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I need a tutor who can summarize this article.  No outside sources…

I need a tutor who can summarize this article.  No outside sources

Savage Breast (from The New Yorker, Dec. 8, 2014) By Elizabeth McKenzie

It had been an ordinary day, to a point. I had a headache that wouldn’t let up, and there was a party I’d promised I’d go to—I’d said see you soon to the people at work. But after I unlocked my door and kicked off my shoes all I could think about was jumping into bed. Once I allowed myself to think that this was a reasonable idea, I felt released from the grip of the party; I realized that if I slept right through nobody would really care.

I threw down my bag in the hall. A stale smell engulfed me, as if from a storage room that hadn’t been opened for a long time, but I was too dead to investigate. I groped for the light switch but instead felt a warm furry thing on my hand.

Next thing I knew, I was lying on my back in a bed.

The bed was hard, and there was a thin blue blanket over me. Looking up, I saw light coming through an old-fashioned shade that had been pulled down over a window. There was nothing like this in my apartment. Slightly yellowed, it had a cord hanging from it which had been crocheted around a plastic pull ring. There was a familiar water stain on the shade, a lion’s head coming out of a rose, and I sat up in bed with a gasp.

Across the room, on the opposite wall, two pink-framed pictures were precisely where I remembered them. In one was a fluffy, cartoonish-looking kitten wearing a tuxedo with a white carnation on the lapel, and a tall top hat that reflected light in the pattern of a hazard symbol. The other showed a kitten on skis, wearing blue earmuffs and sitting at the bottom of a snowy slope. As a child, I used to stare at these pink- framed kittens from my bed and think of them as significant features of my universe. There were other familiar items—on the bureau was a red enamelled poodle pin I’d baked in a kiln for my mother, even though she hated poodles. Beside it was a key-chain lanyard I’d made for my father, with yellow and brown braided plastic twine.

“Mama?” I called, for it seemed perfectly natural to say that, even though of course she was no longer living, and I had recently forced myself to stop talking to her when I was alone.

Instead, a large beast swept in. This explained the furry touch on my hand. The beast stood on two legs and was about the same size as my mother, but it was covered in a mat of brindled fur that was as thick as the coat on a sheepdog and obscured the contours of its body.

The beast sneezed. Dust flew in the small sliver of light that came in at the edge of the blind.

I said, “O.K. if I open the window?”

The beast crossed the room and pulled the little hoop—once, twice, until the blind caught and rolled up. I realized that it had been a long while since I’d seen blinds like this. They had fallen out of favor for some reason, though they were really very functional.

With a shock, I saw the trees that had been outside my bedroom when I was a kid—the mulberry, the elm, and the peach tree, all in scale to my youth, stopped in time.

“How did we get here?” I asked, noticing how thin my voice sounded. But the beast was gone.

I jumped up and started looking around. A few of my games and toys sat in the closet, right where they belonged. I had often thought of our old house, and thought I could remember it perfectly, but there were all sorts of things I had forgotten. The map of the United States in the hallway, for instance. My parents had mounted it on cardboard, and made a frame for it out of binding tape. Beside it was the hall closet. Yes, there was the old hospital-green rolling vacuum cleaner, nestled between my mother’s wool coats, which smelled of mothballs.

The bathroom was as it had been before we fixed it up. I liked it better this way. Original wallpaper, which I remembered later helping my mother strip with a steamer and a scraper, a good example of false progress. I peeked around the corner into the living room, wondering if the illusion was complete.

It was, in every detail. The brown sofa, the basket full of magazines, the bookshelves, the ceramic owls. I crossed the braided rug, followed the hall on the other side, and went into my parents’ bedroom; there was the beast, lying on its side, as my mother used to in the afternoons.

I knew exactly what to do, and I wasn’t afraid.

I came around the bed and sat next to the beast, situating myself near its upended hip.

The beast stirred, and peered up at me.

It reached out and put its large paw on my arm. Exactly the way my mother used to. I lay down beside it, and the beast hugged me to its breast.

***

We snoozed like this a long while, in great contentment; when I woke, the beast was gone. My back was cold, and a cool draft blew in from the window, making the curtain billow lazily. Somewhere in the distance I could hear a chain saw and the low hum of rush-hour traffic.

In the kitchen, the beast was pushing onions around in a pan. It glanced up, not minding me at all. I could hear a rustling sound just around the corner, where our kitchen table used to be, like the sound of my sister doing her homework or cutting pictures out of magazines. There was a small beast doing exactly that, holding a pair of red plastic scissors, snipping out pictures of animals. She was arranging the cutouts on the table: a cow, a giraffe, two dogs, and a bear.

I sat in my good old chair. The small beast was kicking the center pole of the round table, pinging it with her bullet-like toes, just as my sister used to. It was annoying, but I didn’t feel comfortable kicking the little beast or complaining. Instead, I picked up a magazine from the pile and began to leaf through it. It was Life, April 13, 1953. Before I was born, but my parents were alive. I flipped through it: there was an ad for the G.E. Range that thinks, a letter to the editor about Igor Stravinsky—”Stravinsky’s statement that music is incapable of expressing emotion is a reflection of the sorry state modern composers have entered.” There was a strongly worded editorial about Korea and ending the bloodshed; I knew barely anything about that war. A photo of demonstrators being clubbed in Brazil, a photo of massacred and “Disarmed Kikuyus” in Kenya, ads for a spinet piano and a full page for Hunt’s ketchup and another for

Hertz—because “there are so many times a woman needs a car.” Strangely, I knew much more about the piano and the ketchup than about the events in Brazil and Kenya. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever really thought about 1953 in any specific way—a whole year of people’s lives, a whole year of history, a whole year that all years since had built on. I didn’t want the little beast to cut this magazine up, so I hid it under the table, on my lap.

By the old clock on the stove, I could see that it was precisely six when a large, father-shaped beast came through the back door, as my father used to do. He greeted us all with hugs—me as well, as if I were no different to him than the others—and took a large tumbler etched with Romans in togas and filled it with ice and gin and just a dash of vermouth. I knew exactly what was next. He removed a jar of dry-roasted peanuts from the cupboard and poured some into a bowl and shook it until the peanuts levelled out. And then he sat with us at the table, tossing a few into his mouth while enjoying his Martini. Shortly, dinner was served: peas, small steaks covered with onions, and baked potatoes, on the green Melmac plates we used to have. It was all too remarkable for me to feel hungry, but I tried to eat, wanting to fit in.

***

I had wished many times to re-inhabit my childhood home. For years, I dreamed about the house and its every corner. Many of the dreams involved getting the house back, either magically or simply by having it come on the market. In some dreams, the house was different and yet I recognized it as mine. In others, the house was backed by vast tracts of land that descended into canyons and valleys, even though it was nothing like that where we lived. We had not been especially happy there, nor was it an especially beautiful house or neighborhood. I could never really understand why it haunted me.

Now I saw that beyond our back fence were acres and acres of grass and alfalfa, with solid granite outcroppings here and there. There were footholds in the rocks where local tribes used to climb. There were also mortar holes they had used for grinding pemmican, and narrow pits where they sharpened arrows. No one had graffitied the rocks or left them covered with bottles and cans, which surprised me. It would have meant so much to me to wander back there when we lived in the house. How could we not have known? My mother would have loved it, and it might have saved her mental health. She could have roamed during the day while we were at school, looking for arrowheads, taking notes in her field journal, making sketches.

We once found a trading bead in our small back yard. It was cornflower blue, caked with mud. My mother rinsed it in the sink, just about the most excited I’d ever seen her. I started digging holes in the back yard after that, hoping to find more relics and antiquities to please her. I wondered what it would be like to live along the trail on which Napoleon marched to Moscow. Or along the path that Hannibal and the elephants took across the Alps. The soil where we lived was very hard and difficult to dig in. I kept digging, though. I liked having an ongoing project. Every week, I got a little deeper, hoping to find something.

***

This interlude, or whatever it was, carried on. Days went by in what felt like the usual fashion. I could barely remember my recent life—there had been a lot of rushing around in uncomfortable shoes and meeting with people and always having to play some game from which I was supposed to receive some gain. I didn’t miss it at all. My surroundings in the past several years had become unimportant to me, and whenever I transferred jobs I moved from one serviceable apartment to the next, not the least attached to any of them. Now here I was, walking my old route to school and revisiting the houses of childhood friends, who had been supplanted by beasts of appropriate shapes and sizes. I was relishing every iconic

detail. Each reunion thrilled me in a way that is almost impossible to describe, and sometimes I found myself smiling so hard that tears came to my eyes.

And so I settled in, enjoying the chance to investigate all the old drawers and cabinets in my house, to examine the simple artifacts of that life with wonder, and to accept the genuine warmth of the beasts and their embrace of me, which was something I’d always felt was fragile in my own family. The motherly beast who cuddled me that first day remained gentle and warm. The childish beast played happily, without much complication. I did not have to struggle to express myself, and felt included and appreciated, and somehow that was more than enough. I started to feel that words had been my undoing, that in trying to explain anything I’d ever thought or felt I’d only driven a wedge between me and other people. Sometimes, after I’d spent a long afternoon pulling books off the shelves, looking at the inscriptions, or actually reading the books to gain greater insight into my parents’ interests, I’d find myself feeling slightly unmoored, and before I knew it the beasts would come and surround me in a circle, hugging me. There was such pleasure in their warm soft bodies and in the way they responded to my unspoken moods.

They fed me old favorites and new things, too, like flavorful bowls of mush, rich and delicious, as if filled with butter and nutmeats. An old beast visited regularly who enjoyed brushing my hair, something that I knew other girls’ mothers did. Another prepared baths, and scrubbed my back and washed my hair patiently when I sat in the warm fragrant water, as if it were some kind of honor to take care of me. The beasts didn’t wear clothing, yet someone always washed and ironed the clothes that were in the closet— yes, clothes I’d had as a child that somehow still fit me. The weather coöperated with all this kindness, every day sunny and bright and warm. I’d sit in the yard and pick a peach or an orange or a fig off trees that I knew had long ago died of disease and been chopped down.

***

Looking around my room one day, I saw a book on my shelf that reminded me of a long-forgotten incident. There was a phrase in this book that had caused me some trouble, and, sure enough, thumbing through the worn pages I found it quickly. The book was about a big lucky family of English children and their wonderful summer adventures of complete freedom on a sailboat. Here it was, Nancy speaking: “And then we’ve got to be all proper in party dresses ready to soothe the savage breast when the Great Aunt comes gorgoning in.” I laughed out loud. This phrase had made me shriek during free-reading at school. Surely it was a typo, surely it was supposed to say “savage beast.”

My fifth-grade teacher was an old woman with legs so swollen she could barely stand long enough to write things on the chalkboard, and when I showed her why I was so worked up she sent me to the principal.

It was not the first time that she’d sent me, and Mr. Leonard knew me by then. “What is it this time?” he asked. He was a giant, probably six feet six, with close-cropped curly hair and teeth like piano keys.

“I just wanted to know if it’s valid to say ‘soothe the savage breast’ instead of ‘soothe the savage beast.’ ” “Is this in dispute?” the principal asked. I showed him the passage.

“I believe Mrs. Haymond is embarrassed by the word ‘breast.’ Not to mention ‘bosom,’ ” he said, and then it was I who blushed.

A few weeks before, I’d been sent to Mr. Leonard for saying that word, a word that struck me as nasty. “Breast” was a firm and lean term, but “bosom” sounded dangling and clammy.

“It’s true I said that to cause trouble, but I didn’t say this to cause trouble.”
“I also understand that you’ve continued to pronounce ‘ed’ at the end of all verbs?”

It was an annoying compulsion, that I felt I had to say “walk-ed” instead of “walkt.” “Why does it matter to her so much?”

“She thinks you’re trying to annoy her on purpose. Would you be opposed to doing it a little less, just to keep the peace?”

“It’s just that . . .” Should I tell him that if I didn’t do it the core of the world would collapse? That it was an outlet, that I needed to be absorbed in small, manageable projects like that? But he was cutting me some slack, and I agreed to stifle myself.

I had seldom thought about Mrs. Haymond’s hatred for me in the years since, or of the strange pleasure I got from provoking her. She was a lonely old woman with fat legs who was probably miserable. She had to be dead by now, buried and forgotten. And she wasn’t the only person I’d been mean to back then. I used to enjoy frightening my sister, chasing her around with the roaring open hose of the vacuum cleaner, letting it clamp onto her like a viper, leaving round marks on her skin while she screamed. But we’re close now, aren’t we? I believe we are; I am sure we are. We talk all the time on the phone.

***

And then one day, when my guard was down and I simply believed I deserved all this warmth and comfort, the beasts began to hurry around with great agitation, and it was plain that something had changed and we would have to clear out.

To tell the truth, I’d stopped questioning the nature of this reality. I didn’t know what the world was like outside the neighborhood—if the whole world was as it had been, or if this was just a bubble within the world as it was now. Would we stay in the bubble, or have to go back?

We left all at once, at night.

I ran to keep up, guided by the jagged breathing of the beasts around me. We rushed down a long alley to the wash, pushed through the wire and down to a concrete platform by the waterway. A small boat waited for us there, a beast at the helm. We climbed in as if we were being chased, though looking over my shoulder I couldn’t see or hear anything. The beasts formed a circle and allowed me to sink in between them, cushioned by their luxurious fur. The captain started the motor, and we set off down the culvert under a sky of silvery stars.

I wondered what the danger was. I trusted them completely.

We passed down the channel a good distance before the boat slowed. Ahead, a lantern was swinging in the dark, signalling to us. As we pulled closer, I saw that it was held by a large bear wearing a ranger’s outfit.