DAPHNE MERKIN
409
are covered with a sprinkling of light brown hair, which may any
day get worse and render me a full-scale freak, just like the Monkey
Girl I have seen a photograph of in Benjamin's book of freaks (his
favorite book after
The FBI
Story);
my father, whom I'm afraid of;
Lily, who is always watching me and who I wish would die instantly,
clearing me from the necessity of submitting to her unfriendly,
ready-to-be-jealous gaze; the geography test that I haven't studied
enough for and even if I did, it wouldn't help because I still have no
idea where the different states go. (No matter how many times I
study the filled-in map, all visual grasp flees my mind the minute I
am confronted by the blank outline in Mrs. Gordon's class with the
instructions:
Fill in the fifty states.
What am I to do with Oregon and
Utah and Wyoming, reduced to one unlocatable jumble, but assign
them hapazard places - tucking them in around other states whose
neighbors I can't remember, Florida and Louisiana?) There is every
reason in the world - in my world - to be awake at midnight, but
most of all there is the dull clang of my self-dislike, striking the hour
of awful truth like the most discordant of clocks: Hannah Lehmann,
I am as I am, wrong.
If
I were right, it wouldn't be possible to feel
such aversion to my own skin; I would have a mother other than
mine, a mother who wouldn't say, unnaturally: "Your tears don't
move me," when I cry. How can I feel right unless she is all wrong,
and how can she be all wrong when I long for her, loathe and desire
her, and don't think I will ever cease longing?
How did my father, having no direct link with me, decipher that
now was the time to prove my case, that his youngest daughter- me,
Hannah - was in some slow-dawning but nonetheless genuine
fashion, imperiled? Did my mother, who was the usual conduit of
news about "the children," good or bad, relay the symptoms oftrou–
ble? And whose idea was it to have my father, for a period of a few
months, pay me a quarter every weekday evening to hang up his
coat on one of the thick wooden hangers with the three initials–
wLM-ornately engraved in the center? Whosever idea, it was an in–
spired one: I loved my stint as my father's personal hat-check girl,
greeting him at the front door and then helping him off with his
heavy, single-breasted black wool overcoat. There was also a double–
breasted taupe coat of cashmere, and an English raincoat. To be
paid for taking my father's coat from him as he shrugged it off and
for then walking several feet to hang it up in the small downstairs
