RECAPITULATION

—Mother revives—a party must be thrown—you don’t need a barn to hang your star—did I teach you how to bow?—I am dead—making herself over—the via Dolorosa—a chair that loves me—something younger than she ever was—the Roman dentist—her unlivable desires—Mama cracked—I move us to Golconda—made to wing one—I know this story—we arrive at the butcher’s—browbeat them with blood—Hopey is a brave, good dog—home at last—no light, no wife—I am way past time—gone for sausage—name the change—a different kind of quiet—and then—we took that bath together—isolating theatres of self—I come from Mama’s scar—shameless guilts and glancing ardors—but a party!—some brighter, brand new hours—our last good looks—tonight, all good guesses will be true—the son may speak—I love you—am I funny?—sleep fast and remember—

Mother stuck. We could not finally lose her. She revived. A birthday, after all. A son, a grandson, two boys, once and twice descended from her blood were born, and here we were, her proof, she lived, she had forgotten, said that certainly, of course, a party must be thrown, balloons must be arranged, cakes frosted, tables set, stars hung, planets, comets, moons; the blessed Virgin and her holy son, according to my mother, must not go unremembered through the celebration of our seasons. Lincoln and Lincoln. Joseph, she said, Mary, Jesus. We are born. Something must be meant, our being born so near to Him; something must be made through which a guest might easily perceive how “each and every one of us,” in His creation, is illumined as the blessed vessel of His holy meaning. That means you, and you, and me. We are needed, placed, beholden and responsible. No accidents. No soul of us unsparked. “Granted,” said my mother, “some sparks big, some little,” but from the big the little could be made a little bigger; from the vision of our savior bearing forth His cross, “your Grace Dendaris of the world can see a point to what they’re doing.” Yes, naturally, my mother said, a person needs a scene to see what he is meant for looks like, though to stage a scene, she said, you do not need a trough. Nor do you need a beam from which to hang your star, nor a hank of baling wire to make one. Think tub, Mother says, think sink, think screwhooks in the ceiling. According to my mother, you can pick a mess of paper flowers up at Bi Rite. You can find a slew of party favors at the Rexall. You may boil weenies, dye punch, plug a record on the jukebox.

“Know this,” Mother says, “Grace Dendari wants to dance.”

If she isn’t dead, my mother says, then Grace is surely lonely, older, more the same, and yes, again, of course, very much—what did I think?—she wants to dance. According to my mother, Grace has seen her weight fall from her chest, and through her hips, and past her thighs and knees to gather at her ankles, and she has known that all her life her hands were meant for kneading dough, and that her feet were meant for dancing. Trouble is that these days she can’t lift them. Likely never could. Some can’t. Though most remember that they could, can, and did, though they did not. In the early a.m. hours, as my mother sees her, Grace Dendari stands before the full-length mirror, plucks the hem up from her baker’s apron and recalls a girl who danced, tells herself, “I danced,” and sees another, slimmer leg, a lighter foot than this reflection of a foot she feels is nailed down to the carpet. Oh, it moves, this foot, it isn’t really nailed to any carpet, but it isn’t light, it drags, it clumps, you could not call it dancing. Her shoe is wrong, her hosiery, there is a fatness at her kneecaps. She holds her hands out to herself, acceptingly, shapes a space out with her arms as if she has embraced a partner. Drag and clump, clump and stagger. Is this elegant? What should she say? She has been to parties. She reads the magazines. She wants to say she wished she lived where people ate more scones than doughnuts. She wants not to feel so many stories left to her are prefaced by In my day... She is short of breath, she cannot breathe. Help her, says my mother, invite her, show her how to dance a simple step, ask her where she’s got her hair done, tell her she is just as I remember.

“And when her song has played out, and you’re finished,” says my mother, “don’t forget to bow.” Says my mother, “Did I teach you?”

My mother picks her brush up, touches it against her hair, smoothes her palms against the places she has touched without her palms quite touching. She was waiting, I think, for an answer, traction, some response of mine to help inspire and direct her. She had begun, I think, must have felt herself to be at a beginning, and yet how many times must she have heard herself? How often, every day, had she passed over Grace? How many times must she have picked her brush up, brushed, smoothed, begun to touch her hair, and known enough to not quite touch it?

“I’m all burned up,” my mother says. “They say with some it never happens, but I never met the person yet who takes her dose that doesn’t get her hair fried.”

“They gave us ham,” my mother says.

She says, “Vernon says these spots will run together one day, and I’ll look like I have got a tan.”

You saw her looking to us for her tone, I think, a sense of audience, somebody, somehow she must play for. Should she be angry with us? With herself and her condition? Bewildered, was she? Was she touched? What did we two think? Would we like for her to shame us for our youth, our health, our beauty? She could empathize, she seemed to say, she knew how the boy must feel, she could, if he liked, invent a party which would fall out from the marrow of his feeling. Something new to her, an old story, remade for the boy, just let her know, just give her something she might go on. She was beginning, did we see her, had we heard, she knew she was a bore, she must repeat herself “just something awful.”

She says, “You get the wearies, hearing so much ping-pong.”

She twists a lipstick from a little silver cylinder.

“I am invited,” she says, “aren’t I?”

She says, “He died of water.”

And, “I have got a wind-resistant sportsuit.”

She tells us we must turn our backs, wants us please to step out in the hall, if we don’t mind, make ourselves scarce, close our eyes, at least, “A lady needs a little privacy.” Then she turns her sleeve up, shows us where they could not find her vein. My mother asks us would we like to see her ankle, or her knee, asks us would we like to see where they have cut the rib out.

“I’m all bruise,” my mother says. “I don’t dare wear short sleeves out in public. I bump up against a doorjamb and my skin breaks. Say I’m visiting with folks, well, then I am last of us to know that I am bleeding.”

Says my mother, “Died of water. We are made of water.”

She says, “Scares me how much nothing hurts.”

My mother asks me please to fetch a blouse for her, wants for me to fix the hook on her brassiere.

“Don’t look,” she says, says, “Do you see a lump there, just below my neck, to the one side of my backbone?”

Me, the son, my mother’s son, I do not look; I do as I am told to do, in part, as I believe my doing will best suit me. Me, I poked around my mother’s drawers and shelves, looking there, and not, and through the jars of pills and syrups, the wrinkled tubes of creams and jellies, I saw Hope, saw burlap and Visqueen, the butcher’s bones, my son at play with Hope and happy.

By and by, because I wanted her to know we listened, that I, at least, had heard her, I said, “Mama. Mama, nobody believes these days too much in Jesus.” I said, “I think Grace is dead.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said my mother. “Folks believe a whole lot more than they let on, and Grace is only all about who’s living.”

My mother rubbed a salve into the raw spots on her wrists. She sifted through her jewelry box, held up gold and green and blue and cast-and-chiseled silver things against her throat and earlobes, judging for effect. We would not help her. How does she look, she wanted to know. How about this, she seemed to say, too gaudy, too formal, do you think, or this necklace with this blouse, too loud? But we did not help, we could not say. We were all hands and pockets, slouched, red-faced and foot-focused, dumb. My mother turned back to her mirror, dismissing us, I think, as men. She chose according to herself. She had begun, she seemed to say, I will not go back, I will make my own way newly. We watched how she applied her base, what she chose to highlight, saw her hang herself with jewels. She stood. She began again, with a difference. Lily Fong’s, my mother said, the renderer’s, a vet; what on earth, my mother wondered, did I believe she ought to know about Humane Societies? Was this visit really all about a dog then? Was I to let the boy believe a dog meant more than people? More than family, Mother said, more than generations, our histories preserved in blood?

“Bow,” she says. “Let’s see if you remember anything at all I’ve taught you.”

My mother lifts her chin at me.

She is smaller than a girl.

She says, “I thought so.”

To the boy, my mother says, “And you, who teaches you your catechism?” She said, “Gracey is the one she makes your doughnuts.”

She took his fingers in her hand and laid them on her wrist and asked him what he felt there. You could see her coming into focus. I think I understood that she would not be lost, not by us, not this night; this night, she was saying, we would not mistake her.

“That’s me,” she told the boy. “That’s you. That’s the heartbeat you can feel that keeps us living. That’s blood. On earth, when you’re alive on earth, your soul lives in your blood, and that heartbeat is your soultime. You’ve got more beats left to you than I do. You’ve got a lot more soultime, understand, all your life on earth for keeping quiet. I could die tonight, you know, and you’ll be sorry someday that you didn’t talk to me because you lost a doggy. Do you know what I want, I want to hear you say what you would like to see there at your birthday. Don’t you worry,” said my mother. “You take care of people, and your dogs will follow. I’ll tell you what, how’d you like to hear about the party I once gave your daddy—did he tell you?—when he was turning five, the shindig I put on to celebrate his birthday?”

Well, to hear her tell it, you would have thought it was another mother’s party. To see her, you would not have guessed she was a woman who had dressed away her pretty days in corduroys and sweatshirts. You would have seen her as she might have seen herself, the wearer of a mateless earring, that silver hoop, an arresting woman, “carelessly luxuriant,” a mother who has saved herself against her motherhood, an idea of her motherhood not hers, no, not hers—she, my mother, she was fashioned from herself, ahead of her time, an idea any girl once might have had of Mother and forgotten. She was free to go. You could believe she went. You could believe her son once sneaked into her bed when she had risen just to smell her. You understood his want to rub her underthings against his cheek and then to one day wear them. She had hips, breasts. When they looked, the son, the father, men who had a lover’s eye for women, they could not have said with any certainty that hers was the lap through which a child had passed, swelling and distending, cleaving her and sucking, gnawing and scratching, needing her and crying through her sleep for her and needing her and needing.

My mother seemed to me then to be growing. In that room, under that light, the more she spoke, the more I saw her bones fill. You looked at her when we walked in and would have said her bones were hollow, more shell than bone—her skin, her flesh more of a yellow moss, I would have said, a drapery of antfood, maybe, guppystuff. She was dying. This year, she said, this was it. She dreamed it. She had seen it many times; she was a little girl, she wore saddle shoes, flowers fell her way, oceans called, she watched a porter wheel her trunk across the gangway, she was dead. Ants, tiny fishes, she saw, worms. She said so on the telephone, I am dying, she said, a priest last night massaged my feet, an angel offered me a biscuit, I am dead. And then you walked into her room and saw her eyes float and her hands shake and you heard her say my name and you believed her. Yet here I heard her voice succeed itself, uninterrupted, and I saw her bones somehow becoming bones, thicker seeming, denser, marrowed, an able carriage for the skin I saw was skin, the flesh I saw was flesh, nothing to be fed upon, nothing static, not to rot, my mother’s body able to advance itself untaxed from one place in the room and to another, powdering itself, applying to itself a stripe of brick-red lipstick, rouge, mascara, a modest drop or two behind the ears and knees and ankles of perfume. Shindig, she was saying, and soiree, and her bones filled out, and she commanded them, her bones, her body, my mother was in charge, getting herself up, she said, making herself over.

This was the lie. The lift. When she smoothed her hair again, brushed and smoothed and sprayed her hair, rinsed her mouth, pulled her cuffs down past her wrists and straightened up the collar of her wind-resistant sportsuit, I do not think she saw herself a fright. Grace Dendari, Amelia Dangberg, dear love Vernon, Owen, Papa, my son, my wife, me, myself—she left us all a long way back behind her, way down underneath. She was flying now. Untracked. Unbound. She had begun. In her eyes I thought I saw the far blue I recall we were to see in Rome of Michelangelo, ceilingless, the colorway through which she passed from home and to the soul of her religion, from the poplars to the frescoes, from the calves to the cats, from the squeeze-chute to the coliseum, my mother passing peacefully, swathed, in blue, uncorruptively ascendant.

So what was Mother on? What drug? What dose, I asked myself, and how long would it last? Her euphoria, what antidote might interrupt it?

She was saying Rome. To the boy. She had been there. “Oh, many times,” she said, “since I was just a little girl, just your age, by train, in those days, to New York, and then by boat,” the same lie I had heard her lying all my life, yet true, credible, at least, to the boy, apparently, and through the boy, to me—true, and seeming truer still the farther she would stray from what could be the truth, the higher you could see her rising to the place where her regrets appeared to be forgotten, and fear was not foreseen, and every want she knew was answered yes so long as she continued in her story.

“Your grandad,” she was saying, “he didn’t come along. But he didn’t stop us either. He took us to the airport, and he kept the postcards on his dresser, and I remember when he met us coming back he’d brought me flowers.”

She infected us. Mother, her talent, a woman’s talent, any aging bearer in the world of children must possess it, this talent to infect; me, at least, I felt her marrow in my marrow; I could not recover to myself a worry over where a story was begun, what was true and not and where a truth was softened up, omitted and extended. You compose yourself for Father. You remain composed for Grace. You may argue. You may pity. Yet Mother, any worn out, dying matron on the bus bench, well, I did not want to sit by her; I did not want to touch the peaches she was squeezing in the market; I did not want to know she bathed; I did not want to hear that she had kissed a man once with that mouth; I did not want to hear another word about another dream another mother had of dying.

Yet Mother wasn’t dying, as we watched her, Mother lived. Cowardice, a meanness, my ingratitude—whatever I would feel come weighing I could feel my mother was relieving. My skin itched. My brain slipped. A kid, I think, some kid was shooting slingshots in my chest; behind my eyes some boy was sleeping with his feet up to his ankles in the freshet; though I could not have said so at the time, I am pretty sure a man in me was fingering around for anything he could recall had made him happy. Certainly, I felt high enough and elsewhere, there with Mother; I was rising on the swimmy rapture of my wants; I saw them swim as if in silted water, never coming clear enough to say beyond what each want might have felt like—this want calm, this want light, these wants hopeless, simple, smiling, fearsome. I could not say Rome. I could not name a saint. I saw no infant suckled from the bosom of a virgin mother, no galleries of weeping Christians gathered at the foot of any savior’s cross. I had no color. I had no certain way of being taken. I was calm, hopeful, happy, scared, according to my wants.

I think really I was having fun. I think that I was glad then to be given over. This was play, I must have felt, Mother’s game, infectious, I must have wondered what her rules were, how a son might best compete, what was fair or not and were there handicaps and was I handicapped or Mother? I know that I was dizzied, hyper-and desensitized, felt as if my veins had been injected by my mother with a heavy dose of an anesthetizing stimulant. I remember that the stain I saw on the seat of Mother’s wingback would not keep itself a stain. It dissolved, seemed to me to lose itself, its shape, as a stain, seemed to blur into the color and the pattern of the fabric while I watched it. It was unexceptional, not a flaw, I understood, this stain was meant to be there. The tear in my mother’s bedspread, the patch she stitched to mend the tear, these, too, were meant to be there. They disappeared, being there. Too soon, I could not make out that antiseptic odor I could typically make out, nor the faintly acrid urine stink, nor the stink of bad gums, open sores and loneliness a guest made out beneath the antiseptic, nor the pots of potpourri my mother spread about her room to scent the whole mess over. Here, then gone. As if my senses meant to tell my brain, So, what the hell, this place is just like any other place, a place is only what you make it.

My mother, I believe, was saying something about a broken heel, and cobblestone, and cars competing six abreast—charioteers, I think she said, like gladiators, she was saying, like they were driving chariots, from ancient days, right there on the via Dolorosa, right there in their little cars and modern suits!—and it occurred to me I could not hear the quiet there, in her room, the sound through her wall of her neighbor’s television—more bad news, an oil spill and a car-bomb and a scandal in the White House, the belated isolation of those pathogens responsible for her neuralgia, or his phlebitis, for their sciatica, glaucoma, carcinoma, their stout, degenerative hearts. Ain’t that the way, I heard, and, Just when you are drowning in the poop, they offer you a carrot. Typically. Typically, my mother did not speak, neither of us spoke, not in the presence of the other, we were quiet, saving up for phonetime, and through the quiet I could hear the news, yes, and the commentary on the news, and the gameshows and the soaps—the lights and bells, septuagenarian recipients of speedboats, gas grills, ATV’s and Caribbean Cruises, citizens you saw with one foot in the Anchorage and one foot in the den, where they, too, were channeled on to Days of Our Lives, All My Children and Another World, falling dozey through another week of vows, betrayals, and amnesiacs, the resurrections from the dead and the arrival, on a Friday episode, of Duke, the delinquent son the honest Doctor Bob is shocked to learn—on the eve of celebrating two-and-one-half decades of connubial fidelity to Kim, one-quarter of a century to Kim, to Kim, to Kim—is his. I thought that I could hear my mother’s neighbors staying tuned till Monday. Typically, I thought that I could hear the lids come off of jars, the labored twistings of the crippled fingers, the sparing application—not too much, not too much, you don’t really need it, remember The War, remember The Depression—the dabbing on, then, of the liniments to stiffened, swollen joints; I thought I heard them thinking, an old gal practicing the speech she had rehearsed for when she picked the phone up, redialed Everald Wilson, Grievance Communications Unit, this old gal praying for the strength to not conclude herself politely; this old man praying for the strength to say a word or two at this week’s funeral; these old boys and girls, I could be pretty sure I heard them praying not to wet the bed, heard them trying to remember to affix the bridgework for the grandkids, heard them calculating pocket change, recalling eight-year droughts, one-night stands, regretting choices from the menu on a rare night with the sons and daughters out to dinner, pondering what might be said, in the common room, later in the evening, during TV Time Discussion Group, about the state of a world in which the script demands a sinning, two-faced Doctor Bob. Typically. I heard, and figured what I heard was health, the heated, busy, decomposing mulch thrown thickly over what it meant to be here. Doesn’t mean I’m dying. Doesn’t mean I haven’t got another place to go. Doesn’t mean I haven’t got a son who loves me. You get old. You age. You do this. Play ping-pong. Eat popcorn. Goof around. Is your life really any different?

My mother spoke, uninterrupted, and I think I lost my way with her, the sound of her voice against that little voice I used to raise against the quiet, my No, my answer to the question It’s not this way where you live? She came over me, winningly, I wasn’t ready to play, could not compete, not yet, I had been counting on a lull here, a reprieve. No, I should have said, not me, it isn’t mine, not my game, your life, I have a child, a wife, a job, a lawn to mow, a walk to clear, a fence to mend and a roof to patch, a garden I will help to weed come springtime and a chair that loves me.

I said, “Mother,” and she offered me her elbow. I said, “Please,” and she was saying, “Shall we?”

I think I understood then that the only end of Mother’s game here was desire, who could want the hardest, who could want the most, a simple game, child’s play, an instinct, untaught, the survivor’s code for an uncivil, civil kingdom: Make them want what you want and you win.

So, Rome. Well, why not an elephant to celebrate my birthday? Why not a clown, the magician who had sawed a woman half in two because I always liked a circus? A dancing bear, she told the boy, a juggler, a man who swallowed fire, a circus, a real-live Russian outfit, and food as catered by the French, in favor of Amelia Dangberg’s Irish. She was escorting us, conducting. We moved slowly out the yellow hall, my mother’s arm hooked through my elbow, my mother drawing pictures with her free hand of the big top and the catacombs she meant for us to see there.

She told the boy, “I had a toothache once in Rome, and I was scared because a dentist’s place back there is not what we know here. There was cracked paint in that place, and that nurse, I tell you she was rinsing off those tools in water you could see was only luke.”

We should have kissed her. We should have told her we were happy to have stopped off with the No. 7, appreciated her performance, promised her to do our best to honor her performance while confessing her performances, in memory and in fact, were likely to survive the lives of several Dahls without an urgent rival. I might have told my mother, Sit down, now, Mother, you are tired, it’s late for lipstick, it’s time I get back to my own chair.

My mother said, “And then, late on in the evening, your great grandad, my daddy, your daddy’s grandpa Al—he was a little tipsy, and a prankster like you never saw—he took and led that elephant from straight out of the barn, straight out through the snow for folks to ride him.”

My mother walked us from her room, down the hall and through the spryer ancients gaggled in the lobby, my mother lifting up her voice to call us back to when it came up her turn to ascend the elephant, insisting on an image of herself a little difficult, outside of cinema, to feature. She, a woman, all in white, as she recalled, “riding all of Africa,” a long-toothed trumpeter my mother said the Russians borrowed via hush-hush Roman brokers from the Pope.

“You could hear the music from the barn,” she said, “and I had the light on me, and I could feel the people down below me, looking up.”

She waved. Maybe she was blowing kisses. I did not prevent her, my son did not prevent her, nor the ancients. A person might have wondered where she could be going. Dressed as she was dressed, made up, irrespectful of the season, where could we be taking her; this time of night, her age, our town, where was there to go?

“Golconda,” said my mother, as if she had been asked, as if she meant to punish with her answer, “Pancake Summit.”

So Mother stuck, intuitively, I thought, physically; she stuck to us, she acted. A good grip, I was thinking, for an old gal, a forceful mind, pungently directed. Something younger than she ever was was up in her, pushed us through the door and asked us please to turn our faces up to catch the falling flakes. Such beauties, she was saying, every one of them unique. She did not tire of her inventions. She did not stray. I ought to have quit with her, interrupted her, insisted, for the boy’s sake, on the facts. Yet I must have hoped that she would come to them, the facts, her nuts-and-boltsy self. She was old. Soon, surely, she must run up on a damaging confusion. I drove us, and I watched her for the moment she must stop herself to look at me, and at the boy there in the back seat with the dog, my mother asking of herself how much our being there required her to take back from this latest story she was telling of her life and its unlivable desires. Yet my mother knew her story well enough, spoke as if she had lived what she said she had lived, as if she were remembering and not inventing, as if she all along had known we could have lived the life she was describing, all of us together, and been larger having lived it. She could accommodate. She could include. She was never wholly absent to the present. I was there, the boy was there. My father. She was infectious, nothing too far-fetched, you saw through Mother that the life you came to was the life you left behind, the vital riot lifting through your bones of scenes in loves you had and had not chosen. People went to Rome. Amelia Dangberg went to Rome. My mother could have gone to Rome. It would have been so easy. I could have walked with her, been handsome on her hand, she might have been so pretty. Sure, too, there might have been a place for us to sit, a place she told my son where she once sat, outside of Rome, not far, “at the gates of Rome,” she said, on the counsel of her Roman dentist.

“He failed me,” said my mother, “or I failed him. All I know is that he rapped my tooth here with his poker, and I hollered, and I guess he was surprised because he jumped and let that poker fly smack at the ceiling! Well, the paint’s coming down and I am up from his chair and all but holding out the cross around my neck to keep him off from me in case it’s harm he’s shouting my way in Italian. He wasn’t happy one iota. You wouldn’t say that this man here would be the same man who directs me to the part of Rome where God and Jesus and the major saints all took vacation from St. Peter’s. But he sent me there, with a map and a name, prescribed a jar of pills I learned were working best when I would swallow them with good old U.S. bourbon. It was called a villa, this place, an old man and his lady seeing to it. The man of the two, when I asked him why he’d got there, he just shrugs his shoulders and he opens up his palms to point me down the hill as like to say he’d got there for the reasons anybody got there—by his eyes, he’s saying, thumping on his chest, and by his heart. I tell you, that first day, those folks took my bags and showed me to a stone bench in a garden where you could not think exactly what to call its colors. Reds and pinks that weren’t exactly red or pink, purples not exactly purple, whites you saw that some were greenish, some whites orange and others yellow. All different sizes and shapes, and packed in tight together, so if you looked and looked again you kept on seeing more than what you’d seen the first look. A wee, wee tiny thing, hiding close out to the ground, or a vine, I can recall, that it just was sprouting out in trumpets. So many leaves. Furry looking ones, and spikey, some leaves wide and waxy, then a leaf it looked like velvet. Blooms as wide as any face you kissed when you were just a baby. Such perfume. And such a reach! I took my shoes off and I practiced looking far and near and far and then the notion came to me that these same gardens must be growing all the way down there to Rome. Maybe this was bourbon talking to me, or those pills, or maybe my poor tooth, but I saw this garden, you know, growing down to Rome, same colors, same shapes, same perfume, even where the day before I’d seen the cafes and the Pantheon, those men in suits I told you I was seeing on the sidewalk. I couldn’t see these flowers finished. I saw them way back home, even, way out in the desert. That garden there, fountain sounds, and garden birds, water songs and paths you walked through statue heads of men and women you supposed were gods and saints and martyrs—I saw them in the hay fields and the meadows and the sage and in the driest, whitest dust that blows across our playa. I was not afraid to die. Right then, I would not have said that it was possible to die. I don’t know what to call what I was doing. I watched the fireflies. I listened to the frogs and crickets. I wore a dress. My knees were smooth. I sat there till the bugs bit. They called it Kosmos, the place, the old man and his lady, and do you know that if you look it up in Greek, that’s beauty.”

“You never saw a snow like this in Rome,” my mother said.

She said, “Your grandad had a saying. He used to say, I didn’t leave my keys in Egypt.”

Piazzas, fountains, cypress; poplars, silos, mesas—we see them, yes, such beauties, I think that nobody must finally refuse them. And yet I refused them; someway I have made myself the origin of small, insidious refusals.

I told my mother, I said, “Mother, you were never once in Rome.” I said, “Lincoln, understand—about the elephants?—your grandma here is just pretending.”

She was sitting straight up, Mother, just beside me, leaning forward, as I saw her, chin up, eyes up, hands clasped at her breast, a jawbone and a sheen of moistened, painted lip, a gaze, forward, wide, unblinking. I allowed myself to think I saw the people and the places she described as if they lived before her. Particles and waves, forms enacted by a massy, supple, shadowed light, creased and reaching, voiced, Roman, a demitasse, a saucer, laughter, smooth stone and a long view—I saw these beauties of my mother’s call her from a past she had not lived enough till now to see transpire. I let myself see in through her beneath her coat, her wind-resistant sportsuit, clear down through her ribs and to her lungs and heart and to the valved and urgent, branching ways she was refiring in breath and blood and her confirming, other-earthly spirit. Anybody saw where Mother went; we know by now how Mother gets there.

“Gaga,” Papa called it, Mama cracked.

The light cast briefly on her face, then passed her face, and in the dark I felt the rend in Mother closing when I asked and she could not recall the Russian’s name. The French name, when I pressed her for it, was a name she said she always had some difficulty in pronouncing. It was a lot to ask, she said; she repeated she was old; she thought if I would not be “half so pushy,” then the names would come to her; she said it was a lot of life here she was trying to account for, a lot to ask a woman I would not have asked except the woman was my mother.

I said, “What about the Little Lord, He Crapped His Pants? If you have been to Rome, then where are all your relics?”

“He’s mean,” my mother told the boy. “Is he so rough on you all?”

And yet I meant no harm. I had a story, too. All this day, other days, for weeks I think before this day, months maybe, maybe years since I first saw this child and understood I was a father, I have been trying here to tell the boy this story, recount a day for him that was for me the first remembered and the most enduring time through which I could sustain myself in the belief that all I saw was me and mine and all for me and could not be or ever once have been without me. I was needed. My mama and my papa, my guests, the desert hills and all its creatures I had loved—it was possible for me to feel they all were needing me to be there.

I drove, moved us past the town lights to Golconda. Traction was poor. The road was slow and steepening. The snow fell out before us as a tunnel, surging, closing down and opening up, white, and whiter; you saw out to the hood of your car, not out past your windshield and your wipers, then out and far enough again to guess the pavement from the ditch, the shoulder from the sagebrush. I hunched myself against the wheel, gripped the wheel and pulled at it as if I meant to strip it from the column. I did not think that either Mother or the boy took note much of our local danger, nor my effort to preserve us from it, nor the folly I foresaw in seeking out a view upon a snowbound summit.

I said, “I helped you set the whole thing up, remember? You had those seating cards. Don’t get yourself mistaken, that was your advice, don’t get yourself mistook. And you taught me how to bow, except, did you know what, I never really learned. I think partly why I never liked to dance was how important you said bowing would be after.”

I told my mother not to worry, I wasn’t blaming her about not dancing, dancing wasn’t me, I recounted for the two of them my thinking even then that dancing was for sissies. I drove on, recounting, too, the sawdust and the plywood, refreshing my mother with the memory of Poplar Juan and Uncle Ikey, Grandpa Al and furze, any salt-and-peppered dish or sour custard I believed was capable of contradicting Mother, failing to observe that Mother had retired from entertaining any contradiction. I pressed and pulled the wheel, felt us on the verge of cliffs and drifts, the riverbank, the hayfield, any greater solid than ourselves with which we might collide before the summit, and Mother wasn’t listening. Of course, if I myself had been more thoughtful of the summit, the idea might have come to me much sooner simply to pretend our having finally achieved it. No vista in this weather favored any other vista; the view from the top must be the same as the view from the bottom; any sense of privileged seeing must in any case be ours to bring about. At any point, I might have said, Here we are, and not been disbelieved; I might have quieted myself, left my mother and the boy a little nearer to the heights they had achieved before I started speaking. As it happened, I did not quiet, no, but drove and talked the two into themselves until their eyes descended several heads beneath their sockets and I understood their view must reach no further than the unlit skin that stretched across the ribcage.

“Almost there,” I got to saying, “almost there,” and, “here we are, we made it!”

I turned the dome light on, rolled the window down a crack. I commended the air. I asked the boy if he would like for me to roll his window down so he might put his hand out. He seemed not to want to. He seemed, along with my mother, to be carved of pine, sapless, lamps out, wind-pocked and shellacked. Stiffs, I thought, two stiffs now, three, if I should count the dog—one stiff dead, one dying, one unwarmed as yet to living.

“Mama,” I said, “here we are. Isn’t this the place you wanted us to come to? Golconda,” I was saying, “Pancake Summit?”

Failing to enchant, failing to revive. I stepped out, thinking to revive myself, at least, avert a further failure. There we were, in this pullout we had come to, a carwide swath of level ground where drivers could attend to their disasters free from traffic. Flat tire, radiator, transmissions, squabbles in the backseat, emergencies of nausea and urination, a feeling in the driver’s heart that he must pause, regroup, extract himself from motor-speed, recover to himself the still, atomic core from which he feels himself erratically disbanding. Too many irons and fires, I was thinking. Too many fathers, too many mothers, wives, and children. One of each. One of anything—a Humane Society, an Anchorage, a dead dog and an angry neighbor, a barn, a mailbox, and a ceiling—one present, one future and one past, too many and too much for me to govern in conjunction—each scent, each promise, wound, and color each discrete, and pulling outward, calling me away, and away, each away and outward from the other.

I stood a time outside the car and felt myself, the outward pull unspinning me; I stood out there and felt unspun, slowed down, the voices and the images and thoughts I heard and saw that day dispersing through the falling snow, coming each to rest, I felt, each thought to a flake, each fleeing voice and whispered image coming finally to rest, cooling and reposed, crystalline and falling over me again, onto my head, my shoulders and my arms, over on the earth where I might gather them and bring them back again to an enchanting, potent order. I saw Mother wave a gossamer scarf from the upper deck. Papa on his belly to a blade of wetted grass. Papa taller, saddled, he and Whim set out to gather. My wife, too, I saw, dressed in a cotton print, sitting by a river where she read a book, looked up from her book, closed her eyes and laid her head against a hollow in the silvered driftwood where she fell to sleep and waked up unalone and unremembering who she shared the shore with. I saw my son call out and lean and work the runners on his sled as if my son and speed were fast companions, unstuck from the level ground to which his age, his hands and eyes confined him. I saw myself in him, my son and I as one, careening, riding level ground through wild descents of seeing, and reseeing, my son and I revived, reenacted, able to act, acting, reenabled. I scooped the snow up from the hood of the car, I could do that now, used to do it all the time, I thought, thinking, Yes, well, pretty fun, a snowball! What you do, Dahl, is you take and shape out snowballs round and hard and packed together tight enough for throwing. You throw one. You watch it out into the dark and throw another. That’s your shoulder you feel, throwing, you can throw your shoulder out, remember? You blow into your hands. You stamp your feet. You pack another snowball and you pick a target. You let her rip. That’s how. Let her rip. Have a little fun. From the hips now, Dahl, you make a whip there, mister, shoulder, elbow, wrist, you let it fly, you snap it off, you really want to wing it.

In this way, or in some way very like it, I was made to wing one. And then I winged another. I clobbered a roadsign and a fencepost. I forgot myself, my volume and my tone, my frame of mind, I cleared the windshield, got back in the car and headed us, perhaps a bit too eagerly, downhill.

I suppose I hoped I would be seen as something of a hero. Athletic, after all, a performer for my mother and my son of a profoundly moral, spontaneous transformation, a Houdini of oppressive moods, a kid, at least, at heart. I had a pretty good arm. The snow, as I saw it in the mirror by the domelight, made a pretty, curling frosting of my hair. Next to them, I was bigger; I seemed to have assumed my bigness, gently; I suffused a human rendering of nature, beneficent and elemental. Was I a man to talk his mother out of Rome? Would I begrudge a boy a circus? Could they hope from all they’d seen that I might come around at last to asking their forgiveness? I acted. From here on out, I thought, I would dedicate myself to words and deeds of restoration.

I said, “Mama, what did I do ever nice for Pop? Tell me more,” I said. “About the clowns, how about? Did we hire a clown, or was a clown just uncle Ikey?”

I was warming up, then, I think I was sincere. I drove us and I did not have the feeling anymore that we were playing games. My mother was old, and earnest, sicker than I thought, more deeply interrupted. This was not the time, perhaps, for a forgiveness, neither mine nor hers, not the time for an apology, an enthused contrition. Yet was I as serious, earnest, really, as a mother? Was I really seeing all that I am saying? I sat in my chair, today, this was, not so long ago, and saw another boy completely, a wheezy, stump-tongued creature, club-footed, excessively mucosic, an impossible, in any case, a catastrophic permutation of my seed—did I say that? Each succeeding birthday cause for his diminished celebration? Get the boy a nose job. Keep him in correctives. Was this me?

“Tell me more,” I said, “tell me more,” and when I understood that no more would be told, not soon, not by Mother, not by son, I said, “Okay, a little peace, then, here, a little quiet.”

Yet I could not keep quiet; I did not understand. All day long, I thought, I had been talking to myself, no kind of talking maybe, yet a kind of talking, no kind of listening, yet listening, a kind of hearing, a listening to myself, myself overheard. I did not understand myself. I could not resist myself. My day, this day, its perceptions and its memories, its distillations and its forecasts rose and formed in me, sailed and sunk in me without expression, uncontested. I repeated. I sifted, cycled, could not align myself, a mood in my wife with the thought in my head; I despaired that there might never come a day my son and I would each be hearing from a clear desire if I should call him sweetheart. I could say it now, say, sweetheart, and yet I could not. I was afraid the boy would fail to hear me; afraid my mother would insist I was too late. And yet by now I needed anyway at least to speak; it was as if I had been gaining to myself an irreproachable momentum; as if months and years in me of running-starts could finally not be turned away from leaping; if I should die, if I should die, my body, I was thinking, was a mailsack stuffed with unsent letters.

I drove. I took better care. To talk.

To say, “I think I’ll call it quits on the Humane Society.”

Or, “We’ll leave off Hope at Hans’s, see if he can keep her in his freezer.”

They made it easy for me. By their silence I began to see that I could say whatever thing I wanted. We made our turns, ploughed our way against the storm, and with the storm, and then again against the storm and to the butcher’s, and the glimpses I could fill out from my mother and my son appeared to me to be as trackless and as white of judgment or suggestion as the snow that lay before us. Whatever thing. Anything. I went ahead and told the boy what I intended by the freezer. I asked about my mother’s medication. I said maybe I would take her home with us tonight, dial the Anchorage for her, call in well, pour her out a good, stiff drink. I thought to lure them, I suppose, startle them into speech, though neither son nor mother were prepared as yet to say a word. I kept talking. Wrecklessness, abandon, an uncomplicated swell I felt at the root of my crotch, surprised to say, directed my mouth; I followed; I led; I spoke in low, coaxing tones, in chords and single notes, in gallops, trots, and canters, epigrams and anecdotes, reportage, biography, and idiot confession.

I don’t know but I felt really, really good.

I said, “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

And, “Silence is golden.”

And, “I’ve always been a talker.”

I said, “Furze. One thing I keep coming back to is old grandpa Al’s furzebox. Listen, Lincoln. Did I tell you yet about your uncle Ikey? Guy who did the stunt with dental floss? Guy who let the sheep in?”

We were closing in here on an end. I hurried us. I was taking care of the dog. I could see the boy was thinking, trying to recall if he had ever heard of furze, perhaps, and if not, then what the sound of furze must mean it looks like, the size of the box it came in, and its shape, its texture and its odor. He was me, a boy, after all, I saw him sitting up, rising up inside himself, same as mother; they were looking through their eyes now, out, I thought, at me; I was a charmer, I was thinking, not unlike the gray man sitting on a clay floor with his whistle, erecting snakes from pots by strains of whistled stories. I knew this story. I knew the way. Through the dark, through the storm, to the butcher’s, and to home, to roof and to walls, to fire, respite, chair. Here I went, then, and here we were arrived to Hans’s! I parked the car. I told my mother and my son to wait right there. I crossed the lot. I found the place locked up, lights off, no note, shut down hours prior to his posted closing. I returned to the car, reported on our luck, assured the mother and the son that all was well, I had a plan, and drove us.

Well, how swift, I thought, the days must seem to men of action! How absented of longing and regret, fulfilled in promise, how narcotically performed! A man could cross a lot. He opened doors, closed doors, drove his miles and said his goodbyes and hellos to pretty faces. He packed himself. Stuff rushed in. He rushed through stuff, eyes open, mouth open, open-handedly, grabbing, letting go, his day a striding dream of brass knobs and pavement, cutlery and hems of skirts and handshakes and a key. He touched, glanced, dismissed, replaced, moved on through chips and beams and wires, by satellite, by accident, recovery, insights and oversights, hindsights and fore, a life evolving from the everyday parade of semi-directed nexts.

And my life, I asked myself, this day, what had it been, how much? How could I turn myself around, in ratios of thought to hard stuff? Was it too late, were the hours insufficient to reclaim the day to action? Were we too tired? Had I worn us out, I asked myself, could anybody bear to look at me and listen? I hoped so. I leaned on my wit. I recognized myself in terms of a financial indispensability. I could browbeat them with blood, as my mother browbeat us with blood. I was the patriarch, the household’s head, what could they expect to do without me? Who, save me, the father of the boy, could love the boy as Father?

I kept talking, hypothesizing on the butcher’s whereabouts, suggesting to my mother and my son that maybe Hans had swallowed down some tainted meat. I drove. I invited them to comment on my driving, tapped the brakes, sent us into safeish, playful skids I meant to simulate a frolic. We left the lighted districts back behind us. I turned us onto O Street, shifted our attentions to the charms along our block of Christmas cheer and landscape. Blinking lights, multi-colored, the single-colored, classy whites. Windows trimmed, and doorways, gables, eves and porchrails. Plastic Santas, plastic reindeer, plastic elves, a plastic creche. And underneath this snow, need I remind them, the green prides of our town, the clipped green squares of grass and dormant bulbs of summer? Leaves lay resting in those limbs; the green buds clenched and slumbered. Soon, the county plow would come and clear our road. Soon, the sun would rise again and see me hail my neighbors through the sparkling airs, a shovel in my hand, in their hands, too, a shovel, our warmth in work and greeting floated out from us in crystal-ridden plumes.

“O Street,” I said. “If you want to, tonight, you can stay with us.”

My mother looked at me, turned around to face the boy as if to know who I described when I said “us.”

Act, I told myself, keep us moving here, talk, park the car, get out, go around and help your mother. Sure, I meant to help her. I meant to help the boy. Tomorrow, we would bury Hope, find the boy another dog, his own; I would expose myself to the mercy of my neighbor. If the sun shined I would paint the mailbox, mend the fence, knock the snow off from the roof, strip the shingles, find the leak and fix it. Yet was I serious? Consult the wife? Mix the frosting? Surely, the boy and I could sit down on the kitchen floor and lick the beaters. Spoons and fingers in the beater bowl. Tousled hair, a woolly cap, jacket, snowpants, sledding. Was I serious? Would he look at me, speechless, his face arranged to ask me, Are you kidding? First step was to take a step. Take my mother’s hand. Thin hand, light thing, hollow-filled and birdy. Tough old bird, I thought, tough old bird, she came along, kept her head down from the snow, pushed her shinbones through the snow without complaint.

I told the boy, I said, “Hopey will be fine there in the car. She’s a brave, good dog. We’ll take care of her, first thing in the morning.”

I kept us moving. I tried not to think. Not to slow down to remember. I was talking. Uninvented scenes, some lived, some not, lines from dialogues, spoken and unspoken, images and phrases fastened onto things before me, as if whatever thing I told or thought to tell was free of me, and lived or would be living through my mother’s hat, or through my son’s left mitten, as if the hedgerow were translucent, and the hayloft I described to them was shining from behind the matted branches. Translucensies, I thought, superimpositions. Anywhere I looked, the housefront, the sidewalk and the streetlight, there I saw whatever thing I had been saying, heard whatever thing was said, saw Grace Dendari chewing on a slab of roast, saw my papa’s thumbs hitched in his pockets, heard my mother asking did Amelia Dangberg need another glass of punch. Was this what it was to act? Sure I thought that this was acting, seeing. Yet I did not know how a person came to such a seeing. If I recall the day’s successions, one state from another, I find fatigue, and hunger, health, poor health, too many green pills, too few red, an ample wife, a silent son, a cloying need, desire. Perhaps it was this simple, to desire, people wanted. I wanted to feel as I felt, see as I saw, say as I said, act as I was acting. Here we came, up the walk, home at last, husband home with child to wife, how could she resist me? Should she rip the fabric from my chair because I had returned without an antidote to Hope? Should she cut the cushions into pieces, burn the frame and sell the springs for scrap for having brought along my mother? My wife, too, was a mother. She must see my place, my necessity, handsome Papa, hand-in-hand-in-hand, a family man, humbled, heightened, taking steps.

Though I did not see the light.

“Light,” my mother said, having chosen finally to speak, “no light.”

True, I saw, no light. The house was dark. There wasn’t any car, no footsteps and no tiretrack, strange to say and to infer, no wife. I moved, babbled, became a spokesman for the staggeringly apparent. Must have gone somewhere, I said, must have left before it started snowing. I put the key to the door, let us in. I stripped the boy of mittens, hat, and jacket, overboots and sweater. I helped my mother with her wind-resistant sportsuit. I said the house was warm, was nice, was likely homier than she remembered. I asked my mother please to sit while I hung hats and jackets in the closet. She could sit in my chair, I said, or my wife’s chair, didn’t matter. I asked did anybody want a cup of cocoa, a night like this, would anybody like a bowl of soup? I went quickly. I must have felt that I could do without her, my wife, for the moment, could wash and rinse and stack, begin again, as my mother had begun, at the same beginning, with a difference. Just the other day it was I boiled water, measured out the powdered chocolate and stirred. What difference? What change? I went out to them. I saw my son had got up into my chair, my mother sat down in my wife’s. My mother cared for neither chocolate nor soup. A glass of water for my mother, for a pill—she wasn’t sure which one—if I could read the label?

“I’m way past time,” she said. “It’s nice you brought me here, but I’m afraid I won’t be very lively.”

Not to fret, I said; said that if she wanted to, it wouldn’t bother us, then she could go ahead and sleep. She seemed very near to sleep. The boy seemed near to sleep. I left them. I filled a glass. I filled a pot and put it on the burner. I kept moving, I was calm, I would come to things, our house, a job, our family, my story. What was wanted now was ice. Crushed, or cubed, I wondered, crushed or cubed or crushed. I stood and filled the glass and saw beneath a magnet on the freezer door a note there from my wife. Four words—three words, really, and a name—a neat scrawl underneath the drawing I mistakenly believed my son made of the lizard that was me.

Lincoln—Gone for sausage.

I read, Lincoln—Gone for sausage.

That meant me, the Lincoln, the sausage meant the butcher. I told myself that I did not know what that meant. I went. I gave the glass of water to my mother. I read her label. I tapped her out two pills. I passed the boy and touched his shoulder on the way back to the kitchen, told him, “Chocolate.”

I measured out our cups. I waited on the whistle.

I read, Lincoln—

Then I took the drawing and the note from off the freezer door, struck a match, held the paper where I stood and burned it. This seemed new to me, that I should burn it, crush the ashes to the floor, another new beginning. When the whistle blew I stirred the water in the cups, put the cups onto a tray and served us.

My mother seemed tireder, the boy seemed tireder, both of them seemed less likely to be listening, more likely to be dreaming, now that I had come to see a way to tell the boy a story. Still, I thought, I might still be heard; it made sense, this late in a day, that I be heard by sleepers. I climbed in with the boy. Here the hours were begun. From this chair I stood from my repose to man a shovel. From this chair, with this boy and with a dog I made a day of it, discovered holes that were not for digging, healers not for healing; I recalled the oceans from my deserts, recalled a tribe within a solitude, a health within a sickness, a forgotten way remembered, recalled the boy, my father, wife, and mother. There she was, across the table, made up, powdered, rouged, and scented, a long glimpse of my future bride, the drugged and slumberous look into myself. I asked myself: Am I serious? If I took a reading on myself, could I name a change? This was the moment my life changed? And then I knew my life would never be the same again forever? Here went a day, the hours passed, a distance crossed, a place I had returned to, yet I found myself no less confused, in sense, equally afraid, unchanged to myself, save for how I sounded to myself in speaking. Sure I fetched no living dog, had not managed even to provide a place in which to rest the dead one. Had no pretty bone or button, could not ask my wife to close her eyes, place a penny-candy on her tongue and tell her, Here, this here is a little token from our journey. No, I thought, here, from home, were I my wife, I see my husband has departed, crossed his distance and his hours and delivered back the same dead dog, a mute son and a husband’s mother.

Yet here I found another mother, something other than a muted son, here I sounded different to myself, at least, I really listened. I was a different kind of quiet. I heard a different kind of sound. I heard the furnace click, combust, heard the heated air pushed through the ducts to warm us, and I could not say louder, softer, smoother, grayer, only different, only I must be the difference. I sensed differently, more presently, I was present for the water resting quiet in the pipes, the wires in the wall, the expansions and contractions in the studs and joists, the loaded, groaning rafters. I could not be calm. I was remembering. I was talking. I was telling. I knew my son and mother were as good as sleeping, briefly thought that maybe I should better call it practice, what I felt, I was practicing, maybe what a person ever does is getting ready, his every act is a preparing. Sure I told the boy about my father’s horse; from me he learned about our wars; doubtless his description to you of our barn should lead you to the hayloft no less easily than mine should. Sure I said so just this day, and almost any other day, on the telephone, I loved my mother, but to say it now, what difference, Mother, just right there, I love you?

I was saying, “You could see the steam come up from off the basin, way down way below us.”

I went slowly, giddily, from my father to my mother, surface to surface of that day, one thing following another as the day began itself for me at dark, and lived on through the sun, and passed into the dark again when Mama turned the light off in my bedroom and my day was finished. I would finish, I could see that, an end now, having finally begun at a beginning. One day. A birthday. One day, I was saying, I waked up and I was five. My son’s head was rested in my chest. I turned his face to me and took his glasses off. He saw me. His cheek flushed. He pushed farther into me, seemed again to sleep. Still I think he heard. He must have felt me, the stuff at work inside me, stomach stuff and stuff for air and heart.

I kept on talking. I said and then a lot. And then I went with Mama for another look around the barn; and then the guests came and the band played; and then the snow fell; and then the guests were driving off and honking horns and happy.

I said, “You would have liked your grandad.”

I said, “Remember, Mama, what Owen gave me, the best thing from a kid-guest I remember getting—that old quiver made of stitched-together feedsack and a strip of sheepskin leather?”

I said, “Wasn’t all bad, uncle Ikey and the goats. I think most folks thought that it was pretty funny. I did. And the cows. Who was it started milking Losivya straight into the punch bowl? Folks liked the snow. Big people, hollering and running, throwing snowballs at the barn—you could hear somebody’s pickup starting up, and then another, and you heard those snowballs folks were throwing at the barn and ladies being lifted up and squealing how I didn’t know a lady could just like a girl. I think really if they were a little peeved about a cow or goat then they forgot. You could hear it in the way they hollered their goodbyes. Goodbye, goodnight, goodbye—sounding more to me like how you feel when you are stepping out to see a sweetheart. Cars warming up, wipers and smoke, those wet flakes coming down as big as hands and fingery and laceylike with spikey, lacy, fingers you could catch and run inside and study till they melted. One thing I saw, a man help out a lady with her coat. They stood just inside the barn door, looking out, and the thing I saw that made me know what kind of time they had was how she looked when he pulled back her hair and put his mouth up to her ear and told her something it was just for him and her for hearing. You know how a lady lets her eyes shut. You know how her mouth goes in a way that you would stab your own eyes out if only you could see what hers were seeing. She had a night. She had herself a time, I’d say. Her night wasn’t any uncle’s time to ruin.”

I recalled a great big man who seemed to be the center of a top, a dust-devil, Papa called him, a man you saw was hardly moving but he sent the ladies spinning out and all about him so you wondered that they did not either break a neck or fly off like a scrap of something papery and blown off high and drifting down across the desert. One man limp as his scarf, one man starched as his collar. I recall a man he did not dance at all but stood outside against a post and smoked. This man waxed his mustache and he mostly ever said to folks that I heard, Yah, and Yah, could be. To me, he said, “Smoke, kid?” And he let me puff a time so I was feeling pretty green to go back in and play at war or watch those spinning dancers.

“I never danced,” I said. “Not with anybody other. What the young ones did was more like jump around or run and skid across the sawdust on the plywood. You might see a lady take a kid and push and pull its hands around a bit for pictures, but I was never keeping still enough for taking. Only picture I remember me for sure in is the one where I am blowing out the candles.”

Lighting candles, blowing candles out, second-helpings and a third I could recall of cake; I was saying I was thinking for the first time I remember I preferred a pie.

I asked my mother, I said, “Do you remember how you used to save some strawberries and rhubarb out to freeze so you could bake my pie clear in December?”

But my mother was asleep.

Mother. Mama. Ma.

Ah, ma, c’mon, ma, you remember?

We dressed together. Stood naked in her bedroom, clean; our party clothes were laid out on my mother’s bed, arranged how we would wear them. I recall I liked it that she wasn’t wearing western. Mama wore her black. Pearls and that crazy mateless earring. She asked me please to zip her. Zip her, brush her hair, hold the heel of her foot in your hand and say you like the polish on her toenails. Do not ask why polish if she’s also wearing stockings. Do not wonder why she fusses over shades of red if she is wearing shoes that do not let her toes show. Do not bother telling her you think she might do better by that second earring. She knew. Let her tell you why the best shoes are Italian. Watch her. That was the rule I understood. Listen. Learn that here was the supplest leather, an exquisite line, a poised, a modest, an aristocratic lift. Attend. The pearl rests at the collarbone. The breast must never shine. Recognize a powder. See what happens to a woman’s face to have her hair brushed. Grow up. Learn how else a woman is a mother.

But Mama was asleep.

I said, “You had such pretty hair. How come you never wore your hair down?”

But Mama slept.

The boy, too, slept.

I said, “Papa tied a Windsor.”

I told them I remembered standing in the kitchen, me, my mama and my papa, clean, the three of us, dressed, finished with my mama’s lists and waiting quiet with the kitchen clock to tell us we were ready hours early.

I said, “Somewhere we have lost a picture of the three of us together.”

Whereas I might have said I loved her. And the boy. Any time now, I was ready, I could say it, say, I love you, just like that, and trust that I would mean it. Maybe earlier had been too early. I felt it coming now, you feel it, just before you say it, you clear a way for it and know the time when it has come and when the time has passed if you have kept your peace and missed it. Though not peace. Not for me. In me, what came and went, comes and goes by my affections has not come and gone in peace, not easily, not readily, but has come and gone in worries and in dreads, an escalating, chicken-hearted question: Do you mind this, that I touch you? Are you laughing? Do you like me?

They were sleeping.

I was saying, “We took that bath together.”

Not a soak, I said, no bubbles and no steam; this day Mama drew us up a bath of coolish, glassy water. She got us stripped. She was rough, said we had to hurry, wouldn’t let me do it on my own. Knocked my head against the wall, pulled my nose and ears off with my collar, grabbed up hanks of hair without a sorry or excuse me. Yet why hurry? This was hours early, stark daylight. I recall the sky up through the window just as hard and bright as sky could be and seeming cold against the branches. The floor was cold, and the tubwalls, and my mama’s hands were cold and hard and so were Mama’s eyes though not so cold and hard that I would not want them to touch me. She surprised me. I wanted her to look at me. Time enough, I thought, for her to look a little more at me and not my fingernails so much and toenails or behind my ears and in my ears where she was saying there was dirt enough for planting in potatoes. My birthday, I was saying, feeling something must be due to me, a present, I kept saying, some respect I must have thought should be accorded my authority, without my knowing also what I might be author of or how a person came to think his being born deserved a present. I told my mama she was hurting me and she said not to be a baby. I wasn’t hurt, she said, the water wasn’t cold, she was in the same tub I was, and would I look at her, just listen, did it sound as if she were complaining? Naturally, I looked. I always looked and saw my mother as a person sees the bar of soap, the soapdish and the spigot. That body had been home, food to me and drink and shelter. I used it. Used it up, perhaps, took another, harder look at her and saw how far along her way away from me my mother had proceeded in her body to reclaim it. I wanted her to feel how hard I saw her, to respond to me in kind, to look at me and know that I, too, had proceeded. Yet she did not look at me. She scrubbed, wiped and blotted, looked and saw my body, “my hide,” she said, another needy, dirt-streaked surface. She scrubbed. She pried. She used the washcloth and the clipper and the brush. She used her thumb to lift my chin up. She looked me in the eye, I thought, and still I wasn’t there for her except as she might see a duty more or less completed. No Lincoln. Nothing like the son. She flicked, her eyes were flicking, narrowing and gray, palpably incisive. I think nobody must see by lights more surgical than Mother’s. I think nobody but Mother operates toward more isolating theaters of self.

Me, I wanted out. I wanted my boat. I saw too much. I saw my mother’s breasts. I saw Mother in those breasts, her determination, an allure, Mother’s pride, something to be dressed, lifted up and scented, lightly powdered and admired that way and wanted. Fatty things. Useless. Boo, I used to call them, pale, crinkly-tipped and wobbly. Baubles, icons, eyetraps, I was not to touch them. How was I to see them? And what of Mother’s shins, and Mother’s leg, the way she pointed her toes to shave her leg, how was I to watch my mother’s mouth, the pleasure I could see she took there from her leg, its shape, perhaps, its toneyness and its proportion, the time she saved out from her hurry to caress her leg when she was finished? Two hands. From the ankle way up past the knee. A red soap I was not to mention to my father which I figured smelled like money. She soaped her throat, under her breasts, the hair between her legs, between her legs, in that crack, where I knew I should have come from, though I did not know what to call it. I knew icky, and winky, and carrot, but I did not know what my mama’s was, not to say it, but only knew it was the place where you could see a calf pulled, or a lamb, and also where I saw my papa push it back inside itself and stitch it. I did not come from there. I knew this much. I came from Mama’s scar. Mama soaped herself and I remember thinking that I came from Mama’s scar, but here I did not see her scar and could not think if I had really ever seen it or had only ever heard it, You came out of here, through this scar, though I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t say it past the word if I had ever seen it. Scar. My mama’s word. Was it true? Or had Mama rather I had not come from the other how I ought to? Had she fibbed? She said, The doctor had to cut me. Why? I was five. I thought already it seemed long ago my papa waked me up to see the sunrise. Fast, and long ago, anything I might have said was passing much too quickly. My mother was saying for me to hurry. I wasn’t hurt, she said, she wasn’t hurting me, she was saying please be still. It hurts, I said, it hurts. Yet I did not say why a scar, or through the belly, did not ask what the place between her legs was called if mine was called a carrot. It tickles, I was saying, let me do it, stop, and then my mother stopped, she let me, said, You’re right, you do it, you’re a big boy now, it’s your birthday.

“But I still liked for you to do it,” I was saying. “I didn’t think I was that big.”

I said that I was awkward with myself. I only wanted us to take our time. I wasn’t ready yet to learn how hard it was to feel myself without the touch of other persons. I told my mother not to worry, I was not ascribing sex, not to her, nor to myself, not desire, I didn’t mean to make of the tub the mess of Mamas-Sons-and-Papas. I meant I was growing up and did and did not want to. No fault of ours. We were clean, soaping up. I think of mine as the sex and the desire, the priapic panic that must come from being made aware of being seen alone. She knew I watched, was all. We had caught each other out, we evened, I would bathe myself from here on out, from here on out we two would mark a little closer to ourselves what we were showing to the other. After we had dressed, stood before my mother’s mirror, combed and brushed and scented, I recall that I was happy, yes, inevitably, and also saddened to be welcomed to an older age, our necessary days of mildening, shameless guilts and glancing ardors.

My mama’s talk, for instance, was returned to guests. She gentled. She toweled me dry, would touch me, hold me, kiss me on the cheek goodnight, but I believe I sensed my difference to her in how she touched me, what she said and how she looked at me and listened. I felt limits—whether suddenly, from our time there in the bath, or more gradually, less perceptibly, from sometime shortly prior to the bath, then incrementally, broadly after—I felt our time together cool, become less intimate, more mannerly, routined, as if I were another person now, a little man out on my own to whom my mother paid her kind respects in passing. She slowed. She engaged me, let me know she was attending, had her eye on me, I could not look at her without believing she must know what I was up to. She must know I thought that she was pretty. She must know I wanted her to let me brush her hair. You want first dance with me, she might have thought, you are surprised to see me eat with other men, you never thought another man might chase me. That man, I think she meant to say to me, his name is What If, and it’s for him a mother paints the nails she hides inside her shoes, “It’s for Grace Dendari,” she was saying, “why we keep our backs straight.”

Mama said, “A lady, who she doesn’t need to just be Grace, she gets herself up. Same as we do. Take Amelia Dangberg, my friend, Amelia. She doesn’t love her husband. She doesn’t not love him, but she wouldn’t say she loved him either. She’s ashamed of Owen. Said she’s glad she waited not to have another. Truth be told, Owen’s nothing worse or better than what made him. He’s not pretty. He wets the bed yet. He’ll be that pock-marked boy you worry where he’s got to, all because his mama tried to comb a part into his hair and threw the comb at him and said for him to comb his own hair when it wouldn’t part right. She’s got guilt, my friend Amelia, understand? I know what she’s wearing. Underneath, I mean. I know she’ll be the only one to see it. Here’s a man she lives with, her husband, and she’ll keep it from him same as she would keep it from a perfect stranger. Understand? My guess is they’re on their way right now. Two hour drive, and she tells me she’ll be early. Tells me she sweeps. Says she’s tired of dust. Said that yesterday she pulled a fingerful of dust from off a sill she dusted just the day before. She wiped it on her pantleg, got herself a rag and then she stops and asks herself, Why this? Dirty pants, worn-out cotton bra—she said she hadn’t had a window open since September. She’d rather that the whole entire house burn down. She’d rather drive on into town and run down Main Street raving naked. Thank God for your party, Bonnie Dahl. That is what she tells me. Wasn’t for this party, she might not have seen the reason she should buy herself a little something silk and dainty, a new, clean thing she could wear and feel more how she used to mean to. So I’ll tell you,” said my mother, “it’s for her we hang the stars and run the goats out. A person doesn’t know what he is doing in the country, not the desert. You drive two hours with this man and child and neither one of them has looked enough to think what you are wearing underneath and what’s against you. You will know. I’ll know. Other folks will guess. It’s what she wants. What will people make of her? True or not, you get the feeling from your loved ones you’ve been made and fixed. Amelia, Grace, Vernon, even your old uncle Ikey, anybody you invite, they will hop alive to have that chance of feeling not quite made yet. You watch your daddy,” Mama said, “and see if he is standing any straighter. Listen to him when he talks and tell me you can’t hear the clean-cheeked boy there in his voice. See if when he’s got a pretty lady looking you don’t find a man who feels he’s being guessed at. What funny thing could this man tell me. That’s what I would used to wonder with your daddy. Does he save the bone out for his dog when he is out to supper? If he thinks I look like a deer, or like a girl, will he keep it to himself, or will he say so? I’ll confess, with him, I don’t guess much anymore myself. Good is good. I made him good. He’s head-shy. He’s a dreamer. What’s best in him is simple, that’s what I believe, same as anybody, simple and unfinished and forgotten. It’s work, remembering. You live side-by-side-by-side like us, you get too tired to guess. But a party,” said my mother. “One night. Some brighter, brand new hours. Tonight, after folks have got beyond their gossiping and meanness, I believe they will remember how they felt when they were getting dressed. What their drive was like, how they felt when they walked in our barn and saw what all was done for them. They will eat, and they will dance, and they’ll tell their jokes and laugh and talk as people talk when they are guessing good of one another, and for tonight we’ll know that all good guesses will be true. Give them something to take home with them,” said Mama, “a thing to last them through their drives and long enough to take to bed before they fall to sleeping. Let Amelia’s husband guess what she is wearing underneath is true, let Amelia be surprised to know she hasn’t really finished with her husband. His name is Emmit. He has a name, after all. She might say it, say Emmit. Your papa might say Bonnie. His name is Lincoln. Same as yours. You are Lincoln,” said my mother, “Lincoln Dahl, and tonight these folks will have a time they’ll always think back on that was your birthday.”

And there was light yet. Through the barn door, an eastern aperture of setting winter sun. Our last good looks. The schoolhouse out there, and the flagpole, our orchard and the windrow and the pine corral all lit in quiet, chilly blazes. Nothing seemed not ready. Jesus here and there, Joseph, Mary, and the asses. Kitchen-stalls, ballroom-crepe, wire-constellations. Mama in the desert. Mama’s little Italy, her Roman pageant, my mother’s nuts-and-bolts of necessary flight. Lady Gal, pearls and sweatshirts, honest keeper. From the dancefloor, on the bandstand, my mother set a camera up to take our self-timed portrait.

She was saying, “Folks don’t like to be caught picking. That’s why some bowls you should make of pure cashews.” She said, “Tea is for later, coffee. Folks that make it to the ends of nights, they like a little something warm to hold and have inside them. Truly, if you’ve thrown a party to remember, then folks don’t suffer staying up.”

But Mama slept. The boy slept and our neighbors. We live here on O Street. I do not know where that picture’s got to.

I said, “Good night, Mama. Good night Lincoln.”

I said goodnight to Vernon, and to Owen and Amelia, Emmit, Grace and Hope.

I said, “Good night, Pop.”

I listened for my wife. I leaned, felt as if I tipped outside myself, listening, leaning out there through the doors and windows. I had a sense that things were on their way. I had a sense of something’s coming. I felt my arm go numb, my leg where my son was pressing, my body falling tinglingly to sleep. I could not move my toes, did not want to wake the boy by seeing could I lift my arm up. Most all this day, how many hours, what must it be to not have spoken? If I were him, what might I have said? When is too late for saying? All this day, we assume the boy has suffered his traumatic shock. We suppose he grieves. He sleeps. Somewhere, pressed against me, I feel my son rests deeper than a dream, deep down in his body, dark and undisturbed, stiller than the picture-forms of conscious possibles, potent, unhistoried, intact. He sleeps as women sleep. As my mother sleeps. He sleeps. This storm will pass. The sun will shine. He may speak. What word will he bring back for us? How has the body taught him? His mama bathes him. His guests arrive. He strips the paper from a box, blows a candle out, distributes cake. He is to be the centerpiece of cheer. So which yields? What does he say? Which word does he welcome? Today’s, tomorrow’s? In me, a shell has grown around tomorrow’s word, my bright core, shelled, a shell around a seed, hardening and growing hard, immovable, unsayable, held, and held, too late. I sat. I talked. I listened. All quiet. All still. Yet I talked. I believe that I am heard. Something I am saying here will be brought back. My body tingles, is numbed and wooden, yet something riotlike leans out from me, seems to strengthen, I feel stronger, talk my way back to tomorrow, a simpler, unconflicted saying.

I try it out, say, “I love you, Mama.”

Say, “I love you.”

Love and love, I love you mister Lincoln.

And was I serious?

Am I funny?

I said, “I know we had a funny view from up there in that hayloft.” And, “You never saw a lady more surprised to dance than Grace.” I said, “Mama, where’d that picture we took on the timer get to?”

Easy, once you started, you had only to recall your chair, convince yourself that if you sit, wait them out, then you might come to one idea that is true. Consider yourself a wholly handsome man. Eat right. Age well. Man your shovel. Mind your son. Zip him up. Play catch. Teach him how to carve. Save your letters. Save a brick out from your Roxy. Don’t complain. Let a little light in. Ask yourself: Do I believe in God? Tunnel deep. Think back. Somebody is hurt. Somebody is chasing. Say: I had good, long talks with Pop. Say: I have loved my wife. Wonder: What great thought have I not yet been thinking? Where have you found beauty? Know the fields are growing over. The kids are building fires in the desert. A star burns out. The dust walls up. The bank is having trouble finding takers. Sleep well. Sleep tight. Are you happy? Can I come over? Do not forget: I am a handsome man. I believe. I miss you. Ask: Is this what all I want? Have you come to what you meant? Do not ask why. Say: Goodnight, now, goodbye, goodnight! Sleep fast and remember: Anything you say tonight is easily unsaid by morning...

And as for me, this evening I’ve been meaning here to speak of, I am settled deep down, deeper in my chair. I kiss my son and say, “Okay, folks, now listen up. I’m telling you, what’s true, what I liked the best, remember most, it was a goose we cooked I helped my papa slaughter. Mean old gander thing would pluck a chunk out from the fat part of your arm when you were feeding if you let him. He came at you. Big, big spread of wings, neck stretched way, way out like this, hissing and honking. Cleaved him at the shoulder. Roasted him in lemon juice and salt and pepper. I got to stick the fork. Papa carved. Folks cared mostly for the breast meat. You tried not to think how long his neck was. You spooned a sauce. He looked good there, in your plate. Red sauce. Beef and mashed potatoes, green beans and a square of lemon jello. Almost made you miss him. If you knew him how I knew him,” I was saying, “you would surely not have guessed he could be tender.”