On Looking: Essays Read online

  I now have a child, and because of this, it’s assumed in the subtlest ways that being a mother constitutes a certain aesthetic, a frame for observations, a dependable set of responses. For example, if someone sneezes and you, a mother, rummage around and come up with a tissue you’re likely to hear “oh, you’re always prepared” or even “what a good mother.” Actually, I carry tissues because I have allergies and sneeze a lot—just like my father, who never hears about being a good father for handing out Kleenex. He keeps his in a neat little cloth packet, made expressly for that purpose. I suppose I should say, too, that I wad tissues up, before and after use, and they sift to the dark bottom of my knapsack gathering dust. And that I never have enough.

  But because I am a mother, I was told a disturbing story. The story belonged to a teenager I knew who recently had a baby. I don’t think I reacted as I was supposed to—maybe not enough outrage or pity upfront. Too quietly. And not quickly enough. I watched her face as she told the story; it was round, mild, and smudged by the tasks of the day and I wanted to wipe it. I never thought I would feel that way, though I do now, and often, and for people other than children. I may be over-dramatizing; perhaps I commiserated properly. It certainly wasn’t lack of anger that restrained my reaction, but the confusion that always arises when the issue, at heart, has to do with aesthetics.

  I know why she wanted to tell me her story: my response would shore up a certainty of hers about mothers, but I’m not sure she was aware of this. I’ll tell you the story and some others that gather around it which constitute, really, the whole slippery problem of aesthetics and being a mother.

  One afternoon, because she does not have a job (except, of course, for the caretaking) she and the baby were sitting together on the front porch of the place they live when a planet came down, a tiny planet she thought, or maybe a jewel, a lit spangle; it was something amazing. It came to rest on the baby’s head, light as snow but it didn’t melt. It traveled, jittery, over the wrinkles on his forehead. She said the circle was M&M-sized. M&Ms were the rule she used. This was the year laser-pointers were all the rage and you could buy them cheap and affix them to anything. Someone had a bead on the boy and held his stillness in place with crosshairs. He must have been an easy mark. I once looked through a gun’s scope and knew that crosshairs whittle a viewer’s world down to a manageable thumbnail. I remember how purely relaxing it was to see in that way, everything cropped, in focus, contained.

  The target shone three concentric rings and made of the flare that could have been pain, a little red spot on the baby’s head. The men weren’t using the gun as a gun, just as a scope, but I knew, as she herself was learning daily, all it takes is one slip. (And, as if to support this point, I heard later that day from a friend who, distracted by coughing, shot himself in the knee with a nail gun while fixing his fence.)

  This was the week my son loved the word “knee,” and touching mine, his father’s, his, spoke the word like an incantation, until it lost sense and began to sound like cheers at a rally. We loved the way an ordinary word collapsed its meaning into pure sound; it made us fall together, laughing.

  The red lingered on the child’s forehead, then moved to the soft spot where the bones had not yet knitted up. As a mother, of course, one reads with both shuddery interest and fear about the fontanel and about being careful, but it always felt remarkably strong when I stroked it. Still, I kept sharp things, heavy things away. A laser, though, will roam anywhere and project the shape of anything at all: Mickey Mouse ears; a glow-red heart over the place a heart should go; a cloverleaf; a lucky 7. Anything with its small heat can dance over the body.

  I have known the heat of the morning to swell the old wood of stairs, baseboards, molding, and release from within the deep core of a house something of water and dust and age. Even as a child I was pleased by that scent. As it lifted and floated on air, I’d feel I was not alone, that the scent was of my history, there in my grandmother’s house, and was conjured anew every day by the heat. I love that smell, still. It catches light and fixes time: early mornings especially, when I stayed at my grandmother’s house to get over a cold at my leisure while my parents were working. As I came down the stairs the scent would rise and I’d move through it, toward the couch, to settle in for the day with my fever. My great aunt—it was her house, too—would start cooking, before the pace of the day overwhelmed, the scents would further complicate, and there, my body, warm with its manageable aches, repaired.

  Later in the day, after I heard the girl’s story, my son and I were playing in an overgrown field. And because I live these days at a crouch, I found a four-leaf clover. I wasn’t searching. Nor was I hoping. It was a big one, the size of a quarter, with a shirring of very light, almost white rick-rack along the edge of each leaf. The clover was heavy and moist with dew, the stem a beautifully taut little straw of lighter translucent green. I used to press things like this flat in a book or keep them preserved between two strips of clear tape, but that day I told my son about clovers and luck and then gave it to him to play with however he wanted.

  The laser on the baby’s head was a cherry lozenge, a button, a tack. The color of holly berries, chokeable, dangerous, we keep from our son. It was all a joke. Intended to be, and no, no one was shot. Not the girl who was learning to be a mother, not the baby on whom the light was training.

  The laser on the child’s head, she learned by their laughter, was “just a joke.” And in fact, the men parked at the curb repeated the phrase later to the police. From what the girl said, they were somewhat indignant (though she didn’t say it exactly that way) as if she, out of stubborness, refused to admit it was funny. As if she, and not the joke itself, was causing the trouble.

  The men in the car parked at the curb laughed at her confusion; in particular how at first, in awe, she followed the light back to the source to be sure it wasn’t a holy event she just saw: something alighting. Something bestowing. What they liked especially was the way she jumped up when she noticed the light, and with one arm scrambled the air while screaming and holding the sleeping baby. It was slap-stick funny, lowly as pots and pans clanging down on the head of, say, a bachelor, trying to bake his first cake. And the cake a wedding cake at that! One that, later, would turn out, surprise, to be his! But first, the messy scenes with skidding, twists and turns, a flour-cloud rising, the amusing vertigo that comes from keeping too much in the air at once. They found her thus, heavily up and out of the lawn chair, holding the baby tight, hair a mess, kicking the Coke, crashing in through the meager screen door.

  And that’s not all; there’s more, a kind of backstory: she had been undressed by their sight, which, after it touched the boy’s head, traveled up her arm, over her shoulder, and bounced breast to breast. (Maybe they poked one another and said follow the bouncing ball and sang a simple, bawdy song. Funny to see her try to brush the beam off like an insect. Perhaps one of them thought she moved delicately then, as if she were a milkmaid, a shepherd girl, wearing a bodice of lace in which some scratchy hay was caught. Dishabille might not have occurred, but kind of messy-pretty? Maybe. For a moment, maybe. Then he would remember where he was and put the thought out of his head. Because to keep it there would mean he had seen her differently. That she was not exactly funny. And since she was trying to swat her breast and not swat the baby’s head, and everything was flying apart, that was enough to think about for now, and he would just laugh along with the rest.)

  But that’s my take. My story, not hers.

  “Why would they do that?” she asked me.

  And although it was insufficient (you’ll see why), I did answer. I believe a mother should answer, as best she can, the questions put to her.

  Once in a park, I stopped to drink from a fountain and there in the cement bowl was a silver dollar. Lucky! I thought and bent to pick it up; lovelier still, wet and shining. But it resisted. I pulled and pulled until I heard laughter and realized two older boys were holding the end of some fishing line l
ooped through a tiny hole in the coin. I bent my head and walked away fast, in shame. And then they laughed louder. But when I got home and considered the scene, it was kind of funny and I wished I’d thought up the prank. I remember, soon after, looking for books on practical jokes in the library.

  When Geppetto made Pinocchio he made a puppet, which of course he could manipulate, make jump at will, and dance. But he didn’t want that. He wanted the boy to be real: good but imperfect. I just read the book to a friend’s little girl. She liked the lying-and-consequence parts best: the donkey ears, the pole of a nose that a bird, two birds, then a whole flock could perch on. Peck at. Which hurt Pinocchio but didn’t stop his being naughty. She liked that, too. It was sad-scary-funny. Or amusing-right-frightening. After we finished the book and were talking, she couldn’t say why she liked those moments. And she couldn’t decide if it was all right to like them. I said I felt the same way. I said it was complicated. And disappointed in my answer, she went right to bed.

  From their car the men watched a woman move like a puppet, but there was no moral. It was just a great scene. They liked it that way, who, long ago, would have been drunks on a rough bench after days in hot fields, at the foot of the stage of an opera buffa or vaudeville act, any traveling show. Audience, relieved of monotony, for whom banana peel slip-ups are reverie: better him than me, better to see him go down, land on his ass and turn around steamed, as if to accuse the peel, cracked sidewalk, hole, broken step. Funny, as if it had never happened to them.

  And that’s the magic of burlesque: you forget, by way of extravagance, that a planet once came to your cheek, that a circle of light, the red eye of a new god traveled to find you at rest and stayed.

  You sit back and enjoy the play.

  It’s someone else’s fate on stage: the dumb man’s, the sleeping child’s, hers.

  “Why would they do that?” she asked.

  I was staring out at the yard no one mowed, the baby’s clothes on the drying rack, the high, broken curb where the men parked their car. I was thinking: because they just happened to find it funny. That’s why. That’s aesthetics. Complex. Unpredictable.

  But I said: because they’re idiots.

  Because, being a mother, I knew what she needed just then.

  On Form

  . . . It is the forged feature finds me; it is the rehearsal

  Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear. . . .

  —Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry Purcell

  How does the guy with hooks for arms jerk off?

  But it didn’t come forth as a joke. Nor was the answer “very carefully.”

  More powerfully, there was his face, a face used to seeing questions like this in others’ faces. How does a face like that look? It didn’t shut me down. It didn’t slam or ignore or isolate. But he recognized the question (hooks working the receipt into his wallet). He’d heard/seen it all before (outside the store, whoa, he drives a car with those things!). There was a shape to the question and it was a cliché to him. Thus, I felt seen, transparent. Naked. Looked through and turned inside out and found lacking. In imagination. Or just a beginner.

  But neither did he see me imagining (the hooks unstrapped, the harness off) his arms on me: small of my back. Back of my neck.

  Lifting my hair.

  I’m practicing now.

  Someone I know tilts her head to the side when looking hard at another. The gesture always annoyed me and seemed a contrived show of attention. Then I tried it. And it was like voices pouring in; it was like opening the front door and sweeping wide an arm for guests. Like kneeling in front of a child, eye to eye, to ease the confession. Inviting. Hospitable. I didn’t know that.

  I’ll go on then, angled to the pour of these forms.

  Though this may seem indecorous.

  The hotel manager in Cambridge that afternoon was impatient with me. His name was Khalid. He was bald and had a large, flat forehead that shone. But his forehead was crushed in one spot, like a soda can gets dented. Or a garbage can. And the light lingered there, on the dent, and darkened as I asked—and asked again—for directions to the airport. Someone must run their hand over the dent and smooth it and know the dip of bone and hammock of skin as one knows the contours of a temperamental lock, how to jiggle and fit the key, first one way and then the other, unthinkingly. And though I repeated the words back—Red Line, Green Line, Blue Line, Shuttle—I was really, standing in front of him, jiggling the key. Hand on the tumbler plate, pushing to go in.

  My child comes close to touch the imperfections of my face. Touches the flaws because they beckon. The white bumps and red bumps. Small scars. Dark spots. Counter, original, spare, strange. He touches because he can, because I allow it, though hiding back there (it’s bubbling up, he’s capping it, tapping it back down) is this: that thrill without a name. That weird package of love and revulsion, that “glad it’s not me” layered over with real tenderness. Some forward sway. Some retraction. And him teetering on the line between. When he does this, all the soft, pink, round things, all the brown, scarred, pitted things that held me as a kid come back. I remember my own secretive glances at the compromised, familiar faces I loved as a child. The tiny, stiff hairs that made nets to catch me. How even as I twisted free, I wanted to be caught.

  Here is a man fated to chew as if perpetually working an olive pit out of his mouth. There is a boy who spits when he talks and snuffles and is just too watery to make friends. And with the stem of a dandelion, cut, its bitter milk touched to the tongue, here I am, calling it “milk.” Swallowing the bitterness so that an outward sign might match the inner atmosphere I carry with me these last, long days of fall. Swallowing makes me wince and contort. I feel my mouth tighten and take some more in. If it’s poison, it’s not enough to hurt me, I reason. And anyway, I’m testing. Making tests. Rehearsing ways a face can twist.

  I use a mirror for this.

  I’ve been watching her run the bobbing-for-apples booth at the local fall festival with her friends. After long minutes, I draw a horizontal line to see the way the girl would look if her jaw could be fixed, reinvented, if it wasn’t so lumpy and overgrown. I draw with a black line, in my head. And then, because I’m at a distance, staring, I squint and hold up a finger to nudge the line of her new jaw into place. But the new line doesn’t work. Not at all. The next week, at a restaurant, in a booth across from me, is a younger girl with a half-sagging face and a bulging cheek. I go to work with my tools, sharp scalpel of sight, and pare her back to a simply chubby moon. I tack the sag up by her ear; I fix the slipped mouth. But her face is a soft curve of fine sand, a dune blown to an easy rise. It slips back into place and the fixing is wrong. The swell is like a velvet bag. What lovely behaviour of silk sack clouds. Throughout dinner she rested that cheek in her hand, as if she was thinking. Though I’m afraid she was hiding.

  “When the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it,” said Wittgenstein. And DaVinci wrote of the bodies he took apart to study, and to his colleagues inclined to work as he did “. . . if you should have a love for such things, you might be prevented by loathing . . . and if this did not prevent you, perhaps you might not be able to draw so well as is necessary for such a demonstration . . . or if you had the skill in drawing, it might not be combined with knowledge of perspective . . .”

  And so forewarned, I’ll try my hand: Anthony touched my face with his stump. We were fourteen. Anthony touched my face with his stump. I’ve said this phrase to myself for years. Sotto voce. Sometimes while walking. I say it in part because I like the beat, the variant anapests that beg another verse or want to break into hymn meter, and in part because that moment so impressed me. I hold the phrase itself up like an object of contemplation. His arm ended just below the elbow, this antic boy with raucous good humor, who played the trumpet and who, himself, called his arm “my stump.” The sensation was like nothing else I knew. Not a head, not a nudge. Not a child’s knee, not a ball. There was headlo
ng force, texture, heat (this was summer on Long Island) and his unselfconscious desire, which instructed me.

  In Botticelli’s portrait of St. Sebastian, the one I’ve looked at most recently in my ongoing study of St. Sebastians, it’s the outline of the arrows, the many, whole arrowheads buried beneath the skin, lodged in the flesh and those slight hillocks there, where the tip entered and stuck that holds me. So well-focused and attended, it’s more than a detail of the ecstasies of form: light, muscle, shadow. I think it’s what Botticelli wanted to paint most of all. The rise of flesh, stippled, blue-bleak; the body so changed and so reshaped, and how to praise that awful beauty—pied. Plotted. Pierced. I think this was the task he set himself.

  At one time I would go so far as to get out of the tub to better hear my neighbors fighting. I’d reach, dripping and freezing, over the toilet and open the window to listen more closely. I’d wish away the noisy trains coupling down the street. I’d wish away my housemate talking in the driveway below so that I might log new accusations in their falling and rising cadences. I practiced seeing gestures, appointed gestures to their words in the steamy cold. Deformities of anger, gnashing twisted mouths, inner bile stirred and poisoning their postures. I wished them peace, I did. But when they screamed, I felt I could see the corners of mouths pull back. I felt the word “gnashing” freeze a mouth. Eyebrows slant like blades sharply down. They were real gargoyles perched and turned to stone.

  All the better for sketching.