That was many years ago but she still thought of him with gratitude, could sometimes see the young man in the old. He helped her in the years after John died, told her to look for a sign, and she began to sit long hours in the sanctuary washed by the light from outside died deep blood colors as it filtered through the stained glass windows. A ray of royal blue that had once been white warmed her hand as she sat in her pew all that spring after John’s death. The sign was this: things change form with ease, with abandon. There was much comfort in that.
Another granddaughter comes to the table, brings Alma a square of dark red Jello, half a pear trapped in the bottom like a small white turtle. Alma thanks her, wants to give her a gift also, points out the steam in the kitchen, a gas that had once been liquid, crowding against the window in the swinging door which leads into the banquet hall, leaving a film of moisture on the glass. But the granddaughter says, That’s nice, accustomed to her excesses, doesn’t know that Alma’s trying to save her years of searching, goes down to the other end of the table and sits by the granddaughter in the man’s shirt.
Other grandchildren and great-grandchildren come to the table. Some bring her Jello, others bring her rolls. One laughs, says, We’re the Jello brigade. Alma knows she will remember that phrase forever, that that grandson will always be the leader of the Jello brigade. Never one to think of a phrase, she is always the one to make it stick. One of the women at Sunday dinner looked at the table of widows and said, We’re the go-go grannies. From that point on, Alma had never issued an invitation to coffee or games of Manipulation or chicken dinners at the Hollyhock Hill without saying, It’s the go-go grannies, We’re the go-go grannies, The go-go grannies are getting together. Long after the rest of the women had forgotten where the phrase came from, Alma could have told who said it and where, on what Sunday of what month of what year.
Another grandchild comes with a roll for her. He sits and wraps a transparent ribbon of kraut around the tines of his fork, doesn’t want to eat it. A son sits across from her and begins telling her how much he’s always loved her music cabinet with the hand-painted picture of a man playing a lute on the front. He guesses it must be worth hundreds, a real antique. Sometimes Alma welcomes these comments, wants her things to go to those that want them. At other times she’s resentful, thinks they pay much more attention to her things than they used to. She grows suspicious that they’re all waiting for her to die, holding their breath. On days like this it seems that they’re all talking at once, saying Grandma, I like your monkeypod tray from Hawaii, I like your cloisonné lamp, but you didn’t really sell the Tiffany, did you, you do still have the humidor and the cranberry glass? When this happens she can feel her lips getting tight and thin, her eyes getting narrow, and she hears herself ask in a scratchy voice that can’t be hers, Why do you want to know? There are things she can’t bear for anyone to have. And they’re not the important things—her Bible, her pictures of John, the china and cut glass. It’s silly things like her rolling pin, the mammy and pappy salt shakers, a metal coffee can where she keeps her saltines, a cotton slip. She knows they won’t fare well. She can picture her daughter saying of course these things we can throw away. She can see them looking at her earrings—how tasteless, how quaint, how oldfashioned. She can see them laughing at her supply of wine that the doctor told her to drink to build up her blood, a joke almost slapstick, the old lady drinking wine for medicinal purposes. She’s told them often enough that she enjoys the wine, has had it for dinner all her life, that the doctor only told her not to stop, that it was good for her. The one son who loved to make jokes found her wine the richest material he’d had in years. It was this same son who, when he was twelve and obsessed with being pure and wanted to become a saint, when he stopped eating for a week, had thought her wine was wicked and wild and poured a bottle out in the gravel driveway to save her soul. Alma thinks that she hasn’t changed, that if her wine has to be interpreted she would rather be thought of as slightly wicked than as feeble and silly.
And last week in the middle of the night she suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of someone throwing away the tiny clear glass bird with the air bubble in one wing and the broken wire sticking out of its breast that John brought her as a peace offering at the end of that same awful summer when she had the crush on the pastor. When he brought it into the dark entry hall, the wire was longer and embedded in a piece of driftwood. They knelt in the hall to put the driftwood on the floor and a thin wedge of light through the letter slot in the door lit only the glass bird, the round glasses on John’s face, a lock of his blonde hair, and the diamond on her hand as she touched the bird’s left wing. And filled with white light, the wire hidden in the dark and bending, the bird looked as if it flew away from her on its own power, then back to her hand. And she decided that she loved him again, through that bird. Then John placed the bird on her dresser where two days later one of the children, she’d forgotten which one, snapped the wire and left the bird lying in an ashtray. She told everyone she’d thrown it away then, but she kept it in an embroidered handkerchief in her nightstand, ashamed of being so foolish. Then last week she started thinking about it, and she put the bird and the handkerchief in a velvet-lined ring box and went outside in her nightgown to bury the box in the yard. When she came back into the kitchen and poured herself some wine and sat at the table she started to giggle, couldn’t stop, wondered how she’d become exactly what they expected of her, a crazy old woman drinking medicinal wine, going outside at night in her gown with a shovel, burying things in her back yard.
The table fills. Everyone eats, the younger ones push the kraut to one side of their plates, wrinkle their noses. One great-granddaughter takes a napkin and dries the kraut juice from the knockwurst she chose instead of sausage, because it tasted the most like hot dogs. One granddaughter, the dancer, taps a tune on her plate with a knife. A son wolfs down his sausage, spears his wife’s uneaten sausage with a fork, finishes that, and looks around for more. Alma eats a roll, some Jello, wonders if any of her married children will notice that she doesn’t have anything else, decides she’ll wait to get more food until someone mentions that she doesn’t have any. Before her illness they would have noticed, now they’re afraid to look at her too closely. They talk to her of things around her, look at that car, at that photograph, and that’s where their eyes rest. A four-year-old great-grandson sitting on her right leans over and says, Grandma, are you sick? and his mother, putting her arm around him says, No, of course Great-grandma’s not sick, she’s fine, she’ll live forever, and Alma wants to stand up, make a speech, say, Listen it’s true and today I’m not all that afraid, things change form, why are you all ignoring it? But she doesn’t say anything, because she knows it’s hard not to be afraid. She wants to say that it’s only something about cells growing too fast. She knows enough to sound scientific about it, she can talk knowledgeably of organs and glands, but she doesn’t know enough to stop it from feeling like black magic. And it hasn’t been that easy to live with it. A few cells having a grand old time at the expense of her body, not just her body, but her self and everything she saw through her eyes in her own way. One consolation there. Revenge if she wanted it. The earth would lose one way of looking at it. No one would ever listen to her back yard quite the way she did. And that’s all the earth has required of her after all—a pair of eyes, ears, a nose, nerve endings in the skin, another organism to sense that it all exists. God required more of her, her husband even more, or sometimes it seemed that way. But the earth required only that she touch, and the earth contained the cell in her that was going wild. For a while she tried thinking of it in another way, that those cells in her throat were life, growth in a knot. The only recourse, she decided, was to feel herself as the cancer, to become the cells, cheer as she felt the explosions in her neck, as each cell lit a new cell, eating a vacuum through her body. The grandson in the khaki coat back from Vietnam, short hair he wouldn’t grow so he wouldn’t forget, talked about lightin
g up an enemy, not death. That lighting up was real to her, but she couldn’t carry it off. She was wherever the cancer wasn’t, it was as simple as that. She couldn’t contain it. She couldn’t ignore it. She wants to tell her children that, that she didn’t will it, that she doesn’t want it to happen to them, but that if it does, they can stand it, that things change form with ease, that they should remember the family. She wants to tell them that, but they don’t want to talk about it, each one of them positive that he is the one human being in the history of the earth who will never ever die.
The great-grandson on her right leans over to her, blonde hair like John’s brushing her arm, and says, Grandma, I’ll trade you this hot dog for that Jello, and he pushes a plate of kraut and applesauce and a hot sausage with one bite missing toward her. She gives him two red Jello salads and a sweet roll, saying Take this sweet roll and remember that yeast is an animal that causes flour to rise, and the grandson laughs, Funny Grandma, and takes a bite of the roll, dripping caramel on his clean white shirt.
Rapture
All that Illinois winter she’d been afraid of a coming ice age and now here they were where the last one hadn’t touched, where dinosaurs had fled and shrunk in the comfort, the ease of the life, to ruby-throated lizards which skittered across sidewalks, where prehistoric birds dove at the water for fish and plants looked like ancient and protective clusters of swords. She sits here now, in a fresh early-morning restaurant behind a glass wall looking out on the Gulf, on a small peninsula so she can watch the sun rising higher on the water as if she is in Mexico, not Florida. With clear lime water glasses on the tables, oranges in baskets and some on the ground outside rotting, dolphins arcing through the water, and white birds and sails both the transparency and lightness of communion wafers on the tongue, she feels something rising in her, an excitement, a joy in her that is almost difficult to contain. In Illinois the colors had been drab—wheat colors, dirt colors; here they are outrageous reds, greens, yellows. And here the warm air and moisture bathe her, close in around her like a pot so she feels, strangely, aware that she lives. (Her first memory involves water, warm air, and this same feeling. They’re by a lake, her mother and father and she. The air that day was greenish-gold, mid-summer, a pleasant lake smell of rotting weeds, still water, and gasoline. Her mother had on a black one-piece suit and the legs cut into her thighs and her arms were round and her skin was blue-white. Her father stood in the water by a motorboat and tried to start the engine, but it kept dying. Later they would get it going and he would give her a ride around the lake, and that was exciting and full of action and she remembers the texture of her father’s bare knees and the sticky smell of plastic seats and cool water, but that isn’t her first memory, her first memory is the moment right before the engine starts, and it felt, and still feels, like before that she was unconscious and she chose that moment to wake up.)
When the waitress comes, her husband orders coffee, eggs, fresh-squeezed juice, a newspaper. She sees Eggs Benedict on the menu, something she’s never had. When it comes and there’s a slice of orange and a stalk of asparagus alongside, she feels dizzy from the happiness, as though the orange and the asparagus are signs, another symptom of the goodness here. She tries to explain this to the waitress and to her husband, and they smile at her, her husband turning slowly to his paper, the waitress no doubt thinking she’s a tourist, giddy from the climate. She leans back in her chair, rubs her hands over her bare arms, and thinks no, I live here now, this is my home, cold weather will not touch me, nor the cold seasons of the heart. She drinks her coffee, watches a tree full of wild parakeets outside the window, the silver watch on her husband’s left arm, his cheekbones tensing and relaxing as he reads. Last night they had gone outside, around midnight, and gone swimming in the warm water of the Gulf. They had gone far enough away from shore that it felt as though there were only water and sky, both the same shade of blue-black, and holding onto one another, treading water and looking up at the stars, both of them had the same sensation, as though they were swimming through space, like a dream of falling and there’s no end to it, but a safe, euphoric falling, like flying. She reaches over now and touches his hand, asks him if it hadn’t been wonderful, swimming in the Gulf at night, and he puts the paper down, apologizes for not paying enough attention to her. He says he’ll be sorry when his job starts next week, that he might get too tired for a while to do anything like swimming at night, and she says she can’t imagine that it could really be like any job he’s been used to, not here. He laughs, and they begin to eat. My eggs taste like lemon, she says, sweet lemon. (Days before she had, automatically, tried to remember what she needed to be worrying about, a holdover from the way she used to feel, and she had found that there was nothing, nothing she was worried about. She’d even begun to forget old worries—the dreariness of Illinois, problems as a child—and could remember only the good times, the comfortable times, as though she had taken thread and made a stitch in every pleasant memory she had and drawn them together with the dark places hidden in folds, gone. And she herself is expanding, infinitely, a balloon that is not brittle, that will not break.)
As usual, he finishes eating before she does and sits drinking coffee and pointing out articles in the paper. There are new color photographs in here of Venus, he says. He shows them to her. The joy rises and settles in her chest like something tangible. She feels that she could run, climb mountains, and still it wouldn’t be released. How amazing that those colors have been there all along, she says, and no one to see them. Yes, he says, amazing. He says that he might get a telescope, that he might make astronomy a hobby. He had never talked about hobbies in the North, had been so involved in his work there. She touches his hand again, knows she can’t begin to explain how wonderful his saying that makes her feel. She turns to watch a dolphin, eats a piece of toast, and listens while he calmly talks about theories of the edge of space, the birth and eventual death of the sun, colliding galaxies, in between sips of coffee. Many scientists now think, he says, that the universe is expanding and will some day fall back into a cosmic egg and then explode again into a new one, will pulsate, which makes time stretch infinitely and allows cataclysmic things to happen, as they do biologically, which we can understand, but only so long in the future that it doesn’t concern us and helps us feel less responsible. Some theories, he says, are more reassuring than others. She nods, smiles, thinks that sounds as logical as Superman and the planet Krypton and other science fiction, wonders if she plants a poinsettia now if it will bloom this Christmas, wonders when their grapefruit tree will bear fruit that she can pick in the mornings with a wicker cesta. She can find the Big Dipper and the North Star, and she saw them last night and she’s seen them in Illinois, and the Indians saw them, and the Greeks saw them, and that’s what she knows about stars. She reaches for her coffee, knocks over her water glass, the water darkening the cloth on the table. She takes the chipped ice in her hands, puts it in the glass, says just the same, tell me it isn’t true, what you said, about galaxies colliding, the universe erased and redrawn. It isn’t true, he says, laughing. Thank you, she says, I knew it couldn’t be, and she looks out at the water, the palm trees, a blue heron walking like a cat. She wonders how he can so calmly think about such terrifying things when they’re so happy here, and safe.
The waitress brings a basket of small pastries shaped like sand dollars, places it on their table, fills their cups with coffee. They both lean back in their chairs. Her husband looks calm, thoughtful. The cookies taste like anise. She breaks one in half to look for the doves that real sand dollars have in the center, but the baker hasn’t put them in. She thinks that she would like to open a bakery herself and make sand dollar cookies with sugar doves in the center. People would bite into them, unsuspecting, and discover the candies, and in that way she could, possibly, begin to communicate the joy that she feels now. Her arms feel good to her, the soft cotton of her dress, the sandals on her feet, her hair, the way the edge of the tablecl
oth brushes her knees, the bitter taste of the coffee, the gritty texture of the cookie in her hand, the hardness of her husband’s legs, his arms, the soft hollows at the base of his neck, beneath his cheekbones; all of these things are good. We’ll swim or fish all afternoon, she thinks, watch the pelicans dive for fish while we eat dinner on the beach, and swim again at midnight.
The check comes and her husband pays it. I drank too much coffee, she says as they leave the restaurant, I feel like I’ve been drinking ether. Outside it is hot already, this early in the day. Everything shimmers. This is heaven, she says. I want to stop in the bait shop next door, he says, so we can fish this afternoon.
The Invention of Flight Page 5
