Her mother is a sly predator bird who avoided capture. She’s infertile, arthritic, and she’s lost her claws. Her liver is diseased and her nest is lit by kerosene and candles. She’ll be safe there. She will receive the correct instructions and this time she will listen. When they drive through the Four Corners, through the region of the Harmonic Convergence, this time she will hear.
Her mother is driving, white and stiff in the darkness, a woman with lines like dried tributaries gouged into her face. She gave birth to a daughter she named for the distillation of all strata of purple. Raven wraps a shawl gold as a concubine’s solstice festival vestment around her shoulders. This woman will give her tenure. Amy leans against her mother; her eyes close and she is completely certain.
The architectural drawings can be salvaged and revised. They can build with hay bales now; it’s cheaper. They can do it themselves. After the adobe walls and kiva beams, they’ll tile the floors. Later they’ll plant chilies. Then half an acre of lilies, Calla Lilies. They can have a roadside stand in April at Easter. They’ll be known throughout the northern plateaus as the women of the lilies. Some will call them the women who sell communion.
They’ll be known only by rumor. It will be said that the solitary raven of the mesa received a miracle. There was a brutal severing and a long season of mourning. Then, inexplicably, since this is the nature of all things, the unexpected occurred. Hierarchies are irrelevant because they do not examine central and recurring events. There’s the unknowable trajectory of inspirations that prove to be barricaded cul-de-sacs. Or a king has an aneurism, issues a final edict, and families collapse, and villages vanish.
As there is lightning and cataclysm, droughts and wildfires, so too exists the revelatory accident. Are we not reconfigured as we cross rooms, strike matches, and catch moonlight on our skin?
On a mesa above Espanola, where the Rio Grande is a muddy creek you can’t even see from the highway, it is said that one day a lost daughter bearing the name of a sacred stone was somehow returned.
SKINNY BROADS WITH WIGS
For precisely twenty-five years, Barbara Stein has required her advanced placement English class at Allegheny Hills High School to produce a three-page creative essay describing their summer vacation.
Introduce yourselves to me, Mrs. Stein has asked a quarter century of 10th graders. Begin with the last three months.
In return, she’s presented with listless landscapes like postcards selected at random in convenience stores or found accidentally in a stranger’s drawer. Cities meet their harbors, waves unavoidably fill the centers with anonymous paint-can blues, but it’s all secondhand and detached from the speaker. They’re merely views without fragrance or the possibility of vertigo.
Her students omit the ambiguously provocative areas of their Julys and Augusts. They replace them with predictable travelogues. She is presented with formulaic montages of interchangeable beaches meeting cliffs with the remnants of fortresses and rubble of cathedrals and lighthouses.
The images are the certified version of location and event, but they’re a censored translation, generic, erased of danger and revelation.
This is so impersonal; it might have been transmitted from another planet. In red ink she writes, Nice image, but what are the sounds of summer? The specific smells of your July?
Mrs. Stein believes catastrophe has a distinct texture and climate. Summer disasters are deceptively intense and enacted under stark white light. It’s garish and has nothing to do with illumination. It’s the flash of a camera freezing your face with a comprehension of circumstances you don’t suspect you know. That’s why you reject the photograph. It isn’t because the angle is unflattering, but rather the image contains gestures and dialogue occurring just behind your shoulder. It’s in the hallway or on the pier, a subtle text you pretend doesn’t exist.
Tell me about the quality of light, Barbara Stein instructs, and you’ll find out who you are.
Some students begin to listen. They consider the periphery of their lakeside villages — the implications and the words they don’t actually hear but subconsciously intuit. On certain summer nights the prolongment of divorce is unmistakable — it’s an edgy scrape across an unwashed plate, an unexpected slap on a face, a slammed car door, a phone call in a voice too rapid and soft in a back room with the lamps shut off. The correlation between betrayal and darkness is obvious. One must listen beyond thunder and crickets, past wind blowing the motel banner advertising free dinners for children in six colors.
If you’ve trained yourself, you can hear disease and derangement growing. Cancer is sudden and yellow and smells like rotting tropical fruit and algae in neglected aquariums. Sickness favors surfaces like plaster hallways, mesh screen doors, and plastic kitchen counters in rented bungalows. Sometimes it appears after lightning storms as if electrically incited. Divorce has its unique architecture and undertow. You must search for this while you’re fishing. It’s not in the bucket of bait or on the nylon lines. Instead it’s in the wakes boats carve on water like a legible script.
This is a good setting, Mrs. Stein inscribes on the margin of a student paper. But I think there is more you want to say. Don’t be afraid. The page is your best friend.
Mrs. Stein is intimate with the core of summer. It’s the khaki of tents and sleeping bags and army uniforms. It’s the khaki of camouflage.
Her students entertain the notion that she has unspecified powers, perhaps of a telepathic nature. Yet Mrs. Stein is known as a teacher you can trust. You can tell her about your mother’s new boyfriend and how you’re having trouble sleeping. Mrs. Stein doesn’t demand specific information or what was actually suggested in the barn or pick-up, and the events that followed. She understands what you’re not saying. You can reveal yourself to her in a way you can’t to the guidance counselor who will report your confidences to the principal.
Barbara Stein is an expert keeper of secrets. It’s curious no one suspects her of also possessing them. That’s what keeping a low profile, rarely confiding in another human being, and buying your clothing from the LL Bean catalogue does. It renders the most salient aspects of your personality invisible. In an age of labels and categories, one can effortlessly disappear.
Barbara Stein is, in fact, festooned with clandestine hieroglyphics. If her subterfuges were made dimensional, shaped perhaps into ornaments, she could be Allegheny Hill’s annual Christmas tree. She would sparkle with the radiance of her concealment, her omissions, and what’s growing in her periphery and margins. There’s the matter of where her daughter is, and how she hasn’t spent the last twenty years of winter nights alone. If Barbara Stein told the truth, she’d blind you.
Her students respect Mrs. Stein’s courage. When the schoolboard banned The Catcher in the Rye and The Diary of Anne Frank, she continued teaching these books. She drove all the way to Pittsburgh to buy paperback copies. She purchased them with her own money. When the board threatened to fire her, she replied, “Fire is a weapon against truth. After all, they fired Joan of Arc.”
Students in graduate school return to pay their respects. Mrs. Stein doesn’t encourage this. She doesn’t save their postcards with literary allusions or their trinkets from England and Greece. She doesn’t read their publications and has only an abstract and minimal interest in their achievements in the field of the written word.
Mrs. Stein doesn’t think there is much field left for the written word. It was once a frontier, a primitive meadowland like the acres of shoulder high Mustard, Purple Thistle, and Golden Rod beyond her apple orchard and gardening plots. It’s become a squalid cul-de-sac, a footpath littered with garbage you can’t find on a map. The quality of books has changed in her lifetime. They’re constructed from a different sort of paper and poorly bound, as if intended to be discarded. They’re like cereal boxes rather than sacred artifacts. She’s seen exhibitions where text was used as a graphic element — letters were selected for their shape, rows of words were pasted into columns
forming geometric patterns. These representations didn’t offend her.
In truth, few of her students want to read, not even the brightest and the most verbal. They’ve been inundated by more images in their fourteen years than entire libraries contain. Sentences and paragraphs are tedious, irrelevant like fortress walls. They don’t believe books provide revelation. Words are a version of stone.
Her students spend afternoons in computer chat rooms, employing aliases, and inventing constantly evolving identities. They exchange texts they mistake for accurate approximations of their values and psychology. They don’t recognize they’re engaged in acts of fiction.
Once she mourned the passing of the poets. She recognized that, when they became obsolete, something of what was intrinsically human would be extinct. So it was for the bards with lyres and the carvers of canoes who navigated Pacific islands by the sound and scent of currents. The Gutenberg Printing Press lasted five hundred years, certainly longer than airplanes or cinema will. The technological revolution is an abrupt compression, a swing toward an incremental and collective synthesis. Who is to say half a millennia of books are not enough? She keeps these thoughts to herself.
On Maple Ridge Road, her neighbors perceive her as neutered and eccentric. She’s beyond fertile and therefore harmless. She’s a middle-aged woman, predictable in navy and cranberry, who does her own gardening and house repairs. In late summer she sells eggs and blueberries from her yard. She looks like she’d defend Emily Dickinson’s honor with her own life if it came to it. Barbara Stein is viewed as a distillation of English literature and the teaching profession itself.
If there’s a sense of tragedy in her eyes, it’s an ancient wound — or the result of childhood abandonment. There are rumors of an unfortunate early marriage and a problem with a daughter. But it’s nothing anyone can verify. Invisible women do not invite serious investigation.
Mrs. Stein is aware of the multiplicity of rumors surrounding her. Some are perennials, flaring like banks of May Daffodils, Tulips and Lavender Crocuses. They have a short season. Then the anomaly of annuals that stun but don’t return. In point of fact, she has more than a passing interest in the powers of intuition. Mrs. Stein suspects she might be an adept. When she’s luminous with clarity, she can, in fact, see. She penetrates the ordinary to an enormous brilliant core like an inland sea. It’s a region of pure marrow, detailed and unspoiled. She could trace it with her fingertips.
The inland sea is a body she can open. She’s learned its subtle anatomy and how to subdue and characterize it. Ridges of bone are maple leaf green, the surrounding tissues are chartreuse, and the fluids are a jade she can split with her lips.
Mrs. Stein has a natural affinity for landscape and its seductive promise. All women in gardens sense there is a further purpose. Women on their knees in dirt are engaged in conspiracies of disguised eroticism. The shears, gloves and baskets are blatant props. Any woman gardening is prepared for acts of love.
“Menopause is turning me into a witch,” she told Elizabeth.
That was the last time they spoke. Elizabeth is her only child, the daughter she is going to Los Angeles to find. That’s what Barbara Stein does, secretly, during the two weeks of her summer when she has the budget to leave Maple Ridge and search for her daughter. She’s been doing this for twelve years.
“You were always unusual,” Elizabeth said, her voice raked raw and hollowed out. That was three months ago when she still had Elizabeth’s latest phone number. Barbara Stein inscribed it in her leather directory, in a section filled with discarded Elizabeth phone numbers and addresses. These are kept under D for daughter.
Sometimes she just layers blank papers with the ten phone numbers the way her infatuated students reproduce the name of the object of their desire. They’re engaged in acts of magic — a kinetic incantation, the pencil and paper are flints and there’s an angle that can produce fire. Her students wonder if this is the meaning of geometry and why mathematics is required. It’s an attempt to stem delirium.
For decades, notebook pages of —
Brian
Brian
Brian
Brian
Justin
Justin
Justin
Justin
— fall from folders onto her classroom floors. The repetition of the printed patterns, the crude calligraphy spilling beyond the margins, the curves and etchings suggest the deliberation of engineering and construction. Who is to say these are not novels about love?
She last spoke to Elizabeth three months ago. Barbara Stein was surprised when her daughter answered the phone. She told Elizabeth that her life was a simple arithmetic of addition and subtraction. She had lost her hormones, her interest in men and sex. She had insomnia, needs eyeglasses and a prescription for sleeping pills. Her hair fell out in clumps. The veins in her legs rose like so many summer flowers, lilies and peonies pushed from below.
These manifestations were not the ordinary residues of age, Barbara Stein intimated, not mere spider veins embossing her thighs and calves. Her legs were like dusk avenues where ritual processions passed and stalls on riverbanks offered Carnations and Chrysanthemums for altars and cremations.
“I’m being tattooed while I sleep,” she told her daughter.
“You always wanted a tattoo,” Elizabeth said, voice husky from cigarettes, whiskey, sequences of strangers mouths, and some unspeakable vast fatigue.
“We were going to get them together. Remember?” Mrs. Stein remind her.
Elizabeth was increasingly breathless, as if calling from a public phone on a rush hour boulevard above a subway. There’s too much noise and static on the line. But it’s better than a beeper.
“You sound exhausted,” Barbara Stein realized. “You’re not taking your medicines.”
“You’re clairvoyant,” Elizabeth managed. “It’s too hard. They disrespect me at the clinic. Nurses won’t touch me. They give me the same forms to fill out. They won’t let me use their pencil. And you always wanted a tattoo, Mommy.”
During college, her roommates returned from weekends in Boston or New York with moons carved on their shoulders and bracelets of flowers engraved around their ankles. Barbara Stein craved this ink and envied them. She couldn’t have a tattoo, of course — her parents denounced it as unacceptably vulgar.
Her father was a rabbi. Her parents were, in their way, sophisticated for their historical moment. It wasn’t about the Torah, her father was quick to point out. It was about commerce. God was the family trade and a tattoo would be bad for business. It was that simple.
But her parents are dead and she’s being etched from beneath as she sleeps. Why not choose the actual design? When she gets to Los Angeles and finds Elizabeth, she will get a tattoo. Perhaps they’ll do this together — select a symbol, an emblem, a celestial configuration.
On her final morning, Barbara Stein thinks about tattoos, constellations and the history of carving images into flesh. All cultures practice this and interpret the positioning of moon and stars as recognizable objects. It’s a perpetual night of cause and effect.
Barbara Stein slides her suitcase into her gray Volvo. She assembles stacks of AAA maps and state pamphlets listing motels and local attractions. She realizes, with sudden urgency and discomfort, she wants a summer vacation distilled to three pages.
Eric, the teenage son of her closest neighbor, arrives. She gives him the last of her instructions. He’ll feed her cat Grace for the next two weeks and pet her for ten minutes every day. He’ll pick what’s ripe in the garden.
Eric follows her into the vegetable and herb plots, noting where she keeps the shears, gloves, trowels, shovels and baskets. She demonstrates how the beans must be cut, the tomatoes and strawberries picked and stored. He’s a polite boy, shy, serious and attentive — a city boy, excited to be standing where vegetation rises enormous over his head. Jack in the Beanstalk. Yes, it is true. Behold. This is the birth of cities and epics. The grain you hold in you
r palm is the history of this planet.
“What about the vet?” Eric asks. “Do you go to Dr. Sutter’s clinic?”
Barbara Stein tells him that she doesn’t. It’s an odd admission and she regrets it.
“What if she gets sick?” Eric asks. He stares at her grey tabby. He’s concerned, “Okay, but if it’s more than fifty dollars, just put Grace to sleep,” Barbara Stein tells him.
The boy is stunned. Her new neighbor is a surgeon from Philadelphia. The doctor had bought Professor McCarty’s house, and his wife virtually gutted it. Their family made what they term a quality of life move. That’s what the doctor’s wife, Amanda called it. Barbara Stein isn’t sure what this means and she doesn’t ask.
The McCarty house was a sequence of maple, ash, hemlock, oak, and cherry. Walls were made from two hundred-year-old barns and doors salvaged from churches and government buildings, courthouses and town halls. The ceiling beams were once railroad ties. Now the interior of the house is a uniform light oak. Any surface that can be coated has been painted white. Glass and marble have been installed over the hemlock and cherry. The railroad ties are gone, replaced by a series of skylights.
“It’s a bare beginning,” Amanda said, urgency and threat in her tone.
On the few occasions they’ve met, Amanda spoke incessantly about her personal crisis. During mandatory student orientation, Amanda discussed the possibility of a second life, simplifying her life and changing her life — as if those concepts were interchangeable. Amanda did not mention her son. Eric sat in silence and looked out the window.
Mrs. Stein was tempted to tell Amanda that only the simple simplify their lives, and having a second life was more typically characteristic of psychotics. The only plausible verbal description was, in her opinion, changing your life. But behavior modification lacks immediate gratification and happens, if at all, one imperceptibly slow detail at a time. Then Mrs. Stein recognized she had little to say to Amanda.
A Good Day for Seppuku Page 7
