by Carole Maso
“Mother,” I whisper into the glossy photo, into the fresh ink, the cool, smooth page, “take me, too.” Her pale eyes surface, her pupils open, overflowing with love, it seems.
“Yes,” she says very quietly, reaching for me through the terrible distance. “Come then,” she says, “follow me.” Louder this time, “Vanessa, yes.”
In what is called “real life,” I have only passed once through Paterson, New-Jersey, the place where my mother grew up, but I have been there manv times in dreams. Some people would say that is the safer wav to go to that sad, violent city, but I would not agree with them. What I have imagined from casual remarks made over the years by Aunt Lucy after too many brandies or bv mv mother, who on occasion tucked a childhood memory into a bedtime story, is just as dangerous, if not more.
Christine and Lucy are huddled in one corner of the sickroom. It is dark and quiet—dark even though it is summer, quiet even though the children are out of school. The house holds the family’s pain in its wooden hand. Though it is hot they seem to be shivering, the two little girls and the mother who is so sick. “Why are you this way?” Lucy wants to ask but does not. “What makes you this wav?” The girls crumble into each other; the house crumbles into the gray dust. I have seen houses like this before—in downtown Poughkeepsie. They are furnaces in summer. People hang out their windows or sit on the broken-down front porches fanning themselves, on the steps of August, music blaring from transistor radios, dogs tied with chains in the backyard. I have always been frightened of these houses, where I think I can see my mother barefoot, back by the fierce dog, or peering out from an upstairs window—a little girl. She will not hold still.
There are no curtains on the windows of my mother’s house. There is little furniture. At night you can look straight through to the other side. There is nothing to obscure the strangeness of the fact that we live in boxes made of wood. A whole family lives in this sad box—though the father is not home much, has never been home much. He works at the silk mill, two and three shifts a day. The mother’s medicine is expensive and without it the doctors say she will die.
“Don’t die,” Christine whispers at the edge of her mother’s bed as she sleeps. “Please don’t die.”
“Tell me a story,” her mother asks when she finally opens her eyes. My mother takes her mother’s pale hand. Words are good, she thinks. Words are medicine, too. With her words she makes curtains for the windows. Light weaves through the little girl’s lacy tales. She crochets beautiful bed linen. She makes elegant nightgowns for her mother. With words she wraps her, with words she makes her mother smile. She would save her life; she would make her well—with words.
“What made you this way, Mama?” Lucy finally does ask. Their mother who has been so sick for as long as the girls can remember, too weak to talk much now, moves her hand toward her heart.
“It’s my heart,” she whispers. “As a child I had rheumatic fever and now I have a damaged heart.”
“Rheumatic,” Lucy says, writing it down, sounding it out, “room-attic.” How terrible.
On the day their mother died the girls were only eleven and twelve years old. Their mother was thirty-five.
“Room-attic,” Lucy said over and over again. “Room-attic. How terrible.”
And it was only months after their mother was gone that my own mother came running into the death house after school, crying out to her younger sister, “I’m dying, too.” She hurried Lucy into the dingy bathroom and said, “Look, just look,” and she pulled down her underwear to show the blood that had stained them and continued to flow from her.
“It won’t stop, Lucy. I’m just like Mom.” And she began to sob.
“Don’t cry,” Lucy said, stroking her sister’s head. Something occurred to her. “Wait. I’m not positive,” my eleven-year-old aunt said, “but I think this is supposed to happen.”
“This is no time for jokes, Lucy,” my mother yelled. She sat at the edge of the bathtub and wept. Blood ran down the inside of her thighs. Bright red blood fell to the tiled floor, flowing harder, the harder my mother cried. Her sister sat on the edge of the tub and began wrapping toilet paper into a little pad which she put in a clean pair of underwear to absorb the blood.
“Here, put this on,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something.”
But secretly Lucy was worried indeed. She looked up blood in the encyclopedia. She looked up cut, bruise, scrape. She looked up every possible spelling of rheumatic but found nothing. Maybe it was true: they were marked for death in advance, as Christine said.
“Mother!” Lucy said, growing impatient, stomping her feet on the street and looking up into the sky. “Tell us what is happening!”
But their mother was dead now and she had been too ill to hold the words of life in her mouth that would have prevented this scene.
Wandering desperately through the drugstore, trying to find the courage to approach the pharmacist who had known their mother so well and to tell him the terrible news, Lucy found the clue she was looking for on a box. The box was lavender and had flowers on it and a woman about the age of their mother smiling. Another box was pink with a sunset and a bird flying across it.
“You’re men-stroo-ate-ing,” my aunt said proudly.
“That sounds bad,” my mother said softly. “How long do I have?”
“No, you don’t understand. It is supposed to happen. And everyone is smiling on the boxes like they have a secret.”
“What boxes?”
“The napkin boxes.”
“The napkin boxes?”
“Sanitary napkins.” And Lucy presented Christine with her own box. “They catch the blood.”
“Did Mother have this, too?”
“Yes, I think she did.”
“Everybody gets it?”
“Only girls do, when they become women.”
“I’m a woman?”
“I guess so.”
My mother cried with relief. But she also cried, I think, because she was a woman and she did not want to be one yet. For some reason she knew that a woman’s life would not be an easy one. Her mother, the only woman she really knew, was dead; she did not know where to turn. Lucy, soon to be a woman too, began to find consolation in boys who, by some predictably fitting quirk of fate, did not have to be men when girls had to be women.
Soon Lucy would never be home anymore either. She would get a job in the drugstore selling Hazel Bishop lipsticks behind the cosmetics counter, the same drugstore where she had discovered, not so long before, the secret of menstruation. The rest of her time she would spend at the local soda fountain or “having adventures” as she liked to call them. She would be a wild teenager, riding motorcycles with boys in leather jackets, jumping from planes in parachutes, teetering on the edge of the Great Paterson Falls. What was my aunt wishing as she looked down at the jagged rocks, the rushing water? I don’t know what would have happened to her had the man in the suit and tie carrying the briefcase not shown up and offered his hand and said in his optimistic way, “I hope you have a good life plan, young lady.”
“Huh?” Aunt Lucy must have said.
“I said you should be protected by a comprehensive life-insurance policy,” he shouted over the water.
“Life insurance!” she said to the man. “Life insurance?” She was only sixteen.
When Philippe Petit, a celebrated tightrope walker and bon vivant, would cross the falls in the early 1970s, Aunt Lucy, in her nurse’s uniform, taking the afternoon off from St. Joseph’s hospital, would be in the front row with Uncle
Alex, her neck craned, pointing, closing her eyes, visualizing herself up there, too, next to Philippe, umbrella in hand, remembering her own days of daring at the edge of these same falls.
The insurance salesman proposed marriage when Aunt Lucy was seventeen, and that year she entered nursing school and put her old life behind her. She would learn what made her mother so sick in the first place and why nothing could be done about it.
I can see her today. When my brave aunt puts a steady hand on a patient’s forehead in Beekman General in Hartford, Connecticut, or speaks softly to a sick child, or cradles a postoperative woman in her arms, I know it is really her mother she hugs and whispers comfort to, her mother’s forehead she touches. Daily she saves Grandma Alice’s life as she checks a pulse, measures temperature, takes blood pressure. Over and over again for thirty years—she continues even now.
And what of Christine, my mother, a young woman left all alone in that silent house? Motorcycles, parachutes, souped-up sports cars—these things frightened her. All the risks my mother took were mental. Her high dives, her balancing acts, her fiery leaps were in the imagination. Every day of her teenage life she tried to imagine her way free—to find somehow the shining door inside her that would provide the escape from this Paterson and their poor life and no mother. Escape it with words; change it with words. Words—she looked tirelessly for the words that might bring back her mother if only momentarily or the words that might make some sense of things. She invented the versions, pictured the scenes where her mother still lived, finding a way to continue.
She looks still, wherever she is, I’m sure of it. She searches for that pale quiet woman, wrapped in blankets. She writes, helping her up from the bed. She writes, getting her back, recovering her from the dark.
This is their favorite day of the week. The children sit quietly in the room and wait for their father to come home. The mother, who is so sick, sleeps, preparing for his arrival, too. When he comes in at twelve from a morning of overtime, he will have with him flat bread and poppy-seed buns from the Armenian bakery, and the Sunday paper. They will sit together in the bedroom and all afternoon he will read to them of exotic places from the paper’s travel section.
“Where are we going today?” Mother asks. She has not left her bed in weeks.
“Let’s see,” Father says. “How about Savannah?”
“Oh, yes,” little Christine says. “Let’s go there!” Savannah—they all sigh and he begins to read. He reads to them all afternoon. Savannah first, then Niagara Falls, then Taos, then San Francisco, then Savannah again, until the sky grows dark.
“It’s pitch black out!” Lucy says.
“We could be anywhere!” Christine whispers.
As they grow sleepy in the scent of Savannah, of jasmine, of magnolia, Father flips to his favorite section—sports, where he reads the horse-racing results out loud.
“They run fast as the wind,” Lucy says.
“Like the wind,” Mother says, and her voice wavers, “the wind.”
“Yes,” Father says, “as fast as the wind.” And with those words they are asleep. Her father closes the paper and leaves the house for the night shift.
She could dream of petting one. She could dream of running her hand down its smooth, broad nose, between the large, brown eyes—the gentlest of all eyes. She could touch its coarse mane, put her arms around its tremendous neck. She could hear its heart, its loud, huge heart, kept in the wide silky box of its chest.
She watches it play in a field of sweet clover—its rounded haunches, its curving neck, in the golden light of day. She says the word graze; it sounds good to her.
If she had one she would offer it apples and feel its square nose flatten her hand. She would make it a soft bed of hay. She would cover it w ith a red blanket, put fresh water in the drinking trough, put feed in a jute and burlap sack.
At night she would stay with it in its stall. If she saw an animal like that she would never leave its side. She could feel its large, warm breath in the dark, making a veil of protection, a home of breath. She would put her mother in that safe, warm tent where she might live forever.
Now he turns to the sports section in the drowsy room. He gets out his wallet and hands his wife and his two daughters two dollars each. They sit straight up and listen with great care as he begins to read the litany of names: Bride-to-Be, Let’s Go Stella, Off the Sauce, Lunar Landing, French Lace—
“Lunar Landing!” Lucy says, “I want that one to win!”
“French Lace,” my mother sighs, claiming her horse.
Their father marks off their choices on the newspaper. They consider nothing but the sounds of those names—not the jockeys or the trainers, not their racing records or the conditions of the track or the odds.
“Double or nothing,” the father says, or “Miguel Hernandez will be riding.” Their mother, Alice, picks “Christmas Bells.” Father picks “Chrissy the Wissy” because of his daughter, Christine.
She loves the language of horses her father can speak. “It’s the Perfecta,” he says, “the Daily Double—the purse of a thousand dollars.” She thinks what she would do with that much money. She closes her eyes and sees the jockey in satin bouncing up and down, up and down—the reins, the whips, the numbers; the horseshoes of flowers; the arms of roses. She spins garlands. She places laurels of her own making around their thick necks.
She could dream of riding one, feel her legs gripping its powerful sides. “They go as fast as the wind, Lucy.” She could dream of never coming back.
She would ride as fast as the wind, feel the great heart pumping, the lungs breathing, the fierce neck straining, she straining too toward the finish, their bodies yearning toward home. She looks to her sleeping mother, squeezes her pale hand—aching—kisses her on the cheek—striving.
She joins her mother in a green pasture of sleep where they walk together longing for those horses. She knows how much they need them. They grow large in her dreams. She says the word graze. It sounds good to her. Each horse floats in ghostly procession in front of them, countable as sheep. Giants, they pass in slow motion, the sound of their hooves magnified a hundred times. An endless procession, one by one they lope over the hill and are gone. She names them as they pass her: Bluebell, Hibiscus, Daffodil, Mimosa. They walk, they prance, they canter, they gallop—they never tire. This is what she must do. This, she knows, is what she has to do: help her mother onto the floating back of one of those gentle ghost horses, make the trip as easy as possible for her—over the green hills, into the blue sky.
I know when she shuts off her light. I know when she shifts in her sleep or when, unable to sleep, she walks in her high rubber boots through fields of snow near our house. Her restless body plows through my every dream, my deepest sleep.
My mother raises her arm, bends her knee. The pasty dance instructor veils in a shrill voice, “One, two, cha-cha-cha. Three, four, cha-cha-cha. Head up, cha-cha-cha. Smile, smile, cha-cha-cha. Good, good, cha-cha-cha.”
The sun is a steady drone in the sky. She covers her eyes as she ascends toward it. Her ears flood with the melancholy voice of the pilot. He sounds like a skinny man, she thinks, with no family. She laughs. To him she has given her ridiculous life, filled with gravity.
The steward offers after-dinner drinks: amaretto, Kahlua, Cointreau. The plane shifts its path. She wants nothing but to see Natalie in France again. Even if Natalie whispers lies, even if she talks about someone else’s dark eyes, she will allow it; she would allow Natalie anything. “I will,” she says to the woman fastened securely next to her. “I will see her again.”
“Natalie,” she whispers in the tiny, steel bathroom. “You would like this, you would really like this.” She smoothes the lining of her coat and adjusts her belt, which is heavy with hash, with cocaine. “If only you were here,” she thinks, looking at the tanned arms Natalie once said she loved so much.
Her name is Marta. She is not on her way to meet Natalie. She is not going to France. She is going, of all places, to Poughkeepsie, New York, back to college for her senior year. Alone, she thinks she will watch her body grow white without sun in the Hudson Valley winter. The small toilet spins like the empty cylinder of pills she holds so tightly. Dizzy, she kneels on the floor. She is caught in its circular motion as if it were a tornado, as if it could carry her away and when it stopped she would be safe finally. If she could only keep the pills down, sh
e thinks. But her body has its own logic. It pumps out the poison, insisting on life. She vomits again and again, expelling the small ovals of white. She drops the bottle, disgusted, it having taken her nowhere.
“Natalie, did you forget our plan? The River Gauche, Capri, London? Have you forgotten everything? The way we carved our promises into one another’s arms, slowly, deeply, so we might never forget? And how much we bled? Has the skin grown back so thick over those words?”
Blood flows up from the toilet: clouds, mangled birds, hands—Natalie’s hands, her punctured arms, Natalie’s blood, dark and purple—a storm—Natalie’s blood. She leaves the bathroom, looks out the window. The sky is covered with it. She will see her again. The whirling wind will take her there, she tells the woman next to her. She smiles and sucks in the sweetness of high altitude. She is spinning, she is turning, she is moving away, far above the troubled earth, to Natalie.
I do not think he could help but let the past back in as he drove down Raymond Avenue and we approached Vassar College where my mother had gone to school, where he had first seen her that night at the dance, and w here now I, their daughter, would be. Though he had not been back in years, he was probably not surprised at how little it had changed. There were places like that, he thought. I imagine, as we approached the main gate, that he could still see my mother there, sitting on the bench in a cotton dress and a straw hat holding a small suitcase and waiting for the bus. As we passed the library, which he pointed out to me, his eyes seemed to linger there as he watched her under that huge tree, reading Baudelaire and Rimbaud to him tentatively in French.
Perhaps once these images started coming they did not seem so dangerous to him and he no longer fought them off. I would like to think that in the consistent Vassar air he could go back easily in time and feel comfortable there.
I was to live in Main Building, where she had once lived. As my father drove home on the curving Taconic Parkway, perhaps this made some sort of lovely sense to him and he said to himself, “Life works”—said it out loud alone in the car, “Life works; things turn out,” and for a moment he felt at ease in the deep green of late summer in the Hudson Valley. I’d like to think that he took a deep breath and was happy to be alive—and that the world loved and accepted my father as well. For an instant, as my father drove back to Connecticut, the future must have seemed manageable to him. I want to believe that that night my father saw in his mind my mother and me in that great building together at the mouth of the campus, and that his complicated emotions simplified and things fell into place and he smiled to himself.
