I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  There had been a day of rain and thaw. Now everything had frozen. The birches had laid down their heads in the snow and now the snow had seized them—the snow had them. The birches jerked in the wind. He found it funny, and called his wife. She was his wife still. The trees looked frantic.

  He said, “They look like a bunch of old women out there frozen in by their hair.”

  He said, “I went ahead and built that bunkbed for them with the boards I measured and saved. I took the Christmas tree down. The pipes are frozen. Everything is frozen. I rolled the tree into the creek bed. Lucy bled all into the snow. She got a nosebleed—she was sledding—she bled all into the snow. God, the snow. It’s been blowing. It’s scoured. It’s blazing out there. I can’t see.”

  The house grew darker. The windowpanes rattled in their tracks in the wind and the wind drove the snow in between the panes into miniature drifts on the sill. The drifts darkened the house. The sun burned on the snow. The snow had a glaze poured across it that even the ox the neighbors kept did not, as it walked, break through.

  The mother said, “He doesn’t know me. He hasn’t the faintest idea I am here.”

  THE MOTHER SLEPT in a chair beside the boy’s bed and waked when anyone came in. She talked very quietly to him, not knowing if he could hear.

  “When I was little,” she said, “by accident, my mother set fire to my hair.”

  “A bird snatched a sandwich from me.”

  “My mother weaved a crown of flowers for me and I ran through the garden naked, painted up, making soups of sand and leaves.”

  She said, “Wake up. Wake up, Henny. Mama’s right here.”

  The boy had a hose down his throat to breathe and he held it, the way a baby will, the way a boy holds the branch of a tree he has climbed and is swinging through the shadows from.

  THE GIRL FELL on her back from the monkey bars from swinging in her mittens.

  Her father came early to fetch her. He came at Thank You Time. She was thanking each one of her dolls. She thanked the nurse for her Band-Aid. She was wearing a Band-Aid stuck to her head where her brother’s head was broken. She thanked her papa. He was a good papa. She said, “I always buckle my dolls.”

  “He makes me popcorn,” she said. “I would like to thank him. Papa, thank you, Papa, for giving me this—what’s it called again? This bolo.”

  She was swinging her dolls by the hair.

  They had a Thank You Rock they passed, each to each. The teacher held out her hand for the rock.

  “I amn’t finished,” the girl said. “He made a ladder for me. I like his brown spots on his hands. He smells like bread to me. Thank you, Papa. Thank you for making me popcorn. Thank you for ice in my water. Okay next now.”

  She passed the rock. “Say you’re welcome.”

  He could not say much: he had lost her. He would lose her again and again.

  TO HER MOTHER, she said, on the telephone, “You could have gone into the snow, couldn’t you? It would not have killed you. You could have buckled us all all in.”

  The police, too, had questions they called with. The woman from the insurance company called to say, “Lady, your son can sue.”

  The mother said, “My son is two. His favorite color is blue, or it was. He liked to play blocks. He made a good sound like a siren. He’s just small and he is sleeping and he will wake to himself and say blanket mama me. And you? You can’t be—are you serious? You can’t be serious. You are calling me and telling me, Lady, he can sue?”

  “When he’s older, ma’am.”

  “So sue me. Put me in jail and sue me. I was in my lane and here the guy came and there was nowhere for me to go. It was morning. We were driving up the hill in the snow. It went shadow and sun and shadow, and do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking, eight or nine? I was going to buy skates for my daughter and I couldn’t think eight or nine, what the size was, I knew the color. Sun. And shadow and here he was. I thought I was seeing something. I waited for him to correct himself. I saw nowhere to go. The guy was driving a car like their father’s and I thought if he was their father but it was not him. He was a guy from around. I patched him up once. I cut a rusty hook from his eyebrow once.”

  THE TWELFTH DAY passed and another. Nothing felt right—not going, not staying away. He hated to call but he called her. Did she need the clothes he had laundered for her or the potpie he had made or the bread?

  “You made bread?”

  “Well, I tried,” said the father. Which he hadn’t.

  It amazed her—that anyone still made bread. That anyone tended lightly, easily, to the household, the press of tiny cycles, children’s simple needs. Blanket. Mama. Hungry. Pee.

  How many times had she wanted to run out screaming from him?

  Dirty, ornery, noisy boy.

  And now what would she—just to dress him, for a kick in the shin, to wipe his backside—what would she not give?

  She rubbed his belly—hot, distended. He used to say, days ago, used to, “I want to feel your hot skin.”

  He was a boy who once lay so quiet in the grass a honeybee stood on his nose. The neighbor dog pissed on his bottom. She thought of him standing in a backyard pool hoisting an enormous zucchini. Of the ocean, she thought, the first time he saw it. A wave came over her head.

  “I tried to run from it,” his mother told him. “The wave was breaking. I was holding you over my head.”

  THE DAUGHTER CALLED to speak to her, to sing to her, something made up, come suppertime, a song of ice and trees. But her mother wasn’t answering. Her mother had stopped answering the phone.

  The girl spoke into the dead receiver. She bumped her nose against the counter to get it bleeding as she spoke.

  “Papa’s cooking,” she reported. “He’s a yogurt.” (It was her brother’s word for ogre.) “Now he’s not. He’s being that cooker that’s fancy—right?—with the clogged-up nose. I got a nosebleed,” she said. She tried to hide it. “And a fox came and ate up the melty stuff where I bled all down in the snow where the snow—”

  “Papa, don’t,” she said. “I’m talking. Please don’t turn that on.”

  The snow looked like a cherry slushy. In the morning it looked like a hole in the snow that a fox had come to see.

  She said, “Mama, my tooth is looser.”

  And: “My papa fixed my hair.”

  She said, “I love everything you are cooking.”

  She liked him cooking. She liked the spots on the backs of his hands. She liked how if ever he took off his boots, he stood them back up again. They smelled of sawdust. There was sawdust packed into the treads.

  She cleaned his boots for him, and shook talcum into the toes. She had an accident—and scorched his shirt with an iron.

  They were like other days, these days, how they passed—her mother at the ER, her papa steady, home.

  But they would be finished come morning.

  In the morning, she would pour out cereal for her father and pick the caught bits from his beard. She’d find his calculator—his cowcutator—and take that. She’d take a rock to pass, a ball and jacks, a quiet pull-back train. Only quiet toys. Her father told her. You had to keep very so quiet there. You keep quiet when your brain is bleeding. You keep yourself so so still.

  She bent her nose some, and drummed at it with her knuckles.

  She found her brother’s best sit-and-ride toy and rolled it out into the cold. The trees creaked and popped. She liked the sound of them.

  She shoved the toy down the stairs to take. The ox fell down in the field. The girl mooed to him. Her papa mooed back.

  They would see Henry Bear in the morning, unless the ice came, unless the snow.

  THE MOTHER SETTLED into her chair as if to sleep.

  He had brought fresh panties for her, and the line emblazoned on them kept repeating in her head. More whiskey. (A joke from the old days, a busty, puckish cowgirl, a lariat overhead.) More whiskey and fresh h
orses for my men.

  The news was the same and the same and worse.

  She drew her knees in, shut her eyes. Again the phone started up. They were after her: she was somebody else’s mother. She was still somebody’s wife.

  The doctors appeared, went off, clammed up. Stingy bastards—pretending to hurry. Getting out, out the door, down the hall, man—quick, before she cries.

  She should lock the door, yank the phone out. Doctor him herself.

  She worked the ER. She had seen plenty. Things they never had seen, she had seen—manglings, flayings, freakish stuff, the slop and stink that didn’t make the cut for prime time TV.

  She had the head for it: the body gone at. The fat man disemboweled.

  She had her face along the highway on a billboard.

  SHE PUT CLEAN scrubs on. Her boy whimpered. He shut his hand, opened it again. When he opened his hand, the phone rang again.

  “Officer Sweet here.” You bet. “One question.”

  She dropped the receiver back onto the cradle again. Seconds passed, a minute, and up it started.

  Her boy’s hand opened when the phone rang, opened again, as though the ringing were a sound his body made and emitted through his fingertips. It sounded howly, living. The room was darkly purpled. She watched his hand move—a howling, pulsing flower, she thought, a bud caught in time-lapse footage, passing through the seasons, through the years.

  He was two. He had not even learned to run quite. He still threw sticks backward.

  She tried not to hear the phone. It seemed louder then. She tried to quiet it by listening.

  Her boy thrashed in his sleep. She shook him lightly. He hissed at her when she shook him. Blood bubbled out of his ears.

  THE FATHER SAID, “Up, up. Time to scoot.”

  The girl brought sticks for her brother she had dug from the snow. She brought dolls and the dresses she had made for her dolls. She made a long gown of raw bacon she poked twigs through the fat of to hold.

  She told them, “Sometimes when your nose bleeds. Sometimes when your brain bleeds, you have to just swallow it down.”

  She rode in the back behind her father with her family of dolls. Her father rolled up the window on an out-folded map so the daughter’s eyes wouldn’t and her doll’s eyes wouldn’t sting in the so-bright sun. When he got the map right, he kissed her. She said, “Kiss Mama, too,” and held up the doll who was the mama who was wearing the bacon gown.

  The daughter’s cheeks were shiny with grease and she was wearing a lacy pajama top and her hair had not been combed. He bent to kiss her again, her head tipped back, her narrow face turned up to him, a miniature of her mother’s, and the daughter thrust her doll at him, saying, “Mama’s right here.”

  “Cousin?” she said, addressing her doll. “Listen to me, cousin. I can show you. There’s a thing with just marbles and springs we can see, and ditches with pops and whistles. This ladder thing carries this ball up. Okay? That is not for sick kids. That is for luckies like us.”

  IT WAS EASY for her to walk but he carried her and, as he carried her into the hospital, she sang.

  This pretty planet, she sang,

  spinning through space.

  My garden, my harbor,

  my holy place.

  And then:

  Bis bitty banet

  binning boo bace.

  By barben, by barbor

  by boly blace.

  The halls smelled of macaroni. She said, “I’m hungry, Papa. I want to eat, Papa.”

  He kept walking. She picked something out of his beard, tossed it into her mouth. “Better now?”

  “No,” she said. “No way, I’m not. No.”

  She felt like eggs, or candy. She felt like having a snowball fight.

  “You’re so stupid,” she said. “She won’t like it.”

  She said, “You should have fixed my hair.”

  The father found the room, the door pulled to. He swung it open and stood without walking in.

  The bed was tucked and smoothed. The boy was laid out naked in his mother’s arms—living, he didn’t know, or dead. The father held on to the girl.

  She said, “You’re hurting me, Papa. Papa, stop.”

  Still he held her, awaiting the news of the day, the life ahead, unstoppable. His daughter slid down his chest and off and he felt he might float up. He tried to steady himself, make bone of the sand his bones became, put a stop to it. He was pouring into himself. Sinew and gristle, the renewable heart, the hard little beans of his kidneys—everything in him was mixing, slop, a caustic, grainy wash. He stiffened his skin to keep standing.

  His wife waved at him. It rose up in her: the swarmy, passing happiness of seeing him again. She could smell him, it made her giddy: a man come in from the cold. More whiskey, she thought, and wished he would kiss her. Cross the room and kiss her. Fall on his knees and forgive her. For an instant, all at once, how hard could it be? She could ask him to forgive her.

  He stood away from her, his hands folded over his zipper.

  The daughter’s doll began a dance, dancing gently, wildly, the bacon smacking against her legs. When she had finished, the doll fell on her back and glistened in the sun. In a whisper, the girl asked, in her doll’s voice asked, “Do you think that dance was so pretty?”

  “Oh, yes,” her mother said.

  “Not you,” the girl scolded. “I asked Henry.”

  The sister reached in among the loops and straws and patted her brother gingerly, leaving little slicks of bacon grease. She pulled toys out to give him from the sack she had brought, saying, “Brother, I brought you this one, Brother, and that and that and that.”

  “The ox fell down in the field,” she said. “I was swinging in my mittens.”

  She poked him gently. “You’re not listening to me, Brother. He can’t hear.”

  She blew into his ear and the hair lifted up.

  He wasn’t Henry yet. She wasn’t any Henry’s sister. She was a mother-girl with a bacon-doll with no little man to love.

  “Hen, Hen, Hen,” she said.

  She kissed his head where he was hurt and stood up. She found the pull-back train in the sack she had brought and pulled it back across the floor to release it, to catch it up again. She would take it back home, she decided. The rest of the toys, he could have when he waked, finding that she had been near.

  The daughter tugged at her father’s knuckle to make him kneel for her, and spoke in a whisper to him.

  “We can go now,” she said. “He’s just quiet. Little Henny’s just lying quiet in the dream of his life again.”

  NOT SO THE DONKEYS

  The donkeys are eating the barn. They’re bored, poor things. They are eating out the shape of a donkey, of a dull, sulking herd of donkeys, until at last, come spring, when the thaw comes again they wander out into the sun.

  There they stand there. Flatulent. Yawning takes a full minute and you can jam a hand past their teeth. A bee zips in, plenty of time, and wets its wing on the painted dome. Spring at last.

  Soon dark comes late and the donkeys, exhausted, lie down in the mud. They pass a night like this. Another, the bums. Beetles. Look, a bunny. A tender, inquisitive mouse, twitching her sealed vagina. In a week she’ll reach lordosis.

  Not so the donkeys. The donkeys go on warming the shapes of themselves in the commodious mud. Never mind the month’s splendid exertions—a mole nosing darkly toward a parsnip, a raccoon sipping pearls of dew.

  Here a wren sets down on the ridge beam. The barn shudders, slumps, collapses at last. The donkeys let down their sloppy members and kick up their heels in glee.

  DUENDE

  I came upon the pink plastic leg of a doll in a country where next to no pink people live, and soon upon the broken arm of the doll with its fanned-out supplicant hand. I thought about the girl whose doll it had been, whose doll it was maybe still. Like a brother from a war, his limbs missing. She had a father who crumple
d his shirt at his chest and stroked his belly in the sun. She sang songs she made up to her mother and her mother, in her way, sang along.

  I poured the sand out, salt, a scrap of shell, and carried the arm in my pocket.

  I came upon the teeth of a man dead and buried in a grave the sea dug out. The teeth were the color of honey, lodged in an eaten bone. Ants in the bone, in the tunnels. How did I know these were a man’s? I didn’t. Ser humano. Ant farm. It doesn’t matter but it did to him.

  I came upon the cap my boy left on the shore between pangas with his shorts he’d had on. He’d had a girl out there where the pangas are and a thief swiped most of their clothes. Missed the cap.

  You could have called me, I said.

  He said, Mother.

  His cap was blue, sir. She wore polka dots green and yellow. A flower in her hair. I found the print where they lay, I found their footprints—dents in the polished sand.

  I came upon one of her flip-flops, her feet as small as a child’s.

  Upon a child washed to shore—but I didn’t. But a child had washed to shore with his eyeballs burst on a tide from the neighboring town. A rag in his mouth. A body curdling. Brother, cholo, son.

  A melon, an eel. The ragged fin of a whale. Each day for many days: yellow onions. Peeled clean by the sea and spit out.

  I came upon a bead 400 years old that meant: ten chickens. One cow. Who really knew what it meant, what it counted? One bucket of milk. Two virgins. The bosque from there to here.

  Repollo. Bizcocho. Huecito. Chorro.

  Cabbage. Cake. Little Hole. Curly.

  Did they know what had happened? They didn’t.

  In the cup of Chorro’s hand was a parakeet blown off course from the jungle.

  Macaco. Payaso. Carlita. Juan.

  I asked anyone I found.

  I found Adidas from Fukushima. Alligator handbags. Bowls that fit in bowls that fit in bowls, all bright. Flyswatters in little-kid colors.

  I found a booby, dead, its feet like a duck’s, a webbed and miraculous blue. Hawksbill. Olive ridley. A hammerhead as small as a hammer. A swallowtail, a bee. A wing bone weightless as a drinking straw, walking, I found these walking, until I couldn’t walk or see anymore or think at all or breathe.