On Looking: Essays (4 page)

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Authors: Lia Purpura

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And although it was insufficient (you’ll see why), I did answer. I believe a mother should answer, as best she can, the questions put to her.
Once in a park, I stopped to drink from a fountain and there in the cement bowl was a silver dollar.
Lucky!
I thought and bent to pick it up; lovelier still, wet and shining. But it resisted. I pulled and pulled until I heard laughter and realized two older boys were holding the end of some fishing line looped through a tiny hole in the coin. I bent my head and walked away fast, in shame. And then they laughed louder. But when I got home and considered the scene, it
was
kind of funny and I wished I’d thought up the prank. I remember, soon after, looking for books on practical jokes in the library.
When Geppetto made Pinocchio he made a puppet, which of course he could manipulate, make jump at will, and dance. But he didn’t want that. He wanted the boy to be real: good but imperfect. I just read the book to a friend’s little girl. She liked the lying-and-consequence parts best: the donkey ears, the pole of a nose that a bird, two birds, then a whole flock could perch on. Peck at. Which hurt Pinocchio but didn’t stop his being naughty. She liked that, too. It was sad-scary-funny. Or amusing-right-frightening. After we finished the book and were talking, she couldn’t say why she liked those moments. And she couldn’t decide if it was all right to like them. I said I felt the same way. I said it was complicated. And disappointed in my answer, she went right to bed.
From their car the men watched a woman move like a puppet, but there was no moral. It was just a great scene. They liked it that way, who, long ago, would have been drunks on a rough bench after days in hot fields, at the foot of the stage of an opera buffa or vaudeville act, any traveling show. Audience, relieved of monotony, for whom banana peel slip-ups are reverie:
better him than me,
better to see
him
go down, land on his ass and turn around steamed, as if to accuse the peel, cracked sidewalk, hole, broken step. Funny, as if it had never happened to them.
And that’s the magic of burlesque: you forget, by way of extravagance, that a planet once came to your cheek, that a circle of light, the red eye of a new god traveled to find you at rest and stayed.
You sit back and enjoy the play.
It’s someone else’s fate on stage: the dumb man’s, the sleeping child’s, hers.
“Why would they do that?” she asked.
I was staring out at the yard no one mowed, the baby’s clothes on the drying rack, the high, broken curb where the men parked their car. I was thinking:
because they just happened to find it funny. That’s why. That’s aesthetics. Complex. Unpredictable.
But I said:
because they’re idiots.
Because, being a mother, I knew what she needed just then.
On Form
 
. . . It is the forged feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear. . . .
—Gerard Manley Hopkins,
Henry Purcell
 
 
 
 
 
 
H
ow does the guy with hooks for arms jerk off?
But it didn’t come forth as a joke. Nor was the answer “very carefully.”
More powerfully, there was his face, a face used to seeing questions like this in others’ faces. How does a face like that look? It didn’t shut me down. It didn’t slam or ignore or isolate. But he recognized the question (hooks working the receipt into his wallet). He’d heard/seen it all before (outside the store, whoa, he drives a car with those things!). There was a shape to the question and it was a cliché to him. Thus, I felt seen, transparent. Naked. Looked through and turned inside out and found lacking. In imagination. Or just a beginner.
But neither did he see me imagining (the hooks unstrapped, the harness off) his arms on me: small of my back. Back of my neck.
Lifting my hair.
I’m practicing now.
Someone I know tilts her head to the side when looking hard at another. The gesture always annoyed me and seemed a contrived show of attention. Then I tried it. And it was like voices pouring in; it was like opening the front door and sweeping wide an arm for guests. Like kneeling in front of a child, eye to eye, to ease the confession. Inviting. Hospitable. I didn’t know that.
I’ll go on then, angled to the pour of these forms.
Though this may seem indecorous.
 
 
The hotel manager in Cambridge that afternoon was impatient with me. His name was Khalid. He was bald and had a large, flat forehead that shone. But his forehead was crushed in one spot, like a soda can gets dented. Or a garbage can. And the light lingered there, on the dent, and darkened as I asked—and asked again—for directions to the airport. Someone must run their hand over the dent and smooth it and know the dip of bone and hammock of skin as one knows the contours of a temperamental lock, how to jiggle and fit the key, first one way and then the other, unthinkingly. And though I repeated the words back—Red Line, Green Line, Blue Line, Shuttle—I was really, standing in front of him, jiggling the key. Hand on the tumbler plate, pushing to go in.
 
 
My child comes close to touch the imperfections of my face. Touches the flaws because they beckon. The white bumps and red bumps. Small scars. Dark spots.
Counter, original, spare, strange.
He touches because he can, because I allow it, though hiding back there (it’s bubbling up, he’s capping it, tapping it back down) is this: that thrill without a name. That weird package of love and revulsion, that “glad it’s not me” layered over with real tenderness. Some forward sway. Some retraction. And him teetering on the line between. When he does this, all the soft, pink, round things, all the brown, scarred, pitted things that held me as a kid come back. I remember my own secretive glances at the compromised, familiar faces I loved as a child. The tiny, stiff hairs that made nets to catch me. How even as I twisted free, I wanted to be caught.
 
 
Here is a man fated to chew as if perpetually working an olive pit out of his mouth. There is a boy who spits when he talks and snuffles and is just too watery to make friends. And with the stem of a dandelion, cut, its bitter milk touched to the tongue, here I am, calling it “milk.” Swallowing the bitterness so that an outward sign might match the inner atmosphere I carry with me these last, long days of fall. Swallowing makes me wince and contort. I feel my mouth tighten and take some more in. If it’s poison, it’s not enough to hurt me, I reason. And anyway, I’m testing. Making tests. Rehearsing ways a face can twist.
I use a mirror for this.
 
 
I’ve been watching her run the bobbing-for-apples booth at the local fall festival with her friends. After long minutes, I draw a horizontal line to see the way the girl would look if her jaw could be fixed, reinvented, if it wasn’t so lumpy and overgrown. I draw with a black line, in my head. And then, because I’m at a distance, staring, I squint and hold up a finger to nudge the line of her new jaw into place. But the new line doesn’t work. Not at all. The next week, at a restaurant, in a booth across from me, is a younger girl with a half-sagging face and a bulging cheek. I go to work with my tools, sharp scalpel of sight, and pare her back to a simply chubby moon. I tack the sag up by her ear; I fix the slipped mouth. But her face is a soft curve of fine sand, a dune blown to an easy rise. It slips back into place and the fixing is wrong. The swell is like a velvet bag.
What lovely behaviour of silk sack clouds.
Throughout dinner she rested that cheek in her hand, as if she was thinking. Though I’m afraid she was hiding.
“When the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it,” said Wittgenstein. And DaVinci wrote of the bodies he took apart to study, and to his colleagues inclined to work as he did “. . . if you should have a love for such things, you might be prevented by loathing . . . and if this did not prevent you, perhaps you might not be able to draw so well as is necessary for such a demonstration . . . or if you had the skill in drawing, it might not be combined with knowledge of perspective . . .”
And so forewarned, I’ll try my hand:
Anthony touched my face with his stump.
We were fourteen. Anthony touched my face with his stump. I’ve said this phrase to myself for years. Sotto voce. Sometimes while walking. I say it in part because I like the beat, the variant anapests that beg another verse or want to break into hymn meter, and in part because that moment so impressed me. I hold the phrase itself up like an object of contemplation. His arm ended just below the elbow, this antic boy with raucous good humor, who played the trumpet and who, himself, called his arm “my stump.” The sensation was like nothing else I knew. Not a head, not a nudge. Not a child’s knee, not a ball. There was headlong force, texture, heat (this was summer on Long Island) and his unselfconscious desire, which instructed me.

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