The Summer Without Men

Not long after, his boy died. A month later, he died. Meidung is also known as “the slow death.” Two of the elders who had approved the Meidung also died. There were bodies all over the stage.
    It seemed to me at the time that I had fallen under an evil enchantment, the source of which could not be proven, only guessed at, because the crimes were small and mostly hidden: pinches that didn’t happen, hurtful notes written by no one: “You are a big fake,” the mysterious destruction of my English paper, the drawing I had left on my desk—found scribbled over—jeers and whispers, anonymous telephone calls, the silence of not being answered. We find ourselves in the faces of others, and so for a time every mirror reflected a foreigner, a despised outsider unworthy of being alive. Mia. I rescrambled it. I am. I wrote it over and over in my notebook. I am. I am Mia. Among my mother’s books I found an anthology of poems and in it, John Clare’s poem, “I Am.”
     
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied, stifled throes—
And yet, I am, and live—like vapors tossed
     
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise …
    I had no idea what “self-consumer of my s tossedx201D; meant. It might have helped. A little irony, child, a little distance, a little humor, a little indifference. Indifference was the cure, but I couldn’t find it in myself. The actual cure was escape. That simple. My mother arranged it. St. John’s Academy in St. Paul, a boarding school. There I was smiled upon, recognized, befriended. There I found Rita, co-conspirator with long black braids and Mad magazine, fan of Ella, Piaf, and Tom Lehrer. Lying each in a bunk, we crooned out in faltering harmony every verse of “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” (I felt bad for the fictional pigeons, actually, but the sweet camaraderie of Rita far outweighed the pinch of pity.) Her pale brown legs. My white ones with a few freckles. My bad poems. Her good cartoons.
    I remember my mother as she stood in the doorway to our room on the first day. She was so much younger, and I can’t summon the precise features of her face as it was then. I do recall the worried but hopeful look in her eyes before she left me, and that when I hugged her I smashed my face into the shoulder of her jacket and told myself to inhale. I wanted to keep the smell of her with me—that mingled odor of loose powder and Shalimar and wool.
    *   *   *
     
    It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shapeless; an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank: We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes. And yet, as I sit here at my desk and try to bring it back, that summer not so long ago, I know turns were made that affected what followed. Some of them stand out like bumps on a relief map, but then I was unable to perceive them because my view of things was lost in the undifferentiated flatness of living one moment after another. Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia. Consciousness is the product of delay. Sometime in early June, during the second week of my stay, I made a small turn without being aware of it, and I think it began with the secret amusements.
    *   *   *
     
    Abigail had arranged for me to see her handicrafts. Her apartment was smaller than my mother’s and, at first glance, I felt inundated by the shelves of tiny glass figurines, the embroidered pillows and wall signs (“Home Sweet Home”), and the multicolored quilts folded over furniture. Various artworks covered most of the walls and Abigail herself, who was decked out in a long loose dress embellished with what appeared to be an alligator and other creatures. Despite the dense arrangements, the room had that neat, newly dusted, proud feeling I had come to expect from the swans of Rolling Meadows. Because she could no longer stand upright, Abigail used a walker to deftly propel herself around in the doubled-over position. She opened the door, shifted her head sideways to eye me, and, fingering her hearing aid with her free hand, looked intently in my direction. The auditory devices were not like the ones my mother wore; they were much