Of course, it had to happen sooner or later. A body came; Benny was out; I took the key from my desk and let the delivery man in. Normally they walked out with me, but this man was in a rush, fumbling with his clipboard and pen, and after I signed he left me in the eerie quiet. Usually the tables were empty, but that day there was a body on a table near the freezer door. I could make out the jut of feet and a head beneath the plastic sheet. I walked toward it and paused, then passed on, drawn toward the giant door of the cold storage.
I pulled on the silver handle, half expecting it to be locked, and the sealing popped. A stinking waft of cold air hit my face. There in front of me, hanging from giant hooks in their ears, were thirty or so naked bodies. They dangled limply, toes pointed toward the floor, their skin pale as bread dough. On carts against the wall were a few others, limbs sprawled this way and that, their genitals exposed. I had the urge to cover them. And because there was no sheet, no privacy, I shut the door.
I took a few heaving breaths with my back against the stainless steel, then walked closer to the lone body and lifted the sheet. I wanted to see everything. I knew I wouldn’t go back there again. Underneath was a woman—an old woman, I was relieved to see. She was unmarked, except for a shunt coming out of her neck. The faint whirring sound that I had heard without noting was a pump on the side of the table draining her blood.
Perhaps it was something about the surroundings—the chemical smell and machine hum—but I felt nothing of the frisson, the faint charge in the air around a living person. Whatever animated her had gone. I felt it in my chest and fingers—an absence of feeling—and I thought, This is just a husk. What hopefulness, though, that I imagined her intact somewhere, as if the integrity of the self couldn’t be dismantled, but only evicted from its housing. And perhaps she was intact in a way, held for a while in the minds of those who’d known her, loved her. With a pang I saw that her fingernails, curled against the steel pan of the table, still bore a fresh coat of polish.
I dropped the sheet, feeling guilty. The dead are so helpless. But I knew one thing about this woman, or the woman she had been: she had willed her body to science. She had signed papers that described how her corpse would be embalmed and then slowly defleshed by anatomy students. She had offered up her unique case—the tendons gnarled by use, the organs swollen or misshapen—a body quite apart from the clean diagrams of the textbook. I thought a woman like that might have forgiven my curious stare.
I spent the rest of the afternoon typing up invoices as I normally did—100 white mice, 2 human heads—except the words no longer seemed rhetorical. Those were individual heads, the detritus of individual lives. I took comfort from the thought that whatever mattered of those lives had long since slipped free.
When I showed signs of interest in the life of the mind, Leslie began treating me like a fellow scholar. She was in the middle of her architecture Ph.D., and her thesis took her into realms of theory where few people were inclined to follow. It must have been a lonely thing, to work so hard at something you couldn’t usefully discuss outside a small group of colleagues. I knew she longed for more people with whom to worry the kinks out loud, but she had become accustomed to the idea that most of the jokes weren’t worth explaining. Once in a while, I’d ask her to decode some term I’d heard batted from the lectern, and gratitude would break across her face. After that, she began to tell me a little about her work.
“It’s about—well, you’ll understand this—it’s about the pedagogy of design.” She talked then of Hegel, Gramsci, and Derrida, and in fact I didn’t understand most of it. Still, I was grateful that she considered me worthy of real conversation, and I tried to pay attention and keep my head clear.
I remember Leslie once talking about a theater of ideas—a mental theater, in which the seating chart reflected the relationship of different schools of thought. We were sitting in the breakfast room, a narrow room with a bay window, and she spread her hands out across the sunlit panes as if she could see that theater before her. The oldest ideas had orchestra seats, and as things got more complicated you moved toward the mezzanine and wings, until finally, at the far-flung reaches of the balcony, there were the poststructuralists, postmodernists, and their ilk. Her mental organization left me in awe. In the theater of my mind, there were whole rows of empty seats, important members were unaccounted for, and at times—when I got in a panic—there was a headlong stampede for the doors.
But it was a relief to see things becoming easier between us. Once I moved out of the house, the bad business about the closet and borrowed clothes faded into the background, and meantime my sisters were getting old enough to do some trespassing of their own. “I guess I’m doomed to have my closet raided for another fifteen years,” Leslie said, and we managed to laugh about it.
Now and then she and I would run into each other on campus, and Leslie, who had always looked young for her age, looked younger when I saw her on those brick-lined paths. She was buoyed up by the chance to steep herself in research, theory, academic intrigue. She was still a Marxist. I understood that much. But now that she had left off working on the line, I couldn’t imagine how she stayed at it all those years.
I spent most of my free time on campus at Kerckoff Hall, a Gothic building overlooking the center of campus. My friend Wendy managed a coffee bar housed in the east wing, so I was treated to endless cups of free espresso. I drank mochas and lattes, cappuccinos and straight shots with lemon peel. Then I went upstairs to sit under a leaded-glass window and try to read, my heart yammering in my chest.
One afternoon, I was in Kerkoff’s second-floor bathroom, which gave out onto the roof of a side wing, when on a whim I hoisted myself to the windowsill and out to the gravel-lined rooftop. There wasn’t much to see, just ventilator shafts and the tops of nearby buildings, but I felt a small surge of triumph, and when I saw a nook cut into the main tower, which rose up another two stories, I decided to sit there for a while. I was filled then, as I often was in those days, with a sense of pregnant confusion, as if I were on the brink of discovering something that would change my life. This promise was ever receding before me, and the pursuit led me out of windows and onto cigarette-strewn rooftops, where I lost the trail and got muddled.
This feeling may have had something to do with caffeine. In addition to the four or five espressos Wendy slipped me over the counter, she and I took five No-Doz a day—two with breakfast, one with lunch, and two with dinner, as if they were vitamins. We figured that in order to compete among students of the highest caliber, it was of primary importance to be alert.
So I must have been fresh off a double espresso and my lunchtime supplement when I sat on that rooftop, confusing an exploration of the campus architecture with getting an education. By chance I looked up and saw that the nook in which I sat was in fact the bottom of a narrow stone chute. Along one wall, receding up into the darkness, was a metal ladder. I took hold of the cold rungs, and began to ascend into the dark. The sunlight shrank to a distant square below me, and my eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, until I bumped my head on what seemed to be a trap door. For a moment I imagined myself popping up in the chancellor’s office in the middle of a meeting or, more likely, into some steamy boiler room filled with bare wiring and rats. Then I pushed up on the door. A crack of sunlight. I had reached another roof, this one small, perhaps thirty feet square, and bounded on all sides by high parapets. It was the top of the tower, a sort of useless open-air room, but jutting into this space was a structure housing the final leg of the building’s stairway, a clapboard wedge with a glass-windowed door. Someone had braced a plank against its roof, and when I climbed up there I could see over the parapets: a 360-degree view of the campus, the city, the hazy Bel-Air hills.
I took my mother up there once, when she came to visit the campus. Jim waited in the courtyard with Alice and my baby brother in a stroller. When I showed her how to step on the sink, my mother hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and clambered up, laughing as
she slipped sideways through the narrow window.
Together we climbed through the dark chute and up the plank, and when we reached the top she turned in a full circle, hands on her hips. Then she broke into an incredulous grin. Now that I lived far away, nothing pleased her more than my confidences.
The two of us leaned over the wall and watched students moving in streams across the courtyard, eddying at the path-side tables. It was late May. The lavender crowns of the jacarandas seemed to float above the flagstones, their trunks obscured from above.
By her misty-eyed quiet, I knew my mother was full of her days at Cornell. She was nostalgic for stonework and ivy, for musty libraries and carillon bells. To her, those were the textures and sounds of a young mind cut from its leash. And I saw then how much of my pleasure in college life had been prepared by her descriptions. Her stories shaped the air of certain places, so I walked under the columned portico of Royce Hall with her delight slipping around me like an invisible current.
“Look at that sloped lawn,” she said, nodding toward the smooth waterfall of green at the edge of the courtyard. “There was a lawn like that in front of Grandma Wood’s house in Great Neck. It was so steep, the gardener tied a rope to the mower and pushed it off the hill.”
Suddenly my mother spotted her husband among the foreshortened bodies below: “Hey, there’s Jim!” I could hear in her voice that pleasant shock of coming to his familiar shape and not knowing it for an instant, so that to recognize him was to be plunged back into his dearness.
I stared at my mother—leaning over a gargoyled parapet, three flights up and miles from her country home—and was swept by a similar sense of wonderment. That she didn’t ask where I was taking her. That she was willing to hoist up her skirt and follow me.
In the years since I had left home, I had made a fiction of her: sensible earth mother, raising her kids without fuss or decorum, shoveling manure to make her plot thick with greenery. In the sculpture garden at the north end of campus was a statue by Gaston Lachaise, a towering ur-female with enormous hips and breasts, and I once bought a postcard of the piece at the campus art gallery and wrote my mother a note on the back: “This woman makes me think of you.” No doubt she was less than flattered. When I mentioned the statue a few months later she looked blank.
What I failed to say was that the resemblance wasn’t so much physical as symbolic. My love of that sculpture had everything to do with how I saw my mother: figure of bounty and unabashed strength, feet planted wide, hands on her hips. It was my mother of the Spring Street garden blown up to mythic size. What I had seen in Lachaise’s Standing Woman, and what I wanted to see in my mother, were the shapes of motherly nurturance.
All that year I wrote her ardent letters, one of which turned up not long ago in a box of family photos: “It is a very quiet night, I can hear the city crickets. I have been looking around my house and thinking of the transience of all this—I will move from this place, these people will pass out of my life—and it all seems so simple, so logical, the evolution of each of our lives, and doesn’t make me feel sad as it sometimes does.
“I love you so terribly much, because you are Ann, and I think the fact that you are my mother must be some cosmic coincidence, because not all daughters love their mothers like this. We are kindred spirits, I would know you if I found you anywhere, but instead, we are living at the same time, linked by blood, one sprung out from the other. Tonight this seems a small miracle, and if you think about it maybe it will seem such to you also.”
My mother may have heard these cries of kinship, but she didn’t respond. For weeks after I sent that particular letter, I checked the mailbox for a reply. When none came, I called her, the talk on my end wooden as I waited for mention of my note.
Finally, I had to ask. “Did you get my letter?”
“Your letter?” A long pause. She was skimming back through the days. “Oh, yes, that was very nice.”
I didn’t have the sense to let it go at that. “Well, did you … I mean, what did you think I was trying to say?”
“Hmm, let’s see…” I heard the clattering of plates in the background. I could just see her at the sink, the windows blackened before her, the phone tucked into her shoulder. “I think it said that you liked me quite a lot.”
I may have believed that I wrote out of pure emotion, but of course it was more tangled than that. I wrote for effect; I wanted to stir something in her, some reciprocal passion. What pained me most was the feeling that I had failed to find words to rouse her.
But, of course, it was a failure not of language but of subject. My mother preferred to talk of the world: “So it’s a good day here. We went to Conway’s and loaded up a whole truckload of manure. He’s getting out of the dairy business, so we’re determined to get his last barnful.”
Then she told me that the birds around the house had become interested in their reflections. She noticed it, she said, because on hot spring days she left the car windows open and their droppings had slid into the interior. Soon the pattern became clear: a spreckling of white and black along the door and on the gravel below the rear-view mirrors. Then one day she caught sight of them, perched on the passenger door, peering at themselves.
“Who knows what’s going to happen next?” she said. “I mean, at some point we made the leap from patterned behavior to learned behavior, and the birds might just do it too. It might happen right here in our driveway—bird consciousness.” She let out a wry laugh.
I drove up to my mother’s house the summer after my junior year and spent a week working with her in the garden. One afternoon we crouched together weeding around the swimming hole. It was easy work. The plants came out of the sand with a toothy rip, and we didn’t need a rake or tarp. We threw the pigweed and hemlock into the river and let the current take them down, no doubt destined for some distant neighbor’s bank.
While we worked, my brother sat naked in the shallows, scooping mud into a watering can, and the sight made my mother reel back to our days at the communal house in Manomet.
“You were that small then,” she said, pointing to him, “and, boy, you had moxie. You had barely learned to walk, and you could kick your legs up waist high, like this.” She demonstrated for me then, hands on her hips, making like a majorette across the sand. “I was like, ‘Hot damn! Look at those motor reflexes.’”
That memory had surfaced many times over the years, and by now I was tired of the little girl in the story—that wild thing who ate butter sticks and shat in the sugar bowl—tired of the way my mother’s voice turned breathy over her charms. She swept into the tale as if for the first time, and I stared down at the sand, turned up in dark mounds where the weeds had come free, feeling bored and churlish. I was twenty. Would I always be the sullen child? All winter I had missed her, and now she was here, telling me a story that had only to do with love, and I could barely meet her gaze. I forced myself to look up—at the sunbursts around her eyes, at her hair fleeced with gray. That story was more hers than mine. She was twenty-four years old then, on a grassy bluff above the sea, watching her daughter march naked across the lawn. After her lonely months in a Lower East Side apartment, she suddenly had a surfeit of company. It struck me: that story was like a much-loved time, an anthem for happiness. She liked the sound of herself singing it.
I waded out into the current and floated on my back. At the water’s edge, my brother harassed the water with a stick. Higher up on the beach, Alice sat in a lawn chair reading. Something thick, I couldn’t quite make out the title.
I asked her, “What are you reading?”
She closed the book and looked at the cover: “Hawaii.”
James Michener. Pulpy as it might have been, it was adult pulp and she was only seven.
“It’s not very good,” she said, “but Dahlia and I are having a contest to see who can read the book with the most pages.”
Later that night, after we had rinsed the sand from our feet and eaten dinner, I tucked my broth
er in, lying beside him on the short bed that had once been mine, my heels pressed against the footboard. One wall of his room had windows from floor to ceiling, which looked out onto a slate patio and the lacy branches of a dogwood tree. My mother had laid the patio herself, and she liked the activity so much—the pleasure of fitting the slabs together like a jigsaw puzzle—that the slate soon spread, taking over the lawn and part of the flower beds, running up the retaining wall that extended off my brother’s room. Hung on this wall was an enormous mask that Mau’s parents had brought back from Mexico, which passed through him to my mother. It was cut from weathered wood, a rough-hewn jackal’s face, the brow and chin curving forward, a brute nose jutting from the center. The evening clouds shifted, and a beam of moonlight fell against the wall.
“Look at the light on the mask,” I said to little Jim.
“Yes,” he said, in a sleepy, offhand way. “It’s dancing light.”
We were quiet for a while, then he piped up again: “Last night I dreamed there was a raccoon.”
“Was it a good dream?” I asked.
“It was trying to get in.”
“Maybe that’s because of the raccoon that was on the porch the other night. You saw the real raccoon and then you dreamed about one.” What hollow comfort—to try to knit fast the worlds of sleep and wakefulness. I tried again. “Dreams are strange, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” he said, tucking one hand behind his head. “Dreams tell you what’s in your heart coming now.”
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