The Best American Essays 2016 (35 page)

In the presence of the brain-damaged we find ourselves in the Uncanny Valley. It is we who are made to feel unease, even terror. I am made to feel guilt—for I have had access to language, to spoken and written speech, and she has not. And this, by an accident of birth.

Not what we deserve, but what is given us.

Not what we are, but what we are made to be.

I have not seen my afflicted sister since 1971, when she was fifteen years old. Tall for her age, wiry-thin, gangling, with pale skin, an expression on her face of anger, anguish—or as easily vacancy and obstinacy.
A mirror-self, just subtly distorted. Sister-twin, separated by eighteen years.
Though I have thought of Lynn often in the intervening years, I have not seen her; initially, because my parents would not have wished this, and eventually, because such a visit would be upsetting to her, as to me. And futile.
She would not know me, nor even glance at me. What I would know of her, I could not bear.

It is difficult to imagine a mouth that has never uttered a single word, and has never smiled.

Eyes that have never lifted to any face, still less locked with another’s gaze.

All literature—all art—springs from the hope of communicating with others. And yet there are others for whom the effort of communication is not possible, or desirable.

Seems like she doesn’t know we’re here.

What do you think she is thinking?

Perhaps this is the unanswerable question: Does the brain
think
?

If the brain is sufficiently injured, or undeveloped: Can the brain
think
?

In itself, perhaps the brain does not
think
; it is the human agent within the brain, which some have called the soul, that
thinks
. And yet—can a soul, or a mind, be differentiated from its brain? We speak of “our” brain as if we owned it, in a way; as we might speak of “our” ankle, “our” eyes. But such common usage is misguided, perhaps.
We are nothing apart from our brains, thus it is our brains that think. Or fail to think.

Obviously, our brains generate consciousness—but this is an unconscious process. We are habituated to believe, at least in our Western tradition, that “we” are located somewhere inside our brains, behind our eyes; for it is our eyes “we” see through. When we look into the eyes of others, as we speak to them, we are looking “into” the brain, that is, the core of personality—or so we think. (It is unnerving to think that just as our personalities reside in an organic, perishable brain, in some infinitely vast network of neurons beyond all efforts of tracking, the personalities of others reside in a similar place.) Except, of course, in some individuals, there is no eye contact—the brain refuses to function in accord with our expectations.

In April 2014, fourteen years after our father’s death, in response to a query, my brother brings me up-to-date on our sister’s condition, which seems unchanged:
Lynn is totally nonverbal and does not talk at all. She has frequent seizures and wears a helmet at all times to protect her when she falls . . . She does not recognize me nor do I think she recognizes anyone at all. She is shy, and does not like it when her routine is changed.

It would have startled and displeased my parents, if I’d suggested going to visit Lynn in her facility; it would have seemed intrusive to them, for they would have surmised that if I visited my sister, it might be for the purpose of writing about her; and they would not have wanted me to write about her, not then, not ever. And so I had not ever inquired about visiting her—though I had many times fantasized about visiting the now-adult woman who very likely closely resembles me as I would have been if at birth some neurological catastrophe had occurred to render my brain impaired. And after sixty years, as I contemplate visiting Lynn at last, with my brother Fred, I feel faint with dread, and guilt.

For the fact is, the visit would not benefit Lynn, only me. The visit would be intrusive and upsetting to her, who is upset by any break in her routine. Only my brother has visited Lynn, in the years since my parents’ deaths. But Lynn does not recognize him, has no awareness of him, and for him too such visits are futile; except as Fred Oates Jr. is Lynn’s guardian, he has no role in her life. Yet my brother has (heroically, I think) acquitted himself fully as her guardian, and has borne the responsibility he’d accepted at my father’s request.

“Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”

It was a festive time. It was, in fact, my birthday: my eighteenth birthday. I had not been forgotten after all.

My parents smiled with happiness. It was their hope, if I helped to name my sister, that I would love her too.

This was long ago. Yes, it was a happy time.

For so much lay ahead, unanticipated. No reason to anticipate the wholly unexpected of years to come.

After days of deliberation I presented my parents with the name that seemed to me the ideal name—
Lynn Ann Oates
.

A very nice name, they said. “Thank you, Joyce.”

MARSHA POMERANTZ

Right/Left: A Triptych

FROM
Raritan

1. Share/Split

M
Y FRIEND BOA
slithered up the stairs beside me to my room, keeping a lower profile than such well-known confidants as, say, Christopher Robin’s bear. Boa was a bootlace strung with red, yellow, blue, and green wooden beads, and as I led him by the knotted nose, I told him how things were in the world. He was always pleased to give my findings independent confirmation.

The facts:

1.
Mothers don’t eat.
It had come to my attention that mothers were fueled by something other than food: possibly telephone talk and worry. I wondered how old you had to be to turn into a mother and not have to eat anymore.

At breakfast my mother would hover ominously as I moped over my oatmeal. At lunch she would often be cleaning, exuding busyness and wearing a kerchief that swept her hair up from the nape and tied in a knot above her forehead—like Alice’s headgear in
The Honeymooners
, only the Russian-immigrant version, a flower print with strong, blotchy pinks. At dinner, as Lowell Thomas brought the news from North, from South, from East, from West, my mother brought the lamb chops, mashed potatoes, and thoroughly boiled vegetables from the stove to the table. Rarely did she sit down with us and eat them. If she sat, she would jump up to get an extra knife, then to answer the phone, then to put the pots in the sink and fill them with water so they wouldn’t dry out and exhaust both her and the metal-scented Brillo pad that already oozed rust.

As I ate I distributed dinner to the four corners of my personal geography, imagining an ingested olive-drab green bean traveling through my middle to my left big toe, a forkful of mashed potatoes dispatched to the right elbow, and so on. I tried to make sure that all parts of me received sufficient supplies.

Despite my best efforts to keep all my regions intact under a centralized administration, I learned that

2.
Halvsies is all.
This finding was made not at the kitchen table but in the car on the way to my grandmother’s in the Bronx. It was a Sunday; my father was driving the two-tone ’51 Buick, my mother sat next to him, and I was in the backseat. Maybe the Yiddish hour was on WEVD, and maybe my mother was singing along, off-key, to “
Rozhinkes mit mandlen
” (“Raisins and Almonds,” which she may or may not have eaten). “So if you’re our little girl,” my father said, the glance over his shoulder falling short of my eyes, “which half is your mother’s and which half is your father’s?” They seemed to be waiting for an answer. After due deliberation, I awarded my right side, which I favored, to my mother, whom I loved more that year, the antagonism over oatmeal notwithstanding. Years later I was still assuaging my guilt with the thought that the left side contained my heart, location of loving and thudding, so my father didn’t get such a bad deal.

It has been suggested to me that this early split was the forerunner of other geographical divisions in my life, such as the attempt to inhabit both Israel and the United States, journalism and poetry, one man and another. My behavior in a swimming pool is symptomatic. Some people, when lowering themselves into an occupied lane, say, “Do you mind if we share this?” I say, “Do you mind if we split this?” The distinction is obvious only in the American half of my life. In an Israeli swimming lane the word for
share
is the reflexive form of
split
, so I say, if I bother to ask, what amounts to, “Can we split ourselves on this?” Which goes a long way toward explaining Middle East politics.

The principle of halvsies also came into play with the youngest of my three older brothers, the only one close enough in age to share a split with. When our neighbors gave us a chocolate bunny and egg at Easter, the gifts were usually stored on a shelf in the basement, where their existence could be denied until the end of Passover. Finally they were brought upstairs to be divided, and then of course the question was who would get the bigger half. Fairly early I learned the moral advantage of saying I preferred the smaller. It felt less like losing. And it was practice for turning into a mother. At Easter I learned another fact, related to the principle that contiguity implies causality: I learned that

3.
Rabbits lay eggs.
They were everywhere together: plush bunnies and dyed eggs nestled in shredded green cellophane approximating spring. Clearly it was a matter of kinship.

There was an alternative, vegetable theory for the origin of eggs, however: the first book I ever took out of the school library, when I was seven, was called
The Egg Tree
, and it was full of pictures of pastel-painted Easter eggs blooming on bare branches. My mother lifted her head from the gossip columns of the
Daily News
to take a look. “Jewish girls don’t read books like that,” she said. Although I didn’t return this book to the library immediately, I no longer had the heart to pursue my research into rabbit-and-egg relations. My heart, in any case, was in occupied territory.

My father the occupier had yet another theory about eggs, which I discovered inadvertently on the rare occasions when I’d come home from school and find him there. He’d be in the hall near the back door, under a light that I noticed only years later was a bare bulb, checking messages tucked behind the warping plastic switch plate. The ritual went like this:

“Where’s Mom?”

“In my back pocket.” I’d duly glance into the one where his wallet wasn’t. “Not there,” I’d say. “What’s new?”

“
Ah katz iz geloifen oifn dach und geleikt ahn ei.
” Yiddish for “A cat ran up on the roof and laid an egg.”

I thought maybe he was right about a cat being on the roof, but he couldn’t be right about a cat laying an egg. Even Hallmark greeting cards reinforced the theory that eggs came from bunnies. Then again, I did know that startling things occurred up there on the shingle slopes. For instance,

4.
People roll snowballs off the roof in the middle of the night.
I had very firm proof of this, having woken up in the dark one winter to the sound of small creaks and large plunks from above. By this time I was about ten, and more scientifically inclined. My confidant Boa, under the bed among the dust bunnies and the mite eggs, heard these sounds with his very own ears. If someone was rolling things off the roof, I thought, I would see the evidence on the ground. I looked out the window. Sure enough, indentations in the snow below the edge of the eaves. I ran and woke my mother.

“Someone’s rolling snowballs off the roof.”

“Don’t be silly.”

I coaxed her out of bed and into my room to see the evidence from my window.

“Icicles dropping off,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

“I can’t.”

“You’re not trying hard enough.”

I swore I’d never say that to my kids. Better yet, I’d never turn into a mother at all.

Fortunately, I found more tolerance for truth in other quarters. One night a few weeks later, when, being the youngest, I’d had to go to bed while family and guests reveled downstairs, there was a knock at my door. My cousin Miriam came in and sat on the bed.

“How ya doin’, kid?” she inquired, with a little box to the elbow she didn’t realize was the locus of potatoes mashed with chicken fat.

I was pleased to have her company and even more pleased by the revelation she was about to share, not split, with me and nobody else: she had been born an Eskimo, named Minigoochi, kidnapped as a child, forcibly imported to the gray geometry of Astoria, Queens. She gave me extensive details about life in the igloo and herring for breakfast; none of that oatmeal. I sensed a fellow displaced person, another being half elsewhere. Maybe the snowball rollers had been her long-lost relatives and arrived on the wrong day, signaling high and low.

Years later, clearing out my parents’ home after my mother died, I found in the heavily varnished credenza (my mother, when enunciating, said
credenzer
) a small clear-plastic box containing wooden beads colored red, yellow, blue, and green: Boa, deconstructed. I threw him out, or maybe threw him in as a bonus to the tag-sale customer who bought the busy flowered kerchief, or the radio containing Lowell Thomas, or the mattress of my insomnia on a snowy night.

Recently I had lunch with my cousin Miriam and thanked her for confiding in me about her Minigoochi life. She had no recollection of either the life or the story, but, patting my potato elbow, accepted my gratitude with grace. It surprised me at this late date that even she had deserted the cause of truth. But then, only half of what I’ve written here is true. I won’t say which half, and I won’t say which half I love more.

2. Milk/Meat