At some point in my forties, maybe not for the first time and certainly not for the last as that has yet to come, I was walking down a street and saw him, Bad Luck, that is, sitting on his stallion, this in a time of great and personal abundance, or what some might call good luck, writing awards, offers to lecture in Australia, fellowships, and even a lucky lottery ticket for one hundred fifty bucks, scratching away the gold and finding beneath my prize in bold black letters.
And then, in the midst of my abundance, walking down some street on a day like any other, Bad Luck suddenly appeared. Thinking he was handsome or rich or simply amusing, I stupidly agreed to share his saddle, not imagining for even one second the high price I would pay, the prisoner I’d become. Here’s what happened: Since that day, since that decision, Bad Luck and I, we’ve been going at quite a clip, and I can’t for the life of me get off while galloping. Bad Luck has a black cowboy hat and a five o’clock shadow you can’t help but try to touch, the stubble pricking your finger, that bead of blood always a shock, no matter how often it happens. Am I responsible for Bad Luck, or is he responsible for me? Have we married? Can we divorce? It’s hard to think, what with the sound of these hooves in my head. Ouch. Have you seen me? Look up. That’s not a cloud or a bird or a plane. It’s me. Hanging on hard.
Good Luck, they say, likes to visit in threes, or derivatives thereof. I’d say this is true. The discovery of my sanity round about the age of thirty set in motion triptych after triptych of success. Previously a mental patient in a johnny, I became, in a matter of a few years, a productive author, a professor, married, a mother. Money came clattering down, as if I’d stumbled across some rigged slot machine in the sky. These were my years of butter, babies, and books. All my gardens grew. I tried to ignore the fact that Good Luck’s gifts likely came with some serious strings attached.
I won an NEA grant and a Knight Science Journalism fellowship, the prize money totaling sixty thousand dollars. Were these rewards deserved or merely bestowed? Of one thing I felt sure: real luck has to be earned. You can’t simply swallow it like your pills. I pictured a massive collapse, the end of my own personal Ponzi scheme. I celebrated my every milestone with one eye on the second hand of the clock. It never ceased. Time kept moving in joyful circles, like a dog too dumb to know that death is always near.
Despite my great good luck I had many nagging questions, and these many nagging questions about what I deserved led me to actions that some might call “pushing my luck,” actions that, I guess, made me the cause rather than the victim of a crash. Pre-Prozac, I dreamt of being a writer and worked hard at a craft I could never claim to have mastered with any confidence, despite my efforts. Post-Prozac, my literary posture improved. Slumped words found their backbones, stood straight, and took to tap dancing. My stories stumbled upon voice, pacing, rhythm, and thus stopped stumbling. I discovered in myself a willingness to be honest. I flaunted that honesty, my raw body, the raw form of my work, and while this was partly in response to my writer’s mandate, it was, in equal or unequal parts, a way of testing the limits, only so I could know them, only so I could avoid—or choose—a free fall over that sky-high cliff, thereby bringing my stellar career to an abrupt and nearly coveted close, for I did not deserve these prizes and publications and offers of Australia, and worse, it was corrupting me, the urge to write now all mixed up with the urge to win. I was lost, and found, and lost. I was like a blind man, cane tapping his tentative path, or a geologist, eyes closed, running hands over rock, palms sensing the scripted fault lines: Delve here. No, there.
As an artistic strategy, my pushing the limits of raw, unfiltered honesty failed. It never got me where I needed to go. It earned me a reputation, I suppose, as a controversial writer. It earned me faithful fans in equal proportion to determined detractors. But it did not, this pushing, describe or delineate the edges of my professional bounty so that I might better come to control it. Thus I wrote still harder, faster, riskier, only to find my confusion increasing in proportion to the amount of attention I received, and the more attention I received and the more money I made, the more sure I was that Good Luck would be leaving me soon, and how much the better if I left her before she left me.
No, I don’t know his horse’s name. Or what sort of underwear he wears. All I can say for sure is that he claimed me like a cowboy, with a whoop and a holler as he lashed out his lasso and snagged my ankle, bringing me down into the dust, me yowling like a calf, and then a cow, and then a woman who has dropped her dignity down the disposal and cannot get it in her grip.
Let’s just say, for the sake of story, that the first appearance came three years ago, when Bad Luck was delivered through the mail slot carved in the wooden hunk of our heavy antique door. I distinctly remember this event, how the man-myth and his horse came flying through the letter slot, miniaturized and disguised as lawsuit numero uno.
As with much—but not all—of what followed, I did not do anything, or much (and “Ay, there’s the rub,” as Hamlet said, feeling for his responsibility), to justify this first lawsuit. And yet, I would also say I did not do much—if anything—to justify the second lawsuit. And then again, I would also say I did not do much—if anything—to justify the third lawsuit. You see how this sounds? Suspicious, eh? When enough Lemony Snicket sorts of events start to pile up at one’s purportedly innocent feet, one would be a fool not to wonder if, or rather where (and then again if), personal agency enters the picture. Thus we come to the core of my question: Precisely how am I haunted? Back and forth I go, ping-pong turned existential and absurd. I did it. It did it. I did it. It did it. To rephrase the question: To what degree, if at all, am I the reason for both my comedy and my tragedy, my riches and my rags?
First, the first lawsuit, which caused the deeply dented coffers. Then, my best friend one day and entirely out of the blue stopped speaking to me, writing in an e-mail, “Stay away from me and I will stay away from you.” As if I were diseased, and, who knew, perhaps I was. I began to feel tilted, unwell. I had a huge fight with my literary agent of twenty productive years and left her, or she left me; it matters not. The point: a great gulf came. My favorite aunt, my mother’s middle sister, as sweet as my mother was not, died in an automobile accident, driving down the highway without her seatbelt, hitting the car in front, my aunt flying through the windshield, an angel going through glass. My luck turned, and I began my mourning. After my aunt died, our hot-water heater burst and flooded out the basement, destroying all my notebooks, all my earliest attempts at writing, the tiny diary I kept at the age of six, with its little gold lock and minuscule key, warped beyond recognition, this one of my last links to my old home, the one I’d left for a foster family, never to return, left just like Good Luck left me and Bad Luck appeared, pronto, in her place.
And then I was sued a second time, for something equally as ridiculous as the first lawsuit, but the thing about lawsuits is this: you can’t just walk away. You have to play the game, get a lawyer; the whole shebang cost me over one hundred thousand dollars, so we went from being well-off to being unwell and also off, but off of what? Off a ledge, an edge, a place of quiet comfort.
And then one day, soon after the second lawsuit had begun, our lawn got a weird disease and then died, and from the dead thatches of sod grew odd purplish plants I’d never seen before. They all had stout scaly stems and broad waxy leaves, and they stormed the yard, multiplying like the rabbits they most certainly were not, daily gaining ground and girth.
Soon after the odd botanical appearance, we began to find small mammals in the once-was grass, their corpses already stiffened, their bodies curled in the corners or simply splayed straight out, flies feasting. At first, we had no idea what might cause such a spree of death nor did I fully comprehend that Good Luck had left for good, so I was slow to take things seriously. My husband and I tried not to giggle through the hedgehog funeral, presided over by the high priest of my daughter and her servant, my four-year-old son, who solemnly covered the cardboard box and placed it in the grave my husband had dug, clearing a patch of the odd plant with a sharp spade.
The morning after the funeral I went outside and tugged on one plant, surprised at how freely its forked roots gave up the ground, dangling their long slippery strings. “Deadly nightshade,” the man at the garden center claimed, looking at the limp victim I held out between thumb and forefinger. He snapped on a latex glove and gingerly took the weed from me. A latex glove? “It’s everywhere in our yard,” I said, and I felt something soft in my throat, something, well, gushy.
“I’ve heard of occasional infestations before,” he said. “It’s a bitch to get rid of, and you gotta be careful.” He placed the plant’s corpse on the counter. “This plant,” he said, “this plant is one of the most deadly weeds on the East Coast. One bite of its berries and a child’s heart stops in a second. I’d keep my kids out of the yard.”
Berries?
In August, he told me. The plant becomes a twining vine that unpacks its petals, a fragile purple flower, the seed head stocked with millions of its descendants all dueling to duplicate. At some point mid-month the seed head bursts into birth, the flower furls and falls, and in its place, at summer’s end, grow clusters of berries. The horticulturist showed me a botanical drawing of our opponent. In the drawing the flower was long gone, the berries painted a rich red, dangling on the slender stem like a lumpy scarlet scrotum. According to the horticulturist, the berries are surprisingly sweet to the taste, attractive to all manner of life forms who know no better: raccoons, skunks, hedgehogs, minors.
It was well into summer, then, and my corner of the globe was wilted in warmth. The sidewalks sizzled. The flowers along the fences had long since fainted, their faces hanging sideways. Only the nightshade thronged. We had resigned ourselves to the necessity of chemical intervention lest the hedgehog lead to a swan lead to a prince or princess.
I spent a few hundred bucks on contractor-grade herbicide, thigh-high rubber boots, huge plastic goggles, pale-blue gloves. Sweating from every gland, I tromped around our yard, pumping the valve, poison arcing from the plastic spout and splashing with a small sound onto the thriving green leaves. The next morning, the nightshade looked, well, unsettled, as though, perhaps, every stalk was being sued. By evening, the purple flowers had rolled up and dropped off. Within a week, the stalks were dead and brown, their previously plump vines stringy, the plants arced and twisted in what seemed expressions of agony. Our yard still looked infested, but not with nightshade anymore. It looked infested with death. And not a single scream.
I can’t possibly tell all the terrible things that happened to me. By now I’d been through two of the three lawsuits that came my way, an infestation, the toaster caught on fire. We went in search of sunshine, to Florida, and all our luggage got lost and was never found, so to this day our brown bags are somewhere circling and circling the globe. I started fighting with my spouse; this was—what—2006? And then 2007 came in a gust of mild garbagey-smelling January wind, the winter melt laced with brown, sloppy dog turds on every city sidewalk. The paths around our more rural home smelled as though they’d been made from septic sludge. I felt my words wobble when I wrote. Periods turned into question marks, which marched off the page and stood sentry in my head. Was this word right was that word right was this word right? It finally became clear to me that, at some point I could not quite determine, Good Luck had definitely—and with finality—departed, on to bigger and better pastures. Previously a veritable font of authorial productivity, I felt my spouts close. The blank page is, in fact, far from blank. Stare long enough into its creamy smother and you feel yourself start to gasp.
Less, I’m sure, is more in situations of negative abundance. Thus I’ll try to do this quickly. Our house began to rot. Or maybe it was always rotting, and I began to realize it. During an unseasonal rainstorm, a chunk of our foundation came loose, and when the wet weather passed we found the chunk on our neighbor’s lawn. Slates slid from our previously sturdy roof. Water dribbled down our walls, the color of rust sometimes, and then sometimes the color of soot. I’d always loved our house; we’d been living in it, a small saltbox with a single stained-glass window in its narrow hall, for over three years now, a house set on acres and acres of pasture and forest, the trees so tall and old a man’s huge arms could not circle their massive majestic trunks.
Good Luck and Bad Luck have similar plot lines. They start slowly, gather motion, roll, then rise to a crescendo, and, following the basic laws of physics (Remember this from seventh grade? An object in motion remains in motion unless . . .), stop only when acted upon by an outside force.
Thus my panic, for what would the outside force be if not Bad Luck’s sole equal and opposite—Good Luck—with her honey hair and high heels, long gone from me now, involved with her new clients.
Humanoids emerged on this earth two million years ago, and since that time there have been on the order of a quarter-million regal philosophers who thought through issues as diverse as time and grief, evil and isolation, the blessed and the cursed, the whys and wherefores. The great playwright Sophocles dandled luck in his lap and wove it into every act, and still, in the end, he could not name its ingredients or its origins. If the most noble philosophers pondering the issue for, say, the last twelve thousand years have not been able to unpack luck, why on earth, so long as I’m on Earth, would I? Sometimes giving up is a form of grace.
My cognitive revolution occurred in—so appropriate—the sweet rainy spring of 2009, when the clouds emptied themselves of their water weight and emerged, come June, as lean, clean lines of white and the palest of pinks. The rain-drenched earth yielded up its goods in excess, so ripe strawberries, as nubby as tongues between large green leaves, emerged everywhere in our garden, the weeds washed away, the loam beneath as black as melted chocolate, the fiery-yellow flowers standing in stark and gorgeous contrast to the ground. In June, the flowers bobbed and nodded when the breeze blew, as if agreeing with me. Yes. Call it quits. Enough wondering why. Or when. Or if. Enough examination.
And yet, what does one do after quitting? I’d been struggling for so long, puzzle piecing for so long, meditating for so long on my fortune and its reversal, trying for so long to woo my ex–best friend back to me and to repair what was beyond repair with my literary agent, working and working, chewing and chewing: how to give all that up and simply sit? I have never liked meditation. The mandate to breathe always makes me feel like I am choking. The practices of Buddhism are not my strong suit.
“Let’s build a pond,” I said to my husband that summer, and he, perhaps sensing that I needed a project other than myself, agreed, and so we took up our shovels, together for the first time in a long time. In the abandoned, weed-eaten field behind our rural home, a field the prior owner scraped of its top soil to sell for a fat fee, we excavated the hard earth, hurling sharp spades into its stone-studded skin, splitting it sideways, subsoil yielding up the glossiest, wriggliest worms, and those stones, everywhere, flat and round, veined and mottled, but all, every one, mysteriously smooth, as if they’d been pounded for millennia by the sea. “Perhaps they have,” my husband said, holding in his palm a gorgeous purple globe, a red arterial scrawl just visible beneath its opaque, violet skin. “After all, this was once the ocean,” he said, gesturing with his hand to the land all around us, the tall grass in the healthy far fields rippling like the hide of some huge beast; picture that. We were once covered. It comforted me, for a reason I can’t say. You find your blankets; ultimately, you do. I pulled the sea around me, a salty shawl.
And, comforted but still uncomfortable, I, and we, continued to dig. The sun swelled hotter, higher, as the days went by, and on the solstice our sun was pierced on its pointed peak, spinning and spinning madly, this fire-star, our raison d’etre. They say to never stare into the sun, but I did. I stared straight into its blackened stove-belly and saw for minutes afterwards dark shapes dance before my eyes. I posed no questions. I got no answers.
Meanwhile, we dug ourselves in and, paradoxically, out to a depth of five feet, ice-cold lemonade cracking the thick glassine thirst that coated our throats, proving relief was possible.
“I want ten feet,” my husband said, eyeing the modest hole. “If we’re going to make a pond, I want it deep enough so I can do cannonballs without worrying about my ass.”
This seemed reasonable to me, so we hired a yellow machine with a steel claw, and the machine gnawed out another five feet, so at the end we had a crater that descended deep into the earth, the tapered sides taupe colored, at night the hole so impenetrably dark, so utterly mysterious one could almost imagine the tiny flickering lights of China deep in the deepest distance, a world beyond our world.
Ponds, like breasts, are not meant to be made. They are meant to simply occur. When one makes a thing like a pond or for that matter a breast, one must resort, unless incredibly lucky, to unnatural interventions; in the case of breast-making, saline implants or chunks of fine flesh culled from a chunky bottom; in the case of ponds, plastic liners or concrete, some way to hold the water. We’d resigned ourselves to a liner, all twenty-five hundred pounds of Firestone nontoxic rubber.
It was July then, and the rains resumed, and our pond-making stalled while we were pelted. The rain came down like a temper, a tantrum, beating its billions of fists against the hoods of cars, the roofs of houses. Tears of rain snaked their way beneath the loosened slates, slid down the walls, so the walls wept while I watched; I practiced watching. How do walls weep? Why do walls weep? Can walls weep? Do weeping walls stop weeping? I might have had such crazy questions if I had succumbed to my mind’s inclinations; but I did not succumb. I watched the rain. I waited it out, and, in the waiting, my body began to rain right along with the world. I rained droplets, sweated drops, the humidity coating me, its hand across my mouth.
I detest clichés, but then again, there’s a reason why certain phrases have attained immortality as clichés. I cannot think of a better way of saying that when you let something go, it frequently comes back to you. I let go of the search for understanding my bad luck, and in doing that, I also let go of the hope embedded in that search: that, by understanding, I might come to control my fortune, which I would swiftly reverse once I figured out the stick shift. I let the wheel go, watched Good Luck and Bad Luck disappear into their separate mists, lost sight of them completely in the rain, and then the rain stopped. The clouds cleared. They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond. We had ordered the liner, and right this minute it was en route, rolled like a massive scroll, a Torah made of rubber, on some truck, halfway between Minnesota and Massachusetts. Understand, the liner was key and, therefore, even though it ensured a synthetic wetland, we couldn’t wait to receive it. Our pond depended upon it. The liner would at once contain and seal the pond, allowing it to exist while ensuring its fraudulent nature. Unnaturally sealed up, our pond would require expensive aeration systems and flashy pumps that would circulate the water 24/7, sending a no-no message to mosquitoes seeking stagnant fluids in which to hatch their larvae.
And now, after rain, with only a few days left before the shipment was to arrive, we followed the water’s path to our half-made pond. We weren’t going to see if it held water; we assumed it would not. We were going to see if the pounding rainfall had destroyed the plant shelves we had so carefully sculpted.
I think we heard it before we saw it, the sound of plop plop plop. Ben says he heard gurgling, not plopping, but I don’t see how that’s possible. I heard plopping, and then, peering over the sculpted lip of our hole, I saw emerald frogs arcing from bank to bank, missing by long shots, falling into what could be called a massive puddle or could be called a . . . a . . . pond, for the hole was holding water, against all odds, against all rules, because dirt in New England does not hold water, but, well, this dirt did. “Clay,” an aquascape contractor, told us a few days later, when he came out to see our little miracle, our piece of great good luck, the liner shipment cancelled, $12K returned to our account. “You’ve got clay here it seems,” the pond professional said, grabbing a chunk of the saturated stuff and letting it ooze through his fist. “You know,” he said, “you’re really, really lucky. You won’t need a liner. Pond people would kill to have your soil.”
I started to laugh then, because I knew no one would kill to have my soil. Of this I was positive.
Still, there are times when clocks stop and awareness of the terrible temporary nature of your world gets suspended in some liminal, summer-like state, so your life hangs like a long afternoon in a perfect mid-July, the roses rose-red, their mouths yawning wide as if in perpetual surprise, or sleepiness. And that was what our sudden luck was like. We didn’t ponder its temporary nature; we just enjoyed it. The kids whooped with delight, stripped off their clothes, and went racing down the embankment, skidding, stumbling, finally belly flopping into the half-filled crater, muddy and foggy but delightfully cool and totally ours. All day the kids played in the pond we’d made, caught frogs, pried stones from the field and let them cannonball down deep into the deepest part. The children emerged from the murky water at sunset, sun-baked and flaking mud; we hosed them down outside, brown giving way to a deeper brown, the bodies of my estivating progeny.
I woke early the next morning to a sound. A step. Something emerging from the forest that lined our land. I don’t know how I could have heard her, for she was too far away, but I swear I heard her step, her delicate cloven foot landing lightly on the still soaking leaves, coming closer, closer, while I slipped out of bed to watch at the window. The doe seemed to be of suede, with a fine shapely head and ears at once triangular and furred. Her long neck arced out, lowered her head like a lever, and I saw her drink the accumulated rain our whole pond held, for her, and us.
I believed something was over, had passed then. I felt I had climbed to the top of a steep spiral staircase and now I stood looking down at the vortex of steel from the final landing.
That afternoon, Benjamin took the kids for ice cream, and I planned to try the pond out for myself.
Where we live: on thirty-eight acres forty-eight miles from Boston, MA, but forty-eight worlds apart. Our town is tiny, rural, the streets astir with horses and cars in equal number. At rush hour, carts roll down the road, pulled by geldings with black blinders siding their angular faces, and every morning the sun rises from behind the mountain, first its rays snaking upward and then at last the yolk of yellow yanked suddenly into the sky, as if pulled on a chain, or some string, held in the hand of god. And every night that same sun sets in reverse order, first the yolk, aflame now, streaming salmon pinks and hemorrhage-red from its bruised body, that yolk drops down abruptly behind the stony ridge, leaving its rays to linger aimlessly, until, one by one, they fizzle out almost audibly, and the darkness is a-chirp with crickets and other creatures.
Where we live, a neighbor can be eight acres away.
I walk around naked where we live. When it’s warm, I do this, despite my weight, because of my weight, I do this and revel in my privilege.
Thus, I stripped to my skin and, without even the screen of sun lotion, walked down the dirt path to the pond, which looked so peaceful, like a huge cup of tea on an earthen saucer. Dragonflies glinted above it, snacking on mosquitoes, and way down at the bottom, frogs skimmed the water, their back legs flung behind their goopy bodies, clowns, every one.
Now I made my way down the embankment we had made, surprised at how steep it actually was. We had tried to dig the sides to no more than a slope of twenty degrees, but this could not have been twenty degrees. Gravity put both his hands on my back and pushed me, so my cautious walk turned into a stumble, and then a slip, and then before I could say catchascatchcan, I went lickety-split into the pond, sliding to my destination on my bare ass, cool clay caking my palms and parts.
And then I was in, swimming around, pedaling in the water, flinging my legs like the frogs, breast stroking back and forth with them. Delightful. Five days of heavy rains had not managed to fill ’er up to ten feet. I’d say our pond was filled to four feet ten inches, maximum. I know this because when I finally stood up, I, at five feet, could stand with my head above water, stand, that is, in the center, the deepest point of the pond, which is where I stood now, with my head above water, and then I walked forward, towards the embankment, our steep-sloped shore, having had my fill, ready to get out, standing for a second in the shallow end to admire what we’d made, the water calm and lapping. I stood, water at my ankles. I stood for no more than maybe five seconds, gathering myself to get out.
And that is when it happened. Not slowly; it happened suddenly, as though a rug had been pulled, because suddenly I was sinking, the muddy bottom collapsing out from under me, my flailing feet searching for water but instead stuck in sucking mud, and I could not stop the sucking. I’ve never felt anything comparable. I had never known the earth was capable of collapsing in this manner; my standing spot was having a nervous breakdown of some sort, melting down into some substance all ooze and excrement, some voracious devilish substance gobbling me up, or down; down, I went, not even thinking to scream.
I was, then, sunk to my knees, my thighs; it happened fast. I recall feeling in a flash how hot and heavy the afternoon sun was on my head, like a hand, pushing me down, this image in a flash of a flash, and then disappeared, just darkness, and now the mud was at my midpoint. I kept going.
My life did not roll before my eyes.
I did not process my regrets, or my loves, or my luck, for that matter.
I lost all thought; I shed my status as a noun and became pure verb, at one with the plot I was quite literally sucked into. I was going down, and I needed to find a way up, and out; but I was no match for the mud. My muscles were irrelevant in the mud. I could not quite grasp this fact at first, because I have always thought that, if caught in a natural disaster, your muscles would save you or sink you; it was all about strength, was it not? And yet here, no matter how hard I strained and clawed, it made not one whit of difference; I was clawing at mush, at mash; clawing at cloud, pushing against emptiness, each tiny, solid center my feet seemed to find collapsing still further inward.
A long time passed. This I know. So perhaps my struggles did do me some good, did slow the sinking; the sun was far westward when the mud crept past my neck and pressed up against my pursed lips, clasping my whole head just below my flaring nostrils. “Where the fuck is my family,” I thought, and then, in a flare of rage, “This is one hell of an ice-cream cone they’re all eating.”
Now, the mud was in my mouth.
Up my nose.
I started choking, spitting, but whenever I spat, the more mud was in my mouth. I could still breathe. I could breathe well enough to weep, and weep I then did, and my tears merged with the mud and made it still muddier. And once again, then, I saw that, quite literally, there was nothing I could do. There was simply no way out. No amount of understanding, or struggle, would crack the code of quicksand, which this essentially was, and I was tired. So very tired.
I tried once more to thrash my way upward, and then exhaustion captured me completely, and I slumped in my mud and tasted its taste: drenched darkness, thick salt, shredded plant. I tasted it all: the earth, the depth, the darkness, the minerals, the fire, the water, the loam the clay the seeds the salt the weeping the wanting the living the dying; I tasted it all because I was forced to. I slumped in my mud and sampled the whole world.
I didn’t know that if you are ever caught in quicksand, rule one is not to struggle. I stopped struggling because I could not continue.
And once I stopped, the mud stopped with me. In fact, it was as though the entire earth just came to a quiet halt, with me. I hung there, entombed, suspended between here and there, then and now, with nothing sucking; just stopped. Dangling in density, utterly liminal, still weeping.
But even in tears I took note of how stopping had helped. Once I stopped, so too did the sinking. I’d like to know why this is, but I have not had the time to look into it.
And then, after minutes or hours, mosquitoes still nibbling on my scalp, the suspension transformed itself into an ever-so-slight upward lift. I felt it, a tectonic shift, a northward shrug, the earth in all its layers quite literally lifting me out of my mess.
Now I stayed very still, afraid to even wriggle my toes, because clearly there was a connection between the stillness in my body and the upward movement of the world. I was in mud, but miles beneath my feet the tectonic plates held me aloft, ground their gears, and then urged me skyward, so eventually my mouth emerged, my neck, my shoulders, my breasts, black moguls, my belly, black balloon; I rose in increments standing still, doing nothing. I rose, or, rather, the earth rose me, rewarded me, and once my stomach was out, I flung my whole self forward, clung to the embankment, hauled myself high and higher still, the pond’s lip just inches away now. And only then did I allow myself these images: phoenix, swan, mermaid, rising from her own excessive froth, finding her land legs, ecstatic not because of talent, and surely not because of luck (but then again precisely because of luck, her gifts sometimes gaudy, sometimes simple, she favors the prepared, perhaps, but, as far as I’m concerned, everything I get, both good and bad, yes, everything I get starts to go as soon as I feel it on my fingers . . . .).
And yet this I can count on: I made my way up over the embankment and stepped on solid ground. Imagine what I must have looked like from far away, my family far away, pulling in, tumbling out of the Subaru, seeing a black woman with a silver halo of hair stumbling across an infertile field, tears making tracks in her Nigerian face, this is what I must have looked like from the outside. But from the inside? Well, that’s a different story.
I was on a whole different pole but not polarized, no, no longer. I was simply on the inside, in a shining bright room, a small bundle of fire flickering in the hearth, well-steeped tea in a saucer by my side, beloved book in my lap. I looked around. Outside butterflies massed by the windows, so many species, so many colors, such a plethora of filmy wings. I could just barely hear them beat, just barely smell the garden pouring its perfume. I was inside, in a space and a grace called this place here is home, and I held out my hands and my children came running and my husband came walking and the butterflies came flying and the frogs came hopping and the locusts came shrieking and Job came limping and god came on his chariot and Bad Luck on his stallion and Good Luck in her Mercedes and my children on their lean and thank-the-lord-healthy legs and my husband powered by his steady and thank-the-lord healthy heart, they all came, such a crowd beyond counting, five football stadiums came as I held out my hands and everyone ran and I let them inside. We went inside and lit a small fire, and I told them this tale, this story, of sinking, of stumbling, of summer, and of finally finding some stillness, small fire, the fall of my footsteps always in my ears here; fall fall fall, the sound no longer ominous, oddly sweet now, like the autumn that is coming, like the leaves that will blaze, like the trees turning to torches while I watch all this, my hands held out, in humility, for balance, my borders; here is where I stand.