I Am T.A.M., the Transparent Woman
Or, A Fourth-grade Field Trip Considered as Heirloom. What do I do with it?
Hello Gentle Readers! In the last six years, I’ve moved three times, each time trying to pare away the accumulated unnecessaries and get down to the treasures. Probably most of you have done some version of this; it forces you to evaluate all kind of things—things, literally, of course, in terms of what objects mean and why they’re worth the back-break of lugging around, but also abstract ideals like comfort and style and identity. Who am I, without the stained-glass lightcatchers my grandmother made, without the stuffed platypus one beloved class of high-school students gave me when they graduated (We Are Platypus 4eva!)?
Once begun, this kind of musing quickly lit on other sorts of baggage. Experiences. Values. Culture, writ large and small. The following piece started with an image that surfaced out of nowhere-ish recently and made me think, “yikes, what the heck did I learn in elementary school?!”
The edges of everything are bright and hard; the winter cold has gotten into the window frames and the surfaces of our coats, the soles of our shoes, and the stiff “pleather” of the schoolbus seats. They crackle under our jittery bodies like they’re stuffed with hay—and maybe they are. It’s the late 1970s in rural North Carolina, and who knows but that the bus-seats, made in the Thomas factory right down the road, could be stuffed with hay, as much of it as we see rolled up in massive bales by the side of whatever road we’re on.
The thrill and the dread of the field trip concentrate our awareness and attention as the entire fourth grade crams into “activity buses.” I’d spotted them this morning, all white with blue lines and lettering, trundling into the parking lot as we kids had gushed out of the regular yellow buses, sluiced down the halls and into the tributary classrooms, and formed puddles of giggle, instigation, and Pop-Tart crumbs. “Quieten down!” Mrs. Calicut had barked us into our desks at the bell. And now that the bus jiggles, either under the jouncing of fifty or more nine-year-olds or over the pitted and rutted country road or both, “QUIETEN DOWN!” comes again, and “DON’T. TEST. ME.” Her considerably larger-than-us bulk rises and looms. Her track record as one who is not to be fucked with is long and storied, and we subside.
For a moment. Then there’s a swell of low murmuring, safe enough, and then—it feels inevitable, doesn’t it? dire and hysterical as Fate—a shriek punctuates the hum and is promptly muffled, then giggles start to loosen and unfurl like the tendrils of some creeping plant climbing up and over the seats, tagging us one by one into an amoeba of cautious defiance—we won’t stop talking, you can’t make us, there’s only one of you! You’ve played amoeba-tag, right? I was never among the last free agents but got subsumed into the amoeba early, slung around the playground without will or direction, sometimes pulled by the kids on either arm in different directions until it seemed like I’d tear in half, sometimes trying to pull my own way, toward that forgotten kid who darted around, unsure if they should be glad to be free or sorry the amoeba hadn’t embraced them yet. That’s how the bus load of us rises from silence to crescendo, from whispers to a few screeched verses of ACDC’s “Highway to Hell” that start in the back seats, of course, where the kids believe they are furthest and safest from the hammer’s fall. Safety in numbers, safety in the far precincts of the bus—these are among the tenets of elementary school survival, and woe betide the kid who doesn’t adhere. There’s always one. But that’s a story for another time.
Closer to the front, we can see the back of Mrs. Calicut quivering. We wait for the lunge forward that means she’s hauling herself to her full height to wheel and let us have it—but the whole bus wheels instead, a hard turn into the parking lot of the Natural Science Center, smushing everyone’s guts in centrifugal arc, disarming the hand of Fate for the moment. Sweaty despite the cold, her eyes wide and trained on us like the Tasmanian Devil’s, she lumbers off the bus, biting out instructions. We’re NOT to talk inside the building, we’re NOT to talk while the rangers are talking, we’re NOT to chew gum or touch each other or stray away from the group. We are UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES to touch anything in the Science Center unless we are told to do so, and we are NOT to ask any SMART-MOUTHED questions at any time. “Is that CLEAR,” she demands, her voice quivering with emotion, and although that crack, that give-away, ought to be the beginning of the end with her in our eyes, the blood in the water that spells weakness, we are not yet sharks, and we nod. We do not want to embarrass her, for in the outside world of the Science Center, she has changed sides; she is ours, now, and we are hers, and the strangers who pull the snakes out of their glass boxes and offer them to touch and hold, they are the ones to be wary of.
The Science Center is impressive only because of the oddities it contains in small nooks, in fluorescent-lit low-ceilinged rooms, in gray-and-taupe spaces designed—clearly—on a principle of thrift rather than aesthetics or even utility. “Single file! No talking! Everyone put your finger on your lips and keep it there!” As we shuffle through the warrenlike hallways, a kind of trance sets in. I feel it glazing over my vision, weighing down my limbs. We’ve been here forever, doors and turns, rooms off-limits, hard light that flickers unrhythmically. And now, we’re guided into a room, a destination at last. “Take your coats off and sit down on the floor,” Mrs. Calicut orders. There’s a stage, of sorts, in the corner of the room, a rounded platform that obtrudes, around which we’re directed in ragged rows. Across the platform is a heavy curtain, as if we’re about to watch a play here at the Science Center, instead of petting the goats or gawking at skeevy spiders and reptiles in tanks.
We sit, but the spirit that animated us on the bus has left us; we’re mostly quiet now, mostly obedient. Breakfast has worn off and lunch seems like it’s in a different time zone. I fold up my coat and sit on it for cushioning as do most; some kids just keep theirs on. We all gaze straight ahead, for once. And then a mechanical clicking and whirring as the curtain opens on the last thing I could’ve imagined I’d see: a pedestal on the platform elevating above eye-level a woman-shaped mannequin. Her clear plastic skin exposes a formidable tangle of innards, her head tilts downward and her arms are extended almost like Jesus—but not crucifix-Jesus, more like the “suffer the little children” Jesus I’ve seen in picture-books written for children. Modest, gentle, welcoming, and naked. Profoundly naked, but not in the normal way at all.
“I am T.A.M., the Transparent Woman,” a voice declares from the speakers. It fills the room, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. The mouth of the mannequin doesn’t move, of course. Nothing about it moves at all; it’s like a cross between a department store clothes-horse and a Greek statue—it even has a weird, clear-plastic hairstyle molded atop its transparent-skulled brain. And it’s that third component—the interior—that drops the jaw: as the calm voice describes one bodily system after another, they light up, each upstaging the others in turn. Skeletal system, endocrine system, vascular, digestive, reproductive, nervous. The pedestal rotates as the voice speaks, so that we can all see TAM from all sides, the tangle of red and blue vessels, the pink and purple and peach and yellow organs, the white glands clustered in the most intimate folds of the body and under the pert molded nipples of TAM’s transparent breasts.
I’ve seen naked people before, women, men, children, babies, in real life and in photos from National Geographic and the Encyclopedia Britannica. I’ve pored over the images in the Family of Man book that we have on our shelf at home, soaking up the different shapes and sizes and shades of people. But I’ve never looked through someone’s skin as though the skin were the least important part of the person. “The skin is the largest organ in the human body,” TAM tells us, glowing like an anatomical Christmas tree through her invisible skin. This is some Emperor’s-New-Clothes-level delusion, to tell us that biggest of all the organs is the one she won’t light up and show us, as if it’s not really all that important, despite its size, despite its job of keeping everything else safely enclosed. It reminds me that none of this, not one bit, makes any sense. I look at my hand, and yes, I can make out the bones in it, can see a squiggly hint of a vein across the back, but by and large, I am solid. I am one whole, opaque and firm, and even the trick my mother showed me of holding a hand up to a light bulb or candle’s flame only proves that my skin can glow redly, that the bones I can feel at the core of each finger are solidly there. TAM isn’t real. TAM is some sort of alien being from the distant planet Adulthood spreading misinformation—what does she want of a roomful of nine-year-old humans? I wonder if anyone else realizes, as I have, that we are much more like each other than we are like this person-shaped bucket of plastic guts. Even Mrs. Calicut, who on her best day resembles nothing so much as a bridge-troll from a story book, can’t be anything like Barbie-shaped TAM, who gently and calmly reveals herself to us, bit by illuminated bit exposing the awful, knotted-up labyrinth of her insides and saying, as if we’re supposed to be glad, that we all carry around a trippy, haunted-house smorgasbord of organs within, that this is what we have in common.
I would say that my heart is in my throat, but now I know that it is not. I would say that my stomach is in knots, but I’ve seen how it hangs suspended from one tube and empties into another that accordion-pleats itself neatly in the cradle of my pelvis. What presses on my chest and constricts my throat I have no expression for, not now. It’s invisible, like the mannequin’s skin, and as confining.
“Now listen carefully,” Mrs. Calicut steps to the front of the group as TAM’s curtain closes, “we’re going to take a bathroom break, and then everyone get back on the same bus you were on before. When we get back to school, you’re to go directly to the cafeteria so that you’re not late for lunch. Do you hear me? Now let’s go.”
And we do. On the bus, the mood is apocalyptic, jaded, as if whatever we’ve just seen has ripped the veil and left us on the other side of something, though we don’t know what. Out of the buzz of talk, imitations of TAM sprout, her voice put to weirder and fouler uses, until some kid squats in the aisle and narrates TAM taking a shit, and the squeals and shushing clue Mrs. Calicut in to the mutinous energy that’s been gathering force in the ranks. “QUIETEN DOWN,” she thunders, and now there’s a fraying edge in her voice, as if she, too, has been shown something she can’t believe and wishes she could unsee, as if she can’t wait to hand us off at the lunchroom and hit the smoky teachers’ lounge, sink into the dingy couch with a cigarette in one shaky pinkish hand and a coffee in the other, as close to safe as she can get.
The fourth-graders eat lunch, kicking each other under the long tables, making “seefood” with our mouths and grabbing tater-tots off each others’ trays. TAM is behind us. By tacit mutual agreement, no one talks about her again. It’s made easier by the fact that there’s no quiz, no discussion, nothing at all in class, and when I get home and Mom asks, “how was the Science Center?” I say, “okay, I guess.” I add a casual lie, “They tried to get us to hold the snakes.” Mom shudders; she hates snakes.
How can I tell her about TAM? How can I tell about the invisible skin, the entrails pulsing with colored light, and above all, the voice that spoke for her from the outside like the Wizard of Oz, that couldn’t have been her real voice? Whether or not I speak aloud, I always hear my voice inside my head. The alien voice in the auditorium never told us about TAM’s thoughts or her feelings, where they lived among the terrible, neat, and well-lit organs. Surely TAM’s thoughts bubble up within her the way mine do, but from where? And where, with a fixed mouth, with stiff invisible lips, can they go? I think of her on the curtained stage, in the dark, her inner lights darkened, too, and her true voice that no one’s ever heard crashing on the inside of her molded lips like the sea, and that’s when I catch a glimpse, for a second, of how we are alike.
This is wonderful. You get that moment in childhood of bewilderment whose meanings continue to unfold. I recognize those childhood moments when "lunch is in a different time zone" and just that fascination wit bodies, your own and others. Thanks. This is why I decided to join Substack.