Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (24 page)

Nor did my students seem impressed with my exegesis of Edie's manuscript. By the end of the spring semester, over half the students in the four sections of English 1 that I had submitted to this pedagogical experiment had dropped. Perhaps the reading load was too much, perhaps being asked to sharpen their analytical abilities against the stone of a real-life tragedy (as opposed to the usual fluff: gun control, death penalty) proved too overwhelming—either way, I was, I admit, slightly relieved to have significantly fewer essays to grade. Their assignment for the final paper was to offer an analysis of a passage of their choosing from the excerpts I had provided them of Edie's manuscript, explaining how and why Edie's claim is spurious.
They had to support their analysis with at least three other sources, chosen from a list I had provided. Most of the students—that is, those who had stuck with the demands of the course and not fled for the hills—did a pretty good job with this. They zeroed in on relevant passages and, using the analytical framework that I had provided them in class, showed me, with wonderful insight, the errors in Edie's logic that we had discussed in class. The one exception was Yolanda, who deviated slightly from the prompt. In her essay, she focused on one passage that technically appeared in the pages I'd excerpted for them, but only incidentally. I had highlighted a passage that started halfway down page 155, when five-year-old Edie observes George and Jack conversing around the kitchen table. Just above that, however, is a section break preceded by the end of a scene that I had not intended on bringing into the discussion. It's just one paragraph, completely decontextualized, in which Edie describes George letting her tag along to the grocery store. It's not a very exciting scene; it's filler—do we really need another scene of a husband struggling with basic errands while his wife is away?—but in her essay Yolanda focuses on one particular passage in which Edie, walking beside her father in the cereal aisle, sees

a bright red box with a friendly black man smiling back at me. I thought the man on the box looked like Philip, who tended our garden and fiddled with the chemistry of our swimming pool twice a week. I wanted to show the box to my father, wanted him to see it, tell me that it was in fact Philip, congratulate me on my sharp eye. I pulled on his pant leg. He did not respond. I pulled
harder, called, “Daddy.” He was looking at the small shopping list in his hand and did not look down at me. It was overwhelming, my need for him to look down, to see the box I'd found, to see me.

Yolanda argues that this passage acts as a microcosm of sorts, reveals a theme of invisibility in Edie's narrative. She then goes through the rest of the manuscript—or at least the Xeroxed passages I provided—and pulls out sixteen other instances in which people either do not make eye contact with Edie or she otherwise feels unseen. Yolanda then claims that, regardless of whether or not Edie's accusation about her father is true, this “theme of invisibleness” (
sic!
) gives us insight into some of the subtler motives behind the accusation: “The need to be seen,” Yolanda wrote, “to be acknowledged, is a powerful one for a child, for anyone really. Edith is asking us not just to see her father, but to see her, and I think we should at least try to acknowledge that this is a woman in great pain.”

I gave the paper a C+, wrote a quick note saying she should stick to the assignment.

To be fair, though, Yolanda's impulse to draw attention to material that I had not technically included in the curriculum was not an entirely bad one. There were, in fact, some crucial passages from Edie's manuscript that I had omitted from the unit's course packet. Specifically, there is a chapter I left out because I myself make a small appearance in it, and I was nervous that my students would be able to identify the young Paulie. I'm referring to the tattoo chapter. In 1961, as I think I mentioned earlier, shortly before our mother returned to Africa, she pulled Edie into the laundry room to show her (Edie) a
tattoo that she (Mother) had gotten on her hip, something called a sankofa. A month later, when news reached us that our mother had become an innocent victim of the Eritrean War, Edie decided to honor our mother by getting the same tattoo. (I almost typed the word “allegedly” there—perhaps the word is becoming something of a tic—but then I remembered that I do in fact remember these events, so I can attest to their veracity; besides, I bring up these tattoo passages not to doubt them, as with so much of her manuscript, but to draw a correlation that I think will shed light onto the pathology that underlies Edie's book.) Like our mother's tattoo (which I never saw) Edie's tattoo (which I have seen) is small, a knotted little design on the curve of her left hip. The correlation I wish to draw here is one that Edie surprisingly doesn't make herself. Betty Short also had a tattoo on her left hip. Betty's, however, was not some esoteric African doodle—an American commodification, and quaintification, of eastern spiritualism, a conformist claim to individuality through ritualistic scarification—but rather a simple rose tattoo, designed solely for the purpose of seduction: In a
Los Angeles Examiner
story from January 17, 1947, Will Fowler quoted Santa Barbara Juvenile Officer Mary H. Unkefer, who'd arrested Short for underage drinking in 1943, as saying that Short “loved to sit so [the tattoo] would show.” Though the impetus that led my mother, my sister, and Betty Short to get their tattoos were all different, the parallel is interesting as it suggests that Edie identifies with Betty more than she would care to admit. This might add some shading and nuance to the bald jealousy that we have seen cropping up in Edie's descriptions of the victim, and it allows us to see Ms. Short as a window into Edie's brain. I'm thinking specifically of Betty's tendency to construct entire
narratives out of tragically misunderstood gestures from the men in her life. In his investigation, Fowler uncovered a whole cache of Betty's correspondences in the years leading up to her death. In early 1945, Short received some flirtatious telegrams from Major Matt Gordon, who was stationed overseas. It's clear from these telegrams that the two had had a brief sexual encounter sometime in late 1944. In response to his casual flirtations, Betty wrote a number of letters to him that she never actually mailed, letters overflowing with sentiments of love and devotion. In letters she did mail, however, she told her mother that she and Gordon were engaged and would be getting married as soon as he returned stateside. She had similar wartime “relationships” with Lieutenants Joseph Fickling and Stephen Wolak. The latter even wrote her a letter that very graciously attempted to disabuse her of these romantic delusions, writing, “Infatuation is sometimes mistakenly accepted for true love.” This seemed to be something more than infatuation, though, something a bit more pathological. Major Matt Gordon, unfortunately, did not get a chance to disabuse Betty of her marriage fantasy: In November 1945, he died in a plane crash. When Betty read his obituary in the newspaper, she cut it out, carried it around in her purse—the same purse that investigators picked through after her death—and began telling people that she was his widow. The young woman we see emerging in these letters and telegrams is someone whose loneliness and desperate need to belong has begun to eclipse not just her rational judgment, but her view of reality. Edie admits as much when she covers this material in her book, but, just as Nick's description of Gatsby reveals more about Nick than it does Gatsby, I posit that Betty's habit of using the misconstrued actions
of men as the basis for an entire fantastical narrative is one my sister shares. To illustrate my point, let's go back to the chapter in which Edie describes getting her tattoo. Edie writes,

My friend Moose [she doesn't mention this gentleman anywhere else in her manuscript, nor do I remember him, so your guess is as good as mine as to how trustworthy a man with this moniker could be] had recommended a tattoo parlor in Venice Beach called the Branded Bull. The only real tattoo advice he'd given me, though, was a caveat emptor: “Buyer beware, baby.” A week after Mom's funeral I drove down to the Branded Bull. It was a square brick building with trails from recently removed vines snaking up the walls and an Old West–style awning out front. I parked, and when I put coins in the meter I hesitated: thirty minutes, forty-five, sixty? I remembered how Mom would always pay for the minimum amount of parking on her errands, thinking it would force her to be efficient and not dilly-dally. I paid for just half an hour.

Inside, there was only one guy, the tattoo artist presumably, sitting behind the counter with a dime novel, his arms a jumble of sailor tattoos. On his neck, between his ear and his shoulder, was a bulldog, a simple contour outline that looked like it might have been my high school mascot. I figured this was a good sign and thought to myself, Go Bulldogs! He had a face that was just starting to drop from boyish to jowly, framed by sparse red sideburns.

He asked what I wanted, his voice exasperated in a way that reminded me of Paulie. I told him I wanted a sankofa. A what?
I showed him a picture I'd torn from the encyclopedia. I said I wanted the tattoo “here,” pointing to my left hipbone.

The tattoo artist—who was wearing a patch on his shirt that said
Aaron
—led me back into a cubicle-like area with what looked like a dentist's chair. He told me to take off my pants and underwear.

“My underwear?”

“Listen,” he said, with his eyes down and one hand up, “I've done these hip tattoos before, and the panties always snap back in my face.” Now he looked at me. “You don't want me to screw up, do you?”

He sat on a desk chair and scooted over to the counter to prepare the tattoo gun. I removed my shoes and put them side by side next to the chair. I took off my jeans, folded them, and placed them on top of my shoes. I tugged at the bottom of my T-shirt. With the chair between me and Aaron, and his back still to me, I took off my underwear, folded them in half, and placed them on top of my jeans.

Aaron turned to me. He was now wearing thick-rimmed glasses. He told me to take a seat. I did. The chair's vinyl was cloying on my skin. He pulled his chair over to me. He had on latex gloves and was holding the tattoo gun in one hand, raised like a quill in mid-thought. “Just relax,” he said, laying one latexed hand on my thigh. He poised the tattoo gun over my crotch. He started the little motor. It was a tense buzzing. While I was waiting for him to ask if I was ready, he began. I could feel the needle, but not with the precision I'd imagined. The sensation was sharp but spread evenly over my skin in a blurred spotlight of pain. It was a pain I learned to anticipate, noticing that there
was no fluctuation in it. Relax into it, I told myself. The ceiling tiles were spotted with brown water stains.

Aaron's left hand was holding my inner thigh, keeping a firm grip, while his right hand did the work. Needing something more specific, less painful to focus on, I concentrated on his left hand. My own hands were clenched on to the edge of the seat, its vinyl cushion and metal frame. His thumb seemed to move up. He was surely just trying to steady my body while he worked. I didn't want him to screw up, did I? He probably had no idea how close his thumb was. He was probably too focused on his work to realize. Without looking, it was hard to tell if I was just imagining it, but when I squirmed I felt the dry touch of latex pull some of my pubic hair. It would be dumb to ask him to move his hand back down. Dad always said I was an overreactor. Then his thumb inched over and I felt him push inside me. It hurt, and this pain, unlike the vague territory of the tattoo gun, was precise. The ceiling tiles were spotted with brown water stains. “Steady,” he said.

When he was finished, he sat back, wheeled his desk chair over to the counter, and set down the tattoo gun. He sighed and took off his glasses. He returned to me with a warm, wet cloth, and wiped some blood from my skin. Then he pulled off each latex glove with an elastic snap. I looked down to see it for myself: The little design was there on my skin, black and simple, dabbed in blood and glistening like a newborn.

Aaron was in the corner now, washing his hands and telling me how to care for the tattoo, but I couldn't follow what he was saying. He came over and taped a patch of gauze over the
sankofa. I stood up, and he offered his hand for a shake. I took it. His grip was surprisingly weak. “It looks great,” he said. I got dressed, paid, and left.

On the drive home, the clutch and break of Dad's Ford felt like they were stuck in tar. I was too weak to pull the heavy steering wheel all the way around and so made some drunkenly wide turns. The other cars gave me the wide berth I needed. Finally back in Van Nuys, I pulled into our driveway and ran into the house, through the living room where Paulie was watching TV, all the way back to Dad's office and pounded on the door. I was crying, and shouting something, though I'm not sure what I was shouting. He did not answer the door and it was locked. He'd barely stepped out of that office all week—all my life, for that matter. I was asking to be let in, and he did not let me in.

I crouched on the floor, my forehead to my knees, my arms tucked against my stomach. My new tattoo burned like hell. (105–109)

She then claims that our father apparently ignoring her suffering was proof that he'd detached himself from the suffering not just of his daughter but of all women, the residual effects of what he'd done to Betty Short. But, realistically, he probably just wasn't home and so, ipso facto (see? Edie's not the only one who remembers high school Latin!), could not open his office door. Like Betty Short, Edie—not just in this particular passage but in her entire book—has the ability to (mis)read volumes into the smallest and most meaningless details, with tragic results.