling, arrogant walk; again we would be inches apart, but I could see he wanted to get out now. Once he was past me and out the door he started to run. Up the stairs to the roof.

  I knocked on the doors of two of my neighbors for help. The first was the anthropology professor next door, the flirt, to put it politely; his field was Mayan culture, and he and his wife were always going to Mexico. I knew he owned a machete, something to do with his archeological digs among the ruins, and he had once said to me jokingly, If you ever need help, just bang on the door, and I’ll come with my machete. Many of his remarks had a double entendre, but at this moment I literally wanted him with his machete and said so, and he rose to the occasion, wearing his usual plaid bathrobe and carrying the machete as promised.

  The other neighbor was an actor who would later appear on Sesame Street, the father of four children. My own children—the one now standing up in her crib and the one not yet born—would watch him on Sesame Street and be thrilled to see him in the halls and to play in his apartment with his children, who by that time would number five, but the thrill would quickly wear off. He too came with alacrity, and the two men chased the intruder over the roof while I went back to see to the baby in the crib—I was afraid to leave her alone—but they didn’t catch him. I thought, well, anyway, my neighbor the professor is more than just a flirt—he made good on his word.

  I thanked them and went back and finished cooking the sweet and sour chicken, which seemed the logical thing to do: nothing was really changed except in my mind, and why shouldn’t the festive dinner still take place? The parents had come all the way from Cleveland. My husband came home from work and my little sister and her family arrived; the sweet and sour chicken was appreciated, and it was a pleasant evening, all in all. I told my story and my audience was duly shocked: out-of-towners love to hear New York crime stories. They enjoy having their worst fears confirmed, and while that usually irritates me, this time it was gratifying.

  After that incident in the hall I couldn’t sit still at the front end of the apartment for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch for fear that someone was climbing in the back window. I had to keep walking down the hall to check the window. Every little noise I thought was another intruder. At night, if my husband was working late and I was home alone with the baby, I imagined a boy just like the boy in the porkpie hat walking down the hall. I couldn’t concentrate on reading in the living room because my ears were on the alert for his footsteps; sometimes I couldn’t stay in the living room at all but had to take my book to the bedroom so I could keep an eye on the window. But out of pride I refused to keep the window closed all that hot summer; I refused to give in to my fear. I wouldn’t give the boy—or my fear—the satisfaction of my discomfort in a stuffy apartment. I thought of going to a psychiatrist—it was that bad—but knowing little about therapy at the time, I reasoned that it would do no good since my fear was based on a real incident, not a fantasy or neurotic exaggeration. Things improved slightly when the weather got cold and I had a legitimate reason to close the window, but still that was a dark and terrible year. I thought I would never get over my fright. Then gradually I did.

  Later, my little sister married a Columbia Law School student and they had a baby named Chad after the lake in Africa; the name also had some other ethnic significance, which they must have explained but I no longer remember. They invited my husband and me over for an African dinner, a very good stew in which peanuts were a key ingredient. After a while they got divorced.

  Many years later, soon after the game professor next door unexpectedly died, there was a fire in the building and the hall truly was full of smoke, but as it happened I wasn’t there to see it because I had a temporary job out of town. I was living alone in a large house in a small city and always kept the door unlocked and was never afraid. The children were big then, and I left them with my husband for several months—they had long since stopped watching Sesame Street and the actor and his wife were divorced too. She took the five children and moved to the suburbs and he shortly remarried and had two more children. No one was hurt in the fire, but our apartment and the apartment of the actor and of the professor’s widow were pretty much ruined. I never made sweet and sour chicken again—I had never made it before that night—and I never wore that dress again either.

  That part was easy to write. More or less. Nothing is truly easy to write, but I mean it didn’t present any excruciating difficulties or demands. What follows will be harder. In the interests of full disclosure—not my usual mode—I will say that the above is the result of an exercise I assigned to a group of students. I told them to write about an incident from their past, giving as many tangible details as they could manage but omitting all interpretation or subjectivity. Just the facts. It’s an exercise that diverts students, at least briefly, from their seductive and endless and often fruitless soul-searching and forces them to concentrate on things and words. They resist, but in the end they’re always amazed, as I am, at how much better their writing is when the goal ceases to be self-expression.

  I did the exercise with them. That always feels so democratic: look, I’m the same as you; we all have to start from scratch each time. There’s not much else to do, anyway, for those fifteen or twenty minutes that they’re scribbling. And I thought I might get something useful out of it, the germ of something. When we read the pieces aloud (the students trading papers and reading anonymously to protect their privacy, not that anyone cares much about privacy anymore), I liked the way mine sounded and decided to pursue it. In the process, as is obvious, I broke my own rules here and there, but outside the classroom rules are of no importance.

  Maybe it was too easy. When I showed it to someone, she said there was something missing, something maybe I was trying to avoid. She suspected it had to do with race. Was the intruder black, and was there some unexamined connection between that and the student being black? Also, why didn’t I close the window? she asked. I thought I had explained that adequately. A reader has to accept a writer’s perversities—they are an essential part of the story.

  But I thought dutifully about the issue of race. I didn’t know what race the intruder was; he had the kind of olive-skinned face that at first glance might have been anything, and I was too terrified to study him closely. His race didn’t, and doesn’t, seem a crucial matter. I searched my soul the
way the students do and found nothing. Only his clothes remained vivid—the droopy jeans, the dark windbreaker, much too hot for the weather, and the ridiculous hat. His race didn’t seem to have anything to do with my sister and her family, who viewed the boy as our common enemy; the divisiveness of class can be more powerful than that of race, and my sister’s parents were archetypally middle-class and genteel, so genteel and well dressed, I recall, that I was slightly abashed at the artsy-craftsy, eclectic surroundings in which I was entertaining them. I hoped they wouldn’t think I was outré, a bad influence. Of course the presence of a husband and a clearly well-cared-for baby was a mitigating factor. But at the time none of this felt very important. In fact the more I think about that reader’s response the more it sounds like the warning of my friend in the alumnae office: making an issue out of what should be a non-issue. Then again, race is always an issue, which I suppose is why I included it in the first place. The account wouldn’t have seemed complete or true to its moment without it, unfortunately.

  That warning, though, was definitely an issue. In time I got to be good friends with my little sister, especially after she graduated from college and grew up. But the fact that my friend in the alumnae office had alerted me that she was black always remained as a faint shadow on our friendship, something about its genesis that I could never tell her, and this something was not of my making nor of hers: it too intruded, unwelcome, from outside.

  I was fond of that friend in the alumnae office, and yet somehow we lost touch. I’m wondering now if her well-meant remark had anything to do with our losing touch. Hard to say; I’ve lost touch with many people for no special reason. Only writing this makes me think about it and regret it. I could look her up. I’ve lost touch with my sister too; she moved back to Cleveland with her child shortly after her divorce and I never heard from her again. I wouldn’t know where to begin finding her. Through the alumnae office, I suppose.

  But to return: I went back and examined each of the elements of my story to see if and where I might be hedging. The first thing that struck me was those pineapple chunks I was stirring in the electric frying pan. I would never cook anything involving pineapple chunks today. I noted in the piece that I didn’t like pineapple, or to be precise, that I didn’t like sweet and sour chicken; today I wouldn’t cook anything I didn’t like, even to please guests. But beyond that, pineapple chunks are so out of fashion, I wouldn’t be caught dead serving them. Also, on the subject of food, I found it curious that I went right on cooking the dinner even though I was so upset. If a similar incident were to occur today—God forbid!—I’d probably drop everything, have a fit, pour a stiff drink, and when the guests came, send out for Chinese or Indian food. I wouldn’t worry about proving my stoicism or resilience or culinary skills, which by now have been amply proven. With the passage of time one has so much less to prove. I’m older now than the Cleveland parents were then, and I know they would have understood. (On the other hand, decent take-out food was far less available back then.)

  I felt some nostalgia over that mini dress, which I probably wouldn’t wear today any more than I would serve pineapple chunks, but for different reasons. Also, on the subject of the mini dress, my phrase “I thought he would rape me because of the mini dress … is questionable. We all know now, better than we did then, that rape is not caused by short skirts, and thank goodness the “she was asking for it” defense has been discredited, at least publicly if not in some hearts and minds. And yet I might well think the same thing today, even if I know better.

  In the end, food and clothing weren’t really germane to my quest: even if my attitudes have proved subject to revision, the transcription of them isn’t evasive. (It would have been evasive to try to sneak my current revisions into my account, making my younger, naïve self sound more sophisticated, which is always a temptation.)

  The hall is full of smoke: those were the words the boy spoke to me. And as I say toward the end, years later the hall indeed was full of smoke since there was a fire in the building. Volumes could be written about that, and as a matter of fact I did write one, so I feel no need to reiterate it here—it wouldn’t enhance the story—and I feel safe from the charge of avoiding anything on that score.

  I noted the minimal mention of my husband. Was I being cagey there? I think not. He wasn’t home for the incident, and I didn’t get a chance to discuss it with him in private until late that night when the guests had left and we were cleaning up. We did talk about it at length, and he was suitably concerned and even put bars on the window (though they seemed impregnable, they did little to ease my terror, so I guess a psychiatrist might have been in order). He did all that could be expected, but none of that seemed part of the story.

  I thought about the tactic of ramification, which I used, I think, to good effect. Here’s where I might be most open to a charge of avoiding something, or rather to being arbitrarily selective, choosing certain details to elaborate rather than others. I chose those instinctively, through a sense of what would be dramatic or piquant or obliquely connected to the subject. (It’s lethal to analyze such choices, so I won’t go any further.) Other details did occur to me but I passed over them—for instance a couple of items in the lives of my little sister or my neighbors—because however piquant, such items would violate their privacy and to no purpose. The only essentials in this story are the intrusion itself and its aftermath; the details are deliberately arbitrary and reflect the peculiarities of memory and association at moments of crisis. I might have said, with no danger to anyone’s privacy, that I once offered my sister a piece of a very hard, sweet Italian confection called panforte and quipped, Don’t break a tooth on it, and then she did just that, and I felt very bad and arranged an appointment for her with my dentist. Or that my next-door neighbor, the professor, died very suddenly and tragically of toxemia: thereby hangs a tale, as they say. Or that the seventh child of my other neighbor, the actor who later appeared on Sesame Street and divorced and remarried, grew up to be a famous rock star. But none of that is necessary. And why, anyway, should I mention his child who became a rock star rather than one of the six others, say, who became an electrical engineer? Because a rock star is the kind of profession one would note if one noted anything at all in that vein; this is not democratic, alas, but true. In any case, that piquant detail didn’t figure here.

  My conscience is clear now. I have nothing to hide: I wrote the piece in order to write about my fear. To articulate the fear that once gripped me, have it out in the world, shaped and visible, rather than unseen, in me. Even before the actual writing, while I was watching the students scribble away and casting about for a subject of my own, the reason this incident came to mind and not some other is that the fear is always available, always on tap. I don’t mean I’m still afraid of intruders; I’m not. I rarely think about intruders. Anyway, since the fire we’ve lived in another apartment with a different layout; I couldn’t feel the same fear without the same long hall and the same window. I mean that the shape and texture of that specific fear—not the momentary fear of the boy but the long fear afterward of someone like the boy climbing in that window, so that for a year I couldn’t sit still unless I had my eye on it—has lodged in me for good. Now and then I visit it, say hello. I might even miss it were I to forget it, but there’s no danger of that. And I don’t marvel at it as a strange thing of the past, the way I marvel that I ever cooked pineapple chunks or calmly prepared and served a whole dinner in a state of suppressed terror; the fear strikes me as entirely natural and comprehensible. It’s part of me, like a scar you grow attached to. Precious, if not exactly beloved. I don’t wish it gone, though of course I would have preferred the intruder never to have intruded. But since he did, the fear he caused is mine now, preserved in amber, the insect’s delicate wing forever caught mid-tremor.

  I told my older daughter I had written a few pages about this incident but that something might be missing. My daughter is grown now; she was the eighteen-month-ol
d baby standing in the crib and rattling its bars when the intruder entered, the baby I was afraid to leave alone when my instinct was to flee the scene. Back then I wasn’t totally accustomed to her existence but now I cannot conceive of my life without her. She said maybe I should write more, write about my unease with the ambiguities surrounding the piece. She knows me well and I take her advice seriously; this time I felt specially prone to do so, for she was there at the time, exposed to the same peril as I was, and that gives her some rights in the matter. So I’ve done what she advised, although doing so defies all my writerly instincts, which run opposite to the aesthetic of full disclosure; I prefer concealment, cunning, and artifice. But somehow I felt honor-bound to her suggestion. And why not, I thought, it might be good for me, like the exercises I give students and consider good for them.

  I think I didn’t do justice, in the telling, to my fear. I didn’t do it justice because, for one thing, my own feelings and experiences—recounted in a straightforward way, that is—rarely entice me as raw material. Terrible and frightening things happen every day. They’re not enough. What entices is not what happened but the transforming of it. So what I wrote can’t satisfy me because it’s limited to truth. It’s not even cathartic—not that that would justify its existence—since the fear remains, in amber, as vivid and gleaming as the day it was born. I’m mildly glad to have shaped it into words after so long, to have played around with it and made it a thing that stands in the world like a piece of granite rather than a delicate hidden insect in amber. And in some strange way, having shaped it for public disclosure makes it all the more mine. Still, the fear I’ve described isn’t porous or malleable, but rather solid and intransigent. Even when set in its context of class, race, and young urban married life, it doesn’t go beyond itself.