by Carole Maso
“But, Marta…”
“There are things that can never be explained, Vanessa, things that will never make sense. I’m unlucky, I guess. I can’t get around the facts; they keep coming back. Natalie is dead. She died for nothing. I can never bring her back.”
Mourning clothes weigh far more than regular clothing. They are not only heavier, but they cling close to the body and they do not come off at night. I was not at all surprised by Marta ‘s stooped posture, her rounded shoulders, her slow motion. I was impressed that she could move at all under such a tremendous weight. It must have taken great effort. She barely picked up her feet anymore; they were covered by mourning shoes.
How did we get up to the catwalk of Main those late afternoons where we stood and watched the sun sink like a heart? She could barely walk most days, but we climbed up there somehow. Where was Jennifer, I wondered, as we stared into the pink light and Marta told stories?
“Oh, off on some project, no doubt,” Marta said, with disdain and affection. She laughed, picturing her friend talking in feminist to the Ladies’ Auxiliary Club in Poughkeepsie or negotiating some treaty with the women at Bard College.
“You’ve got to give Jennifer credit,” she said, exhausted just thinking of the piles of leaflets and petitions that covered the floor of her room.
I miss her, this Marta, only because I have seen her shed for a moment her mourning clothes and join some unencumbered present where she comments on a task of Jennifer’s or a particular professor’s eccentricities or reads aloud some ridiculous article from the student newspaper. I wish for this Marta to be with me all the time. But as quickly as she’s surfaced, it seems she sinks again, so heavy in her clothes of death.
I too had grown fonder and fonder of escape. “Where is the needle, Marta?” I asked.
The Chinese are right to make white the mourning color. It is the color of the eyes rolled back in the head, the color of the blank page that is always before my mother. It is the color of cocaine—the color of heroin.
She is baklava sweet in the stale ground.
“She slipped out of the wreckage of our lives casually,” Marta said, falling into sleep, “as if out of a pair of stockings.”
There was no sign of turmoil on Natalie’s face that day as she discussed with her adviser taking the year in France, then wrote to her parents, on vacation in Africa, for money, then made the plane reservations. She felt calm, relieved even, as if some weight had been lifted.
Not even she knew how much damage had been done. The mind can continue for days or months or years sometimes before allowing chaos in. Not everyone falls apart immediately during a crisis. Some grow stronger at first, more beautiful. The men on the plane could not keep their eyes off Natalie. She knew this, and it brought her some small pleasure as she lit a cigarette and unfastened her safety belt. They had no power over her and she enjoyed that, for she could never love a man and their lecherous and forlorn looks made her quite suddenly giddy. She was in control of her life. How easily she had made all the necessary arrangements.
What waited for her in France she was too tired even to conceive. She took from her large leather bag an Italian Vogue, a French dictionary, and some light-blue writing paper, which she quickly put away. She would not look back again. Gray Poughkeepsie was gone. She had made it disappear. She could do anything. Marta, too, was gone. Her French, of course, would need brushing up, she thought. Marta ‘s had always been so pathetic, so horribly Spanish. Natalie loathed imperfection, weakness of any kind. She hated the way Marta groveled. Natalie practiced her cold, hard look on the man across the aisle. He fidgeted in his seat. Marta had become so weak. At the end Natalie could not stand the sight of her. She smiled. She had made her disappear.
I stumbled into the white room. The weather was getting colder and colder now, the mercury falling way below freezing. I hugged my black coat to me. White envelopes fell from my pockets and the package of needles. Jack looked into my eyes, rolled up my sleeves.
“Goddamn it,” he said. “Goddamn it, Vanessa.” He kissed me everywhere as if he might suck the drug from my system. “Goddamn it,” he whispered.
“Don’t do this,” he said. “Save yourself.”
White, too, is the color of snow.
“Crazy Horse was dead. Sitting Bull was soon to die. What Drinks Water dreamt in advance was coming true: ‘they will come and they will build small gray boxes on the land and beside those boxes we shall die.’”
We walked on the farm with Grandfather. He was getting old as he spoke the story. “Let’s sit here,” he said, and we sat in the center of a field of wheat.
“They were being crowded into camps,” Grandpa said. “Their food was being cut off and they were slowly starving to death. The land they loved was being taken away. The white men wanted to buy it. They did not understand that it was not for sale.
“It was the end. The earth was being pulled apart for coal and gold. Every promise was broken. Many, many were killed. There was no hope on earth.”
“It was the end,” Eletcher said. “They could not roam on the land. They were put into camps.”
“But then from the west,” my grandfather said, “came a dream over the plains.” He made a large gesture with his arm. “And the dream was this: Christ had come back to earth as an Indian. Indians from all over went to Nevada to hear the dreamer’s story. ‘The dead will all be alive again,’ Wovoka said. ‘The earth will be green with high grass. The buffalo and elk will return. There will be plenty of food. It will be like old times.’
“They were starving. There was no hope on earth. Crazy Horse was dead,” my grandfather said.
White Feather thought of her son and her heart swelled.
“‘We will walk and talk with our lost ones,’ Wovoka said, ‘if you do the Ghost Dance,’ and he taught them how to do it. ‘Everyone,’ he said, ‘must dance. There will be food and sweet grass. And the white man will become small fish in the rivers. Spread the word.’”
The Indians brought Wovoka’s message back to their tribes, Grandpa told us, and everywhere men and women began dancing the Ghost Dance. They wore the magic Ghost Shirts that were painted with sacred symbols and impenetrable to the bullets of the white man.
There was no hope on earth.
“After doing the dance for a long time, men and women fell into trances. Many saw what had been promised. There was happiness and peace. When they came back from the trances they told their dreams to others. They had seen the dead. In the next spring it was promised there would be no more misery. They danced on and on. The white men ordered the Ghost Dancing to be stopped. Sitting Bull was taken away. But the Indians continued. ‘We shall live again,’ they chanted.”
It was 1890 and winter was coming on.
Anne Stafford held her five-year-old son Joshua tightly in her arms as if she might squeeze the life back into him. Her heart ached so that she wished she might die with him. Cholera had broken out all along the Platte River. All day as they traveled westward in their covered wagons, they could see people burying their dead, using the side boards of the wagons to construct coffins.
“You cannot trade the lives of children for handfuls of gold,” Anne cried. “One does not make up for the other.”
After three days Anne’s husband finally pried Joshua away from his wife, took some boards and made the second small coffin of their short voyage. Her arms were now empty of both children. One could hear her piercing cry, like that of the coyote, through the dark nights. In grief she gathered her children’s toys together, glued them to a pail, and painted them blue.
Eva Hauser, sitting up in bed, moved the blue stamp from Germany from the top corner of the canvas down to the bottom. A series of pink stamps from France, cut in half, ran down the left side like a border. She sprinkled a bit of chamomile through the center. Looking at the various scraps of fabrics the women of the sewing circle had left her, she picked one and held it in her hands. She cut out a triangle from a family ph
otograph and placed it carefully to the right. A broken teacup that her grandmother once lovingly put her lips to every day completes the piece.
“I can’t live here anymore,” she sighs over the phone, exhaling cigarette smoke as she tells her parents of her plans. “I can’t even drive.”
“Drive? What do you need to drive for?” her mother, always chauffeured, asks.
“You’ve obviously never come to visit me in Poughkeepsie,” Natalie says. “You obviously don’t know what I’m up against!”
“Your father will get you a car,” her mother says.
“Yes, but I don’t want a car. I want to go back to Europe.”
Marta began to eat only things that crunched: carrots, celery, crackers, popcorn, apples. She did not move. I brought these things to her bed, closed my eyes, and listened to the sound of her jaw coming down on a stalk or a core. She did not speak. She was making sounds the only way she could. No more talk about Natalie’s death—no more talk at all, the crunching went on all day and long into the night.
As I lie alone in my bed in New York now, I hear her crunching again, though I have not seen Marta in such a long time. Now in the middle of this lonely December she hands me a perfect, red apple. “Eat this,” she tells me. “Eat this.” She passes me a carrot next, a cracker, not much, but all she has.
“I miss you, Marta,” I call out in the darkness where only the cat moves.
“I loved her so much,” I hear her say. “It was so hard to try to live without her, to try to live after her.”
She tries to help me now as a light snow begins to fall, and I realize that she has been helping me all along. The room, the candles, the photos, the—it was all part of the rehearsal. She gives me my marks on the stage now, telling me where to stand, my line cues. She hands me a ripe, red apple. “Eat this,” she says, “eat this.”
Before her eyes the highway opened up like a field and slowly filled with snow. She looked up at the white sky; it seemed the snow might never stop. As they neared home in the little red car, the snow fell harder, transforming the landscape.
It was one of those bright, impossibly clear spring days that had become less and less common in New York. Rain had become its weather, gray its color. Ahaze that would not entirely burn off seemed always to envelop the city. We had grown accustomed to it; it was how we lived. So on this day in Central Park the heightened clarity seemed strange, giving us all a sense of unreality-Things this clear did not seem true anymore.
I was unused to such a skyline. It was sharp, pointed. I felt I might pierce my hand on the Chrysler or the Empire State Building; they seemed that defined, that close. I could nearly see into them: the off-hour office scenarios: in one building a band of young lawyers working this Saturday on an antitrust case; in another building a boss taking his secretary onto his lap.
Such clarity provides information we do not know how to take in, how to integrate. Faces are more exposed, we are forced to see the hundred deaths in them. Words are more vulnerable, fragile, sounds are magnified. Everything is exaggerated. Even a piece of paper can have a wounding edge. But this was the day chosen months in advance to celebrate the earth, and on the thousand mouths of those who gathered, the words “perfect,” “beautiful,” “lovely,” “exceptional” rose as they looked to the blue-egg sky.
My mother looked to me, then away, then back again quickly as if she saw some small feature of mine that had been hidden from her for seventeen years. My father studied Fletcher who, chosen by the high school to make a speech this day, was just approaching the podium. It seemed as if Father was seeing Fletcher clearly for the first time, seeing him with new eyes, and with these eyes he glimpsed something he hadn’t been able to see before; something came clear in his own mysterious life. Staring straight ahead, he was not the man who adored my mother and lived in her shadow, he was not the father of two children whose jacket ends were tugged even in sleep. He was not the wayward son, the disappointment. Looking at his own son he was someone else, a man of nature with a destiny, a free will. It welled in his chest and filled him with a great feeling of power and momentum. For a few brief moments I saw my father this way: a free man, an immense, important figure in his own life.
But in less than a minute something happened. The wind changed direction or the public address system hissed and the spell broke. It is I who cannot sustain this vision.
Though my mother’s shoulder touched mine and my father’s shoulder touched my mother’s, I was aware that something was already beginning to divide us, separate us. Fletcher seemed to recede before me, my parents to fall away. “Don’t go,” I said, but no one heard me. I knew that I would have to start talking louder, concentrating harder. Blocks of lucite or some other modern, clear material seemed to be forcing us apart. I feared it would cloud over and distort my eyesight. I feared that soon I would not even be able to shout through it. I should have investigated its terrible proportions more that day, touched its thickness and its edges before it grew monstrous, untouchable, unbreakable, without boundaries. My father, a tall man, found his knees constricted by the invisible slab. They knocked against it. Through it he looked at my mother and, sensing her uneasiness, attempted to calm her with talk. The tiniest details of everyday life could sometimes relax her. They looked at the light fixtures, changed since their last visit to the park. They noted the tourists, guessing their nationalities. They watched the colorful garb of joggers, talked about shoes, followed the horse-drawn carriages as they made their way around the park.
“That horse is so poorly groomed,” my mother said, pointing to a shabby brown one. “An animal like that should be cherished, not made to pull overweight foreigners on concrete.
“Where do they keep the horses at night, Michael?” she asked, and her voice was as high and light as a child’s. Once my mother got hold of an idea, she did not easily let go of it. She moved back and forth slightly in her seat. I knew as my brother neared the podium that she was imagining those old brown horses shifting from one leg to another in their tiny stalls.
“It is no secret,” Fletcher said, and she jumped, looking at me with animal eyes that darted wildly as if there were fire and she was a horse. I took her hand.
“I love you, Mom,” I said, and the “m” sound hung in the air. It reminded her, I think, that she was a mother, that next to her was her daughter, in front of her son, and she smiled slightly, if only for my sake; and as I watched her smiling for my sake I knew for no particular reason that somehow this was the beginning of the end. How ridiculous, I said to myself as soon as the thought formed; I did not know what it meant, it was senseless, melodramatic, and still I believed it.
“We are each of us alone,” I thought.
My grandmother, dead two years, would think that on such a bright day such thoughts were inappropriate: my brother giving a public speech, the sky an impossible blue. But my grandmother could not see beyond primary colors, and this sky had too much white in it to be a true blue. I watched Fletcher against this backdrop.
He is a little boy fishing in the lake, catching trout, then throwing them back.
He is a little boy waking early to find his turtles, which he left outside overnight in a pail of water, eaten by birds, a tiny leg there, a piece of shell, a head bitten off and left.
He is a little older, up late, caught already in the excitement of primary politics, watching the young senator win California, then moments later fall mortally wounded.
He is older, sitting in the woods collecting moss and putting it in a basket.
He is older, looking at mushrooms under a microscope.
And there is my brother, sometime in the future, slumped over the edge of a stage, dejected, but I don’t know why.
He felt himself to be falling. He seemed to be struggling as he spoke to maintain his momentum, to keep up his energy. He was floundering in shallow water. He was doing all he could to stay afloat. Those who did not know him could not have realized that he was having trouble, but
he was my brother and an intricate system of attachments bound us in a way not even we completely understood. He was having difficulty. My magnetic brother, the person who could convince anyone to follow him anywhere, my brother, whom hordes of people had followed wherever he asked them to go, now panicked. As he began I saw him take a deep breath and shake his head. Like an athlete he had prepared for this speech, done jumping jacks, run in place, but he was not feeling it. Something was wrong. It might all slip away as he spoke. He might wander off or his voice might falter. People would pull back. People would think him insincere or weak. This is what I detected in him. He worried through the speech that he was somehow not connecting, not getting through, holding back. Only the audience reaction, the donations of money, the number of volunteers proved otherwise. He had moved his listeners, illuminated the problems. In some new way they would see the situation. He had succeeded. He sighed. He felt such relief that tears fell from his eyes, and his arms and legs went limp.
As we neared him I could see that tiny lines had already begun forming in his face. The shadows cast in the bright sunlight were long and dramatic. Now that his speech was over, his thoughts turned inward, growing darker, and they kept him separate from his earthly vision, and his own pleasure at what he had accomplished that day was diminished. For a split second he knew it. What he had sensed somewhere in the beginning of his speech now was clear: what he hoped for with every cell of his body would not come true. He sat alone perched on the edge of the stage, a dark hawk (dark as the sky was light), inconsolable.
It is late afternoon. He is an old man. He stares at the bright orange wall of the house. His eyes burn. He looks down at his hands. His palm twitches. He knows this means he will soon strike someone or become angry.
Nothing moves—not the high grass, not the prairie dog, not the shriveled pods of yucca. All is the color of sand and dust. Rusted cans are strewn on the landscape.
