I look and look and look. Graeme takes hold of the tag stapled through the ewe’s ear and quickly tears it from the body, removing extra strips of skin and tucking it into his pocket.
“She’s got to be claimed,” he says, climbing onto the bus.
We settle back into the vinyl seats. Graeme puts the bus in gear and we continue down the empty road. He is a young man, his face pocked with scars. He is solid with strong, blunt hands. He is building a hostel of his own during the winter months when he isn’t giving tours, a log cabin on the Isle of Mull where he grew up. Graeme clears his throat and drives fast. He speaks into the microphone and watches us in the rearview mirror.
“Sometimes,” he says, “sometimes the heather is dead and dry and the sheep eat it and get stoned—hallucinate, like magic mushrooms. Some seasons we have to be very careful. They fall from the sky and land on the roofs of the cars. They think they can fly. That ewe thought she could fly.”
I’ve heard about this phenomenon before, of some animals imbibing just as recklessly as humans: deer tipsy on late-season apples and goats that climb to the tallest peaks of the Rockies to chew on high-altitude weeds that get them, well, high. And like their human counterparts, animals are most vulnerable to the lure of altered reality when times get tough, right before hibernation or during the deep cold of mid-winter.
He fingers the plastic tag in his pocket and thinks about the man he’ll later call to report the accident. A jovial farmer named Pete who has lost more sheep than any other man on the island, which Graeme feels is a shame and yet, a little funny, too.
Once, when Eric and I were young, Jon was in a bad car accident. Our mother roused us in the middle of the night and shuffled us, lank and ghostlike, into the backseat of the old blue car. We drove the empty streets in silence, save for our mother’s muffled swears and my brother’s bare feet kicking at the back of the front seat. We’d done this before. If he could avoid the police, if the accident was just between him and the inanimate objects littering his way, Jon would call us to come get him before the neighbors got nosy. I never knew what became of the crumpled cars and trucks. As far as I knew they were left right there, like dejected toys.
We found his battered truck in a ShopRite parking lot, the smashed headlights still pulsing lazily into the mist like two dying fireflies. The parking lot was empty except for the truck, a few wayward shopping carts, and the streetlight that had blocked my father’s passage. I wasn’t yet able to distinguish my waking life from my dream life, and so it all felt like fantastic fun. I knew money didn’t grow on trees, but it did spew from machines just by someone tapping a few buttons. Likewise, bodies were a given and death was an illusion. Nighttime was the stuff of movies and dreams and so was without consequence. Whatever unfolded in the cover of dark was a separate reel. Its only link to the calm of morning coffee and cartoons were the thin threads of memory, and I knew that couldn’t be trusted.
When he got into the car he was wet with blood and something else, something glittery spread into the new yellow hairs along his chin. When he turned around to face us I could see a swathe of shattered glass smeared over his skin like tiny kernels of sand. I thought he was beautiful, a beautiful shimmery monster in the flashing light of another broken car. My mother looked straight ahead and said nothing.
“I got you guys something,” he said. “Candy.”
My mother whipped her head around.
“No!” she said. “Don’t you give them anything.”
I felt my brother reach out in the dark as my mother smacked away my father’s hand, the two pink sugar cubes clattering onto the metal floor.
“Your fucking hands are covered in blood!”
“It’s only candy, for God’s sake! It’s wrapped.”
But he didn’t say any more, just sat there mute as we drove home, his magic cheek turning colors with the changing stoplights on the way.
Slowly, I reached down and collected our treats from the floor. I unwrapped them quietly and shoved them both into my mouth. I let the pink sugar melt slowly and silently onto my tongue and finally I fell asleep on my brother’s lap, content.
Until a few months earlier, Jon had been sober for a year. He’d taken us to the Poconos to teach us to ski. When we arrived, he dressed us in six layers of clothing each and sent us out to get a feel for our new mobility. After he finally left the lodge, he found us both at the top of the mountain. Somehow, we had managed to figure out the ski lift on our own. I heard my father calling to us from the lift, “Don’t move!” We were unaccustomed to such forceful, masculine instruction. We froze, clutching at each other’s arms until Eric began to giggle helplessly beneath his two woolen caps and I couldn’t hold back; I began to laugh, too. I remember how red our father’s face became as he realized that we no longer took him seriously. By the time he reached us he was not angry, but stiff with embarrassment.
We took off down the mountainside, our little bodies banging into one another, barely upright, barely controlled. Our father passed us, demonstrating the “pizza slice,” a way of narrowing the skis into a point in front of you to manage your speed. We picked this up immediately and began to move more slowly, delighting in the mastery over our own skinny limbs. I held Eric’s hand. We were too small yet for poles. As our father sped ahead, we lost sight of him in a great flourish of snow, but we were confident he would find us at the bottom, scoop us up, and take us onto the lift for another try. And then, incredibly, he did.
THE DOLLHOUSE
MY FATHER WAS Cynthia’s firstborn and she likes to tell the story of his beginning. I am twelve and sit cross-legged on an Oriental rug inside the townhouse she bought after divorcing my grandfather. She rocks in her rocking chair and works a needle through the hem of my overlong pants. I sit rapt, a blanket over my bare legs, popping cold green grapes into my mouth and chewing like a cow.
“Don’t chew like a cow, child,” she scolds. “You’ll get fat like Helen.”
Helen is my mother’s mother and my love for her is uncomplicated and soothing, like cake. It is different with Cynthia, I am realizing, though I haven’t seen much of her since I was eight and she and my grandfather moved to South Carolina after his retirement. Now she is back in Pennsylvania and I am learning how to please her. I wear the shiny penny loafers she bought for me at Lord & Taylor and call my brother icky because all males, according to Cynthia, are icky. She does not invite Eric over. It is the beginning of a swift and merciless erasure, my brother’s gender relegating him to nonpersonhood. She does not call or speak to him and nobody understands why. Cynthia had four sons and has buried one already, though two more are slouching ever closer and there is nothing she can do about it. Eric, it seems, might as well join them now and without much fuss. “I’m no good for boys,” is all she will say when pressed, though I rarely press. Her wrath is unpredictable and I know, even at twelve, that my abdication would be forever. She refers to me as her daughter and speaks of my mother (once her pet, too, and now, it seems, her competition) as if she is no better than the squirrels digging in her trash cans.
“Well, I was the one who had to pay for all those abortions,” she says to me casually one day. “Oh, you didn’t know? A ploy to keep your father around, that’s for sure.”
But here on her rug, one winter day when I am twelve, crackling heat rushing from the fireplace, the soles of my feet warm and the bursting grapes sweet and pulpy as I chew one and then another, I feel only gratitude for my inexplicable specialness, my new role as the chosen one. I do not yet realize how many have come before me, that each of her sons received this same treatment at one time or another—the shopping sprees and chin-lifting adulations—and that my own mother, whom she now so disdains, was once her “daughter,” too, a thin girl from a middle-class Jewish family who ogled what seemed only opulence and discretion, the new boyfriend’s family like a wealthier version of the Cleavers, practically aristocratic, the very blood in their veins like gilded silk.
Cynthia
was an only child from a small town in Illinois and she loved her father with singular ferocity. He sold high-end lawn mowers for a company named Barbara-Greene. He also flew small single-engine planes over wheat-cracked fields and once, in the 1920s, before he married my great-grandmother, he fell in love with a Parisian burlesque dancer named Lucienne. Her photograph hung behind Cynthia’s desk for years: Lucienne’s small perfect breasts bare between the sparkly straps that hold up a large billowy skirt. She wears ballet slippers, her ankles crossed in perfect fifth position, and her plump white arms reach high over her head, her fingers laced into the plume of peacock feathers she wears on her back. Her expression is girlish and amused. If sadness is there, I don’t see it. She smiles with one side of her mouth. Her eyes are dark and round and lined in kohl beneath straight black bangs.
Cynthia had many fantasies about Lucienne’s life, as she did about any lifestyle she imagined exotic, and she whispered them to me gleefully when I was a child, as if relating the red pockets of her own past. She lamented how her father’s parents had forced him back to Illinois to marry a local girl who cooked well and collected porcelain. She imagined his alternate life the way most girls covet fairy tales; she spoke of dark curtains and snifters of brandy and crinoline petticoats hiked above Lucienne’s knees, her thighs cold and chiseled like marble. But there was propriety in it, too, because Cynthia was a woman who valued intellect and social status above all else, and she learned to play puppeteer to her loved ones with long strings of money. And so Lucienne is an orphan escaped from a rural convent and forced into the sordid life of the Folies Bergère, until one day she meets my great-grandfather and is given the opportunity of education, Cambridge or Oxford of course, where she becomes a brilliant art historian, traveling the world on cruise ships with her devoted husband, her early career just a cheeky anecdote revealed to certain enlightened company during small but decadent dinner parties.
I found these stories mesmerizing, even while I recognized the essential misconceptions that made them possible. They were fascinating because they revealed a softer side to my grandmother, a glimpse of the woman beneath the facade of doctor’s wife, church choir soprano, and country club denizen. As I got older, I learned to distinguish the many layers of Cynthia—many personalities even—each with its own voice and posture and set of values. But they took years to learn, years in which Cynthia shed her family and friends like dead skin, a gradual sloughing of excess souls, until it became just her and me on the telephone, a young woman she exalted and lavished with money and attention, a relationship as fantastic as any fable and just as dangerous. I am your fairy godmother, she often sang out in the middle of conversation, her voice a mercurial liquid silver.
Now that Cynthia is dead, Lucienne is above my desk. I talk to her. She is my confidant, my silent partner, an empty vessel into which I pour my stories. She does not breathe a word. She is sexless, heartless; her skin is bleached. She is a doll that I can arrange at whim, as I once was, ragged and mean. I wish I could dig my knuckles into her spine and pull those tender shoulders back against my chest.
Hold your shoulders back, child. You have such lousy posture.
My Lucienne is smart but ineffectual and greedy in the hungry way of the young. I send her abroad and buy her pretty dresses and expensive scarves. I pay her way to Italy, England, Scotland, and Ireland. She studies art, history, and the literature of decadence: Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee and Robert Browning. She is my world, my pigeon, my little pet. Perhaps she is half-Jewish, my Lucienne, my beautiful belle. She is not to tell and not to use those words, her mother’s words—oy and kepala and kvetch—they only make her sound dumb. Even now, I must help her tidy her sloppy sexuality, her stringy clothing, her countless mispronunciations. A silly girl who needs fixing.
My mother was fourteen when Cynthia swept her into the fold. The four Nelson boys each drove expensive but practical cars. They snuck out at night, drank themselves sick, and in the morning came down to breakfast donning neckties. They attended (and were summarily expelled from) various boarding schools in New England. When Cynthia came upon a glass bong in the basement one day, she mistook it for a vase and filled it with fresh water and a handful of white lilies from the garden.
There were prime ribs for supper and fences to keep the deer from dining on prize-winning rhododendrons. A gardener named José and a beautiful Jamaican housekeeper named Icy. A grand piano. Cynthia was learning the violin. My grandfather, Harry, nipped at bottles of gin squirreled away in the cushions of his easy chair and tugged on a pipe, bergamot-laced smoke tumbling over the fat drowsing cat they called Floosy.
It was an intoxicating narrative, you understand. My mother’s father sold upholstery; her mother, real estate. They did not vacation in Bermuda, but down the Jersey Shore. Year after year after year. And when Cynthia stole my mother’s favorite synthetic-blend sweater and sliced it to pieces with her sewing shears, they all had a good laugh. There would be better sweaters soon. Countless cashmere sweaters and matching pearls.
But enough. I am twelve and I want news of my father. I rarely see him anymore and so she tells me this story.
It was 1958 and Jon was still churning inside her belly while the blows of Chicago’s most violent snowstorm were still at bay. She did not yet realize all the damage it would do, that she would be right there, in the eye of the storm. She was a new wife and living in Philadelphia with my grandfather Harry, who attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. She did not love this man, not really, but had married him to please her mother—a stony woman who’d been drawn to the scent of old money wafting from the Nelson family home, from gleaming mahogany chests and the warm flanks of the thoroughbred horses as they stood stomping and snuffing inside the stables. The cinnamon smell of the maid’s slick, black, and shining skin. A doctor’s wife, her mother had cried out after receiving news of the engagement. Her heart was an empty bank vault, Cynthia tells me, and I believe her, believe most anything she tells me for a very long time.
Jon craved red meat and so she ate it, rare at first, thick steaks singed and peppered black on the surface, wet and crimson inside. It would not do; it was raw flesh he demanded—needed, she supposed—some prenatal nutrient gone missing from the modern diet, and so she pried apart small strips of the uncooked steaks and sucked them down greedily, stealthily, until Harry caught her one day and snapped, “Cynthia!” She’d felt ashamed and stupid and didn’t eat much of anything after that.
“That was my first mistake,” she says.
She gestures me close and helps me into my newly hemmed pants. She does not hug me or pinch my tuchus like Helen, but she pats my head and blinks, her eyes giant blue marbles like Louise’s, my favorite doll’s. Louise has three yarns of yellow hair that I twirl around my tongue until they yield like chewing gum. In this way I fall asleep most every night. Cynthia gave me Louise when I was just a baby and she will periodically confiscate her and give her a good scrubbing. Cynthia’s hair is soft as rabbit fur and she lets me fluff it sometimes when she is using her baby girl voice, which she uses now, and there is much blinking and mewing and oh, she loves me so.
“I flew to Illinois. I was eight months pregnant. Daddy was away on a business trip and had begged me to come home and look after Mother while he was gone. I agreed, out of boredom, I suppose, and devotion to Daddy. It was a Saturday when I arrived,” she says. “I know it was a Saturday because the milk was out, in the bottles, you know?”
But of course I don’t know, being twelve and morose and narrow-sighted.
“When Mother answered the door she just stared at me. She was wearing this white silk robe I couldn’t recall. She must have thought me fat, fat, fat. And I was. ‘Well, come in child,’ she said. ‘You’re letting all the good air out.’ Can you imagine, Jessie? Oh, it was an ugly house! Cheap, cheap!”
She lifts her arms in front of her and lets her wrists dangle as she flutters her fingers about. It is a silent request for me to hold her hands,
which I grant her eagerly, because physical affection from Cynthia is rare—or at least it is never enough for me, so accustomed to the hugging and kissing and cuddling from my mother’s side of the family.
I WILL RECALL this conversation years later, as an adult, when I arrive at her deathbed and startle her out of a morphine coma.
“Gramma, it’s me, Jessie!” I cry out. “I’m here.”
I won’t mean to cry, but the suddenness of her condition will undo knots and scrape the sky out.
An email from Harry’s third wife on another Saturday morning:
“We have sad news. Grandma/Cynthia is in critical condition after having been diagnosed last Wednesday with pancreatic cancer and metastases to her liver. She is not responding but is getting excellent care at the nursing wing at Foulkeways where she has been living.”
Beyond the inappropriateness of an email in such a situation, it is the duplicitous mention of her, “Grandma/Cynthia,” that will dissolve any last notions that this is a family. When I finally get to her from Connecticut, two hours later, she is already beyond language, and there is only this final expression of her.
“It’s me, Gramma. Jessie. Can you open your eyes?”
When she does, I will see that I’ve scared her terribly, suddenly wrested her from whatever hollow of peace the drugs had carved out, her blue eyes shot through with electric yellow, the liver quickly expiring (weary, punched out), and her arms will lift and her fingers will flutter and her expression will send screws tumbling to the floor—an image that will beat itself out inside me for weeks and months and maybe forever—her mouth contorted in the most awful grimace of hopelessness and anger and utter disappointment. Even though I am assured by the nurses that this has nothing to do with consciousness, with agency, with message, but only with the helpless contractions of a body shutting down, I cannot help but feel that I have let her down, again and now eternally, and I will never know why. More than likely, this is the ego at work, a terrible self-importance compelling me to believe her ultimate act of will would be for me, albeit one of scorn, and that she would use any last shreds of selfhood in order to get this message across. But because I can’t know, because she did not phone me the week before, when she first learned of her terminal diagnosis, nor in the days that followed, I cannot help but wonder and despair at the thought of her loneliness, her fear, and what may have kept her from reaching out to me then, as she did with most any other grievance. Was it merely to protect me? Or was it because she had decided that her final days would be her own, away from the tears and terror of people who had already mourned so many, and so loudly? Certainly, a little quiet might be in order. I ought to honor her bravery—that she would climb so quietly into her deathbed and politely offer up her arm for the morphine drip that, she must have known, would take away her volition for good. While I had often felt that she was living her life through me, offering up the pleasures of travel and education, she had never suggested that I had any right to her death, too. I had assumed that this singular love meant that she would want me near her in those closing days, the only person she seemed to trust, and that she would have some last wisdom to impart, some direction to offer to a life in which she had seemed so vested, and yet so quickly abandoned. In turn, I thought I could offer all of me, just this once, which is what she had always wanted after all.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 9
