came up, and these television people worried, got themselves into seemingly inexorable jams, sad but so funny predicaments, and their enemies began to rub the palms of their hands together thinking that this was going to be it, and they were going to get caught off base doing something that would disgrace them forever. But with the shake of a head, the wrinkling of a nose, everything was set right, and the bad guys were foiled. Spirits and magic and common sense were put to the test. This was better than religion, this was the way things should work.
Jeannie and Samantha could do nothing wrong in their menâs eyes, or in mine. No matter what they did, they did it in such a way that their men were able to maintain a sense of being the man, and not merely a man but the man, the boss, the transcendent hero of a clearly ridiculous, clearly delusory drama of male predominance. Jeannie slept in a bottle, Samantha was reclusive for fear she might twitch her nose by mistake and manufacture a disaster. Both were hidden from the world not because they were ugly, or stupid, but because they were beautiful and unique and clever, because, above all, they had real powers against which a man possessed neither defense nor even a strong argument. They had powers like I thought I might someday like to have, as I lay there curled on the floor like a cat.
Trudeau I saw every other week. Faw and Mother would drive me in, leaving the boys in Djunaâs charge. It would be a sultry morning, with the drear heat already sitting on the road, and the commuters looking harried behind the wheels of their cars. Manhattan would finally start showing itself, in its pinnacles and the tops of its towers, here and there between Queens overpasses and billboards. Through the tunnel, and already Iâd begin saying, âDo we have to go?â and my mother would say, yes I had to go. Trudeau had hours at Mount Sinai, and that was close to the old neighborhood, which made me feel an ambivalence, happy to be near the light people, uneasy to be near them, too, because I had triedâas Djuna recommendedâto forget about them, forget everything I could, and being there forced me to realize how utterly Iâd failed at doing that.
âMeaning what?â Faw would ask.
âAs Iâve said before,â she (Trudeau was a woman) said, âthe icicles are something more common in post adolescents, as Grace has described the blind spot in the center of her visual fieldââ
âItâs not a blind spot.â I was fussy about the details, if only because I knew them so intimately.
âWell, what is it, Grace?â Faw asked.
âThereâs nothing there, inside the icicles.â
âWell, thatâs what she just said.â
âNo, she said it was a blind spot.â
Trudeau said, âThere isnât supposed to be anything there, it isnât that you canât see it, whatever would be in the blind spot, itâs that there isnât anything to see, is that what you mean, Grace?â
âYes.â
As my episodes dated to when I got my braces, the traditional Brush bracesâcanted front teeth ran in the familyâFaw had some theory about the braces being the cause of all my troubles. My brothers teased me about my silvery mouth (âMaybe we should melt Grace down, silverâs worth a lot more thanââ) but what was of interest to Trudeau was my appetiteâthe braces certainly didnât stop me from eating. Faw noted I was âquite the pig,â though I was thin as a birch limb, my arms and legs strong and spidery under the colorful frocks I liked to wear.
Said Dr. Trudeau, âMy presumptive diagnosis would still beâ(at this medicalese my father was always seen to roll his eyes)âthat her migrainesââ
âMegrims,â interrupted Mother, trying to be helpful.
ââare congenital, and not the result of an injury to the brain, or
Learning to Kill: Stories