Barbara Benjamin
Fiction (with a glimmer of truth)
3700 words
Award winner
Memoirs À
la Proust
"The Story Book"
Most infants grow gradually into an awareness of life and of themselves as separate
beings apart from mother, father, and others around them; though of me, it was
often commented that I was born into an awareness of death. Before a recognition of the faintest shadings
of life settled upon my optic nerves, slowly raising the curtain of perception
on the miniature dramas in my busy orbs—for the eyes, I think, are the first
instruments of awareness that the brain awakens; and then smells, sounds and
touch infuse life into what sight spreads out before us—before that first
awaking awareness discovering the small world encircling my senses, and before my
thoughts registered familiar, everyday images of life, the shadow of death laid
its hand upon all my senses.
From my earliest recollections, the passage of time echoed from
every object or person in my world. When
I was very young, my aunt gave me a picture book, the first I ever had. With magical pictures of a small girl
imitating animals: "A bird can fly. So can I!"
this little book was the source of my delight.
A picture is everything—the way the characters are drawn, the distorted
proportions of the eyes to the head, the head to the body, the expressions on
the faces, and colors; like political cartoons, which the cynical or satirical
impact is set up, not so much by what the cartoon says, but by the precise way
the picture is drawn relative to the cartoon's message. On each page the little girl's dress, hair,
and pose changed according to the animal she imitated. Her face and pose carried an air of
self-containment, a sense of freedom to be what she was—imaginative and
carefree. Moreover, shown by all the
different, colorful dresses she wore, and by the clever ways her hair was done
up, her mother, I thought, possessed an inventive and indulgent nature—neither
character trait, to my great disappointment, were inherent in my own mother. My ardent identification with this
adventurous and creative picture-book child owed it's
flowering to my immense passion for clothes, hair ribbons, and vibrant
colors—dresses with lots of ruffles and lace, full skirts that one could twirl
about in, puffy sleeves, and soft, yet brilliant colors. And, it wasn't enough that I wore a pretty
dress, but it had to contain character, one that could be named, such as the
dress of numerous buttons and small bows that I appropriately called my
"buttons and bows" dress; or the one with a print of spinning
tops—naturally enough, I called my "topsy"
dress. By naming my dresses, my mother
knew specifically the dress I wished to wear that day; but Mother drew the line
at wearing one lavender sock and one blue one.
My little girl of the picture book represented my desire for the new and
unusual; something pretty, a sense of freedom and creativity; and, I suppose,
all of these combined stirred my internal yearning for the expression of life I
imagined she was permitted; and for how she must have felt. Transferring my identity to hers, I was
transported to some place beyond my world.
Although I had a peculiar and extraordinary sense of death and decay, my
nature wasn't morose or gloomy; rather, my sense of beauty seemed to parallel that
of my sense of death.
Each morning I awoke to the thrill of remembering my book, of
knowing that at a certain time each day my mother would sit me down, then give me a glass of milk and
the book. The routine was quite ordinary and unadorned, but the anticipation it
stirred in me marked an indelible space in my memory, which, when thinking on
it now, draws a gasp of breath and a brief quickening in my chest; and for a
moment something foreign, except to that memory, courses through my body, like
a feeling one gets from a certain aroma after a long forgotten pleasurable
event associated with that aroma, born from the intensity of a long-ago emotion
from an erotic experience, and left behind to live as a haunting ghost in a
special chamber of our emotions; though the actual memory recedes into
forgotten coves, that exquisite experience and all it's associated emotions are
condensed, let's say, into the smell of a particular perfume, so that, if
unexpectedly, the smell of that same perfume crosses the olfactory senses
again, before any conscious recall of that forgotten memory is triggered, a
rush of sensation, a titillating passion and ardent desire grips the emotions
unaware—almost paralyzing—dulling the consciousness of the present moment,
overwhelmed by the ancient, once living moment brought to life again simply by
a brief whiff of the memorable scent. Then, the memory associated with this
aroma is uncompressed, welling up to live again. Sometimes the memory is never
unlocked, but the emotions, nonetheless, live independently of the memory,
hidden until a chance sensory stimulation releases it. So is my state now
should I see anything resembling those pictures inside my special book; an
astonishing exhilaration sweeps over me, catching me off guard.
Each day, after my nap, Mother would place a large, wine-colored
brocade cushion on the floor by the coffee table. I would sit down on the
cushion and wait for her to bring the milk and the book. Returning with the
milk, she'd place the glass on the table and hand me the book. When my tiny
arms and hands reached up for it, a nearly indiscernible tremor would shiver
from my jaw down to my belly. Straining for composure, my lips formed an
uncontrollable smile exposing my tiny clinched teeth, my jaw set tight against
a squeal of delight and every muscle in my face giving away the pure excitement
I pained to conceal.
This precise moment held within it a meaning no other could, in
quite so arrant a way. I suppose if there is to be a frighteningly negative thought, it will impose itself in
the strongest way upon something equally positive. For, cherishing anything
opens the vulnerability of its loss. No desire greater existed for me at that
time in my young life, than the moment of once again mentally climbing inside this
picture book. It was the center of my
world and every event and myself
were satellites moving around it. As the source of my most profound joy, it
also became my greatest punishment. The slightest event could affect this
solitary, longed-for occasion, forcing the possibilities of all manner of
disasters to surface into my awareness.
Across the alley from our house lived a middle-aged woman whose
apparent sole interest in life was everybody else's. By her good luck, her
house had the advantage of sitting on a slight rise of ground, high enough so
that from her bedroom window on the second floor, she could survey an area that
included about eight houses in circumference to hers. Regularly feigning the
activity of knitting or crocheting, she would sit for hours by her upstairs
bedroom window, assuring herself that nothing happened without her notice. Her
husband had died young, leaving her childless and with a small inheritance. She
apparently never desired to marry again for she never sought the company of
men. Instead, she made the rounds from one women's social group to another; so,
she was able to learn all there was to know about what was happening within
each family, since the talk between women is relatively open, divulging nearly
everything down to, but not including, the activities occurring beneath the
matrimonial sheets. This subject was tacitly taboo, although there were those
willing to flirt with talking all around it, pretending that what they were
referring to was not what the others thought, although they knew everyone
did. Talk about sexual escapades finds
greater acceptance among men, since their image of manhood, in part, grows from
a certain supposed sexual prowess. But a woman's intimate life must remain a
mystery, based, I suppose, on the Christian ideal of virginity that has been
promulgated for nearly 2000 years. Although the social mores of our era have
strayed from the intensely strict laws of the previous generations, and for the
most part ignored, nonetheless, a certain reticence still lingers. Though a
woman, no doubt, has no less interest in the subject, divulging her personal
experience of intimacy would strip away her mysterious quality as a sexual
being, cheapening her image as low-grade or base. Mrs. Baker, apparently, needed
to stay in touch with intimacy, but without having to touch it. She was a kind
of voyeur to life in general, because her sole apparent occupation was to stay
informed about all the lives within the households that came within her
purview. So, on a somewhat regular basis she visited each house, usually at
For the women of the neighborhood, these visits were an
"honorable" way to stay abreast of the juicy intrigues brewing inside
the cooking pots of one's neighbors. The
gossip received their tacit approval, although publicly they would righteously
condemn it. Like all the other women on Mrs. Baker's route, my mother valued
the spicy and titillating dramas Mrs. Baker replayed separately to each
neighbor, who was both audience and critic. To minimize the insult should you
be the last to hear the latest story, Mrs. Baker had a way of making you
believe you were the only one privileged to hear whatever juicy tidbit of news
you salivated for, which, of course, she assured you that she was about to
divulge the information to your ears alone.
Before releasing her treasures, she would extract a pledge that "on
your honor" you would never repeat what she was about to tell you. This was the price of admission to each
family theater. Since eventually nearly all of Mrs. Baker's tales wound their
way through the doors and living rooms of each neighbor, any resulting open
gossip held her blameless, and all the gossips implicated themselves. None
dared to reveal directly her source (even though everyone knew who it was) for
fear she would be dropped from the entertainer's list.
Sitting on my bed in my room, during Mrs. Baker's visits, it
seemed as if the walls began stretching outwards the way the body of a balloon
stretches out when someone begins to blow air into it; so, too, my room and
everything in it grew beyond all proportion to me and seemed to be the universe
itself. With anger and self-pity, my esteem, no doubt, suffering with the fear
that Mother, in her absorption with Mrs. Baker's stories, would forget the time
altogether and leave me in the abyss. At these times, I became like a mere
speck of dirt fallen into the carpet. So, like an ant, I would creep slowly
across the surface of my chenille bed cover, running my small finger over its
patterns, keeping my eyes closed testing if I could tell when my finger ran
over the top of a bump or into a valley between them. My chest of drawers was but a towering,
smooth brown wall; no longer were there any doors or windows, closets or
beds. Over the edge of the bed I'd
slide, dropping softly to the floor and crawl around, keeping my face close to
the floor, peering closely into and between the carpet strands to blur out
everything else around me, the tip of my nose just barely brushing against the
carpet fibers. I imagined the fibers as
an endless chain of mountains that must be scaled if I wanted to cross the
room; and, to find food would take days of walking. I'd roll over on my back and look up at the
sparkly popcorn ceiling through squinted eyes.
With my eyes squinched tight, I looked through
the merest slits, then the ceiling didn't look like a ceiling anymore, just a
kind of white nothing.
I'd lie there squinting, thinking about my book; in my mind,
going over the picture of the girl on the cover to see how much about her I
could remember. I'd picture her in
motion, as she appeared on the cover, with her black hair standing straight out
behind her to give the illusion of wind blowing, and her bangs blown back off
her forehead, covering the blue ribbon in her hair, the ends of which fluttered
in the breeze the same direction as the hair.
She had her arms up, with her hands bent downward in a flying gesture,
and her legs appeared to float beneath her, proving that she indeed was
flying. Her face was large and round on
a tiny neck, like a balloon floating above her body. On the face were two black half-crescent
moons representing closed eyes, and just a hint of a small red mouth in the
shape of a 'V,'—clearly a self-possessed smile. She flew behind a bird, his wings, feather
tips, and spindly bird legs and feet all in a similar attitude as the
girl's. They circled over the land below
them, which was filled with romping, playful cartoon animals.
A shiny gold strip of paper covered the spine of the book, a
trademark for a series of children's books, so that when several books are
lined up on the bookshelf, the glistening image appears as a golden mirage
amidst the spiritless black, blue, or red monotony of the competing books'
bindings. Reflecting on my book as I lay
squirreled away in my room, it occurred to me that, of course, I'd be too small
to ever see it, that its overwhelming size relative to me would obscure my
recognition, that if even right beside me, its shape would be unfamiliar. Although, the slightly irregular stack of its
pages between the covers, I thought, would be magnified and resemble steps,
giving way to a curiosity to climb them.
But, once on the top, instead of pictures, I'd see great splotches of
random colors, like standing in the ocean up to your eyes, looking in every
direction but seeing only the blue-green of the water until coming into a
section with a distinctly different color, perhaps from the seaweed—for a
gradual change of color you'd probably barely notice—then everywhere you look
is just that color. Though precocious, indeed, I was given to such fantastical
imaginings of exaggerated realities to deflect the consuming anxieties of my
isolated world. Thus, as I receded into my miniature world, I imagined that the
colors would bath me, completely close in around me. In my normal size, I can see the myriad of
colors around me concurrently; they appear in groups, recognizable as some
object or person. The picture of the ocean on my bedroom wall had endless
shades of blues, greens, grays, and white, which my eye could choose to see
separately or blended together in a way that I knew, without contemplation,
which blues were the sky and which blues were the water; or which greens were
plants and which greens were the sea. Colors are not mere areas of colors, like
the blobs of paint an artist applies to a canvass before the point they become
a thing; but the colors I see mean something: the sea, the waves, or the
beach.
In my blown up world, distended like a telescope's view, I was
left behind in an abyss of space. In
this state, I imaged that my sense of touch gained no comfort from my blankets
or pillows; instead of folds, creases, and textures, surfaces would become
obstacles or seem flat. In this world, I
imagined how I could never wrap about me a blanket, nuzzling my face into the
soft, downy material; my size prevented me from sinking softly into anything,
rather, of walking always on top of everything, as if there was nothing that
existed beyond what I stood on at that very moment, a forever kind of flatland.
The thought of punishment restrained my growing impulse to cry
out for Mother, although the desire consumed me, for I feared I'd be lost
forever imprisoned in my room-universe.
My life was being devoured. When
imprisoned, you at once wish time to quicken its pace so you can leave your
prison, but you also wish for time to almost stop, realizing that every second
passing is stolen from you, robbed from the time you could have been living
outside the prison, again in your own world.
Prison is not your world, but an imposed world. This seemingly endless
prison imposed on me by Mrs. Baker's visits transformed my world into a chasm
of both a timeless and time-consuming void.
Like my room, Mother's time became distorted, speeded up without her
cognizance. She was not lost, but she was lost from me. Her world, for that time, was riveted on the
imagined worlds of others and the real-life fairy tales spun out by Mrs. Baker,
the storyteller. It was her time to lay her life beside other's, to crawl
inside all the little risqué and sordid details of lives normally not on
display—the moments about people's lives they wish to keep secret, but often
unwittingly leak out. So, such were the worries that plagued my endurance of
Mrs. Baker's visits.
The appointed time of day Mother gave me the book was after my
nap. Since my restless nature rebelled
at naps and bedtime, mother saw the book as an inducement; hence, giving me the
book after the nap rather than before.
Endurance, then, became a new feature of my life. Before the book, I tolerated naptimes with
boredom or tantrums, resentful of her insistence that I take a rest each day
when I knew perfectly well I didn't need one.
Probably to my mother's dismay, I functioned in only one of two states:
actively awake or dead asleep, and it was usually the former, for I needed very
little sleep. Most children, indeed,
most people, have varying degrees of alertness, fatigue, and
sleeplessness. I rarely know a state of
tiredness. At the point my activity at
last runs down, almost instantly, a tsunami of sleep washes over me. I feel a drifting away, led by a Pied Piper's
hypnotic song leading me into the recesses of my subconscious, succumbing to a
sensual heaviness pulling me toward a blue-black vagueness; a mental dimness of
cascading notes engulfing my senses from some distant haunting music, casting a
blanket of soothing sounds about me, melting all resistance. At that moment, I desire complete surrender
to this velvet darkness enveloping my consciousness. So thoroughly does my body and mind surrender
to the hypnotic trance of sleep, that
I often awaken in the morning in the same position I fell into sleep, having no
recollection of the intervening time.
Mystically, I'm drawn into a life of sleep; wholly surrendering my mind
to this life so remarkably dissimilar to waking hours, without the brightness
of sunlight and everything muted, and speech often incomprehensible, which is,
nonetheless, understandable, but only there—not here. I've never understood those people who
concern themselves to "understand" their dreams. The author of your
dreams, your subconscious, attempts to communicate to you. We tend to separate
conscious and subconscious as if they're two foreign bodies; but the conscious
mind needs the subconscious winds to circulate through it. Sleep awakens the subconscious---or, we
awaken to it---releasing its coded messages in the shapes of objects or people,
of fragments of places or events; all guarded parts of ourselves, forcing themselves into some kind of
integration. In sleep, I live in an
immersed part of myself, the "night school" of the self, learning a
language that belongs to me alone.
Perhaps the lessons pass into a
darkness upon awakening, but I sense the presence in a wordless
whisper, reminding me who I am, unveiling mysteries, like the curious allure of
my picture book.
When at last the book was in my hands, I would set my gaze on
the cover for a moment and a trepidation passed across my thoughts, like the
shadow a cloud casts on the ground as it moves, for this moment prescribes a
point on a downward spiral; another petal unwound, breaking free from the bud;
another complete revolution of a tire, leaving minute traces behind of itself
as it rolls. Gazing at the cover, I
scrutinized it for signs of progressed age.
One day I'd see that the upper right corner acquired a dent in it;
another day I'd see a new scratch, like the first scratch or dent in the shiny
paint of a new car—the first sign that it's a used car. Everything shows something that distinguishes
it from the time you saw it last, its proof of passing through time; a point or
line between the past from the present, or the present from the future. Nothing accentuates that mark more distinctly
than routine or custom, like a birthday or a holiday. For me, seeing this book each day at the same
time, experiencing that irrepressible inner thrill, ran headlong into my comfortless apprehension
of passing time. It was my fate to
fixate on the slow decay and eventual demise of things, perceiving scarcely
discernible changes in the objects and the people around me; which, as a child,
denied me the security of the assumed immortality of parents and grandparents,
of which most children never question the authenticity.