And did it begin then, the unraveling.
Or had it begun months and even years before and at this late, exhausted hour the clarity of it: the absurdity: waking to discover yourself in this place among strangers indifferent and impervious to you who wished only to adore them, in desperation clutching a textbook of ethics set forth in seventeenth-century theorems and propositions like geometry. And trying not to cry. For you are not a child. Nineteen years old, an adult. Yet so hurt! heartbroken! fated to recall the sting of that rude drunken rebuff for a lifetime.
Sisters! Always I'd yearned for sisters of my own. From first grade contemplating with undisguised envy and wonderment the large farm families of most of my classmates. For even when sisters quarreled-and sisters were always quarreling!-the fact remained they were sisters. The fact remained: they lived together, ate meals together, shared rooms, often beds. They wore one another's clothing. Mittens, scarves, and boots freely mingled. They shared facial features, ways of moving their eyes and heads, ways of gesturing. They shared a last name. And I had no sister, and would never have a sister. Except in my memory, which others derided, I had no mother. I was pitied as a freak, without a mother. My brothers were much older than I and took no interest in me except sometimes to tease and taunt, as big dogs might play with small dogs, injuring them occasionally but without rancor or intention; my father who was "in construction" was often absent from home for weeks, even months-it wasn't clear where he went, or wasn't clear to me. My brothers and I lived with my father's parents on their twelve-acre dairy farm near Strykersville, in Niagara County, New York, thirty miles northeast of Buffalo and three miles south of Lake Ontario.
The Snow Belt as it's called.
A childhood of snow. Blank amnesiac patches of snow. Beside the window of my small room beneath the eaves, a cave-like opening in snow formed by the drooping limbs of a juniper tree; after the fiercest snowstorms, there was yet this sheltered space outside the window, I could look out and see, beyond, a blinding expanse of white like a frozen sea transforming the familiar terrain of our farm.
My mother died when I was eighteen months old. I would be told Your mother has gone away. In time, I would be told that my mother had wanted a daughter so badly she'd "kept trying" after three sons-and two miscarriages-and at last had had a baby at the age of forty-one, and never recovered. This would be told to me with an air of disapproval, reproach. For in those years, forty-one was a repugnant and even obscene age for a mother. It seemed fitting then that my mother had not been able to give birth "normally" but had had a caesarian that failed to heal; her milk-laden breasts developed cysts like tiny pebbles; the gossamer-thin web of nerves that constituted her mysterious and unknowable self grew tight, tighter, tighter until one day it broke and could never be mended; the way a spider's delicate web, once broken, can never be mended. When I was eight, having annoyed my grandmother in some childish way, she told me in a bitter yet gloating voice that my mother had died of something eating her up: cancer. My grandmother gestured clumsily, shamefacedly, at her own big, sunken bosom, saying, "They had to cut off her…" She fell silent. I was speechless with horror. Her breasts? My mother I loved so much, and missed so badly, her breasts had been… cut off?
I ran from the house and hid in a field. It was not winter then: I hid in a cornfield. I ignored them calling for me. I hated them all, I would never forgive them.
After that day my grandmother seemed to have forgotten what she'd told me. Or behaved as if she'd forgotten. Yet it was tacitly assumed that I knew this shameful secret about my mother, and must take responsibility for knowing. Sometimes I'd overhear my grandmother speaking to relatives or neighbors, careless of whether I might be within earshot, in her dour, dogged voice, "He blames her, you know-the little one. For Ida dying." Even as a small child I understood the fatal juxtaposition of that he (my father) and that her (the "little one" who was myself).
Yes but I remember her. I am the only one who remembers.
"Ida"-the name was magical to me. In whispers, in the dark. Beneath bedcovers. Forehead pressed to a windowpane coated with frost. "Ida." What a strange, beautiful name: I could not say it often enough: it was easy to confuse "Ida" with "I"-the sharp simple sound I learned to make with my mouth and tongue when I meant myself.
In the interests of truth, with the rapacity of an invading army, my brothers belittled my childish claim of remembering my mother. "You! You were too little, only a baby when she died. We knew her." They hated me for having been born; having been born, I caused our mother's death; yet they could see I was just a little girl; I wasn't a worthy enemy. They argued it was only in snapshots of my mother that I knew" her, not in my own true memory; confusing the sallow-faced mature woman with the younger, much prettier woman of the snapshots in the family album, dark hair bobbed in the sexy-boyish style of the Twenties, hands on her hips, knuckles inward. A brash smile flying to the camera like a bird flying toward a window. I did not wish to consider that this striking young woman was not, precisely speaking, my mother. But these early snapshots were the ones I adored. Others, taken in the Thirties, my mother with my brother Dietrich who was eleven years my senior, my mother with my brother Fritz who was ten years my senior, my mother with my brother Hendrick who was seven years my senior-these engaged me far less, though they were nearer in time to my own birth. For I couldn't bear to see my mother with babies not myself. Young children in her lap, clambering about her legs. She was beginning to look tired, drawn, her smile had become forced, in the later snapshots. Her chic bobbed hair was gone, now flyaway hair, or skinned back severely from her face and knotted at the nape of her neck. Her body had thickened, grown shapeless. After my birth, my mother's health was so poor that no snapshots of her with me were ever taken. No snapshots of the little one at all. Yet I claimed to remember my mother and held firm in my obstinacy against all detractors. My German grandparents who were old, old, old all my life like trolls peering at me in pity and reproach. It was clear that they hadn't liked my mother yet they liked me less for killing her and for making their only son deeply unhappy. Muttering together in that language I could not comprehend, and had no wish to comprehend, would never study in college, though sometimes they spoke in heavily accented English for me to overhear-"That one! Where does she get her ideas!" Inwardly I answered, "Not from you. None of you."