Reconciliation Story

Karen Hays

One day when you were in preschool your mom took you to a craft fair at a pavilion with a roof shaped like a pyramid. The pyramid was similar to the Louvre’s except its ceiling was clad with acoustic panels instead of glass, and rather than shelter the lobby of a world-class art institution, its use was contracted out by the local old folks’ village, an enclave that grew like arterial plaque at the atrophied heart of your hometown, a suburb whose metastatic sprawl was well on its way toward gobbling up all of the Civil War landmarks and green, karstic topography your father remembered so fondly and so well.

When he saw the new developments with their monochromatic box houses, treeless sod, and cul-de-sacs shaped like empty thought bubbles or defective light bulbs, your father pined for the spacious austerity and neighborly self-reliance of his own childhood, for netting paddlefish and shooting quail and smothering biscuits with preserves made from stone fruits his or some nearby family grew and picked and blanched and put up themselves. A home ought to shelter you from the wide wilderness of the nighttime, not spare you from the sight and eyes of strangers who scurry between hidey-holes like crawdads. No. When he saw what your hometown was turning into, and in how hell-bent a fashion, its artless growth and deluded independence from the land, your father itched in a big, forevermore way for elbow grease and elbow room.

Back when you were a kid, your parents were what you were made of and yours held polarized views of the world. For your dad, better was a condition that predeceased you; for your mom, better was the future you were finally and doggedly on your way to. The space in between their counterpoints was the time line whereon you and your sister dwelled, like a shot at the center of a sling, momentum vectoring out in both directions. Maybe that’s why it was a relief to you when the tension between them firmed into something real and geographic, when it turned out that between your mom and dad there existed a no-kid’s-land that couldn’t be entered so much as squarely circumnavigated, but only in your dad’s car and only on every other weekend. That’s when he shuttled you back and forth between the little house he mortgaged with your mom and the five places he lived before finding an ear of land he could piss on whenever the urge struck him, a damp curl of floodplain where, an hour or two after the sun wheeled down the cicadas and spun up the mosquitoes, it was sometimes quiet enough to hear the peristaltic squelch of night crawlers extruding themselves for their mysterious moonlit adventures, by which point you were old and spoiled enough to traverse between points M and D all by yourself.

Until such time as you had wheels of your own, however, your dad picked you and your sister up two Fridays out of every four, returning you two days later to the town whose most memorable building from the road was a multipurpose pyramid, your dirty laundry slung over your shoulders and a too-precious child-support check cupped into one of your palms. Your dad folded the check down the middle to protect you from knowing the financial cost of your growth, the paper sweet with his unsmoked tobacco and astringent with the ink of his felt-tip, the dyslexic 2s and 5s drafted carefully and without a single curve and often in red, like the numerals on the bombs whose explosions were always imminent on television. Your body was a temple. You were what you ate. Your parents loved you, each in their own separate ways. In the middle of crises, a tiny winged cow poured so much milk into each Kraft Single that if you consumed enough of them you were sure to fossilize yourself alive and therefore not slouch or break when, at some unfathomable point in the future, you had the tragic misfortune of looking into the mirror and finding there the reflection of an old person, some cloudy-eyed lady whom you would’ve never known back then but who, looking back, would always, always know you. Even when she remembered very few others. Even when she remembered very little else. Here is the church, you used to think, attempting to stand the child-support check upright on your mother’s dining-room table. Here is the steeple. Open the doors and …

One day when you were in preschool your mom bought you a necklace in the pavilion whose roof was shaped like a pyramid. The pyramid was similar to the one in the picture of your grandmother wearing that red hibiscus behind her ear, except its exterior was made of ordinary roofing materials instead of stone, and rather than travel to it by Mexican tour bus, you rode past it countless times in your mom’s car on the way to and from the dance studio where, for entirely compulsory reasons, you took tap, jazz, and ballet lessons, never once with cause to stop and enter whichever of the pyramid’s giant leaning triangles harbored a door. Until the day of the craft fair, the old folks’ pavilion was a shape you could occlude with your palm or frame between thumbs and forefingers against the car window.

Your mom would’ve had a cow had she known that weekends he had to work, your dad trusted you to your own devices in his car or alone in the closed lawn-mower shop. In the parking lot you sat in your winter coat reading library books about a girl who rode dolphins in water of a shade that would not submit to your crayons. You twiddled your favorite necklace as you read and meted out the car’s battery life by only checking for good songs between chapters and during slow sections. First your toes succumbed to prickles and then to a stony numbness. When it drizzled or rained, you lifted your head from the glass to stare at the rivulets through the clear spot your hair had mopped in the condensation. Alone in the car, your bodily and social hungers sublimated into appetites that could be satisfied with the nullity of the written word, while somewhere outside—in a whole other realm—your sister helped your dad and uncle by fetching cigarettes, passing wrenches, and pressing some ailing engine’s gas pedal on cue.

In the lawn-mower shop, its lights off and heat lowered, the two of you sat on the riding mowers, either pretending by bouncing up and down on their seats that you were driving or pretending by talking in manly, grinning voices that you were salesmen—imaginative dead ends both. Sometimes one of you dared the other to Frogger her little body across the busy road and into the taco shop with the empty parking lot and the ten-gallon hat on its roof, its cowboy lights blinking in parallel like a Venus flytrap and a drunken landing strip, but neither of you had the taco money to make the treachery or risk to life and limb worth it. Sometimes you upended the empty paint bucket in the bathroom and stood on it to reach the vertiginous stack of porn perched on the plywood plank nailed over the toilet. Sometimes you stood in front of the black, sweet-smelling sink and extruded the longest strand of vermicelli that the greasy soap could hold before breaking from the dispenser and coming to rest in a white turd-like coil below the faucet.

The most disturbing thing about the porn was not the orange women who beckoned like the taco joint that you smelled and surveilled from the lawn-mower shop’s darkened storefront, but the metaphors and lies of specificity in its captions. The fake names, fake want, and all the animal-vegetable-mineral euphemisms. The failure of its presumptuous second-person pronouns to jibe with its readers in that particular bathroom in those particular moments. Your body was a temple. You were what you ate. Someday when you were a big girl a man might mistake you for a cat named Candy or even a piece of food on a plate. Was that the secret the big, smug adult world was trying to keep? If a woman lying on her back makes a peace sign with her bare legs, what does a woman standing on her own two feet make? In more years than you could comprehend, you would graduate from high school in the RLDS conch just a few blocks down the street, the church’s molluscan spire jutting heavenward as if some temperamental god had reached down and given a warning tug to its navel, its internal spiral so nacre slick and steep in its state of unravel that you’d barely be able to navigate it in the pumps your mom would loan you for the occasion. In the auditorium you and your classmates would sweat and answer to the names that your parents felt would give you the best shot in life, even if they weren’t the names you went by. You would graduate in a town called Independence because no venue in your suburb would be big enough to hold you all. Though your father would decline to attend, your mother’s father, who refused to attend her graduation thirty years before, would be there, and he would cry and tell you that you looked pretty as you sweated and teetered and clung to the rail to maintain your balance in the heels. His tears would reveal a bit of what your growth cost him, the egg of you tucked away inside his own daughter while she was still a mystery curled in the salt of his wife’s wild womb. Everything, cocooned. Everything, sheltered. Here is the church. Here, the steeple.

On the day your mom bought you your favorite necklace, your sister had a dance recital inside the pavilion whose roof was shaped like a pyramid. The pyramid was nothing like the one on the green butterflies your mother teased from her wallet to buy you that little necklace. Those were crowned with all-seeing eyes while the one in your hometown appeared blind or else simply more introverted, its dull opacity swallowing light rather than emitting it. Your hometown pyramid was an inanimate fixture in your life and yet your feelings toward it were ineffable and complicated. The pyramid felt like your best impersonation of a grown-up—a pairing of grandiose and boring affectations, at once jokey and too self-serious. It tempted but without much promise, like a dome your grandmother might lift from the table when it was OK to tuck into the ziggurat of divinity and fudge she’d assembled for a holiday gathering, which desserts you were never particularly fond of and which party you were as likely as not to vomit after. On the day of the dance recital, your sister was recovering from strep throat, and your mother was hoping against the odds that you would not succumb as well.

When one of you was sick, suffering was the cause as well as the result of your separation. The rest of the time, suffering was merely the result. Yours, mostly. That’s because as different as your parents were from each other, your sister occasionally was from you. You hated how readily she dissolved into her group of friends, how instantly your pairing lost its significance when a new opportunity arose. You even sometimes hated the girls. They tittered and flitted about like the sparrows that swooped around gathering up crumbs at the concessions area of the municipal pool. Conspiratorial and ornery and impossible to catch up with, they left you to trail lamely after your mother instead. The older girls were reckless with their estranging perfection—cruel, you felt—and your heart would’ve had room for nothing more than a green, stalwart desire to fall into their fold at any given moment, at that given moment even, if it weren’t for the deep, toothed gullet they were doomed to perform in.

Did you have any idea before that day? That a pyramid to the ground is a square? Or that a pyramid, like a tree with hidden roots, might actually only constitute the upper half of a submerged diamond? Stepping inside, it became immediately clear to you that things were not at all as they had seemed from the road. The perimeter of the pyramid was lined with card tables where locals were peddling their homemade jewelry, candles, pot holders, and paintings, and the center was carved into a theater as deep and cavernous and spotlit as you felt your very own groaning belly was. At the bottom of the pit was the bright platform whereon your sister and the rest of her tap class, composed of a dozen or so six- and seven-year-olds who were just then patting their sprayed hairstyles and plucking nylon leotards from their rear ends, would perfunctorily execute their shuffle-ball-change routines. Meanwhile a troupe of girls who waited in posed silence on the stage looked like a bunch of sparkly stalagmites whom the music would magically animate, the pyramid’s providential eye beaming upward—beaming upward—at them. When your mother turned from one of the card tables and held up a necklace for you to reject or approve, you stood at the exact interface between the upside down and the right side up, your stomach articulating in lurches what your mind could not in words. The portion of the pavilion accessible to your body was the geometric reflection of what your eyes had sized up from the road, the bright, belowground spotlight echoing its dark, aboveground apex—the latter open to the sky, the former enclosed as a basement.

Nothing you’d seen before had prepared you for the space that was at once light and tomb-like, expansive yet crushing. Where you grew up there were no mountains and what you knew of real caves you gathered from the billboards and drippy limestone roadcuts you blew past on the highway. How unto yourself you felt in the back seat, and how invulnerable. How easy it was to confuse insularity with safety when what physically encapsulated you sealed your mind off as well, a trusted parent behind the wheel. You moved through the geography of your life as if the scenery were composed of giant vertical canvases that time whisked away as you approached with gaze outstretched, like an inexhaustible stack of tablecloths yanked out from beneath a handful of fixed landmarks and celestial objects, or a flip-book whose pages the wind sheared off before you had a chance to fathom their individual illustrations. A magic trick. A dozen or so years would pass before you’d clap eyes on your first etching by M. C. Escher. You’d be sitting in the top tier of the recessed amphitheater of your high school’s art room when your teacher would project the maze of gray scale stairs onto the screen below you. The image would be new to you, but the queasy feeling of walking on the ceiling would be one you would instantly recognize from navigating the plunging aisles of the inverted pyramid. Your fingers would search in your jugular notch for the plastic bead on the blue woven cord, the necklace by then a choker. On both sides of the bead, a wan blue rose would still have the same old second thoughts about blooming. Your hair would still catch in the clasp that unscrewed like a miniature metal version of the barrel you once kept your plastic monkeys in. The bead would still keep its cool in your jewelry box but assume your body temperature just as soon as you put it on, matching you, like a proxy or a good friend. You would still receive compliments on how the bead’s design echoed your own color scheme, as if it were your third eye and not a plastic bauble on a string. The only difference in the necklace that day would be its numbing accrual of associations, a cloud that the memory of the pyramid would swiftly burn away. Perhaps the old folks’ pavilion became surrealistically ingrained in your mind because you were on the febrile edge of your sister’s strep throat on the day that you entered it. Or perhaps a sickly, giddy sensation insinuated itself through your eyes that day, like a kind of mnemonic virus, and stayed there until the conditions were just right for it to resurface, reuniting the necklace with its source, and you with yours, to each her own duality, no one as simple as her outward appearance or reducible to the sum of her parts. If memory obeys the laws of natural selection, then the stories that survive in you are also the most adaptable and therefore the ones you ought to trust the least and forgive the most. It stands to reason that each retelling is a distortion as well as a distillation. A reminder as well as an act of defiance. Equally true and false. Art doesn’t grow wider, said Degas, whose pirouetting girls you wouldn’t meet until college, it recapitulates. How many times in one day do you find yourself standing in a room confused about your path and purpose for being there? How does your mind look to you when you need to talk with your teenaged son about the plastic disc-shaped thing he keeps getting stuck on the roof of his high school and the only word you can think of to recall that wayward flying object to his mind is wrong, is zebra? Your exterior voice repeating zebra and your interior voice, the you who speaks beneath the I, screeching like locked tires on asphalt, split thoughts careening within the frame of your mental collage, your son laughing as he corrects you, Close, Mom, close, and making you laugh too, blessedly dowsing that subterranean caterwaul?

Suffering has a way of inserting itself between you and the ones you love and throwing out its elbows, whether as the initial cause or the growing effect of your separation. Whether as the germ or the fruit of human sickness. Once or sometimes twice a year your father, sister, and you converge in three cars in the parking lot shared by your grandmother’s apartment and the old folks’ pyramid, your dad from his house on the floodplain, your sister from her home in the mountains three states away, and you from the seaside town in California where you landed after a journey of a couple decades.

Sometimes your grandma still makes fudge, but divinity you haven’t seen since you were a kid. Often you picture her with that red hibiscus in her hair, or smoking cigars with your dad at your wedding. She introduced you to Georgia O’Keeffe and Joyce Carol Oates when you were a kid—the latter introduction scandalizing your mother—and still jokingly refers to the local library as the Incontinent rather than the Midcontinent. She’s the only other reader in your family. You, the first to graduate from college. She complains about how the most recent expansion of the old folks’ village has led to the neglect of her older, lower-rent unit, same as its development once led to the neglect of another less lucrative set of residences. Life’s conveyor is unrelenting even at the margins. The enclave has apartments, an assisted-living facility, a nursing home, and hospice care, but the apartments are the only dwellings that seem to keep expanding in count and grandeur and scale. Your grandma’s apartment is luxurious with the scents of cumin and lentil soup and potting soil and roses. The theme of the art on her walls is maritime. After almost a century, she’s seen enough to weigh in on whether it’s better for your mind to go first or your body. After almost a century, she’s sharp enough to weigh in on pretty much everything, her edges well stropped on her fellow residents, many of whom she finds too preachy or conservative. For the few hours you’re all together each year, the conversation crackles with politics in various states of ventilation. The time reminds you how easy it is to confuse insularity with safety when what physically encapsulates a person seals his or her brain off too.

On the Sunday drives back to your mom’s house, your dad used to adopt a style of reminiscence that excluded narrative, as if the grief it failed to disguise was inarticulable or possibly even metaphorical. Often he pointed out changes to the landscape as he drove you and your sister back to the tidy little house where you girls and your mother still lived, your hair, skin, clothes, and sleeping bags reeking of the smoke your mom deplored but was too dignified to complain about in your presence. This used to be wooded, he would say, his elbow straightening from its crook to point out the window, a cigar jutting from his peace sign like the middle finger your uncle lost to a saw when he was a kid fresh out of high school, the cigar’s cauterized end underscoring the need of some injuries to smolder and to do it in plain sight if not a place of high honor. This here, a farm.

In the car, your dad used to indicate the whereabouts of the bloody skirmishes between the Confederate bushwhackers and Union Jayhawkers, and tell you which prominences were named after which brutish guerrillas, overlaying your view with a taxonomy you neither understood nor cared much about back then. Myopia wrapped itself like a well-meaning hug around the entire protected span of your childhood, depriving geography of history and history of relevance. You were a girl first and a child second—too young and saturated in your culture to articulate all the sides of otherness your body tumbled on, your gender imparting a palpably gross lowliness, your skin color a palpably gross privilege. The effect of your dad’s captioning was not to crack your insularity but to lend suspicion to the flip-book his car made of the land. Entering the pyramid on the day of your sister’s dance recital, repeatedly losing her affections, nestling into the fissures of your mother’s heart, reading porn in the bathroom of the lawn-mower shop, receiving your dad’s terse auto tours on Sunday afternoon drives into the suburbs—each had the unsettling effect of expanding the world from the x-y plane into some other more dangerous dimension, hinting at a whole new set of swallowing and burying prepositions, an over, an under, a through. Around began to seem less and less like an option. Nothing could witness what this land had seen and remain so passive, so forgiving, so self-contained. At some point you started to think of the earth as some kind of anesthetized animal and not a drippy old hunk of dissolving craton. You imagined it mammalian, its fur thin at the knuckles and shaggy where little creeks forded its resting haunches, uncombed prairie rising in tufts between its gentle undulations, limning the ditches, bristling at the tree lines. You imagined the land genderless and deceptively dormant, but unquestionably alive. You pictured it storing history beneath the strip malls, the housing developments, and the traversable mesh of tic-tac-toe grids whereon you were precisely nowhere and therefore precisely no one, also unquestionably alive. You tasked the land with remembering everything your dad was afraid the world would forget, because you weren’t up for the job yet and might never be. You grew and imagined and played optical games within the frame of the window, unable to zoom out enough to surveil your own context or voluntarily merge with a reality that was any more threatening. Now you imagine the countryside rehearsing stories like a baby songbird practicing its father’s notes in its sleep. You picture the land dispersing enmity through no malice of its own, silently and indirectly, via the blood seeped into its aquifers and the ash turning to clay in its humus. You imagine fear and suspicion making their way up the food chain, decaying with some long and incalculable half-life in the steeples of bodies, towns, and states. Once, you were what you ate. Your body was a temple. Open the doors and there you all were, all of you, all of your land’s people.

After your annual or sometimes biannual visits with your dad and grandma, you and your sister, each with her sons and secrets and fissured hearts in tow, return to the countryside where your mother and stepfather have happily retired, in the same county where Jesse James and his Quantrill’s Raiders once planned their cross-border ambushes. After their 1863 massacre left a couple hundred abolitionist boys and men dead in Lawrence, Kansas, Union General Ewing attempted to flush the county of Confederate bandits by ordering the area depopulated and torched—its livestock shot, its grain confiscated, its crops incinerated. Almost a century and a half later, the county’s historical society put on a fund-raising raffle in which a local jewelry store distributed guns to lucky ticket holders at the rate of one per week. 52 GUNS IN 52 WEEKS, the waving banners read. Your kids love visiting their grandparents but a part of you is hell-bent on dividing the past from the future, as if geography were a cure and not a buffer. Like your dad after he split, you moved and you moved and you moved, each time stretching the distance between your worlds a little farther, tighter, like a rubber band between the tines of a sling. On the drive back to your mom’s, through the sod farms and dairy pastures, up the gravel road and past the pear tree swaddled in the cotton candy that spells tent worms, you try to impart some of the regional history to your kids, though the stories they most want to hear are your own. The ambushers and the ambushed, don’t you see, they were just your age, you say. There’s no question your kids are troubled about what they see on the news these days—your oldest wants to move to Canada and your youngest wants California to secede—but you feel it’s important to pair their recent loss of innocence with the ancient loss of the country’s. A real suck cycle, is how one of them summarized the content of this interminable history lesson, signaling he gets it and needs to move on to something more pleasant. When you reach your destination, your mother, in whose face you are getting better and better at recognizing yourself, asks, once again and therefore incomprehensibly, whether you had a nice visit with your dad. After the grown-ups go in, the kids stay outside among the frogs and mockingbirds and mud-bugs, throwing the zebra around in the field. Smarter than you, your oldest son is teaching himself Latin; he knows that pavilion derives from papilio, for butterfly, or tent, and as such there is something obscurely redundant and funny in tent worms, since tent worms are really caterpillars. Maybe one day you will tell him and his little brother about the time when you were in preschool and their grandmother took you to a craft fair at that dumpy old pavilion they’ve ridden past countless times, the one whose roof is shaped like a pyramid, but whose form is really a diamond. Looking at their two reflections, you swear you will always know your kids, have in fact known them your whole life. Looking into their faces, what choice do you have but to believe with all your heart? Better is a future you’re stubbornly marching toward.