Hardness was no stranger to Harriet, and neither was remorse. “You are not a good girl,” her mother used to remind her. “You are not loving, or compassionate, or true. You never help with the housework, or care how I’m feeling. You never prepare meals for me unless I ask.” Sometimes Harriet’s mother would disappear for days and weeks at a time, returning with an ostentatious clatter of keys in the middle of the night, a bag of groceries under one arm, a six-pack of beer under the other. And it was always Harriet’s turn to cook breakfast.
Harriet’s mother liked to say that she had been an Abstract Expressionist long before being an Abstract Expressionist became popular. All day long she smoked marijuana out of a corncob pipe and wore a loose-fitting terry cloth bathrobe, gazing blurrily at her uncompleted canvases as if she couldn’t tell them apart. Their large studio contained two mattresses, three splintering wooden benches, large enormous rolls of medium-grain canvas, knock-kneed stepladders, framing boards, and countless rusting splattered paint tins stacked everywhere in weird configurations—pyramids, crosses, triangles, and ellipses—as if someone, somewhere, secretly intended them to mean something.
Harriet left home when she was seventeen, moved to North Hollywood, and spent every night sitting on the floor of her unfurnished apartment gazing at the palms of her hands as if they were paintings on a wall. She wanted to know the things her mother never thought her capable of knowing, those things they hadn’t taught her in school. She didn’t want to be just plain old know-nothing Harriet anymore, because she wanted to be better, and wiser, and filled with more meaning than herself. “You can’t see beyond the world you live in, which is why you will always be sad,” her mother used to tell her. “Now stop crying and go to sleep.”
Some nights Harriet clipped at the blue veins in her wrist with a pair of pale, dull scissors until the blood came. She did things to her toenails with matches and cauterized sewing needles. She gripped metal table knives and inserted them into the sudden frisson of bulbless lamps and open sockets. This, Harriet wanted to remind herself, was pain and attention. This was what happened when you were bad. A remote bright sensation of inflexibility and heat. A sort of visceral information. When Harriet felt pain, she didn’t feel lost, she knew where she was. She realized there was a world outside, a world that wanted her, a world that would hold her in its arms.
Every night before she fell asleep, Harriet tried to imagine the total destruction of her own body. Flames would work, missiles or bombs. Stroke, angina, renal failure, poison in the bloodstream, plutonium in the water. Suns and planets might explode and take civilizations with them, or the dollar collapse so Americans couldn’t buy bread. Comets might arrive just like prophecies, and then the entire world would know. Harriet tried to imagine herself shot in the head by hasty addicts, or run over by blundering buses in the street. When the body died, the mind went someplace else, escaped this embrace of skin and politics and metal. Continents grew infirm, galaxies milky, teeth loose, philosophies abstract. If you were lucky and didn’t struggle, you might learn the pain that really mattered. You might even learn to be good. You might finally understand.
Sometimes the bleeding wouldn’t stop and Harriet visited the doctor.
“Do you do this to yourself?” he asked. He stood over her during the examination, exerting force and profession. “Or was it some boyfriend? Is it something you ask them to do or do they just go ahead and do it anyway?”
“I’m clumsy,” Harriet said, closing her eyes, seeing the white starry impact she saw whenever she contemplated herself. “It happens when I’m cooking at the stove, or chopping vegetables at the sink.”
Sometimes the doctors sat behind their desks and watched her from far away. They stopped looking at her body. They tried to look into another part of her.
“Why do you do it?”
“I don’t really do it.”
“Is it because you don’t like yourself?”
“I like myself fine.”
“Have you ever been on medication? Have you ever visited a therapist?”
“I’ve consulted therapists,” Harriet said. “But I’ve never taken any prescribed medication.”
Then one day a man came along and tried to save her, a man Harriet consequently neither forgave nor forgot. Boyd Thomas left his wife and children, changed his job, and moved into Harriet’s apartment on a Superbowl Sunday, setting up a sort of provisional base camp on the living room sofa. Every day he went out for groceries and supplies from the local market. He did the chores, washed the dishes, and emptied the trash. Every evening he prepared large, nutritious dinner salads and vegetarian pastas in Harriet’s underequipped kitchen, and never even made a fuss when Harriet refused to eat. It was a type of cruelty Harriet had never known before. A man who wanted to take care of her. A man who wouldn’t go away.
Boyd assembled his dense, secret ministry of affection in Harriet’s life while Harriet wasn’t looking: new dishes, silverware, appliances, furniture, vitamins, consolation, and advice. Some mornings Harriet awoke to discover new curtains in the kitchen, tools and workbench in the basement, roses in a vase beside the stove, Boyd’s shoes under the sofa. “You need to get out more,” Boyd told her, arranging the dull clatter of tea things on an aluminum tray. “You need to stop feeling so sorry for yourself. Reenroll in school for chrissakes. Career Management—that’s what I was thinking. And look at me when I’m talking, why can’t you ever look at me? All I ever do is give, give, give, and all you ever do is take.”
Boyd could endure even more abuse than Harriet, and that’s why she couldn’t make him go away. He intercepted flying plates and glasses with ease, replacing them patiently on the shelves where Harriet could reach for them again. He entertained crude slurs about his manhood with an attitude of benign and sinister avowal. He took all the sharp objects from Harriet’s apartment and destroyed all the matches, and refused to slap her whenever she slapped him. There didn’t seem to be anything Harriet could do about it. Wherever she turned, there was Boyd trying to love her. Boyd with a cold washcloth to wipe her brow, and two strong arms to hold her.
In bed at night Boyd stroked her white back with his rasped, knuckly fingers. He whispered endearments at her as if he were pushing bulbs and garden implements into the dark earth. “I love you,” he whispered, over and over again, a litany as inextricable as his embrace, his voice reaching into places even Harriet couldn’t go. “You’re a really great woman who deserves the best life has to offer. You shouldn’t hate yourself so much; you shouldn’t feel so insecure. You’re a really strong, special, caring sort of person, and that’s why I really, really love and respect you.”
After a while Harriet would let Boyd make love to her, because it gave her distance and dimension back. Boyd and Harriet, him and her, man and woman, hammer and earth. She would close her eyes and go away into the wash of galaxies that wouldn’t last, into the casual obliteration of planets that never mattered. The man would climb off her; he would insist on holding her in his arms. Then Harriet would fall asleep and dream of catastrophes. It was the only real submission she could make anymore.