How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

by Lydia Netzer

  Inside, there was a man in the uniform of a security guard. The insignia of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy was emblazoned on his lapel. He reached out his hand for her temporary ID card, and then he waved her through. She turned to the second door, on the other side of the gatehouse, and opened it. She was inside.

  Irene remembered the last time she had stood here, after her college graduation. She had come for an interview with the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, and, having opened this door, she turned directly to the right and vomited into a bush. She had found the appointed room for her interview, and then had so utterly shit the bed on all the questions that the professor conducting the interview looked at her almost kindly.

  “Do you really want this position?” said the professor. “You seem a little undone.”

  *

  The night before that interview, Irene had stood in her mother’s kitchen, holding her car keys and her purse. She was exhausted from the drive, but she was never allowed to fly home to visit, because Bernice had seen a vision that she would die in a plane crash, so begged and demanded Irene would stay out of them. Cried. Cajoled. Irene had conceded the point, conceded air travel entirely. Bernice was holding Irene’s face in one hand, and kind of hurting it. The words she made sounded like “told you, toldyer, tole,” and Irene wondered: How can this person have a life, and friends, and answer the phone, and not have anyone know that she is the town drunk, in a silvery gray cardigan, and Birkenstocks, and a fog of lavender oil, and dead sea salt, and jazz?

  Irene hated jazz. Hated everything about it.

  “Look,” her mother had said, “I made it. I bumped it over. I bumped. I buh.” Her mother smiled apologetically and shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t put my sentence in order!” she said. There were two bright spots of red on her cheeks, and her eyes were watery. “I’m so happy you’re here,” said her mother. “I bumped up a dinner. Bumped. Buh.” Her mother’s shaky hand lifted the lid from a huge oval Crock-Pot that was plugged into the wall. Inside were some gray things and some brown. “Root vegetables,” said her mother, “Buff. I can’t say it. Beef tenderloin. That’s what it is. Now I cooked it a long time. And then. Well. You get a plate. I’ll get you a plate. Sit down in the other room.”

  It wasn’t funny to Irene. At all. It’s not funny when it is your own mother.

  Her mother’s television had been tuned to the Food Network. Bobby Flay was auditioning some chefs who were making canapés from ingredients found in the wild. Wild Indian cucumber. Wild coconut. Wild blackberries. The chefs were winded, fraught, red in the face. Her mother brought out a plate that was a paper plate wedged into a smaller ceramic plate. On the plate was a piece of meat that was beef. There were also cubes of vegetables and runny juice pooling under all the food and in between the pieces were thick wedges of mushrooms that looked like they had been in the back of her mother’s fridge for a while.

  Her mother had said, repeatedly, that if something was cooked long enough, it was fine. Ishfine. No, it’s not. Ishfine. It’s a freezer, Mom, not a cryogenic chamber. Ishfine.

  “I don’t eat mushrooms, Mom,” said Irene. “I don’t like mushrooms.”

  “Oh, well if you can pick that out. Those are turnips. This is beef. You want soup? I also made soup, from celery, and it’s in the car. It’s in the freezer. It’ll taste ahhh.”

  “I don’t want any soup,” said Irene.

  She peeled a shred of beef tenderloin off the chunk and put it in her mouth. When she was a child, she remembered eating watery lasagna, peanut soup with beet greens, flatbread, undercooked and wet, smeared with soy sauce. Irene had never developed a taste for food. She had always regarded it as a dull necessity.

  “Aren’t you going to eat anything?” she asked her mother. “Aren’t you going to have some?”

  “No,” said her mother. “I am not hungry. Now I just already ate mine, and it’s gone.”

  Her mother sat down heavily on the red stuffed chair, watched the television while Irene ate. She ate the turnips and the parsnip, but the meat tasted as if it had been boiled in parsnip juice. She shredded the meat and then decided to leave it on the plate. When she turned to look at her mother, Bernice had fallen asleep on her chair. Irene went up to bed, and hunched over her laptop, and studied. The interview committee might ask her to name a thousand stars. They might ask her to explain the Aristotelian disunion between the perfect sky and the rotting earth, the spirit and the self, the stars and the man. They might ask her to define loyalty, or explore in an essay why a young, intelligent woman would want to come back to live at home with her mother, when her mother was likely to boil turnips in beef slag and then leave it on the counter for days, still eating away at it. The answer to every question might be, “Guilt.” Who discovered Saturn’s rings? Guilt. Who delivered Pythagoras’s pizza? Guilt. What made Irene try coming back to Toledo? Guilt.

  Sitting upstairs from her passed-out mother, looking at science things on the laptop: this was a moment when Irene felt a sharp urge to find a tall, tall bridge over a deep river. The Anthony Wayne Bridge was Toledo’s suicide hotspot. Someone had even started a Tumblr, to darkly document the slippage of humans into the river from this bridge. It is a terrible way to die! The author of the Tumblr wanted people to know. Like being hit by a car, but then you drown! What was keeping her from slipping over the edge of this bridge, Irene wondered. What was keeping her awake? Guilt, guilt, guilt.

  *

  That night, laptop shut, sheets flat, Toledo drifting into unconsciousness all around her, she dreamed herself into the Hinterland. Lucid dreaming always came easiest in her mother’s home, where Irene could so well remember her early lessons in the practice. In her mother’s house, she didn’t even need the trick with ringing the bells on the shelf, because she was already home. She almost felt her mother’s fingers on her forehead, her voice chanting the words, talking Irene into dreaming, helping her stay under it. I want you safe in your own head, her mother would say. I always want you to be able to find me, no matter what happens.

  If sleeping is like dying, her mother had taught her, then dreaming is like heaven. If dreaming is like heaven, then you can build your own heaven, if you know how. Or you can build your own hell, a massive Victorian monstrosity with eleven rambling wings connected by a whistling ruin that wants to annihilate you. Irene had decided maybe dreaming is a preview for the afterlife, a directionless meander through our finest wishes, our most compelling fears, our wretched secret sexual urges, our basic confusion. Like life, like memory, most of which we will experience deeply and not remember at all. She knew that science could tell her almost nothing about dreams. And almost nothing about death. The most important things are mysteries: the universe, and the way we die.

  Asleep, she sat on the porch of her mother’s house and stared at the bleak Hinterland. Irene put her teeth together and kept all the guilt inside her mouth, where it piled up on her tongue and made her sick. When her mother came out of the house, at last, she went and sat on the porch rail. She pulled a stem of the climbing rosebush that had wrapped itself around the railing through her hand. It didn’t hurt her. In the dreamworld, there are no thorns on roses. If you count your fingers, you will find the wrong number. If you pull your hair out, it will be daisies. If your drunk mother talks to you, it will make sense.

  “I’m sorry, Irene,” said her mother.

  “It’s OK,” said Irene.

  “No, I’m really sorry,” her mother insisted. “Here you are, home for the first time in a year, and I feed you mushrooms. That is just a mistake I will not forgive myself.”

  Her mother did not say, I’m sorry for being drunk. I’m sorry for being incomprehensible. I’m sorry for nearly burning you to death. I’m sorry for giving birth to you. I’m sorry for delivering you from wherever you were before you were born. I’m sorry.

  “It’s OK,” said Irene again.

  “Did you pick them out?” said her mother.

  “Yes, I picked them out.�
��

  “And ate the beef?”

  “Mmmm,” said Irene.

  “When I wake up, I probably won’t remember,” said her mother. “So if you tell a lie, I’m at your mercy. But you’ll always know.”

  “I’m sure I will,” said Irene.

  “What do you want to do?” said her mother.

  “I want to talk about my interview,” said Irene. “I don’t want to come across as desperate. But I think I am desperate.”

  “You are.”

  “Yes, I’m desperate to go there.”

  “Did you pull it up out of the well? Did the well show you this fellowship, Irene? Or did you try to stuff it down the well yourself?”

  In the center of the square of the Hinterland there was a well. An old stone well that was deep and had no bottom. When she had been learning lucid dreaming from her mother, as a child, her mother had used this well as a trick for her mind, to let her access her subconscious. So she might say, Well, show me something pretty. Then she would reach in and pull up a gardenia bush. Well, show me what I should wear to the prince’s ball. She would reach in and pull up an outfit. Now that she had better control of her dreaming mind, she didn’t use the well as much. But when her mother said, “pull it out of the well,” she was asking if Irene really wanted it, or if it was something she was only trying to want.

  “Mom, I would be a janitor there, and I would be happy to get that job. A grad student, fine. I’ll pay to go. A research assistant, great. Give me a job. A fellow, my god. Could I ever deserve that?”

  “You deserve everything,” said her mother. “You’re the smartest person in the whole world and I’m so proud of you.”

  Irene relaxed. She put her head in her mother’s lap. She drifted farther into sleep. She left the Hinterland without stepping foot into Dark House. It was a beautiful dream.

  *

  In the morning, her mother would not get out of bed.

  “How did you get in bed,” said Irene. “How did you get yourself up the stairs?”

  Her mother lay in the bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, one arm thrown over her face, her nose buried in the back of her elbow. Her bedroom was quaint and quiet, white walls and carpet, an iron floor lamp with a toile shade, lace around the Victorian patchwork quilt on the bed. Many throw pillows, also edged in lace. “I have a headache,” said her mother. “I am not getting out of bed.”

  “My interview isn’t until eleven,” said Irene. “Can I bring you anything? Tea? Pills?”

  “Tea and pills,” said her mother.

  In the kitchen, Irene pulled three tea bags out of the canister and flooded the cup with boiling water. She wrapped the strings around the handle, tore the foil off two sinus pills, and trudged back up the stairs.

  “Just leave it on the nightstand,” said her mother, who had not moved.

  “Mom, what’s that smell?” Irene smelled something sharp.

  “I had a problem,” said her mother from under her elbow. Her lips were terse, wired together.

  Irene set the tea and pills down on the nightstand as directed. She walked into the bathroom and began to fill the clawfoot tub. It was wide and deep, dramatic. Irene squirted lavender bath gel into the water under the running tap, and it began to foam up. When it was steaming and full, Irene went back into the bedroom. Her mother was sitting up and had taken the pills with the boiling tea.

  “Go get in the tub,” said Irene. “Throw your clothes outside the door when they’re off.”

  The stain in the bed was orange, a deep vibrant orange. It was large. Irene swept the fluffy quilt back, stripped off the white sheet and the mattress pad. Irene felt a mad, animal urge to run away from that stain in the bed, from a mother who puts stains in her bed. But she picked up her mother’s clothes off the floor in the hallway, bundled them into the sheet, and hauled the armful down to the laundry room. Standing in the kitchen, listening to the washing machine fill, she felt a drip of water on her head. She looked up and saw a water stain darkening on the kitchen’s drop ceiling, and raced for the stairs. Her mother had let the water of the tub overflow. Had she drowned? Was she dead? How was she able to sustain life in this state?

  It’s not good when your mother pisses herself in her bed. It’s like you’re the one doing it, and you feel sorry. But you’re also the one seeing it, so you feel rage. There was too much of her mother in Irene for her to feel completely safe from pissing her own bed, and no matter what tourniquet she tied around her neck, she could not guarantee that her body would effectively die, that her belly button would effectively disappear, that she would separate, be just a head, her own head apart from her mother’s.

  She found her mother dozing with the faucet still spraying, the water in the tub spilling over gently onto the floor. Irene switched off the water and began to cry. Later that day she drove to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, parked in the visitors’ lot, barfed in a bush, blew up her interview, and accepted an offer in Pittsburgh instead. Pittsburgh had a bridge 240 feet above the Allegheny River. It would do.

  But before she left for Pittsburgh, she had one more conversation with Bernice. When she got home from the ruined interview, her mother sat in a rocking chair in her bedroom, her mouth flattened into a line. The graying hands in her lap clasped each other urgently, as soon as Irene said, “Mother, I’m leaving. So we need to talk.”

  When the words were out of her mouth, Irene almost wanted to call them back.

  “I know about your drinking. I know you drink. It’s not sinus, or an ulcer, or anything like that. You’re drinking too much. And you have been forever.” She sat next to her mother on the ground, in a supplicating pose, took her hand, held it. She wanted to go back to not having said those words out loud in the world, when she could just dream about it and then get through the waking hours as if they were a dream.

  “I’m not going to visit you anymore, once I get to Pittsburgh,” said Irene. “Unless you stop drinking. Then I will.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” her mother had said. She was sitting in a rocking chair, and her face was drawn and tight, her mouth suddenly small and pinched. “The doctor recommended I drink a glass of wine a day,” said her mother. “For my health. But I’ll stop. I’ll stop. If you say I have to.”

  “That doctor doesn’t know how much you drink.”

  “It was a different doctor a long time ago,” said her mother. “I have a heart condition.”

  Irene paused. She wished she had never brought it up.

  “Mother, I know you pissed your bed this morning, because your liver is failing, because you drink so much gin. You think you are fooling everyone you know, but you’re not.”

  “No one knows. It’s none of their business what I do.”

  “They know, mother. They can smell it.”

  But did they know? No one seemed to know. How did they not know, when she sometimes answered the phone by saying nothing at all?

  “It’s odorless,” her mother said. “It doesn’t smell like anything.”

  Irene remembered a time when she and her mother had been arguing. Her mother had sunk her fingernails into Irene’s arm, face close enough for spit flecks to fall from her mouth to Irene’s cheek, and had said, “You’re a hateful child. A child of the devil. You’re an ungrateful, hateful devil child.” The cold stones in her mother’s eyes had flashed completely sober, and Irene had found herself, in that moment, impatient for her mother to get that drink inside her, to become tolerable, to fall asleep, to go away.

  But now Bernice’s face didn’t move. It stayed taut and she kept staring away from Irene, over Irene’s head.

  “You’ll see me in your dreams,” said Bernice. “Like we always have done.”

  “No,” Irene said. “I won’t be joining you there either. You must stop drinking, mother. You’re going to die.”

  “I don’t even drink that much,” said Bernice. “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Mom, I know you’re trying
to kill yourself,” Irene had choked out. “I understand that you are.”

  “No, I’m not,” Bernice snapped.

  “The only sad thing,” said Irene, “is watching it take so long. It’s taking too long, Mom. Killing yourself this way is taking too damn long.”

  Irene had gone to Pittsburgh. And her mother lived and lived, and tried to write and call, but there wasn’t enough guilt to bring Irene back: not to the Hinterland and not to Toledo. Then she died, and Irene came. And went back to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, this time in triumph. It was hard not to connect the dots, and make a constellation: it would be a flame, a twisted, tangled flame. And above the flame would be not a phoenix, not a bird at all, but a girl all alone.

  9

  Irene’s phone barked in her pocket. She fished it out and looked at the number.

  “Hello?” she said. “Sparks.”

  She crossed a two-lane street decorated with hanging baskets of geraniums, and she was standing at the head of the main quad.

  “Hello,” said Belion. “Belion.”

  “Oh, hi, babe,” said Irene. She looked down the quad at the glistening arcs and spires of the university’s buildings. “I’m in Toledo.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said.

  “I’m on campus,” said Irene, “Right now.”

  “What’s it like?” Belion wanted to know.

  “It’s nice,” said Irene. She walked straight down the quad, across the grass and the crisscrossing sidewalk squares. She passed a tall, stately marble building on the left, and on the right a smaller one, capped with a dome and surrounded by a portico. The style of the buildings was Greek revival, because obviously, Pythagoras and everything. Yet the tallest building, the one at the end of the quad, was different. Its roofs more Persian, its spires twisted and eastern, its doorways arched. And at the top, a layered series of rectangles, each one smaller, until on the last was mounted a long dome, the only elliptical observatory in the world.