came downstairs to tuck me in and kiss me sweet dreams, she still had on her perfume, her triangular earrings, her lipstick, her purple dress, her gold bracelet, her gold watch, her black high heels—all that evidence of having competed in the world and won—and looked so pretty I decided I must never lose her love.
In order to make certain I hadn’t forgotten to tell her something she should know about, I took to telling her anything that could possibly be construed as bad behavior. For a while, this was a charming enough ritual—every night after dinner, Jeremy sitting on Mother’s lap and recounting all the little misdemeanors he’d committed—but very quickly I became fixated upon filling her with negative information. No offense was too trivial, no confession was too exhaustive. If while playing with friends I indulged them by speaking of Willie Mays as a “nigger,” or while walking the dog I pulled the leash so hard I made little Bruin choke, I couldn’t wait to rush home and tell Mother how dreadful I’d been. My after-dinner apology grew so lengthy Mother would lie down on the living room couch where, while she kept one ear on what I was saying, she’d watch Chet Huntley, dip oatmeal cookies in lemon tea, and read the
Examiner.
Before I finished my disclosures, she’d be sound asleep with oatmeal crumbs across her lips, and the paper—open to the Op-Ed page—at her feet.
The only way to attenuate the atonement was to do no wrong. I set out to be perfect. I treated Bruin with respect. I called people only by their Christian names. I crossed the street at the stoplight, a mile away, on top of a hill. I gave blood. I didn’t listen to baseball games in bed. I emptied the trash twice a day and went out at night to hose it down. I burned comic books whose binding staples I determined to be inexactly aligned. I gave all my money to skinny girls in Africa. These devotions lasted for months, but they amounted to nothing because goodness gave way to spotlessness. I showered and showered and showered. I washed my hands so often a rash formed on my palms and when the rash cleared I washed my hands so often a rash formed on my palms and when the rash cleared…. What money I didn’t spend on African girls I used to buy a small-scale vacuum cleaner. I dusted on top, in between, underneath, inside. After dusting, I’d vacuum. After vacuuming, I’d dust. I changed bed sheets every night. I changed clothes every hour. I wiped the towel rack until it broke. I scrubbed the sink until the splash of tap water felt like iron filth upon my marble white sculpture. My nightmare image was a
National Geographic
photograph of a parched lake bed cracked into an infinity of caked chaos. Last week, while we were packing up my parents’ ex-house, Gretchen called me “the boy in love with bare rooms.”
Mother’s cover article for the National Federation of Nurses monthly magazine was called “From Tears to Triumph,” and its opening bars I could practically hum:
The reactions of parents to the birth of a malformed infant involve a form of grief closely associated with the mourning process. Some mothers quickly see the birth defect as a realistic problem; others may continue to look at the child as proof of their own inadequacy—visible evidence of their own imperfection. Mothers usually react with strong feelings of hurt, guilt, and helpless resentment to a congenitally deformed child.
“From Tears to Triumph” ended up winning for Mother the coveted Nightingale Award from the National Federation of Nurses and, if there is power here to the prose, it seemed to me to owe itself to the fact that it sounded as if she were writing about her son. For all I know, she just might have been, because this insane epistemological touching, this hypochondriacal perfectionism in which life appeared primarily as a problem, this sickness got sicker.
The two impulses—the desire, on the one hand, to be morally impeccable and the
In order to make certain I hadn’t forgotten to tell her something she should know about, I took to telling her anything that could possibly be construed as bad behavior. For a while, this was a charming enough ritual—every night after dinner, Jeremy sitting on Mother’s lap and recounting all the little misdemeanors he’d committed—but very quickly I became fixated upon filling her with negative information. No offense was too trivial, no confession was too exhaustive. If while playing with friends I indulged them by speaking of Willie Mays as a “nigger,” or while walking the dog I pulled the leash so hard I made little Bruin choke, I couldn’t wait to rush home and tell Mother how dreadful I’d been. My after-dinner apology grew so lengthy Mother would lie down on the living room couch where, while she kept one ear on what I was saying, she’d watch Chet Huntley, dip oatmeal cookies in lemon tea, and read the
Examiner.
Before I finished my disclosures, she’d be sound asleep with oatmeal crumbs across her lips, and the paper—open to the Op-Ed page—at her feet.
The only way to attenuate the atonement was to do no wrong. I set out to be perfect. I treated Bruin with respect. I called people only by their Christian names. I crossed the street at the stoplight, a mile away, on top of a hill. I gave blood. I didn’t listen to baseball games in bed. I emptied the trash twice a day and went out at night to hose it down. I burned comic books whose binding staples I determined to be inexactly aligned. I gave all my money to skinny girls in Africa. These devotions lasted for months, but they amounted to nothing because goodness gave way to spotlessness. I showered and showered and showered. I washed my hands so often a rash formed on my palms and when the rash cleared I washed my hands so often a rash formed on my palms and when the rash cleared…. What money I didn’t spend on African girls I used to buy a small-scale vacuum cleaner. I dusted on top, in between, underneath, inside. After dusting, I’d vacuum. After vacuuming, I’d dust. I changed bed sheets every night. I changed clothes every hour. I wiped the towel rack until it broke. I scrubbed the sink until the splash of tap water felt like iron filth upon my marble white sculpture. My nightmare image was a
National Geographic
photograph of a parched lake bed cracked into an infinity of caked chaos. Last week, while we were packing up my parents’ ex-house, Gretchen called me “the boy in love with bare rooms.”
Mother’s cover article for the National Federation of Nurses monthly magazine was called “From Tears to Triumph,” and its opening bars I could practically hum:
The reactions of parents to the birth of a malformed infant involve a form of grief closely associated with the mourning process. Some mothers quickly see the birth defect as a realistic problem; others may continue to look at the child as proof of their own inadequacy—visible evidence of their own imperfection. Mothers usually react with strong feelings of hurt, guilt, and helpless resentment to a congenitally deformed child.
“From Tears to Triumph” ended up winning for Mother the coveted Nightingale Award from the National Federation of Nurses and, if there is power here to the prose, it seemed to me to owe itself to the fact that it sounded as if she were writing about her son. For all I know, she just might have been, because this insane epistemological touching, this hypochondriacal perfectionism in which life appeared primarily as a problem, this sickness got sicker.
The two impulses—the desire, on the one hand, to be morally impeccable and the
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