Face (18 page)

W
hen I tell her I’m about to go out for my morning run, my mother tells me that New York joggers inhale two to three times
more carcinogens than people who spend their free time in museums. I remind her I took up running in California, so those
figures don’t apply to me. Besides, the chemicals keep me going. She asks, as if she has eyes through the phone, how I can
bear to be seen wearing the rags I run in. I tell her they’re my only defense against muggers and besides, I’m moving too
fast for anyone to get a decent look. She warns me I’ll need surgery on my knees and hips before I’m thirty. I tell her I’ll
need a psychiatrist if I quit, and that finally shuts her up.

My mother’s distaste for psychotherapy dates back to an elementary school social worker who told Mum at the age of nine that
she was having difficulty with multiplication because she was in love with her father and wanted to kill her mother. Also
that she’d best marry well because with her IQ the only employment she’d be fit for was waiting tables or teaching kindergarten.
Mum took her revenge by clipping for her children tabloid stories about patient seductions, perfectly sane women whose lunatic
therapists had locked them in asylums for years,
and psychiatrists who used hypnosis to access their patients’ bank accounts. “The only people who go into that line of work,”
she told us, “are the ones who most need it themselves.” To prove it she read us chapter and verse on Freud’s own sex life.

“No, Mum,” I tell her now. We have come to the reason for her call. “No, I don’t want to go to Delong’s studio and see his
latest masterpieces. I’m too busy shooting junk.”

I was a junior in college and the nightmares had been stalking me for four years when I finally decided to defy my mother’s
conditioning. Surely the counselors at the campus psychiatric services would be different from those tabloid monsters. I was
referred to a thirtyish woman who looked like Morticia Addams in leather. Dr. Elsa Gertz spoke in a breathy whisper and drank
from a large mug that said “U O Me,” which she refilled with black coffee twice during our hour-long session. She asked what
was bothering me, and I started telling her about my nightmares, but got only as far as the Statue of Liberty before she cut
me off. “People used to say that nightmares were evil spirits, like ghosts, that rose from the past to haunt or suffocate
dreamers. Those evil spirits come from your childhood.” My problem, said Dr. Elsa Gertz, was that my father was an alcoholic
and never loved me. My mother was a doormat and—did I have brothers and sisters?—well, yes, they were as wacko as I was, of
course. The only solution was to cut off ties with all of them. No phone calls, no visits, no letters. “What do you owe them?”
she demanded. “You didn’t choose them to be your family. You’ll only get better when you choose a unit of surrogates who can
retrain you to love and be loved.” If I had any trouble breaking the ties, Dr. Gertz and her husband had a farm outside town
where they ran a kind of “halfway family” for some of her clients. It was billable to insurance.

“I need you,” Mum’s saying. “His studio’s in Harlem, you know, and neither Henry nor your father will go with me. Please,
Maibelle. We’ll take a cab up together. It’ll be an adventure.”

I can see her clutching the receiver, frown lines trenching her fore
head. Deepest, darkest Harlem. The urban jungle. My mother, the champion of race relations.

“You’ve been there before, though.”

“No. He’s always brought his work to the gallery. Now he says if I want to show him, I have to come to him.”

Her breath erupts in little gasps. I try to focus on her hypocrisy, tell myself she deserves to squirm, but the critic in
me is silenced by a sudden, improbable but inescapable image of her struggling, hands trapped behind her back, face pressed
against the pavement. Going down with a weapon at her throat.

I never saw Dr. Elsa Gertz again, or any other licensed psychotherapist. But for all this woman spooked me, the invitation
to implicate my parents was too tempting. If I just got clear of them, I thought, we’d all be better off. My nights would
become as soft and comforting as an eiderdown quilt. I would discover how to love and be loved, and they would be forced to
protect each other. Which is why, on my graduation day, I drove into the sunset with them waving me off and refused to look
back for five years. But all the while I was running away, I still worried about them, still hoped my flight would remove
a danger I felt but couldn’t name. This isn’t the first time I’ve envisioned my mother bound and threatened.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Come with me, Maibelle. Talk to Delong.”

“Why?”

“He can help you.”

The image twists abruptly. Hands freed and ready, she rises, towers. Now I am the one going down. And my mother holds the
weapon.

“I don’t want that kind of help.”

“Gerard, then. Come to the July opening.” Her breath quickens. The game revealed, she’s pushing for her goal. I remember how
this works from all those years of listening to her sales pitch. The only danger to my mother is in my head. Always has been.
“It’s the first time he’s been here in nearly two years. You could show him your work, at the very least talk to him, for
God’s sake.”

“What’s God got to do with it? I haven’t been to one of your openings since I got sick all over that Jerry Uelsmann print.”

“You were allergic to that horrible man’s cigar smoke. It was only a test print, and not a very good one at that.”

“What I’m allergic to is gallery openings. Especially ones where you expect me to suck up to your boss.”

A long pause. “You don’t mean that, Maibelle.”

“I never mean what I say, do I?”

“Think about it. That’s all I ask.”

“I’m going out for my run now, Mother.”

I’ll admit it. I do get some satisfaction from my mother’s taboos. The same satisfaction, I imagine, that Henry got playing
pinball all those years, or still gets from his homeless status. That Anna gets from her New Age immersion. Mine seems a minor
infraction by comparison, but it’s a start. Dr. Gertz was right about one thing. I’d never stopped to consider whether I wanted
to be the daughter my mother was assiduously grooming.

That daughter is now running ten miles a week. A drop in mileage from the West Coast, where I used to jog an hour each day
along the beach, but enough to help fend off the nightmares. I’ve gone as long as two weeks clear of dreams when consistently
running. The exercise also helps draw out some of those ghosts Dr. Gertz talked about. In a flower on a window ledge, the
exhaust from a home-style bakery, a small boy flying a paper plane, I’ll see or smell or hear a cue, and for the next two
miles I won’t notice the catcalls or feel the concrete slamming into my knees. Or think about my mother’s invitation to prostrate
myself before the reigning tycoon of Art.

This morning’s genie is a dancing chicken in front of a Hell’s Kitchen dime store. Here amid the throb of salsa and the sizzle
of frying plantains, this withered fowl brings me to a full and unexpected stop. I stand gulping air and staring as the bird
desultorily pecks at the wire floor of its glass cage. It cocks a leg and lifts its head and, in the
space between one uncomprehending blink and the next, evokes an evening more than twenty years old that lasts the rest of
my run.

It began in the Chinatown arcade, where Henry routinely took me on days when Mum left me in his charge. Not that I went willingly.
The arcade was a long, dingy ell filled with smoke and swear words, the stink of beer and laughter that sounded like machine-gun
fire. It was a hangout for bad boys who ditched school and carried switchblades. Henry enjoyed the hoodlum atmosphere almost
as much as the games and immediately disappeared into the arcade’s depths. That afternoon, like so many others, I stayed with
the dancing bird up front.

At one time the chicken machine must have been a popcorn maker—the kind some old-fashioned movie theaters still have in their
lobbies, with a red base and butter-colored lights inside a wide glass cage. The popcorn works had been replaced with a trough
for seed and water. In the middle of the cage stood the Chinatown chicken, whose particular identity changed over the years
but who always had the same mangy feathers, half a tail, and eyes glazed over with a thick white film.

When you dumped in your quarter, electric current ran through the cage’s mesh floor. As long as the bird’s nervous system
still worked, these shocks would send it leaping and crazily flapping its wings. It looked a lot like my sister’s dancing
in the mid-sixties, and later, after she got into psychedelics and hooked up with her Indian guru, I wondered if she and those
chickens didn’t have even more in common. But I figured my sister at least had a choice in what happened to her body and mind.
The chickens were trapped in the dancing machine until they simply gave out.

That day was so cold I could see my breath in the arcade’s open doorway. I was trying to decide whether the chicken, too,
felt cold when suddenly, without anyone even putting in a quarter, its wings started twitching, the head bobbing and smashing
into the glass. Every part of the poor thing’s body seemed to move in a different direction. It looked the way I thought someone
would feel whose brain was sliced in half. The crazy moves lasted about a minute, then the bird keeled over. It lay on its
side, those white eyes open like tiny silver dollars.

I was still staring at the dead bird when Henry grabbed my elbow, steering me toward home. Mum and Dad were taking us to Little
Italy for dinner before the New Year parade, and there was a little skip in Henry’s walk as he pulled me along. My brother
loved Chinese New Year.

So did all of Chinatown. For days the merchants had been hanging good-luck red and gold in their doorways, displaying altars
with candles and incense, fresh flowers, oranges, and fat, round New Year’s cakes. Women thronged the grocer’s and butcher’s
shops. Children compared inventories of firecrackers and imitated the lion dancers they would see that night. Ordinarily I
would have been just as excited. But I couldn’t forget those silver eyes, those crazy moves.

“Hey, what’s eating you?” Henry asked.

“The chicken at the arcade. It died. I saw it.”

“Cool.”

“No! It was horrible!”

“C’mon. You know how many birds bite the dust in Chinatown every day. Just look!”

He was pointing at Wah’s Imperial Poultry. That wasn’t the same thing at all.

I kept seeing that dead bird’s eyes all through dinner and was eager to get home, but by the time my parents had finally finished
their espressos the Chinatown crowd was backed up all the way to Broome Street. Walking through it was like pushing into earth
that got progressively heavier and more dense. I could hear the clamor of gongs, cymbals, and firecrackers, but for most of
the way I saw only the backs of wool coats and boots stamping frozen pavement.

Then, as we crossed Canal Street, the crowd pushed back to make room for the dancing dragon. The huge red, green, and gold
head bobbed and dove just inches away from me. The great mouth flapped, seemed to gobble the round heads of lettuce being
lowered on strings from balconies above. The rest of the body undulated to the beat of the drums that followed, and somehow
the dragon and its bearers, whose legs showed underneath, darted fluidly among the hundreds of firecrackers
that were thrown skittering and clapping like pyrotechnic mousetraps, directly into its path.

As soon as the dragon passed, the mob closed in again, this time so tightly that I was lifted off my feet. My arms were sealed
against my body. I had no idea who belonged to the broad tweed back into which my face was pressed, and except for the dim,
sulphury glow of lanterns overhead, all I could see was black. I cried and yelled for my parents, but no one could hear me
above the din. I screamed, but others were screaming, too. Finally everything within me shut down, the engine run too hard.
I tried to think of the crush as safety, my grave between bodies a place where I could not get hurt.

It seemed as if I’d been suspended like that for hours when a sizzling sound drowned out the surrounding din. Like bacon frying
in my ear at top volume, smelling of cannon fodder. I turned my head, caught a glimpse of pink paper—a pack of sugar candies
or a party favor? I wriggled my shoulders and flailed against the surrounding backsides. The little tube rolled against my
neck. I shrugged but could not get rid of the thing, and although I yelled again even louder, my voice was swallowed by the
column of padding around me.

No one paid any attention until the firecracker exploded.

I was aware of the stink of burning hair before I realized it was my own. By then I’d been passed to my father’s arms and
the pain was shredding my skull. But the pain didn’t blind me to my father’s face when he realized what had happened. If anything,
it magnified his reaction.

His eyebrows lifted. His cheeks twitched. His skin turned a shade as ghastly pale as that dead bird’s eyes. He seemed to be
looking straight through me, and as he looked he tightened his grip until I thought he might be trying to squeeze the hurt
away, as if it were a bruise.

If I could have signaled past the screaming inside my head, I would have made him understand he wasn’t helping. But I couldn’t,
and we probably would have stood there all night had my mother not snatched me from his arms. The menace in her face made
people hustle out of her way, the solid wall parting just in front and reclosing immediately
behind us so that I didn’t realize until we’d gone several blocks that the rest of my family was with us. Henry hopped alongside
to see if there was a hole in my head. Anna whined for Mum to give her the key so she could just go home. And my father, still
looking dazed and disoriented, tried to catch up.

We spent the rest of the evening at Gouverneur Hospital’s emergency room, where I was treated for a ruptured eardrum. After
it was established, to Henry’s dismay, that I had not been terminally wounded and would soon recover full hearing in the damaged
ear, my mother stopped haranguing the hospital staff and began to curse the associations that organized the parade.