Burnaway

[cont.]
Maggie had found a pictorial history of the Holocaust when she was nine. Momma had been off delivering another baby and she had been shunted over to a neighbor’s house. The neighbor let the boys run wild in the fenced backyard and she was left alone. Left alone in a room stacked with fine books, she had found this one. The black and white images of the tall piles of clothes, the mound of gold teeth beneath a lamp shade of skin, the emaciated faces of adults with empty dry eyes standing behind the wire, the skeletal children with long skinny fingers – they had in fact ceased to look fully human. Work and hunger and being trapped had done this to them. Was this what Roman nobles saw when they bothered to notice the workers – freemen at the brink of starvation, the emptiness of hopeless slaves?
Seneca told the story of visiting one of his properties where he noticed a decrepit guard at his door. When he demanded an explanation from his bailiff for the possession of this man so close to death, the old man entreated him to remember him, Felicio, Seneca’s pet slave from childhood. Seneca didn’t greet his childhood companion or offer him more food or any comforts. Seneca’s response was instead to write that we should cherish old age because it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it and continued with a meditation on the ravages of age, discoursing about the divisions within life, the overlapping circles of time. The dying pet slave had value to Seneca only to illuminate ontology. Reading this story killed her interest in studying the roots of Western Civilization. She couldn’t bring herself to celebrate the self righteous justifications of the privileged.
Those faces from the book, though, haunted her and shaped her. She was too young to have perfected the skill of concocting abstract constructions to ease the rawness into the back corners of her memory. Maggie had nightmares for months after discovering those photos. Momma had been too busy with the baby and a still colicky toddler to even notice. Those gaunt faces haunted her. Every time Momma sang her favorite song to the newest baby, “Work your fingers to the bone and what do you get? Boney fingers. Boney fingers.” Every time Momma sang the song, Maggie saw those faces clearly, staring blankly from behind the wire, the boney fingers reaching out. The first few notes alone evoked the hard memory more instantaneously than Proust’s petite madeleine prodded out his memory of his aunt’s bedroom on Sunday mornings in Combray. Maybe bad memories are just stronger and take less to rekindle. Or maybe it was repetition which kept this one so strong. The babies kept coming, every one of them needing lullabies: Maggie could not avoid the song or the memory so she tried reading more, tried shoveling so much information into her brain that those memories would be squeezed out. It was like she set out to build an alternative world inside of her out of all these bits of information gleaned from books, a shelter from the particulars of her own life, and it mostly worked. The nightmares gradually reduced in number, if not intensity. The only time she slept soundly through the night, though, was at Miss Tillie’s, those few years before that too ended.
Reading became her cure for almost everything that ailed her.
When she was almost thirteen, her father saw her kiss the boy across the street. The boy had called her a dyke and told her the only way to prove she wasn’t one was to kiss him. So she kissed him and it felt slimy and disgusting with his tongue in her mouth. She knew she had been tricked into giving the kiss and was angry with herself, the boy, the whole world. And to top it off, her father dragged her home by her hair, whipped her with his belt for what felt like an hour and then locked her in her bedroom to whimper alone. Solitary confinement, he called it. Time for prayer, Momma called it. Being locked up in her bedroom, away from his screaming fits, alone with her books, was a blessing. She must have looked too happy. Her father started going through her room every night before locking her in to confiscate any books which weren’t the Bible. As penance for the kiss, he demanded that she memorize Genesis, all of the verses. Instead of reciting just it, she added the chronology of Presidents and Kings of England and was thrashed soundly for it.
The first Friday night after the slimy kiss, her father and Momma took the bigger boys to the high school ball game. Her father locked her up tight in her room with the two littler ones to care for. She rocked them to sleep and used her pillow and blanket to keep them from rolling off her bed. While everyone else was at the game and the little ones asleep, she heard someone break into the house. The sound of glass breaking is pretty distinctive. What could she do? She couldn’t climb out the window for help. The window was now nailed shut and she wouldn’t leave the babies anyway. She didn’t have a phone. So she sat with her back pushed up against the door, holding a pencil, the only sharp thing she could find in the room. Her heart pounded as she heard the thief knock over the chairs and chests of drawers, heard him grunt as he ripped the curtains from her brothers’ room. He tried her door but couldn’t get it to budge, although it sounded like he stuck something metal into the lock trying to jimmy it. The noise woke up the babies and they started wailing. She didn’t hear the thief leave. When the rest of the family finally came home, her father was convinced that her “boyfriend” had done all this damage because he couldn’t have his way with her. Normally her father whipped her with his belt across her back and buttocks. This time she deliberately contorted so that the belt buckle hit her face. Let everyone see her penance. The police came around and asked her questions, thinking that the burglar had roughed her up. They only gave her father, a sergeant major in the Army, a single sour look. It was a father’s right as the head of his household to discipline his children. The younger cop, though, explained to him that it couldn’t have been the neighbor boy. Theirs was the fourth home robbed in the area and before that, five more way over on the other side of town, all done the exact same. Her father never apologized for the beating. The next Sunday, the paper mentioned their robbery in the Local Police Report section. “The victims told the police the burglar entered by breaking a bathroom window, stealing many belongings including a camera, television set and change from a child’s piggy bank. Also missing was a rosary and cross set valued at $100. The suspect additionally took clothes from the closet, a boy’s Schwinn bicycle, two Emmett Kelly Clown plates which had been wedding gifts, and Civil War memorabilia, including a genuine cannon ball. No arrests have been made in this incident.” Momma cut it out, taped it on a piece of cardboard and put it in the cabinet where the plates had been. All of the glass in the cabinet door had been broken except one pane.
Her father continued locking Maggie in her bedroom at night until he was transferred and the family moved again. Despite Momma’s pleading that she needed her daughter at home to help care for the boys and the new baby, he sent Maggie off to a convent school. Now that she’d kissed a boy and had a taste of sin, he couldn’t trust his wife to take proper care of her while he was overseas. He believed the Bible when it said all women were weak and inferior to men. He was enormously pleased that his wife was pregnant again when he left. “One less thing to worry about.”
Maggie dealt with his version of solitary confinement by becoming adept at hiding school library books. Consequently she knew a great deal more than she really wanted to about igneous rocks and bird identification because those books were the smallest and she could best hide them where her father could not reach. Once in the convent school, she had a new library to pillage until she got caught reading the unabridged version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with the contemporary English version on the facing pages. After rapping her knuckles, the nuns took it from her and encouraged her to put her mind to better use by reading St. Augustine and St. Teresa of Avila. They knew what was best for her. Her father knew what was best for her. Years around her father had taught her a pretty decent poker face, its blankness the safest face for the powerless of any age, any era. Momma used to tell her when she made faces, “Do you want your face to freeze like that?” In a sense it did freeze: the poker face was her default setting. Only recently did she allow herself the luxury of exposing her feelings. Taking them out of hiding. Test driving them in public.
Painting finished, Maggie went into the tiny Klein blue bathroom and washed up. The deep sink filled two thirds of the space, the toilet half hidden in the corner behind it. She rolled up her sleeves and peeled off a long strip of dried latex which had adhered to her arm. It always surprised her how much texture her skin had, all the little lines and crevices captured and clearly visible in the paint. When she was still living at home, she used to peel off her sunburned skin and observe the same qualities, holding the skin up to the light to see how fragile it really was, thinking about the lamp shades made of skin she saw in that Holocaust book. She wondered as she scrubbed down the tray, whether Yves Klein’s process of painting took long enough for his trademark blue paint to dry on the female models he used as living brushes. That paint, did they peel it or wash it off? How did it feel to be Klein’s paint brush? More than a muse, less than an artist? An object of desire, a utilitarian tool? Fine art or a publicity stunt? All of the above? What an odd thing, to be famous as a paint brush.
Maggie cleaned her nylon bristle brush with soap and cold water, wrapped the roller in a plastic bag which she put in the miniature refrigerator in the office. That would keep it soft until all the touch up painting was completed. When she pushed her hair back from her face, she felt the tiny bumps of dry speckled paint on her nose and partially rubbed them off. She should clean up before she went home.
Outside the sun was setting and she looked at the dirty yellow sky with the band of bruised red along the horizon, punctuated by the tall palm trees. Circumcised palms, all the dried spikes and dead leaves neatly hacked off, the sharp phallic silhouette backlit as the lights along the street clicked on. It could have been a postcard photo of paradise.
Life was good here. Some days were even glorious. Instead of lightning bugs and the roar of katydids, she had all the colors of city lights and the roar of traffic. She had known for a long time that Momma was wrong when she told her that you have to be happy with what you’re given in life. That was a consolation designed to keep slaves compliant, not a fate written in stone. It was not the moral of this story.
Return on Wednesday for the next chapters of  Just Like Suicide.