On Looking: Essays Read online

  The pin continues as a sliver of glass or jagged piece of shell on the beach continues. The sky here, now, is as low and vast as some other sky, elsewhere and past, and I step over: I, whose hand in a plastic glove swept through a cow’s stomach. I, who was told the window in the cow’s side, the cannula, still-awful word, didn’t hurt at all. Imagine the child pairing the word “window” with “stomach”, squaring the phrase “won’t hurt at all” with “the cow’s side is open for us all to touch.” Imagine the child on a high, wobbly stool, sweating, itchy—it was early June—watching, beginning to narrate her own hesitation:

  She pulled out a handful of cud and it was sweet-smelling. She was not the least bit afraid to press her face against the warm hide, to plunge her arm down and feel the stringy, matted stuff.

  It wasn’t fear, but the adults’ insistence that skewed the scene. “The cow never even notices the hands inside her stomach,” and “go on, go ahead” they urged.

  And though I did go ahead (I was a brave child), I could not make the moment grow, and I knew this resistance to be right. I could not make the cow a thing. That story would not unfold.

  I keep in front of me always, on a sill or shelf, in every place I’ve ever lived since college, the jaw of a calf I found in a field. It was January in the Badlands of South Dakota. The cold was shattering; it left one literally breathless and coughing. One night the Sioux rancher I was staying with for the term got a call that part of his herd wandered out of the barn and their faces were iced to the ground. In the blackness, he and his sons dressed and went out with blow torches to free them and bring them back in. I did not live for long on the Reservation; I was only working there for a while. But I have the jawbone with its planes and curves, and I can see, anytime I look up, the darkened patches, the curtains of teeth, their folds and pleats, the porous, roughened bone with grays and creams, and where the light finds a translucent patch, a delicate near-pink.

  I keep it because, as forms go, it’s shapely, beautiful. I might say, more accurately, it speaks to me. There’s a crescent-shaped hole where a cord once went through, a few teeth are broken and the joint’s only partial, but it gathers around it the idea of what flesh used to be. And in that way becomes substantial, softens, contours, draws around it the possibility of what once was, the story of another life.

  If the thing is a form desire takes, I like to be reminded of that, going out, coming back, stepping over the pin, morning, afternoon, the pin dangerously open and tense and snagging the available light.

  Red: An Invocation

  I remember the fox in the light I drove forth. It was just before dawn. The headlights lit the fox’s eyes, who did not blink but passed the light back, so it shone between us. Two beams of dust in colloidal silence spread and touched the dark brush by the side of the alley. The fox was ember-colored, fresh-snapped, and already cooling.

  Later that morning, I remember seeing nothing at first but a puff of crisp leaves, a burned smear in a tree. Then I stopped below the hawk. On the scythe-curve of its breast, I remember the color as blood-dried-in-air, as the rough, indeterminate edge of a notion, just forming. I remember thinking “it looms over us,” then saying aloud “looming over” and then, to better myself, to sharpen my sight, when it flew I said “the air of the loom.”

  I was walking my son to nursery school when I saw how the notion forming was poised, with hawklike curves, with foxlike silence.

  With that red.

  Red, come toward me. Stay, as I walk with him. Shorten the distance from this teeming place to that, as we cross, as we ford with one step, another, and another, ford as a pioneer girl did—the year is 1846, vast with rivers and mountains—and who, casting back for the story’s beginning, mid-summer before the terrible snows, before Donner Pass was so named, wrote: “let me say that we suffered vastly more fear . . . before starting than we did on the plains.”

  I looked along the hawk’s burnished body, its smooth burnished weight. But “burnished?” No.

  And “red” for the body of the fox isn’t right, though when you look, as you might for long minutes if you’ve never seen a fox before, not like this, so still and so close, you’d see, not red exactly, but how the color is a form, recognizable: a particular concentration inhering, a body’s signature reflex and decision. The barest gesture we know a thing by, and by which, in a breath, it is gone.

  “As she forded the schoolyard, the loom of warm air shuttled fast above, and she took her son’s hand . . .” I wrote of myself in my head as we walked, though I did not point the hawk out to him.

  The moon was still just a sliver, and the light I drove forth showed the fox’s front leg held aloft, strictly still: it could not know if this was the light of kindness or a killing spot, and so with one leap, all deftness and economy, the fox slipped into the underbrush, wholly out of sight. As it disappeared, the tail of the fox was a wisp, a streaked, feathery plume.

  As the hawk lifted up, its brushfire tail was barely a rustle. That is, that morning, the hawk with the breast of a useful blade, with its breath and intention and hunger contained, took off from the highest, steady branch. Its underwing red, its shoulders red-dipped.

  By red I mean the last thing I could see as the hawk disappeared.

  As the fox slipped away.

  And yes, I led my child into that day.

  The Smallest Woman in the World

  . . . said the red letters on the painted measuring stick at the Maryland State Fair. It was a hot, darkening day, the sky holding off rain. Between the play-till-you-win fishing game and made-to-look-old carousel, there was her booth. The Smallest Woman in the World.

  Do you want to see her, I asked Joseph and his friend, Denis. Yes, they said. It was only fifty cents. Ania, who just told us that she was afraid of big characters in costumes and so would never go to Disney World, figured she was not going to like a very small person either, and stayed out. The man at the entrance returned her fifty cents, in dimes.

  Joseph and Denis went into the tent and peeked behind a cubicle, gray and fabric-covered like in an office. I saw them waving. Waving back, since at seven, they wouldn’t have thought to do so on their own.

  Yes, a heart can sink. A heart can drop as fast as a white rock in a clear river, a dry leaf in white water. A heart can sink far from sight, the misstep above chipping the rock, the pieces hitting each outcrop down the steep cliff: there was a folded blue wheelchair in the corner. There was a cheap wheelchair I was hoping the boys wouldn’t notice.

  Because then she’d be small-because-hurt. Small-due-to-problems. Not little-pal small. Not hold-her-in-your-pocket-magically-small, like a coin or a frog. Not small as a secret, or the very idea of a dog waiting all day outside the school fence—just for you.

  Hoping they didn’t see what? The way the chair leaned into the makeshift corner? Its blue, tarplike back? Its own terrible smallness? How its careless placement broke the illusion of small-for-small’s sake?

  I stayed out of the tent. I wasn’t going to leave Ania alone, with her fear of large characters transforming. I could not let her stand there while I went with the boys, who of course, also needed to hold a hand while looking.

  Looking at what?

  The Smallest Woman in the World.

  Now, weeks later, Joseph still can’t sleep and comes calling: I’m thinking of the smallest woman in the world. Why? And: When will I stop thinking of her?

  When I was eighteen, and in college, I began to think a lot about being seen. I remember not wanting to be seen “as an object.” And that we insisted on being called “women.” But just a few weeks ago, walking past some old, drunk guys on the stoop of a neighborhood bar, I reversed my position. I let them look. I allowed them the sight of me. I mean I did not scowl and did not turn sharply away. At eighteen, I’d have been edgy and hard; I’d have walked past with my shoulders angled to cover my body. But I walked by them thinking, “If this is all you have, if all you can do is look, then here, look. Take it al
l in.” It was easy to do, though not enjoyable. If it was some sort of sacrifice, it was not hard—first profile, then a full frontal view. What do you want to see—some ass passing by? The swing in my walk? And you, some breast? I was on the way to meet a friend and had been singing a John Pryne song I like these days: “Somebody said they saw me, swinging the world by the tail, bouncing over a white cloud, killing the blues.”

  You’re seeing me killing the blues, I thought—you’re seeing that, right?—the white cloud, the world by the tail? Because I’m in deep, and somehow that’s clear to you three, who have been drinking, it must be, for hours already, though it’s still early morning. I’m killing the particular blues I’ve got by laughing a little at your stupid, raw comments, by turning toward and not away, and the amber liquid is tilting a line, like—so clearly it comes back—the cross section of a glacial lake up against its perpetual glass in the Museum of Natural History back in New York. What you’re holding in your hands, in that bag, is terrain. What I am is—terrain. Map me, then, Sailor. Lay me out. Say you’re just passing through and want to see a sweet thing before you leave port.

  But she wasn’t passing through. The boys were. They walked up to the cubicle and waited and waved. And stood for a moment and waved again. And then turned to go—as she must have turned from them, and back to something at hand, at rest in her lap. Enough, her eyes must have indicated. That’s all you get.

  I did not see what my son saw. He went out without me and now he’s lost there, in the scene, with her, though she was nice, he assures me. She had a plastic jack-o’-lantern of candy she was eating from. A jack-o’-lantern, I asked? Yes, he said, with her hand digging in it. It was August. And that gesture, that image, will displace him for weeks: the jack-o’-lantern in summer. The candy unoffered. Her own private stash. And was there a book, tableside, she was reading? A tiny TV? My own questions keep coming. Does that man make her sit there, my son asks and asks. Is he mean? Is she happy? Does she want to be there? Mom, why am I sad? Is it because I looked at her like she was a sculpture? Why is he advertising her?

  The other day, in the early September sun, I walked for a block or so to try this out: hands behind my head and elbows out, to take up a lot of room, like the guy who had just passed me. He was walking down a wide, shady street, at home in the ease of his body’s expanse. And yes, walking that way, I take up a lot of room, as he did, but there’s this: when my hands are behind my head, my breasts lift up. Am I freer because I take up more space, or less free because now I’m even more seen? Do I provoke more attention, erode my own space, invite, by the provocation I cannot help being, another’s gaze into the scene?

  I just want to be that guy, arms up in the cool air, my shoulders and neck stretching, lungs open, ribs rising.

  I want to lift my shirt and scratch my stomach as a friend of mine does wherever he likes. “I do that?” he asks. Yes, you do, I point out—in the kitchen, in the store. On a walk. Wherever you like.

  When will I stop thinking of her? my son asks and asks.

  I have a friend who goes to strip joints. (And who, by the way, has written surprise compassion into those scenes, real compassion, the kind that shows he knows the below-deck of all the whirling hers in the dark surround: working mother, or artist, activist, would-be accountant. How formal and graceful his words become when touching, yes, touching, that other.) I have another friend who subscribes to Playboy. (Who thinks it’s more the anticipation—article, article, article: photo!—than the photos themselves that... do it for him.) What do I think about that, he asks. What do I think of his subscription. I tell him: why not? As in: go ahead. Live it up. I say why not?—because I, too, like to look. At everything. To see myself. To see myself being seen. Though Playboy certainly used to bother me. A lot, when I was eighteen. My son, reading his cousin’s 1970 collector’s edition one morning this summer when we were visiting, woke me saying “This is disgusting! Why are their clothes off?” At five a.m., this was all I could muster: I said it isn’t disgusting, that the body is beautiful and it’s natural to be naked, but the magazine isn’t for kids. Not at all, hand it over.

  My son still thinks, by way of the perspective in photos or drawings in magazines that some people are really very small—say, two inches high, and you can hold them in your hand. Just pluck them out of the photo and pocket them. He wants to know where they live. A boy in Sudan on a tiny barren hill. Can I take him? he asks. Home, he means, and can I hold him here safely?

  There’s a scene I remember from college, an image so sharp and clear and impressive I remember thinking, you’ll retain this. It was my last year and I was standing outside the militant vegetarian co-op with a friend, talking. And I stopped, just stopped midsentence, and she looked in the direction I was looking. “He’s cute,” she said. But that wasn’t it at all. I was aware of his beauty, and of my easy desire, but more powerful still, I wanted to be him. I wanted the angular frame and slim hips, low belt and button-flys resting just so. I wanted the T-shirt’s sharp fall from his shoulders to fall from my shoulders. For a long moment he didn’t even have a face. I couldn’t unravel the two desires: I wanted to look and to touch, yes. But more than that, really, I wanted to be him.

  I look now, at forty, more like him than ever. I’ve pared down. I wear my pants low, with a belt and I tuck in my T-shirts, simple white T-shirts or green or black ones. And though I’ve lost the wide hips of a new mother and the full breasts for feeding, the lines of me are still rounded. Is this a body a man would want to inhabit? Would a man want to be—I mean walk, sleep, move—in this frame?

  When I started to read the Little House on the Prairie books to my son, I was prepared. While I loved the characters, and identified with them fully—the sisters whose hands were cut from twisting straw into makeshift logs for the fire, their bare faces browned by hot, summer sun, their calico dresses, the rough crunch of batting and ticking at night as they slept—I was prepared for him not to like the books. I was ready for him to say “this is for girls.” But he didn’t. Not once. I believe he felt that slightest membrane between bodies, that he saw how easily one form can inhabit another. There, on the prairie, in the dug-out, the lean-to, he tasted their water, cool from a dipper. He slapped down the bread and basted by lamplight. He sang with the family. He blew out a candle. He slept with a quilt.

  He wanted to be one of them.

  As he very much did not want to be small, and displayed at a fair in the heat of August.

  The Space Between

  Now, more than hitherto, there occurs shocks, surges, crossings, falls and almost scrambles, creating thus a different space, a space scattered and unknown, space enclosing spaces, superimposed, inserted, polyphonic perspectives.

  —Henri Michaux

  Where is the fear this afternoon? Where did it go and why can’t I locate it now?

  A goldfinch flies up while leaves, gold and russety, sift and fall. A flight up, a flight down, the very air marked, so both rising and falling are held in a furor of sunstruck ongoingness.

  I am outside this bright afternoon.

  And even as I am built anew by fear these days, here, in Baltimore, I am also, right now, assembled by the brisk feel of New England, and fall, and my childhood there. That peace. Those biting blue skies. The elements mingle, brick by brick (though the sensation is softer and welling) and add up to this moment, a seep and twining that constitute now. Of course, this moment has little to do with simple construction, simple addition. But it’s hard not to think in these terms.

  I’ll try again.

  Events crosshatch: the air this afternoon is cleanly scented, still unstark, and in it, among sheering leaves, among goldfinches lifting and scalloping air, a sniper—in a patch of woods, gas station, mall parking lot—is hiding, aiming and shooting.

  And here, too, is the heavy sweater I’m wearing, thin at the elbows, the bruisy ferment of old apples, leaf dust, clouds stacked high in the west, peace.

  Other things, too,
are stacking up today: campaigns for Maryland’s governor, though few of us now seem to notice, so frightened are we to pump gas, to let the children walk to school. Candidates must wrest control of voter attention, the paper says. “Rest” I say to my son, who learned from other kindergartners there’s a bad person out there shooting, my son who’s going to take it easy this afternoon, play Crazy 8’s, maybe a little chess, inside.

  Inside such perfect weather, an investigation is mounting. State Mounties are out on their horses, horses such as the angry men mounted this evening as they rode out of De Smet, Dakota Territories, to a riot at Stebbins camp, deep in Montana, 1878, I read to my son as he went uneasily to bed. As the Ingalls family rested uneasily By the Shores of Silver Lake, in the perpetual now that is book time. The children tucked in, the lake serene, the riot ongoing in moonlight, on a night just like this, I point out the window and up, to where “the great round moon hung in the sky and its radiance poured over a silvery world. Far, far away in every direction stretched motionless flatness, softly shining as if it were made of soft light.” The moon outside Joseph’s window. The very moon that swallowed both that writer’s fear, and mine.

  See how the moments go layering up?

  These days, late afternoons in our small living room, a form unfurls and spreads its weave—music building and cloaking, uncloaking and reaching. The fugue my husband is working on makes available to light, and with a light of its own brings forth a moment: amber with its captured specks, bubbles of breath and veering planes. And across the country, now, right now, in that other Washington, where it’s a still-bright two in the afternoon, there’s a search on for bullets a suspect once fired into a stand of trees. In a quiet neighborhood, ATF agents saw down stumps and haul them away in trucks as evidence.