Nothing nestled in her remembrance.
There were belongings to buy, and a ruesomeness incompressible into any of the words she knew, and a past already kaput and ready to rebulk, rebuke.
But twenty-two, twenty-three — she was running out of realms.
Or it was just that she had such an overacquaintance with herself, suffered from such an oppressive overintimacy with her body and the contents of her every minute, that on those rare occasions when she stumbled upon a glimpse of the bigger picture of herself, and actually got a look at the contours of her life, she was practically undone — because the microscopic view and the larger perspective did not fit together at all. So she was plunged into a disabling uncertainty that at length infected her speech and gave her trouble with the first-person pronouns, because the range of reference was now clouded and baffling.
There were jolts and didders to her nervous system.
Her life did not so much advance as narrow itself out unamelioratingly.
But did she shoplift?
With fingers so thin they looked like snippets from somebody else’s?
She was not blessed with a voice in the head that furnished a running interpretation of human incident. Lives around her motioned brokenly this way and that. She made herself more available, visible, riskful. But even her own body would not honor her. There were flubs in her private locations, and her hands did not mix all that well with each other.
There was in fact less and less talk in her life, and when she did speak, it was as if the words were issuing not from her mouth but from some rent in the murk of her being. It was the penetralia speaking for once and at last. So what came out did not sound that much like ordinary utterancy but came crashing out of the vocabulary she kept crashing herself against.
Her bugginess and obsessions and sexual instabilities were probably never that far from home, though they were mostly a tiny and shrinking department of her life.
It was a life into which others now and again must have pitched some of their woe.
Our mother?
Two parties must be present at every birth.
Neither ever survives in one way or another.
While she was growing up, some packages of potato chips used to carry, on their backsides, a defensive notation along the lines of “This package is sold by weight, not by volume. Contents may have settled during shipment.” It put her in mind of daily, unshapeful life — though the generalizings about it would carry her only farther and farther away from where she was trying to throw herself at the first perfectly rotten mood to come along in anyone looking more likely to last.
And our father?
As a girl, she must have known it was a coin collection, at least of sorts. But the nickels and silver dollars had not been pressed into any of those gloomy folders from some hobby shop.
My sister needed the chocolate teenies, the sourballs, the licoriced whatnots.
She was big on upshots and bitter ends, but she did not see herself as polarizing. Why should she have to see herself at all? That was somebody else’s affliction, not hers. She had learned long ago how to prepare herself for a day without recourse to a mirror.
It was in the restrooms of cosmetology colleges, restaurants with communal tables, underemployment agencies, off-price stores, that her fingers offered herself and others a fugitive and unimproving satisfaction of a kind, though she otherwise lacked the reach that life was said to require.
She did not like to drive, she suffered motion sickness on trains, planes were much too aerial for her taste, and on buses she would get stuck next to the perspirational, the heartsore.
She was uncottoned-to, but a soft touch always.
She audited an Oral Communications class at the township college. But despite all that dreamy speech-course certitude about “messages” and their “senders” and awaiting “receivers” (those textbook diagrams with the perkily curving arrows always made her sad), wasn’t most communication of any sort a one-way street anyway? Shouldn’t she have been content with the inner sentences of hers going on for miles and miles — an entire continent’s worth, for that matter — without anyone in any oncoming traffic taking any notice whatsoever?
The professor said things like “Other things being equal” and backed drably away from her after class. He looked cramped and made sport of in his own life and forums. There was a turnout of papules, ingrown hairs, whiteheads, on his face. Her final grade was a Courier-font C.
Of the flight home for the first of the funerals, she remembered little except that the couple sitting to her left kept rousing her from her narcosis (she had chewn some stupefacients) so they could use the restroom. They always left and returned as a couple.
She hoped she hadn’t been talking in her sleep. A big fear was that in her sleep she would “open up” and give untidy, exploded views of her psyche.
Later stilclass="underline" that dick-ridden gleam to her, the razzmatazz of her makeup, an autumn with a winterly girl (lavish of eyeliner and with that knack for the pathetical), then newer and newer dips to her sadness, and the panache of her about-faces to follow: setting foot out of herself, or making overtures to herself — she owed it to herself to see life flatten itself desirably in the very design of a day.
Then where — Kansas, Arkansas? The paychecks were direct-deposited, so you tended to forget.
She felt cozy in the time zone, but her days out there were as livelong as all get-out.
In those parts, the supermarket bakeries baked bagels without even a hole.
There was a diary for a while. She dressed page after page in a sneaky, tossing backhand:
Rubbing: I came to it late and didn’t get a whole lot out of it.
My life, so help me, has been little more than an ongoing demonstration of the fiasco of the bodily.
Other pages, I later saw, concerned the ruck and malarkey of monthly life, the unwondersome ways in which people finished with each other.
I like to think she might have said something quieteningly final and fair enough.
I bought a car, a black one, and drove it. I let the thing fill up with more and more trash.
In next to no time, the driver’s side had been keyed intricately, all-overishly, though perhaps keyed is not quite the word. There must have been ice picks and chisels involved as well.
Partial List of People to Bleach
She was either next to me on a plane and turning a page of her magazine every time I turned one of mine, or else she had come forward from way back to be a handful anew, because people repeat on you or otherwise go unplundered. I will think of her as Aisler for any priggish intentions I might still manage here.
Aisler had spousy eyes, and arms exemplary in their plunges, and she brought her bare knees together until they were buttocky and practical. I hemmed and hawed inside of her for some weeks after but never got the hang of her requirements. A woman that swaggering of heart will not bask in deferred venereal folderol.