An Arrangement of Skin

by Anna Journey

  I’ve learned that, like friendship, wisteria climbs in one of two directions: clockwise or counterclockwise. Noticing the direction of a particular plant’s spiral is one way to determine its species. The botanical term dextrorse denotes a leftward twinning (clockwise) wisteria while the term sinistrorse refers to rightward-spiraling (counterclockwise) vines. The fragrant, grape-bunch-shaped bouquet of each wisteria shoot is a fluffy structure called a raceme, and contains the thick base of the stalk—the peduncle—which thins into the wispier rachis, off of which shoot smaller stems, or pedicles, that bloom pale lilac flowers.

  In the cobblestone alley that linked South Cherry and South Laurel—my street and Lee’s—behind the row house I rented with Carrick in Oregon Hill, a wisteria vine draped the top half of a wooden fence, dangling its ethereal racemes over a pair of black garbage cans. Each fall and winter, I’d almost forget about the shrub as it receded into a skeleton. Completely bare of flowers and leaves, it resembled a harvested grapevine. In spring the wisteria would flower and join the crepe myrtles in dropping lavenders, pinks, and whites over the smooth blue cobbles.

  Bayou Two O’Clock, Clara Mack, Pondside Blue. Some wisteria species sound like the names of bluegrass bands, pioneer women, or lesser-known jazz standards. Others recall bad poem titles (Amethyst Falls), facial rashes (Rosea), or German skin creams (Nivea). We’ve lost a number of unique shades and shapes of wisteria to extinction: the long, compact racemes of the violet Backhousiana, the deep purple tufts of Purpurea. There’s even a form of Kentucky Wisteria that blooms a rare starched white.

  In addition to his ties to the delicate blossoming shrub of the pea family, wisteria’s Quaker namesake was also honored in the moniker of a certain inbred strain of white rat used for medical research, the Wistar rat. Wistar rats originated in the 1930s at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia, which was named after the good professor. So the father of wisteria is also the pater of the iconic red-eyed lab rat.

  Lee’s first encounter with a rat occurred in 1950s Missouri, when his fiery, working-class adoptive mother discovered the vermin perched on the edge of his crib and allegedly fired at it with her pistol. I don’t remember whether Lee said she hit her target or if the rat died. I do recall Lee’s pride in his adoptive mother’s fierce loyalty, however, which he contrasted with his birth mother’s rejection. He’d joke, darkly, that he had a lump on his skull attained when he was yanked from his mother by the deforming tongs of midcentury medical forceps. He’d once tracked down his birth mother—at a girlfriend’s urging—drove to Missouri and telephoned her, hoping to arrange a visit. She was by then in her eighties, a former Ozarkian wild woman, Lee said, and mother of at least eight other children. She either couldn’t recall giving Lee up for adoption, due to the haze of advanced dementia, or didn’t wish to acknowledge him. She hung up the phone.

  Caspar Wistar collected his medical lectures and published a two-volume treatise, A System of Anatomy, in 1811 and 1814. In the chapter titled “Of the Heart and the Pericardium, and the Great Vessels Connected with the Heart,” Wistar writes: “The muscular fibres of the heart are generally less florid than those of the voluntary muscles: they are also more closely compacted together. The direction of many of them is oblique or spiral.”

  The direction of my friendship with Lee is oblique or spiral. He finally ended our decade-long bond after he learned, from his fiancée, that I’d cheated on Carrick. Outraged, he told my ex and they both stopped speaking to me. I understood Lee’s feelings of betrayal. To a degree, I even understood his actions, too: that latent Catholic in him emerging, finally, flush-faced from behind the pulpit.

  When we finally reconciled, nearly two years later, our friendship felt pale, vulnerable, wary. I’d become that wisteria vine circling its point of origin, growing ever more distant from it, or that passenger on the bus in Levis’s “Slow Child with a Book of Birds,” seated in the ironic echo chamber of the boy who repeats the warped and reverberating name of the snowy egret: “No Regrets.”

  Maybe I don’t need a pack of counterclockwise-racing greyhounds to spiral Alice—and myself—back to the past. I have the time-warped alleys of Richmond, those narrow corridors of stillness through the city’s rush of traffic, above kayakers whirling in the James River’s ochre rapids, beside students walking to VCU. As soon as someone enters an alley, the wisteria-shrouded path stops time. The vines erase all signs of contemporaneity: they hide the shiny tops of sedans parked behind row houses, climb the silver bowls of now defunct TV satellites, canopy children’s blue plastic swings that dangle from pin oaks. Without these modern markers, the wisteria-topped gates barbed with cast-iron magnolia buds might as well fence another century. Yet they form a permeable border. Why not believe Poe might mosey around the corner at any minute, his tussled hair frizzy from the Virginia humidity? Each time I walk though Richmond’s winding alleys, gestural with high hedges of wisteria, I step into an ancient landscape.

  Over the telephone, my father told me that the reason Chinese wisteria and the woody shrubs that cover Appalachia look so similar is because they were once entangled in the forests of the same region: Pangaea, that ancient landmass in which all the fragments of our world existed in a single irregular plane. The probable configuration of Pangaea, mapped with contemporary geographical borders, resembles a child’s wobbly drawing of a parrot: Eurasia (beak and head), North America (breast), South America (belly), Africa and Arabia (wing), India (lower back), Antarctica (leg), Australia (tail feathers). Somewhere in the “neck” portion of the three-hundred-million-year-old parrot, the original wisteria knitted together its network of lavenders, until the landmass began to break apart, about one hundred million years ago, at the start of continental drift. “It’s all very wisterious,” my father deadpanned.

  Like Wistar’s and Rush’s, my friendship with Lee had split in a sudden continental drift. I don’t remember most of our last telephone conversation before the rift. “You’re a deceiver,” Lee had shouted. I remember hanging up on him—or did he hang up on me?—and the way that final severing seemed to echo and shake every wiry hair of the Spanish moss outside like a shivering ghost wisteria. The way it fractured me from my past that had seemed, until that point, so whole, stable, retraceable.

  In Levis’s vision, the present and past swirl together, the poem itself becoming “that unrelenting music / That makes all things a scattering & wheeling / Once again . . . .” The lyric moment seems to braid both directions of the winding wisteria at once, its clockwise growth toward some future and its counterclockwise movement into the past. I often feel that I’m growing in both directions at once, that I continue to reside, stubborn outlaw, in both provinces. Or maybe this space is like a cobblestone that I’ve stomped on for the hundredth time, which wiggles loose so I can stoop and carry it in my palm or pocket. No Regrets. So, I claim for my past one extinct raceme of the violet Backhousiana, one pedicle plucked from its vanished lilac expanse. Surely I can burden a tuft of wisteria with eight years, with the streets named Grove, Hanover, Park, and Cherry. It can carry all the cobblestones, the poetry teacher, the old boyfriend, the clay-covered smock, the girl cross-legged in the graveyard with a lapful of poems, Edgar Allan Poe, Larry Levis, Caspar Wistar, his wisteria vines in the alleys twisting, with the hands of my clock, slowly back.

  A COMMON SKIN

  The first time I rode a horse after nearly three decades out of the saddle, the grilled asparagus I ate later that day tasted like the smell of a stable, like hay dust, leather, and sweat. While Proust had his madeleine, I had the grassy synesthesia of a scaled vegetable. For two years when I was six and seven, my family lived overseas in New Delhi, where I took English riding lessons, a mix of dressage and jumping. I’ve discovered that my body retains the muscle memory of that time, though none of the suppleness. I can recall the proper motions—the posting diagonals, the low heels, the “light seat”—but my ass keeps crashing down on the cantle, smacking the horse
’s back. I used to be able to sync my rise and fall with the two-beat rhythm of a trot, keeping my crotch tipped toward the curve of the pommel, but now my pelvis slips back and my shoulders plunge forward, my body stiff and off-kilter, one stunned knot of bruises in action.

  Imagine that you and the horse share a common skin, the classic book Centered Riding, by Sally Swift, tells me. Imagine, Swift says, that both of your legs have been hacked off below the knees and you’re riding only with your thighs, a spry amputee, balanced evenly and spread wide in the saddle. Imagine you’re a thirty-five-year-old woman, driving up to Mill Creek Equestrian Center, through the dry auburn canyons of Topanga, California, trying to recover a common skin: that ghost limb that was your life in India. That was you, at seven, centered and lean, cantering a white mare named Kara (your favorite horse) over a two-foot jump, or the chestnut Koldana, or the grey Arabian Kumal, always with the green ringneck parakeets and metronomic wock-wock of the coppersmith barbets in the acacias. Always with the patient calls of the instructor Raju—“Up, down! Up, down!”—hovering above the kicked-up dust, the blur of his beet-colored Sikh turban in the center of the ring.

  My parents moved overseas during the second half of the 1970s, when my father worked variously for UNICEF, a German plastic pipe manufacturing plant, the health sciences division of the International Development Research Centre, and the World Bank. They shed their Mississippi accents sometime between their moves from Dhaka to Kuala Lumpur, from Peine, Germany, to Ottawa, and finally to northern Virginia, where I was born. When they returned to Dhaka, in June of 1981, I was seven months old. We spent five years of my childhood there, and the next two in New Delhi. Listening to their voices on old Christmas videos, no one would guess my mother grew up a folk-singing Southern belle in the suburbs of Jackson, or my father a skinny bibliophile amid the gritty kudzu of Greenwood. Listening to my own now-extinct childhood dialect, I sound, at times, like a prim English schoolgirl during the era of the British Raj. “Say, Rebecca,” I announce to my little sister in the video. I’m wearing a green velvet jumper over a stingray-sized ivory pinafore, and I’m holding my right pointer finger straight up beneath the branches of our synthetic pine. “Shall we?” I ask my mother, waving a wrapped present. “Yes, quite,” I answer my father, with a rolling upper-crust warble. At one point, Rebecca croons to her new dolls, like the world’s tiniest fairy godmother, as she tucks them into an imagined bed: “Now, now, my little ones, don’t you peek out.” Although neither of my parents used such antiquated expressions, we’d picked them up from the fairy tales my mother read to us—“The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Baba Yaga.” All of the books she bought at Zeenat Book Supply were imported from the UK, including the six Faber volumes for children edited by Sara and Stephen Corrin. For the first eight years of my life, I spoke an exaggerated British English, a fastidious Grimm creole. No, I shan’t apologize to Rebecca because she’s a wicked girl!

  Much of our lives in South Asia evokes the specter of a colonial empire: the private social club for expats; the English riding lessons; the ruffled Edwardian-style frocks that seem ripped from a tintype; the footman we referred to as “our bearer, Stephen”; the Bengali cook, David, to whom I took my first steps, and whom my mother taught how to fry chicken; the young Garo aaya, Onani, who helped care for Rebecca and me; the wrinkled gardener, Tota, who helped me catch frogs during monsoon season. Because of the soggy tropical heat, my mother filled our closets mostly with delicate cotton dresses instead of pants, many of them in pastel blues, yellows, creams, or mint greens, sometimes trimmed in eyelet lace or embroidered by a local tailor. The velveteen or silk ribbons my mother tied in our strawberry-blond hair—which in the moist air would spiral in frizzled ringlets—made us look like old-fashioned porcelain dolls. And our Irish complexions—ivory skin, sandy freckles, stark veins in the blue bends of our elbows—regularly fascinated Indian children unused to seeing folks without much melanin. They’d sometimes dart up to us among the clustered marigolds at Nehru Park and quickly pinch our cheeks before my mother could tug us away.

  To enhance your stability while riding a horse, imagine, suggests Sally Swift, “that your legs are growing longer, so long that your feet are resting on the ground—ground that is soft, warm summer mud.” During my first riding lesson as an adult, I rode a brown buckskin pony named Snidely, who enjoyed gnawing on pepper trees, cutting corners in the ring, and trotting as slowly as possible. Even though my instructor, Jenna, hoped (I presumed) to minimize the distance between my rusty ass and the ground, I couldn’t “grow” my calves or sink my ankles down to the mud. My limbs felt locked in place. I couldn’t “open” my hip joints, my heels hung hard as rubber, and my rigid calf muscles had all the flexibility of dried corncobs. “I feel like I can’t make my legs do anything,” I said, trying to conceal my frustration. I used to soar on Kara through the goddamned air! Now I couldn’t even hold a jumping position for more than three seconds without quivering miserably and thudding to the cantle like an amateur. Now my thighs sat like chicken cinched in plastic wrap, passive and raw. “Don’t be such a perfectionist!” Jenna cried, frowning as I attempted to correct my moves en route. “Perfectionist? I’ve never heard that before,” I deadpanned. “You have the muscle memory,” she said. “It’s just going to take a while to recover what you already know.”

  But what about all I can’t recover? I’m fine with the loss of my musty British English funneled in from the dark forests of the Brothers Grimm. I identify as (and sound like) a Virginian, and no one in the twenty-first century says “shan’t.” And I embraced, ages ago, my Americanized spelling. No more colour, centre, inflexion, or practise. No more clamour, agonise, lustre, or mould. Grey remains my lone Anglophile holdout. That a doesn’t splash a single atom of any particular color in my mind’s eye: when I look at the word gray, I see something like an empty crawlspace in my skull. Grey with an e contains tiered monsoon clouds, dirty steps into stone tombs, Kumal’s graceful slate flanks. As a writer, though, I mourn the cultural attack on my stylized childhood handwriting—an act I find, even now, bewildering and unforgivable.

  In my first-grade class at the International School in New Delhi, I learned to write in the elegant style called D’Nealian: a fluid hybrid of print and cursive in which each letter remains separate from its neighbor but contains an ornamental flourish often nicknamed a “monkey tail” by linguists. Every letter loops a curlicue or two, like the end of a ribbon shaved to a curl with a scissors’ open blade, even the unlikely e’s, t’s, and o’s. I don’t know which enforcer of American norms decided to have me “unlearn” D’Nealian. Was it my teacher in Fairfax, Virginia, when, due to my young age, I entered the American school system by repeating the second grade? Was it the principal? Was it the guidance counselor worried about culture shock, who suggested, via moose puppet, that I try wearing jeans like the other students, instead of dresses? Perhaps they felt, as others have argued, that D’Nealian creates a wasteful, unnecessary “step” between block printing and cursive, or maybe they objected to having to acclimate to grading homework penned in an alien font. So I learned to chop off my letters’ whimsical monkey tails, each one a miniature Anne Boleyn, my handwriting haunted—for years—by phantom limbs. When I sift through the old schoolwork my mother saved from India, the baroque pages of my D’Nealian exercises look like an archive of correspondence compiled by some anonymous Victorian scrawler with a stutter. Neighbour. Neighbour. Neighbour. Flavour. Flavour. Flavour.

  The reason my grilled asparextract-firstagus tasted like a hay-layered stable may be simple. I’d just come from Mill Creek. I’d brushed the dusty, sweaty Snidely. I hadn’t changed out of my dark-olive jodhpurs and black boots before entering the French bistro. I can compartmentalize the sensory scramble: Grassy shoots simulate hay straws. Sea salt recalls pony sweat. A charred vegetable dries into a smoky hide, a braid of hard leather between my teeth. I can psychoanalyze the synesthesia: a burst of wishful
earnestness toward my inner child. As I sat on my sore ass and battered thighs in the restaurant, I began to recognize a twinge of my similarly injured nostalgia. I thought of the haunted, sinuous poem by Beckian Fritz Goldberg, “Retro Lullaby,” which begins, “Sometimes I carry the smell of moist hay from my childhood. / And sometimes I put down this burden, never / without its consent.” A few stanzas later, Goldberg concretizes the specter of her speaker’s childhood self:

  And now all I have is a postcard of a little stranger.

  If I drop the card in the hay-smell,

  her ear will plump up like a dried apricot in wine.

  And her stupid white hands will come up like two

  white pages from the bottom of a lake

  And I’ll coo, It’s ok, you can be my baby.

  My part.

  Aging, Goldberg suggests, doesn’t just betray our bodies; vast physiological and perceptual changes estrange us from the sense of ourselves as children. Who is that “little stranger” staring back from the family photograph? It’s as if she’s sent us a “postcard” from her phantasmagoric, and impossibly ongoing, adventures in the exotica of the past. Goldberg also implies that the act of remembering (“If I drop the card in the hay-smell”) can reconstitute the parched body of the past, though perhaps only a fragment at a time, an organ (“her ear will plump up like a dried apricot in wine”). The speaker claims a tender, if partial, relationship between her adult and child selves: “my baby. / My part.”