A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

  In this darkness, pirates and magicians, exiles and alchemists camouflage themselves as beggars. Names and identities are manufactured and exchanged for cash. Flesh is bartered for packets of brown fragments resembling tree bark. The air is charged. Lamplight is calibrated an elegant 14 carat, tinged with pear. Such a light can burn in deserted rooms for years, with no fear of suffocation or fire.

  If we believe in sin and retribution, then antiquity must be continuous. The Minotaur is in the Allegheny Mountain farmhouse. He’s your mother’s new boyfriend. In pastures, bulls with bronze feet breathe fire. The Cyclops is your uncle. He’s coming for supper. Yes. Again. Brush your hair and put on that pretty dress he got for you. It’s not too short. You could thank him better. How’s that going to hurt? Want to get a reputation for a cold heart? And you don’t need GPS. You know where the labyrinth is. It’s past the path to the tool shed and patch of corn behind the trailer.

  Barbara Stein stops on the edge of the Mohave and buys postcards of Los Angeles. She drives east, crossing the desert and mountains. She must accomplish this journey on her three-hundred-dollar budget. Three days of sunlight like sheets bleached a pure white and leaching the air, absorbing events until they’re rubbed away past intention.

  She must patch her roof before the ambush of winter and tend to her garden — the canning and freezing and the ritual of blueberry jam. Then she’ll manufacture a three-page essay encapsulating her summer vacation. She’ll describe tropical vegetation, the colossus of wild magenta Bougainvillea blanketing the bamboo fenced edges, and the boardwalk with its skaters and fortune-tellers. She’ll note the Pacific was paler and cooler than she expected. She’ll say she might have seen a movie star wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses in a Jaguar, Mercedes Benz or Ferrari.

  She has the postcards to provide the authority of detail — the bay below cliffs the color of flesh where wild purple succulents cling, and on the tame exhausted waters, fishing boats return in the late afternoon. Sometimes the fraudulent laminated illusions are enough. Conventional versions can also serve. Who is to say experience can’t be distilled to a 4x6 photograph?

  She won’t write anymore margin notes in red ink. We live by aliases and don’t even reveal our serial numbers. She won’t mention the stucco apartment on the low sloping hill near Ocean Avenue and Marine Street where her heart broke. These are coordinates she’ll be buried with.

  Science has methods for reconstructing villages jungles swallowed. Aqueducts, bridges and temples are reformed from a chip of rubble. They can decode architecture in reverse, inventory the crops in warehouse wharves, and catalogue the birds in royal aviaries. Capitals known only by obscure footnotes and rumors are discovered beneath hundreds of feet of sand and routinely resurrected with the statues of warriors, holy scrolls in earthen jars, and concubines’ solstice gowns intact. Portraits of princesses are painted from a fragment of skull bone. Surely then the restoration of one woman’s life is possible. In this way, we will someday gather our daughters and bring them home.

  FEEDING IN A FAMINE

  Megan Miller returns to the farm in July or August when the river is low and the air yellow. There’s been a six-year drought. She looks across the barley field to the twin silos and interprets them as reassuring. It’s all a sequence of impressions to which we assign meaning. I could call them sores or anchors, she thinks, deliberately selecting the later.

  Eleven Cottonwoods line the front fence. She counts them anyway. There’s a new horse in the pasture. There’s always a new horse in the pasture. She’s been told his generic name several times but forgets. Blacky. Honey. Wheaty. Rusty. She can’t remember them from season to season. There’s a take-home message here. One must not fraternize with livestock. To give them names implies a psychology, a personality, an emotional involvement. The next thing you know, you’re screwing sheep and everyone in church knows precisely the category of your sin. They smell it. It’s a capacity they’ve developed, like scenting sudden wind changes and ominous indications in shifting cloud structures.

  She calls this horse Lady Gaga. “Hey Lady,” she yells through dense sunlight, across channels where voices are effortlessly lost. It strains the mouth to carve syllables into the laminated glare. The Sargasso is with us, Megan thinks, in our suitcases, our briefcases. We unpack salty red kelp as we do our silk suits. And the horse comes running. Megan waves a carrot she prepared in a slow motion, stood at the sink pealing with a dull knife while watching the aluminum coated silos. Such containers are festering lesions or acts of revelation. The farm is ground zero. And the silos her first punctuation. They rose from the ground like metal teeth.

  Her father passes, almost grazing her shoulder, and climbs into his pick-up truck. “You’re going to spoil that horse,” he warns. He shuts the truck door hard, but it’s not a slam. That would be too decisive. Still, it’s a clear dismissal.

  Megan observes her father drive away. This is how she remembers him, precisely, in insomniac nights in Paris, Maui and Los Angeles. He leaves a deliberate funnel of dust and the irritating scratch of gravel scattered beneath him. It’s an unmistakable threat. He’s a man of tornadoes and flesh wounds, surrounded and camouflaged by untouchable elements, stones, wind, motion, and the ripped air that leaks through wire fences. You know his plaid jacket better than his face.

  An area is defined not only by what it contains but also by what is missing. That’s what Megan thought three days ago when they picked her up at the airport and drove home. She saw thunderheads and smelled damp barley. Fields like sea grass wind cut paths through. Perhaps this is the specific absence she is trying to fill or define, some weedy fluid movement loitering at her borders.

  We carry intangible mistakes and garish miscalculations we never reveal. Megan recognizes they are simultaneously indulgent and brutally irretrievable. She glances at the barley. It’s a piece of her that’s been removed. It’s an amputation.

  Megan is assaulted by the absolute knowledge of place. She surrenders to it, the river swollen with sun and insects, heat blowing in, thunderheads circling like gray walls growing up from the ground. Clouds are a speckled bouquet in reverse; a mysterious expanding fabric a woman initiated in such practices would know how to pick. Here all materials are saved, arranged and stitched. It is always quilting season.

  August is white and yellow moths, monarch butterflies, oriels and golden eagles. Dust turns the sunset red and exquisite. It redeems and elevates the flat fields of wheat and barley, alfalfa and potatoes. There’s an insistent indication of gold between sheets of leaden gray and she thinks, suddenly, of medieval illuminated books.

  That first afternoon, watching her father carry her suitcases into the house, Megan realized climate and personality are intimately linked. It is possible that geography is a form of fate. The valley is entirely ringed by clouds. They rise from the earth like a sort of crop. Potatoes are flowering with tiny white buds and if she ran the division of nomenclature, she would call the blossoms comafaces.

  It’s two o’clock and Megan inhales heat from the unpaved road where her father drove away. It feels brittle, could settle on skin the way dust does, pollens, particles from plants and stalks when they’re cut and everyone’s eyes run. Harvest tears. But there’s more in this air, an underbelly tarnished with bits of wings from dying butterflies and yellowish feathers from sun-bleached hawks that often fall, a further layer of stained accumulation.

  The posts on fences are ashy, the identical color of gravel in the driveway. Everything is chipped off, rubbed away. Even horses in the pasture with stalled summer across their backs are muted, dazed. The one blue spruce by the highway looks parched, neglected, scrubbed out. It’s merely an inconsequential blue afterthought, easily erased. There’s residue to this thought containing a darker implication, a midnight blue of bruises, perhaps. It’s not a psychological resonance but three-dimensional; you might actually see it in a mirror.

  “She’s so dark,” her mother repeated. “That’s the darkest g
irl I’ve ever seen.” Dylan was four that summer, black haired and olive skinned like her ex-husband. A girl with enormous dark brown eyes who laughed and tanned easily, wanted to touch and ride the horses, swim in the river, pick flowers, eat peas from the garden, feed the chickens. A four-year-old from the season of infinite yes.

  “I’ve never seen a child that dark,” her mother said again. “So dark and so small. Is that normal? You get her tested? She going to fade out? Is that her permanent complexion?”

  Megan has not brought Dylan back. Now she wonders why she returns to her hometown, continues this pilgrimage in reverse, this journey where she expects to find nothing and does.

  Restless, she drives the gray pick-up her father doesn’t use anymore. She parks on River Street, one block north of Main, and walks toward Maple. If the town had a center, this would be it. If there were answers, they would be here under the accidental circle of tall pines. In such shadows, one can engage in acts of personal architecture and invent a strategy for reconstructing seminal events.

  Megan squints into sunlight. Morning comes at her in fragments, as if she’s an accident victim with extensive memory damage. She has a form of selective amnesia. That’s why she returns to the actual site where place should reveal itself as definitive.

  Megan spends much of her life picking out shards like a woman stumbling from a car crash. She is paralyzed in a long startled, moment of pulling splinters of glass from her skin. There’s a sharp, gritty irritant she can’t identify. That’s why she returns each summer. It’s an archeological excavation. Decades of dust, sun and relentless digging pass before the unearthing of one gold bowl, an orb of what might have been a concubine’s earring. Or one singular coin with the face of a princess known only from rumor. You stand on a plateau, wind anointed, staring at the face of a god in your palm. There is danger in this heat; in the way thunderheads assemble above her shoulders when she isn’t tracking them. You must constantly bear witness. Now a crack of thunder behind her, close like a warning shot. And could it have happened here, on Maple or Main or River Boulevard? The specific coordinates she is searching for?

  Megan Miller returns home like a journalist sent to cover a catastrophe. It’s an assignment. She’s collecting evidence, prepared for body counts, mass graves and vistas of burned acres. What she finds instead is Joe Carlson’s Fountain, Drug and Prescription. A woman could drink a milkshake at the counter while filling her pain killer supply, in one swoop like a hawk. Mrs. Carlson is seventy-nine. She can barely count. Megan can pass fraudulent scripts, give Mrs. Carlson telephone numbers of non-existent doctors in Los Angeles or New York, and confuse her with area codes and unusual spellings. Then Megan remembers she has already done this many times.

  Outside is thunder like a plane straining at a blue edge too fragile to be a real border. It’s a juncture created by intention and rumor, composed of insects and feathers clinging to the underside of yellow air. It has nothing to do with her. Neither do the desolate stranded silos, derelict barns and brittle roots of Cottonwoods along irrigation canals that seem trapped and trying to claw up from the dirt.

  It’s raining when she walks into the house. Her mother sits at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and playing solitaire. No lights are turned on. Rooms are cool hollows, suggesting bones and forests, images from a children’s book. A yellow dishrag lies on the table beside seven piles of cards. But her mother isn’t drying or dusting anything.

  Megan realizes her mother engages in domestic chores only when her father is home. When her mother hears the pick-up truck in the long driveway, she empties the dishwasher, sponges surfaces, piles plates, moving her fingers and objects through space. When her father is home, her mother washes clothes, puts them in the drier, and busies herself with fabrics and how they are folded, stacked, ironed, stitched and carried. She wonders when her mother began preferring cotton, china and silverware to her husband. She suspects her mother is living secretly. Her father doesn’t know his wife possesses a deck of cards. She keeps cards in a box in her apron pocket. Her mother is surreptitious, layered, and indecipherable She has her own climate now, her own seasons and storms, and rivers that relentlessly change and bend.

  Perhaps this is what naturally accrues to rural women. They learn camouflage, notice subtleties, the way a trail winds, how a bent branch might contain information that will save your life. One becomes adept at finding niches you don’t tell your children or neighbors about. What appears to be a lethargic primitive state is actually an evolutionary adaptation.

  “I always used to know what you were thinking.” Her mother stares at the nine of diamonds. Fields of barely and potatoes and willows slung along irrigation canals tremble between thunder. Lightning now, hot neon pink streaking directly at the ground. Her mother is not looking out the window. “I used to know,” she says.

  It’s not a question or accusation. It’s so neutral, without emotional direction, that the statement is less than a gesture with incidental sound. It’s like placing plates in a cupboard. Her mother is leaning over the table, studying a black king. Lightning is lavender and forked.

  “What was I thinking?” Megan asks.

  “That last year. You’d walk across the yard, pressing hard, leaving your boot prints in the snow. See these tracks, you’d say. Remember them good. They’re the last marks of me you’ll ever see.”

  “That was cruel,” Megan realizes. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need.” Her mother places a red seven below a black eight. “It was your way. You were heading out and telling us. Fair warning, fair enough. We didn’t think you’d get that scholarship. Whole year early for college. Never had your senior prom. No graduation pictures. No corsage. But you were right. Those tracks faded and they never came back.”

  “I always come back.” Megan is defensive. “I come home every year.”

  “Some girls have a phase.” Her mother slides a red seven below a black eight. “You were different. No phase. You left and you were gone.”

  “Are you saying you missed me?” Megan senses she’s being baited, but takes it anyway.

  “I don’t even remember you,” her mother says. “What’s there to miss?”

  Megan walks into the bedroom she is sharing with her sister. The room her father built into the earth, paneled with pine, constructing one wall out of gray stone he carried in his truck from the quarry. He mortared all August, working in silence in the long late afternoons of sunlight, hammering and painting the extra room he didn’t believe they needed. He hauled and nailed and knelt with his back turned away, his face and hands to the wall. Rage entangled in the ridges of his muscles like vines on certain trees, tendrils growing into and over the branches, strangling them.

  Her younger sister, Martha, sits on the bed smoking. “You don’t come back to see us. You come back for us to see you.” Martha doesn’t shift position. Her words are small rocks.

  Martha has been discarded by a man a sane woman wouldn’t have given her telephone number to, let alone married. Martha has been abandoned by this man and left with three children under the age of seven. Two boys and a girl, blond and bland like everyone else in the region. Their names are inspired by television programs, so contrived Megan cannot remember them, like the horses, Paint Spot or Brownie. These children wear the syllables of characters from ports and capitals where they will never go. Paris, Brittany, Austin, Kingston and Wellington, Chelsea. Three children with features Megan cannot remember. They are generic, sturdy, already solid and fleshy, a good harvest. She couldn’t pick them out of a line-up.

  Martha chain smokes, follows her around the downstairs bedroom where she now lives with her three uniform children, her plain wrap kids. Martha is tracking her, resting a hand on her rolling acre of cotton flowered print skirt hip, and says, “We’re some sick ritual for you. Something you do before the verdict comes in instead of a prayer. You think we don’t know?”

  What does Megan actually know of the intelligence of these people, t
heir ability to synthesize? Martha is convinced all attorneys are dirty, greedy and corrupt. She has a T-shirt with a rendering of a white shark. Beneath the caricature, block letters spell out LAWYER. Martha wore this shirt at the airport.

  There is a further level of disdain she recognizes in her sister. Martha considers it absurd that a woman should work, or rather and more precisely, that a woman would deliberately choose this. Women only work from necessity, from external and unavoidable harsh circumstances, like death or abandonment. A good woman would be taken care of. Everyone knows that.

  “You come by once a year, flaunting yourself. Get yourself a new name. Megan. Mildred wasn’t good enough, right? You’re a brunette. You’re a redhead. You’re getting an abortion. Then you’re divorced. You’re smoking pot. Then wed up a Jew boy. Now it’s lifting weights. Yoga and sailing. You know what?” Martha stares directly at her face. “You use us. We’re your private clinic. We’re your private mirror. Don’t you think we know?”

  Outside is lightning pink and lavender like neon party streamers. Outside is rain on fields and horses, everything a sodden dark green. Outside is a driveway leading to an interstate, more fields, and a tributary winding to the Snake River. When she looks up, Martha and her children are gone.

  Obviously, what she needs to see isn’t in the house at all, but rather in the distance. In the morning, Megan drives into town and buys a pair of l0w power binoculars and a book titled Birds of the Western States. What she is searching for is beyond the frame. It requires the aid of a technological device. It must be behind the silos or on the edges of irrigation canals, past the barns and gully of cloud, a slice just beneath the horizon.

  Megan drives back to the farm, one hand resting on the box containing the binoculars. She’s forgotten what it is to drive a truck, to be intimate with a machine, the gears that feel abnormally warm in her palm, the spectrum of metal motor sounds you must listen to. She can’t drive with the radio on, it’s too distracting. There is nothing on the radio but religious sermons and country western songs, a squalid repetition of alcohol and poorly educated people without recognizable options whining about it in strict and predictable rhyme schemes.