5.
The night of the party, I’d fallen and hit my head, and because of the blizzard my mother couldn’t track down my pediatrician, so she’d taken me upstairs to see her friend Dr. Jane Vornado. She hadn’t intended to stay any longer than it took to have Jane look me over, but there she was, putting away her third rum and Coke. My mother and Jane had been friends for decades, yet my mother arrived wearing the apologetic smile she put on anytime she had to involve a third party in my care and comfort, the smile meant to give the impression she was a reasonable and pliant woman, not one given to hysterics or undue demands. She hoped that the smile would, in turn, transform her so this attitude of agreeability would become her genuine state of being. Jane was the one who put the first drink in her hand.
Her reflexes are fine, Jane had said. Coordination’s fine. It’s a little cut. I’m going to put some Loctite on it.
Do I need to ask? my mother said.
Something I picked up from an OB at City. He picked it up from a midwife.
Isn’t that remarkable, my mother said, sucking down half the drink.
For tearing. Better than stitches. Right, Hazel?
Tearing what? I said.
In a percentage of births, the perineum sustains tearing during delivery, Jane said. Do you know what your perineum is?
I shook my head.
It’s the area between the bottom of your vaginal opening and your anus, Jane said. Sarah, you’ve got to get in there on this stuff. These days there’s no telling where they’ll pick up things if you don’t get in there first.
Can you stop saying I have to get in there? my mother said.
That would hurt, I said.
What would? my mother said.
Tearing your vagina, I said.
Yep, Jane said, dabbing my wound with gauze. And then you have to get stitches. But for first-degree lacerations like this one, sometimes you can use glue. That’s better, right?
Right, I said.
Okay, hold still. She pinched the wound and dropped a dot of the clear cement onto the skin. Toothpick, she said to my mother, who handed it over, and Jane smoothed the adhesive around. Done, she said.
My mother knocked back the rest of her rum and Coke.
Hey, Jane said to me. You get dizzy or you feel like you’re going to throw up, you tell your mom right away, understand?
I crossed my eyes and stuck out my tongue. I got brained! I said.
That had been hours ago. Days, years ago. I had happily ensconced myself in a guest bedroom to watch TV. My mother felt the party stretching out, becoming leaner as it settled into accumbency for the long night ahead. Though still early in the life cycle—people were standing around in clusters, and only a couple of guests—a man and woman, both white-haired, who looked like they’d just gotten off the Concorde from de Gaulle—were dancing to the Stooges album pounding through the speakers. They were both wearing silk scarves and platform shoes. Once the party got a little older, the sofas would fill up, someone would dim the lights, the crowd’s id would emerge. These parties, if they were any good, went backward in time, the guests urging the river back upstream, toward their coolest years, always bygone, and they’d land on “I Can’t Explain” or Cavern-era Beatles and they’d abandon conversation for dancing when that frenzy of physical memory shot through their spines, everyone young again for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. That would come later. They were still on punk, music for corporate cools, according to my mother’s students, all of whom listened to reggae. Donna Summer would put in an appearance before a sustained bout of Bowie, depending on when Bo relinquished control of the stereo. No time soon, judging by the gunslinger’s slouch he’d assumed against the wall next to the cabinet. As long as he was manning the controls, it would be mood music for the cubes.
A young party, then, and it would pass through the stages with inevitable predictability, the same as every other party. What a sad thing, always striving to be unique, a party unlike all those that had gone before, a vanguard moment in communal relations, a night that charted, a memory. My mother had always thought of parties as events designed to foster collective amnesia, so that what you wanted in the end was a memorable place for forgetting. Cute.
She was in a clutch of five, the right number, the configuration at which two-by-two intimacy (always man-woman, man-woman, wasn’t it?) broke apart into the impersonal, performative stage-and-audience situation, a five-way conversation being a mythical Loch Ness sort of thing, because in reality, wasn’t it always just one guy speechifying while the other four stood there and swizzled, which was exactly what she was doing, swizzling, absently observing the varieties of digital combinations employed to cradle a wineglass, almost as individual as the faces above them, each one a signal, her mind wandering, fingernail polish color, prominence of hair between knuckles or lack thereof, presence and make of watch, style of bracelet, wedding ring.
Thank god we look at the nose when we’re talking, she thought. Thank god we don’t actually have to look into people’s eyes.
In her little flight of five (three women, two men), one woman and one man were married, one of each sex was not, and my mother was, but absent her spouse. They were all about the same age, steered toward one another by Jane, who’d then veered off in search of other lost souls, and they’d talked for a while about how consummate Jane was, and one of the men was funny, the married one, and the other one less so, thus playing catch-up, hard to watch, and both of the other women were perfectly nice, though one, wearing a huge white hat made out of an arctic fox, was overselling her boredom, making no effort to conceal her scans for a better option, a naked disregard for the feelings of the other guests that my mother admired, possibly because she herself was lashed to politic behavior like a sailor to the mast. I suppose it was that same appreciation for brutalist behavior that attracted her to my father. And, naturally, everyone was doing it, checking over the shoulder of whoever was standing opposite, just in case. Three knew each other (the couple and the fox hat), all had Jane and Bo in common, and they had talked out the blizzard and the married man was explaining the Coriolis effect—inaccurately, my mother thought, but what did it matter? She crunched an ice cube and heard the echo of her own mother’s voice, You’ll crack a tooth, and at the same time a more ventrally located dialogue, the morbid drone of Henry Kissinger lecturing her on Viennese-era sexual frustrations.
Low-pressure systems. Low pressure, the man was saying.
I’ve never understood any of it, his wife said. Nothing but a bunch of wavy lines to me, she said, smiling with her whole face, beaming, shooting rays of sunlight out of her mouth.
Lows bring precipitation. And now here’s the interesting part. The Coriolis effect makes wind blow counterclockwise around a low.
Good god, Terry, his wife said, are you trying to get us thrown out of here with all this subversive talk?
Everyone laughed.
Come on, this is interesting, isn’t it? It’s—it’s—it’s human history, it’s ancient seafaring knowledge. Someday it might come in handy. Like when we get tossed out into the blizzard because of your big mouth. He swatted his wife on the ass. She made a Kewpie doll face and said, Did you say counter cock wise?
Good grief, Marg, said that fox hat.
If you stand with your back to the wind, the low-pressure system will be on your left—left for low—and the high-pressure system will be on your right, so when you’re rounding, say, the Cape of Good Hope, making for Madagascar, you’ll know how to avoid those nasty low-pressure hurricanes I’m sure you’ve all heard so much about.