I think she needed something new to be done—even if it’s needless. Something that’s for a future, even a future of not doing rather than doing. We can’t bury an elm, so why not make it a memorial presence? A long while to dry out and make its own long slow way back to earth in its own way. After working all day to build the crib and stack the logs in it—only a little of the wood has been split—the men finish the job. The widow’s in her house. She’ll wait with the wood, there’s a sense in which it’s not even dead; between the two of them, the wood and the woman, she’ll go first, and the dead wood will be her survivor.
Dying with Words
The dirt was bare and the funeral flowers lay twisted and shrunken in the red mud, the gold foil-wrapped cans knocked over, the blossoms all brown. The very day before she died, this woman and her husband had had a fight because she had been worsening fatally for months and he still hadn’t bought a plot and she was angry at him for not having bought it. He’d stopped doing anything at all, she’d said. But now she was buried, although there was no stone yet, only the raw mound that had slightly sunk already because it had rained, and the little two-year-old boy started suddenly to dig into it to help her get out.
Someone had told the father that his children must face the reality of death, but no one could explain to the boy, in a way that a child could understand, the why of his mother’s going. His father showed him where she had gone—but could not tell him why this was not really where. She herself, like anyone else, had been unable to explain to the very small boy where he had been before he was born. So he couldn’t not think that she was under the heap of mud, and he couldn’t think that she was, and he began to dig.
No more, for that matter, had she been able to explain to herself how she had “conceived a child,” for it had seemed to her that she did think him into existence, lying in bed every night and wishing for him, praying for him, after she had raised his sister for a few years and wanted, needed, a son as well. No more than she could conceive that she was going to die soon.
Lying in her hospital bed between the days when her husband brought her their two children, she had begun to distract herself by looking up words in a paperback dictionary, till this searching was no longer a distraction but a discovery of a string of hints to mysteries. But the answers wouldn’t come clear.
She learned to go back farther, she asked her husband to bring her a much bigger dictionary, and he brought it with a resignation that made her secretly furious for a while. She hid her anger from him, just as she tried to hide her panic and fear for herself and for all of them—although he could have borne much more, for after all it wasn’t he who was dying. At the same time, she could tell that he thought—because he was not capable of taking the measure of her helplessness and despair, and did not realize that he could not—that his own feelings of bereft loneliness and irritation were stronger, deeper, somehow more important, than her feelings.
She looked up “female,” which was what she still was. Her quiet hands were more beautiful than they had ever been; the radiation had killed most of her hair, and even her pubic hair had mostly gone, leaving her looking like a girl. (Yet later, after the big dictionary had grown too heavy for her to hold, she wanted to shave her legs one day, and she had to ask a nurse to do it, and it was the nurse, not she, who cried, bending over the straight, still, silken limbs.) But maybe “female” had nothing to do with beauty anymore. “Female” comes from a Latin word and the Latin word came from other, older, words, farther back from the Romans than the Romans were from her, and it meant “she who suckles,” and that is also where the Latin word for daughter, that she liked the lacy sound of, “filia,” came from. Or else that oldest word meant simply “to be, to exist, to grow.” First we suck, then we grow. Her boy had sucked and grown; she had given suck and was dying. The word didn’t apply to her.
Then she looked at “being” and “existing” and she found that in the dark and cold of Norway, whence the word had come to her through ages for her to use without thinking, till now, “to live” meant “to prepare,” and it also meant bondage. To live is to be in bondage—she knew someone had said, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I’m free at last.” But she had not listened to him, then. Had not wanted to.
So before she died she thought that after her death she would no longer be female, because she could not suckle her son, and she would be released from the bondage of her illness. There was another word back in that remote eon that made the Romans seem modern, that meant “to retreat with awe,” and she began to do this, backing into her own death, awed not by the death that was coming but by the life she was losing. Don’t leave, she said to the three of them one afternoon, by which she meant that she was leaving.
Her husband, to whom she had been bound, and her daughter, whom she had raised for a few years, and her son, whom only months ago she had fed at her full, unaccountably painful breast, went to visit her grave. (It had been dug only six days before, by the same discreet laborers who, one day later, had stayed away from the burial, behind large headstones, and then, keeping their distance, had approached at the backs of the mourners returning to their cars.) Carrying in his mind an idea, some bad advice, a witlessness, her husband brought the children back to see the grave, days after that. Rain had fallen during the night. He himself was not wondering where “she” was; he was putting all that out of his mind so that he could live through this day. He had so wrapped himself in his own arms, for comfort, that he was excusably, perhaps, far from his children and the things, every little one of them, that had excited or pleased or pained her, all the daily sensation and stuff she had clung to more tightly as she had sickened. They were very different persons, he and she—they had been.
The little girl felt that her mother would hide from her forever and never tell her what happened, what was happening. Although she felt that what the grave held might not be a person, she was angry. Then the boy put his hands in the mud and started to dig, getting filthy, thinking maybe of her beautiful breast, the one that had been left, and wanting a voice, a warmth, and all else that was gone.
Her husband had wanted to make love to her in the hospital. That came at something “female” that was not what she had tried to understand. She hadn’t let him do it. He had chafed at his own grief and new responsibilities; another sort of man, in his place, might have cried and kissed her. But she lay dying and turned her head away from him to spare him the judgment she knew was in her own eyes, and to take her eyes off the further injury he had become to her, in his simple ordinary failure. She was sorry she had had to reach the end of her life to learn that a terrible trial or terrible need would not bring, as a right, some saving presence, a rescue, a mothering.
This man, this woman. How it went, with them.
Among all the unnamed and unnameable things is not only what the little boy wanted, for which no word is large enough; and the undeniable longing his father felt in the white hospital room empty of the true noise of life; but also the sort of kindness, finally, that the wife gave her unwitting husband when she turned her face away from him so he would not see what she felt, when she let it go, let it all go. We can dig through all the dictionaries there are, we can muddy our arms to the elbows with words, and we won’t find the word for that.
On Belmont
“Watch it, brother,” he said. He who had come up beside me without my even noticing him as I was walking on lively, crowded Belmont one summer night. He dropped into a squat, half-leaning against a building, a brown-bagged bottle in one hand. “Get down,” he warned me.
Ragged, stoned, looking full of fear. I stopped near him.
I don’t think I had heard even a backfire.
“Machine guns,” he said. “I know, I was there,” he said, turning his head from side to side.
“Not machine guns,” I said—to be helpful. Then I had what I thought was a good idea. I said, “And even if it is, they’re a long way from here.” (They’d have to
be, suppose it was possible, they were still blocks away from here, at least, off down the busy late-hours streets lit too bright. We had plenty of time.)
“Oh,” he said, meaning, Is that what you think? With a quick glance. His gaze sidelong, and strong. It would take too long to teach me. But he explained: “That’s when they’re really bad, that’s when they get you, when they’re far away.”
He stayed low, one knee half up, squatting on the other thigh, protecting the bottle held half behind him. He looked up and down the street. I waited as long as I could, maybe half a minute, but all this was over now, that was about as far as we could take it, now that we had had our moment of contact in this world, after our separate years of wandering other streets and other countries. We had happened to be momentarily side by side at the sound of whatever it had been, maybe a gun. I started on down Belmont, I got back my pace, I was heading for the train.
Maybe to him, still squatting and leaning there, not yet ready to stand up, or able, it seemed like he was the one who would get to where things made sense and were safe, and I was walking foolishly in a place of danger. How could he explain it to me, it was way too late for me and everybody like me.
Mission
After she had been in her kindergarten for months already, one afternoon at home she was crying because of something a friend had done or maybe only said to her, and I was trying to offer some solace, some distraction, when she nearly shouted all of a sudden, “You and Mommy left without even saying goodbye to me!”
I said—shocked to have caused a wound so lingering that other pain must inevitably lead back to it—“When?”
“The first day of school!” she said, and she really began to wail, looking up at the ceiling, tears pouring from her, her face crumpling.
“But you wanted us to leave—you were lined up with the other kids to go into class behind the teacher, I thought you were happy to go in!”
“But other parents were still there! And you left without even saying goodbye!” The way rain can arrive with a violent flurry of pouring and thunder but then settles into a steady fall that is the real rain, that will after a while flood gutters and basements and streets and fields and rivers till there’s damage it will take time to repair—so she settled wearily and deeply into her crying.
However a wound was caused, it is there, it can’t be undone, it needs to be healed.
This child is standing before me on the carpeted stairs down to the back door, her eyes level with mine as I sit on a higher step holding her hands, and she is crying as if she will never stop, and the friend’s slight is forgotten, the first day of kindergarten is forgotten, there is deeper sorrow than that, incomprehensible, and for now I am feeling the longing and protective presentiment that bind me to her in love, and I understand what I must do as long as she and I live, and how much I want to do this—love her—and need to do it, and that it is not enough. It is the way of things, and no blame on anyone for it, that it won’t be enough.
Just Imagine
Long ago, if you’d gone to the window where my first lipstick left a mouth on the glass that I wiped off with toilet paper, and you looked out at an angle as sharp as you could get, putting your cheek to the cold glass that was so dirty on the outside, you could have seen that, just as anybody but Mama would think, there was nothing out there on the other side of the fifth-story wall of our living room except the wind that blew around the tall apartment buildings day and night. I’d kissed the cold window, like saying a prayer please let there be something more for us (like she says sometimes). But I knew there couldn’t be. Mama was convinced sometimes—not all the time—that if only we could secretly break through the living-room wall, the same wall where the photograph of her mother had been hanging for so long, then we could find another room that nobody knew about. That no one but us would be able to use. A room just for us—Mama, Donald, Desmond, Bobo, and me. “I’m telling you! Go look out the window on that side and you’ll see it,” she would say hoarsely to me sometimes. She said it like it would be my fault if I didn’t see it waiting for us. And even if I had seen it . . . we still couldn’t have gotten into it. I used to think—if only we lived on Orchard Street, wherever that was, such a nice name for a street.
Mama almost never went out, so we had to get everything for her, when we got ourselves organized and the money was there. In the living room, the bedroom, and the kitchen, which was the whole apartment, there would often be Aunt Jean, Mama’s younger sister who was a loud visitor, but she brought us special things to eat, Mama’s friend Zulie, who was a quiet one and too bad she helped us eat them, and Bobo, yapping. And when Desmond was a baby, on some weekends it seemed like he cried about the same number of hours that working people worked. Donald was always a quiet boy. Mama herself almost whispered instead of talking, so you had to get close to her to hear her, which was what she wanted. And me. But I’m not criticizing them. I wish I could go back there, I wish I could just come through a door from the imaginary room and say, I’ve got a big hot meal waiting for you that I made myself! And see them all crowding in like Christmas.
The secret room had a deep green carpet. And a little piano. And a big lamp with a decorated shade that made a soft yellow light, and a big red easy chair just for reading. It had pictures on the wall. It had lots of windows but the room was never cold. And the city looked different through them. Lights in those office buildings and skyscraper apartments to the east were kind of cheerful and cozy instead of far-off and lonesome—they said come over this way for a while, even though I had never been over that way, never been to where the mountain-buildings were. The secret room had a wooden bookcase painted a pretty green with books in it. And it was quiet in there. Oh, you could still hear the talking and noise from the living room and the kitchen and the bedroom, but muffled by that shut door. You could have laid down on the clean carpet and stretched yourself out any way you wanted and slept, it was that clean. No Bobo piss. No dust and dirt. And nobody stepping on you when they went by. Nobody shouting or yapping.
Donald is seven years older than me, nine older than Desmond. Donald went to California and stayed there. I don’t know him, really. Desmond had me to look after him and he did OK—he drives for UPS. Mama was smart, she was determined, and if she had had some opportunities, if she had gotten more schooling, she might have been president of a company instead of turning into a woman who was not completely in touch with reality. Especially not in touch with it after she raised kids and only had a husband for a few years. I’d look in my head for something I could actually say to her and then I’d say it, so she wouldn’t think I was sulking. So I grew up quiet, like Desmond. He and I. But my not saying much could make Mama angrier. Poor Mama. Nothing went right for her.
The roofs of our building and the three others like ours were flat. The last staircase, leading up from where the elevator stopped on the twelfth floor, was made of metal and was steep and ended at a door that opened onto the roof. No one was supposed to go there. That door was supposed to be locked, but the lock was always being broken. For a while somebody tried to put a big chain and padlock on it, but people knew how to break that, too. The roof was dried tar or something, so if you walked on it, the soles of your bare feet in summer not only got way too hot but also got dirty. And your shoes too, any time of the year. Inside the twelfth-floor hallway there were always black tracks on the floor. And just like on the ground around the building, there was junk up there, too—bottles and cans, some old wood or metal things, busted up, lying here and there. It had a low wall around the edge. But something was beautiful about being up there in good weather. You had to be careful though not to go there when the wrong people might be there already, or might come up on you.
The clouds moved, the sun moved. You couldn’t see but slivers of the lake far away, here and there, and some larger sweeps of it where all the buildings weren’t in the way. But at night the lake made this clean edge and giant place of complete dark nothing, out past the w
hole lit-up city and especially the mountain-buildings. Hard to describe the feeling of looking at that—it was like everything, everything, ended at the edge of the lake and there wasn’t anything else there, no water, no ground, not even any air, nothing. Donald slept on a cot he put up every night in the kitchen, Mama and Bobo slept on the couch in the living room, and Desmond and I slept in the little bedroom, and then when Donald left, the cot disappeared except when somebody outside the family needed someplace to sleep, and Desmond moved to the couch and Mama and I slept in the bedroom, with Bobo. We figured most things out. We lived with it.
I would find the right spot up on the roof and get down on my knees at the edge above where our apartment was, I’d hold tight onto that little wall, and look over, straight down the side of the building and count the floors down to the fifth, and I could sort of see where Mama’s secret room would have been, sticking out from the side of the building, if it had been there. I so wanted to believe in it even though I never really did, even when I was maybe four years old.
An Orchard in the Street Page 4
