Speedboat by RENATA ADLER Read Free Book Online
Authors: RENATA ADLER
another and tie the stems together, in full consciousness that it is not the same. I know that. When I was last at my wit’s end, I dreamed I parked my car on my way to my stabled horse and found the country roadside absolutely strewn with silver. It was also overgrown with poison ivy, vicious, three-leafed, shining. It was by no means a parable about capitalism and making money. I believe in both, and would not think of dreaming against either. Anyway, I do not dream in parables.
But poison ivy. Many people, particularly children, have had poison ivy very often, very badly. They speak of it. They do not forget it. But there is an outer limit, a kind that passes any question of degree. Those who have utterly had it instantly recognize each other—like the Jews and homosexuals in Proust. It has no dignity whatever. There are no poison-ivy heroes. As homesickness, at camp or school, can be a first intuition of death and bereavement, this creeping thing is most nearly a child’s premonitory sense of mortal illness. I had it once when I needed to be led blindly to the school infirmary by a girl who had the flu. I put two fingers around her wrist so she could lead me. The next day there was a neat circle of poison ivy around her wrist. That was a friend. There are other such cabals, reverse elites of outer limit, junkies, sufferers from migraines, the truly seasick, soldiers’ fear in wartime, certain cramps. Many people suffer from cramps severely, turn quite silent, green, and shaky. Someone offers them a glass of gin. But there are cramps of an entirely other order, when even hardened doctors—knowing it is not important, only temporary, just a matter of hours—reach for the Demerol and the needle. It must be so in each lonely degrading thing from which one comes back having learned nothing whatever. There are no conclusions to be drawn from it. Lonely people see double entendres everywhere.
There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act—no campaign or tract, statement or rampage—has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. “There’s one,” it said. That was in the 1960’s. Ever since, he’s wondered. There’s one what?
In covering fires, murders, blasts, quotidian disasters, raffle winners, just walking through the streets, like everyone, I often meet a beggar. I always, always give a quarter or a dime. In recent years, always. I once met a girl called Yael in Beersheba, very poor, who always did, without reflection—gave a little something to each beggar, even ones she passed twice, even the most devastated. She did not look around to see who noticed, simply gave. Now every tin cup—with or without pencils, voice, accordion—stops me. It is not a bribe to my own fortunes any longer. Even lighting candles in a church, I have never prayed quite in specifics. It is just a habit now.
“Forget it,” says the drunken voice outside. “What’s it for? Throw it away.”
My life began, really, at college, where I nearly always slept. Waking, I studied—clinical psychology. We ran rats in mazes by the hour, checking whether rats rewarded learned things faster. At the end of half the mazes, the cheese stood alone. We also ran tests on each other—lie detectors, free-word associations with a stopwatch; the point turned out to be not what you said but just how long you stalled before you said it. Weekends, I took trains. You never knew whom you might meet. There was a man who peddled cigars, cigarettes, and what
But poison ivy. Many people, particularly children, have had poison ivy very often, very badly. They speak of it. They do not forget it. But there is an outer limit, a kind that passes any question of degree. Those who have utterly had it instantly recognize each other—like the Jews and homosexuals in Proust. It has no dignity whatever. There are no poison-ivy heroes. As homesickness, at camp or school, can be a first intuition of death and bereavement, this creeping thing is most nearly a child’s premonitory sense of mortal illness. I had it once when I needed to be led blindly to the school infirmary by a girl who had the flu. I put two fingers around her wrist so she could lead me. The next day there was a neat circle of poison ivy around her wrist. That was a friend. There are other such cabals, reverse elites of outer limit, junkies, sufferers from migraines, the truly seasick, soldiers’ fear in wartime, certain cramps. Many people suffer from cramps severely, turn quite silent, green, and shaky. Someone offers them a glass of gin. But there are cramps of an entirely other order, when even hardened doctors—knowing it is not important, only temporary, just a matter of hours—reach for the Demerol and the needle. It must be so in each lonely degrading thing from which one comes back having learned nothing whatever. There are no conclusions to be drawn from it. Lonely people see double entendres everywhere.
There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act—no campaign or tract, statement or rampage—has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning, Will went out in jeans and frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. “There’s one,” it said. That was in the 1960’s. Ever since, he’s wondered. There’s one what?
In covering fires, murders, blasts, quotidian disasters, raffle winners, just walking through the streets, like everyone, I often meet a beggar. I always, always give a quarter or a dime. In recent years, always. I once met a girl called Yael in Beersheba, very poor, who always did, without reflection—gave a little something to each beggar, even ones she passed twice, even the most devastated. She did not look around to see who noticed, simply gave. Now every tin cup—with or without pencils, voice, accordion—stops me. It is not a bribe to my own fortunes any longer. Even lighting candles in a church, I have never prayed quite in specifics. It is just a habit now.
“Forget it,” says the drunken voice outside. “What’s it for? Throw it away.”
My life began, really, at college, where I nearly always slept. Waking, I studied—clinical psychology. We ran rats in mazes by the hour, checking whether rats rewarded learned things faster. At the end of half the mazes, the cheese stood alone. We also ran tests on each other—lie detectors, free-word associations with a stopwatch; the point turned out to be not what you said but just how long you stalled before you said it. Weekends, I took trains. You never knew whom you might meet. There was a man who peddled cigars, cigarettes, and what