I don't remember being born, but opening my eyes for the first time, yes. Under hypnosis many years later, I wandered through knotted jungles of memory to the lost kingdoms of my childhood, which for some reason I had forgotten, the way one casually misplaces a hat or a glove. Suddenly I could remember waking in a white room, with white walls, and white sheets, and a round white basin on a square white table, and looking up into the face of my mother, whose brown hair, flushed complexion, and dark eyes were the only contrast to the white room and daylight that stung her with its brightness. Lying on my mother's chest, I watched the flesh-colored apparition change its features, as if triangles were being randomly shuffled. Then a row of white teeth flashed out of nowhere, dark eyes widened, and I, unaware there was such a thing as motion, or that I was powerless even to roll over, watched the barrage of colors and shapes, appearing, disappearing, like magic scarves out of hats, and was completely enthralled.

What I couldn't know was how yellow I had been, and covered with a film of silky black hair, which made me look even more monkey-like than newborns usually do, and sent my pediatrician into a well-concealed tizzy. He placed the cud-textured being on its mother's chest, smiled as he said, "You have a baby girl," and, forgetting to remove his gloves or even thank the anesthesiologist as was his habit, he left the hospital room to find a colleague fast. Once he had delivered a deformed baby, which came out rolled up like a volleyball, its organs outside its body, and its brain, mercifully, dead. Once he had delivered premature twins, only one of which survived the benign sham of an incubator, and now was a confused, growing teenager he sometimes saw concealing a cigarette outside the high school. Stillborns he had delivered so many times he no longer could remember how many there were, or whose. But never had he delivered a baby so near normal yet brutally different before. He knew that I was jaundiced (which he could treat easily enough), and presumed the hairy coat was due to a hormonal imbalance of some sort, though he understood neither its cause nor its degree. When he found the staff endocrinologist equally puzzled, he decided the best course was not to worry the mother, who was herself not much more than a young girl, and one with a volatile marriage, from what he'd heard from a mutual friend at the country club. He decided he would tell her that the condition was normal—something the baby would outgrow ("like life," he thought cynically)—and prescribed a drug for the jaundice, lifting the clipboard in the maternity office with one hand and writing the prescription carefully, in an unnecessarily ornate script, which was his only affectation. As he did so, New York State seemed to him suddenly shabby and outmoded, like the hospital on whose cracked linoleum he stood; like the poor practice he conducted on the first floor of his old, street-front, brick house, whose porch slats creaked at the footstep of each patient so that, at table or in his study, or even lying down on the sofa in the den wallpapered with small tea-roses, he would hear that indelible creaking and be halfway across the room before his wife knew he hadn't merely taken a yen for a dish of ice cream or gone to fetch a magazine from the waiting room; like the apple-cheeked woman he had married almost 25 years ago, when she was slender and prankish and such a willing chum; like the best clothes of most of his patients, who had made it through the Depression by doing with less until less was all they wanted; like the shabby future of this hairy little baby, on whom fate had played an as-yet unspecified trick. It was that compound malaise that my mother saw on Dr. Petersen's face as she glanced over the clean, well-used crib at her bedside and out of the hospital window just as Dr. Petersen was walking to his car to drive home for lunch and a short nap before his afternoon hours.

My mother let her eyes drowse over the crib, where her baby, a summoned life, was lying on its stomach, knees out like a tiny gymnast, still faintly yellow, and still covered with a delicate down. If anything, she found me more vulnerable, a plaintive little soul whose face looked rumpled as an unmade bed when it cried, and whose eyes could be more eloquent than a burst of sudden speech. She sang softly as she held my tiny life in her arms, my every whim and need encapsulated in a body small as a trinket, something she could carry in the crook of her arm. How could there be a grownup in so frail and pupal a creature, one so easily frightened, so easily animated, so utterly dependent on her for everything but breath? If only her husband could be there to see her, she thought, as she watched my hand move like a wayward crab across the sheet, if only he could have gotten leave to be with her. There was no telling how long it would take the Red Cross to get word to him that he had a baby girl. And what would he make of such news, anyway, in a foxhole somewhere in the middle of France, with civilians and soldiers dying all around him, at his hands even, what would he make of bringing this new civilian into the world? Though nearly over, the war seemed endless. The radio had run out of see-you-when-the-war-is-over songs. His letters were infrequent and jaggedly expressed, not that they'd talked much or even politely before he'd left. Marrying him had been like walking into a typhoon. But once in it, her pride had prevented her from returning to her parents' house in Detroit. They had warned her about marrying a man as "difficult" as he was, and, anyway, they still had so many children at home to feed and clothe on her dad's poor salary. She had always been a trouble to them, wanting to go to the fairyland of "college," when there were six other children to give minimum schooling, then running off with him when life on the South Side became suffocating. If she couldn't be a good daughter, or a good wife it would seem (no matter how pliable she tried to be), she could at least be a good mother to this odd little being. When would he return? In shameful moments, she almost wished he wouldn't; it would mean a reprieve, a chance to start life over with someone who shared more of her interests and barked at her less over trivial matters like his fried potatoes not being as crisp as he wished when he walked in the door at 7 p.m. and wanted nothing from the world but a perfect, ready dinner. His mother had always managed it for the menfolk in her family, for whom she'd baked and cooked and tended all afternoon, until they walked in hungry and demanding at nightfall, and he demanded it from his wife, period. It was the least she could do while he was out working hard to earn money for the bread she ate, etc. etc. No, he would probably return from war, and life would go on, though perhaps the experience would mellow him. If not. . .well, she could always have another baby. She looked at me. Just imagine, the baby was alive and didneven know that. What a helpless, lovable bundle she had created! She spent the rest of the afternoon watching me and fantasizing about my limitless future.

My infant years might have happened in an aquarium, so silent and full of mixing shapes were they. How strange that a time filled with my own endless wailings, gurglings, and the soothing coos and baby-talk of my mother should remain in my memory as a thick, silent dream in which clearer than any sound was the blond varnish on my crib, whose pale streaky gloss I knew like a birthmark, as it was for so many months of my life. At one, six months is half of a lifetime, and for half my lifetime I'd lain in my crib watching how the blond wood bars seemed to stretch from floor to ceiling, my mother's hands coming over them, though it seemed nothing could be higher. My mother's hands always appeared with a smile on her face, which I knew only as a semicircle that amazed me with its calm delight which each day renewed. It would rise over my crib like one of those devastating moons you can't take your eyes off of. I would knit my forehead, perplexed for a moment, and then smile without thinking about it, and my mother's soft hand would stretch over the bars to touch me, though the touch I couldn't remember in later years, nor any sound. It was a time of shapes and colors, and the puzzling changes in the air as the day moved and I could see the sunlight on a thousand flecks of milling dust, watch the sky turn blue as a bead, then strange, vapory colors ghost through the dark and frighten me before night fell. It was a time of complete passivity and ignorance. Odd things happened to me which I could neither explain nor predict. Life was like that, full of caretakers appearing over my crib wall, sometimes carrying things with shapes and colors so vibrant they startled me, things that would ring or chatter or huff. Long, ribboned, shiny things I found especially monstrous, and sometimes a shocking blue or yellow would be so intense it made my ribs shiver and my eyes scrunch closed. When that happened, the caretaker's face would change like a Kabuki mask, and through my wet, twitching eyes, I would see the moon-mask waiting, watching, filled with delight. The moon shone on me daily. Often, in the black ether I sometimes woke in, when the blond crib varnish was nowhere to be found, I could sense the moon's presence standing nearby and watching me, feel its warm breath and know it was close, transfixed by my every stirring. Sometimes the moon would vanish for long spells and my ribs would shake. Sometimes the moon would appear, all angles like a piece of broken glass, though usually that happened only when another face, shattery and florid, was there, too. To see their faces shuffle and twist scared me, though I didn't know what "scared" was exactly, only that my bones felt too large for my body, my eyes seemed to draw closer together, and I forgot everything but the grating noise, the awful, scraping barks. My thoughts, such as they were, were like a dog's or an ape's. Things happened, but what a thing was I didn't know, nor could I fathom the idea of happen. Not thoughts, but images paraded through my days, and feelings I couldn't associate with anything special like a part of my body or a soft blanket. I was like a plastic doll, except that I was, and, if death had taken me, I would not have known it. There was no confusion, no thought, no sentiment, no want. But, for some reason, the blond crib wood pleased me. I touched it with my eyes, I drank it, I smelled its glossy shimmer. When I watched it, I was not with my body but with the wood. I explored its details for long, blond hours; then I explored the sunlight catching dust in the air. Each time I explored them, or a fluffy being put next to me, or a twirling color-flock above me, it was as if I had stepped onto another planet where nothing was but that sight, nothing mattered, nothing gave me deeper pleasure, nothing came to mind.

At two, most of my excess body hair had fallen off like scales, except for a triangular swathe above my fanny, and a single silky stripe from my ribs to my pudendum. My skin softened to the buttery translucence of a two-year-old's, and my black hair made me look like an Inca. Things had names. All animals were "dog," all people were "mommy" or "daddy," but my voice could follow my pointing finger, and when it did it was almost like touching. I was enchanted equally by oddly shaped animals and kitchen utensils, and the maple jungle of recoiling legs below the dining room table. My world stopped at the shadowy heights of the closet, but some things were close to me that were lost to my mother—the clawed plastic brackets holding the bottom of the long mirror in my parents' bedroom, the heavy ruffles along the sofa that tickled my knees when I climbed up to straddle the armrest and play horsey, the sheet of glass on top of the low coffee table, into whose edge I would peer each day for long, dizzying spells, transfixed by the bright, rippling green waves I saw there.

Some parts of the house had no mystery, and consequently I never visited them. For example, the two closets facing each other in the tiny foyer. Long ago, I'd discovered nothing of any interest was in them, just overcoats, scarves, boots, and drab clothes in cellophane cleaning bags. Toys for Christmas or birthdays were hidden in the bathroom closet upstairs, the one I could just reach at three years old by standing on the toilet, leaning forward until I could brace one foot on the windowsill, and then leaping onto the lowest plywood shelf while grabbing hold of an upper bracket with one hand. I could swiftly explore with the other before I fell onto the bathmat. Only once had I actually touched a box, but I could see them up high, brightly colored and covered with unfamiliar words that soon enough I would know by heart. Games I had tired of were kept there, as well, forgotten so completely I thought they were brand new. Sometimes, while I was banging down the long flight of carpeted stairs on my fanny, as I loved to do and always did when my mother wasn't around to scold me for it, it would occur to me that I had played with such and such a toy before, long ago, almost beyond remembering. Early one morning, I walked into my parents' bedroom, and stood by my mother's side of the bed. Slowly my mother opened her eyes and, seeing me standing so close to her, smiled a spontaneous full-hearted smile. She held my tiny hand for a moment, enraptured by her child's presence. Then, reassured by the rightness of all things, I scampered out of the room, walked down the hallway whose boards creaked even when my slight weight strained them, jumped into the carpeted stairwell as if it were a lifeboat, and gleefully bumped down the stairs on my fanny.

It was a lonely world for me, my mother knew, what with my father on the road selling until late at night, and my mother herself making ends meet by canvassing for long hours on the telephone. Half the money she made she put in an account my father didn't know about, just in case she one day had the courage to bundle me up and leave him. I had turtles and fish and dolls to play with, but no children who lived close enough to be casual with. And, often, I would come to her mopey in the middle of the day, complaining pathetically that I was "bored." How could a three-year-old be bored, she wondered, and where could I even have learned such a word? Then she would feel sorry for me and devise some games with empty egg-cartons or paper bags and crayons I could play at her feet while she continued telephoning anonymous users of unnecessary products to ask them intrusive questions about their laundry or eating habits or television viewing. Oddest of all was my father's response to me. Perhaps it was because he was away when I was born, or because he feared being vulnerable and weak, or because he had not been raised in a demonstrative home himself, but whatever tenderness I sought upset him. He recoiled at the thought of brushing my hair or bathing me. My lidless appetite for love and attention suffocated him. My zest made him nervous, perhaps because it seemed faintly erotic, and that aroused in him feelings that disgusted and frightened him. And whenever I ran to him, as I did mainly on Sundays, since I rarely saw him during the week, he would always find ways and reasons for not holding me, turning his head when I tried to kiss him, keeping me just out of reach when I wanted to snuggle. My mother wondered how such a revulsion could be, and, if she dared to broach the subject with him, he would yell and storm out of the room, muttering "Women! Always some nagging, pea-brained nonsense!" and other irate things, until, finally, she thought the scenes worse for me than the withheld affection.

At four, I had a tower of gaily colored, plastic records, and I knew how to make them sing on the toy record player. But for long hours I would listen to a slow, plaintive song, "Farewell to the Mountains," which I played over and over, as I sat on the living room rug and grew more and more withdrawn. What would a four-year-old dream about? My mother often wondered when she saw me like that, and wondered too if it was normal for a child to be so subdued. But to find out she would have had to have spoken to someone—a friend, a doctor, or, most horrifying of all, perhaps even a psychiatrist, which was a shame only whispered about in nice families. In fact, it was no longer possible for such a family to be "nice" at all, if one of its members admitted to insanity by seeking a psychiatrist. My mother shuddered at the thought, as she fed stray wisps of hair back into her pageboy, and checked her list for the next household to call about their consumption of presweetened cereal. She could hear "Farewell to the Mountains" softly wailing in the next room, and knew I would be sitting inertly by the speaker, dreaming of whatever things a four-year-old dreamt of. A new doll, perhaps, or a dog . . . my experience was so limited, thank goodness; how could the daydreams hurt me? She lifted a pencil with which to dial the next number, so as not to callus her index finger. In less than a year, I would be going to kindergarten, with playmates and things to do, and life would be smoother.

In the living room, while my lugubrious record repeated, I dreamt of escape, of life beyond the windowpanes, of gigantic trees that led into magic kingdoms, of strange, cacophonous animals, and endless kisses and hugs, and a giant dollhouse in which I could live, and flowers so big and perfumed I could crawl into them to sleep, and, most of all, I dreamt of a sleek black horse which I had seen on television and had been utterly thrilled by. How it had reared and flailed when people tried to get near it. How it arched its tail and shone in the dazzling sunlight, when it ran up the side of a mountain. How it lathered and whinnied and looked ready to explode. I dreamt of playing with the frantic black horse which would scare and excite me and, sometimes, if I were very good, let me get close enough to stroke and ride. Together we would run out to those flat, funny-bushed prairies that stretched forever and we would make the sound of rain falling as we galloped. On her way to bed, my mother would peek in on me, and most days she would find me wide awake at midnight, lying quietly in my bed like a tiny Prince of Darkness, my brain raw as henna, just pacing, pacing. If insomnia was unusual for a child, it was normal for me. There was a switch in my cells that wouldn't turn off at night, which is not to say that I was one of those rare few who could get by with little sleep and wake to conquer the world. If I slept badly, I was tired the next day, and, since most days I slept badly, I was mostly tired. Dark circles formed under my eyes, and I looked oddly debauched for a four-year-old girl. Once, my mother gave me a quarter of one of her sleeping pills, and out of that cruel prankishness of which children seem the liveliest masters, I had pretended not to be able to wake up the next morning, even though my mother shook and shook me. When I finally deigned to open my eyes and fake a spontaneous yawn, I found my mother in a cold sweat and the most attentive and adoring spirit, which lasted all day. After that, she just let me grope for sleep by myself, but insisted on a ritual "going to bed" at 8 p.m., since at the very least I would then get some rest from lying still.

It was hard to say who looked forward most to my going to school. Six times my mother practiced the route with me, holding my hand as we walked though the vest-pocket-sized plum orchard that separated my street from Victory Park Elementary School. There was a more conventional way of getting there, of course, full of sidewalks and rigid corners and car-infested streets, but it was twice as long and meant crossing three intersections. My mother preferred to lead me across the street my house sat on and watch me as I walked down the well-worn shortcut leading almost unswervingly through the orchard. Only one part of the path, twenty yards or so, dipped behind a stand of bushes and out of view. But at that point I would be able to see the crosswalk guard clearly, since she was always there, to-ing and fro-ing in her yellow jacket and bright red sash. Perhaps another mother in another city would have been frightened to let her five-year-old walk into an orchard alone each day, but in my hometown crime was not a problem. As I had discovered, boredom was. And the orchard was full of such extravagant smells and sights: low, scuffly hunchbacked things with long tails, chaplinesque squirrels that looked like grey mittens when they climbed trees, mump-cheeked chipmunks, insects that looked like tiny buttons or tanks, feathered shudders in high nests, chattery seedpods, and tall, silky flowers with long red tongues hanging out. Best of all I liked to see the ripe plums, huddled like bats high above me. With my Roy Rogers tablet in one hand, and a brown bag lunch in the other, I would go to school each day in a fine mood because I knew I had the orchard to look forward to. Then, too, I liked this new business of dressing up: purple corduroy pinafore, grey check with a lace collar, red and white jumper striped like a candy-cane. White ankle socks, black patent leather shoes, matching ribbon. I would take my seat in the classroom and do the lessons and play the game and sing the songs, and in the afternoon I would come home again, through the orchard alive with buzzing and twittering, at the other side of which would be my mother, dependable as sunlight, waiting in a pale shirtwaist dress, her hair curled into a long pageboy roll.

The novelty of school lasted only a few months. The lessons were dull, the games were always the same, the other children were so distant and alien. They seemed to share a secret I alone didn't know. What they said was different, what they laughed at was different, what they saw was different. When I drew the plum bats curled high in the trees, or used six crayons to draw a rock, which everybody knows is grey, airhead, they teased me mercilessly, or, worse, ignored me for hours. Most of all, I liked running games in which I ran until I dropped in an exhausted heap, or spun around in circles until I got dizzy. Next to that, I liked looking at the butterfly and rock collections in the science locker, and sometimes I would spend all of recess playing with the kaleidoscope. The other children played jacks, or marbles, or house, or cowboys. I liked cowboys, but wanted to be the horse, not a man shooting nonstop and pretending to die. In time, I discovered the knack of talking like the others, but it was hard to sustain, and though I dearly wanted the friendship of the other children, nothing I could do seemed to endear me to them. I was different; it was as if I had spots or a tail. I hovered on the edge of elementary social life, making a friend here, a friend there, mainly among the boys, who didn't mind including me in their running and jumping games, where more bodies made little difference. At home, my father had begun taking photographs with a Kodak box camera he had bought at a flea-market, snapshots of the family and neighbors on special days like Fourth of July or Christmas. The first time I saw a photograph it was as if a bucketful of light had been poured over me. In the picture people were always smiling, frozen happy forever. I pestered my father to take more and more pictures, and pleaded until he let me keep a few from each roll, to line up on my pink, Humpty-Dumpty decaled dresser next to the bed. With my dolls sitting rigid in a semicircle on the bed, and all the smiling faces in the photographs, I had quite a large gathering for mock tea-parties and classrooms and cowboys and family fights, in one of which a doll's pudgy plastic arm snapped off.

Though I knew the orchard well, and loved to play in its chin-high weeds, bopping the teasel heads with a bat, or hunting for "British Soldiers," red-capped fungi, among the blankets of green moss, my sense of geography was very poor. Getting anywhere was a blur. The world seemed without boundary, unimaginable and infinite. Even though, on most days, I had no desire to go farther than my neighborhood, I sensed the world dropped off at a perilous angle just beyond it. I was frightened at the literal perimeter of what I knew. Had I been a grownup, I might have been reminded of the Duke Ellington song, "There's Nothing on the Brink of What You Think." What did I fear? I didn't know. It was not a rational fear. Just as wailing for my mother if we became separated in a supermarket was not a rational act. I just feared. But the fear fled when I was with a gang of children strolling the neighborhood as we did each Halloween when, often, we would go as far afield as three or four streets away, bags laden, ready to perform the simple acrobatics it took to con strangers out of sweet booty. Spreading my loot on the living room floor afterwards, I would go through it with my mother, who adored sifting the haul and always got all of the Mary Janes, which I loathed the taste of.

One day, as if a typhoon had just ended, my father died of an ailment that sounded to me like "pullman throbs," and thus disappeared from my life the same stranger he had always been, a lodger who directed my life with his shouts, who had absolute control over my fate, and could not be appealed to by tears or reason. He had been an omnipotent, mysterious stranger who left the house before I got up each morning and came home after I went to sleep each night, and on weekends was sullen and tired. He only ever seemed to read the paper or watch television or sleep or yell at my mother or slam the door to their bedroom, after which I would sometimes hear my mother crying. For some reason he never had time for me. In my heart, I knew it must be my fault, that I must be somehow unworthy of his love, his attention even, the way the newspaper or television at least had his attention. I understood deep down in my soul that something serious must be wrong with me, that I lacked something—I wasn't pretty enough, or smart enough, or funny enough. . . . I didn't know what quality exactly—whatever that alchemical thing was, I lacked it. Otherwise he would surely have loved me. I had tried in prismatically different ways to delight him, to please him, ultimately to win him. Some mornings I would spend fifteen minutes choosing the right ribbon—checked versus striped, plain edged or lace, flat cotton or broad glossy satin—and then tug on my embroidered ankle socks, and deliberate over the dresses in my closet as if I were a floosie primping for the man who brought my chocolates and cheap jewelry on Sundays. I was like a war-bride with a shell-shocked husband at home, attentive to his every whim, trying hard to reconstruct their tender armistices. After so many silent, private years, I seemed suddenly to be an extrovert, and my mother delighted in the long-awaited change toward what she saw as a normal, if hyperactive, childhood. Without understanding why exactly, I would play the clown whenever my father was around, dancing little jigs, doing impressions of TV characters, pretending to be a dog by fetching his slippers in my mouth and then sitting up in front of him as he read the newspaper in the enormous, rose-colored armchair by the picture window, my tiny hands lifted and loosely flapping like paws. Sometimes I would bake him ginger cookies, his favorite, which my mother would let me cut with bright red plastic cookie cutters shaped like men and women, clowns, and Christmas trees, into which I would press candy buttons and eyes. When he was around, I would follow him like a tropic flower the sun, needy, riveted, always open for warmth. Sometimes he would take me on his knees, or pat my head lightly, and, when he did, I would feel happy and even-hearted all day. But most days he simply ignored me, or yelled at me for pestering him, and, when he did, I would try extra hard to please him. I would eat my food without playing with it first, though I loved taking dollops of mashed potatoes in my hands and rolling them into balls for a snowman, which I would stand on the rim of my plate while I ate. Once, for Sunday lunch, mother and I concocted a "Happy Jack" out of a tomato, tunafish salad, and a hard-boiled egg, scooping out the tomato, filling it with tunafish, and toothpicking the egg upright in the middle. I painted paprika eyes and mouth onto the egg with a wet finger, stuck in a whole clove for a nose, and then attached the cutaway tomato lid with a toothpick to make a beret. Then I dressed up in my Halloween clown suit, and presented it to my father on a dinner plate. He laughed out loud, and hugged my shoulders by wrapping one of his enormous arms around them, and that pleased me so much I was contented for days. But nothing less extreme seemed to waylay his thoughts, which were always galloping away from me. Then he died, and it was as if a door had slammed shut. There was no warning, no reassurance; he just left. Though I had not gone to the funeral, I understood that dead meant being broken beyond repair, as my mother had explained it, and could see that, when it happened, grownups cried torrentially and then walked around gloomy and snuffling for days, as if they shared a secret cold. I understood that he was gone now on weekends, too, and that he had left without saying goodbye to me, though perhaps, surely, he had said goodbye to my mother. While he lived, he would at least wave when he left. Now there was not even that. Now I could no longer even try to please him. Without meaning to, I reverted to my sullen, dreamy ways. My mother shook her head and, without going into details, told friends that his death had come "at the worst possible time for everyone."


 
The last instruction I received as each hypnotic session came to a close was that I would remember only what I felt comfortable with. It was a relative fiat, and it worked, letting just enough of my subterranean past seep through to give me a sense of origin, of development, without reminding me of any war-crimes that might alarm me. And so it was no surprise that in my waking life I remembered little of my recaptured childhood: its sensory delights, a few events, and its tense, poignant moods. Whether or not a crucial drama lay salted away in my memory, I never knew. Once, coming out of the well of a trance, I noticed my eyes were sore and my nose blocked from crying. Where had I gone? Toward a sexual event? A violent one? I didn't know. At first, the childhood I began discovering mystified me, its iceberg fragments were so high-focus and yet remote. And what was there between the fragments I didn't wish to remember? But gradually, as slants of my past surfaced, I felt like I had adopted a child on the installment plan, a child that was myself, and it felt good suddenly to be part of a community, even if it was only a community of previous selves.