The Tao of Humiliation Read online

  After more walking he gathered twigs, acting purposeful, trying to lose himself in the task. He took a birch’s fallen branch and brushed off the loose peel. He put it beside other branches and twigs. He’d seen men at the retreat making these little overgrown basketlike contraptions big enough to hold a crouching body. It calmed his nerves to behave as if he had something to do—some bizarre activity like every activity assigned at the retreat. He walked in the direction where he thought he smelled a stream.

  Through the clearing ahead of him shrubs swayed. A bear? They’d been warned about bears. It smelled like a bear. The air was broken into particles. The huffing and coughing of a bear. He crouched to make himself invisible.

  And then, hurtling into view, saddle bags of sweat under each arm, his kilt lopsided: Barry.

  “I thought I saw a girl,” Barry said, looking baffled to find Everett.

  “A girl?” Everett shot up, trying to tamp down his embarrassment. He could feel his face relax, as if slowly unsticking. He was glad to be found by Barry. Barry only noticed Barry.

  “It wasn’t anything. Something. Nothing. A girl.”

  “You saw a girl?” Everett said.

  “Are we lost?” Barry asked.

  Everett should have picked Lisa King up in his arms—he should have taken her out of that apartment, gathered the sheet around her. She didn’t know what she was doing. She was sick. The friend whose apartment she was in was a reckless guy who must have put her up to it—being with a guy like that could have killed her. She was that fragile. Maybe she did it because she would get sick if she confronted Everett. Show and don’t tell was easier. Maybe she was afraid of what he would say. Maybe she was afraid of herself and her temper. Maybe he wasn’t the only guy that something like that had happened to. Maybe it’s happened to every guy that’s ever lived. He was so relieved to see Barry that he was almost ready to forget Lisa King. His heart was loosening, flopping open. If he didn’t watch it he’d cry.

  Barry asked, “We’re not really lost, are we?”

  To which Everett replied, “We just have to wait. Wait long enough and they’ll come for us.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Eventually they’ll realize. We may have to wait a long time. They’ll miss us.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ll notice we’re gone.”

  Everett didn’t have to think hard before he said, “They’ll miss your kilt. It’s unforgettable.”

  “Oh. You think so?”

  “Your kilt will save us.”

  “Great.”

  “Or else it will get us killed. It’s kind of shouting, ‘Kill me.’”

  Barry said, “I kept thinking I saw a girl. Running. Like out of the corner of my eye. Just flashing by. I think it’s a hallucination. You know that guy Lucas? The cancer survivor? He’s writing a book.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “He says that before you kill yourself or maybe he said before you die—I can’t remember—anyway, either way, he says you’re hallucinating.”

  Everett asked, “Did he try to kill himself?”

  “After the diagnosis. So he wants to write a book about how not to kill yourself. That’s why he’s at the camp. For tips. But you know what?” Barry lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t trust Lucas not to depress a clown. Although clowns are often depressed individuals.”

  Barry couldn’t stop talking—about depression, about clowns, about how you can’t go back into the past and survive the present. On the latter point it was like he was reading Everett’s mind.

  Neither man told the other, but they both hoped Barry’s eyes weren’t playing tricks and that an actual girl was lost or in trouble, so that the two of them, although they themselves were lost, could save her. They walked deeper into the woods. Their shadows fell ahead of them. Frogs were starting up.

  By then the girl had run back in the other direction, far on the other side of the rushing stream, and could not have heard the men who would have so gladly saved her, not even Everett, loud with theories.

  Touch Us

  Iris and Jacob slept with their backs to one another, as if even during dreams they were headed in opposite directions. As they were. She had nearly died eight months before. It seemed anachronistic—to be young still, or somewhat young, and to have such a bad heart.

  Only three months after her second surgery Iris and her husband had argued, which was a hopeful sign. Obviously Jacob thought she could defend herself. She was strong enough to stand up to him in the kitchen with the dishwasher hanging open and shooting steam. It was one of those tone-of-voice spats: You sounded irritated, and so now I’m going to sound irritated. During the argument she felt as if her ribs shifted. The pain was so great that she had to sit down immediately—right on the floor.

  After that, she and Jacob didn’t fight. But they did talk. They could always talk about almost anything. Except, lately, about wanting a child. Or about how she didn’t want to be touched. She could never explain how something in her stopped wanting to be touched even though she loved her husband. Both her doctors assured her that she should be fine by now, despite residual pain. But she couldn’t stop feeling that her body was a stranger and had long been a stranger. Now being touched in any way at all made her feel that she could crack open and lose herself. Which shamed her. Of course it wasn’t logical, such shame, such an aversion to her body. And maybe that’s why logic couldn’t do anything about her feelings.

  It was a July morning when Iris’s sister Amy showed up at the door, unannounced, with her twins. Amy probably thought she was on a mission of mercy. Mercy, which required guerrilla tactics.

  A carnival, Amy said. Just like in the old days, she said. You have to come, Iris. I’ll be a wreck without you. Really. You’re doing me a favor, Iris. How can I handle these delinquents alone? The twins stood in front of their mother, like miniature Praetorian guards. For once, they weren’t wriggling and wagging their heads. They stared up at their aunt. Iris wondered what Amy had bribed them with.

  It was hard to disappoint Amy—all that need written on her pretty, big-eyed, insanely vulnerable-looking face. Easier to please her than not to. Amy was the younger sister and wore the role without interruption, unless she could get her way by using other tactics. Jacob never liked Amy and that both pained Iris and was, somehow, reassuring. Amy was so pretty with her slow insinuating smile that years ago when Iris started dating it wasn’t unusual for anyone she brought home to stare frozen with admiration at her younger sister.

  Amy’s boys, Ephraim and Tanner, were dressed alike in denim shorts and blue polo shirts, and usually you couldn’t go for more than five minutes without one of them shoving his brother or locking his head under his arm. Just being around them you could break a bone. They were nine now, at an age where head-butting was regular behavior. Amy hardly noticed their acting up. Or else she seemed proud of how loud and disruptive they could be. They were still staring up at Iris when she realized they might not actually have been bribed to be good. They appeared curious about her, and their eyes looked a little frightened.

  “Where’s Kippers?” Amy asked. She peered behind Iris for the dog.

  “Oh—a long story,” Iris said.

  By the time the fairgrounds came into view Iris was furious with herself for being pulled out of the house. So hard to stop pleasing Amy, although it was the path of least resistance in the long run. If Iris hadn’t come along today Amy would have shown up tomorrow with an even more preposterous idea: laser tag or skeet shooting. Besides, with Amy you actually did feel you were doing her a favor, that you were needed.

  They immediately came upon two double strollers on the fairgrounds, and each time Amy stopped to talk to the infant twins’ mothers, as if they belonged to a secret society and were obligated to exchange code words. When the sky began to drizzle the infant twins were tucked under clear plastic, like blister packs, in their strollers.

  Soon the rain ended and wet patches on the walkway ev
aporated and the strollers were unzipped. The sun was fiercer than ever, and Iris’s chest crawled with so much sweat that at first she thought an insect got under her blouse. Most of the carnival rides weren’t like the ones she and Amy went on when they were kids. These were serious. Apparently if you didn’t scream while you rode one something had to be wrong with you. Maybe you were already dead. At least Amy knew better than to ask Iris to come with her and the boys on any of the rides. But then there was the funhouse.

  “Maybe I should just watch you guys?” Iris asked when Amy invited her to join them. She was beginning to feel like a bad sport—and she wanted to support Amy, given that the twins kept whining, and the shorter one, Tanner, demanded to know why it was called a funhouse when it didn’t look like fun and the taller twin began echoing his brother. “We can get out of the heat,” Amy said.

  Amy and the boys blundered ahead of Iris into the trailer. The twins were right, Iris thought. What’s fun about it? She was inside what amounted to a tight maze of glass and mirrors. Between smudged panes she could see children swarming with their hands out. The glass around Iris looked as if milk had dripped on it. From somewhere to her left came laughter, muffled.

  In the next channel she recognized one of the twins. He looked close enough to touch before she realized her mistake. His image was blurred behind thick sheets of glass and somehow a mirror was involved.

  She set out again, holding her arms like a sleepwalker. She kept finding herself in the same steamy quadrangle with the same tiny handprints smeared over the glass. At last a skinny attendant in jeans led her out. There were cameras, she realized. The attendant must have seen her lean her head against the glass. Pain is like God, she thought—it’s not visible. Only its signs are, and then only to the faithful.

  Amy and the boys were waiting for her outside the funhouse trailer. Then the three of them went together on one more ride, and Iris hovered in the shade of a sausage truck. She was there long enough to remember one of the strangest summers of her life, a summer she had avoided thinking about for years.

  When she was thirteen Iris was hired to babysit a three-year-old boy during the day while his mother worked. And because the boy and his mother lived thirty miles away from Iris’s home she stayed at their apartment throughout the workweek. The little boy’s right arm was in a cast. He often tried to knock Iris with it. As if that wasn’t enough, she had to sleep in the same bed with the mother because the apartment was so small. The only time she’d been more miserable was seven months earlier when her father died and her mother became anxious and frightened, and Amy became alternately bossy or helpless, as occasions warranted. And Iris: the older sister who guarded her little sister and her mother. Iris the brave and stalwart. Iris, who hardly let herself cry at her beloved father’s funeral. Iris, who babysat to bring in money for her family.

  One day while Iris was babysitting, something miraculous happened. Carnival tents and rides were set up on the edge of town, on a high hill. She and the little boy walked to the fair to look at the rides. Only to look: she didn’t have money of her own. She can almost see herself. She must have weighed less than ninety pounds—a tiny girl in white shorts with pockets, and in one of the pockets the empty wallet she always carried. Because of a heavy downpour earlier in the day the hill was slippery with mud. Iris and the little boy kept sliding.

  By the time they reached the top of the hill the sky was drizzling. No one was on the grounds except for the men who tended rides. Those men, all of them stringy and scary, wore shirts as flimsy as tissue paper. One of the men—skinnier than any of the others and nearly toothless—pestered Iris to buy a ticket to a ride. She stood there, mud splattered up her legs. The little boy was so terrified he clutched her hand. She told the man the truth: she couldn’t pay for a ticket.

  And then the miracle started. The man took her hand and motioned for her to get inside a ride. She and the little boy climbed in, and the dragon boat shot upward. Iris and the boy could see off into the suddenly apricot-colored clouds. As they soared, the boy huddled close to Iris. Afterwards, the first man passed them on to other men who lifted the boy into ride after ride and told Iris to get in beside him. The men’s kindness was so startling and exhilarating and comforting. The thing that surprised her most: the men treated her like a child, even though she was already thirteen. She hadn’t ever thought of herself as a child, as someone in need of protection and kindness. She and the little boy were together in this, but then, reluctantly, because the mother was due home soon, the two of them began to float down the hill and into town.

  They were only blocks from the apartment when the little boy clambered up onto a stranger’s porch steps. Iris followed and reached out to ease him away. She knew how he could swing his cast at her and shriek. Instead he turned and smiled up into her face. Just then a door banged open. An enormous man, like a bloated gray frog, rolled his wheelchair onto the porch. His mammoth head was sunk into his chest. He didn’t stop shouting even when Iris and the little boy bolted from the steps.

  The boy—shock on his face, his legs trembling—would not let Iris carry him home or hold his hand. Nor would he forgive her after that.

  And then, within a week, the boy’s mother set Iris up on a date with an orderly from the hospital where she worked. The orderly was nineteen. That’s what he said, although Iris would wonder later if he hadn’t been older. The orderly stopped coming around for Iris only after—his words—she “went catatonic” on him. She hadn’t known what else to do, other than to play dead, to stop moving, to pretend not to hear anything he said.

  Amy appeared at Iris’s side, the boys right behind her, and announced that she wanted them all to go into the silly old-fashioned freak show. When they went on the last ride she and the boys had passed the tent. It looked cute, she said. Just one more thing. For the boys.

  “All right,” Iris said for the benefit of the twins and to help out Amy. “I’m game.”

  This is it, Iris told herself. No more after this. Not even for Amy.

  Who was Amy these days, anyway? What made Amy kind and yet spoiled, tolerant and yet a busybody, vain and yet sloppy and late and smart and self-deprecating and needy and, under it all, wildly in love with herself? Some women had a certain sort of power they could apply at will. It didn’t matter how they looked. They could be ninety years old and you still felt it. They’d joined forces with their own power. They might be surprised they had the power when they were girls, but after a while they learned how to make that power work in their favor, and to enjoy it. After a while they didn’t even feel separate from that sort of sexual power. They thought they and their bodies were one and the same. They didn’t recognize that there was a difference between themselves and their bodies. Or if they did recognize the difference it was subtle enough to ignore. When Iris’s boyfriends looked at Amy all those years ago, those boys thought they were seeing all of Amy. And Amy thought so too. But Iris knew that what they saw was separate from Amyness, the way a door isn’t the room it opens into. Or at least that’s what Iris hoped. Because if we are our bodies what was Iris? Hadn’t everything she’d endured taught her that her body has a life of its own and that she has the right to hate that fact?

  Amy was actually remarrying her first husband in August. He knew what he was getting and wanted to get it again. And Amy believed he was the lucky one. For how long would Iris’s husband accept that Iris didn’t want to be touched? He knew what he wasn’t going to get, and he still wasn’t going to get it.

  Gorilla Boy, The Cow with the Transparent Heart, The Three-Headed Pig, Snake Girl. The canvas signs were faded. Whole words were scrubbed.

  Iris lowered her voice to warn Amy and said, “The boys don’t look too impressed by the signs.”

  “I know. We should have stuck with basic cable. They think they’ve seen everything. But it will be cooler in the tent.”

  And it was. The sides of the tent beat softly, buffeted by breezes. The light bloomed as if under a pink
and orange parasol, and there was a smell of cut clover. Amy and the boys headed toward a raised platform while Iris paused just past the tent flaps, the shade calming her.

  She caught up with her sister and the boys yards ahead. They were alone in the tent—except for a middle-aged woman on a stage. The woman was turning in slow circles. Iris had seen a face like hers many times—at the pharmacy, touring through the mall, waiting in the doctor’s office. Even the haircut, the cropped helmet sprayed into place, was familiar.

  What was different: the woman wore a lacy too-short dress that looked like an amputated bridal gown, and her giant thighs were rumpled and orange, almost like the color of rind on expensive cheese, and the rumples there were deep, almost trenches. Gator Woman, a sign said.

  Her skin didn’t look like alligator hide, not really. More like tree bark.

  The taller twin—that was Ephraim—was staring, his face hardening. Iris followed his gaze to the woman’s sandals, the purple paint on the woman’s toenails.

  When Iris looked up she felt the woman’s eyes on her, as if a fly stickily crawled over Iris’s neck and traveled across her blouse and then down to the Capri pants that pinched her waist. She shook her head as if to make a fly go away, when what she wanted was to shake the woman’s eyes away.

  Because Amy was busy brushing something out of one of the twin’s hair, at first she didn’t see that Iris took the brunt of the woman’s glare, took the full force and couldn’t look away. There was no way for Amy to see that Iris could not keep from thinking that she herself was a cartoon monster, her body patched and sewn sloppily, her veins shining through her skin. It was as if Iris’s body was being searched by that woman—and her body was shrinking, trying to hide from the woman’s eyes. For Iris knew it. Someone loved the woman and desired her too. How else would this woman have the strength to stand, on exhibit, and yet to pour her stare, willful, unconquered, defiant, out beyond her body?