Читать книгу God Is Not a Boy’s Name - Lyn Brakeman - Страница 6

I was born through tears, none of them mine and all of them cried before I emerged to contribute my own. My mother had suffered three miscarriages, wept often on her doctor’s shoulder, and stormed heaven with her prayers. My first life achievement was hanging in there for nine months. I’ve been tenacious ever since.

It was high summer in 1938 when I whooshed into life, breaking my mother’s waters and interrupting my parents’ winning bridge game six weeks before a hurricane blasted the Northeast. Nineteen-thirty-eight was a teetery year between wars, but full of hope for prosperity and a brand-new line of Buicks, the car of choice for our family. It was Sunday, a day the church called holy and my mother called my personality, according to the rhyme: “The child that is born on the Sabbath day is blithe and bonnie and good and gay.” Sunday or no Sunday, her choice for my theme song never fit my personality—silent, somber, serious, and shy. Mom was the one full of gaiety and energy. From an early age I wished she would alight.

Dad gave me my name, Lynda with a “y” to call me Lyn or Lynnie, as well as his handsome features, thick dark hair, and introversion. He worked on Madison Avenue advertising soups, and my mother stayed home and advertised me. I was, she said, “my father’s child.” Such a dedication might have set me to wondering whether I was her child, but I didn’t because of her studious determination to remake me in her image, putting little bows in my unruly hair and daily dressing me in frilly pinafores. The red party shoes were acceptable, but honestly, the only good thing about pinafores was their “wings.” I wanted some hair-rumpling hugs that mussed me up but I don’t remember many. Still: I got something more, something that would intrigue me for the rest of my life.

“You are a miracle and a gift from God, Lynnie,” my mother told me more than once.

“What’s a miracle?” I asked.

“Something God does for us that we can’t do for ourselves,” she said. “I wanted a baby and I kept losing them. Miscarriage, it’s called. And then you came.”

“But didn’t I come from a hospital?” I asked.

“Of course, LeRoy Sanitarium, a maternity hospital in downtown Manhattan,” she said.

I would have kept up my questioning, but my mother had that “enough” look and turned aside. So I pondered my near-divinity on my own. Miracle status was problematic, in part because it earned me excesses of maternal praise and made me feel almost breakable, and in part because my younger sister Laurie never made it to miracle status, even though Mom had two miscarriages before her birth. I was just plain too miraculous for comfort. Being a gift from God, however, had promise. Who was God? What kind of gift was I? Where was God? I wanted to meet God.

I’d seen God in a book called The Little Book About God published just four years before I was born. It became my favorite book, so favorite my mother got sick of it. I still have it, crayon marks and all. God was an old man with a long white beard perched on a cloud and creating wonders on earth far below. In the city where we lived everything reached up, like an alleluia hymn, so on our daily playground walks I held tightly to the carriage and trained my gaze skyward searching for God. I never saw God up there though, so maybe my book’s sky-God wasn’t all there was to God.

Nightly, Mom and I prepared for Daddy’s homecoming. I shed the pinafore and hair bows. We bathed. Mom dressed me in a not-too-frilly nightgown, and herself in a lavender negligée and mules with open toes. She sat at her dressing table, prettying herself with bright red lipstick, rouge on her cheeks, and perfume behind her ears. I got a daub on my wrist. A cigarette hung out of one side of Mom’s mouth, causing her eye to squint as she brushed my hair to a sheen and said out of the other side of her mouth, “Isn’t this fun, darling?”

I nodded, held my nose, and requested some lipstick, which Mom spread on lightly with her fingertip.

“It’s just for girls,” she said. “The bewitching hour because we love Daddy.” My mother taught me vanity and an awareness that appearances could help me feel good-all-over feminine.

I begged for a book. “Just one, a short one, please, please, Mommy.” She read The Children’s Hour by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I held my breath.

Between the dark and the daylight,

When the night is beginning to lower,

Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,

That is known as the Children’s Hour.

I think my mother and I both longed for the children’s hour. It evoked a hope that hung unspoken in the air between us: This night will be different. But every night the Children’s Hour turned into the Cocktail Hour. Daddy would come in the door and we’d both run to meet him. He tossed his newspaper aside and picked me up for a kiss. His cheek was grizzly and tickled mine. He smelled like tobacco. “Smell my perfume, Daddy.” I held my wrist to his nose as he carried me to the bedroom where he changed into his velvet-lapeled smoking jacket. Then we all went into the living room. An hors d’oeuvres tray sat on the table in front of the blue-and-white sofa. Daddy sat in his Daddy chair, which had wings like my pinafores did. I sat in my small rocker. The stage was set for my mother’s entrance. She appeared on cue with the drinks on a tray, her large Coke and Daddy’s large cocktail shaker and his favorite glass—shaped like a triangle with a long slender stem and three enormous green cross-eyed olives nestled in its bottom. It was one of the few times my mother’s butterfly soul alighted. She riveted her attention on Daddy, who twirled the omnipotent glass and took sips. That glass sucked up all the attention I wanted for myself. We could’ve been in church for all the awe this ritual commanded.

“Can I have a sip, Daddy?” I asked, breaking the spell.

“Not for little girls,” he said.

“Mommy?” I said, and got a sip from her glass. I wondered if olive-filled glasses were for men only.

I rocked at breakneck speed and hummed little tunes, but no one noticed. Fed up at last, I gave up. I snatched Ritz crackers from the cocktail tray and huffed off, with the stomp of three-year-old feet. It sometimes seemed to me that my feet knew where they were going before I did. That was certainly the case as I exited the cocktail hour, hearing my father, by now turned martini-nasty, say as I left, “She only wants all those crackers for herself.”

I found a place and invented a ritual of my own under the dining room table, which had cross beams to connect its four fat legs and a cloth to the floor. At first I felt lonely and lost, so I removed my slippers and placed them outside the tablecloth so my parents would know where I was; then I lined the Ritz crackers up on a beam and sat cross-legged on the worn maroon rug. To make company I began to chat to my three imaginary friends when a fourth friend joined us—very silent, extremely invisible. I had longed to be noticed, yet suddenly discovered a mysterious freedom in going unnoticed. That’s when I knew I mattered and decided that this fourth friend must be the God I longed to meet. With delight I unburdened my soul. God listened to me with an attentiveness neither of my parents, distracted at this hour by an ugly glass, nor my distractible imaginary friends could give. After our conversation I served a one-course meal under the table. I ate one Ritz cracker and left four on the beam, partly to prove something to my father and partly because it was plain polite.

At bedtime, my mother called for kisses and took me to bed. In the morning the crackers were still there, just as I’d left them.

Not for some time did I realize that I would not have picked out the little God book for myself. It had no splashy illustrations and I couldn’t read. My mother picked it out for me. How did she know I would love it, or did she love it for me? Another portrait of God in the book was earthy and true to my experience:

When God was sitting in His garden very quietly, He began to hear a sound coming up from His Earth and the sound was like the buzzing of a great far-away bee. And God became very interested. And He began to listen, and separate it, one sound from another, and to find the place that each came from. . . . And the sounds of the Earth were very interesting to God. And He said “I do so love My Earth.” He went on listening. And while God was hearing all these sounds and looking up each one in its own place, He heard one small high sound that called through and over all the others. And God tried to find out what was this weeny sound, but it was hard to find.

Every evening I kept up my “weeny sounds” and my Ritz cracker meal. I asked God to take away my father’s glass and give me my mother’s heart, but God didn’t do one single thing I asked for, at least right then. Nevertheless, I found contentment in my under-the-table chapel for another three years until my grandmother moved in and the dining room table moved out to make room for her bedroom.

I suppose you could say this was my first crisis. I learned to mourn as this experience slipped away. Still, I never forgot it, nor my four friends. Their voices still echo inside me: Cookie, the good girl who loved rituals like the one we invented under the table; Gawkie, a bad boy, my secret favorite, full of mischief and creativity; Cracker, the curious explorer; and God, who listened for “weeny sounds.”

•

By the time I was six World War II was underway. It made the world feel tentative but it gave me a job: dashing around our apartment to pull down all the thick black shades so the war enemy couldn’t see to bomb us. I was helping the war effort, Dad said.

School brought more adventures. My school was only for girls. I knew girls were as smart as boys. Still, I went through a cap gun cowboy phase and dreamed of being a boy. The Lone Ranger was my hero, mostly because of his huge and glorious stallion, Silver, and the music of the William Tell Overture that set my heart thrumming. Though sometimes I seriously doubted my own boldness, I galloped around the apartment anyway, yelling “HI HO Silver, away!”

In the summer we went to a farm where I galloped on a real steed and learned some of life’s most vivid and dire lessons. The farm was in upstate New York far from anything city-like—dirt roads, small squat farmhouses dotting a landscape of pasture lands, and a big red barn full of animals I’d only seen in picture books, like horses, cows, bulls, pigs, and chickens, and a lot of hay that made me sneeze. I found new “chapels,” like my pony Snowfie’s velvety snout and the giant cornfields that whispered back to me as I walked, invisible, through them.

My summer job was to crumple up newspapers and stuff them into the rat holes. The farmhouse where we stayed was so full of holes it whistled. I only knew about city cockroaches—shy and mostly hidden—but rats had no modesty. I’d heard lore about rats gnawing babies. Sometimes at night I heard them scritching so I turned on a light and shouted loudly to let them know it wasn’t safe to come out. I worried about my little sisters: Laurie, a toddler and Jeanie, born in June, 1945, with curly hair all over her head. My job kept rats away from my sisters.

The war affected life on the farm, too. Farmer Kurtie ran the dairy farm with his wife Ba. Kurtie had come from Germany—Hamburger, I’d thought. Some official people came and confiscated his radio. It was Kurt who persuaded my father not to enlist because he had a family.

“Aren’t you happy you don’t have to be a soldier, Daddy?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” he said, but he didn’t smile.

“Would you like a martini?”

“No, thanks,” he said then stooped to my level. “But how ’bout a hug?”

Bella, Kurt’s and Ba’s daughter, was just my age. When we were old enough, we got to ride out on our ponies and herd the cows from their field back to the barn for milking—another important job. Once I saw a pregnant cow sink in quick mud and disappear—completely gone. Another time I watched a cow deliver her calf, a girl Kurtie named Lynnie after me. That slimy knee-buckled calf walked too early yet she made it to her mother. I swear the mother and baby kissed with their noses.

Another time I watched surgery on a cow’s stomach for hardware retrieval and learned I could faint. Bovine sex, however, was by far the most harrowing farm lesson, one I should have fainted over. But I’d wanted to see a male cow, a bull, so my mother brought me to the barnyard where I stood up on the fence for the best view. This was one time when my insatiable curiosity did not pay off, through no fault of the bull. The cow stood chewing her cud, heedless of the creak of the barnyard door and the large bull trotting out. Bulls were supposed to be fierce and snort but this one didn’t seem ferocious, as he angled over to the cow and climbed up on her back side of all things. She raised her head and let out an ear-splitting bellow as the jouncing bull dangled from her haunches.

“What are they doing, Mommy?”

Right then and there, my mother seized the moment and told me all about human sexual intercourse in detail, finishing up with the astonishing disclaimer, “And Lynnie, this is the most beautiful thing a man and a woman do together. It’s love.” Mom said many odd things but that was the most insane. My father would not do such a thing. Sex, I decided, would not be my preferred route to maturity; nor would trusting my mother much, especially after she told me I couldn’t watch her and Daddy do it.

Horses, I felt sure, were above sex. They were the most powerful, holy creatures God could ever have made. One of my most enduring memories of the farm was riding breakfasts. Bella and I, the two oldest daughters, rode out with our fathers into the open country predawn. The image engraved on my heart is this: my father and I sitting still and quiet, I on my small pony and he on his big horse—together like one, our souls riveted as we watched the globe of orange sun rise and take over the earth for a new day. After that we ate breakfast sandwiches Mommy had made of bacon slathered with mayo and a shred of lettuce—unhealthfully delicious and with no cocktails. Sometimes we’d end up at the swimming hole and ride our horses bareback into the cool water. I didn’t know horses could swim, but Snowfie slipped into the water and glided along like magic. I gripped his mane with both fists until I understood that I had to trust his strength, not mine.

The summer I was to turn eight I had a strange experience. I was sitting in jodhpurs on the edge of my bed removing my riding boots. I smelled of barn: scents of stable dung, hay, and oats, all mixed together. I closed my eyes: I could sense Snowfie’s nose quivering to my kiss and feel the warm exhale of his snort; I could hear the clink of the bridle as it came off and he tossed his head, spraying me with saliva that he licked off my hands. When I opened my eyes I saw only the thin curtain flutter, lifted by a hot stale swish of summer air. Watching thoughtlessly, I suddenly felt saturated with a feeling of inexplicable well-being. It lasted seconds and felt eternal. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t make it happen again.

I decided right then that when I got back to city school and entered third grade, my art project would be an illustrated version of The Lord’s Prayer, which I’d memorized in Sunday School. I spent the rest of that summer planning my project: God’s sandals would be difficult but I’d get help, then use a lot of gold and glitter for GOD, a name so unique no human had it. Thy will be done was a puzzle because God had never exactly told me what it was. Jesus, I’d heard in church, was God, but he hadn’t made it into this prayer—probably because he was encased in stained glass and preoccupied with far too many clingy children, a few of them girls. I took Jesus out of the window and drew him into my prayer, with an outsized halo and surrounded by a bunch of stick figure kids, some with triangle-shaped skirts—on earth as it is in heaven.

I knew I wasn’t a good artist, but it didn’t seem to matter much.