Talking Heads (28 page)

My baby, tiny and dead though you are, well. I'm sure you realize that I first searched out another clue or two, Teen Detective, in order to confirm my suspicions that dear old Fudds' affair had indeed ended; you realize, I'm sure, that I couldn't simply leave that laceration alone. I first made certain that my father no longer went traipsing off on his dubious overnight “presentations” (in Duxbury,
mon pere
?); and after that while I can't recall, here before this gray grid, just when I moved into my angry little studio on Dana Street, nonetheless the answer is yes, I mean the answer to the question your mother was just asking …

Yes
! I went directly to my Rampage! Yes, in that candid moment over my father's gin-&-
Journal
I understood that the man was no longer a
campeñero
, that he was in fact just another tin-star dictator with blood on his hands and a happy banana …

Examples, God knows I have examples. I have irrefutable evidence that nine-tenths of what I said and did in those days was all about me and my father. Yes, the answer's yes, and our mother could regale you with ugly evidence indeed, with incidents draped in transparent Freudian slips (o, games), incidents that go from backstage at a bar where Aerosmith had a gig to upstairs in the Parker House with a prominent State House Old Boy. This weekend, thanks to my little talk with Dee down in Providence, honest hindsight at last revealed that throughout this entire incident-packed period (interesting word!), I was after my father—whether after fucking him or killing him, or both … well.
Hoo boy
, as your stepfather would say (o, yoo hoo, my prince! yoo hoo! [but the truth is he won't be home for hours, my baby; I've got plenty of time left to Delete])

The truth is, even at my most outrageous, my most Rampageous, I was just another rebel rich girl, wasn't I? Even out on the astral plane you've come across the type, haven't you? Bright but lacerated nucleii, aren't we, grubby little handfuls struggling for greater mass against the fracturing effects of shame … My weekend journey to find you, and then my sitting here to put you into words, these are both mysteries, don't you know—but I do wonder whether, in the end, there exist any mysteries about personality at all, these days. I do wonder if we haven't had the mystery charted and graphed out of us, these days: nailed like Natasha into Tolstoyan immutability.

When I at last caught up with Dee, don't you know, she too seemed no mystery; rather she seemed the natural end result of a progression already sketched on the air at the time of our last conversation—sketched so plainly (o, history without mystery) that nothing had changed, for Dee, even though she'd rushed out of our last conversation in tears. I mean, here she was in hospital fatigues, working the Sunday shift in Emergency Trauma at Good Samaritan, in hospital fatigues and an unpretentious wedding diamond, with her hair in a sensible bob … She knew her likes and dislikes and their funding, my baby; she showed no trace of how hard I'd once tried to hurt her.

Myself on the other hand, God knows, I must have looked like rather a
case
, when dear old Dee first laid eyes on me… Indeed, the foremost victim of The Rampage, The Rampage! (after myself, myself!) didn't recognize me, until I called her by her Cliffie nickname. Indeed, her first once-over—before I spoke her name—made it perfectly clear just what sort of a case she saw in me, with my Newbury Street curls and coat, my Sunday eyeliner: she saw another pampered and overcomplicated troublemaker: another rebel rich girl.

Then with her Cliffie nickname, I became three-dimensional, just like that, out of her file folder and into her heart—or more precisely, into her craw. She became angry, did Dee, frowny, and no one can frown quite like a startled woman in a gymnast's haircut, a startled doctor at a busy station, demanding an explanation: Where are you hurt?

O, Dee, sticks and stones may break my bones, but it's these old names that really hurt me. They ooze, they itch—for as you've no doubt figured out by now, my baby, I needed to ask this woman about, well. About the past, our mutual past; and
naturellement
, that's what I began to see before me, right there in the Trauma Center: no sooner did some clumsy euphemism for The Rampage come from my mouth, “um, that time when I was um, more than usually sexually active”—no sooner did I mention it than I was back in it, in the worst and meanest moment of it: back the night I'd invited Dee over to the studio, back not long after too-tired Fudds had walled himself up behind his
Wall
(for good, I might add; he hasn't come out since). I was back taking a night off from my Oedipal Rampaging (it's all charted and graphed, isn't it?) and instead steering my girl talk, my cheerful girl talk with my dear old chum Dee, well—steering our conversation towards intimate particulars.

I was cunning, in those days: little Miss Cunning Stunts … Dee brought herbal tea, she introduced me to herbal tea, and I made certain that she had a firm and thorough understanding of my situation before we'd finished our second cup. I can handle a word like “clitoris,” don't you know, with a
sang-froid
that's nothing short of clinical—though in that regard I'm hardly unique, am I, not when the Cambridge Adult Education Center is offering seminars like
The Problem of Orgasm
. My baby, you wouldn't believe our ‘70s silliness: women actually refer to climax as “the big O”…

All this, you see, being just the sort of Kinsey-cold detail I offered Dee, that night over herbal tea: detail as cold as the windows on a seaside Cottage in mid-winter, and all intended to prove just how much the Steyes like to fuck.

I was a flirt, in my skirt … Delete. In my jean skirt I smile, legs Indian-style … Delete.

As I say, my baby, last night in the Trauma Center I re-experienced the entire heartless episode, the mean bitch that I was … And the present-day Doctor Dee, don't you know, Dee on duty—she actually exhibited some of the same responses as her younger self: then (in the flowery scent of the tea) her sensible gaze had flickered because she'd been stung, and now (in the antiseptic flatness of the Center) her look clouded because she became concerned; then as my nasty-nasty unfolded, her knowing posture had faltered, on my apartment's deeply dented hassock, and now as I tried to explain, her perch softened, on her wheeled stool; then she'd spoken from deeper in the throat with every new question, and now the same, the same … And both episodes ended in tears, o,
naturellement
.

Then
—it had pleased me, don't you know, it had pleased your bitch mother to send Dee out of her place crying, to break down this girl a year “ahead” (so I suppose I've provided an example of Dee's unusual spirit after all: I've defined serene-a-Dee by its absence)… It had pleased me to see the proof that Dee had cared for old Fudds, that he'd broken her down, too.

And
now
—well. In the Trauma Center it ruined me, because I wasn't just resurrecting a sour old spirit, I was resurrecting a whole crucifixion, I was resurrecting the whole unhappy Testament back to that first unhappy Garden, back through the Crisis Centers and the Cutty Sark and the Cottage, through the scars across your stepfather's lovely eyebrow … It ruined me; I was the one in tears last night, Bette like the actress, absolutely dripping onto her lapels, proud black velvet lapels
(
I never so much as undid my first button), dripping with shame all over again—especially, my baby, when I brought up you.

For of course I did bring up you, my baby .

I'd searched out this woman because of you—not because of me and Dee and, well …

O, all right, I suppose I was also there because I needed to apologize, to make amends: all right, that too—but not just that, not solely that. Rather I journeyed to Providence to speak with two people at once (just as I'm doing now [maybe baby]): with her and, at last, with you .

Mysteries, God knows there are mysteries, and this one strikes me now as badly done: the clues at first are nowhere to be found, and then they come in clumps, the characters seem no better than cardboard cutouts and the villain (the real father [in fact I can only guess who it might be]) remains offstage the whole time. This should all be redone; certainly I can't let your stepfather see it (Dee was kind to me, finally, and so will be Delete).

I made a shambles of the clues back in those days, too, back when you were actually folded up there inside and trying to tell me … well. A missed period, there's a clue, and a stout New England constitution that never misses a period, there's another; and then your mother began to suffer wooziness in the mornings—though it was wooziness I always put down to the previous night's rotgut and reefer; oh, I made a shambles of your every clue, my baby; I didn't want to know. And even so, long thoughts did start to creep up on me, don't you know, during my rare empty evenings; and I fell into even webbier meditations on what I'd done to Dee, how I'd hurt her and how she'd cared .

Then behind those thoughts there came to mind three or four occasions of conception to choose from, two or three perhaps—the fact is, I can only guess at your real father, my baby; and I don't believe it was the ghost who's come back to haunt me lately, the groan over the phone … Then the riding accident, what else? didn't I say the characters here were nothing but cardboard? nothing but bright grubby subatomics moving in predictable patterns? I fell from my frisky Hepburn (my baby, all my mounts are Hepburns): fell clumsy with rotgut and reefer, fell careless with showing off for some tall-in-the-saddle bedmate; I fell and after my fall I had so much bleeding that I called a halt to my, to my, well … you wouldn't call them “antics.” But whatever you call them, with the heavy bleeding I called a halt for a while, a while that went on stretching, stretching, just as every night my long thoughts were stretching: until they became so long and dark, my imaginings, that at no point was your mother able to bring herself to a doctor (your mother, me [I, she]: perhaps all I'm really doing these days is seeking a happy medium between first person and third)…

Dee was kind, as I say—Providence-tial and kind, yesterday—though she remained bewildered, and she hadn't quite lost her frown yet, either; she must have asked me six times if I didn't want to take off my coat. She had the answers I'd come for, however; and once you learn the vocabulary, my baby, honestly, you start to wonder what all he the fuss was about. Once you learn an expression like “spontaneous abortion,” well. That's nothing to cry about, is it? and neither is a statistic like one pregnancy in every four. I would guess now that Dee was deliberately, um,
underplaying
: that she tempered her information, in order not to upset her bizarre midnight visitor any further—as when, for instance, she claimed that miscarriages of one kind or another were so common, we couldn't even be sure that my riding accident had had anything to do with it. She was clever, actually, not merely kind, just as the neutral blue of her hospital uniform was a color cleverly chosen: restful and reliable: true blue.

And yet Dee's expert tone and the skill with which she later skated round my soggy offer to get together some time (perhaps on the astral plane, dear)—none of it, nonetheless, undid the basic compulsion at work in my Sunday (and in my Monday, too [I've got a lot to Delete])… none of it undid the decision I'd come to, the decision I've slept on and now input: my resolution that
there'd been a fetus in the first place
: there'd been something to miscarry.

Briefly you lived, my baby …

You lived, born of the worst mess of my life, and that mess was born of my father's: you lived, and from there I scroll back, back … yet really I must Delete.

Really, this should all be, well. The lacerations itch, they ooze, and your mother can't help but see the sheer silliness in what she's done today, this weekend: like a talking head up on an interior screen, a perpetual electronic voice declaring:
Look
at you; Just
look
at you … (and the men have the same problem, my baby, judging from your stepfather). Your mother can't help but cave in under the pressure of that head. My baby, I won't deny you any longer: last night I said
you lived
in the face of Dee's power to Delete, and today I've input the same, in the face of my own; I've said it, I've input … but I can't print out, my baby; I can't let your stepfather see me like this (not when he's spending all damn day with that other Mzzzz buzzing around) …

O, what am I talking about? I came to my Apple with something simple to say, plain and simple .

This should all be redone .