I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  Sister blunders in, weeping, she is naked, “YOU,” wet from the tub, hot on the trail, like the time, like the time, our little tribe, what a sight, little sweetnee boy, buckaroo, will you look, buckareno, pleased: little god, lucky life, lucky mama, lewd; heat; teat and maw; the muscled sack, galactic. A mind blown out, the shimmering hoard.

  I am cellular, moldered, spall. Dewfall, a pebble turned. Viscera and brine. Oocyte, fiber, hind milk, fore. The body’s yield and issue.

  He cries: my milk springs forth. George laps it up in a rapture and the dog dives under the bed.

  THEY ARE RESTORED to their places when I wake again, the room hushed. Nothing to hear but the baby, the jubilant, garrulous moon.

  I fetch the basket from the foot of our bed. A little something. I think it is something a sister might do: bring a basket—grass of tinseled plastic, a few wrapped chocolate eggs.

  The light is still on in the bathroom, the water still in the tub. A streak of her blood on the toilet seat, Sister’s fingerprints on the wall. And in the hallway: something soft underfoot, a lump, then two, another. I think I am finding animals, deer mice come out to forage at night and caught, our bird dog’s habit. I pick them up by their tails, hold them up in the bathroom light.

  It’s surprising—how little you can tell. But I can smell them, a mineral stink, the legendary filth of menses.

  The dog has worked at them to leech the blood, to grind the swollen cotton loose. They ride in her stomach, glossed and turned, grown slick before she spits them up and the color of tarnished silver.

  I creep the door to Sister’s room open.

  She has her foot out. Our mother used to sleep with her foot out.

  I pull the sheet back. The dog’s lip twitches; she yips in her sleep. Sister has a hand hooked in her collar.

  “Go outside?” I whisper.

  I draw the curtain back, the sky in the trees a weak boy-blue, light enough to see by. I see she has a pile of the cotton pads I keep in my bra to sop the milk. The pads are shredded. She has found a bra, too, the dog tore up and a plastic diaper cover.

  She has my gown on. On her pillow is the mangled snapshot I have learned to expect to see: the newly loved, the newly dead, a name in her hand across the back, the boy’s name: Joe Young. She will pull it from her pocket and speak to it when George ferries her back to the airport: I’m coming home, Joe Young.

  Her duffel’s open. Two spores. Socks: one pair. The raggedy peel of an orange. She has brought her makeup case, my kaboodle, she calls it, locking, big enough for shoes. Cowboy music and a hymnal—so she can practice: make the cut, the bus.

  They go by bus, the Miracles, mouths pressed against the window glass, plying the river towns. They wear their leather bracelets, tooled: W.W.J.D.?

  The mark of the exalted. The innocent, the maimed.

  Sister wears her bracelet in her sleep, I see—should she wake in the street, the rain coming down. Should you find her. She has wandered off, her house in flames. Her ribboned hair freshly curled.

  W.W.J.D.?

  Let it be a question.

  What would Jesus do?

  A LITTLE SOMETHING, baby. All I’m asking.

  I try to think of something to take from her, to give to her, the towels I took from the hospital, mementos, what have you, the drift of things, the sock stuffed with rice for the suture, I think, to lay across it, warmed, a balm to me, a smell like buttered toast. Let Sister strew rice through the house, I think, and tattered foil and tampons, the shells of the eggs I have boiled for her, dribblings, her mark. The body’s gluey excess.

  Here. You got me here.

  I will find her with the sock with the toe eaten out and pretend she has failed to be grateful where gratitude is due.

  I slip her Jesus bracelet off.

  Make a deal with myself, with Sister. I will teach her how to hold him, how to bathe him, what to do. How to tend the stump of umbilical, the pasty, toughened button. It is turning on its tether by the time Sister flies in.

  You draw the nub back, the button. Take an easy sweep at the healing root with a cotton swab.

  Don’t be afraid of it, I will tell her. I tell her what Nurse Jane told me. Nothing to snip, to tuck or stitch. Nothing to be alarmed about.

  Come light, first thing, when I am tidy yet, rested some, stronger then, scrubbed. The night behind us, breakfast on the stove. Sister will come down swinging her basket and take her place at the table.

  Somebody new to talk to. Somebody new to listen. Sister, listen.

  WE LEFT THE house first thing in the morning, I will tell her, salt on the roads, the blank of the day, a foot in the cage of my ribs. We crossed the river—once, twice, crossed again, for the feel of it, the sweep through the fog; for the time it took, the scrap of a chance to be ready.

  I didn’t know what to feel. What would it be to love him, to tend to him, never to be alone again, my own again, never to be without him? Still to wake and find him gone. A curtain tapping at my window.

  This was our house when you were a boy. Here is the bed you slept in. When you waked, you shouted, It’s morning time! and we lay in our bed and listened for you—coming to us, bright boy, running to us, for the sound of your feet in the hall.

  She will sing to him, coo at him, bounce him on her knee, the baby palsied—her whole body going, his. “Whee hee hee. Whee hee hee.”

  Oh, don’t worry, Binny. Don’t you worry, Binny. I am right here.

  Sister turns in her sleep, moaning. At her throat: our mother’s pearls.

  “I saw her sleeping.”

  I say it aloud, whisper it—to hear how it might sound to her, how it sounds to me. “I saw our mother sleeping at the bend in a yellow road.”

  They wheeled me off from him—swaddled, scrubbed, still as death in his Lucite bucket.

  Nurse Jane who wheeled him to me. At her throat, a string of pearls. First light, white world, the blind at the window sprung.

  Little bird.

  The day clapped shut. The river turned and gurgled.

  I thought I’d lost him. I thought if I never saw him.

  They drew the curtain across my chest.

  No moon. The light popped, the room stuttered out.

  Maa maa. Want to jump on rocks?

  I called out for a nurse.

  Nothing doing.

  I SLIP HER pearls off, her glassy ring.

  “Little bird,” said the nurse, “little keeper.”

  “Nurse Jane.”

  She lifted him out to show me, pleased: no X where there should be a Y, no extra smudge of either. No stump of gray, vestigial tail, no show of sticky bone.

  No moon. Not a sun I could see.

  YOU THINK IT’S easy?

  I kicked at their hands, their faces.

  I wanted to go out swinging, wild, and knock off their heads with my saber, bawling Sister’s name. In the name of dumb heroics, of the bold Tecumseh’s boys.

  I will let her hold him. Tend to him. I make a game of it—of pretending she will not hurt him.

  I make my offering: the band at his wrist, the name my name, a loopy, girlish cursive. Orderliness, a story. Something to think of us by.

  “Nurse Jane tidied my bed, humming,” I say. “She seemed to bleed from her ears.”

  I bend to kiss her. I kiss the bright patch above Sister’s eye, a scar from when we were girls.

  You will take good care of your sister? Mother asked.

  Her children loose in the world.

  No harm. All’s well. Nurse Jane. Come light.

  I’d have destroyed him—when he was in me, pod, stalk and sponge, not to have him be like her, not to be as I am with her.

  Her mouth is open. I think to spit in it.

  I think of us in the quiet, the blessed antiseptic cool. The nurse standing by to wait for her. You have to wait for her.

  She draws her foot back. Such a pretty girl, our sister. So easy, for a mo
ment, to love.

  I bend to kiss her. I kiss her gently.

  I think of how she called to me; she pressed my hand to her belly.

  “See?” Sister said.

  I said nothing. Nothing came to me.

  Nothing comes to me now.

  The baby kicked and swung in her. He was having a good hard romp in her before they got him out.

  I stood and felt him. The nurses whistling, padding about in pneu-matic shoes, music on the PA. Sister hummed a bar, how like her.

  And then he quieted. To hear her. I swear I think he quieted to hear the bit of a song she knew.

  I leave the basket. Get out before she wakes, I think, go down to dip the eggs.

  And yet she wakes. I press the pillow against her face—to calm her. It has calmed her for years: to have something soft to scream into.

  She thrashes and shrieks and I hold her, wait for her to twitch off to sleep as she does—on the instant, the disconnect, the body jerking free.

  Then I go down to dip the eggs.

  I DIP THEM briefly, pallid blues and yellows, enough to be seen in the snow. It is early yet, the plows have not come. The wind has not come from the sea yet and the snow is crusted over.

  I pull my boots on, step out. The yard is shining. Everything is shining, throwing off light from the snow. The trees are bristling. The crocus are showing through. The first of the jonquils bloom and droop and the thrush in the trees come back to us out of the hot flat land.

  I put two eggs in the birdbath. Another behind the gutter spout behind its gout of ice. I put a blue egg in the bottommost limb of our front-yard beech. The limbs are bent and glisten. The tips of the limb are cased in ice that rises from the crust of snow.

  I bowl an egg gently across the crust so as not to leave my boot steps leading to it to give it away. Just the one I bowl. To make it difficult. The rest are easy.

  I take my time some, the baby asleep, the plows groaning out on the highway. It seems to me a blessing to be out in the bright and cold. I bask in a patch of sunlight; wave at the good reverend passing, pedaling off on his bicycle bearing the bright calm lamp of his head.

  I hide the last egg, open the door: he is screaming.

  I find her lying in bed with the baby, my bed, a cigarette smoking on my bed stand, my gown in a heap on the floor.

  “I was trying to—”

  She can’t talk right. She’s got the nub, the gristled button, tucked away in her mouth.

  I sweep a finger through. She was trying to what?

  Don’t ask her. She didn’t do anything, she was lying there, she found it dropped to the foot of his sleeper. No use in trying to ask her: did she yank the nub loose or gnaw through the leash, take a bite of his hide, so sweet, so soft you scarcely know you have touched it?

  I FEED HER—COFFEE, toast, get her out and away, searching for eggs in the snow. The dog by and by learns to carry the eggs, to hold them gently in the heat of her mouth. She bumps one along to Sister, bowls it along with her nose.

  The snow moves in a slab to the lip of the roof. The barn is steaming. The grasses appear—in the sun, risen up, a friend to the earth, in the wind blowing in from the sea.

  I keep her out there. I make her find the eggs, bored or not, after I have gone to the trouble of hiding them, before we go back inside. I found a cap for her, a coat and gloves. I’d have found Cinderella’s glass slipper for her to keep her out of the house for a time.

  George passes through the window with the baby. They are happy, drifty perhaps. The blooms perk up. The day slackens.

  Our old beech groans and tosses its head. We hear the bristle and click of ice on its boughs—a squirrel has lunged and, sluggish, missed, and the body is dropping through.

  WE MOVE IN. Afternoon. The dog dreaming. The baby asleep on my chest.

  Sister takes a nap in the sunroom, ribbons in her hair, gorged on sweets, her cache beneath the bedsheets, the chocolate rabbit nested yet among the bright sweet beans.

  I walk Sister into the pines when she wakes, the orderly rows, her fingers hung in my pockets.

  No sun much, dusk coming on. No wind where we are to speak of. A thrush somewhere, silvery, sings. The boughs are still laden with snow.

  And then a squirrel chirps, a clump of snow breaks free. The dog springs like a deer through the timber, squealing, demented, a grape-sized brain, Sister lurching after, the squirrel going limb to limb. Quick as that.

  A great wet clump is falling. She keeps her face tipped up to watch it, watches it to the end.

  The dog rears up and swoons as she does and hooks a paw over each shoulder, kisses her neck, her ears. She picks Sister’s—George’s—cap off, lopes away snapping the cap in her teeth as though it is something to kill.

  By then I’ve reached her: Sister spluttering, spitting out the plug of snow. Her mouth is bleeding. Her face is the grotesque of a face, a soul in flames, some rung of hell, spit puddling under her tongue.

  I sink to my knees beside her. The Keeper, the Tender: the cheap tableau. “Let me see it.”

  On her forehead, the abraded skin is grainy with blood. “Poor girl.”

  I bend to touch her. But she is up, what fun, lunging away, stupid thing, elated. She pounces at me, forgetful, or not—it’s that I’m feeble still, tender still, careful. I have been told to be careful.

  Sister pants: a dog. I never see it quite: who she means to be: monkey horsie walrus bear. She rears up and kisses me.

  I take a swing at her.

  It is the hour, the light, it must be—the sly animal weight of it, amnesiac, the seizing, the night sky clamping down. Fevers rise, hunting time, predators on the move.

  I try to get the dog to come to me, come sit by me, I think maybe this will calm her, if the dog comes and sits very quietly, she is trained to, you can’t know.

  I know I haven’t had my pills yet. I have taken the last of the pills I had that have been while I heal a help to me, in the evening time in particular, dark coming on, the flattened trees—to dull the ache, the progress, the healing meant by the mess I pass, the sheeny clumpy liverish ruin that is left of being sufficient, of having been, for a time, sufficient, for a time, I swear it, calm.

  A body needs something.

  Sister wheezes, pets at me. I stop and wait for it: her sudden chirping cry, her drawn-on cartoon mouth.

  And then I hit her. She is the way she is and has always been and how she will always be. And so I hit her. I had forgotten. You forget how it feels to hit somebody like you used to when you were young.

  NO MOON, DIM world, the sky velour. A bird above us, circling. We make our way from the trees.

  The reverend streams past, slush flung up. Gone to vespers, gone to God. Perhaps he hears her. Thinks not. It is the hour, the light. The wind in the trees. And yet it comes to him; he must think of it—crossing back, going home—to supper, sleep, to his wife, a dream—he must have seen it: the bloody trail Sister leaves, walking back to the house.

  We cross the street, the welts of slush. The light in the kitchen is burning. The windows are steamed from the heat of something George has set to cook on the stove. Still we can make him out with the baby. He is sitting in the kitchen with the baby, looking out across the road.

  It comes upon me—the old gone way we used to live, how we lived outside until dark came on, until Mother called, the dogs at our heels, the horses fed, hay in the rustling barn.

  We pass the bed of slackened blooms to pass unseen through the window light to watch George sitting inside. I see Mother at the sink then also, Mother at her labors, at the washing, at the meals—young still, pretty still, laughing. I remember myself in the spindly dark, the lee of the hedge, the sweetened smell of the harrowed rows turned in the fall in the ripened fields. I spun myself out in the clovery dark; I felt myself thin and wobble. I lay on our land like a fog—upon every fence and creek and stone, every leaf and fallow.

  I watch our George
in the blaze.

  “You know I saw you,” he said. “I never meant to. They had you opened. He was spun in his sack and looking at me, lodged in the saddle of bone.”

  The dog whimpers. Sister kicks a pale stone at the barn. A dry hush in the limbs and a wicker.

  A pine is down in the street. We see in the gray in the grainy dark the seepy luminous tear in the trunk that the head of the tree as it fell has torn—all trunk now, that tree, a hollowing snag, a yellow gash that as the woods grow dark tips and floats and burns. I swing the porch door open.

  “Aren’t you cold?”

  “No.”

  “Not hungry?”

  “Uunh.”

  Sister moves off, calling the dog out slowly.

  LOVE’S THOUSAND BEES

  The boy was blind and from Zelienople. He came among us as a bear-child might, such a slumber, the sow labors in sleep, from sleep heaves up, raving and newly mothered.

  The boy had fattened at the taps, sucked from the trees was how he reached us, wise to set out in spring. Our nights had warmed and the frogs thawed and by day sun weakened the trees. Sap twanged into our buckets. To improve these notes, the frogs gave up their two favorite notes from the pools.

  The boy added to this the wheezing a fat boy does to breathe, and the slur, as he walked, of one pant leg against the slickened other. He slogged through the pools and his galoshes filled up. He felt with his hands for trees. We didn’t know was he blind or did the meat of his face make it hard to see. We looked for his eyes—they were bloody, shot into his head from afar. We saw his scalp creased under his hatband, yeasty and flushed in the stubble.

  The fields were too wet to plow; we had snow still patched about. So we busied ourselves in the sugarhouse, sweetening in the steam. We sharpened our hoes and shovels.

  Spring, and everything wants to move. The children wake at daybreak and beg to throw from the mound.

  The boy was spotted first beyond the backstop. Daisy it was who saw him, lifting out of her trance on the swing. Daisy had clawed a ditch through the snow for her feet to pass through to swing, who loves to swing, the one among us, the better yet to see. She sailed down in her skirts and went to him. She heard a kitten, who mewed in his pocket.