A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

  “I’m shocked,” my mother decides. She stares at her fork. She has what appears to be a glass of orange juice near her plate. I know she put vodka in it.

  “Don’t call the Director.” My voice is too loud. I glare at Marty and add, “I mean it.”

  I want to leave the table, but I don’t. I finish dinner. Then I go to my room, close and lock my door, and begin packing. I wrap all 16 masks separately and take an extra suitcase.

  My father and Madeleine wave to me in the corridor of the Erie Airport. We run to embrace each other. When we walk, I’m in the middle. My father holds one of my hands and Madeleine holds the other.

  My dad’s gray van is like the skin of winter. It’s made of rain, clouds and wind. It’s a hot summer night. Even though the moon is nearly full, the stars are astonishing, strewn like confetti, and more abundant than mica in sand. The stars aren’t broken pieces, but separate entities, each in its appointed place, spinning and burning. Dad plays a U2 tape. It’s Joshua Tree and Madeleine sings the chorus.

  “In Spiritual Discussion, I met a guy named Scotty,” I begin.

  “Did you fall in love?” Madeleine inquires.

  “I think so. Practice Rabbi Jeff asked what we’d take to another planet. Everyone lied. They all said they’d take their parents and dogs. But Scotty said he’d take a kilo of cocaine and a Tec-9 with extra ammunition.”

  Madeleine laughs. “Sounds like someone we know.”

  “Not me.” My father isn’t amused.

  “You at 13 maybe,” Madeleine amends.

  My father turns up the volume and Madeleine knows all the words. They don’t ask me what my plans are. Or talk about the most important thing in the world, participating effectively. They don’t want distinguished certificates suitable for framing. They don’t want me to go to the rainforest the size of New Jersey. Or Lake Como, not even if the Goldberg twins take me on their yacht.

  I leave my suitcases at the front door and sit on my bed in the wooden room and look out at the Maples. Even in the dark, they’re relentlessly and unapologetically green, as if no circumstance can alter their condition. Later, they’ll be burgundy and magenta, claret and bronze.

  I mail Scotty an O’Hare Airport postcard. I sit on the porch, eaves entwined with Wisteria and abandoned finch nests. I watch the mail truck come and go. 8 pick-ups pass on the dirt road. I walk to the creek. I stand at the well. Then I follow the perimeter of the property and return to the house.

  Madeleine is in her music room. It was the attic the band used as its official rehearsal space. My father turned it into a real music room for her, one slow refinement at a time. He glued acoustical tiles onto the walls and put skylights in the ceiling. When Madeleine plays piano and writes songs, she can look out the thermal paned glass windows and watch the forest run through its seasonal progressions.

  Maples have scales and melodies. Wind sounds differently in red and yellow leaves than it does in green. It’s more like horns and brass. When leaves turn burgundy and magenta, the forest is fragile and tinny, like it’s filled with clusters of miniature cymbals. Winter is drums and castanets and all forms of percussion.

  Madeleine is playing guitar, sitting on the floor, her back leaning against the wall. She’s lit incense and cranberry scented candles, but I know she’s been smoking pot. I determine this by how her body is inordinately airy and receptive to sway, even though there’s no wind in the room. She could float away but won’t. Her hair is long and falls across her face, streaked with a gray that resembles currents of silver. Her hair is a smoky mirror. I can watch her head and know what she’s thinking.

  “Do you steal?” I ask.

  “Everybody steals,” Madeleine says. “We all dip from the same trough, dear.”

  “So you steal?” I press.

  “It’s unconscious. Sounds and images live inside. They mutate. When you write a song, you don’t even realize the palette you’re really using.” Madeleine puts her Martin acoustic guitar across the pillow near her leg. She gestures for me to sit beside her. I stand where I am.

  “I mean things,” I say.

  “Things?” Madeleine repeats.

  “Like clothes or lipsticks or boxes of candy.” I stare at her. “Or guns.”

  Madeleine says, “No.”

  “Why not? Because it’s wrong?” I am tall above her. I’m a sapling, intrinsic to this forest. I have my own dialect of shadow and metamorphosis.

  “No,” Madeleine replies. “Things you can buy don’t interest me.” She picks up her guitar.

  “Why do you keep writing songs?” I demand. “Mother says it’s ridiculous. There are no 40-year-old unknown singers. Zero.” I make my fingers form an 0. I hold this 0 in the air between us. I move my 0 up and down and jump from one foot to the other. “You’re never going to sell anything!” I scream. My voice bounces off the tiled walls.

  “I’m not trying to sell anything,” Madeleine says.

  “So why do you do it?” I need to know.

  “It brings me pleasure.” Madeleine strums a chord progression. A minor, G and F. Then she plays C, F and G. She plays it over and over, at least a dozen times. “Those are 3 chords you could build a world on. I’d take them to another planet.”

  I walk outside through acres of shoulder-high wild flowers and into the big barn. My father wears his white lab coat and washes Psilocybin Mushrooms in the sink. They’re veined with purple, as if they’re organs, pulsing and alive, waiting to be transplanted. The marijuana plants are eight feet tall. Soon my dad will cut them down and hang them up-side-down to dry from ropes strung between the rafters. As they cure, resins accumulate in the buds. He’ll sort the buds by size and quality and vacuum-seal them. The leaves are compacted into bricks, weighed and packaged in plastic and canvas.

  “Mom and Marty are Republicans now,” I reveal.

  “So what?” My father runs water over the mushrooms and places them on the drying mesh. His hands are steady and nothing spills.

  “Don’t you hate Republicans?” I’m confused.

  “I don’t hate anyone in particular. I’m an anarchist.” My father spreads mushrooms across the mesh in even rows, none of them touching.

  “Why didn’t you go back to school when the band broke up? Like Marty?” I decide this is a good question, even though it isn’t directly connected to the 10 Commandments.

  “I was happy as I was,” my father says.

  “But you could have made lots of money. You could have been important,” I point out.

  “I’m important as anyone,” my father says.

  My father dries his hands with a towel. He crosses the dirt floor to where I stand. He wraps his arms around me and holds me pressed against his chest. I hear his heart beating, each individual increment of pump and flow, and I do not count them.

  “Do you steal?” I finally ask.

  He releases me from our embrace and stands an arm’s length away, examining my face. It reminds me of when he looks in a mirror, shaving. Then he says, “No.”

  “Why? Because it’s wrong?” I’m not wearing my red lipstick with the dangerous disguised stars embedded in them. My mouth is stark and small. It’s a winter mouth now.

  “There’s nothing I want,” my father says.

  It’s the cusp between summer and autumn. It occurs to me that transitions can be crossed by trapeze. The grass beneath my bare feet is a soft half-asleep green like pond water. Deer are sighing and pawing between Maples. It’s the end of blueberry season. Apples redden in baskets. I hear squirrels and fox, finches and owls, crickets and frogs. There are more sounds than I can count, but I just want to listen by the pond until all the stars come out.

  WHAT THE LILIES KNOW

  A my Gold hears the rumor and instantaneously recognizes it’s true. She’s being denied tenure. Then Alfred Baxter Coleman ambushes her in the corridor. Alfred Baxter Coleman, the ABC of the History Department, stage whispers the terminal news to her. He executes his standard mock Indian mime, emitt
ing a sort of emphysemic whoop, and his arthritic fingers anemically slap his thin lips, sporadically, with no discernible rhythm. Whoop whoop. He ho. He ho.

  What he actually says is, “No way, Sweetie. Told you.”

  He’s intimated this for months. Amy ignored him.

  She stumbles into her office and reaches onto her desk to steady herself. She picks up the first object she chances to touch. It’s her phone book. She holds it in her palm like a magic stone, an amulet, a medicine bag. The pages are fragile as petals or antiquities. It’s an artifact with disasters between the lines.

  On this particular morning, she dials her mother. Then she waits for her mother to answer. Raven Gold is an integral component in her arsenal of weapons of personal destruction. Raven is the core, her plutonium centerpiece. Amy needs an action to definitively express her rage and grief, something like a hand grenade or bullet. Raven can pull the trigger.

  Cellular service, with static intermittent voids and uncertainties involving wind currents and angles, has finally come to Espanola. Theoretically, they can now communicate directly. But Amy Gold cannot talk to her mother. They speak as if with flags the way people do at sea when conditions are mutable, possibilities limited and primitive. They choreograph pieces of cloth. The planet is compressed into a basket of fabrics. They wave at each other with rags.

  Raven removes language and logic. Cause and effect are illusions. Raven has an unscripted life. No scrawls in the margins, and no footnotes.

  Her mother has a cell phone now, but Amy is still rendered childlike and vulnerable. She presses the phone hard against her ear until the metal hurts. This is foreshadowing. Amy counts the rings. Twenty-five.

  “They didn’t give me the job,” Amy begins, her thoughts spinning chaotic and circular.

  “You’re surprised?” Raven laughs. “You’re not a team player. You always wanted a rank and serial number. The right uniform. Play first string for the military industrial complex.”

  Out the fifth floor window ersatz palm trees are stunted by sun, and the air is oily and smeared. Outside is a slice of Los Angeles in early summer. Hills are a brutal stale green with brittle shrubs like dry stubble.

  “Do you know how long it’s been?” Raven asks, softer now. “Since you called?”

  “To the hour,” Amy answers. She tells her mother precisely how many years, months and days passed since their last conversation.

  “I’m impressed,” Raven admits.

  “You’re always impressed by the wrong things,” Amy says. “Men who add fast without scratch paper. Chess players and piano players, no matter how mediocre. Women with trust funds who sew their own clothes and bake breads.”

  “I’m a simple country gal. You were always too smart for me,” Raven offers.

  “I want to see you now.” Her words are sudden and tumble into the hot-stripped morning like dice hitting a wall and she wonders if she means them.

  “Then get in your car. You’ll be here tomorrow,” Raven says with surprising urgency. “Just check that AA crap at the border.”

  “I’ll leave half my IQ, too,” Amy offers. “As a sign of good will.” After a pause in which Raven fails to construct a reply, Amy asks, “How will I find you?”

  “Ask in the plaza. Anyone can tell you where.”

  Her mother hangs up. No more details. Just anyone. In the plaza. It’s like a treasure hunt. Or eating peyote and letting it happen. That’s what they did for years. Let it happen. They camped on mesas and the rims of canyons. Raven had a boyfriend with a jeep and a sawed off 12-gauge under the seat. His 9-millimeter was in his backpack, and he had a .32 semi-automatic in his pocket. A man, one man or another, who played drums or bass in a band, just returned from Australia or Japan. They stayed in the juniper forests for weeks. Finally, insect bites, sunburns and infected cuts made them return. Sometimes Raven just wanted a hot bath.

  “I demand perfume,” Raven laughs, half-dressed on a plateau, her bare shoulders sculpted as if by centuries of wind and a gifted potter’s hands. “I must have musk and a new hat with an extravagant feather.”

  They find towns with a hotel sporting an old west motif. Durango or Aspen, Las Cruces, Silver City or Santa Fe. Her childhood is a sequence of lead glass windows and crimson floral carpets, mahogany paneling and authentic antique saloon doors. The card tables and upstairs brothel are gone but somehow manage to assert themselves, not quite visible and completely intact. Chandeliers emit a tame filtered light like pueblo churches. Late afternoon is cool, and the amber of honey and whiskey. It’s the color of an afternoon shoot-out.

  It’s the era of the commune and just before boarding school. Raven’s boyfriends have what they call business in town. They take unplanned flights to Los Angeles and Miami. Raven drives them to and from airports. Small planes land on salt flats in the desert where there are no roads, and Raven has flares, flashlights, and a basket of still warm tamales and rum in a jug. Amy is wrapped in a down blanket in the backseat. Why do they lean into one another whispering? She knows they’re dealing drugs.

  Amy doesn’t confront her mother. They already speak in code, in a network of implications and arrested partial sounds like passwords. Between them, flannel and denim and gingham scraps wait to become a quilt that won’t be stitched. Plans for a house built of adobe on the mesa above Espanola that her mother somehow owns stay a rolled-up document, a parchment hollow inside a rubber band. It’s a navigational chart for a sea they won’t sail. Their ideas drift off, despoiled, weightless; they abort themselves.

  Amy is leaving. She’s been accepted to a boarding school in San Diego. The provost pronounced her test scores impressive. He’s encouraging. It’s possible a college scholarship may eventually be granted. In hotel rooms with lead glass windows and red velvet curtains, she studies brochures for colleges in Vermont and Massachusetts.

  In between, she just lets it happen. They return from the mesas, their vision quest Raven calls it, with their filthy clothing, ammunition and stray pieces of peyote stuffed randomly into plastic bags. It’s the best hotel in town and the bellman carries their trash bags with the gravity afforded real luggage. Raven is instantaneously elevated to Madam.

  It’s usually a suite. Her mother’s boyfriend of the moment enters cautiously, his hand touching the gun in his pocket. He eases into rooms, opening closet doors and shower curtains. He glances at the street below, scanning for indications of an ambush by DEA agents, Zeta flunk-outs trying to make a name for themselves, or freelancers.

  After weeks in canyons of juniper, sage, and pinion, cafes and boutiques are a fascination. It’s another form of foraging. She spends afternoons in tourist gift shops. She’s lost so much weight on their plateau vision quests, eating only dried fruit, crackers and an occasional rainbow trout, she fits into size 2s on sale racks in Pocatello, Alamosa and Winslow, where the women have either run away or gone to fat the way domesticated animals do.

  In an Indian casino near the border she buys a hot pink mini skirt for 2 dollars. It feels like abraded Teflon. Eventually Raven has to cut it off her with scissors. Amy buys a silver blouse the texture of steel wool. She stumbles in neon pink spike heels and pretends she’s Brazilian.

  She rides a dawn bus to work from the favala. She’s a clerk with ambitions. Her name was Gloria but she’s changed it to Marguerite. Her married boss takes her to hotels on Sundays after mass. Through the slatted terrace blinds, birds and cathedral bells in cobblestone plazas drift in, and the festive fluttering bells from old trolley cars with electric spokes that sizzle. A choir of indigenous orphans from the mountains offers an incoherent rendition of “New York, New York” and “Take Me Out To the Ball Game.” It’s mutilated by distance, intention and what resists translation. Nuns draped them in novice habits and glued gauzy angel wings to their shoulders. They’re barefoot and hungry.

  Further, men in cloaks of magenta and electric blue feathers from jungle birds play flutes. In the plaza spreading beyond the cathedral, swarms of pigeons
and yellow butterflies almost touch the faces of old women selling dried corn strung like beads and Chiclets arranged like miniature pyramids. Beyond, there’s something rhythmic and insistent that might be an ocean.

  We are all clerks with ambitions, Amy decides then, stretching her insect bitten legs out on a brocade bedspread in a restored hotel suite in Colorado or New Mexico. She is fourteen or fifteen years old. Raven and her boyfriend are out doing business. They leave three hundred dollar bills on the brocade and instruct her to get an ice cream soda and go shopping.

  Beyond town is thunder, glaciers on mountain peaks, then desert and finally San Diego Pacific Academy. Amy Gold imagines boarding school will be similar to the commune. But the sleeping and eating arrangements will be superior. San Diego Pacific Academy has desks and electricity and a library. Bells ring and they have specific and reliable meanings.

  Now it’s noon in Los Angeles. She packs her office. It’s the end of the semester and she won’t be back in the fall. Alfred Baxter Coleman, chair of the promotion and tenure committee, has successfully convinced his colleagues they don’t need her. She’s only half-Indian, after all. Christ, she was born in Laguna Beach. They’ve hired a Palestine to replace her. It’s a more profound historical statement and irrefutably global.

  Amy wraps a pottery vase in the school newspaper. Ink encrusts her fingers and she feels soiled to the bone. She doesn’t want to put her books in cardboard boxes again. It’s an obsolete rite of empty repetition. It’s the opposite of propitiation. It’s failure in a cardboard box the size of an infant’s coffin. Even her fingers resist.

  The square book caskets. She’s been carrying dead texts from state to state, up and down flights of apartment steps bordering alleys and parking lots, Bougainvillea and Oleander strangling on cyclone fences. Amy realizes she doesn’t want the books anymore, period.

  What she wants is a wound that bleeds and requires sutures and anesthesia. What she wants is a cigarette. Amy gathers her cosmetics and tape cassettes from her desk drawer. She takes the gym bag with her tennis racket, bathing suit, jeans, diamondback rattlesnake boots, flashlight and mace. She wraps her raincoat across her shoulders and thinks, I’m down the road. I’m out of here.