This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Of course we can look back on any number of events and think, If not for that, my life would have been different. As Diane’s mother, advising lipstick, used to say, You never know who you might run into walking down the street. If my parents hadn’t chosen that specific house, for instance . . . If I hadn’t noticed Brenda cheating, or if I’d let it go, let her have my B&O Railroad in the interests of peace? Would I be the happy, confident child I remember before that Monopoly game? (If memory can be trusted.) It’s quite possible I’d be eaten with self-contempt for not speaking out, and to compensate, I might have indulged my prosecutorial bent, becoming thoroughly obnoxious.

  In any event, the marking changed the way I’ve behaved ever since. I’ve never given free rein to my temper except, alas, with family, on the assumption, I suppose, that blood ties can’t cast you out. (Though I saw my father’s brothers and sisters—all of them congenitally enraged—not speak to each other for years at a time.) With friends I’m cautious, reluctant to give offense for fear of being banished all over again. I approach thorny subjects with what looks like patience and forbearance, even wisdom. Yet I suspect my forbearance is less virtue or wisdom than a shield against my hasty words and what they might wreak. The feeling of banishment remains, a simmering pit in the gut, something to be avoided at all costs—an avoidance as illogical, as primitive, in its way, as my mother’s dread of being “upset.”

  Her words keep coming back to me, decades later: if you keep losing your temper, no one will want to play with you. I wish she’d never said it: it’s the kind of thing that can’t be dug out like a splinter, as I dug out Suzanne’s cynicism. Because her prophecy came true. My mother implied, and I guess I agree, that I have something explosive inside, like a grenade, which I must keep close watch on or it will obliterate me. If I feel anger, I suppress it (as painful as suppressing urgent desire), rationalize it, hide it, try to think generous, Zen-like thoughts and wait for it to pass. It does pass, but the pressure of restraint can’t help but leave bruises, permanent black-and-blue marks on the spirit.

  Yes, New York, There Are Baby Pigeons

  I’ve never found anything the least bit cute or winning about pigeons. A city without them would be fine with me. My husband was more than indifferent. He called them flying rats and marveled that a few of our neighbors actually shook out bags of food for them in the park across the street, attracting gluttonous crowds. But our hardheartedness was recently put to the ultimate test.

  We returned home from a trip to find that the six-inch south ledge of our French windows had been selected as the site of a well-built, good-sized nest. This seemed a typical example of New York City nerve—the minute you leave your apartment, by death or a lesser mode, someone else tries to take it over. My first instinct was to throw the thing out. Luckily I had more urgent tasks. The next morning it held two cream-colored eggs, slightly larger than the kind we crack for breakfast. Even I couldn’t be that callous. Besides, in these eggs nestled the answer to a riddle that has long perplexed residents of a pigeon-riddled city: can baby pigeons really exist if no one ever sees them?

  From that day on, the eggs were never alone. A plump, gray-black pigeon of the ubiquitous type sat on them round the clock, with only an excursion now and then, for food, we assumed. Other pigeons visited, perched on the rail like protectors. A frequent visitor was an unusual cocoa-colored bird that we fancifully decided was the father; he had a proprietary air.

  We took to checking the eggs several times a day, hoping to catch the moment of hatching. Did the family know when we were there? Were they waiting for privacy? Abashed, we realized we were behaving like fond grandparents, practically tiptoeing near the window and talking in whispers so as not to startle the tots.

  Whether by chance or pigeon cunning, the dramatic moment eluded us. One morning three weeks later, the eggs were gone and in their place were two quivering creatures—yes, indeed, they exist!—the size and color of baby chicks: very unpigeonlike, they were covered with a pale yellow translucent down. Could there be some mistake? We watched more curiously.

  To our surprise, even alarm, the mother bird sat on the newly hatched chicks exactly as she’d sat on the eggs. We were afraid she’d crush them, but we had to assume she knew her business. She would flutter about, maybe smoothing their yellow feathers. Friends and family, including the self-assured brown bird, continued to stop by, sometimes settling in right beside the nest. Only very rarely did the mother get off the birds and take flight, always leaving them guarded by one of her cronies. Several times we caught her feeding them, mouth to mouth. It was hard not to feel slightly sentimental about it all.

  To begin with, the baby birds grew slowly, but then the rate became startling. After about a week and a half they were the size of common robins, then ducklings. The yellow down grew more translucent, revealing the far less attractive pigeon colors beneath, until the young were a mottled blend of yellow and gray. When they began to stir in their nests, we imagined, anthropomorphically, that they might be tired of being sat on so relentlessly.

  At two and a half weeks they were restless, shifting about and trying to stand; now they were chubby, no longer yellow at all but clearly, disappointingly, pigeons. One of them showed a distinctive brown tint, supporting our hunch that the frequent visitor was indeed their dad.

  Around this time, our idyllic little foray into the ways of nature, urban-style, began to lose its romantic glow. The nest, once so impressive a design of twigs, was becoming dotted with, to be polite, guano. More and more each day.

  The babies, though, were still appealing, about half the size of grown pigeons. Sitting on them, the mother was high in the nest, like a ship high in the water. At last they rose to their feet, ready to move, and to our relief, the mother got off and let them have a look at the world beyond her bottom. A few days later, we spied the adolescent birds, two-thirds of full pigeon size now, taking some first fumbling steps on the ledge, the gray-black one more daring and sure-footed than the pale brown.

  This was an exciting reward for our patience. Alas, it also gave us a chance to get a better look at the nest: unsightly, with patches of white everywhere obscuring its intricate structure. It was quite distasteful to imagine the birds climbing back in after their exploratory strolls.

  Under the watchful eye of the mother, the young pigeons (one completely brown by now) began to make tentative liftoffs from the ledge. But for us it was all downhill from that point. Though there was still a fresh, new allure about the pair, they were nearly full-grown and had become unmistakably what we had never much liked in the first place: pigeons. Observing them at close range was no longer the great adventure it had been in their days of smallness and cuteness. As for the nest, it was, in a word, vile. Covered in white paste. As the attempts at flight became more successful, we grasped that the birds would soon be gone, and like thoughtless houseguests, they would not be cleaning up after themselves.

  The morning we found the ledge deserted we were nostalgic, I must admit. But our feelings were mixed. The six-week romance of the life cycle was over, and our hospitality had contributed two more common urban pests to the already vast population. It had begun with the delight of finding the eggs, then the wonder of the delicate, trembling yellow creatures, and it all ended in a pile of guano. Food for thought, as it were. It was best not to probe too deeply its metaphorical allusions. Sentiment past, we got the plastic bag, put on the rubber gloves, and set to work.

  Wheelchair Yoga

  “The yoga teacher is coming this afternoon at two. Why don’t you try it?” the physical therapist suggested to my friend Marian as he settled her back in her wheelchair. Marian had just taken ten small steps with the therapist standing in front holding her arms and an assistant standing behind, pushing the chair in case she needed to sit down in a hurry. I walked alongside.

  From time immemorial, Marian had gotten up at five every morning to walk several miles before going to work. Some mornings she varied her routine b
y bicycling. She’d kept that up until four months ago, so it seemed preposterous that now she couldn’t take a step unassisted. It was a gross error in the scheme of things and I wanted to fix it. The doctors must be overlooking some crucial glitch, I thought; if only I could locate that glitch and let them know, Marian would be restored to her former powers and could forget all about these abject baby steps.

  At the suggestion of yoga, she shook her head, no.

  “Why not?” I urged. “Let’s do it. We can go together.” We would all try to get her interested in the various activities the nursing home offered, but with little success so far. Before her illness what interested her was going to museums and plays. Concerts too, so long as the music was pre-1850. I once suggested a concert that included Mendelssohn and she drew back, eyebrows raised, as if I’d proposed something unthinkable, like bungee jumping. Most of all, she loved books. Whenever we met for dinner, we would each report on what we’d been reading and exchange titles and authors’ names. She was the most dedicated reader I’ve ever known, except for fellow writers. But she read with more selectivity than writers, who tend to read everything at hand, even the trivial. Marian’s taste was too exacting for trivia. She favored large-spirited writers who dwelled on the dismal nature of human destiny, Samuel Beckett, for instance, and she would describe their works with contagious animation, in enchantingly rich sentences, her dark eyes aglow, her voice musical and mellow, its accent unmistakably New York.

  She didn’t watch television, so the TV in her nursing home room was useless. Friends had brought her art books and mysteries, though she’d never been a mystery fan, but the books lay ignored in a pile on her night table. Occasionally when I visited and she fell asleep, which she did often—her head lolling to one side, her eyelids drooping closed—I would leaf through the mysteries. There was one I had started a few weeks ago about a serial killer in England; each week I turned a few more pages, but to date only two bodies had been found, somewhere in the bleak marshes.

  To my surprise Marian agreed to go to the yoga class, or at least she didn’t refuse.

  The class was held in the dining room, where the tables and chairs had been moved aside. It was a light, bright room; one wall was all windows looking out on a parking lot and its surrounding lawn, still green in early September. One by one the residents rolled in and arranged their wheelchairs in a rough semicircle. I pulled a dining-room chair over beside Marian’s wheelchair. The space in front awaited the yoga teacher.

  “She’s a charming girl,” said a woman to Marian’s left. This woman was ninety-three, she told us, and appeared to be in excellent health, rosy-cheeked and sprightly. She had been a buyer for Lord & Taylor and was originally from Virginia but had lost most of her accent, she said, though in this last she was mistaken. “Charming,” she repeated. “Always smiling and cheerful. We’re lucky to have her.” She leaned over to nudge Marian. “You should come every week.” Marian proffered her dazzling smile—a quick flash of teeth, her big dark eyes gleaming so that they looked even larger. The smile and the eyes were all that remained intact while the rest of her was falling away. The smile, now as in her days of health, a mere few months ago, was like a net of sunlight flung over you.

  When she was first brought to the nursing home, Marian had said she didn’t feel she belonged among her fellow residents. They were “they,” the old or sick or moribund or forgotten. She was “I.” There was no “we.” I wondered whether agreeing to take the yoga class meant she now accepted being one of the group, or whether her attendance was only provisional, like mine.

  The teacher sailed into the room, all smiles, as predicted. She was slim, young, and blonde, with curly hair and milky skin. “And how are you all this afternoon?” she asked, gazing intently at the class of about twenty-five people, four of them men. All wore nondescript clothing—bland-colored slacks and shirts, faded cardigans, a few of the men in checks and plaids—except for the former buyer for Lord & Taylor, who was dressed and made up as if for a ladies’ lunch. Still, everyone was neatly turned out, a credit to the staff of this humane place on a green hill in a suburb that was also home to a prison, so that most of the people who got off the train and shared the waiting taxis were going to visit either the prison or the nursing home.

  Marian was definitely not a yoga type. She was skeptical of everything the least bit faddish or ameliorative. In the same vein, she distrusted any kind of zealotry or political enthusiasm. I think in her youth she had had political enthusiasm but had been disillusioned, and typically, once something disappointed her, she wanted no further part of it. She erased it from her personal landscape. I imagined that the skepticism came from her training in the Freudian tradition, for she was a psychiatric social worker. Vanity, all is vanity, or sublimation, or something of the sort, though I couldn’t mount a logical argument on that score. It wasn’t that she distrusted enthusiasm itself: she had it in abundance, but she reserved it for weighty, durable goods like the works of Thomas Mann. Samuel Beckett aside, she had a penchant for the Germanic, the heavy, the somber, the perverse, and when describing such books with her glowing animation, she would make them seem dazzlingly aglow as well, though they weren’t. She had no interest in political or social themes, and if I tried to interpolate them, she would listen politely, then say, “Yes, okay, but . . . ,” and return to her preoccupation with the intricacies of human behavior and the generally hopeless nature of human destiny, all presented with such vast enthusiasm that each book sounded like her private discovery, as if no one had ever read it before. The appeal of her enthusiasm was its purity, and by purity I mean it was untinged by the professional writer’s focus on craft—how it was done rather than what was done. I had enough of the former from other writers. Marian read for the savory pleasure the books gave, and that pleasure was in perpetually broadening and deepening her understanding of the dismal human condition.

  I was not a yoga type either, but for different reasons. I had taken three or four yoga classes in the past, at wide intervals, and would come away contented yet not sufficiently motivated to return. After a while I’d try again, thinking vaguely that perhaps I hadn’t been in touch with my yoga vibes (thinking about yoga generates this sort of language). In fact, I found yoga too static. I preferred classes where you jumped around, modern dance or Afro-Caribbean dance, where the drummers kept up a steady uproarious beat that inspired ever greater efforts of will and exertion. Yoga classes, in my limited experience, transpired either in silence or else accompanied by a kind of soporific, underwater, insipid music, which was precisely what I now heard emanating from the back of the dining room.

  We began as usual with deep breathing. We relaxed all the parts of our bodies, starting from the feet. Then we proceeded to arm movements. Up, down. Up, down. To the side and down. Five or six of the students appeared very relaxed, indeed asleep or otherwise unconscious. One man who’d started out peppy had already nodded off. Others were attempting the arm movements but not doing them properly. The woman at the end of our row, for example: when the teacher said up, she moved her arms to the side, and vice versa, which irritated me. I wanted to fix her.

  Marian was doing better than I’d expected. On previous visits, she’d told me she couldn’t get her legs to move, but now she was bending her knees, flexing her ankles, moving her feet in small circles, whatever the teacher said. She even wanted to lower the footrests on the wheelchair so she could put her feet on the floor, as some of the postures required, so together we figured out how to do that. Wheelchairs are unnervingly complicated.

  I, needless to say, was the best in the class, far more accurate and vigorous than the others. I mention this not to boast, but because it was a new and gratifying experience for me—doing so well in a movement class, that is. I’ve taken many such classes over the years, not only modern dance and Afro-Caribbean, but ballet and jazz. Never before had I been anywhere near the top of the class. I usually brought up the rear. My timing was excellent, I could stay unf
ailingly on the beat, but I was not good at picking up the patterns, especially when they got complex, which they invariably did as the class progressed.

  Amid the wheelchairs in the nursing home, however, I excelled. I was pleased with this unexpected bonus added to my visit. I usually came away feeling discouraged and impotent because there was nothing I could do to stop the inexorable, nothing I could fix. I couldn’t locate the glitch. I could only watch. Once I watched as Marian was being weighed. The scale was curious: a large, elaborate contraption that included a chair. An attendant helped her get from her wheelchair to the scale chair by bringing the two very close together and then maneuvering so that she wasn’t on her feet for more than a second or two. She weighed ninety-two pounds. The next week she told me she had lost four pounds.

  Even for a person who craved thinness, this was too thin. Marian was built small, of average weight or less, but was always dieting, and the diet, as I’d observed during our many dinners out, consisted of roast chicken and green salad. No matter what type of restaurant, she always managed to find roast chicken on the menu. Sometimes I would try to tempt her by reading aloud the descriptions of succulent dishes, but she would only flash her dazzling smile and, with a tinge of irony, say firmly, no. She would leave half her portion of roast chicken, sometimes with a bit of potato alongside, and ask the waiter to wrap it up. “That will be for tomorrow.”

  The yoga teacher kept saying, “Good, good, that’s fine, that’s right,” but the class didn’t look fine to me. They barely raised their legs from the floor. Their arms were limp, their posture sagging. The woman at the end of our row persisted in her willful disregard of the instructions, bending when she should be straightening, raising when she should be lowering, and so on. More people had fallen asleep or showed the signs of sleep. Others were awake but not participating, just occupying space. I wanted to stand up and declare that as long as they were here they might as well take part; I believed in that as a general principle of life. But of course I restrained myself.