By Light We Knew Our Names

by Anne Valente

  While we still mourned, all of us watching the sky like fools for your plane to somehow appear, the Germans bombed Guernica, their involvement in Spain resounding from headlines. It was a development we might have ignored, through our sorrow and through our rage, if we hadn’t noticed how our mothers shifted. We watched them scan the headlines and sit still as death, alone at the kitchen table while our fathers trawled the Eastern seaboard for mackerel and pollock, lobster season at last drawn to a close. We noticed how they raised their faces to the air, as if detecting a scent other than the lingering aroma of toast and maple syrup. Then we watched them walk outside in their robes and stand knee-deep in snow to stare spellbound toward the eastern coast, behavior we might have forgiven if they hadn’t slapped us awake in our beds that night, hadn’t pulled us outside, hadn’t thrust us still nightgowned toward the woods.

  It is time, they told us.

  For what, none of us asked.

  We stood in a circle at the woods’ edge, far from our winter-silenced neighborhoods, our feet tattle-taling our path through the snow behind us. Our mothers stood across from us at the tree line, none of them with coats, an exodus born of urgency and secrecy though none of our fathers would be home for days.

  You know what you are, they told us, an admission that left some of us white-hot with rage. That this was the first vocalized acknowledgement, out in isolated dark and bitter wind. That we’d spent years shaving hair and filing down sharp nails, all while our mothers noticed, all without comfort they might have given. But our rage was fleeting; we felt it melt down into terror, then into wonder as the reason they’d shoved us outside began to take shape.

  We watched our mothers transform before us.

  We watched them sink to their robed knees, dig their hands into snow.

  We watched their fingers extend to claws, their backs arch, their bedclothes split under the strain as their bodies thickened, sprouted heavy fur. We watched their torsos expand into muscular cages. We watched them unfurl their mouths over fangs, their noses elongate, their faces pull into the cone of snouts. We witnessed their stretching and bulking and lengthening and solidifying until they hunched sturdy before us on all fours, a clan of Maine black bears, a legend made real, everything we’d believed as girls.

  You knew, they told us. You’ve always known.

  We wanted to run. We wanted to turn and escape across the threshold of our doorsteps, to climb inside soft sheets, to burrow into the shelter of restless, kicking dreams. But we knew they were right. We knew what we’d ignored. We glanced back at the blinking streetlamps of our neighborhood streets and watched them become an imaginary haven, haloed over homes that would never be the same for us again.

  The world is changing and it’s time, they told us. We are doing this for you.

  They told us a war was coming. A war they could hear and smell, a war that permeated their sleep, that billowed ceaselessly across the coast on the steady beat of waves, portending only sorrow and heartbreak. They told us our fathers would go, gone so much longer than their days at sea. That all of them would go, that some of them would never come back. They told us the world should have held promise for us, that without the war things might have been different. But with the world as it was and what it was about to be, we would become factory workers instead, replacing our fathers, replacing every man in America until our lives were nothing of what they might have once been.

  You will den, they told us. We will teach you.

  We would go underground before the war began, we would hibernate the war away. We would evade the disquiet of daily life in a battling nation, the possibilities of invasion and famine and toil. Our mothers held a line against the woods, their downy bulk our guard. We eyed them wearily, what we would become. We tried to summon gratitude, this loopholed fate, the only protection they knew to give us. But we thought of you instead, Amelia. Your canceled flight. We imagined your plane rising over the silence of our snow-covered coast, remote in height, lost to us at last.

  Our fathers returned, set out to sea again. Their trips grew longer as the spring spread its warmth, heat rising by slow degree. Our mothers packed coolers and watched them go, their boats receding to dark points on a fogged horizon, and when they at last disappeared our mothers turned back to us, told us to prepare ourselves for work. Not the work we’d known, all these years after school. Work of another kind, work we hesitated to begin.

  But it began without us, regardless of want. At school we felt our hair thickening beyond our chests, climbing down our legs as we sat uncomfortably in class. We felt our soles wrinkle as we took geometry tests, our skin leathering inside our shoes, toughening into pads that bore our growing weight. Our cheeks burned a humiliated furnace when in the cafeteria we laughed at other girls’ jokes, and instead of giggles we spewed snorts or unaccustomed growls. And in gym, when our classmates intercepted basketballs and pucks, we felt ourselves blaze with a new defensiveness, an irrationality we kept in check on walks home by brushing our bodies against trees, by dragging our sharpened nails against bark when we were certain no one saw.

  After school we pulled in lobsters, even as the season waned and replenished itself, and even as we knew our work was futile, work we’d learned long before we could spell our names. Work borne of habit and heritage, to sustain us for life if we’d wanted, but for us, a way station until we found our own paths. A cause to sit against the docks, to watch the sky, to dream of what the world held for us and not a shortened sentence, our answer given, a finite term laid before us as our bodies unfurled inevitably toward their end. We threw lobster after lobster into bins and tried to ignore their quiet calm. We tried not to notice that in every batch we found several molting, their own inevitability of growth. Against our wills and our own hardened exteriors, we took extra care of those that molted. We sank to the baseboards of the docks, our coats shielding our growing bulk against early spring wind, and we held their changing, rigid bodies against our chests. We fingered the cracks of exoskeletons splitting down their backs, how they would soon crawl from their old shells. We knew their molting sustained them, a renewal across years and years that would keep them vital and always vulnerable. Their lifespan made us wistful, and the guilt of what we’d caught and thwarted. We felt our palms linger across their bodies, to channel the life left within them, before we placed them back into bins and made our hands let go.

  Then at night, when the last glowing squares of our neighbors’ windows finally burned out, our mothers led us deep into the woods. We watched them split from seam, a transformation we’d anticipated through class and work, a duality of shapeshifting that we too would soon know, they said, once we’d learned control. We wondered what our mothers’ first metamorphoses must have felt like as we watched them sink down to their wild, creatured form.

  We were to learn the basics. To hunt, to hide. To keep ourselves cloaked, to stay awake through the night. Everything else we’d learn through the span of years we were underground. We wanted to ask how long, if we’d bury ourselves forever, and if anyone would miss us while we hid away from the world. But we feared the answers. We feared our mothers. We feared their fangs and sharp claws, the way their bodies so easily gave way to the animal inside them. We feared their unfathomable span of secrecy, how they’d walled us out from our future and how they’d screened us from motherly instinct, how they’d never thought to protect us from their own fate. As readily as we felt twinned to them, even more, we felt lost to them. We watched their ursine bulk grow within the woods, and we watched what was human in them drain away, their eyes as cold as the empty sky above us.

  Each night we learned to climb, our nails latched to bark. We learned to scale pines to search for food, and also to hide if ever our dens failed us. We learned to gather leaves and hollow out trenches. We learned to hunt, which some of us feared, the thought of tearing flesh from bone too mammalian to bear until our mothers demonstrated for us how to forage, how to seek grasses and berries, how we’d rar
ely need meat. We scavenged for nuts and growing spring buds, their roots sprouting from the forest floor through melted, dirty snow. We dug our hands into the open knots of trees for scuttling beetles and nests of honeycomb, our fingers moving gingerly forward to avoid stings though coarse hair had grown across our knuckles, obstructing stingers from open skin. Some of us even learned to fish in the open country’s glacial lakes, the pale moon glinting from their surfaces, so smooth we feared their depths. Though we’d grown up as children of the sea, so many of us had never learned to swim. We stood at the edge of the moon-spackled shore and felt our mothers push us in, the quickest lesson. We expected our limbs to flail, our lungs to fill, until we felt our muscles move by memory. Our nails clawed through the fluid water, our leathered feet kicking, and some of us even grew smug and breached the surface to dive down deep, to seek the bottommost salmon hiding well beneath the moon’s faint light.

  We felt our bodies put on weight, our clothes stretched to their seams. We felt our heartbeats slow and our eyes sharpen in range. We lost our need to squint at the blackboard from the desks lining the classroom’s back walls, seats we slid into knowing we would sleep, our eyes growing heavier as the spring lengthened the span of each day. Sometimes sound prevented us from sleep, every mumble or cough a shuddered blast, and sometimes we couldn’t concentrate on exams even if we tried, the scratches of our teachers’ idle grading too loud to endure while we worked, their pen marks as piercing as gunshots.

  We held our secret close as our bodies morphed. We wore baggy clothing, long sleeves, attire unnoticed and still appropriate to the lasting spring cold. But we withdrew, found ourselves sitting with only each other at the cafeteria tables, away from the watchful glances of our peers, who would notice the way our lunches had shifted, bologna sandwiches on bread traded away for grass and honey. We slid into routine. We sat through classes, we maintained appearance. We tried to hold fast to geometry proofs and Civil War lessons, as futile now as the work we continued after school, our lobster traps full, our rope whittled down to replacement by the sharp points of our nails.

  We might have accepted this, Amelia. We might have grown to love our double lives the way our mothers learned to accept theirs, all the secrets they kept, a power they held against bone, a protected full-house hand. We could have let go of our dreams on the steady beat of nocturnal lessons, bartering cockpits for hunts, swapping a blue world for the keenest sight we’d ever known. We admired our limbs, covered in thick hair but swifter than we could have imagined, gliding smoothly through lake water beneath a night sky we floated on our backs to watch. An empty sky—a sky we once gazed upon for the fluttering flash of your plane. But a sky aching and lovely in silent ether, a star-splashed beauty we could have sought again and again across so many isolated winter nights.

  But then we saw your headlines, sometime in May, when late spring finally let go its grip, when the last of the lingering snow finally melted. We saw there would be a second attempt, that your plans weren’t foiled. We saw that you would at last make your trip around the world, that you would take off west to east this time, that you remained steadfast and determined and would meet your goal. We read that you would take off in July, and though we didn’t want them to, our hearts seized and quaked. We felt as if we would burst, and retired to our bedrooms, away from our mothers’ watchful stares, our burled bodies overcome and shaking.

  We felt hope for you, Amelia—a hope that had escaped us across barren nights. It took root in our chests again, against our will, in the empty spaces we’d resolved our secret would fill. But we felt ourselves come undone from you too, and from the unavoidable pull of our path. We lay upon our mattresses, too soft compared to the growing solidity of our forest dens, and felt our limbs flood with shame, at what we were, at the world beyond us that we’d so easily left behind.

  You departed from Miami in June. Our mothers waited each day, watching out the front window for the newspaper though they already knew what headlines couldn’t tell them, that a conflict was growing, that our fathers out to sea would soon be gone far longer. We waited too, our sight stealthy in perusal, of headlines of your flight and not of escalations and invasions, our glances sharp over our mothers’ shoulders. We learned to hide our want from them as easily as we learned to forage for beechnuts, to lick our claws clean. We sighed our relief as the school year ended, our classmates’ clothes lighter in the warming weather and ours conspicuous in length and coverage, out of season to the onset of summer. But we remained still guarded, to the talk of small towns. We heard circulated rumors of a legend resurfaced, midnight sightings of black bears along the edge of the woods. Black bears beyond the bounds of spotted wildlife, bears that seemed to transform, to disappear in mist. A congregation distinct from mammalian behavior, a clan that moved together, one that vanished at the tree line with the purpled tinge of daybreak.

  We learned the dualities of our mothers, Amelia. We learned to hide our telltale bodies, to split our anatomies between daylight and moonrise. We learned their talent of circumspection, of holding two lives within us. We learned everything they wanted us to learn, and we learned it too well. We learned to shroud our animal truth from the world, and in the end, to obscure our beating hearts.

  We hid our hope, Amelia, our bright burning hope that you would succeed. We knew our future and still we faltered against it, against our heightened sense of smell, our increased rate of speed. These were gifts we might have prized, if we accepted the path of our biology. But we couldn’t, though we tried. We were night-dwellers meant to den, our blood coursing a line long before us. But we were girls too, girls ripped from root, girls who’d had daydreams and wishes and a place in this world. We were what we were, not only animal but human. We pulled ourselves by both poles, one born of necessity and the other of pure-bursting hope.

  We drank in the fine print of your new route around the world, your plans modified by weather and global winds. We watched your plane hop from Miami to San Juan, then on to South America, then Africa to India. We imagined those continents in renewed bright image, continents separate from our forested landscape, a terrain crowding the heavens with trees. We gathered leaves and dug holes and scooped the cavities of rotting logs, and as our dens took shape we couldn’t help but watch the dark wash of sky, feigning interest in the stars for your plane.

  You took off from New Guinea at the start of July. A sundrenched day, seared indelibly into our memory. We read of your twin-engine Electra, the 22,000 miles it had already covered, the mere 7,000 you had left to go. We studied the headlines and every word of small print, and we took in your photo, your flight goggles perched upon your head, your smile lit by a glow that burned within you. We remember our work that morning, how light it felt all day. How even the weight of lobster traps felt like the weight of air. We noted the size of each lobster, bigger as the weather swelled in heat, and some of us even graced the ocean with mercy for once, threw every lobster back to sea.

  We were so happy for you. We knew how close you were. We knew how close we were too, to a full shift, to our precipice and our end. But that day we were weightless. We wanted to wash our light over everyone. That night we gathered twigs for dens, piled higher every leaf for full coverage, but inside us even fate felt foreign; no matter what winter we endured, you would still find your way across the water.

  But in the morning, when we woke back in our beds, we found our mothers standing at empty kitchen sinks. We found them staring into fridges, sitting on unmade beds, standing at counters with half-open jars of jam. We asked them what, what was wrong, and when they wouldn’t speak, we turned to the headlines.

  Our newspapers lay scattered on kitchen tables, on armchairs. On footstools. On doorsteps. It doesn’t matter where we found them, or that we anticipated news of war at last. What matters is what we read, and how our hearts slipped to the floor and broke.

  You disappeared. Not ground-looped or steered off course, but vanished into thick mist above the ocean.
We ripped through the print, every page for further news of whether you’d signaled, whether anyone heard you, whether ships had sunk their hulls to sea in order to find you, but only the briefest of reports had appeared at our doorstep, news meant to inform but nothing to ease.

  We dropped the newspapers. We dropped our charade. We wanted to pull on our sea gear and fade away into the docks. But we felt our knees buckle, felt our heavy bodies sink down, not to all fours but to the haven of the soft carpet, our limbs immobile. We felt our mothers cross the floor and shake us, shout what’s wrong, tell us to pull ourselves together, to get to the work that grew more and more urgent as the days tilted forward. But we couldn’t move. We couldn’t lift our lumbering bodies. We couldn’t imagine a planet without the blinking beacons of your double engines floating above it, pulsing so far away from us but still there, we knew, so impossibly, distantly there.

  We lost our fear, there on the carpet. We spun toward our mothers and finally asked them why. We tried to ask quietly. We found ourselves screaming. We emptied our long-held questions from the cavities of our lungs.

  Why this, why us? Why? Why why why why why? We screamed until our voices grew hoarse, until our bodies drained away. We expected our mothers to slap us, to leave the slash of nails across our cheeks. But when we at last looked up at them, their faces appeared as stricken as ours. Their cheeks were drawn and tight, their eyes closed. They looked almost as if they were praying. We turned away, ashamed that we’d hurt them. A sorrow upon sorrow to bear. But when our eyes fell again upon the newspaper, we looked back at them, and when they wouldn’t meet our glances we knew.