The Summer Without Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

word for “shard.” They wrote down the names of the threats on broken pieces of crockery.
Word Shards. The Pathan tribes in Pakistan exile renegade members, sending them into a dusty nowhere. The Apache ignore widows. They fear the paroxysms of grief and pretend those who suffer from them do not exist. Chimpanzees, lions, wolves all have forms of ostracism, forcing out one of their own, either too weak or too obstreperous to be tolerated by the group. Scientists describe this as an “innate and adaptive” method of social control. Lester the chimpanzee lusted after power above his rank, tried to hump females out of his league. He didn’t know his place and, finally, was expelled. Without the others, he starved to death. The researchers found his emaciated body under a tree. The Amish call it Meidung . When a member breaks a law, he or she is shunned. All interactions cease, and the one they have turned against falls into destitution or worse. A man bought a car to take his sick child to a doctor, but the Amish are not allowed to drive cars. After that breach, the powers that be declared him anathema. No one recognized him. Old friends and neighbors looked through him. He no longer existed among them, and so he lost himself to himself. He cringed at the blank faces. His posture changed; he folded inward; and he found he couldn’t eat. His eyes lost their focus, and when he spoke to his son, he realized he was whispering. He found a lawyer and filed suit against the elders. Not long after, his boy died. A month later, he died. Meidung is also known as “the slow death.” Two of the elders who had approved the Meidung also died. There were bodies all over the stage.
    It seemed to me at the time that I had fallen under an evil enchantment, the source of which could not be proven, only guessed at, because the crimes were small and mostly hidden: pinches that didn’t happen, hurtful notes written by no one: “You are a big fake,” the mysterious destruction of my English paper, the drawing I had left on my desk—found scribbled over—jeers and whispers, anonymous telephone calls, the silence of not being answered. We find ourselves in the faces of others, and so for a time every mirror reflected a foreigner, a despised outsider unworthy of being alive. Mia. I rescrambled it. I am. I wrote it over and over in my notebook. I am. I am Mia. Among my mother’s books I found an anthology of poems and in it, John Clare’s poem, “I Am.”
     
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied, stifled throes—
And yet, I am, and live—like vapors tossed
     
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise …
    I had no idea what “self-consumer of my s tossedx201D; meant. It might have helped. A little irony, child, a little distance, a little humor, a little indifference. Indifference was the cure, but I couldn’t find it in myself. The actual cure was escape. That simple. My mother arranged it. St. John’s Academy in St. Paul, a boarding school. There I was smiled upon, recognized, befriended. There I found Rita, co-conspirator with long black braids and Mad magazine, fan of Ella, Piaf, and Tom Lehrer. Lying each in a bunk, we crooned out in faltering harmony every verse of “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” (I felt bad for the fictional pigeons, actually, but the sweet camaraderie of Rita far outweighed the pinch of pity.) Her pale brown legs. My white ones with a few freckles. My bad poems. Her good cartoons.
    I remember my mother as she stood in the doorway to our room on the first day. She was so much younger, and I can’t summon the precise features of her face as it was then. I do recall the worried but hopeful look in her eyes before she left me, and that when I hugged her I smashed my face into the shoulder of her jacket and told myself to inhale. I wanted to keep the smell