The German Girl

IN THE AIR OVER IRAN
January 2003

On the plane from Dubai to Frankfurt, I was seated next to a man from Argentina. “My family is from Italy,” he told me, and I could see this in the quick light bones of his face, in the tailored clothes on his elegant body, in the white hair, a little too fine, a little too wavy, a little too long to belong to a man. He wanted to chat; his voice had a graceful accent, and his eyes looked eager, and I was delighted he thought to talk to me. I asked him questions: where he was headed, where he was coming from, what was he doing in the Middle East, and he answered with a concentrated interest in my reaction, his words low and musical, delighted himself to address my next question.

“Where are we now?” I asked, meaning, what country is speeding below us. Iran, he thought, based on how long we’d been flying. Unsatisfied though with his own answer, he took long minutes intently flipping the airline magazine pages searching for a map, checking the real-time flight monitor on the pop-up video screen for comparison. I watched in silent fascination, enchanted by his hands. Yes Iran, he decided. I wondered out loud if he’d been there and yes he had, but did not enjoy it. Too much oppression, he said. He smiled briefly to himself, a shadow that sped across his face, then frowned and smiled again, deeply. He had a story he wished to tell me.

“We are flying to Germany,” he said. “The women in Germany are so free, not like the women in Iran.” He had seen a German girl once, in the hotel sauna. She was naked, they all were, men and women both, naked and unashamed in the sauna together. But she was different; she was free. She sat with her legs apart so he could see everything, and what he saw was that she had shaved, and so was smooth and lovely. And she knew this and didn’t mind if he knew it too, wanted him to know, which made her free. And there was more: a small gold ring. “Piercing both lips down there. Imagine. Beautiful. Amazing.” A beautiful decoration in addition to her own beauty. “Amazing, amazing. She was so free.”

He was aroused by the German girl in the sauna, and was aroused now by describing her to me. Of course he was. His face was luminous, remembering. And I was aroused too, listening, of course I was; I could feel a warmth, a swelling, a dampness. It was unexpected, it was meltingly sweet.

“Imagine the pain,” he whispered, his eyes half closed. “Oh, the pain.” I could imagine the pain, I could feel the pain. The muscles of my inner thighs clenched, my insides lurched, my eyelids fluttered. We all know this pain: every woman, old and young, girl and child and infant. It runs through all of us, the ones who have felt it in their own lives, and those who are blessed never to feel it themselves, we are aware, and we know. Break a woman’s heart and it will heal slowly, imperceptively but surely, like a scalded tongue. But to break a woman there is to amputate the hand of God, to forever maim and cripple the creation of life itself. We all know this, men and women both, and look upon that place with awe and fear. Painters sculptors photographers attempt to catch that fragile sorrowful beauty, to preserve it undestroyed.

This man himself was an artist; he drew her sacred splendor in reverent tones, amazing amazing amazing, and shook his head uncomprehending, his eyes gathering in light, pulling me into him. “How does she relieve herself? How does it not become infected? How does she keep it so hair-free? Like a baby, like a baby, soft, like a baby?” I wanted to weep at his compassion, at the purity of his concern, at his wonder and gratitude in witnessing this mystery. Amazing, amazing, amazing. He spoke with the voice and posture of prayer, bowed in respect, offering his unworthy self before what he had seen. I shook my own head, uncomprehending, at what was now being offered to me, a passage into the secret tender part of his soul. Involuntarily, I felt the swelling of own prayers, my own desire to kneel, my own self undeserving of this miracle.

They were dimming the cabin lights. In a few moments, he said, the veteran of too many flights, they would turn them off altogether. He needed to sleep, he told me. He stretched out his legs; just tap them like this if you need to get out, and now he grinned at me, touching his legs lightly. I believe he knew I had no intention of leaving his side, not now; I could not imagine tapping on his legs. If I touched him at all, it would be to remove the sleeping mask from his face and to kiss his eyelids gently, while he slept. I wished I dared to grasp his hand. I slept for a while too, in the strangeness of strangers, flown away from their consciousness like patients in dentists’ chairs, side by side in the dark cemetery in the point of the plane, held up in the sky by rushing air. And yet I was drowsily comforted knowing this man was near, adorning me in the intimate sharing of himself, that piercing glimpse of naked holiness: that which was given free from the German girl to this Argentinean man, given to me from him, and now from me to you who read this, all of us held in the streaming beauty of the Divine.

Bangle Story

HYDERABAD, INDIA
January 2003

I went, when I first got Hyderabad, India, to the Laad Bazaar in the ancient part of the city near the mosque and the four minarets of the Char Minar. For hundreds of years Hyderabad has been known for two things: pearls and thin glass bangle bracelets.

A man at the bazaar put the bangles on my wrists on both arms. Like a man charming a snake, he kept his eyes focused on my face while his hands kneaded my hands and maneuvered the bangles over my wide western palms, until I had 15 green bangles on the right and 23 pink bangles on the left.

I loved the bangles; they were beautifully glittery and tinkly. The women I was training were impressed on the first day. The second day, they told me about the bangle crimes I was committing: the colors should be interspersed with each other so both wrists matched, these were party bangles not to be worn every day, the colors should match my clothes. I like wearing the bangles though despite the cultural errors, and despite the way my arms looked like they had casts on when I wore a long sleeved blouse, and despite the fact that it was hard to wear a watch. I noticed my arms moved sensuously with bangles on them.

By the third day, they became a burden. I wore my bangles swimming, which looked absurd. Glitter chipped off them and got all over the bed and my clothes. Sleeping meant being mindful of bangles. Showering with delicate glass on my arms, typing with breakable glass on my arms, became dangerous. I wanted them gone, but they wouldn't come off, not without shattering.

The women said they would help. A dozen of us crowded into the bathroom, so many that we spilled out into the hallway, and the men from the class got curious about this crowd of women; I could see in the mirror their heads bobbing above the women’s, trying to find out what was taking place inside. The women lathered liquid soap on my hands and squeezed my thumbs to my palms, worried about cuts and stabs from the glass, and pulled and pulled until the bangles nearly came off, and then they broke, glass flying into the sinks and onto floor. They argued, in loud Hindi, over whether bangles should be removed in pairs or three at a time; one at a time, they all agreed, would guarantee they would snap under the pressure of a hand unnaturally squeezed.

And then Geeta, serene Geeta, glided in past the men and the rest of the crowd, and asked why there was a problem. All the women started talking at once, explaining the situation, but she merely looked at me, and held my hand lightly and said only this: relax. And she slipped all the bangles on my right wrist off like magic, one after the other after the other.

Then she tried the left ones. As she slid the first one onto my hand, it broke. But she said: now your muscles will know how to move, and they did, and those also slipped off like magic, one by one by one.

Picking Up Sticks

PREHISTORIC FOREST, IRISH HILLS, MICHIGAN
Early 1970s

My brother had long ago dropped Ronnie for Ron. Steven was always Steven, and Lisa was never could never be made small and endearing by adding a “y” to the end. Sometimes, people tried to match my name with pizza which I detested because it made me feel as wrong as the inexact rhyme. So we had no nicknames, no pet names. We were known not as children, or sons and daughter, but collectively as “the kids”, more often as “those damn kids” or “those fucking kids”. We each had our own special string of spat out words. “Fucking never gets off his ass to help around here” was Steven. Ron was sometimes that as well but mostly “where is my goddamned hammer or saw or drill or …. Can’t keep his fucking hands off anything.” “Fucking books” – that was either Ron or me. “Always got her nose in a goddamn book” was me. Also: “listening again to damn music on the fucking radio” and “sleeping the entire damn day”. You could hear my father ranting in the basement through the floor. On Saturday mornings I stayed in my room on the second floor as long as possible, until I knew he’d come looking for me to perform some ludicrous chore. On Sunday mornings I escaped to church.

The chore we hated above all else was called pick-up-sticks. It was an all-purpose chore, suitable punishment for any crime, large or small. Our property was lined with massive ancient maple trees on the south and west; a large pine tree spread across the front yard, and the back held a dozen maple and elm trees. All the trees were generous with gifts of dead limbs and branches and twigs and, in the case of the pine, cones. Anything that fell from a tree was considered sticks and all had to be removed constantly continuously unceasingly, not just the large obvious branches but the smaller sticks as well. After being yelled at for sleeping or reading or listening to music, I would crawl around in large patterns, humiliated, on my knees in the grass, seeking redemption in the spiky twigs. There was none to be had, and the round hot tears dribbling down my face made me want to bite and chew at my own limbs.

I did not understand, could not understand, what was so lacking in me, that caused these tears, that caused me to place obstacles in the driveway one summer to try to trip myself as I ran helplessly back and forth, that created the desperate desire to be injured enough to be taken to the doctor so I could feel his cool concerned impersonal touch along my arm searching for a crack in the bone or rotating my ankle assessing a sprain. This didn’t happen; however hard I tried, I could not trip and send myself sprawling. I took to shoveling snow for an hour, or for two hours, in the bitter twilight wind without boots or coat or gloves or scarf or hat. I skipped meals, always lunch and often dinner. I drank no liquids, and used the bathroom barely once a day. And I could not still the terrible roar within me, like a waterfall deprived of its water, its stones normally so beautifully shiny, exposed and dry.

And so the tears came, despicable things that I ignored; they ran into my mouth and I choked and spit out their salt. I could not bear any evidence that I was alive inside or out, and the tears kept coming in spite of the vow I had made when I was four to never ever cry no matter what. I sat on our high school stage, a ghost in the Our Town cemetery and wished, because I was too horrifically alive to pray, that soon I would be a ghost too. I tried to be invisible. I sometimes succeeded. I envied Tom Crisman, another ghost, his uncanny ability to materialize, pale and insubstantial from the shadows backstage. It unnerved us all, that he wasn’t acting. A couple years past high school, his body was found in the car in the garage, windows rolled up, a hose to channel exhaust. The engine had run out of gas before he was found. I think of my tears dropping into the grass, and see instead Tom’s eerie face, ethereal in the curtained darkness, lit only by a small enigmatic smile.