IF ONLY my father could have managed our deaths better than he had our lives. If he’d driven faster, turned sharper, but no, he had swerved without true conviction and instead of smashing into the light pole, the car had skidded over a shallow embankment into a little grove. My mother climbed out, dusting herself and preparing to sail proudly onward, but felt something at the back of her knee, brushed it, and found blood on her fingers.
A hemorrhage, and the doctors urged an abortion: the child would be retarded, they said. Heroic, she insisted on carrying the creature to term, and so five long months had passed, with this rabbit question looming. It was a figment of his imagination, didn’t he see? He hadn’t wanted a rabbit to die, because he didn’t want the baby, didn’t really love her, would have done anything to escape.
She sailed proudly on, with never a reproach (if there was something of the martyr in her movements, well, who could blame her, expecting this poor damaged child who would need constant care). And he, the gentle boy she’d married, became unaccountably sullen, withdrawn. He had seen a rabbit, he had—he had swerved to spare it. He was young and tender-hearted, it was his worst fear that something should suffer because of him. In fact, that was part of the reason why—why he had married her.
She’d been the girl from the valley whose divorced mother took in washing. Every week he brought the laundry down, to peer down the dim hallway with its smells of liver boiling and cheap perfume, the apartment doors left open for air in summer so he’d see old women groaning in their beds, children peeping back at him. He had the loose, quick gait, the lifted chin of a frat boy: an exotic in their world. Behind the next door: Claire Ledoux, eyes narrow, cheeks wide, carriage … majestic, despite the mountain of wrinkled shirts in her basket. She would escape this place; she would iron her way to the stars.
The girls he knew could afford to be gentle. The doors of the future were wide open to them. Claire had only her presence, and her iron. When he asked her to the movies, her eyes blazed and something flashed open in him; a carnal premonition. What might it be like to lift her out of this place—wouldn’t her gratitude make for a fiercer love?
She knew him, from the labels on his father’s shirts. She knew what he represented. She spent the whole day preparing, was still ironing her sweater when the doorbell rang. Yanking it over her head she was seized with a qualm—was there a wrinkle? She must be perfect; this might be her only chance. She picked up the iron without thinking and pressed it to her heart.
Waiting at the doorway, he heard her scream. A minute later though, she opened the door and smiled with perfect, if seething, composure, grimacing only when she’d straddled the motorcycle behind him and he couldn’t see her face anymore. She wrapped her arms around his waist: the girls from the Academy wouldn’t have done this; they’d been sheltered unto inanity. Claire was free of their scruples, better than they. She had to get somewhere; he was going to give her a ride.
They went to see A Streetcar Named Desire. How is it we remember the fifties as a neat, false decade, when they knew everything about sex back then? To take a man into your body is to possess him entirely: from then on his raw voice will call only your name. Of course this knowledge must be kept quiet, as it could drive whole societies mad. But they were reminded that they knew this secret, and each felt the other’s awareness. Riding home she held him closer than before, arms across his chest, thighs against his, cheek pressed to his shoulder … all delicacy, she saw now, was a sham.
Kissing her, he pulled her in tight with a motion he’d just learned from Marlon Brando. In fact she reminded him of Stella—made for love, for childbirth—a real woman. He’d always suspected that real life took place along the dim corridors where stains were scrubbed from the collars of the upper class. His parents were away for the weekend—he’d take her home. He wanted her to see what he had to offer her. A Tudor cottage, with a steep roof of slate scallops, herringboned brick, and holly trees in dark masses beside the door. And Claire, burning with defiance—and confidence: men, even strangers on the street, seemed to recognize something powerful in her that she could only believe when she saw it reflected in their eyes—followed him in through the rounded oak door with its four leaded panes inset, into the hallway with the brass salver and the woodwork rubbed with oil. The grandfather had been an ironmonger, come over from Germany or somewhere, “done gates and fences for all the best people in Manhattan. J. P. Morgan, for one,” said her mother, who took her own status from that of the people she washed for.
Claire went to the window—the harbor glittered there, and Brooklyn beyond. To have grown up looking out over these places—to know things from above that way—it was nearly as if he owned them. The windows were clever: one pane in each belled out to accommodate a small trapdoor. She lifted one and found a screened panel—for fresh air, in wintertime.
“God forbid you should suffer a draft,” she said, thinking of the matchbook under the sash at home.
“It saves oil,” he explained, stung.
So, then, what she thought mattered to him. “It just … shows such care.” She smiled so warmly, to salve the little wound. Impossible not to touch her, and when he did, her smile only became more tender. The wondering, grateful smile that broke from him at this was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
There was a wistfulness in it, poignant to her because she’d have been wistful herself if life had allowed her such liberty. In her face he saw a fierce aspiration, which would have counted as crass at the Academy. What if it were possible to become like her—unrestrained?
“We come from different worlds,” she said, sounding so hopeless and picturesque, as if they were in a movie together. The harbor lights, the plush carpet, the leaded windows that reflected, yes, her own beauty. Her burn was stinging.
“We’ll make our own world,” he thought, feeling he’d fallen into this movie too. He kept from speaking it, though, thinking that he’d just met her, how could his feelings run this high? Her breasts moved him to tenderness as much as lust. That she was willing to let him touch her: she was so terribly kind. He would return the favor, would rescue her. He recast her mother’s flat in his mind, from shabby to truly squalid, so the deliverance would mean more. In bed beside her, in the incredible luxury of it, he tried to confide the deepest things in himself, how his father died just after the first pictures came back from Auschwitz—as if his ancestral people had turned to monsters, his pride turned to shame, and it killed him.
“Cancer, cancer,” she said, holding him tight, keeping her own horrors swallowed. “Not divine retribution.”
“I know,” he said, squeezing her breast to remind himself, love and warmth were right there.
And she, arching up to say, “Take, take of my love and warmth”—she had infinite warmth to give, to him who would otherwise have so little. The sterility of that house, these people embalmed in their own wealth. They wanted fresh air, did they? Well, here she was. (Coming to “Tyger, tyger, burning bright” in her anthology of English poems, she’d felt a thrill of recognition. She would burn bright too.) She’d save him from his own stolidity. Behind him, on his mother’s piano, stood a globe, colored the hallowed gold of old documents, that showed the earth as men had once imagined it. It was encircled in a double ring of iron, as in the hands of a benevolent god—it must have belonged to his grandfather. The ambition that showed there, the intention to possess! Yes, she would take her part in this tradition, beside this boy; she could see how soft he was, how he needed her. She leaned in toward him …
He was beyond speaking. After all, they had things in common: the same loneliness, the same longing. Now it would be fulfilled. And they slipped together into the forest of the night and lost the sense of the outer world.
* * *
TWO YEARS later he was drafted and woke out of the ether of that love.
It was 1955; he was stationed in Verona, which was more than she could bear. Her father had been there in the war; she could still see the red pushpin on the world map that she used to fix her eyes on to keep her balance, as she practiced her pirouettes. Eyes on that pushpin, she kept steady for three years, until the day his ship returned to New York. She was eleven years old: her dress had a red bow at the collar; her gloves buttoned at the wrist. A thousand soldiers streamed past her—all of them in the arms of their families by the time her father came sheepishly down the gangway. He had a new baby daughter, in Europe; he was going to return there. All the time he was away and she was tending his image in her heart, keeping him alive there with memories and prayers—he had simply allowed himself to forget her.
If my father had been sent to Berlin, or the Philippines—who can say? But this struck too deep a nerve. Every day she wrote to him, and every night took the day’s letter, ripped out the abject parts, and worked the rest until it showed her with castanets flashing. This was how it worked: you created a magnificent self so a man could fall in love with you, then you’d have to keep that self up, so as not to lose the man. And that way you’d never disintegrate.
But when he didn’t write back, she found herself begging. “You’re all that matters to me,” she wrote.
It was the abjection that moved him—she needed him so badly her life depended on him, so he could dare to count on her. And she’d given herself so easily, so fully, she deserved something in return. He went home on leave, half thinking to reassure her and escape, but just being near her he felt the old drowsy warmth overwhelm him. When he left she was pregnant. They were married; then came the rabbit in the road.
And the sense they were damned to each other, and to this child, the indelible proof of their shame. He hadn’t really loved her, had married out of duty. She knew this by the instinct that taught her everything. He’d rather she were dead, rather he himself were dead, than yoked to her. He denied this, of course, but without real feeling. And there had been no rabbit! What more was there to say?
By the time I was born, they were living with his parents and he’d started his own business, raising praying mantises in his mother’s greenhouse.
* * *
“HIS FIRST venture,” I told Philippa, shaking my head with a rue I barely noticed, so completely was venture linked with failure in my mind.
“You feel sorry for him!” Philippa said. “It has never occurred to me to feel sorry for either of my parents.” She squinted into the distance, trying to imagine it. “They’d be mortified,” she said, with a shudder.
“Aphid control,” I said, feeling sorrier, wishing I could go back there to that first failure and flip the switch to set my father on the right track. He’d put an ad in the Sunday Times, which should have left him two weeks of incubation to take orders and make deliveries, but Saturday morning they started hatching and by afternoon there were thousands of them, advancing in phalanxes across the glass, cocking their eerie little heads.
I had the story, like all stories, from Ma. And her stories existed to illustrate why she didn’t, and why I shouldn’t, love him. “The praying mantises were infinitely more important to him than you were,” she’d explained, telling how, when her waters broke (how like her, to go into labor like that right when he was in the midst of a disaster), he’d insisted she hold on until he herded the mantises to safety.
But, here came the great moment of her life—the advent of motherhood, with its absolute authority.
“You have to take me to the hospital right now,” she’d said, amazed at the quiet certainty of her voice, and anger had flashed over him. Who was she, to tell him what to do? Then he remembered: she was the mother of his child. He’d wrought this change, he would have to live with it. The deep, lush world she’d taken him into that first night, that he’d dreamed of swimming off into forever—where had it gone? He’d meant to rescue her from her fears and rages; instead, he’d found her mad stare fixed on him.
“It’s the whole investment, gone,” he said, and she, incensed, lifted the perfectly wrought latch and smacked the greenhouse door open with her flat hand. She was sorry it didn’t shatter, the fine old thing with its row of wrought-iron fleur-de-lys along the ridgepole to keep the pigeons away. The emblem of wealth, comfort, and enervation. People would ask: “What does your husband do?” “Why, he raises praying mantises,” she’d have to say. The creatures marched out, turning their cold, curious faces toward their liberator, and streamed away. They’d have baked to death before the Sunday Times ad came out in any case.
So, his project sputtered as hers was born. With each contraction, she loathed him more violently, until he seemed to be the force that convulsed her, the author of all her pain. And then the storm was past, the room was quiet, there were a few soft clouds in the sky, and in her arms, the baby. Seeing it, red and wrinkled, eyes screwed tight, fist up in futile defense against the light—she was overwhelmed with tenderness, for everyone, even for him. She remembered how badly they’d wanted each other, how their first touches seemed to be sacred. Here I was, whole, like the love that produced me: their new life, their real life, could begin. There had been a rabbit; from now on they would believe in this rabbit together. Exhausted, proud, filled with feeling, she smiled up at her husband, she forgave.
“Retarded, indeed,” she said. “Look at her. She’s brilliant!”
He recoiled. Yesterday she’d known the baby would be an idiot; now it was brilliant before it opened its eyes. For months she had despised him, and he’d believed she was right: never mind his intent, he had nearly killed them, and this child would shamble beside him for life as the visible proof of his guilt. Now she’d changed her mind, and he was to forget his anguish, dance and sing? To agree would be to consign himself to the fire of her madness.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Claire,” he said, and she, her bubble of hope burst, turned away.
“Brilliant,” she repeated, though what her imagination conjured in my scrunched little face was more than brilliance: some kind of supernatural talent that would prove her own hidden genius and so resolve all her torments, sing her demons to sleep finally, make her whole. She held me closer, she kissed my forehead with that smile of infinite warmth that must certainly have reminded him of the way she had loved him once, showed what he’d be missing from now on.
* * *
“A HUSK,” Philippa cried, “the inseminator cast aside! A mother is red in tooth and claw. Praying mantises indeed.”
I couldn’t help laughing. It was so good to see them as pawns of nature—if this were true, I wouldn’t have to go back and back over their story in my mind, trying to understand what poisoned their love, so I could look for the antidote.
* * *
THEY BROUGHT me home, stood over me terrified, working up their courage to change the diaper. How did you avoid hurting such a tiny, fragile thing? It needed them every second; Claire would barely fall asleep after a feeding before it woke crying again. Its diaper was dry, it wouldn’t take her nipple, what was wrong? Claire held it—her daughter—tight, rocking her, saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right, your mama’s here,” waiting for maternal grace to take effect, for the baby to relax and sleep. But fretting turned to screaming, until Claire was sobbing too in the fear that she couldn’t give what the child needed, that she was not a natural mother.
Ted slept through untroubled; she’d have liked to smash his skull. He’d rather have killed her than marry her, now her daughter had been born under an evil star. The baby whirled its arms like propellers, and Claire cried so deeply, she sounded to herself like an animal baying, low and angry and hopeless, in pain.
“Wake up, wake up, can you be so deaf?” she asked her husband, shaking his shoulder.
He sat up, bleary and irritated. Wasn’t this supposed to be her job?
“I can’t, I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know what to do!”
“Well, what do you expect me to do?” he asked. Why had she had to have this baby, if she couldn’t take care of it?
But just then, Claire rested her head on his chest, and her crying calmed; she seemed to be consolable suddenly. Knowing how she’d have felt if she could have comforted the baby, she’d thought to give him this satisfaction. This was her instinctive intelligence, and she used it in this secret way.
Ted had never seen himself have such an effect. He took the baby to his chest and made a low, manly sound, like an engine. And the baby was quiet, his little Beatrice, and Claire kissed him right over his heart. They were a family, it was like a miracle.
They were alone together in the desolate dark … they held each other, and each promised, silently, to do better, to make it all work. Warm and drowsy under the feather quilt with him, she remembered a library book she’d loved as a child, about an orphaned girl raised on a farm, where privation and satisfaction went somehow hand in hand. The farm family awoke before dawn, stoked the fire, fed and milked the cows, cut the hay or tapped the trees, ate heartily and simply, and in the evening, settled back at the hearth while grandfather read aloud. Their floor was always swept, herbs dried in the rafters, days of work led to evenings of satisfaction, their children grew healthy and strong.
The next weekend they took the Saw Mill River Parkway north into Connecticut, and when they arrived at the old house at the end of the long dirt road, she knew they belonged there. It had been somebody’s folly—built of fieldstone and heavy timber so the walls were two feet thick, surrounded by a “formal garden” utterly overgrown, and fifty acres of marsh and bracken, two wide meadows full of brambles, a brook running along at the base of the hill, an old root cellar with potatoes and squash still piled. They could see the sky through the barn roof, and it smelled sweetly of hay, of the farm in the library book where wishes came true. They crossed the brook on a log bridge and walked up the hillside. Claire bent down to touch the flowering blueberries, lifting the wax bells with her fingertips so he could see how many berries they’d have.
Ted looked out over the fields, thinking of the work it would have taken to build the stone walls between them. Work makes the man. To go forward, in work, in marriage, one needed to be able to forget the past. He would begin by forgetting that day when he’d seen life coming at him with all its terrible decisions and had driven off the road. He’d been afraid of having a child who needed his guidance. If he had no answers to give, if he failed at fatherhood—that would be more than he could bear. But here was his wife beside him, and his little daughter, and it gave him courage: yes, he’d like more children, more soft little things like milkweed fluff, who flew to their parents for love. He’d borrowed against his inheritance and bought the place that day.
* * *
THESE WERE the people I was doomed to love! She, seething with an ardor entirely unfocused, smoking, smoking, her eyes narrow, her silence terrible: my first glimpse of beauty. And he, in one of those bursts of optimism that punctuated his despairs, was fitting the coop with chicken wire—his old T-shirt, faded red, my favorite color then and now. I squeezed into their embraces, to feel them wanting each other. Or, at least, how desperately they wanted what they couldn’t get from each other. Their passion swam along underneath us, we felt it move there, we never knew when it would rise up and flick our little boat over with its tail. He went to Agway for chickenfeed. She rocked back and forth on a kitchen chair, biting her knuckle to keep herself from sobbing.
She was pregnant again and again, and so came Sylvie, Dolly, and finally Ted, our parents’ folie à deux becoming folie à trois, quatre, cinque, six … Pop faded, grew dim, and Ma intensified, like a storm. She was always pregnant—there was the one too vigorous who tore the placenta away and starved, the one born months early. We could have named her Sadness, this fragile sister; she was the incarnation of our wistful parents’ wishes, curled translucent under the incubator lamp, sucking the bud of her thumb through her few hours of life.
Ma’s head ached and ached; we tiptoed around, hoping to avoid the invisible tripwires that seemed to set those headaches off. I’d drawn with crayon in my copy of Goodnight Moon: how could it be, that a child of hers could do such a thing? She gathered the books in her arms, took them out to the trash barrel behind the barn and set them on fire. Books were sacred, sacred: Did I understand? Her grandmother’s poems, bound in cloth printed with violets, were kept face out on the shelf, a reminder of the high place from which her family had fallen. They’d been literary, way back, far above my father’s common moneymaking sort of people. When Ma was twelve, she won a medal for reciting more Shakespeare from memory than any other twelve-year-old on Staten Island—it was made of real gold. Did I understand? In her high school yearbook, her quotation was: “Nobody understands me.” And looking into the eyes of that smouldering girl, it was hard to tell whether this was a lament or a boast.
He, our father, was away, on some kind of business (we didn’t ask what kind; it was frightening to see him search for the answer as if he himself didn’t exactly know), and she didn’t trust the car, was sure it would burst into flames when she was driving. She would only use it in an emergency, so we were always at home, becoming strange together, contorting ourselves to fit each other and keep the rest of the world at bay. We were not suited to the work of farming—it meant doing the same thing day after day, with no immediate result, and thus it could not pull our attention away from our own drama. We took naps, we wandered up and down the stairs looking for a lost pencil, we sat at the window and stared. When the phone rang a terror gripped us and we cried, “Answer it, answer it!” as if it had come alive suddenly and would have to be slain.
Some days, though, we managed to seem like the characters in her childhood book, the book that had gotten us into this trouble. Braving the musky darkness of the coop, I’d go along hen by hen, thrusting a hand in beneath each one to bring out a warm, shit-spattered egg, carrying them down the hill in a tin pail, knowing that my reward would be the feeling that I was a farm girl, part of the beautiful scene in my parents’ imagination, which was the one thing they really shared. I’d climb into the willow tree to sit all afternoon, reading, watching the brook swirl over the stones beneath. Did I love to read? To hear the water? God knows. I loved knowing that Ma would look out the bedroom window when the headache let up, and see me. And soon she’d be leaning in the front door, all gentleness and hope, so beautiful you couldn’t take your eyes off her, her soft smile showing mostly amazement, that her life had come out like this, her land stretching in front of her, her children reading in the trees..
* * *
RECALLING IT for Philippa, I remembered only that—how beautiful it was. The place, the people, were far away, unable to barge into my vision with all their ungainly wants and rages. Oh, I missed them, I missed the immense love I’d borne them as I sat on the hillside in the evenings, having edged away from the table and its enduring argument, turning the screen-door catch with my hand to silence it so I could escape unnoticed, to look down at the warm light beaming from the windows, all of it more dear to me the more I was estranged.
“Untouched by the outside world,” I said, tears of nostalgia stinging.
“Well, they had to send you to school,” Philippa said, with swift professorial authority, through which, suddenly, shot a spark of doubt. “Right?”
“On and off,” I answered. “You know, when the mood struck.” I laughed, with a little edge of danger—which she caught and reflected in her own laugh, making me tipsy. No one had ever seen danger in me before.
“The school question had to run the rapids between Ma’s contradictions, like everything else,” I said, with a little swagger, having transformed my poor mother to granite with the turn of a phrase. Her ambitions for me had been boundless, but she hardly expected any mortal teacher could help me fulfill them. Teachers were small and ordinary people like my father, who would only want to shrink me, to show me limits instead of possibilities. And there must be no limits, because I was going to grow immense and all-seeing, become a sorceress and save her soul. After three days of kindergarten, she’d had enough of public school and blazed into the headmistress’s office at Northwest Country Day to declare my genius. I hung behind her, avoiding the woman’s eyes while greedily taking in the details of her presence—tweed suit, gray pincurls, a perfume whose fragrance would come to represent constancy to me, so that each afternoon, as I shook her hand before running out into whatever maelstrom my family was suffering that day, I’d breath deep, hoping to carry a whiff of her away with me. My mother’s pride—which had to be immense so as to wrestle down her shame—made her seem at least twice the headmistress’s size. I edged a little further behind her, wanting more than anything to just go home.
Or not quite “more than anything.” More than anything, I wanted to be good, which meant only that I must make amazing accomplishments and love my mother best. I had to see that smile in which all her furies were resolved, everything calmed and completed by … me. The school terrified me—my classmates were Miles Armbruster III, Eliza Anne Cornwell, etc., children who spoke with the commanding voices they learned from their riding teachers, and whose chauffeurs delivered them to school because their parents were occupied in the manner of normal people, whatever that was. I barely dared move for fear the secret stigma of our lives would somehow be revealed to these people; I couldn’t possibly raise my hand and ask to use the girls’ room. Which left me hearing the unfortunate—“Miss McGinty? Beatrice wet herself again,” from Eliza Anne, and receiving the kind loan of a pair of Miles Armbruster’s mittens to replace my drenched socks.
Years later: Ma and I were watching Reagan’s Inaugural Ball on TV and Miles Armbruster danced by. “Do you remember when he lent you his mittens for socks?” she asked. “That’s what you call a connection, Bea.” Another of the gifts Ma had given me. But every school morning, she had stood bereft in the kitchen doorway as if I betrayed her by leaving, and looking back at her I would feel something blur in my heart. She loved me so, loved to take me up into the woods to read stories in a glade we’d found where bright green grass grew under a canopy of laurel, loved to sing to me while she hung up the laundry and I ran back and forth under the blowing sheet. She loved me and I abandoned her, that was just the way her life always went.
Sylvie would try to catch my eye, to keep me there, but I wouldn’t, I couldn’t stay home. I was on an errand whose great if unnameable purpose I felt every minute, and I had no idea how to go about this except to go—fervently—to school. And Miss McGinty had noticed my nearsightedness; I had glasses now and knew that trees were made up of individual leaves.
Sylvie understood (this was her genius). “I have a little cough,” she said, and Ma’s hand went to her forehead and finding no fever, smoothed her fine hair back and kissed her brow.
“We’ll bake bread,” she said, closing me, the faithless, out of the family circle. “Cinnamon swirl.”
Let them stay then, I thought, hating them, wondering why I was so mean. By the time I was in fourth grade and some financial misfortune had dashed me down from Olympus back to public school, we were used to the idea that I was bent on fulfilling my own ambition, while Sylvie was so kind and gentle that she wanted to stay home and help. They stood at the end of the driveway to watch me off to the bus, Sylvie holding Dolly by the hand—it was September, the chicory and goldenrod bloomed on the roadside and I startled redwings out of the marsh grass as I ran, heart tearing, up the dirt road. Our life was so beautiful, it must be as Ma said, that it was more authentic, more fine and true than other lives.
The bus was full of kids from real farms, who reeked of manure from their morning chores. In the valley, where the blacktop crossed the line (into the state of New York, also the state of sinful fantasy for me), it stopped in front of the autobody shop to pick up Butchy and Donna Savione; then we got back into Connecticut and girls named Debby and Lisa would get on with their stables of plastic horses, and the bus picked up speed as we passed the Armbrusters’ and the other great houses along Main Street, heading toward the state of perfect receptivity, not to a subject, but a teacher, whoever he or she was that year—the live being whose magnetism would pull all my loose, mad atoms into alliance and lift me away from my family into the world I was going to conquer for them.
Vietnam was on the news every night, but it had no more to do with us than the antacid commercials that interrupted it. Our reality was there in that house. The essential news we took from the tension in Ma’s voice each morning. Waking up, I listened to hear her in the next room, to guess whether she would adore or despise me that day.
This depended, mysteriously, on my father. He was away on his vague businesses and when he was coming home, she’d clean the house with a blind fervor and prepare herself as carefully as for that first date. Clouds of scented steam billowed from the shower stall where a few hours earlier mushrooms had been sprouting—now it was spotless and she stood with bowed head against the water, swaying like a woman at prayer. She emerged healed somehow, shining with physical pride, her ironing scar an angry Gothic arch over her left breast. All her doubts were behind her and she strode in magnificent nakedness downstairs to get a pair of her wretched panties (she would not spend money on panties, she’d have counted it impure).
She unnerved him—she was so hungry, she might eat him alive. Her breasts were beautiful, but he couldn’t help remembering that heart beneath. Hearts must be compared to fists for a reason, and hers was fearfully strong. So he kept his distance, kissing her in a way she said was typical of the passionlessness of the upper classes. He felt he’d married beneath himself, did he? She was quite sure he did, though as always he was wrong.
“Pearls before swine,” she said, when I wrote a little poem for him. Well, she was going to drag me and my poems up from the pig wallow, or die trying. After all, he was a Nazi (yes, she had filed away those early confessions, so she’d know where to attack). This, obviously, was why she had dreamt the SS were chasing her up the back hill. And she, though apparently a Catholic, was truly at heart a Jew. Was she not extremely intelligent? And persecuted everywhere she turned? Sephardic, she told me—spritzing herself with a little Mediterranean glamour, just in case. His was the face of evil in the mirror! Why couldn’t anyone see?
He went upstairs to change (into a T-shirt, not Stanley Kowalski) and she, lonely in the world she’d banished him from, noticed that Sylvie had failed to mop the kitchen; she dissolved in a tearful rage. See? He’d come home and found us wanting, and now he would go away, and leave us alone to starve in the woods, like the Jews in Germany. She was leafing through Treblinka for the appropriate passage, and he was steeled against her, did we see how he steeled himself against her, his own wife, whom he had promised to love and honor, in sickness and in health? But no, she could not turn to him, he did not listen and did not care, she had nowhere to turn because nobody understood her and she had married a murderer, there had been no rabbit (and, aside to me, who, being the oldest, seemed always on the verge of driving somehow, so that little tips ought to be welcome: “You must never, never swerve to avoid an animal in the road. Human life comes first.” Raging glance shot at my father). I was eleven, and seeing the phrase “lost control of the car” in a newspaper accident report had naturally assumed a car could develop a mind of its own and slam itself and its driver into, say, a bridge abutment, out of … spite … or whatever.
But, was that a rumble of thunder? Distant, but lightning travels at the speed of … (behind her my father was wearily shaking his head; this drove her to greater urgency). “Sylvie, unplug the television, Dolly, now, come with me, please; no, Teddy, don’t cry, everything’s going to be fine, honey.” She held his head tight to her shoulder, reveling in his fear, his need for her, her voice taking a new, thrilling turn as she pointed west: “Look at the sky,” where the clouds were boiling, gray and green. “Up, up, come on,” and then a sharp crack, to which she responded with an immense shudder as if it had split her in two, my father with eyes cast heavenward at the performance as she pushed my head down through the low door, and turned to say, “Any phone calls to make, dear?” We all knew that the most indoor lightning strikes come over the phone wires.
It was close in that cupboard, all of us cramped together in the dark. Dolly was protesting, as always, her little fists clenched, little arms crossed, little mouth pursed with disapproval. Of what did she disapprove? Of Ma, for hysteria. Of Pop, for condescension. Of me, for acting above it all. Of Teddy, for being overwhelmed. She huddled closer to Sylvie, then pulled back. “You smell like hot dogs. Gross.”
“We had hot dogs for dinner. You smell like hot dogs too.”
“No I don’t,” Dolly said, insulted, pulling further into the corner in case this was true. Ma sang to Teddy, rocking him on her lap, twirling his curls around her finger, comforting him as someone ought once to have comforted her. She told us about the ball of lightning that had come in through her window, right after her father left for the war: a brilliant, sizzling pompon that zipped across the room, lighting on the lamp, the radio, the metal doorknob, all the while she, a little girl with no father to help her, sat mesmerized, sheet up to the chin, waiting for it to hurt her, until it was sucked into an electrical outlet and disappeared.
“No one believed me,” she said. “They never believed me.”
So she had given up truth. She made facts of her feelings; menaces grew to fit the terrors they aroused in her, wounds deepened to prove the extent of her pain. She flinched mightily, at a thunderclap, murmuring “It’s okay, it’s okay,” into Teddy’s hair as if the fear was his.
There was pleasure in the linen closet, a deep calm. Finally, we’d worked it so the danger was outside ourselves, and we were banded together against it, safe. When we emerged, into a freshly washed landscape, the last violet clouds ragged over Skiff Mountain, the charge in the air was dispelled, and there was some sense of forgiveness, and we heard the parents giggling together in the middle of the night. In the morning, for no discernible reason, they’d become the kindly, striving people they’d always wanted to be, Pop swinging the little ones up for a hug as we came down the stairs.
Once I asked him how it happened—what made the grim détente between them dissolve all of a sudden. He thought a long time, and finally said, “Well, I guess we made love, honey.”
Sex did it. I did not, of course, know what sex was. On my seventh birthday, he’d taken me aside and, saying solemnly, “I wish you didn’t have to know…” looked deep, deep into my eyes and explained the physical act with no context, so it sounded repulsive and bizarre and I pictured them managing it in the bathroom. I doubted I could ever love any man enough to bear such a thing, and so had given the thought up, but here it was again. Any earlier murder attempts seemed to have been forgotten and there was even a suggestion of some future in which we would all live happily together, and all because of sex.
After breakfast that day Pop left and returned with a newborn lamb. Its mother had rejected it, so the farmer had given it to us. Sylvie took it into her arms as if she finally had a baby of her own, naming it Forsythia, feeding it from a bottle. We were going to become sheep farmers—we’d build up a flock, sell the wool, learn to spin it, to make cheese from the milk. Why had we never thought of it till now? Lambs in the fields, three sisters spinning in the firelight—all this, while, not far from us, in the suburbs to the south, wives were being swapped, Valium swallowed, malls built, gas guzzled, life and love wasted day by day.
* * *
SO HOW was it we were the crazy ones? The house was giving way to nature—vines grew in through chinks in the walls, opening them wide enough for snakes, then mice, then squirrels. The chickens had gone from fluffy Easter gifts to flea-ridden nuisances—they stepped delicately into the kitchen through the tear in the screen, to peck at the bugs in the corners. The cats were afraid of them and moved up to live on the roof, forgotten and starving. One summer night, we were managing to act like a regular family—having a barbecue—when they came swooping down from the eaves over the grill, snatching chops out of the flames and hunkering under the porch to eat, and lick their singed paws.
“It’s a madhouse!” Ma said, arms out, ready to leap into the fountain of wrongness that watered everything we grew.
Not the first time desperation has been mistaken for ecstasy. That night the sheep found a gap in the fence and, panicked by freedom, ran around and around the house all night, hooves clicking on the stone path. Ma dreamed the Brownshirts had her surrounded; they were about to break down the door.
The next morning, her headache was back. “I wish you could just stick a screwdriver right here, in the corner of my eye,” she said, jamming the heels of her hands against her eyes. I looked out the window: the sheep were trying to push back into their field, all at once, so they were bunched in a woolly knot at the fence, their bottoms wiggling urgently.
Pop had business in the city. “You’d rather I was dead,” Ma wept, hoping this was terrible enough that he’d have to contradict her, but he told her to stop exaggerating.
I wrung out the hot washcloth while Sylvie went up to deal with the sheep. I walked Ma to the brook so she could lie on the bank and dip her head into the icy water, put her back to bed, and went up the willow tree with my book, trying to read, waiting to hear her call from the window. She looked out and saw I didn’t care what she endured, how overwhelmed she was, by all these little children who needed her until there was none of her left, by this pain slamming in her skull. I thrived while she suffered, and why? Because I had a mother who loved me!
“You might have thought to pull my curtain,” she said when I went in, her eyebrow quivering over a cold stare.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t sound sorry.”
I kept still for a minute so as not to say, “I’m sorry I don’t sound sorry,” and asked if I could get her a cup of tea. Which amounted to the same thing—I knew she didn’t like people who drank tea. Had I joined the other side? And the dog was baying; the collie up on the mountain was in heat. I dragged ours to the barn by the collar, shut him in, and turned on the fan in Ma’s room, but all night we could hear him whining and suffering. Next morning, I went up to find his nose poked out under the barn door; he’d clawed it to splinters and his paws were bleeding. I got his collar with both hands, but as I bent down to hook the chain on he looked up at me with such pleading anguish that I felt it was hateful to hold him against such a power, whose enormity I only realized that day.
Ma’s headache had become nearly constant. We tried morphine: “Look, Beatrice, look at all the butterflies!” she said, joystricken, like a child. My mind raced: How to fill the room with butterflies before the drug wore off? I couldn’t bear to see her disappointed. But already something was twisting and she looked at me suddenly with strange cold eyes and said, “I can see right through your face.”
Her blinding headache had given her new sight, and she noticed I was becoming a woman—her natural enemy. She herself had armed me, filling me with strength and confidence; now I’d use these powers to strike her down.
I felt the slap of this, the injustice, and I knew she must be right. There was something in me that didn’t give a damn if her head ached, that would have trampled my sisters and even little Teddy, just to get my own way. If she’d been right to have me, against the advice of the doctors, if she was right about my brilliance (I rolled my eyes at this only because I cherished it too deeply and secretly to let it ever be known), if those intuitions were true, then this despicable thread she’d found must be just as real.
The headache over, the butterflies were forgotten and she became defiant—she did not miss my father and when she met a man on the street her posture changed, her laugh deepened, her smile hinted at great adventures in store.
“I’ve discovered the secret of sex appeal,” she confided. “You just have to be thinking about it all the time. It shows, it comes through in your eyes.”
One day she said: “I’m writing a novel.” I must have looked skeptical, because she added, defying me instead of Pop for a change, “It’s about sex. You wouldn’t understand.”
She adored me, would support me in anything, told me fifty times a day how beautiful and brilliant I was, how much beloved, bought me dresses covered in ruffles and lace while she herself wore an old silk bathrobe cinched with a necktie for special occasions. If only her mother had loved her this way. She made sure I had all the advantages, like the girls she’d envied and despised, and no, of course she didn’t envy and despise me, I was her daughter, her own creation.
Besides, she had something I didn’t: sex, the golden key to the door of adulthood, which she intended to lock behind her now.
* * *
LATE ON a March night; the windows so thickly feathered with frost we couldn’t see through, I thought I heard something crying, up the hill. We’d been “snowbound”—held in the house by Ma’s fear of icy roads—for days. Ma had gone to bed with her ache, and Sylvie and I had been playing cribbage on the floor in front of the woodstove before facing the cold upstairs.
Sylvie put her hand to the window and melted a palm’s worth of space to look out. “A light,” she said, with Ma’s portentousness. “What could it be?”
We went to the back door, praying she was right, that a strange light—a mystery—was visiting us; that Danger and Excitement, seeing we could not get out to meet them, had come to our back door. I put my head out into air too sharply cold to breathe.
“Nothing,” I said, but then I heard some kind of grunt and of course whispered breathlessly, “You’re right! There’s someone up there. Put on your boots.” We scrambled into our things and up the hill, to meet our intruder, but coming around the sheep shed, heard a commotion and went in to find Forsythia lying in the straw, in labor a month before her time. She kicked and groaned, surprised by each pain, then forgetting it completely, looking on mildly as the contraction rolled through her wool in a deep wave.
“What should we do?” I asked Sylvie, whose empathy had grown so strong by then it had become a sixth sense, a great competence. That she had “seen a light” just at this moment didn’t surprise me; she was rooted in nature like a woman ought to be, so of course she was drawn to this birthing. It wasn’t fair, that all my schooling, all my ambition had cut me apart from this. And I hated deferring to her, when I had studied everything so carefully.
A shadow crossed Sylvie’s face when she saw me in doubt. “The cats just do it by themselves,” she said.
Something appeared then—the lamb’s folded knees. Sylvie knelt to touch them, looking up at me with awe. Here it was, and fate had chosen us to see! Only fitting—we’d done the work, borne the responsibility day by day, now nature would reward us with a marvel. We glanced at each other in bold complicity: after all, we’d been told not to disturb Ma for anything less than a catastrophe. We’d keep this for ourselves. There was another contraction, and another, but still only the knees were visible, and Forsythia looked bewildered and bleated as if she was asking us something.
“Do you think I should pull?” Sylvie asked.
I knelt in the straw beside her.
“I think…” I said, stalling, and heard the lamb’s neck snap as a final contraction forced it out through the ewe’s torn vagina. Then came Forsythia’s uterus, tangled in the lamb’s back legs. She gazed at us, over the bloody inert mass of her body, with immense liquid eyes.
Sylvie screamed—as if she could scream loud enough to put things back the right way. The vet said there was no point in his coming, Forsythia would be dead by morning.
He was wrong, though. She survived another day, struggling back and forth across the barnyard in search of her baby, her bloated womb dragging behind her through the snow.
“What were you thinking?” Ma asked, with her persecuted glare, the headache warping her eyes out of alignment. “Taking things into your own hands like that, when a life is at stake?”
We’d sold all the living room furniture by that time and the huge empty space felt more like a stage, with her as a Greek apparition.
“When will you understand that your actions have consequences? Life isn’t a game for little girls to play.” She turned from us in revulsion. The veil between us and all that was dreadful was no more than gauze; it would tear at a touch. Why couldn’t I, who was alive only by the most incredible stroke of good fortune, see that? Now had I finally learned?
Sylvie stayed in her room all day. In the evening I went up to the barn and found Forsythia dead at last, curled against her trough.
In her grief Sylvie looked suddenly like an old woman. She blamed herself; Pop knew the fault was mine. Wasn’t I supposed to be the smart one? “You’re always so sure of yourself,” he said, between his teeth. “You may not care, but what about your sister? Look what this has done to her.” He looked at me with bewildered disappointment, as he had looked at me so often. Where was all the kindness, the natural softness one seeks in a woman? At least Sylvie was crying—as if she’d lost her own child, and he comforted her while I stood there numb.
“I—” I said, but guilt swallowed my voice. Why indeed was Sylvie unable to look at the things I was so curious to see? What was the coldness in my nature, this selfish stubbornness that made me refuse to look at life through his eyes?
* * *
SPRING CAME; its beauty would keep us safe in our trance a little longer. Ma took her coffee out to the back steps in the morning, picked a tiny child’s bouquet of white violets and set it tenderly in a vase, as if it represented the gentlest part of herself, the part she had to guard with bared teeth, the part that was like Sylvie.
I at least had learned not to attach myself to soft and fragile things. I would be straighter, prouder than the rest of them—I’d bear what they could not. I walked down the dirt road, crouched beside the spring from the hillside and pulled up a flower that seemed to bleed in my hand, opened its curled leaf and with it a cocoon: a transparent unborn spider unfolded its long legs and clambered desperately away. Now that no one could see me, I cried and cried. Downstream there was an island, maybe ten feet long, moist and dank and overgrown with skunk cabbage and ferns. I read The Yearling there in one long day, listening to the brook split and rejoin itself around me. It was the first time I’d ever read a book without meaning to please my mother—it felt like the first time I’d ever really been alone. I smoothed each page open with the feeling I could dip my hand into the text as easily as I could trail my fingers in the current beside me.