“I don’t know,” I said. “What is the it, Tess?”
She walked over to the fire. “The things they do,” she said. “The things they’re allowed to do. What we accept. What we endorse. What we celebrate.”
I watched her.
“Accept, endorse, celebrate. Is that some kind of a slogan? Something the women without patience stamp on their T-shirts?”
“Fuck you. It’s not them. It’s your mother. She said it.”
So, the master, the guru in chains, was at work on her proverbs.
“She says it?”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“That we’re complicit.”
“In what?”
“Violence, Joe.”
“Violence.”
“Against women.”
“We accept, and endorse, and celebrate it.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. And please stop with the sarcasm. Please. I know I don’t have to explain this. I know you agree.”
“Of course,” I said.
“So then what?”
“The idea of her in there inventing herself as some kind of prophet.”
“Not a prophet. But so what? You’d rather she goes soft in there watching Jenny Jones?”
“I’d rather she’s not in there at all.”
“Well, she is. So if this is what she’s doing, so what? Why does it make you so angry? Why do you hate it, Joey? You should be proud.”
“Proud?”
“Yes. To have a mother like her. To know you come from someone so strong.”
That expression on her face, the one I loved most. All that life, all that determination. I was tired of arguing. I didn’t know why I was angry. Not then, not precisely. Or why I was resisting. I fell back into the couch, gave it up and closed my eyes.
“Now what?” I asked. “What happens now?”
“I’ve seen it, Joey. Don’t forget that. I watched you break your hand. I know what’s in you.”
“That was different,” I said.
“What’s the difference?”
“That was for you.”
“So is this,” she said.
58.
Yesterday, late afternoon, the electric rise. An hour before the sun falls through the trees and I’m sprinting hard through the clearing chasing an elk into the woods. I’d pulled all the pots up onto the counter and was scrubbing them as if they weren’t clean already, sweating from the work and the steam, when I saw it feeding. And then I was out there in the cold, in my jeans, barefoot, shirtless, not feeling anything but my own liquid body gliding through the thickening purple air. If you’d seen me from the window, you’d have thought I was after blood, but all I wanted was to be next to the animal or part of it somehow. If I’d had any idea at all what I was after, which I probably didn’t then. I was just running, so happy and full of sky, certain I could catch the thing and put my arm over its thick, hot neck, or maybe ride it, wrap myself around its back, feel its warm belly against my thighs, push my face against its fur. I ran off the trails, deeper and deeper into the tangle of branches and shadows. The animal was long gone, but I ran on until I had no more breath and the full night had come. But still the rising and I lay down in the underbrush and buried myself in damp leaves until I was nothing but a pair of eyes pointed upwards. The ground was as warm and soft as our bed and I stayed there writhing, shivering with all the power I felt, my fingers slowly clawing at the earth, my hands opening and closing like cats’ paws and I thought, Fuck Tess, who needs her, I’ll go find the woman with black hair and blue eyes where nothing is hidden, her plain, pale face, rosy farmer cheeks, the sweet green pears, hard pucks of cheese, and I will carry her home over my shoulder and show what I have within me.
When I made it home I was cold. My feet were bleeding. Long, deep scratches across my chest. Leaves in my hair. I went to bed and stained the sheets and now I can hear them turning in the wash.
There’s sunlight in the clearing and I am alone again, waiting for whatever I will do next.
59.
Will you go again eventually?” Tess asked.
“Of course, I will.”
“May as well go now then.”
So up the hill, along the Spine, down the valley, onto Prison Way, into the parking lot, through the check-in, the metal detector, the hallway, to the visit room, to my place at the table.
You think memory is enough. But then you’re there and see how wrong you are. It’s something else entirely. Intensity of sound, rush of color. Smell. Sometimes it’s too much for me.
It seems I’m missing most of the filters. Or they work only half the time. The older I get the brighter the light, the louder the sound. It is worse now, but it has always been this way. As long as I can remember. A shirt tag like a tack in my neck. A seat belt edge like a blade across my shoulder. Paralyzing jackets. Everything irritating. Nights when the sounds get louder and louder. Angry pipes. Complaining trees. Pine needles hissing in the dark. Baying coyotes. Mice in the eaves. The tawny owls calling, Joe, Joey, Joseph, Joe, Joey, Joseph. Come home, come home, come home.
Cities terrify me. All the motion, all the people, all the talk. Chattering and chattering and chattering. The saturation. The grime. How do you stay still? How do you keep it out? How do you keep from drowning? Interior, exterior, the light, the color, the noise, the smell, every moving part, the intuition, the animals, the cars, the fear, the trees, the glass, the desire, the food, the smoke, searing meat, need, elbows, hideous people, vulgar, shuffling, lurching people.
All of it comes in one liquid mixture pouring through me fast. A wide and steady stream in ever-changing colors blasting from a toppled hydrant. When it comes, I cannot stop it. On the bus it pours into my mouth. Subways are worst of all. I have terrible dreams of those subterranean trains, in the tunnels where there is no escape, no natural light. Locked inside where there is no relief, no sky, no air, no exit. The adrenaline comes. The sweat follows. My body vibrating the way it does on dark corners, in bad alleys, footsteps behind me, when a fight is inevitable. It is the adrenaline of war. And soon my whole face is gone. I am left with a dark oval, a void, the stream flowing in.
And even here, so far from any city, before the quiet woods, where no cars can be heard, no neighbors can be seen, still the noise rises. The needles, relentless birds, the rain, buckets of shattered glass against the windows, against the roof, the pipes like choking old men.
When it happens now, when the filters fail and I’m afraid I may die, I go into the guest bathroom and I draw the blinds. I close the door and push a towel along the bottom crack to block the light, to block the air the way Claire and I once did in the bathroom we shared in Capitol Hill, when we were kids and she wanted to smoke our mother’s Marlboros.
I turn the lights off and lie on my back and I stay there in the cold dark until it passes. Until the noise has vanished, and the sense that it might kill me has gone.
These days, it’s the only thing I know to do.
I stay there in the stillness with my sister Claire and I wait.
60.
I’d driven out to The Pine and was waiting for my mother at one of those tables, its legs riveted to the floor.
“Everything’s a weapon,” Seymour told me more than once.
And then there she was, Seymour escorting her in. Which was a shock. Though it shouldn’t have been. The odds were good, I guess. He nodded. Gave me that look of his—all at once tender and contrite and apologetic and wise. It was strange to see them together. Or strange to see them come in from somewhere else. It suggested a life without me. Not really a suggestion, I guess. Because that’s just what they had, isn’t it? The two of them inside. Me out. I imagined them entering a dinner party. Bustling in from a cold night, pulling off their coats, their scarves. Sorry, everyone, for being late, traffic was
terrible. That kind of thing. A happy couple. They were no couple, of course, but the intimacy was undeniable. They shared a world that I did not. The routines, the food, the gossip, the texture of the place.
I don’t know why it surprised me. Why I hadn’t considered any of that before. It takes me time with these things.
I’m slow to see the obvious.
Seymour left her at the door. The first time I’d seen her in a month, maybe more. She looked healthy. Strong. Her hair was longer, parted in the middle and pulled back into a ponytail, the way she’d worn it when I was younger, the way she’d worn it in all the photographs of her life with my father before us. Her posture had changed again. She had always been a graceful woman, but now she moved with what seemed to me an affected slowness. Her chin slightly cocked, a subtle, condescending smile. A dancer walking onstage, not yet dancing, just finding her mark, preparing, but even in the preparation there was theater. She’d lost color in her face, but she wasn’t sickly the way she’d been in those first visits. The whiteness of her skin making her eyes appear bluer.
She held me.
“Joey,” she whispered, “Joey,” as if we were anywhere, as if I were her child home from school. I liked the normalcy of her voice, the strength of her arms. I think I had been afraid that she was dying in there, that she would be withered and emaciated, that a woman like her could do nothing but die in a place like that.
“You look good,” I said.
We both sat.
She touched my face. “I am, Joey.”
“I’m glad. I hear you’ve become a revolutionary.”
She laughed. “Is that what you hear?”
To see her like that, flashes of the other person, of the other time, it made me happy. As simple as that. The way that only relief makes me happy.
“Tess,” she said. “She’s lovely, Joe.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“I do.”
“Don’t fuck it up.”
I laughed. “So you no longer think I’m wasting my life living here in White Pine?”
She shrugged. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On your life here in White Pine.”
“What does that mean?”
“I think you know what it means.”
“Tell me. I’d like you to tell me,” I said.
She sighed. “Joey. Do you want to be a bartender the rest of your life? Do you want to stay here? Never go anywhere else, never do anything.”
“I’m happy. Bartending, living with Tess. We’re happy.”
“Is she?”
There was the cold edge.
“You seem to think you know. Why don’t you tell me about Tess. Now that you know her so well.”
I couldn’t stop myself.
“Don’t be a child, Joey.”
“Tell me about her.”
She held my eyes for a long moment. “All right. No. No she’s not happy. She is restless. And if you try to stop her, you will lose her.”
I kept my mouth shut.
“I know you want to stay still. Keep things as they are. But you have to resist it, do you understand me? Don’t get stuck, Joe.”
I leaned forward. “Whereas you,” I said, “you like to shake things up.”
She drew back as if I’d shoved her.
“Whatever the case. Whatever I’ve inherited from Dad, I have your instincts as well. There are the things I’ve inherited from you as well.”
“And what are those, Joey?”
“A temper, for one.”
We both smiled. We both relaxed.
“What else?”
“It’s hard to say, exactly.”
“Why don’t you try?”
“I will,” I said. “One day, I will.”
She looked at me with focus unusual even for her.
I imagined that she understood. That she saw it in me, this fundamental and frightening element. This thing, which was herself. I imagined I wouldn’t have to say it, that it was simply understood. Through that long speechless exchange. But perhaps we were both just waiting for some explanation. Hoping for some understanding that didn’t exist. And again, I wonder what difference it would have made.
She tapped her fingernails against the tabletop. They were painted red. Just like her lips.
“You know, Joey, Tess’s mother died.”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course I know that.”
“Of breast cancer.”
“Yes. Did you think I wouldn’t know?”
I felt the anger surging again.
“Of course you know. And you know, too, that you’re lucky. To have both of your parents alive. Parents who love you. Who care about your life, about the way you live.”
“Yes,” I said.
She was so strange, speaking in these platitudes. So inconsistent. Foreign and familiar, foreign and familiar.
I see her fingers, the way they wrapped around my hand, the varnished fingernails shining, reflecting four times that terrible fluorescent light.
“We love you, Joey. Your father and I.”
Her face had become flushed. Her eyes were shining as if she might cry.
“We love you very much,” she said. “We’re fortunate to have what we do. And fortunate to have Tess. All of us are. This family of ours. And I want for us to give Tess.” She stopped. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her free hand. “I want for us to give her the family she’s missing, the family we have. Can we do that, Joey?”
I don’t know if I’d ever seen my mother cry out of sadness. Out of joy, yes. On some Christmas mornings, with all of us home, eating breakfast together. Yes, I’d seen her cry then. That way. Or in recounting some good story from the hospital, some life saved, or disaster averted. But not like this. Not with such pain and desperation. And yet beneath it all something was not quite right. I couldn’t shake the sense I was being played. That this woman, at that moment wasn’t her, wasn’t the person I’d known as my mother.
Still I said, “Yes, Mom. I will do everything I can.”
“We all will,” she said. “All of us will.”
“Okay,” I said. “We all will.”
Even if I wasn’t sure what she meant, I agreed and squeezed her hand until it was time to go. I held her tightly and kissed her cheek and watched as she was taken away, this time by a guard I didn’t recognize, a heavyset woman with red hair who didn’t look at me once as she walked my mother from the room.
61.
Emerson College was named not for the Transcendentalist, but for and by Henry Emerson, a ruthless Presbyterian missionary responsible for delivering a measles epidemic to the White Pine Valley, which effectively eradicated the indigenous Chinook. Half the adult population died, and not a single child survived. The college, however, does. A former seminary, it is now a much expanded but still small campus of brick buildings and creeping ivy. At the entrance there are two large plaques, one in memory of Henry Emerson, the other of his wife, Lucy. There’s a charming clock tower, and green lawns and sandy paths, which meander over the barrier dunes down to the ocean. In a struggling working-class town populated by farmers, fishermen, and prison guards, it is an oasis of liberalism and academic luxury twelve miles south of White Pine.
Between two pillars a long and well-paved road slopes down a gentle hill. One way in, one way out. It’s something like The Pine—the drive, the suspense and drama of the long approach, the parking lot, the administrative buildings, the insular world.
It was there the women without patience were encamped. And so there we went to meet them. Even if it wasn’t exactly clear to either of us why. We traveled on orders, emissaries of the cause. Whatever that was, whatever it would become, here we were crossing the great quad, passing kids not much younger than ourselves
, who seemed to us so much like children. A cold day. Fog and sun. Everything just as you imagine it. Backpacks and hustling students. Leisure and panic. Frisbees. The theater of permanence and safety. Tess and I searching for some building. Asking directions from an out-of-breath boy, hacky sack in hand.
Somehow I’d expected one of those raked lecture halls, but it was instead an upper level seminar room. Pine chairs around a pine table. The door was open and when we arrived they all hushed. There was a lot of ceremony. Showing us where we should sit. Presenting us with Styrofoam cups of coffee. Thanking us for being there. They had us at one end, and they were all gathered at the other making jokes about which was the foot, and which was the head. Then an uncomfortable silence as Tess and I sipped our coffee, while the women looked on as if we’d arrived by helicopter from the Pentagon. The only black person in the room, the only person who wasn’t white, cleared her throat and introduced herself. Marcy Harper. The only one I remember.
Marcy Harper who said to Tess, “We weren’t expecting a man. Ms. March didn’t say anything about a man in her letter.”
Tess nodded and smiled and both gestures were unfamiliar. The pace of the nod, the restraint of her smile. Now she was tolerant and wise. She’d changed. Without warning me, she had shifted just the way a great actor does. Transformation instantaneous and absolute.
I could never do it. Not on purpose. Not like that. I’ve never had the control. My transformations have so little to do with will. My changes originate elsewhere.
This was something she had been preparing for. All those weeks and here was a fleck of her secret life. This is what she saw out the windows at night. On the ceiling when she went vacant after sex. This is what she saw: herself in this room, her spine a little straighter, her hands interlaced, resting on the table.
“I understand,” she said turning and smiling at me, her colleague. “This is Joseph March. Anne-Marie March’s son.”
There was a shift then. Those women turning their attention to me with a new focus, relaxing, their expressions altered. No longer cold, they looked on in anticipation. My turn to speak.
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