Queen of the Fall

by Sonja Livingston

  Go now from this place. Go now, and see what good might come.

  III

  What do the pink roses on the fence know of frost?

  Of petals scattered like snow?

  JUDITH KITCHEN

  Flight

  THE PROFESSOR STANDS BEFORE us lecturing on family systems, Bowen Theory, and genograms, demonstrating symbols that depict relationships between people—solid lines for marriages, slashes for divorce, a series of dashes and dots for love affairs. “Two circles indicate a trusting relationship,” she says, “slashes show discord.”

  What if children are born out of wedlock? How to show adoption? Physical abuse?

  Her answers are solid as the lines between good marriages. She wears a sharp suit, with her dark hair styled just so. Nothing throws her off, no family constellation is too obscure to be taken in and illustrated by the genogram. I sit and listen, but spend most of my time in the back row thawing out.

  The walk from the parking lot freezes my face into a mask. I’ve convinced myself that the drives to and from Buffalo are a return to graduate school, a new beginning, but find as I sit there that I no longer care much for family systems or theories. I rub my hands together while considering my crumbling marriage, the approach of thirty, and what to put into its gaping mouth. I enjoy the drive most of all, the sun sinking into the New York State Thruway, the sky going orange and pink before mottling into darkness—one final burst of light upon metal and glass—so that I’m blinded as I drive west, not seeing where I’m headed exactly but glad at least for movement.

  Driving is the best part of everything until the night the professor asks us to write family histories. We’d already used pencils and erasers to make genograms, arriving to class like oversized kindergartners with our drawings—“Now,” she says, “we need narratives to accompany them. Write your family stories, going back to before you were born.”

  I’d barely managed all the slashes and broken lines that was my genogram and slumped under the thought of yet another family tree exercise. They’d come like clockwork each year in grade school, the branches on one side barely filled and those on the other a terrible blank, until I’d finally wised up and learned to lie in sixth grade.

  But this is different, I slowly understand, the writing of sentences versus stand-alone names sprouting from Xeroxed branches. The words come with little effort—the logging camps of Maine, the hidden underside of upper New England, all those men dying young, all those hard Yankee women baking pies until they could no longer stand the sight of berries or the little faces gathered in their kitchens.

  Something transfers onto the paper as I write, stories so close I’d never really seen them before. It’s clear to me suddenly, the way the women in my family are nothing so much as birds, every last one of them throwing herself against cages that seem self-made but are in fact constructed of poverty, early marriage, and children. Each of them doing her best to weather containment until she can take it no more and flies away or lives out her days with an eye perpetually cocked toward open windows.

  My days were made of middle schoolers named for exotic flowers and perfume bottles—Amaryllis and Enjoli—girls with eyes so brown and wide I had to look away from time to time lest I fall in; boys with budding muscles who spoke in unguarded moments of the peculiar joy of a basketball as it swishes through a net or the dream of building airplanes and what it might feel like to make something that could lift off the earth.

  I kept my job counseling kids who were beautiful and broken and pregnant at thirteen years old, but decided against the PhD and dropped the coursework and the drives to Buffalo. The family history assignment had moved me, but the hook had been the writing, not the theory.

  “Take Judy Kitchen’s essay workshop,” a friend said. She’d suggested it before, swooning over local writers who’d taken the class, hauling out names I didn’t know, repeating the praises they’d sung.

  “Some writers take it more than once,” she said, and “be sure to take it from Judy; someone else might teach it, but it won’t be the same.”

  It all sounded a bit cultish to me, a bunch of writers flocking out to Brockport for an essay class. I wasn’t sure I was ready for another classroom and the word essay conjured images of No. 2 pencils and blue examination booklets, so that it was perhaps the promise of the weekly drive more than anything that spurred me into signing up.

  Judith Kitchen. A teacher who did not abide tardiness, lack of preparation, or prolonged deficiencies of imagination but who harbored certain soft spots for President Clinton, for Norman Maclean’s novella of fly fishing, and all that’s possible when words come together in just the right way. We read—did she assign Woolf, talk about Montaigne? I only recall my mouth hanging open while following a rumination on the color green by Marjorie Sandor and the feel of galaxies expanding while reading Albert Goldbarth’s mash of religion, poetry, and physics. Essays. But nothing like the forced compositions of school days. More like the sun cracking open before sinking into Lake Erie.

  From the French for making an attempt. Essayer. To try. Human thought winding its way toward understanding as it considers the words of a jump-rope song, a bride handing out favors on her wedding day, or the memory of a fourth-grade play that never quite fades. Essay. An entirely gorgeous word. Like the workings of human heart, but freer still. Wild and flapping. Capable of as much movement as a car headed west on the New York State Thruway, words becoming automobiles and airships and even shorebirds as they push forward and double back, hovering here and there, abrupt landings followed by august flights—each object, idea, and memory rising and, for a moment, held against the light.

  I’d have taken it every semester if I could, Judith Kitchen’s essay class. I’d made my way out of my marriage, had traded in questions about the approach of the age of thirty for questions about divorce, which I put forth to an attorney selected from the Yellow Pages—one whose eyeliner made a raccoon mask of her face and who kept her space heater blasting, even in July. A woman who looked to weigh less than the platform shoes that anchored her to the earth. She’d have blown away if not for those shoes. And being blown away had a certain appeal. I’d started taking the long way to class, driving along the Ontario lakeshore while listening to the classical station, the sound of bassoon mixing with the beat of wings. Watching gulls and herons take flight while trying to guess which category of drugs my divorce attorney was using—these were my pastimes, so I was primed, I suppose, for the movement of words on the page.

  I would have been in her workshop again and again, until she denied me further entry or until the counselor I’d started seeing again intervened with warnings of obsessive compulsion or fixation, which would have been true; I was fixated. On this woman who opened worlds and handed them like new fruit to her students, on this form that made an art of an attempt—for what is life but a series of efforts?

  And as it turned out no intervention was necessary; I took her essay workshop only twice before Judith Kitchen left western New York for the other side of the country.

  That should be enough. A woman trading in the study of family systems and the remnants of a marriage for a word that means to try. It should be enough, and almost was. But as much as I wanted to take Judith Kitchen’s writing class every night of the week and offer to carry her books and ask her feelings about adult adoption—in the end, it was Kitchen’s writing more than anything that convinced me just how luminous an essay could be:

  Days rise out of mist: my father transplanting the flowering quince; dandelions buttoning the lawn; my perch in the apricot tree, where white blossoms drop, like snow, in the breeze.

  Days rising from mist. Blossoms dropping like snow. Beautiful and familiar.

  I fall off the swing on the day of my Aunt Margaret’s wedding. My new shoes slip on the polished seat and I fly, briefly, as though my heart, too, were lifted above the ordinary lawn.

  Something unfolds as I read. I become a child again, rubbing my eyes, a ka
leidoscope blooming behind my lids—a progression of color and shadow, peonies unfurling atop daisies atop roses, flowers opening like loosened fists, pink-fluttered parades of revelation.

  How many times can you fly in a lifetime?

  How many times can the heart detach itself?

  I close the book and bring both hands to my face. The truth of it. Whether I sit or stand or race through time in a car going seventy miles an hour, this longing will remain. It will keep me company like the child I never had, pushing its way through the outlets of my body like the crocus does the hard earth—and why shouldn’t it? What does the body know but want?

  One life only.

  A bird’s flight, blue flicker from branch to branch.

  What to do with such language? What to do but take it in a line at a time, stopping now and again for breath? What to do but swallow it whole, until saplings take root?

  One for Sorrow

  WHAT BROUGHT HER TO me the day the teacher played Mozart in music class?

  It was only a recording; a serenade rising from the grooves of a code-laden compact disc, but she was as new as a spring flower, a first grader whose fine hair spilled into her face as she cried. “The music makes me sad,” she said through wet fingers. And I was a counselor, so what could I do but peek under the pile of slippery hair and ask, “Did the music make you remember something?”

  “No,” she said, and I leaned forward, maybe even touched a shoulder.

  “What did the music make you think of? How are things at home?”

  How inconsequential my questions. How little I knew compared to the girl. But I was a school employee, paid to ferret out the source of the girl’s pain while she wept into strands of yellow hair until her breathing slowed and she could talk: “It’s just so pretty,” she said. “The music is very pretty.”

  The next girl brought horses; how sturdy their backs, how golden their manes.

  They were named for sweet things: Butterscotch, Miss Peachy, and Honey Pie. Her father read the Bible every chance he had, interrupting his scripture only to preach at his family for being so wrong. “My horses,” she answered when I asked her to say more about home, “are the best friends ever.”

  Did I breathe a little easier when she brought out those horses, this child with a Bible-thumping daddy who sometimes let his snakeskin boots sink into her mother’s side? I thought they’d lived in the subsidized apartments in the village where so many of the children who came to me lived, but no, this girl knew the feel of a horse, understood the possibilities of an open field. She talked on, dark hair smooth under the Alice band, a little adult as she told what she fed them, delighting us both with her horses, how she kept pictures of them taped over her bed. Until our time was up and I asked, “When will you ride them again, the horses?”

  “Actually,” she said, brown eyes going to the wall while the whole of her face became an exaggerated grin, “I was lying about the horses; I just wanted to talk about something nice.”

  What exquisite lies they tell, little girls. What perfect fictions.

  If only you could press your ear to the wall and hear the silk of another girl who insists she can’t remember her new brother’s name because they’d stolen him just last week. She’s scared her teacher with the story, bringing up kidnapping where other children bring up bedtime stories and new toys. “We took him when his mother wasn’t looking,” she giggles. “Mommy’s been wanting a baby for a long time.” She’s five, a tiny thing—they are all tiny things, all round eyes and new hair—as she says, “Mommy stole him for us.” So solid in her conviction, so thoroughly embarrassed over her failure to remember the pilfered child’s name, there’s no choice but to make calls to see if her mother has ever been pregnant and I must find what I’m looking for because the story stops there. But all these years later I still think of her; the fine cut of the lie, the way it continues to gleam as I look into it, part of me still believing that her baby brother came from the corner near the village gazebo like she said.

  She lied too, Halladay.

  With such certainty and stony face, there was no invitation to meet her in the land she’d created. Halladay’s lies were like pebbles pelted at the world—lies to get others in trouble, lies to prolong her time out of gym class, lies to get an extra Tootsie Roll: “You promised you’d give me two!” Halladay was cemented by the rightness of her own lies as she stood before me, belly poking from under her sweater, bringing the legs of her pants above the ankles. A round belly for such a small body. One of the few swells of softness about the girl.

  The blight of sorrow began that year.

  I’d been warned about burnout in graduate school, and once I was hired in my first counseling position, I watched for it—waiting, I suppose, for all those sad stories to worm their way into my heart. But I’d worked with older kids and tougher kids and had heard so many hard stories that I thought I was immune. But no. My heart worked fine, it turns out, and flapped open when I least expected, in a bright school with construction paper fishes decorating the halls. It took years to arrive, but when it came, the sorrow, it arrived in one gigantic wave.

  The verb “to sorrow” comes from the Middle English sorwen, the Old English sorgian; cognate with Old High German sorgôn. But sorrow has been with us long before Middle English or any English, before the human condition was parceled into nouns and verbs, from the moment the heart leapt like a fish inside the first human chest.

  When tented together, Halladay’s hands made a perfect church of flesh.

  Brighter than her years, she’d skipped a grade, and was younger and smaller than the other girls, her hands still dimpled. She offered them to me once, her hands, when she found out I’d written a book. Even in the third grade she was an intellectual and preferred to speak of the writing of books than shows on TV. She liked cooking too and told of the dishes she might one day make and the exotic ingredients she’d need—an artist and snob at such a tender age. Most adults disappointed her, except for the original pair, who as they do for all children, became everything. Except for them, Halladay had no use for grown-ups, so easy to see through, so unaware of what she saw. But a book. Well, she’d heard about it and asked to read it. She’d read Twilight last year, so she thought she could handle it. Instead of answering, I distracted her with my need for a cover image—someone had suggested a child’s hands and while the idea was not great, trying to shoot that cover was the most enthusiasm I’d ever seen Halladay express, almost smiling as she let me zoom in on her hands, the scratch of red nail polish flaking from the tip of each little nail.

  A different child, this one with only one hand. She had two, really, but one stayed at her side, fingers locked together. The child had many fortunes. She was sent to school with a well-stocked lunchbox, wore a new dress nearly every week, had sprays of dark curls and eyes like the sea. So gorgeous a child you hardly noticed the hand, but it was there.

  She came to me once a week for years. At first she was an elf, charming with her smile, hiding under my desk when I stepped into the hall. Then she read books and made regular reports on Sweet Valley High. Next she grew into a healthy rebellion and challenged me to games of Chinese checkers. Sometimes she asked me to open her milk carton or bag of chips, but only when the door to my office was closed.

  We both understood that she’d been sent because of the hand and the way it made her feel; and though she was a beautiful girl with many fine dresses, she felt the weight of that hand—felt it so keenly she could barely speak of it. I was supposed to help her deal with her feelings, to help her see the beauty beyond the broken thing, even to find the beauty within the broken thing; and sometimes we could and sometimes we did, but she was a whiz, this girl, and saw what the world does with broken things. And so I spent my time in collusion, allowing a place where she could talk of the goings on at Sweet Valley, an office bright with posters and potted plants, a place to forget the press of the world outside its doors for a time.

  Halladay rarely a
llowed herself displays of joy, but was incapable of pretense where sorrow was concerned. She cried over the stuffed raccoon she wanted to take from my office after every visit. She howled over the girls who wore matching leopard-trimmed skirts and would not let her sit with them at lunch. She crossed her arms and pushed out her bottom lip as she talked of her mother who swore she would visit this weekend—though her mother had problems of her own to deal with and was not able to come the last time nor the time before.

  Another girl. All sun. Cascade of yellow hair, California face, this girl could not sit still. Butterfly. Hummingbird. Busy bee. Perfect except for the glasses perched on her nose that enlarged her already wide eyes so that catching her at certain angles made her face into nothing but eyes. She came because she liked to cut paper and I had good supplies—you can’t imagine how much children will talk while cutting paper. This girl preferred the sort of scissors that turned the edges of paper into lace.

  Her inability to be still was only a liability at school. At home it kept her awake until her mother passed out, so she could check to be sure she was still breathing and that the man who’d landed by her side at least looked kind. Sometimes the child’s energy kept her awake enough to get in the car with her mom to watch the swerve of road. They’d landed in a ditch once and another time a man died in their apartment—something to do with drugs—but at least her mother was alive, her beautiful trembling mother. The girl never once complained. She just cut paper with scalloped edges and spoke of watching her mother the way other children talked about tracking the electric blue movements of their betta fish.