Textiles didn't seem to matter to the Polish woman, though while I spoke of them and my father's work, when I searched for topics she might like and that we could discuss, she managed a decorous smile, and a look of interest (littered on her attractive, broad face, which was also distinguished by its vacancy, but whether that was because she worked at a job she disliked, endured daily annoyance and boredom, which cemented her face in a placid mask, her serving face, or because she was dull, I don't know. When she urged me to have a massage from her, after two years of my having facials, though she wasn't especially expert in its practice, she expressed the determination that I relax, she didn't talk about my sensitive skin, she kneaded my skin like dough, and she might have noticed the cherry on the back of my upper thigh, but about it she has never remarked.
The inventor loved his dog, who was always with him, except at mealtimes when he entered the big house, where his disregard of the community's pet prohibition would be noticed by the authorities, and where he also met and fell in love with a woman who seemed to appreciate him, but then she stopped, or she never did like him; his friend, another resident, told me she was too classy for the inventor. He confided his suspicion after the inventor had dropped his jeans and exposed his rosy ass from the dark wood balcony, so I wondered if the woman had been disillusioned by an act of cheap bravado and considered him vulgar. She left before I could ascertain if she was a classy character; anyway, class is meant to he shunned, and here anonymity fosters and superintends the myth of American classlessness, an aspect of American Exceptionalism that also claims the nation as an entirely new world, unlike its parent Europe, especially England, so it can't have an empire and doesn't have a hierarchical social order. Still, I'd be surprised if she had lost interest in him for that, because while it might be considered an outrageous act in our motley, possibly disreputable community, his well-turned ass was beautiful. I was surprised that it affected me, that I perceived his skin as a riotous invitation, tempting, and often I wish I were a dermatologist. Mine advised me to stay out of the sun years before others acknowledged the terrible damage it can do to skin, but people still lie under a blazing sun, without sun block, and imagine they are soaking up its beneficial, natural rays, when, in fact, they are harming their skin, aging it, and making themselves sick. People with sunburns look clown-like under their coat of sick skin, though when I was a child I was often tan and hoped to get as dark as I could, though when I was two or three, I saw a dark brown or black infant, dressed in blue, in its carriage on the street and loudly asked my mother why the mother didn't wash him. At this time our family had a maid who was black who came to the house three times a week, and she had a son, whose name I don't remember, with whom I played. We roller skated, there's a photograph of us with our roller skates on, I'm looking at him, he's smiling at the camera, I usually didn't look at the camera. It was an awkward moment on the wide sidewalk, the two embarrassed or humiliated mothers, who were strangers, with their innocuous children, one older than the other and talking, and my white mother, who's not sensitive, must have been stunned by her child's impertinent, revelatory question, because she apologized, and the black mother graciously or uneasily accepted her apology. Then my mother apologized again, grabbed my hand, and yanked me away. It is my earliest memory of skin, though it's possible that when my father first remarked on the cherry on my upper thigh, I was the same age, and that could have been the first reference to skin I heard. When my friend and I walked around Vienna, and it snowed, he joked about how it was telling us something. My friend explained he was at greater risk than I, because he was a young, black man prey to other men's aggressive impulses, if he read on the subway, he might he challenged to a fight, and generally men die before women, and I do have more dead male friends than female, they must take more risks, be less concerned with their health, less observant of danger, or in some sense court death more. He lost his life on a mountain, where it was snatched from him, so he will never return. The cherry may still be there, fading on the back of my upper right thigh.
In my sleeping room, lying on the bed, with a white, bath-size, damp Egyptian all-cotton towel over my overheated body, and only the nighttable lamp lit, I miss my wild cat and envy the inventor's idiopathic behavior. It is, of course, what makes him, and I'm not him, yet I would like to expose my ass and act brazenly or indecently, though some here may believe I already have. Every day, my cat matures without me, housed by my mother, though fed by her paid companion, and my mother says she loves cats, especially hers, who now sleeps on her bed every night, but she had the family cat and my dog killed, which she doesn't remember, so my own cat may not recognize me when I return. It's a wonder that I have left my young cat with my mother, though I don't really expect she'll kill him, but, on many days and nights, I'm troubled by my abandonment of him, or exasperated by it, but I couldn't help myself, they don't permit animals here, they're a nuisance or a bother to the staff, are considered unsanitary, and the staff might fear undulant fever, a bacteria that causes disease in both domestic animals and people, producing pain in the joints as well as great weakness, and which can be contracted in humans from infected animals or from consumption of their products. I'm not like the inventor, even if I'd prefer to be, I am primarily incapable of disregarding a rule that might put me on probation, take away my privileges, or summarily send me home, so I resist making trouble, though I am trouble to some, I have caused distress to some, I believe it's inescapable, since human beings can be obstacles to each other's peace. Yet I don't want to be sent home in disgrace or, worse, to jail.
Leslie Van Houten spends her days writing letters, reading, doing chores, working, hoping for release, teaching new inmates what she has learned being inside, and she washes her face and brushes her teeth, eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner, wants snacks, exercises and stays fit, and she goes nowhere in the large cage to which she has adjusted. Most human beings can adjust to almost anything, except severe physical and mental torture, though some have a higher threshold for pain than others, and our elasticity is a comfort, though I find change difficult and am resistant or reluctant to face or in a sense pardon the new for dispensing with the old, like the shoes I loved that the manufacturer stopped making, which may be why American history appeals to me, when it does, once almost exclusively, but less so every day, and design increasingly more each day because, though design has a history, within its history is a will to disown the past, too, or at least to sidle away from it, all the while looking back reflexively. I can configure or conceive from my mind and with my hand, but I must accept the hand history deals, since about most things I have little or no choice. For instance, I might be forced to leave this community before I am ready. Because of her actions, Leslie Van Houten was forced to live in jail and has accommodated herself to a highly regulated and restricted existence, she has matured there, received an education, made and lost friends, she may die there, though I believe they'll let her out when she's very old, as another kind of punishment, to experience completely what she has missed. I haven't experienced her restrictions, I can't know hers in my skin, just as I don't know being imprisoned in my body with all my limbs paralyzed, or suffering the insane discomfort of full-body atopic eczema, or to have been a slave and borne the lash of a whip. When in the millennial year 2000, Van Houten was up for parole, she wore her partially gray hair in a bun, and instead of a dress that made her look like an executive secretary she wore a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt, mostly white with red sleeves, an aging cheerleader's get-up, for she was a cheerleader in her own defense, but to deaf ears, even though, in 1982, the chair of her hearing had told her she was "much closer than she might realize" to going home. But she isn't home and still can't leave her cell when lights are off and the block is in lockdown. But something could transpire, she could be paroled, and she's asked, we're all asked, to have hope. I don't expect I'll be sent to jail, but I might not return home, even to my young wild cat, and, to be honest, as the daughter of time must be, I regularly wish for an event such as was prophesied by the tarot card reader, a bright, definitive occurrence that transforms me or casts the next day into something I haven't known, though I don't wish for more catastrophe.