Season of Fury and Wonder

by Sharon Butala

  I had seen the image of a dancer in a magazine of my mother’s; it was an advertisement probably selling face powder or something, but all I saw was the grace of the pose, the long, slender fingers, the meditative, almost sad expression on the face I would one day learn to call “Botticelli.” I wanted that. In an instant, after I’d recovered, I knew that was what I wanted – whatever it was. But in my childhood, even if we had reached a city large enough for dance studios and ballet teachers, I would have been too old. Modern dance, in the world I had been born into, was mostly still laughed at. And anyway, we were poor, a poor family, and how would lessons have been paid for? Who would pay for the costumes?

  Sitting across from my cousin Roxanne, once a pretty girl as I too had once been, lithe and quick, slender as young trees, and now lumpy, wrinkled, not so much overweight as misshapen, I saw that I chased after that image all my life, wanting to live in the world it represented where people did not have jobs or bosses, where boys did not fumble and grope, and call you names if you asked for a little polish from them, where you did not spend your young womanhood washing dishes and diapering smelly babies. I wanted the lavish bouquet of roses the dancer would have in her dressing room and on the marble-topped table in her home, which would be all thick rugs, floating silk curtains, and soft light; I wanted the handsome men in tuxedos who surely wooed her; I wanted the theatre I had read about, the dazzling parties and balls, even the long cigarette holders, and false eyelashes and designer clothes. I did not want small, prairie villages with their uneducated louts (I more or less included my own family in this description), their wooden sidewalks, their dirt roads, their stupid kids who laughed if you said something smart in school they didn’t understand. Sometimes your teachers didn’t understand the things you said either, and gave you a puzzled smile and didn’t say anything at all but moved on in a faintly confused way to the next child as if you hadn’t spoken. I was nine years old when I saw the picture of the ballerina, and I wanted out: I wanted to be a ballet dancer; I wanted to be a famous actress or a famous author, and write books. I wanted above all to live in a sophisticated, glamorous world, and to be surrounded by nothing that was ugly, makeshift or second-hand or hand-me-down, but only the newest and the best. That I finally achieved this should have made me happy, and it did, sometimes. Mostly, I was grimly proud.

  But if I had mentioned any of that then – no, if I said it today, the people I know would shrug their shoulders and say languidly, who didn’t, and I imagine we’d laugh, if in a pained, inward way. When I was a child, an adolescent, a teenager, though, if I’d told people what I dreamt of they would have thought I was a crazy person, and they would mean the word ‘crazy’ literally. They wanted boyfriends and husbands, fellows with some land or good jobs in town, ones whose dads owned the drug store or the general store or the hardware store. They wanted a raft of babies – can you imagine? – they wanted nice little bungalows with front lawns and flower beds and a vegetable garden in the back. They wanted their parents’ lives, only slightly nicer; they lacked any imagination at all. They did not want to be ballet dancers, or internationally known writers or painters, or even movie stars. They thought all that was silly – worse, they thought it was simply another universe from the one in which we lived, an uncrossable barrier existed between it and ours; to want it at all would be only to break your head and your heart; and it was all worthless stupidity, as any fool could see. I got away as fast as I could after my sixteenth birthday, I was out of there, I was history.

  It occurred to me that I hadn’t asked Roxanne a thing about her life.

  “How do you pass your time?” I asked, trying to inject a little warmth into the question, as if I really cared what she did with her time.

  “You mean, what do I do with myself, given the state of my debilitation?” Roxanne countered. I hesitated.

  “The days are long,” I said, then amended it to, “I find the days are long. How many books can a person read?”

  “People drop in,” she said. “I am getting my affairs in order. That keeps me busy for a couple of hours each day – putting loose snapshots into albums and labelling them, that sort of thing.”

  “For whom?” I asked.

  “For Melinda,” she said, and her voice was that of a little girl explaining to her mother why she’d cut a lock of her own hair, or painted on the mirror with her mother’s lipstick.

  “Of course,” I said. “Dear Melinda. She was a sweet little girl.” Not that I had a single memory of her as a child, but Roxy seemed, for once, not to have noted my untruth. What mother thinks her little girl isn’t adorable? “It’s a shame St. John’s is so far away.”

  “Yes, a shame,” Roxy whispered.

  “In that regard, we have wound up in the same boat: no children to care for us in our old age. When everybody else was having babies I was making documentaries in countries we’d never even heard of when we were kids.”

  “And sending us postcards from them just to drive it home.”

  “Drive what home?”

  “That you were living the good life, and we weren’t.”

  The good life? Lying in sleeping bags on the floors of mud huts, beating off insects and snakes and all sorts of creepy-crawlies, spending weeks in places where we were surrounded by fly-ridden beggars, surly thieves, and would-be kidnappers, with machine-gun fire and bombs going off in the distance. Having to hire bodyguards. I still sometimes have nightmares about the things I saw in those years. But I had to spend some time on the dark side so I could build some credibility. I was pretty, but I wasn’t that pretty – although I always pretended I was, and that mostly worked – and although I was smart, I was rarely quite as devious as I needed to be, until the later years that is. And wouldn’t you know it, right about the time I was finally golden, age began to creep up on me; you can only fake youth for so long, you know, before people start to laugh at you.

  “That was when I learned the final lesson.”

  “What?” Roxy asked. I had lost track of when I was musing and what I had actually said out loud, but I was aroused now, no longer quite in control.

  “In the end you die, just like everybody else. You get old, and you die.”

  I realized now that Roxie’s face had been in shadow ever since I had first seen her with her walker on the top step of the verandah of that rambling old house, doubtless slated to be torn down the minute she was gone and, built in its place, one of those stacked wood-and-glass boxes. I had not once seen her face clearly. Now, as she lifted her head at my remark and her eyes met mine, the light cleared it, I saw her face at last, and I saw how tired she was, tired of life, tired of being in pain, tired of being brave, tired of being a widow, tired of ungrateful children and dying siblings and dying friends, tired of being alone, tired of waiting for the end.

  How clear her eyes were, so blue in that wrinkled, weary face; for a second, time unravelled, and I saw the girl in her again, her warmth and unfailing good nature, which I used to tease her about. She seemed to think being nice would spare her the misery from which we all suffer – as if life would not beat her even harder for it, beat some sense into her. I was so angry in those days.

  Was she seeing me clearly too?

  “Yes,” I said, after a long time had passed. “You’re right. Gerry Duncan and I were married for two full years before I left him. He trailed around behind me, him and his pathetic broken heart, for another year or so before he finally vanished. I went to Tokyo as a production assistant on my first documentary with that famous filmmaker whose name I can’t even remember now. The company paid for my ticket, but it wouldn’t pay for Gerry, and he couldn’t afford to follow me. After that, he had gone somewhere when I got back to New York, and if I am to tell the truth”, here I paused, laughing a little, “I never saw him again. And further, I did not miss him. I have not missed him once in fifty years. I have missed nobody; I have missed nothing.”

  Roxanne gazed steadily at me, the words she wouldn’t sa
y alive between us.

  A roll of animal sound began low in my abdomen, in my womb: a ball of ripping claws tearing its way upward, the sound rising to a keening as it forced its way upward into my solar plexus, my chest, growing into a wail that rose and rose into a howl of the purest desolation. And I could not stop.

  The Things

  That Mattered

  Inspired by Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, 1990

  For breakfast, still paying homage mindlessly to a lifetime’s habit of breakfast-eating, she ate bread spread with peanut butter. Peanut butter was said to be nutritious and didn’t require dishes or turning on a stove. Studying the brown paste on the thin bread, she knew that it was this or starvation, and the latter, she knew, would come soon enough. Lately, food had become one of the things that used to matter: the golden-skinned Christmas turkey, the cranberry sauce, the mountain of whipped potatoes steaming in the bowl, yellow butter melting down its sides, or further back, the towering wedding cake with its pink and white rosettes, the chocolate birthday cakes of her childhood, the roasts of beef and ham or red slabs of salmon. Food only made her gut ache now; elaborate food bore no more reality to her than a crumpled picture in a magazine did; that she no longer felt hungry seemed to her inevitable and natural. All her days now she sat in front of the television set, and wept.

  At five p.m. she drank white wine, which did not stop the weeping, nor make it any worse. All evening as she sipped, she watched the lanky women with the bony ribcages and too-prominent clavicles, the awkwardly-long legs, like no people she could recall ever having seen anywhere, who were, nearly all of them, blond, and whose faces became increasingly indistinguishable from the one another. Understanding about Botox, facial surgery, electrolysis, breast enhancement, daily body-shaping workouts in gyms, bulimia, and anorexia, she wept. She remembered Chinese foot-binding, Japanese comfort women, female genital mutilation. Even while the women laughed their bright laughs and tossed their golden tresses, she wept for them, she wept for the women. She didn’t let her thinking go any further because, although she wept all day each day, she did not want to sit and think of the vast and ancient cruelties of the world. She wept instead at what she saw.

  And yet, the night that she heard, at three or four a.m., on her bedside radio, that an old woman’s body had been found in her house in Rotterdam and that it had been there for ten years without anyone noticing the woman’s absence, she had not wept. She felt wonder that the world could still surprise her, but then she filed that observation away along with thousands of others she had accumulated over the years. What a backlog, when you thought of it: a century of perceptions, insights, enlightening (although miniscule) glimpses of the fabric of the universe.

  And in the world itself, insights available to all going as far back as Gilgamesh. Now don’t get clever, some distant part of herself reminded her. It availeth naught. She even wondered about that. How did she know if it did or didn’t availeth?

  Hadn’t she seen enough of the brilliant ones whose faces repeated themselves day after day on the television set while she sat before them watching, listening intently, tears leaking steadily from her eyes, dampening her cheeks, their words constructed into sentences so cleverly that they made her weep, and still nothing of the world changed? While she suspected them of loving the words’ sounds and their facility with them most of all? Not that it mattered anymore.

  In any case, she had her standards. Having discovered, or so she thought, the shocking unreality of reality television, she didn’t watch reality shows at all, nor the more vulgar of the half-hour sitcoms that actually, she discovered, lasted at the most only around twenty minutes, this seeming to her another in an endless line of hypocrisies big or small which made up the knitted threads of the world. She always muted the commercial messages, although she watched the screen with interest thinking how ingenious the scriptwriters were, even those who wrote the most loutish of the sitcoms, in being able to tell a story visually in so short a time, while their real purpose was only to sell the products in the advertisements. She was saddened at her lack of originality on this issue, and wished that she had been gifted with a bigger brain or one capable of more complex thought. She wondered if maybe they were the same thing but decided probably not. It was the sort of thing she could never talk to Mervin about.

  Sex scenes annoyed her, though, to the extent she could still be annoyed about anything. They annoyed a part of her that had once mattered – that was it – but that nowadays was more a hazy recollection of annoyance than the real thing. Her once-normal sex life had ended with Mervin’s death, whenever that was, and while for a number of years, as far as she could remember, this lack had been the source of the worst pain (again, she was not sure what that pain had felt like), it had been one of the first of the things that had mattered to simply melt away. At first this failure of its mattering had worried her a great deal, that she was abnormal both to want and not want its return, until its not mattering overcame the mattering and seemed both touching in some sweet way (or what she would once have called sweet) and inevitable and right, as breathing remained inevitable and right.

  Her name was Velma York and she no longer knew for sure where her children were, although her eldest son had graduated from Harvard. When she had last seen her youngest son, he had just finished his training at a technical school, and was a plumber in this same city where she sat all day in front of the television set and wept – the children dug out of rubble from bombings, their tiny bodies as flexible as rubber, caked in a choking, grey clay, silent and merely acquiescent in their rescue. Or the African women refugees forced by human traffickers to work as prostitutes for as long as their bodies lasted; the African Americans who wept over their once-vigorous, laughing sons shot dead in the street; the Vancouver drug addicts responding to their questioners with a jaunty discomfort designed to hide their despair and shame. Or even the desiccated hides of elephants killed only to satisfy the ivory trade, their bodies rotted away, their outlines, like archeological discoveries of the foundations of once great palaces, all that was left. Her eyes were like wounds, seeping tears instead of blood; she barely needed a tissue, she didn’t even sniffle. Hadn’t someone once said that the wound is the eye or the eye is the wound? Or that the wound and the eye are one? Who was that? Jung? No, Hillman. But she wondered about wisdom: did tiny, penetrating insights advance the human species incrementally, since almost no one listened to them. Or, if they did listen, did humans understand them? Was her soundless weeping a response to that void?

  Her child-rearing days had been so long ago though, that she felt nothing when she thought of her boys, having expended all her fruitless longings for them and then her grandchildren – surely now parents themselves. She remembered them more as dreams of her own or as happenings from another, different, world, fading closer to nothingness with each passing year. She had even stopped wondering why her boys had slowly abandoned her. As far as she could remember, she had been a reasonable and loving parent, as had Mervin been. But, it seemed, having all the time in the world in which to consider, that children all grew away from their parents and, given the right conditions, such a thing could happen as had happened to her boys with regard to her. They had simply not tried to arrest what was a natural inclination. She said out loud, testing this idea, “It was ever thus.” She saw how true it was, but also how it wasn’t always true. She thought this thought was something sensible over which she might weep, but she did not, not as she once had wept. She could think how ungrateful children were, as she supposed she had been with her own parents. But that memory went too far back, and her recollections of her own childhood were, nowadays, mostly pale and uncertain, bereft of all emotion, no longer mattering.

  She recalled that for a few years, long ago, she had consoled herself with the notion that one day her grandchildren would look for her, until it occurred to her that they probably thought she had been a monster to her children, and then some time after that,
she realized that they had probably been told she was dead. What brave new world is this? she had asked herself that day, meaning, a world in which the families of her youth had been curtailed and the world thus transformed to one she could not grasp. She discovered that her own childhood and her children now belonged to the expanse of floating shades of things that once had mattered, but no longer did.

  Even, she thought, her weeping was suspect, so she examined it as well as she could. As far as she could tell it was spontaneous and not connected to a belief system about how the world was. She had never wept before in so general a way, not even when she had gone through a time when she had been somewhat less than ‘deeply’ religious: sort of mediocrely religious, a tentative believer waiting for the miracle that would sweep her into a life of self-abnegation and prayer; the vast, silent wind that touched only her as she knelt at the altar, the electric warmth shooting down her arm as she held her rosary, the ray of brilliant light from deep in the universe striking her and her alone, knocking her prostrate. After a while, when nothing of the kind happened, she had stopped with the religious stuff. She thought, when you are religious, all you think about is yourself. That was, as far as she could remember, when the weeping had begun.