I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like

by Noy Holland

  Now. Fix on something. Prepare.

  Burn your letters, settle your debts. Change your nightgown, clip your toenails; paint your lips red, brush your hair.

  Now pick out a smooth place to fix on and some tall thing to navigate by—the twisted oak a bolt of lightning struck, your father at the door. Stay loose. Be glad. Be soft and glad and loose in the knees and touch down running and roll. As if your bones are fished out. Hold to nothing. Becalmed, be afloat on the brassy Sargasso, sunshiny windless days. And if from beneath a raft of weeds the sound of a child comes to you, mad with thirst, depraved—cry out.

  Out of the dark and mutinous. But one, but one.

  Three apples.

  SHE SAW HER face in the window, not hers—her Margaret. Her raven-haired girl ever flown.

  And now the moon. If now the moon and the boughs of spruce and snow in the bluing light. Now the moon. She couldn’t think what more she was thinking. And thought how lovely, how lovely and how unlikely it was: Margaret would let her mother brush her hair.

  This was the sum now of what she wanted—the gift of repetition, row on row like a painting and the white hair woven through. She cared nothing any longer for the new; the mother wanted what she had, had had, had had and lost and wanted again, her musty coat, her ruby, her mukluks red as embers in the shaded blue.

  The kitchen light dimmed and brightened.

  And how are we now? And what do we want?

  She wanted to brush Margaret’s hair. Touch the snow. She wanted to crouch in the bower with Margaret and eat a cookie, eat an apple, mangled and sweet and cold.

  Now the pain came and she went elsewhere as she had been told to do. She went with Margaret. The two, and it was summer, it was June, and she was holding a polished bowl of mash and the shadows moved on her arms. Margaret would marry. She was eleven, or nine, and rode in on her horse in a taffeta gown, to marry, she would marry, the altar was a swing lashed to a limb in the shade of the mothering elm.

  Still the pain rose up. She felt it thicken, subside, and she tried to fall away beyond it, beyond Margaret remembered, anyone loved, past rock and field and bending tree, and as she fell she counted: yellow yellow blue, and yellow, and blue at last and white came and white was the blank of exhaustion. White was the drift, the beaten cream. The beauty, the supple joy.

  How blue the band between earth and sky and how prettily it curved. A lark. And how spooky the mind, really, the softening it could do. So the room was a cloud and it dipped and swerved and the earth was beaten cream. Time was a stone held on the tongue and Margaret was coming home. Soon.

  And years ago, and now again, the spider shook her web. She walked about on oiled feet and wound the cloth around her food while her babies grew and multiplied, tried their legs and prepared to live. They would live. They would burst from the ripened walls of the sac and swarm the web she had spun for them—eruptive, no sound, though there were hundreds, a thousand hungry baubles of skin on legs the light passed through.

  All without a whimper.

  The sun came up, the moon sank down: not a whimper, not a sound. So much else in the world muttered and screeched and rubbed its knees together. So little lived in quiet, patient, thinking ahead.

  So maybe she was mistaken. Maybe Margaret would correct her, Margaret with her fine encyclopedic mind like her father’s. Scientists; court recorders. The spider emits a chuffing sound—thank you, Margaret. Category, fact. They had no patience whatsoever for the approximate, the likeness, the whim.

  The spider went on tidying—like a woman hanging clothes to dry. Like a woman buffing her toenails while in plain sight above her, the mountaintop spits fire and boulders melt and flow. The sac wobbled on her back—a chute cinched shut.

  Could she take it off and go on?

  Sleep on the floor like a gypsy, using her arm as a pillow?

  It was true the mother knew next to nothing, but what did she need to know? That she waited. She was snowed in alone with a spider, an old woman in a nubby robe.

  She had her questions, a way to begin. She had her husband, but where had he gone?

  Buffalo? Erie?

  Uniparous—was that a word?

  Was a bough a branch, just a prettier word, or something different, really?

  The sac was the color of the leaves of the beech that turned on the branch until spring. A branch; a bough. Snow cupped in the leaves furled to leeward, their crumbling backs to the wind.

  Snow in the barbs of the fences.

  She had fallen like a leaf through the sky. Beautiful. And from the barbs of the fence.

  What was it? From the barbs of the fence her Margaret’s hair and that was a name for weather. No.

  From the barbs of the fence.

  And the mare’s tail: that. The mare’s tail fluttered and twisted in the wind and that was a name for clouds. Mares’ tails—wisped and scattered in the blue and blue the day come morning. And white the beaten cream. And the sac was the color of the leaves of the beech and veined like a hand and dry.

  They would fall soon, they would never fall.

  She would not live to see them.

  Not leaves, not foals, the grasses green, spring again, and phoebes calling themselves by name. Not again the nodding fern, one among many—shhh. See the fairy? Margaret turned in the wind and whispered. A fairy is waving hello.

  Hello, hello.

  She couldn’t bear it. Not another day, another minute.

  To be seen, to go on, another day, and now the snow, and what did she look like, really? And wouldn’t this be what Margaret saw, kept seeing, helpless, her mother, like a terrible dream, through the hoard of her life ahead? Would this be what she carried? This what waked and dogged her? Not love? Not the song for years her mother sang to her, not the polished bowl not the fern? Not the bent grasses they lay in, not the kite in the wandering blue?

  Not love? Not love but a dream: you wake choking.

  IT WENT ON, she lived on. And why?

  And in the cupped leaves the snow caught.

  And in the grooved bark of the trees.

  And across the lake where Margaret lay—there snow driven like shattered glass sank from the face of the buildings. The airplanes were grounded and lacquered with ice and their wingtips quivered in the wind. The lake was ice, a great bellowing slab the wind ran snarling above. Snow stood in hard, scoured peaks and what was loose was driven on—and driven on, the sound of a bone being snapped, a rock split, and with it a hollow, moaning song as though a whale were caught beneath and smashed its head.

  The ice was fractured, fissured, veined like a hand. Clouded, and in it were paper sailboats and little toy shovels and leaves. In it were naked babies with their bellies up and their hands—if that?

  Would she have a baby then, her Margaret? If she could walk across and choose one and hack through the ice and go home?

  They were cased in ice, the babies, but they melted if you held them, they moved.

  They called you by name. They whistled.

  As a spider whistles, the mother decided; it sings. The mother sings and tidies and boulders flow bright as fire and spit like a stew and cool.

  For an instant she watched the babies emerge, grandly as from a vestibule in a military row—slavishly, submissive, born the size they would live to be. Like ants or bees, good colonials—and a queen—they would come home daily to.

  Not so. But it didn’t hurt to think it.

  Sometimes it even helped—to believe a little, briefly, in tidiness, the comfort of the common denominator, the whip of the common good.

  It wasn’t so, but you could think it. Let your mind go. Let the sac burst. Her father at the door—her husband.

  No. Nobody there at all.

  And when the sac bursts?

  When the sac bursts, the babies howl, a simple vowel, the o of the mouth—jubilant—and fall to feasting. But only spiders can hear it, and old women in nubby robes.

 
The mother heard the wasp in its winding cloth stop trying to shake free and live.

  She heard an engine—no. Wind in the trees. Now quiet. Not even a wasp. The flakes tapped at the glass. Her hooves were freezing in. A snowflake swam in the dark of her eye and rode the raft its melting made until it shrank and was gone. Gone out. Sluggish, the mare’s blood; it slowed; it stilled. And the ground grew soft and hard again and the grasses were flat and broken, the dirt of the field pressed smooth.

  She slipped through—home from school, her Margaret, her hair flying loose, her book bag flung down. Her hair snagged on a barb when she slipped through the fence—no matter. Margaret was home, running barefoot over the field. She skimmed the seed heads, the nodding stalks. The mare lifted her head and nickered. Joy beyond measure or word.

  Christmas already, was it Christmas, a jar of honey in her bag?

  There were colored lights strung in the boughs of the spruce blinking faintly through the snow. Snow at the glass, a sound like a clock, like spiders flung at the sea. The mother had to lean in to listen. You heard the lights blink if you listened, the charge in the strand if you lay beneath the tree among the gifts that would soon be yours.

  And all through the house—how did that go? And all through the house not even a mouse.

  A fly rubbing its hands together—well. Maybe nobody really heard that.

  But a roach makes a sound, scurrying, and you can hear the click of the jaw.

  The mother knew one car from another by sound and the sound of the hooves of the deer. The sound of a moth catching fire. She knew the sound of a map being folded, being flattened; her husband spread it across his lap. Truckee. Cheyenne. Reno. Places he was yet to go.

  She never went to Rome as she meant to. She meant to stand in a castle and listen to rain coming down on the stones. And wear pretty shoes, and her hair hanging loose, and a skirt that made a sound when she moved.

  Her gown brushed across her legs—stringy, cheap—and the static, pinpricks—stars going out—you could hear that, too. Phosphorescence in the sea. Oh, the sea again. Glassy, and fish in the green of the lifting wave, faint—now foam, now flaring—loud, the broken white.

  Surprising what you heard when you had nothing to do but wait for your next clump of pills. What you saw when you could see next to nothing.

  Faintly again the lights blinked in the spruce—yellow, yellow, blue. Not even a wasp, a mouse in a drawer, but her breath she let out—that was something. The rapture of cold and quiet. She felt her gown catch on the skin of her knees—her mother gown, her winding cloth.

  Hadn’t he given her satin once, where was it now, was it Christmas?

  Christmas. Mind of a court recorder. The jars gleaming row on row.

  Christmas the year they gave her the mare and Margaret slept beneath the tree in her flower gown. Snow banked against the house. Glistening drifts. Her father led the mare down the path in the sun—a father’s idea, a papa’s girl, Margaret’s favorite. He was giddy with the surprise. Her father tapped at the glass. Margaret flinched in her sleep. Margaret. There’s something you want to see.

  The mare smelled of hay, musty, of spring. Her breath came in clouds the flakes of snow spun and tumbled through. Something sang in the trees. Wake up, wake up—like a dream, like something the heavens sent—a white horse, hers to grow up with, yours, to speak a secret tongue. Tongue of the ecstatic, unencumbered love.

  Something to care for, yes. Rain or shine—the long devotion the living teach us. Hers to doctor, hers to gentle. Ford the river. Clear the fence. All yours—the mare a steady and steadying love through the mess of everything else. A kind of practice.

  Margaret lay in a stupor along the mare’s back—Christmas day and days to come, in dress-up gowns, bikinis. Lanky, leggy, sullen child.

  Years she pretended to marry. She would never marry.

  But hadn’t she, beneath the mothering elm—hadn’t she pretended to marry, over and over again? One boy and another, any boy willing to play. Margaret arrived at a lope wearing taffeta, wearing sequins, her grandmother’s kid gloves and tulle. Like sequins, the light, how it moved beneath the trees, gilded in the late breath of summer.

  Next, snow. And the snow stayed on for years, it seemed, though of course this could not be true. Snow caught in the peeling crosses the mullions of the windows made and in the gray barbs of the fences, the wire strung round the field. A dog loped across the field. A bird called out: Here, I am here.

  The old repeaters. Too soon for the phoebes but maybe she was wrong.

  Maybe she was hungry: that was a new idea.

  Nothing to eat but honey. Nothing to eat but apples, the white mare sinking in the snow.

  She drew a hair from a slab of butter and flicked it into the sink. The sink was dripping. She considered toast: no. Pudding. Food she could not see through.

  She found a grape in a bowl and held it gingerly in the dry ditch of her tongue. A stone—strange in her mouth and heavy. She pushed into it and felt the skin break and her teeth met in the cold. Surprising, the cold. So much of it. She drew the pulp with her tongue across the skin of her mouth, the veins she could feel and the ripples of her palate like something the tides had formed. The pulp was warm now and felt like tissue as if she were eating her mouth.

  Last of the sweet.

  She couldn’t swallow. She walked to the door and spit out the pulp in a shower in the falling snow. Now the snow was pocked and she was sorry, the flawless blank concealing face—no matter.

  It didn’t matter. But it did. Every little thing.

  She bent to touch the snow and felt nothing and wondered had she dreamed it up. She thought the mare could not have died but lay resting and would come to the fence to Margaret again until at last she felt the cold.

  All so.

  And the nurses would come back and she was dying.

  All so.

  And so how could this surprise her, over and over again?

  She pushed her hand into the snow, deeper now, until snow came over the top to her wrist until her mind could play the trick that it was gone.

  And if it were?

  If her hand were gone and her husband, her ruby would be gone, too.

  She turned her ruby on her finger beneath the snow, her ring finger, her marrying hand, while the cold sank faintly through—into the joints, jelly and spur, a birdish fan of bone. She found a lump of fruit still warm from her mouth, and tatters of grass, living still, though the sweetness was gone and the green.

  She had left the door ajar and now she closed it. Unmistakable, this sound—a latch snapped into place. Daily, nightly. Nurses. Her door opened onto the hallway, dark for months, and seasons passed, and in a given day the mother heard—that—little snap—how many times?

  A given day. Was this a phrase? Given night?

  And did a person give or take it?

  Were these the same or different—caregiver, caretaker? They must be.

  Always the same pair of shoes. Different faces—why so different? Shouldn’t they be the same? Givers, takers? Finders, thieves? Wasn’t she the caretaker, really?

  She was out. She was out in her Christmas slippers. A gift from Margaret. A china teapot. A flat rock lumped with Play-Doh for her to prop her pencils in. Once, a broom.

  Oh, a broom. The mother wanted a good broom to sweep with, to sweep. A shovel for the snow, she was cold. No—thank you. Not cold, not. She was Margaret.

  Margaret—like a name in a poem but she had hacked at it and asked to be called—Meg, was it? Maggie? No matter. She would call her daughter Margaret as she always had.

  She thought to shake the tree—but this was cheating. You could do it but it did not count. If an apple falls.

  If only. But: only if—this, also?

  Her daughter would wander up the path, her hair cropped short, fuzz like a duck’s. It wouldn’t matter.

  She would crawl. Pland through the snow—pland was a word. Br
oom, a word, Margaret’s second.

  Broom?

  That seemed unlikely.

  Twine—the broom that Margaret made—and loose straw lashed to a stick.

  So was broom the word for it, really?

  Was a bad broom a broom, really?

  She had hung it in her closet with her pearls, the mother. Pearls. The mother.

  Was it a word if it were your word only?

  Pland through the snow the violet light. Last of the sweet.

  She would crawl.

  The snow was coming down like ash, the mother thought. Like snow, it was snow. Like feathers. Now cold fluttered in underneath her gown and now her skin was stiff and prickled. She was out. She was looking back at the kitchen. Miraculous. Appalling. She watched the sink drip—twice, the flickering light. Her hand on the latch.

  Better try it. Better not.

  Now the sink dripped.

  Now the tree. Blue, the spruce, and one blue dew, and red like Snow White’s apple. Little gray bird in the shadows. Two? Was there a third she could not see?

  She needed mukluks. A touch of lipstick. Ratty, staticky, terrible gown—she knew exactly the one she wanted. Knew exactly where they were—her pearls. Her clump of pills. Good on you. Who was it said that?

  Who: What the Sam Hill?

  And now the pain came back. And her husband. Husband was a verb, yes, also? To husband. Husbandry. Steward of the land. Was it stewart?

  Cheyenne?

  Had he left her and she couldn’t recall?

  Now the pain. And the mare at the fence. A white horse—blue.

  And a little white pill and a yellow. Smaller than the blue than the yellow. Days she could get them down.

  She lay her cheek against the door and the sink dripped. Snow in the shadow at the corner of the house and a cloud in the ice dam melting. A face. Deer. They touched their muzzles to the glass. Curlews.

  There had been a key beneath the mat beneath the snow. Now even the mat was missing. The trees leaned in, gauzy, like something about to dissolve. The mother was afraid to fall and falling and so dropped to her knees to steady herself and bled numbly into the snow.

  Margaret, the mother thought.