Ghost Dance

by Carole Maso

  “Shh,” I say, dipping my hand into the warm glass jar, the warm paste of plants. I smooth it on, beginning at the roots and gradually working down.

  “I like this,” she smiles. “This isn’t as bad as I thought.”

  I rub the henna into her hair. I feel the bones of her skull, the line of her neck. I touch her lovely curving back. I cradle her head, feel its bumps. I find my mind drifting. I find myself thinking that I would like to hold this head forever. I work more diligently.

  “This feels good,” she says. “Do I get a mud pack next?”

  “I wonder how you’ll look as a redhead,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Well, will I like you as a redhead? Want to hear a redhead’s stories? Want to sing Billie Holiday songs with one? You know.”

  “You’d better not make me a redhead.”

  “Didn’t they have I Love Lucy in Venezuela?”

  She grins.

  “Lucy, Lucy!” I say.

  “Yes, Ricky?” she shouts and then does Ricky’s part, too, in the Spanish I love to hear.

  She becomes weary, bone-tired, suddenly. “Don’t make me a redhead,” she says sternly.

  “Don’t worry. We won’t leave it in long.”

  Her head is nearly completely covered now. The smell of henna fills the bathroom. It smells of luck to me, of long life.

  “Shall we henna this?” she says, touching the fine hair under my arms. She laughs. “Let me have those gloves.” I submerge them in water. She takes them off my hands and puts them on.

  “Will I like a redhead?” she asks as she puts her hand into the jar. “This stuff feels good,” she says. Delicately she applies the paste to each tiny hair, and the plant warmth radiates through my body.

  “I think I will like a redhead,” she says.

  “It tickles,” I say.

  “It’s not working if it doesn’t tickle,” she says. I step back for a second.

  We are so at ease with each other at this moment, so happy, so much ourselves here, green everywhere, so natural, that we almost forget that this all must be strictly timed, that we must watch the clock, that it cannot go on forever.

  She turns to me abruptly as if she can read my thoughts. Her hands are covered with henna. I’m turning away from her when she grabs my arm, leaving her large handprint. Her eyes are black and fierce. Her hair is plastered to her head, a warrior’s ancient helmet. She’s hurting me. “Don’t make me love you,” she says bitterly. “Vanessa, please—don’t make me love you,” she begs.

  Part Five

  On the train home, on the way to the last Christmas in that string of Christmases, where was the sign, the clue? The impossible blizzard, the closed road, the red bird in the snow, the man in the black coat? Where was the symbol that in its perfection would have told us to prolong our gazes, extend our thank-yous, hold our embraces a moment longer?

  We were all students on that train, it seemed—exhausted students, silly students, students in love—nothing unusual, and as the train pulled out of Poughkeepsie and followed the frozen Hudson toward New York, some talked of the exams which in their minds they were still taking, again and again, perfecting each answer. Others slept. Some must have dreamt of home. I was thinking of Marta who was Hying now into a different winter. Henna still stained my hands and arms. I had made no attempt to get it off. It would be a month’s separation.

  Snow had begun to fall. The snow wrapped around the old train like the wings of an angel, and my thoughts shifted to my mother. I was flying headlong through the December night into her favorite season. It was the only time of year when she could lift herself out of the pull of her work and become for a month someone quite different. Some star rose up in her, a perfect, luminous shape, and she seemed to us intensely happy as she shopped and baked and wrapped presents and mailed cards. We had seen it many times now. Each year my father would follow her around asking her not to push herself so hard, begging her to rest, reminding her how easily she tired. December was almost always followed by a January filled with misgivings, depression, lack of focus, lack of feeling sometimes—sometimes worse. She never listened to my father. “It’s Christmas!” she would say, as if that explained everything, and she would continue her frenzied preparation. “Shoo!” she’d say to my father as he persisted. “Shoo, Michael.” These words always bothered me, the way she batted him away, the way she wiped her brow, though it has taken me a long time to figure out why.

  For one month each year my mother and my grandmother would become friends. They sat side by side, putting cloves in oranges, hanging boughs of pine, discussing the Christmas Eve dinner. Each December my mother tried to assume some of those practical, worldly mannerisms. There they sat, the two of them, contented, shoulder to shoulder in our kitchen one week before Christmas—my grandmother laughing with the woman who had ruined her son’s life, and my mother festive, manic, in a flowered apron, asking my father, of all things, to be sensible. Journeying in opposite ways around the world, each year they met for a month on some magic, neutral ground where they embraced and forgave. My mother must have missed her own mother very much; she clung so tightly to my grandmother’s rigid life.

  There were other miracles: the dark house transformed magically into a house of happiness and light, a place where gingerbread men walked from the warm oven in happy rows, a house that rang with laughter and music and bells, a house where a perpetual fire burned, giving a dramatic warmth, the smell of pine flooding the whole living room.

  The star that rose up in my mother at Christmas seemed to hang over our house, protecting us. We were all happy, I am sure of it, even Father. He would sit for hours at the piano and play the songs of the season, asking for requests.

  “We Three Kings,” Fletcher shouted from another room.

  “Un Flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle,” my mother cried.

  “Oh, please play ‘White Christmas,’” I would sigh. I would sit on the piano bench next to him and turn the pages when he nodded. Often he would slow it the hard parts to ensure he touched the right notes. His touch was tentative, is in life. I watched his hand as he reached his long finger up to a black key where it lingered for a moment and then pulled back. For hours I would sit lext to him, watching him, listening to his halting Yuletide songs.

  “We’re quite a team, you and I,” he would smile when he was finally done, touching my back lightly, applying just the slightest pressure. He looked into he other room, lost in some melancholy melody—“Away in a Manger” or “Silent Night.” I could feel the snowy bones of his hand still on my back even is I was losing him. I looked into his eyes, those remote, cold fields. I studied them hard as I tried to comprehend the mystery of love, for, as we sat there on he piano bench—my father, far, far off and then back, then far off again, then returning to discuss his ideas for a hot punch with port—I loved him fiercely, inreasonably.

  “Come on,” cried Fletcher, “it’s almost done.”

  Even as a little boy Fletcher liked to assemble the crèche. In the early years Grandpa had assisted him. First they put together the barn, then carefully unwrapped each Hummel from its tissue paper. They had been bought by my mother’s friends Florence and Bethany, one by one each year, and given to Fletcher and me as Christmas presents. It was only last Christmas, with the youngest shepherd taking his place far left, that the scene completed itself.

  “The wise men,” my grandfather said, his eyes shining. “These, children, are the wise men.” We stared at the kings, purple robed, dark skinned, holding wisdom in their eyes and gifts for the baby in their hands. I looked at the baby, just a regular baby really, then back to the wise men, then to the baby again, then up to Mary. Her bowing head, her glowing face seemed happy and sad at the same time. Her open hands were shaped like hearts. I turned to Joseph. My eye lingered longest on Joseph usually, standing off to one side. I studied every wrinkle in his rough robe, touched his face. He was so lonely, I thought, so separate from the rest—lonely as faith its
elf. I touched his sandaled feet with my thumb. He faltered. His pain was unspoken, difficult to name, his carpenter’s hand raised in front of him as if he could not view this scene, could not view his wife and child except in this way. He never moved. I have thought of him many times throughout the year in that large box in the basement labeled “crèche.” Wrapped in tissue paper, his one hand raised, slightly open, he looks through his fingers in awe.

  Fletcher put the young shepherd next to the elderly man who bends over with balding head, and the scene was complete. We looked at the assemblage quietly, knowing already the rest of the story: the afternoon of agony still to come, the betrayal, the rising up on the third day.

  I would like to believe that Fletcher carries inside him now into the center of the country the whole of this scene. But it is only Joseph’s uncertain position, somewhere between hope and despair, belief and disbelief that I have been able to keep.

  There were times when I had gone off with Grandma, that skeptic, to Mass, where weekly I could witness miracles, babble in Latin, denounce Satan, chant to the dead. Blood flowed down those aisles. God was a white bird called the Holy Ghost and a baby and a man and a father, all at the same time. Trees sang. Bushes burned. There was a living water, an eternal fountain inside us that we thirsted for. There were Barnabus and Ignatius, Perpetua and Agnes, Anastasia. I grew dizzy in the sound of it all: the strange songs, the bells, the incense, the wailing for forgiveness, the cross, the apostles and all the martyrs, the saints, Felicity and Cecilia, the blood no doors could hold back.

  But slowly, as I sat there with my doubting grandmother beside me, the church changed: the bells became faint and then were gone. We did not beat our breasts, we did not chant ourselves, in another language, into knowledge. Things were explained, reduced. Some of the saints were demoted. The huge pipe organ became a guitar. The words relevant and rational were murmured like prayers. And the Holy Ghost became the Holy Spirit because it was supposed to be less scary.

  Leave them alone, the rivers of blood, the bread from the sky, the wine at the wedding, the saints. Leave Him, the man on the cross dying for love. The church puts words in His sweet mouth, simple feelings in His complex heart. I will not listen; its English is as flat as unrisen bread.

  Leave Him alone, the man on the cross dying for love. The church has Him turn his face away from Natalie. The church has Him disown Marta. The church makes Him say He cannot love Florence or Bethany; he cannot love Sabine—ever.

  In Italy, Florence and Bethany say there are steep steps that seem to go to heaven itself, leading up to an altar that you must climb up on your knees in devotion. I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling you can walk up those steps now on your feet.

  Each Christmas Florence and Bethany told me stories as we grated the various cheeses for the soup or for the brussels sprouts or whatever it was that year. Invariably I would get my fingers caught in the sharp grids of the metal grater, my flesh becoming more and more mangled and bloodied as I continued my task. What was I trying to feel? Whom was I punishing?

  Just last year Bethany held my shredded hand under water and shook her head. She talked to me softly as she wrapped my hand up, then hugged me to her as if I were a child. How fond I am of them, my mother’s friends, Florence and Bethany, companions for life, generous and kind, unchanging year after year, not even aging, it seems. How I miss them now—those gentle, large-hearted women, those solid citizens, satisfied, intelligent, calm, like no one I have ever known. I cannot remember a Christmas without them—flown in from Italy or Spain or Greece, wherever they had spent the year before, with gemlike stories from an exotic world and news of Sabine.

  They blend together finally, each Christmas one spirit, one great sensual procession of friends and family. My grandmother and grandfather sit at one end of the large lacy table. My brother is next to my grandfather, then my aunt, my uncle. My cousin Denise, an insurance salesman like her father, raises a glass of white wine to her lips. Florence brushes the hair from Bethany’s forehead. My Aunt Lucy sings for the turkey stuffing in her bird voice, smiling her mischievous smile, so happy. Sing on, Aunt Lucy. Sing now, louder than you ever have. Continue to believe in the life of the family. We need your faith, the faith that turned you from a girl into a nurse as you worked night after night to save your mother’s lost life. We need your faith now, your pressed white faith, your bedpan faith, your practical love.

  Each Christmas my mother and Aunt Lucy made the same call on the upstairs phone. Their voices were always the same: hushed, excited, childlike. “Sarkis Wingarian,” they whispered, all hope. “We’d like to speak with Sarkis Wingarian.” He was the only one in our family missing from the Christmas celebration.

  “There is no one here who calls himself that,” a voice on the other end always said.

  Without ever knowing him I missed him. I missed him for them, for those two sisters who turned to one another each time and said, “But Christmas was Mother’s favorite season. She loved it so. Surely he doesn’t forget that, too.”

  I would never see him, I thought: Grandpa Sarkis, three hundred pounds; Grandpa Sarkis who read to them from the travel section on Sundays; Grandpa Sarkis who worked so hard, who left his daughters, when they were grown, for the old country and who never came back. “In the old country you are worth your weight in gold. In the old country you can grow silk on trees.” In the old country his people were slaughtered like sheep.

  Grandpa Sarkis’s voice rises from the warm, moist body of the duck in front of us. “Musa Dagh,” it says. “Never forget.” Fletcher hears it, too. “We will not forget, Grandfather,” he says under his breath. Fletcher cannot forget anything. He includes Grandpa Sarkis in his grace, with the hungry and the lonely, with all the world’s pain, with the Christmas bombings in Cambodia, with the thousand deaths in Central America. The only grandfather I know nods his head. He is with us every Christmas, even the ones after his death. “God bless you, Sarkis,” my grandfather says, lifting his glass.

  My mother is decorating the enormous Christmas tree. My father has just put up the colored lights and now lies on the floor watching her. To me this tree seems darker than usual, and I consider that perhaps a few sets of lights have been sacrificed to some project of Fletcher’s during the year. My father gets up and moves to the living room where he resumes his playing at the grand piano.

  “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” he starts, then begins again, changing the key. “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.”

  My mother carefully unwraps each ornament from its tissue paper. They are so fragile, so beautiful. One by one she cradles them in her hands, holds them up to the light. She admires especially those that over the years my grandmother has brought to us as gifts. Though my grandmother rarely left Pennsylvania after she arrived from Italy, the ornaments are from all over the world, one more wonderful than the next. Each year is accounted for, every ornament inscribed with a date. It was as if she were keeping time for us, as if without her we would have been totally unaware of its passage.

  My mother’s hands tremble slightly as she picks up the eggshell-thin ornament from Germany dated 1942. “Frohe Weinachter” is handpainted with precision in an elaborate calligraphy across its center. She tries putting it on one bough of the tree, then another. She already knows that wherever it is finally placed, near the top of the tree or the bottom, near light or away from light, it will always hang in darkness. She knows that whatever creative powers she can summon, whatever aesthetic considerations of shape or color or pattern her eye or heart or imagination can come up with, it will always remain unapproachable, hanging alone, in horrendous, unspeakable shadow.

  “Through the years we all will be together,” my father croons, “if the fates allow.” The melody hangs tentatively in the air. His finger reaches up for the black key but then pulls back. Each word from his mouth stands alone. “Hang—A—Shining—Star—Upon—The—Highest—Bough.”

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nbsp; My mother places each ornament carefully, lovingly, on the enormous tree. She steps back now and then to admire her work. She takes two glass fish from their tissue paper and releases them to swim in a piney sea. She moves a straw angel to the front. “Straw is for luck,” she smiles.

  “Mother,” I say, standing next to her, “move those two blue ornaments. Let them float on opposite sides of the great tree. Let their darkness be cast in different directions.”

  “No, Vanessa,” she says, “we must not touch.” And she takes my hand. “This stands for something,” she smiles weakly and she kisses my forehead.

  Behind my eyes now as I sit alone here this Christmas Day in New York, one year later, a deep, red Christmas candle flowers before me, opening itself up, smelly and dark. I cannot see her anymore, I can only hear her voice, coming out of the dark. “Try not to be afraid,” she says.

  Light the candle, I think. Light it now, Vanessa.

  I strike the match in my mind and light the candle there in the dark. In its light I can see everything: the tree, the wreaths, the garland, the crèche; every Christmas, every guest; the china, the cheese grater, the nutmeg, the oranges, the cloves.

  “Try not to be afraid, Vanessa,” she whispers. “Trust me.”

  I trust her.

  I do not make the candle disappear; I do not change the stroke in my mind that has brought this blossoming, bloody shape to me. I do not alter anything. I hold it now steady in my mind, hold my mother’s courage up. It grows larger. The candle opens wider. The flame reaches higher and higher. I do not stop it. There are flames everywhere. I watch my father’s piano music slowly curl at the edges and then disintegrate. I smell the charred body of the duck. The punch ignites. The tree crackles and spits. The glass fish crack open. The straw angels hiss and fold into themselves. I destroy everything—the gingerbread boys, the holly, the winter roses. The lead crystal explodes. The piano groans, collapsing in the heat. The strings pop and stretch and melt. The melody my father sings pulls itself apart like taffy. The sisters’ sweet embrace dissolves. When they dial the phone it melts in their hands as they strain to hear a disappearing voice. It all turns to ash as I watch, and I know I am responsible for this. My young parents dance into smoke. My mother’s organdy dress with wings catches fire.