Assembled by Victor, and held by him, watching the towns pass by from the window of the Volkswagen, I see the thing. Incredible, yet I do see it.
Most of the pretty half-timbered houses trimmed in snow are fronted by broad lawns sloping down towards the road. At the edge of one snow lawn, near the sidewalk, is a clump of metal garbage cans; and lying in the snow, partly hidden by the cans, is a woman’s body in gentle repose, curved on one hip. Only the lower half is visible. She is wearing something pink and light, a nightgown or slip (a smok?) that ends halfway down her thighs. Her legs are slender, fair-skinned, and bent slightly at the knee. It might have been a painting by Victor: it had that reverence for detail, that cool accuracy and sinuosity of line. Odalisque. She does not move.
I swivel my head to keep her in view, but in a moment she is blocked by a stand of trees. Then gone. But not from the inner eye. A white woman half-draped in pink, embedded in snow. A woman who has stumbled and fallen while taking out the garbage and will instantly pick herself up? A discarded doll, a heap of garbage artfully arranged to resemble a female form? I don’t think so. A half-clothed woman, lying out in the cold. By choice? Or by design, accident, circumstance, necessity?
I may be dreaming. But there are the commonplace houses, the diurnal sun, the raw sounds of the broken muffler and Henry’s sniffling. There is Victor’s hand on my right arm, the heads of our friends in the front seat, Althea’s profile on my left, sharp as a cameo. The woman was as real as any of this.
After a while it occurs to me that we are fellow creatures also in the most ordinary sense. “Don, we have to turn back. I saw a body in the snow.”
Tactful disbelief. They think shock has brought delusion. But in the end they humor me. Don turns around and the morning rewinds on the spool of road. “Say when, Lydia.” I manage to locate the house, the lawn, and the garbage cans, but the body is gone. Their troubled concern is not for the woman but for me; to ease them I say very little, making sure to sound controlled and sane.
Once out of the town I whisper to Victor, “There was. I swear it.”
“I believe you,” he whispers back.
Where did she go and what will happen to her? During the long trip home a cold curiosity spins bizarre possibilities. They unwind to infinity like broad white ribbons, rippling strips of snow, snow ribbons wrapping up the world till the world is a covered ball, all done up in satin snow, sealed and ready to be given over. Surrendered.
Mother
I DISCOVERED, TAPED TO the side of Alan’s desk that faces the closet, a picture postcard of some white stone structures in the Mesa Verde, in Colorado. The card showed a tall ladder connecting two levels of the Indian settlement nestled in an enormous cliff against an azure sky. Alan had drawn a circle around the ladder in red Magic Marker, then drawn an arrow going across the card and the light maple of the desk to another circle, where he wrote, “7/13/76.” More than once I had told him that he could write on his desk in pencil, but please not with Magic Markers, which is why he did it on the hidden side.
Millennia ago, perhaps while Thales across the sea was pondering how to measure the pyramids, the Mesa Verde was the site of a thriving, self-sufficient Pueblo Indian community, eventually conquered and abandoned. Early in this century, two men on horseback happened upon its remains. Imagine their surprise, to round a bend and find extant, in those vast copper-and-ochre-colored cliffs, white buildings tucked in the cavernous hollows dug by wind and rain. The cliffs themselves are separated by deep ravines, creating a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle split apart. The stone dwellings, in their linear, geometrical groupings, foreshadowing Euclid, are lucid and harsh, with rock for floor and rock for ceiling. Above on the mesa, their roof, the Indians cultivated crops, scaling the cliff by an obscure path of carefully bored finger-and toeholds, a path indecipherable to outside marauders.
We climbed that perilous ladder, 7/13/76—Victor and I and the little ones, off on a three-week jaunt while Althea and Phil were back East in camp. Below us was a bottomless chasm. “Don’t look down,” the forest ranger warned. “Keep looking straight ahead, at the person directly in front of you.” Directly in front of Vivian was a retarded boy of about fourteen who moved clumsily, and I feared he would make a false move and topple us all. I saw us hurtling through the cubist landscape like falling rocks. Earlier, the boy had tossed a rock down and we never heard it come to earth. He lumbered up one step at a time like a young child, unwilling or unable to go on till he felt each rung of the ladder firm beneath both feet. With every step the ladder trembled. But he didn’t make a false move. He managed as well as anyone else, and up on the grassy mesa at last, I felt like falling to my knees and thanking him, as you might thank an indifferent god who has spared your loved ones out of pure caprice.
In the pottery and artifacts of the Pueblo Indians recurs the motif of a serrated line. After much study, said the forest ranger, archaeologists have concluded that the motif represents teeth. Because of their particular diet (and with no dentists, she added coyly), the Pueblo Indians must have suffered greatly from decaying teeth. So the image for their intractable pain finds its way repeatedly into their art.
I suppose the Magic Marker could be scrubbed off as in the past, but really, what would be the point? What is the point of so many minor restrictions? Most of them are concerned with the setting of precedent and habit, presupposing long life. I should have let him draw all over his room, if he chose. Drink milk straight from the half-gallon container. Live on pizza. Crawl into our bed in the middle of the night way past the age of four. For his whole life, if he liked. I also should have let him do things related not to setting precedents but to my own discomforts: keep a pet mouse, ride his bike alone through Central Park, see Star Wars for the fourth time. Refine his tastes? For what? And I should have gotten him the Adidas sneakers he craved, immediately, not put it off till the snow melted because I was busy, not said they were vastly overpriced and wouldn’t Keds do as well.
One wall of his small room is painted midnight blue and dotted with all the stars in the heavens, each constellation clearly labeled in his slender, neat letters. He writes like a draftsman, Victor used to say. Several weeks have passed and the Beatles records still lie scattered on the bed like huge coins. I select one at random to play while I limp around. When he first played Abbey Road for me, he pointed out how the songs ran into each other; despite their different moods, they were connected musically, thematically, like a suite. He didn’t use those words, naturally, but that was what he meant. I was impressed and pretended I hadn’t noticed. Vivian remarked that the songs on one side of the White Album were connected too: they were about animals. “Animals?” said Alan. “Sure. ‘Blackbird.’ ‘Piggies.’ ‘Rocky Raccoon.’” Alan looked closely at the record label. “Three out of nine.” “Well, still,” said Vivie. I stuck up for her. I thought she had a point. Tenuous, but a point. “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” was certainly animal-like, though I didn’t suggest that aloud. “Blackbird” is playing right now—it has a feathery, airy grace. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting …”
The spy story is on his desk, the spies in their three-piece suits scribbling notes on the Magic Slate in the bushes of Central Park oblivious, forever now, to the danger they risk. But so is the danger, forever now, forestalled. Also on his desk is the report he was writing about Egypt. “Religious Beliefs” is the heading. “The ancient Egyptians believed that when a person dies and goes to their Day of Judgment, their life is put in a balance scale and in the other side is a feather called The Feather of Truth, and if the person’s life tips the scale even a little bit then he does not go to heaven.” A winsome notion of truth, compressed into a feather, far from the Truth we were led to envision: solid, unbudgeable, forbidding, and quite lacking in charm. Evidently for the Egyptians it was the lies that were heavy.
The ol
d Ranger Ricks can go to the school library. The baseball cards should really be given to his friends—they are valuable, I understand—but since I don’t want to see his friends I drop them in the metal wastebasket, where they make a hollow, accusing thud.
There on a shelf is that stupid wooden pig. Flat, barely an inch in depth, only the vaguest outline of a pig, it is a small bank designed by one of New York’s less prescient shop teachers. Its legs—front two and back two merged—can hardly support it. If you move the shelf the slightest bit, it tips over. I move the shelf. The slit on top is too narrow for nickels and pennies: a dimes-only bank. But there is no provision for getting the dimes out, no secret cloacal exit, only that one thin slit on top. And being so flat, the bank fills quickly. Like doing penance, you need to turn the pig over and shake out the dimes one by one, which requires a certain strength of character. I would occasionally shake out a few for bus fare. Alan could empty the whole bank. Every child in the seventh-grade woodworking shop made the same pig and brought it home this past Thanksgiving, which means that in thirty-three families dispersed through District 3, someone shakes out the dimes, humming or cursing, depending on temperament.
Through my years of experience as a mother, it has in fact come to my attention, as the funeral director would say, that the New York City schools are obsessed with turning out small household articles. For girls it begins with potholders, which Althea wove out of colored loops on an eight-by-eight metal loom that she brought home at the end of the year. One potholder even had my initial woven into it; a week later, so as not to appear sexist in outlook, Althea made one with a V, much more tricky. The potholders were useful and pretty but deteriorated rapidly, while Althea moved on to woodworking. Luckily Vivian took over and kept me well supplied; I have not bought a potholder in years, but soon I shall have to. I cannot ask Althea, at seventeen, to weave potholders on a baby loom. Besides potholders, we have half a dozen clay bowls, a dull-tipped letter opener, sand sculptures in applesauce jars, and a lamp made out of a Chianti bottle. We have a bulbous green vase that came home wrapped in newspaper like the Maltese falcon. We have ceramic ashtrays and ashtrays of mosaic tiles, although till lately only I smoked, and not very much. Now, unfortunately, Althea smokes an occasional cigarette. We have boxes made out of popsticks and boxes made out of toothpicks, boxes that hold seashells, playing cards, matchbooks, painted pine cones, stubby candles. All these things we welcomed with fulsome praise.
During his last weeks, Alan gave us periodic reports on a certain crumb pan he was making in the seventh-grade metal shop, successor to woodworking. He first mentioned it in his tongue-in-cheek way, like his father but more pronounced, with a toss of the head so his longish, tawny hair rippled then settled like a sleek cap. I was stumped. Was it something to put underneath a toaster, or maybe under a pie plate? “A crumb pan,” he explained soberly, “is like a dustpan, only smaller. You use it to sweep up crumbs.” “Oh, I see.” I wasn’t sure whether to laugh. “Do you make a little brush also?” “No, Mom, I’m afraid you’ll have to supply your own little brush.” Ah, so it was all right. “Well, good. It’s what I’ve always wanted, actually.” “I thought so,” said Alan. “I sensed there was something vital missing from your life.” “Yes, an unfulfilled need, as George would put it,” I said. Phil said, “We’ll have to leave more crumbs around, though. I think we may be too neat for a crumb pan.” “Yes, all you kids better start leaving crumbs.” We asked him at odd moments about his crumb pan—its dimensions (four by six) and its progress. “So, how’s the crumb pan coming?” It was taking what seemed an inordinate time. It was not the process that took time, Alan explained, but waiting to use the machine that bent the metal, of which there was only one, because of city budget cuts. He was unfailingly good-humored and deadpan, even when Althea said she could think of nothing in the cosmos with less raison d’etre. He explained carefully how it was made. First you do a stretch-out on cardboard, then you scratch the outline on a sheet of metal, then you cut it out of the metal with tin snips. … Victor was the only one who saw some merit in this project; he had nostalgic memories of metal shop. “Did you make a crumb pan for your mother too?” I asked him. “No, I can’t remember what I made. Oh, a belt buckle, I think. Maybe a napkin holder.” “Well, we already have a napkin holder,” said Alan. “That’s why you’re getting a crumb pan.” “Yes, I know. Phil made the napkin holder.” “No I didn’t,” said Phil. “Alan made that too.” “Oh, really? I could have sworn you made it.” “I made a napkin holder,” said Althea resentfully, “but you never use it.” “Is that true? I’m sorry.” “Your napkin holder only held seven napkins,” Phil reminded her. “So what? It’s the principle. It’s not my fault they make napkins so thick.” “I use your little blue ceramic pot for thumbtacks,” I said to Althea consolingly. “That’s not hers, that’s mine,” said Phil. “Is it? I’m sorry. I’m sorry, children.” It was true, there were so many of them and so many artifacts, as though our apartment would someday be studied by archaeologists for clues to our joys and pains, like the Pueblo Indians’ dwellings, that I couldn’t keep things straight. But I would have remembered that the crumb pan was Alan’s. None of them but Alan could have described with such aplomb in the face of the ridiculous how it was cut and bent into shape. I can hear his voice lingering over the words “tin snips,” with a soft merriment at the sound. Now that I can never have my crumb pan I feel an absurd longing simply to see it. I could call the metal-shop teacher and ask if I might pick it up, in whatever its stage of development. Or I might just go in to look at it, after which the teacher could throw it out or, given the state of the budget, unbend the metal and reuse it, if feasible.
Of course there is not the remotest chance that I will pursue the crumb pan. I would never go mad in quite that way. My curiosity will have to remain unslaked, that’s all, along with my curiosity about how tall they would grow, how their features would sharpen, what surprises their talents would lead them to, what kinds of lovers they would choose, how they would take the world and its vicissitudes—would he really become a Quaker? would she always prefer sleep to spiritual communion?—and what they would be and mean to us, grown. “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” Last night, lying alongside of Victor in the dark—guarded, stiff, tense as stretched wires yet for all that companionable, an impossible, agonizing mix—I said, “Oh Victor! That crumb pan.” “Jesus, I forgot all about it. The crumb pan.” And for a teetering instant we didn’t know whether we would cry or laugh. But nothing happened. The moment settled in balance between us and we lay silent, breathing slowly.
I’m shaking and shaking this damned bank, but it’s too full for any dimes to escape. What a waste, to lose so many dimes. How often, in the early years of our marriage, fifty or sixty dimes would have made a difference. They would not have kept Con Edison from turning off the gas and electricity in the bleak old apartment so that I had to warm Phil’s bottles under the tap, raging, till Edith came, took a look around, and for the one time in her life, maybe, lost her temper and told Victor his pride was insane, and drawing in a deep breath for courage, turned to me and said I was no better, then snatched the bill from the kitchen table, slamming the door on her way out. But the dimes would have reheeled shoes, bought a steak or two tickets to a movie. Our pride was insane. But no longer.
I fetch a hammer and screwdriver, and sitting on the floor of Alan’s room, assault the piggy bank. The screwdriver is less violent but also less effective; I have to use the hammer, and mercilessly. The wood cracks and splinters, soft wood that, once split, I can even rip with my bare hands. I take care not to hurt them—I am not planning retirement again, oh no. Never that again. Dimes spill out on the floor, a small fortune in dimes. A legacy.
Finally I sit down on the wide windowsill, rubbing my ankle. I have come to savor that other, duller pain and would miss it if it left. On a nearby roof across the back alley is a young black woman with an Afro, a bright golden dres
s, and Frye boots, hanging baby clothes on a line. Even though it is warmish for early March, the sky is overcast, portending snow or rain. An optimist. I shake my head at her innocence, slowly, like an old lady.
Why did I lose my children? That’s what I want to know. But the question is loaded, no good because it’s not phrased right. It embodies some fallacy or other I learned about in school, an egotistical warp. As warped as asking why did Victor lose his children. A better question would be, Why did these particular children die? To that there are reasonable answers having to do with chance and the law of averages. Also, cosmically: everyone dies. Locally: whatever that official doctor said was the cause of death. I forget the Latinate phrase.
Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic and prig we used to mock, counsels that we be content with whatever happens to us: “Because it was done for you and prescribed for you, and in a manner had reference to you, originally from the most ancient causes spun with your destiny.”
Disturbances in the Field Page 25
