by Martha Ronk
My first memory of sheer joy is riding a bike. It was an adult bike much too big for me and so I had wooden blocks on the pedals which I could push only standing up. It was a year or two before I could ride the bike sitting on the seat but I could ride it much farther then because I could sit down once in a while. He had always been indifferent to my stories of riding, riding without hands, riding the neighborhood, getting away from everyone, riding to outride the boys on the block, riding into the sunset with my cowboy hat flapping against the back of my t-shirt. No wonder he said looking at me as if I were a foreign object he had just suddenly encountered in his living room. But one day he looked at me and said, I’ve inherited the bicycle gene, I’m just like you. Of course he wasn’t, he’d been right in the first place, he wasn’t just like me, but it was a good story.
Myopia
Myopia fosters a sense of possibility one never quite gets over, quite gives up. One can’t quite see. One is allowed another scenario, another way in which things might turn out, things lost and forgotten. One gets dizzy enough to pass from one realm to another. As a child I could fly about the upstairs guest room with its heavy furniture, its yellow wallpaper, its corner window. I was to take a nap. My eyes went dim. The ribbons on the wallpaper swerved and looped. My grandmother had just died in the spring; at the grave site, it was painfully cold. In the room I hung in the corner and visited the window, gazing at the tree which grew just a bit each year, a bit I could almost see as if in a time-lapse film. How unfair it seemed when I could no longer do this. It was an effort I remember as if my skin shrunk tight over my bones and my brain expanded in my skull, but it was an effort I could manage until one day I couldn’t. It made my stomach turn somersaults, but it was worth it and it was better even than the sidewalk glide, better than out-of-focus movies, even though I knew I had to get back under the covers before mother returned, had to feign the ordinary, had to be convincing. Someone might come back from the dead.
In the fifth grade we did reports on time zones, each zone in a different color, and I got so dizzy my eyes dimmed and I was sent to lie down in the nurse’s office. How can you stand it, I asked the nurse, all those times at the same time. Everything passing by, disappearing. She stuck a thermometer in my mouth and went out.
Things lying in the street have a magnetism that is so uncanny one swerves the car not only to keep from hitting the dead body of a possum or skunk, but to shut out the idea of what has already happened. I am driving to a 3:00 P.M. appointment. I am swerving away from the dead bodies. I am trying on glasses at the optometrist. I have to get new ones because my others disappeared. I don’t tell the assistant that I knew they would disappear. That I had bought the frames at a flea market in London. That Barbara had said I had to—they were cheap and stylish and with blue lenses fitting in I could drift in and out of afternoon pool parties in LA. It would be as if I didn’t need corrective lenses, just wanted to see the world through glass-bottle blue. The lights in the garden would blink to each of my steps around the reflecting pool that hung at the edge of the yard at the drop-off, so that it looked as if the silver water went on forever into sky.
I didn’t say that I knew they would disappear. They were just gone as I’d predicted and I was caught in that out-of-time experience of trying to reconstruct my movements, hands in and out of a purse, at a restaurant, by the TV, in the freezer where I found the key to the back door. It is a flat key; it rests perfectly flat along the top of the freezer door as if someone had acted both to hide it and to put it in exactly the right place to find it easily, except I have no memory of having put it there.
I didn’t tell her that they were the glasses of my childhood, the ones I had to wear in fifth grade, the ones I hated and could see my feet through, a time from the past that came back now full force. I remember the look of the sidewalk as my mother and I exited the doctor’s office. The sidewalk came up to meet me. The silver river along which I had walked to school in a dreamy haze was now divided into square cement segments, pock-marked and stained. It was a real sidewalk, which is what, I realized, it had always been. My feet were big and clumsy in brown lace-ups. I wanted to say, take them away, give me the silver river, but I did what was required: I held my mother’s hand and said yes when she asked if I liked the pinkish plastic frames she had just picked out.
When I hear the Tokyo String Quartet playing Hindemith, time seems caught in an endless and dizzying groove. The globe is spinning faster. From the balcony of the auditorium the chandelier is a magnet. Someone’s pink face is swinging in the rafters and I almost can make it out. I see the dizzying swing of it, the arc of leaping into the air above the heads of those below, grabbing hold of the crystals, a fistful in each hand, and swinging into the expanding universe.
The Lightbulb
We were sitting on the edge of two twin beds crammed into a tiny road-front room. There was an overhead bulb. He sat on one wooden foot of a bed and I on the one next to it as we talked about our lives and what had happened since we had seen each other. Cars went by on the wet street below us.
Years later I was driving along the same street with a friend who asked why I put up with him. I started the story of having met him when he was the best friend of my high school boyfriend who has since died, of having tried, after that moment on the bedsteads, to live with him; and it all seemed as I spoke, as so much does these latter days, irrelevant. It was an account, but the account didn’t matter, didn’t explain. What seemed relevant, although I have no way of explaining this to myself, were the bedsteads and the particular way in which light from a single bulb made the evening simultaneously etched and lost in a kind of washed melancholy which depends, I am certain, not on the play of memory, although one is tempted to that conclusion, but simply on the light from the lightbulb itself. It was, I thought then and I think now the causal principle for all that followed.
We sat for a long time in that room getting through stories of our failed marriages, and of our children, all of them still at that moment in time, young and fair and about to be dragged, by us, to the Cape for a summer of sun and sand. My son saw a skeleton in the closet there in his room under the dormers which to this day he remembers as if blaming me for something unforgivable.
She said, driving me to his place, not the apartment with the bedsteads and the lightbulb, but to his house some twenty years later, why do you put up with him. She too possesses a character of great certainty, but of an entirely different sort, certain that we should be kind to one another, gentle in our responses, humble and considerate, and since I agree with her, I am uncertain how to convey my sense that it isn’t what’s called for, that I can’t understand (although clearly I do understand in some way) her question nor frame a response. I think of a story that I don’t tell.
What does it mean to put up with anyone, with oneself even. How can understanding, whatever that is, be based on the quality of light in a bedroom of an apartment he took after his wife left him to run off to live to this day in Italy and the sun. He tells the story over and over. We sit in his garden, now twenty years later, and he tells the story, not exactly as if it had just happened, but as the single most important event of his life, although both of us know it is not exactly that, although as story it may be. And so, if I say that my husband had an affair with his wife and that when we tried to throw in our lots together that summer on the Cape after sitting all night in a room with the light from a bare lightbulb, it follows that it was doomed to fail. My son came out of the bedroom into the summer sun frightened of the skeleton in the closet and he saw in my child’s face the face of the man who had slept with his wife, a fact that might not have mattered so profoundly if his wife had not later left him and run off, but that, given the event and my son’s hallucination, mattered enough to change everything that followed.
At least we changed at that moment in which he saw a man in a child’s face, changed, as we had to towards one another and I moved away, he bought a large house with a garden and
each of us went on to other times and other people who didn’t know the stories, or if they did, because we told them, didn’t make much of them except as stories. Nor can I really make much more of it all, except to recognize in the story the importance of the elements which imprint themselves on those who live through them rather than hear them recited. Except the slant of light as it came in through the room as my son came out from under the slanted roof to tell the story of the skeleton in his closet. Except as the imprint of light during the telling becomes part of the way stories are passed on from person to person so that while I was in the car with her twenty years later and trying to think of what it meant “to put up with anyone,” I was aware of the overcast sky, a sky so unlike the California one I usually live under, that it became part for me of the telling of the story of how his wife had had an affair with my husband and left us, the man and I, forever locked together in a way that isn’t “putting up with,” but one’s life. That the sympathy one feels is, and here of course one is selfish, for oneself, and not only the person one was when young. It isn’t, I wanted to explain to her in the car, that you see him as arrogant, or that he is, but rather that I am, I must be or else I forget all the stories of all that has happened and that is far worse than, in an entirely different category from, dominating the conversation.
And since my husband has disappeared, he is also the link to days he has no exact knowledge of, which I may or may not have told him about, but which had to belong to someone other than me and there are, as I said to him in the garden of the house, so few of us left. Few of us, that is, for whom these particular memories matter so much, imprint themselves so fiercely, so that although he wasn’t there on the day I learned to make a dramatic mess of things, to throw dishes across the kitchen against the wall, to break the plaster and ruin the dinner and raise my voice so loud the neighbors came down from upstairs in their long johns and laughed and my husband laughed and the old flowered dishes we had found in the closet lay in pieces across the floor, he seems to have participated. And because soon my husband, who needed far more drama than the breaking of dishes or even the making up that followed, would have an affair with his wife and would leave the man standing some years later staring at the face of my son in disbelief that he could look so like the father, if that’s what it’s called when each of us fails the other out of following a story into a life.
And of course, one keeps trying to get back into that room with the lightbulb, not only because one wishes, as all human beings wish, to turn back the clock, have a chance to do it over again, nor because we think that we might work it all out better, but because we wish to see again. Knowing as one knows that we have all changed through time, we wonder what it was like to be in that room with the exact light from the lightbulb and to listen to oneself say things about the way the marriage failed because I could not learn to speak in ways so foreign to my own, couldn’t pick up the drama or extend the range of my voice often or far enough. He told me about how lost he felt, like wandering through mazes underground in the dark he said, without purpose or anchor or children. She had taken the children and we were sitting that evening under the lightbulb on the two beds he had bought for his children if they returned, if she agreed to send them for the summer, if she would get them on the plane from Italy to the United States to this room which seemed once I had heard the story, emptier than before, desolate even, so that the quality of the light changed from being the sort of light I might have imagined for a setting in a café where we might have been sitting over watery beer telling our stories for the camera, to a children’s bedroom without the children in a certain unforgettable cast of light.
The Ring
She tried to remember but couldn’t. Had she sold the ring they’d given her? The whole ordeal seemed murky, missing, irresponsible. Had she been aggressive or so pissed off that they tried to make her what she wasn’t? Her toes hit a snag in the sheets; she couldn’t sleep in the rolling around of trying to remember the sequence, the shape of things hidden in drawers, from herself, now from them, and what came back were the irrelevant but perhaps meaningful moments earlier when she’d hidden the ring in her apartment since it was so valuable, and then couldn’t remember exactly where she’d put it, could see herself, a furtive creature moving here and there, looking in cupboards and boxes and then giving up, taking up something else equally pressing or I’ll get to it later, she must have thought.
And then had forgotten for months that she had hidden it since she feared wearing it in public—too showy, too expensive, too at odds with jeans and t-shirts—and then only by chance opening a drawer in the kitchen and finding it wrapped in tissue paper where, she realized, she must have put it, although when exactly, she couldn’t recall. Now she squirmed, mortified and sweaty under the summer sheets, rubbing at the ragged skin of her cuticles as if that would clear her head of the ways things hid away and didn’t hide, showing up in these nightly vagaries that seemed these days to define her. See what I am, she spoke to them silently and turned over to find not what she was looking for.
In the motel she and the man took out plastic cards and opened the room and fell into the bed and grabbed each other in a rush of not looking at anything, the plastic cards fallen on the floor. Afterwards while he showered, she hit herself across the right side of her face, an action that made itself known to her only the next day when her jaw ached and in trying to remember why her jaw ached or what deep diseases she might be carrying in her jaw and if she should phone up for an appointment at the clinic, she remembered the plastic cards that turned the little light from red to green and opened the door where she was hit across the right side of her face before she took her turn in the shower. She remembered it like a blurred portrait, the girl turning her head, the hand gray and fuzzy, the camera unsteady in someone else’s hand.
She could call up the ring perfectly: a pure white stone set deep in a band of gold. Oh my god, who’d you have to be to wear it, and there before her in her thoughts and on her bedside table the portrait of Madame X, a portrait that she could remember perfectly, not only for its perfection, the scooped out décolleté gown, bare white skin, and long long neck, a vision of opulence and grandeur, but also because of what she couldn’t look at or look away from, the diamond shoulder strap fallen off her shoulder, a strap pulled taut and horizontal by her outstretched arm, a woman who could wear anything or take anything off. Distracted, it says there in the text, and she put her pointed finger on the page, willfully distracted, what does it mean willfully distracted when she knew perfectly well to be distracted meant you weren’t responsible, that things happened to you, the strap fell, the events occurred and you just happened to be there, it happened to be your shoulder, your bare skin.
At dinner the two men, her best friends really, the ones she depended on, overmuch she sometimes thought, sat across from her as they always, it seemed, sat across from her, the two of them a pair, she “the odd man out,” she’d always said over the years as their lives went on together and she went on trying. Trying to fit into their domesticity, their travels, their vision of how it should be, how she should be and what it was like when the silver was put away and she’d gone home. The gleam of their perfect life hung over her like a sword she was tempted to say and she knew she deserved whatever would happen to her since she’d taken their gift and sold it and knew even as they spoke to her at dinner about how lovely the ring was, how it caught the light, that she couldn’t produce it. Her insides cramped. She put down her fork.
She saw with embarrassing exactitude the consignment case at the jewelry store, the placement of each item carefully in the carefully lit case, the things someone had loved, had given, now cast off by changing tastes, divorce, death. Someone who wore the tiny wrist watch with the black velvet band had died; whoever inherited it couldn’t imagine herself changing to a jeweled evening watch who never changed anything in her life and never meant to ever again.
She must have sold it for some importan
t reason, but she couldn’t remember the reason, it was lost in her furtive selling of it in a pinch, but had it been a pinch really or had she had to unloose herself from the demands of splendor, and then she knew she was lying to herself about something, squirreling something away, keeping it shut up in the dark. And yet now it was many years ago, and she hadn’t told them and it had gone on for so long it was like forgetting, not so much the event itself, but something, some reason, some aftermath, and the image of the sword returned, too true, too false. She was the one who had taken their generosity and tossed it away and she tried to think of being that person or any person at all. She stood at the sink washing up after a perfect meal. She balanced the silver knife in her hands, the weight of it now wrapped in a tea towel, dried and put away in the left hand drawer.
They’d agreed on the motel because of its funny name, The Farmer’s Daughter. It appealed to their sense of the ridiculous made-up quality of their affair, LA architecture veering first in this direction and then that, the names of streets calling up film stars and parades, the motels catching innocence in a name, or was it the gossiped randiness of the daughter, breasts like melons, stuck in the country, up for anything, up for grabs. It was sleazy enough despite the plastic keys and the clean plastic sheeting on the tables, and when they were done and he had left, she calmly hit herself across the right side of the face and felt calmer than she had before and took a long slow shower, drying herself between the toes with the rough towel, having been told that to prevent jet lag one must shower immediately and wipe between all fingers and toes, and every time she did it, she thought of flying, of flying off, of flying into space, of being space itself.
