The body betrayed

Barbara returns to herself. Plus: The Town series finale in which race and death collide, and I learn a journalism lesson. And a Kabel Kingfisher card.

WHAT’S BARBARA THINKING?

René Magritte, The False Mirror, Paris, 1929

The woman in the mirror

By Barbara Ramsey

AFTER OPEN HEART SURGERY on March 7th, I simply wasn’t myself. The pale, haggard woman in the mirror elicited my love and attention but I didn’t know her anymore. My profound weakness and inability to perform even simple actions stunned me. As if I’d become a separate person, a third party, I’d ask: “What should she do now? Is it time for her to walk to the kitchen for lunch? Do I need to give her another pep talk on the importance of the treadmill?”

My self-consciousness wedged itself between my body and my being. I could do the required things without much thought—taking my meds, brushing my teeth, and going to the toilet. But optional activities, such as making quilts or answering emails or reading books, seemed distant and effortful.  I didn’t feel sad or down, but I did have anhedonia—a lack of pleasure in my usual interests.

One day the word “listless” popped into my head and I wondered about the word’s origin. It turns out that listless is related to the Old English lystan—“to like, to cause pleasure or desire, to provoke longing.” To be listless is to be without those things. That was me. I had no longing.

I could feel certain pleasures. I loved cuddling with my husband at night. I loved the often hilarious phone conversations with my sisters. I read a variety of short stories—with my impaired attention span, they were better than novels—which captivated me with their flow of language. These bits, these threads, tied me back to my real self. But aside from those few things, there was nothing I longed to do.

In his book, A Leg to Stand On, Oliver Sacks recounts his recovery from a serious injury to his leg. He required a complex surgery and lengthy rehabilitation during which he lost the sensation of having a leg. He felt alienated and disconnected from it. Like Sacks, my surgery left me feeling alienated. I felt disconnected from my desiring self. The Buddha preached a release from desire, but this didn’t feel like a release. It felt robotic, disembodied. 

These feelings finally began to dissolve a few weeks ago, slowly and almost imperceptibly. My appetite for food returned! For months I had to force myself to eat. My favorite chocolate bars sat in the fridge. I nibbled on them over days without enthusiasm. Now I finally had cravings. The chocolate bars didn’t even make it to the fridge.

The final piece to fall into place was my sense of time. For months after surgery, time became viscous, a slow thickness that I moved through. The flow of ordinary time, of one thing leading to another, was gone. I had to think about my actions and make a constant string of decisions. Sometimes the path between deciding to get dressed and actually donning my clothes seemed to stretch out endlessly.

But then, just the other day, I saw some of the previous evening’s clothes draped over a chair. I walked over, examined them, put some in the clothes hamper and hung the rest in the closet. I was shutting the closet door when it occurred to me that I hadn’t had to think about any of it. I’d automatically performed a multi-step behavioral sequence without having to make any conscious decisions. Wow! That union between my will and my action was thrilling, despite the triviality of what I’d done. I felt like Oliver Sacks when he was finally able to kick both legs in beautiful symmetry as he swam across a pool.

This feeling continued for the rest of the day. I had a desire to answer an email and I did so. I wanted to visit a friend so I got in the car and drove to her house. I suddenly realized I’d left the upstairs balcony door open and ran upstairs to close it. My activities have had a musical movement since then, a seamlessness that feels glorious.

I not only feel like myself, I am myself. I finally recognize the woman in the mirror.

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PERSONAL HISTORY

THE TOWN describes experiences I had while in high school that changed everything for me. This is the final part of the essay. In previous installments, we met the town’s Black doctor, Raymond Wilcox. Though I have altered the names and a few details, these are true stories.

III. Sandy

THE YEAR AFTER Dr. King was killed, the principal called the entire high school to the auditorium for a lecture by a sociology teacher from a nearby state college. The topic was “Combating Racial Prejudice in Everyday Life.” Seven hundred students pressed through the auditorium doors. With long poles, the Black janitors lowered the shades to let in light from the narrow windows high above the floor. The rows of wooden pull-down chairs inclined steeply as they retreated from the stage, which made it difficult to see the back rows from the front, where I sat.

As we settled in, monitors and teachers shushed the light roar of voices. The sociologist, a thin man in a short-sleeved white shirt and tie, spoke of the troubles of recent years. He had a practiced, cheerful tone.

“Say you are in a small group of friends out here on the school yard and you hear someone tell a racial joke,” he said. “What should you do?”

Boys in the back cracked up. I spun around to see who.

"The best thing is just to walk away. To make it clear you don't think that kind of thing is funny,” the speaker said. I soon heard people in the rear speaking in loud, animated whispers. When the whispers reached the middle of the room, teachers walked into the rows to single out noisemakers.

Still, the volume rose. Teachers pulled a few students out for detention, adding their own scolding voices to the cacophony. By then, it was hard to hear anything from the stage. The principal walked over to the podium, temporarily interrupted the speech, and threatened detention for everyone.

The boy on my right leaned into my ear. “Dr. Wilcox got caught fucking a white woman,” he said.  “Her husband shot his dick off.”

“Dr. Wilcox is dead?”

“He’s in the hospital but they don’t expect him to live. The guy made Wilcox stand up and he shot it off.” 

At that point, a teacher walked over and whispered to the principal. Still at the podium, he apologized to the speaker and dismissed school for the day. The roar broke its seams. Most of the kids pooled out on the parking lot. I sped home to talk to my mother, who I figured might know something..

"I heard," she interrupted me. "It's a lie. Raymond’s in the hospital with a slipped disc. I saw him. He wasn't shot.”

The gossip hit town like a dustbowl tornado and kept up for days. That first evening, the local radio station treated the story as news. At the time, I wrote editorials for the school newspaper and the ironies of the auditorium speech were too rich. I wrote my piece and waited to see it in the paper and hear the reaction. But it was never printed. The journalism teacher caught it on press and replaced my editorial with a stock photo. Back in class, he yanked me out in the hallway, grabbed me by the collar, and shouted at me that I’d endangered the paper’s advertising and his job.

That afternoon, I went home after school and changed for work. At the funeral home, the hearse was parked outside the garage, a sign there was a fresh corpse. No one was in the front office, so I went to the back room to hang out with Glen, the younger of the two embalmers, while he replaced the body’s blood with formaldehyde. The beauticians usually showed up the next day to do the hair and face.

I was surprised that the woman on his table was young, not much older than Karla. Except for a few babies, I’d only seen one young person dead before, the mangled corpse of a college kid who ran his car into a tree.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“Her name’s Sandy,” he said. “The one with Wilcox.”

I gasped. When I could speak again, I asked, “Who did this?”

“She swallowed a bottle of pills last night,” he said. “Then she got scared and called the hospital. They ran an ambulance out and pumped her stomach but her kidneys failed. I guess she couldn’t handle all the talk.”

"She killed herself?" I felt like my friend Butch had me in headlock. This time he was gonna squeeze until all the air was gone. I stared at her puffy face and blonde hair. I looked at her breasts, her belly, her sex, then back up to her eyes — spilled pools of dull blue, clouded white.

At ten, after Glen had finished and gone home, I locked up the front and walked into the chamber. Her eyes were closed now, but I didn’t want to face her. I swung the enamel table around so she faced away from me and turned off the light. I shut the near door and crossed the dark room. At the exit, I tried to tell her I was sorry.

In the driveway the white chat picked up the moonlight and crunched under my shoes. I climbed into my car and drove out Highway 269, then turned onto a county road and floored it. Even with the moon out, the prairie was dark except for the farmhouses with floodlights trained on their yards. The wind, moist with the day’s rain, rushed through the open car window and relieved the heat.

Several miles west, I pulled off the road and sat in the dark, letting her eyes crawl in behind mine. The hot air smelled like hogs. The crickets screamed. For a long while, I watched the young wheat sway in my headlights. Then I put the car in gear, turned around, and headed back to town.

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BIRDS-OF-A-TYPE CARD

Kabel Kingfisher

BELTED KINGFISHERS ARE BOLD birds. If you’ve ever seen them skirmish mid-air or watched them demon-dive for prey or heard their loud, harsh trill as they blast by, you know what I mean. At one end of the beach at Fort Worden State Park, a pier juts into the water and supports a building where the Port Townsend Marine Science Center houses a small aquarium. Belted Kingfishers are regulars there. Their feathered crest is a marvel to me and females like this one have a beautiful chestnut band across their breasts. After an hour or so at the pier, she got used to my presence and settled down on a post, where I took her portrait.

KABEL IS A BOLD typeface, designed by Rudolph Koch at Klingspor Type Foundry in Offenbach am Main, near Frankfurt. I think of Kabel as a polished version of another of his faces, Neuland, which has a more hand-drawn and primitive feel. Indeed, Koch, who was self taught, was well regarded for his calligraphy and had a love of traditional craftsmanship. But the geometric forms of Kabel were inspired by the Bauhaus, suggesting a futuristic and modern impulse. Kabel is named after the transatlantic telephone cable and was released in 1927, the year of the first transatlantic telephone call between New York and London. Koch died in 1934, shortly after the Nazis came to power, sparing him the fate of many of his fellow artists.

Birds-of-a-Type is a regular feature that combines two of my obsessions—birds and typography. It’s a blast for me to design these cards and I hope you enjoy them.

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