Page 62 - WTPVol.XI#4

A Deer Cries Out — Memoir of a Secret
Iam allergic to her milk. Mother cannot nurse me. After my first day of infancy, I consume goat milk through a rubber nipple snapped on a glass nurs-
ing bottle. Freud theorizes that breast feeding is the source of the infant’s psychological security. The entire act of nursing is like a religious ritual. The mother raises her baby up to her swollen breasts, leans forward to brush her nipple on the infant’s cheek to initiate the sucking reflex, then pushes her nipple into the infant’s mouth. Her milk must be deli- cious, though I personally don’t know. I imagine, thick like summer cream, warm as the sun. Manna. She tells me, when I am a teen, father sucks her leaking breasts dry. Father independently relates the same story, emphasizing his pleasure. I can’t visualize the scene. What are they trying to tell me? What are they not telling me? I surreptitiously consult Benjamin Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, that I find on my mother’s book shelf, tucked among Read- er’s Digest abridged editions. Spock doesn’t take up my issue. In college, I read Freud’s case studies. My home village, Plymouth, New Hampshire, is not Vi- enna, but I’m sure I could write a case study for him. The answers would just not be common sense.
In college, to prepare for tests, I groom myself obses- sively, meticulously, before breakfast. I don’t actually eat at breakfast, I have no money. I read Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book, with sympathy for the narrator. I see my New England in his depiction of England’s cultural decay. I wipe condensation and smudge off the dorm washroom mirror, enacting a scene in the novel. I want a clean image. I shave care-
fully, wash, lather, use a safety razor, so not to cut my- self. If I neglect self-care, I panic, as once I do before a chemistry exam.
Being presentable and enjoying company, I am hired to be a social host for the season at a mountain resort. Sort of a roaming concierge. As many guests are unaccompanied women and women with chil- dren, my job is to make them comfortable at the hotel, conversing in the lobby and sitting rooms. A woman with a three-year-old boy requests a baby- sitter so she could do some touring. I contact the hotel desk, who arrange for a young woman in her twenties. After several sessions, the sitter, attractive and buxom, reports to the management that she had concerns about the 3-year-old. He aggressively tries to play with her breasts, pulls at her shirt and makes sucking gestures. The personnel director informs
the guest about the behavior of the child. The guest reacts angrily, accuses the sitter of molesting the
boy, and insists the sitter be fired. She is. The child’s behavior seems credible to me in view of a story I read in high school in my mother’s copy of Ladies Home Journal. It’s a fiction about a young widow. She nurses her infant for 3 years. After nursing sessions, she lies in bed nude and enjoys her child playing with her breasts. In college, I come to doubt that staid LHJ would publish such a story and wonder if I read it at all. The behavior then seems fantastical and confus- ing to me.
When I live in Southern California, I fear to drive the freeways. I read Reyner Banham, Four Ecologies of Los Angeles. Freeways are a ten-lane-wide moving mortuary. They terrorize me. I go through therapy
to cope with the anxiety—a common condition my therapist informs me. Not an irrational fear. I have many allergies. If a hornet is trapped in my pickup,
it happens, and stings me, I know from experience anaphylactic shock erupts in fifteen minutes. Tongue swells, itchy rash appears around my groin, and on my scalp. I have difficulty breathing. Last vision— crashing into an overpass abutment.
My wife and I decide to leave LA for rural America. We keep horses and goats (I briefly consider milking goats) and raise cattle. I read Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods, an account of her sojourn in Maine backwoods. She did not find any profound truths, as Thoreau also had not, in the empire of mosquito and bear. My wife wants our home to be
55
ronalD toBey