banana cream pie—had done that, at 25 she had been 100. m arriage, the good old fashioned kind—beatings and cleaning interspersed with the 3Vi minute fuck—had done that. 27, 28, and 29
were the golden years, she was just a normal age, regular, the past
sometimes welling up and breaking like blisters, one wipes up the
ooze and goes on, reading books, watching television, taking walks,
called cunt and pussy, followed home nights, but not once raped or
beaten, she had known she would have to pay for those golden years.
God exacted interest like a loanshark, you paid and kept paying and
still He broke all yr bones, one Yom Kippur, at the beginning of her
30th year, God had written her name once again in the book of loss,
bertha schneider, let her lose everything, God had written in that
pedestrian prose of His. rub it in, pile it on, and let her eat cake, the
kind wrapped in plastic, God had scratched in the margin.
so in her 30th year bertha had found herself bereft of milk, fish,
and eggs, and all she could afford was cake wrapped in plastic, her
teeth began to go. her friends had already left, all secularists, when it
was writ they obeyed.
bertha had never had any money to speak of but her friends had
been pure gold, the best of every generation, the ones who stopped
wars, the ones who wrote the poems of their time, the ones who held
hands and treasured single daffodils while decadence raged all
around, the ones who were not waxen and false, the ones all those
others could not destroy, the ones police could not police, corruption
could not corrupt, bitterness could not embitter, the ones on whose
hands dirt was clay, not mud. but in her 30th year, God had struck
again, and she had fallen from grace, which is something like doing
a somersault and missing the floor, she kept falling and falling and
falling until she lost even the memory of solid ground.
bertha had learned a few things in life, exactly 3. 1—every Up is
followed by a Down. 2—every Down is followed by an Up, but you
have to live long enough which, depending on how down the Down
is, can be tough and is not a foregone conclusion. 3—Disembodied
Wisdom is the only lover who doesnt get seasick on the curves and
take the easy way out.
bertha had courted Disembodied Wisdom assiduously. Disembodied Wisdom, not nearly as formidable as it is cracked up to be, had given in, lured perhaps by the rhythmic certainty of berthas
tragic sense of life, bertha had had, to be frank, carnal knowledge,
like light through a window pane, bertha, pregnant from the union,
had given birth in a profane world where dog shit and the urine of
drunks and junkies were the only available sacraments, now,
bloodied from delivering the divine fruits of her unique fuck to a
fairly indifferent world, bertha looked around for that one lover detached enough not to run. gone. Disembodied Wisdom had fled, just as Warren Beatty might have. lost, like light through a window pane.
lovers, friends, dust unto dust, dust clings, bertha sneezes, dust
doesnt take kindly to sneeze, dust scatters, bertha calls after it. dust,
what can it answer?
the others are dust and what is bertha? more dust, but bertha
doesnt trust dust, she knows herself, she knows the others, chaos,
craving, dust has its own laws, dust is inconstant, dust hurts the eyes,
dust can sweep up in huge gusts, suffocate, inside the nostrils, blinding the eyes, choking the throat, dust pretends it will cling forever, but bertha knows, it does or it doesnt. either way, once dust touches
dust, the spot is marked, loving, needing, or wanting dust is a waste
of time, especially for dust, even a legal purist like bertha resents it.
bertha understands dust but wishes she were not of it. she is tired of
dust clinging and she is tired of dust scattering and she is tired of
dust coming at her in terrible storms and she is tired of being made
of a substance so ultimately ridiculous, something so substantial and
so insubstantial at the same time, something that passes through
ones fingers* which are dust, like dust, bertha longs for the only lover
she has ever trusted, Disembodied Wisdom, but it is gone, strongly
reminding her of dust, maybe whatever dust touches turns to dust.
bertha had what was, from her point of view, a reliable com-
monsense perspective, all loss was measured against atrocity, she
was poor but bones she was not. her gums were getting soft and
squooshy from malnutrition but live she would, she had no chair to
sit in which led to constant backache and she slept on the floor
which led to constant colds in her bladder, but she wasnt pressed up
straight shitting in her pants in a cattle car on the way to Dachau,
she had been raped and was still haunted by fear and humiliation
but she had not also had cholera at the same time, she had fucked
for money, been destitute on street comers underdressed in freezing
winter, but hunger had not reduced her to eating rats, she had endured and continued to endure real hardship but she would probably live long enough— 1 more month—to turn 31.
this was not stupid of bertha, in Amerika such measuring was
called paranoia or, by liberal psychiatrists, survivors guilt, but bertha, with her european sensibility, knew that she was a realist with a very cogent understanding of history, she didnt imagine that she
could survive atrocity but she prepared for it by constant concentration on what it would require of her. unlike her contemporaries, she believed that normalcy differed from atrocity in degree, not in kind,
it was possible, bertha knew, that she might not survive normalcy
either, harassed as she was by its unambiguous cruelty, every day of
loss and more loss encouraged bertha to wonder: will I live longer
than this terrible time which is, on the grand scale, not terrible
enough to justify capitulation, tired, she measured her fatigue
against the unspeakable exhaustion of her own relatives who had
survived the Nazi death camps, they had not dropped dead of their
own accord, a fact that provided an eloquent rule of thumb, bertha
saw loss, all loss, from this unyielding perspective, this method of
measurement was the discipline by which she maintained an optimistic belief in the likelihood that she too might endure, for this reason, when despair gnawed, she did not welcome it or romanticize
it or enjoy it. self-pity made her sicker than deprivation, and for this
reason, when lovers left her all the while hurling foul epithets or
when friends fell away like diseased flies, she did not cry. she might
well feel sorrow, but tears had to be reserved for disasters that made
tears run dry. her attitude was unfashionable in a world in which
acne occasioned more sympathy than starvation, her own pimples
and the pimples of others did not move bertha and so others, comfortable in excessive emotional upheaval, saw her as cold and rigid, and she saw them as silly and vain, bertha did not share the common