Glass Grapes

by Martha Ronk

  Other books by Martha Ronk

  Poetry

  Vertigo

  In a landscape of having to repeat

  Why/Why Not

  Eyetrouble

  State of Mind

  Desert Geometries

  Desire in LA

  Chapbooks

  Quotidian

  Allegories

  Emblems

  Memoir

  Displeasures of the Table

  Copyright © 2008 by Martha Ronk

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  08 09 10 11 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For information about permission to reuse any material from this book please contact The Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail permdude@eclipse.net.

  Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources, including public funds from the New York State Council for the Arts, a state agency; the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the County of Monroe, NY; the Lannan Foundation for support of the Lannan Translations Selection Series; the Sonia Raiziss Giop Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester; the Steeple-Jack Fund; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak and Dan Amzalak; the TCA Foundation; and contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 216 for special individual acknowledgments.

  Cover Design: Steve Smock

  Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster

  Manufacturing: Thomson-Shore

  BOA Logo: Mirko

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ronk, Martha Clare.

  Glass grapes: stories / by Martha Ronk.—1st ed.

  p. cm. — (American reader series ; no. 10)

  ISBN 978-1-942683-27-8

  I. Title.

  PS3568.O574G57 2008

  813'.54–dc22

  2008019126

  BOA Editions, Ltd.

  Nora A. Jones, Executive Director/Publisher

  Thom Ward, Editor/Production

  Peter Conners, Editor/Marketing

  Glenn William, BOA Board Chair

  A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)

  250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306

  Rochester, NY 14607

  www.boaeditions.org

  Contents

  Part 1

  The Watch

  The Tea Bowl

  Old Nylon Bathrobes

  The Score

  Glass Grapes

  The Sofa

  Cones

  The Tattoo

  Her Subject/His Subject

  The Gift

  My Son and the Bicycle Wheel

  Myopia

  The Lightbulb

  The Ring

  Part 2

  La Belle Dame

  Marybeth and the Fish

  Blue/Green

  Their Calendar

  The Flea Market

  Hands

  Like Visiting Joseph Cornell

  Part 3

  The Letter

  The Photograph

  Soft Conversation

  Listening In

  Page 42

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Colophon

  Something obsessive about “l’objet” (the object) much too deep for anything rational quite possible.

  —Joseph Cornell

  Part 1

  The Watch

  I fainted trying to explain to his mother he really believed in revolution and God, that he really did think what he thought. I see myself lying on the linoleum floor in her kitchen, my knees splayed out. God, I said, looking up, he’s acting for God. I knew it was wrong to lock him up and give him shock treatments, see his ideals as mere mania. Besides I believed that he was a sort of holy man or not exactly that and not that I really believed it, but sort of.

  And the times were right, revolutionary and fervent, and he was ill, far beyond my ability to know it. There were the voices he heard, voices he talked to without sleeping for days on end and without anyone’s being there, so he was ill they said and so I would say now, but for me then the voices were not something that had to be feared or cured or locked up. His hands are what I remember, how he picked them raw as if his eyes hurt so badly he had to distract himself, but then all I could see were his eyes. Paintings I’d not yet seen now get in the way, but then I just looked back, indulgent and culpable. He was, as first loves are, what was. I couldn’t stand back at a distance; I didn’t know how, even as now I don’t know how to get hold of a time when I was someone else.

  Was I ill as well? All I remember is the smell of paint and the sort of dizzy nausea I felt painting the white fence around my parents’ house, a task arranged to keep me busy, to keep my mind occupied, and it takes forever, each picket needing to be sanded and primed and painted with oily white paint, the smell of the paint and the heat of the August days making me dazed and off-balance. All the while I knew that the shape of the universe as I knew it was up to me and simultaneously that I was too weak and amorphous to shape anything. The smell of the fumes was overwhelming. I loved this man, spoke in echoes with him, followed him about without knowing it. They said he was mad. If he was mad I needed to do something, yet could do nothing. Instead, I did what I was told to do and I painted the inside of the pickets with a tiny brush, perfectly, stroke by stroke and prayed for the best.

  If mechanical effort, limited and compulsive, could have made a difference, it would have. If unspoken and fervent thoughts could have helped, mine would have. I painted and held my breath against the paint fumes, held myself into a tight fist. I thought I was something filmy, caught and held. When September came, I kept studying, moving from classroom to classroom, in mechanized movements I thought would help, if not now, then later.

  Later he was released from the hospital and moved to a small industrial town on the east coast not far from the sea. Some years passed. My life went elsewhere, no more certain, but ticking along as lives do in other cities, other streets. It was, I imagine, near sunset. He stood on the rocks by the sea for a long time, teetering and unsure. He asked about the injustice of it all. He used to dance, I could see him, like a puppet unstrung; he used to make noises from his throat as if he could find a sound to call forth an echoed response. The sun was setting behind his figure and he cast long shadows over the rocks. The rocks were wet and covered in moss. I don’t know if this is what really happened, but I always see this scene as if it were true.

  It was this particular event in my life—the image of him on the rocks and I elsewhere in the car—that seems to have determined all else. At this very moment in time I lost the watch he had given me, and so, once I had lost the watch in the gutter, I knew not only what had happened on the rocks by the sea and that I was to blame, but also that my fate was sealed. The watch slithered off my arm as I was closing the car door. I can’t now remember where we were, but the person driving was just shifting gears, the stench of garbage was in the air, and I was pulling on the door handle. I am pulling on the handle in that vivid lost-time manner in which one tries to go back to recover what actually happened in the seconds during which something was said, something was lost, the universe tilted and the watch was off my wrist and into the gutter.

  We never found it. We looked right at the spot where it should have fallen and couldn’t see a thing. It wasn’t something we went back to look for and couldn’t find because someone else had. We looked right then, right away, the car at a forty-five degree angle to the curb as we were just pull
ing away slowly into the alley, and I said, Stop! I’ve lost my watch, but it had disappeared into that very second during which the car began to move. As the car moved forward at that slight angle, the watch broke, although neither of us heard anything, and slid into the overlap of the planes that define time, barely squeezing through just as I looked over at the driver who had a three-day growth of beard. This is very clear to me and fixed, his face and the three-day growth of beard. And in that frozen moment I saw that he, the man in the hospital who had given it to me, had completely lost himself to madness, stumbling off the rocks and drowning in the sea. I saw this scene as a freeze-frame, given to me again and again, unchanged and certain.

  On the back of the watch was an inscription in Chinese ideograms: clarity. It stood for my middle name in some transliterated way I couldn’t understand. But it wasn’t true. I wasn’t clear. I was muddled and confused, as if standing by the jeweled staircase with dew on my stockings and the moon just sliding beneath the clouds, immoral and lost. The jeweled steps are already quite white with dew,/ It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,/ And I let down the crystal curtain/ And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

  Even the man with the three-day growth realized that something had occurred, not to him and not to me, but to some more far reaching state of things. I married the man with the beard who had been witness to the event as if I could by such an act hang onto the one who had died as well as to the man in the car and could collapse two into one, past into present. I went along blindly, living a kind of palimpsest until the man I had married realized I wasn’t married to him at all but was reaching through him to the past, not so much living a life as living an image of a life. Once he realized this, he took up with another woman and then another and another as if it would undo the awful lock the situation had on us, but it only made things worse.

  After he left, I took a job as a house painter in the seaside city where the man had died. Although I hadn’t actually been there, I thought I could imagine what it must have been like for him to walk these streets, stop in these corner stores, talk to these people. I dreamed endless dreams of tracking him down, following his foot-steps, talking to friends and lovers, reading his diaries, writing my words on top of his. I wrote letters to those who had known him and read letters he had written to me, airmail letters on blue foldout paper, and practiced speaking in his voice, saying his phrases, using his flashcards for learning Chinese. I took up memorizing ideograms by carrying the small cards about with me and flipping through them while I waited in line or waited to fall asleep. Moving my fingers on the squares of cardboard, the edges and grainy surfaces, was like eating. I took small jobs repainting single rooms, a bedroom here, a living room there. In between I’d sit by the ladder, pull up my knees, and read the cards, holding them in my hands and turning them over and over tracing the black lines, resting my painted thumb on the bottom edge of the card, staring.

  Eventually he appeared to me, at first in dreams in which I followed his heavy woolen coat around New Haven, in and out of cobbled streets, up and down steps, in and out of apartment buildings, around and around like a man lost in the crowd. Just as I’d catch a glimpse, he’d disappear, and I’d wake in a sweat, smelling of rancid butter, the smell I always associated with him, and I’d know I’d gotten close. Once I got to lean into him in the dream, to feel his body against mine and I knew it was what I had been waiting for and would keep on waiting for.

  About a year later when I was walking home for lunch, he appeared in person in the shadow of a rock near the New Haven library. He was faded and damp but I knew him. I always knew he’d come back to the city where he’d lost touch with himself. People told me I’d had a hallucination, that I was overworked and ill from paint fumes, quite ill in fact and should do something about it, but it wasn’t like that. He asked me what time it was as if he were late. Since I didn’t have a watch, I couldn’t tell him. We spoke as ordinary people would passing on the street. During the years in which he appeared, always hurrying and always a bit faded, I was content. I knew that although I couldn’t force it, he would eventually show up, we’d talk in the frank manner we had always talked, and I’d go on. There was nothing particularly exalted about it. Rather it felt reassuring in some way I can’t explain. I asked him if he would come again and he promised he would and he did many times and then he didn’t.

  Sometimes I began to imagine myself as the person who found the watch in the gutter, someone who was, perhaps, decisive; she picked it up, knew her luck, changed her name and now runs a public radio station in Santa Barbara. She believes in herself, her work, the impeccable clarity of her vision. I have seen her walking to work; her step, decisive and quick, her heels clicking on the cement sidewalks that run along the sea.

  The Tea Bowl

  He: The mind is utterly unlike the body.

  She: My eyes itch. I can’t think.

  He: Don’t touch them, I keep telling you, don’t touch them, and don’t think about it.

  Sometimes my skin just gives way. It started when I was a child—rashes, bumps, patches of eczema and itches—violent as internal storms which accompanied them. I was miserable or it was Christmas. A bottle of perfumed cream appeared in my stocking. It meant, my mother said, the promise one day of perfect beauty and love and I spread it over my entire body, head to toe.

  In the morning I couldn’t open my eyes. My face was a moon and I couldn’t stop scratching. I think that year I got a pogo stick but I was ill or worse. The outside moved inside and then appeared again on the outside, my skin aflame. My mother lit up a Lucky Strike and went out.

  When I was sent away to boarding school I swelled up again. I was terrified and ugly. At home I kept myself tethered by memorizing the exact placement of each item in the room, the fifteen steps measured off from doorway to wall, the number of irregular roses in the wallpaper I counted again and again to make sure. Here nothing was certain. The unfamiliar pulsed around me. I wanted to get out of there, get away.

  In those days the kind nurses in the infirmary shrugged vacantly and applied witch hazel compresses to everything: pregnancy, the desire of girls for girls, bulimia. They lay damp compresses across my face, wound them around and around my itchy neck. I was the Magritte painting, a head wrapped in swaddling clothes.

  My husband says the mind and body aren’t connected. At night I rubbed his back as he lay on his side and breathed and breathed, in and out, in and out. I anchored myself by this vast expanse of back and skin. Don’t touch me, he said.

  I’ve never told anyone about how when I was seven I concentrated and slowly slid my foot through the wall. Such events are different from visions because the dead, I think, decide of their own accord whether to appear or not. I miss the vision of my mother’s ghost hanging barefoot over the backyard, her silk dress blowing in the breeze, her hair recently permed, the brave insouciance of it, but I know also that this wafting was her choosing, not mine.

  It was always in the downstairs lavatory that I tried it. I tapped with my tennis shoe, sometimes hard, sometimes soft, and sometimes I scuffed up the wall and had to sneak back later with Ajax so no one would suspect. But one time when I was concentrating but pretending not to, the toe of my foot just blurred into the realm on the other side of the wall, no falling or tumbling, just the slightest of movements into something not the room I was in.

  It was Christmas and I could hear my mother crying in the kitchen, the mashed potatoes soggy with her tears, salty and wetter and miserable for us all who had to eat them. We sat feeling lumpy and dismissed. She lit up a Lucky and went out, slamming the door.

  He said, Don’t touch me. Leave me alone. Just keep your hands to yourself, he said. I tucked my hands up under my own knees, curled up around my own body at the edge of the bed. I began having those small itches that are the signs of something. At first you think they are simply mosquito bites, but there are too many, they are too small, it is the wrong season and the ponds have dried up.<
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  It’s two thousand and four, he yelled. The coffee came up in the espresso pot. I scratched my arms. He scalded the milk. It’s two thousand and four and what have we come to. His voice grew louder. I burned my tongue. I couldn’t get what was being said. I couldn’t come awake and took in only occasional words. I popped antihistamines and drank coffee. The rash crept down my arms and legs and between my fingers and toes. I tried to stop up my ears, not to listen to my skin, not to hear I was floating out in the pond like the fake island of algae and moss and looking deceptively like a real island, growing grasses and trees and moving peculiarly hither and thither across Whitingham Pond. I wanted what had been promised me at Christmas. He went out and slammed the door.

  Last summer at the train station in Brattleboro I met a boy who was beautiful and aged in some unfathomable way the very young take on, like his grandfather, who, although in his seventies continued to be virile and vain, combing his fingers through his thick hair. But he was in the wrong body for his shyness, and, although he looked much older, was only fourteen, mis-sized like shoes one can’t help buying because they are beautiful and one will never get to New York with the same amount of money again or will never be again in the mood for yellow shoes, but they are too small or too big, but you can’t help buying them, and then, of course, they hurt and won’t stay put and slide up and down on the back of the heel until one has to give them up, although one can’t give them up because they are brand new, and so puts them in a drawer for another time when conditions will be different.

  Perhaps, one thinks afterwards, if only the landscape had been rearranged, phone lines multiplied, different people invited to dinner, other careers taken on, and not that one evening, whatever one evening it happens to be. Things have gotten out of hand and you try to head them off at the pass, to turn them round, but it’s useless.