Mother and Child

by Carole Maso

  THE MOTHER YEARNED for the wolf, at once so dapper and so wild, who had escorted her across the threshold so many years ago now. Shiny, bright. She paged it in the night. She did not want it to leave the child behind. She wanted the child to grow up—immersed in world and in time; she wanted the child to thrive.

  SHE CANNOT FATHOM the time that has elapsed since the galaxy was formed or the vastness that they are situated in. The oldest star in the galaxy is 13.2 billion years old, and the galaxy itself about 10 billion years old. The next arm of stars can be located about 7,000 light-years away. What is 7,000 light-years to her? She cannot imagine how infinitesimal they are; there is not a word that comes in her language to describe the quality of the smallness or the distance or the wonder or the fear. In the vast black cosmos, the planet floats. She thinks of their planet, beautiful beyond belief, swaddled in blue.

  She looks to where the child now stands under the arbor in the Children’s Garden. It is the first time she has been allowed to use the sharp clippers to prune the roses. Light floods the entrance to the darkened garden.

  Holding the glinting clippers above her head, the child whispers, I feel important, and she reaches up. All time, all space rush to her side. Her life is flooded with beauty and purpose. All the energy of the universe streaming toward that tiny, immeasurable, yet indelible, indestructible moment, the child illuminated and on tiptoe—it can never be destroyed: I feel important. Or taken away.

  All had been preparation for this moment—so that the child standing in the Children’s Garden under the arch, pruning the roses now with great seriousness and delicacy and care for the first time, might feel the full force and enormity of her one life—claimed for a moment from the vast and rushing void all around her—and the flames, and the heartache. This was their job all along, the mother thought—to make transactions with beauty and enchantment—morning glories and roses covering the arbor.

  One day, the mother imagines, without her, the child will stand under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and she will reach up as if to touch it, and it will come to her again suddenly, gravely, inexplicably: I feel important.

  IT WAS IN the Garden of Night Miracles where the moth—now half-moth, half-mother, made its appearance in the moonlight. How beautiful the half-mother is—and how alone. The child longs for her, but she cannot find her anywhere, and she is afraid to go outside.

  THE MOTHER PUTS out one of the small blue chairs of Childhood, and the tea set, and she waits. Though the little being may not come, the mother thinks if she sits long enough, there is always a chance. The mother has read of the Little Hominid in the local paper. This tiny person once occupied the island of Flores, one, maybe two million years ago, and does not fit into any place in the evolution of the species. He’s got no place in the early human family. He’s a hobbit, an anomaly. Out of place in time and geography, his ancestry an enigma.

  Come to me, she whispers, completely inexplicable little person. He’s terribly small, but not a pygmy, his skull the size of a grapefruit. Little Hominid who lived isolated, while others made their way to Australia.

  Some scientists insist he was a mere human dwarf with genetic or pathologic disorders, but the mother, who was a nurse, rejects this so-called Sick Hobbit Hypothesis. Come to me, Little Hominid, and stay awhile, and I will protect you from the ardent hobbit skeptics. Come to me and we will have some tea and keep each other company. The same mysterious force, discovered the year of the child’s birth, that is speeding up the expansion of the universe is also stunting the growth of the objects inside it, the mother reads to the little one.

  Little Flore, the mother whispers, and the tiny hominid slowly shuffles out from beneath a Trufulla sprig.

  Such were the days when the child was away, and the mother was left to her own devices.

  ALL THE MOTHER wants some days is to go back there, but she does not know how. Sometimes she cannot see or think about anything else, not even the child, whom she loves with every fiber of her being.

  Though she is drawn there, she is drawn against her will. Layers of ghosts enfold her, gauzy as a Halloween tale. The mother is compelled back, but she can’t get back far enough, and so she must stand forever on this windy hill overlooking the blueberries, neither here nor there, next to the vibrant, streaming world.

  THE CHILD SKIPS home from her choral practice. The big black bat flew back! The mother ran to see. The big black bat flew back!

  Where? Where? the mother said, running to the umbrella stand.

  It’s our Enunciation Exercise, the child said dreamily. For chorus! Say it with me. The big black bat . . .

  But in fact not a single bat came back to the Valley the following spring. The mother could not explain why, but it made her inconsolably sad. The solitude now was mounting. They waited for a new sign, but no sign came.

  SHE THOUGHT OF the prairie vole. When isolated, a prairie vole had increased levels of oxytocin, its heart rate went up, and the size of its heart increased over a four-week period as it tried to stave off isolation. Little prairie vole, the mother called, and it crawled out shyly from beneath a prairie leaf.

  SOME DAYS THE mother is a very dim light in a jar. At times like these, all the child can do is press her brilliant eye up against the glass, lumbering, impossibly large, her warm hand encircling it. Glass was a miracle—that is what the mother always said, and at once the child thought of the flowering of fire and water and sand and the work of human hands, and this jar—the glassblower’s vessel. What was she signaling with her flicker? Perhaps the mother had come to say good-bye. Perhaps it was not possible to die all at once. What if she had made a bargain? Perhaps a deal had been struck, and she had been allowed nine years with the child. But there were now only a few days left until her tenth birthday. Soon Aunt Eloise would be by with the beehive cake once more and the next year of the child’s life would begin.

  THE CHILD WONDERS sometimes where all the guardian angels have gone.

  No one, the child says that night, will come and steal you while I’m sleeping, right?

  No one will hurt you with a sword.

  No one will put you in a fire.

  No one will run you over in a car.

  You won’t get lost in the woods. Tell me you will find the way out. You can always find the way out.

  DARK ENERGY SUGGESTS one day everything will be black. This calmed the mother. The commotion would be over at last. The universe was expanding beyond all human understanding; the child tugged at her sleeve.

  CECIL PETER HAD said to hang human hair from the bushes and sills to repel the animal kingdom, and the mother had dutifully done what he had said. Perhaps she had followed that advice too well, for now she longed for the animals; their teeth, their fur, their claws, their talons. Not this. Overnight they seem to have disappeared. She was sealed off, losing sensation. Collecting locks as they fell from the executioner’s chair, she had put them on the sill. Now she went from room to room and removed them, the tresses of the child, and the tresses of the war dead, and she wept. She would donate those tresses now to the Virgin for her Dormition Wig.

  EASTER CAME EARLIER than it ever had in any of their lifetimes, and ever would in their lifetimes again. Never would it be celebrated as it was this year, in the winter, and in the dark. At the sunrise service it was twenty-four degrees by the Fahrenheit thermometer, and the motley congregation built a bonfire next to the Virgin, motionless in her grotto. The mother wrapped the child’s head in a woolen shawl, and all remarked that she looked exactly like the Magdalene.

  Without the gaiety of flowers or springtime, they could better feel the austerity and gravity of the situation. They traipsed around the frozen fire and someone maneuvered the boy with no legs in his wheelchair over rock to the altar. The women had gone to the tomb.

  Why are you weeping? The words could be heard through the darkness.

  We do not know where the Christ’s body has gone! The tomb is empty, someone in the dark pronounced, and the wome
n sighed, and someone urged the child toward the fire, and the mother pulled her back from it. There was a legless boy, and a rasping death head, and the weepers, and the Toothless Wonder. But the child knew that the disappeared Christ would soon enough appear to the people again as he had promised, and the sun would begin to rise. Everyone was frozen, despite the promise of the sun. No one was warmed, the temperature had not changed, and the fire was dying. When Jesus finally appeared it was to the women, and their heads were covered.

  On a bare branch the mother saw a single bird’s silhouette.

  Do not touch me, He says, for I am not of this world—or the other. Everyone gasped! The child’s arm remained extended. They were being battered by beauty.

  At once, unaccountably, there were a thousand stars pouring from the sky like diamonds. The moon had been full and the sky dark when they arrived and a bonfire burned, but as the sun slowly rose, the moon sunk, and the sky, a dome above them, seemed divided for an instant, one half of the dome dark, one half light, until light began to spill and bleed into the darkness, and all at last was brightness, a translucent blue, and the full moon falling behind the child’s head—a perfect halo. They broke the bread and took the cup, and the mother thought of the Burning Man she had seen in the fall and the quiet ashes in the ground.

  Austere as it was, and as unnerving, the boy with no legs felt there had never been a better Easter service—and the mother had to agree.

  ON GOOD FRIDAY the child’s fish, Miss Tippy, had died and was outside in a plastic bag awaiting burial in the Children’s Garden. What could be better, the child thought, than Miss Tippy on the third day, floating and gold above their heads?

  THE MOTHER REMEMBERED when the child was small and her head was as round as a planet and she would fit perfectly in the mother’s lap. The child’s feet came to the mother’s knees and it seemed to her the most miraculous of designs.

  The Slung Hip Configuration, too, seemed a perfect fit even though in the time that the child and mother made that perfect Slung Hip Configuration, the mother seemed to be always lying prone and crying. The mother could not be saved by the beauty of design, but her tears kept the child alive. They were flammable, and so protected them from the evil that everywhere surrounded them.

  Inside a circle of flame she kept the little baby safe, but to this day when the mother sees a baby, she runs in the opposite direction because she does not want to ever feel that way again.

  WHEN THE MOTHER looked back, the bird was gone. She longed suddenly for the day of Phish and Phosh and the Ovenbird. The covered nest. The beauty of the Father. The Easter story had moved her as if she had never heard it before. She thought despite its grievous shortcomings, any religion that could conjure such a beautiful story was certainly worth something. When Christ rode into Jerusalem, he rode on a donkey, which meant he came in peace. If you rode on a horse you would have come to conquer and in war.

  The mother was filled with sorrows. Four thousand soldiers this March were dead—and five years had passed.

  WHEN THE BABY sat on her lap with her little legs reaching the mother’s knees, the mother’s mouth would fit perfectly at the back of her skull and the mother would take the opportunity to cushion the baby’s round head with kisses.

  The baby’s head, cushioned with kisses, became impervious to the cruel and petty ways of some of the children who seemed to roam the earth, belligerent as if already in training for war.

  Even now the child felt her head to be kiss encrusted, and wherever she walked in the unkissed world, she was protected.

  30

  time

  THE MOTHER IS leaving behind a gesture of her time here. The way she moved through space. A gesture of utmost care and protection, a repetitive one, her hand moving through the child’s hair (that streaming and gleam) and what comes from it, this engagement with time and this one human life. The mother’s hand running through the smooth of the daughter’s dark hair. Is it not like silk as the darkness pours down, pours and pours, and the mother’s gesture reverberates through time and space, leaving no visible trace, but leaving a trace nonetheless. These were the records left beneath the official records. Undocumented, incapable of being caught by a camera or any other means. Beneath the story of the mother on a tablet, or a book, or a grave, is the gesture. The fingers starting at the forehead move through her hair, gently raking it back, and then in a circular motion, curling it around the right ear.

  How mesmerizing is this single, simple act of love and concern and protection. There’s a feeling that no harm can come, though harm is everywhere around them. How mysterious they are, and how light, as if they were made only of wind and of dust. How buoyant. The way this singular but not uncommon gesture, left to the child, will live on. As the child runs her own hand through her own child’s hair one day, a shadow mother accompanies her. The smaller gesture asleep in the memory of the child, dormant, but waiting. The child’s hair, that gorgeous cascade of darkness, shrouding her face, and then the hand coming seemingly out of nowhere to comfort, to help, to arrange—and the tenderness of the mother, which is more, some days, than the child can bear. And that is what the child recoils from, when she recoils—from the tenderness. Sloughing off the mother, for how otherwise is a child supposed to grow and live?

  Long after, the child will regret that shielding—what did she think she was protecting herself from? Long after, sitting by the river, the child will still wonder whether the mother died with the recoiling that day in her mind’s eye, as she tried to push the hair gently away from the child’s face, and the child veering slightly away—No, she had pulled away, as if from a demon. This makes the dead mother smile. Children always believed themselves to be the center of each and every instant of their particular adult’s life. The mother closes her eyes. A velvet curtain closes before her.

  And even now, the mother cannot be sentimental. She had watched the child vanish over and over into another phase of being, and it had hardened her, and it taught her never to get too attached to any person, especially a child. Attachments were not what the world suggested. The world tended toward change and suggested it was the changing, the metamorphosis, that was important. It was one of the most useful and most difficult things she had ever learned while on earth. From here she floated and watched the child grow and grow and change, and change again, vanishing so many times until she, the child herself, had become an old woman like the Grandmother from the North Pole, who is eternal.

  SHE CONCENTRATED ON the moth—its pale green wings against the screen. She put her hand to it. In winter, she would remember that simple gesture—her desire, the silence.

  THE MOTHER THINKS it is sad that after she is dead, the child, who will be a grown woman, will have no way of knowing that this day ever occurred. No one will remember this afternoon—the child so young, the moment so ordinary, so easily forgotten. She will have no recollection of it whatsoever. That they made a collage, that they made paste from flour and water and sometimes they spread it with a paintbrush. They buried little figures inside their Playdough cakes. Grumpy or Sleepy. We make our appearance here. Forgetfulness closes up over us from both ends of the life cycle. In a hundred years the mother and child will be forgotten. The mother called in her orders to the Rose Bakery, and the child filled them. I would like a wedding cake with blue roses, and five loaves of heart-shaped breads, and three dozen hot cross buns.

  No one will remember this afternoon—the child so young, the moment so ordinary, so easily forgotten.

  AND ON ANOTHER afternoon: when the mother and child played Vet, there was often a problem with Bunny Boy’s purr box, and they had to wrap him in scarves. Bunny Boy, a reluctant patient, wriggling out of his clothes, remained unamused. There is nothing wrong with my purr box, he said.

  SLOWLY THE MOTHER and child emerge from the amorphous world of marble, though it is so difficult, and the mother appears half immersed in it, until the last minute, and were it not for the child urging her out, she would s
ink back into the silence and gorgeousness, and be subsumed. One cannot help but think of the great artist liberating the figures imprisoned in the stone. Come to me, the child beckons to her mother, who is half in earth and half emerged, and for an agonizing moment, the mother is petrified there. The mother has a mind of stone, but the child with her touch calls the mother forth, releasing her from oblivion’s pull.

  AND WHEN THE mother gets tangled or trussed in the Cat’s Cradle, the child sets the strings smooth again.

  OUTSIDE THE SPIEGELPALAIS, a little impromptu play was being staged. Bits of dialog were carried out on the breeze. Nothing was heard in its entirety, and yet nothing was missed. The play came together remarkably: complete, whole in its fragments. There was a smattering of applause. Though no one could agree on its content.

  It’s a history of the Valley; it’s a story of the river; it’s a pageant; it’s actually rather more a pastiche, the last remaining professor in the Valley said; but whatever it was, all seemed unruffled, and all seemed pleased, and there was a lilting quality to the day. It was all there this time right before them, spoken above the breeze. No one seemed worried that it was not entirely accessible.

  Where the Spiegelpalais had come from, something that had once troubled them, long ago had fallen away, and they could not remember anymore a time when the Spiegelpalais had not been here.

  Once they might have wished the play to be something more solid, more continuous, less troubling, more legible, and that there might be something they could take away from the experience and put neatly somewhere, some insight, some truth. Once they might have hoped for a meaning—that it had all actually meant something. So often the assumption had been that there was a message, waiting to be excavated, decoded. Once they had yearned for a truth that might be absolute, but all that had passed—they could not explain how. The Spiegelpalais had worked its strange magic.