W. S. Merwin was in town. He read his poetry for two hours in the Tulane Chapel, the one with the pretty stained-glass windows. He read at night. You couldn’t see the sun coming in the leaded glass the way you can sometimes in the mornings. First he read for forty minutes, then talked and answered questions. Then he told us he would stay and read another hour for anyone who wanted to hear more poems. Twenty or thirty of us stayed. We moved nearer to the lectern. We made a circle around him. He read anything we asked to hear. He read “The Judgment of Paris” and “Come Back” and “Farewell” and “The Last One.” All the poems that we adored.
In Southeast Asia children were being bombed and gassed. In Russia and China they were being jailed. In the French Quarter they were being sold to men from out of town. Young girls and young boys, too. I quit the ACLU because they defended a man in Little Rock, Arkansas, who sold his son. It was the first argument your father and I had where I stood up for something I believed. I believed it because you were in my womb and I knew you already. Within my womb as I listened to Merwin you were struggling and moving and getting ready to make your big move. Become an air breather, take that first long incredible gasp and the epiglottis would open to the oxygen that plants provide for us. Provide, provide, dear grass and shrubs and trees. And then they give us flowers.
Flower of my heart, flower of my soul, beautiful daughter of my heart. I love to think of when we sat in that chapel in the dim electric light and listened to Merwin read his poems. You were already six days late. Monday’s child is fair of face. Tuesday’s child is full of grace. Wednesday’s child is full of woe. It was Wednesday when Merwin read. But I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t believe in superstitions or Gothic fears. I knew you already. I knew your bright red hair and wildness and power. I knew your will.
I was nineteen years old. I didn’t have enough sense to be afraid of anything. Your father was afraid. He was thirty-three. A poet himself, a graduate of the Iowa writing program, a tall, funny, excited man. He kept me close to his side. He loved my pleasure in Merwin being there. He had taught me Merwin’s poetry. He knew Merwin. They had marched together at Aldermaston in the late fifties when your father was still a boy. It was because of him that Merwin had come to Tulane.
Your father wanted us to be married before you came. I wanted to wait and have a white dress and a wedding in Brookhaven but finally, after the reading, I agreed to come back the next morning and be married in the chapel with Merwin as the best man.
But you were born at dawn, as you know, and so we had the wedding at the hospital instead, in a dingy little chapel there. It didn’t seem dingy. It was Merwin who named you Ariel. I’m sorry you hate your name. I’m sorry you are embarrassed by all of this. I’m sorry you hate me for it and I wish you would stop being so angry all the time. I cannot bring your father back to us. I don’t know where he is.
“Oh come back we were watching all the time
With the delight choking us and the piled
Grief scrambling like guilt to leave us
At the sight of you
Looking well. . . .”
I will write Merwin and see if he has heard from him. I know your father loves you. I know he wants to see you, to be with you. I think he will come back someday, if he is alive, if he can. He may be too far gone into sadness now. The sadness of being unsuccessful. The sadness of poems no one wants to read. It is the saddest thing I know for a man not to know how to make a living. He knew once. He was a good teacher at Tulane. They fired him when he married me and you were born. It wasn’t your fault and we did not regret it. He said he didn’t like teaching rich kids anyway. But he had liked the paycheck. After that we had to depend on my father. We went to Brookhaven and he worked for Daddy in the hardware store until Wal-Mart put us out of business. Then he left. He went to sea for a while. He wrote to us from ports around the world.
I don’t know. I haven’t heard in three years. You know all this. I cannot change the past, my love. I cannot lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all my tears wash out a word of it.
I thought you wanted to know. You told me to tell you and so I am telling you everything I know. Here it is. It is all I have to give. You are the age I was that night when Merwin read in the chapel. Exactly the age. It was nineteen years ago this week. You want all the rest? Here it is.
We lived in a small ground-floor apartment on Octavia Street. A doctor owned the house. He lived next door in a modern glass house with a swimming pool. He owned all the houses on the block and rented them to people that he liked. We were within walking distance of a grocery store and a Laundromat and a bar. Your father got up every morning and rode his bicycle to Tulane and taught until they fired him in the fall when they found out about me. The English Department knew about me. It was the administration that didn’t know right away. The thought police. So for the first six months of your life he got up in the mornings and rode his bicycle to the school and taught English literature to the angry or sweet or spoiled or scared students who were mostly stoned or else in league with the thought police and listening to every word he said so they could tell their parents.
After he left I would feed you and change your diapers and put you in the bed with me and we would sleep away the soft, sultry summer mornings. Outside the bedroom window was a mock orange tree and a row of Cape jasmine bushes. If I opened the windows the scent of heaven came into the room and lulled us both into a paradise. You, soft against my skin with your fine golden skin. You in my arms as you slept and slept and slept. I adored you. He did too. But he did not get to hold you in his arms those long hot mornings as I did.
I was too lazy to even make coffee. After you woke I’d take you in the stroller around the corner and eat snowballs for breakfast and stroll you up and down Magazine Street in your borrowed, elegant, navy blue and white, canopied, shuttered stroller.
My family had cut me off those six months. My father was so angry he wouldn’t let my mother write to me but my sister still called me up and came to visit and lent me things she had left over from the babies she had had five years before. She never stopped lecturing me but at least she lent me lots of things that came in handy as you grew.
Why did he leave? you ask and ask and ask. Because after we got back to Brookhaven I forgot the things I had learned at Tulane. I began to believe the things my parents believed again. I went to the Presbyterian church. I hated the black people and thought they were going to rape me. I hated the ACLU and not just because they represented that man in Little Rock. I went back into being afraid all the time. I thought everything would go wrong and it did.
Your father wanted me to go with him when he left for San Francisco but I would not go. I was pregnant again but I did not tell him. As soon as he was out of town Mother took me to New Orleans and I had an abortion. They got me a job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office. It was three more years before they let me go back to Tulane. I took you with me part of the time. Part of the time I had to leave you in Brookhaven with your cousins. I had to get an education, Ariel. You must believe me when I say that. I did not abandon you. I was never gone more than a week at a time. I got my degree in social work. I got my duplex in Metairie. We have lived here ever since. Haven’t we been happy? Why do you hate me so much? Why are you so angry?
Ariel says, “The results of the failed bond are guilt and shame. You refuse to believe that.”
“How could there be a failed bond? I held you in my arms morning, night, and noon. You slept in my arms. We lay in the bed in the mornings and smelled the jasmine and mock orange and I loved you as much as anyone could love a child.”
“I remember maids.”
“Only after we moved back to Brookhaven. Until then I took care of you all by myself. You never left my arms.”
“I only remember Sally Lee. Every memory I have is of her big old body slowly bending over or giving me something to eat. No wonder I’m fat. All she did was feed me morning, night, and noon. I lived in a high chair. You weren’t even there.”
“You are not fat. You have to stop thinking you are fat.”
“I need to lose fifteen pounds. I’m too fat. No one ever asks me out.”
“If you were nice to people you’d be asked out. If you didn’t always say such rude things to people. That’s the part that’s like your father. When you see him he will know who you are. He will be crazy about you when he finds out you turned out to be just like him. I’m going to cry, Ariel. Stop talking about this now. I need to rest. I can’t talk about this forever. I’m sick. Can’t you see it just upsets me and makes me worse.”
“You aren’t sick. You have psychosomatic migraine headaches from being horny. You need to get laid, Mother. Go get yourself a boyfriend.”
Ariel left her mother’s bedroom and walked out into the living room of the house they shared. It was very very neat. Not a magazine out of place. She went into the kitchen and got out some bread and cheese and made a cold sandwich and ate it as she went out and got into her car and drove over to Tulane to her English class. Write Merwin, she decided. Yes, he’ll know where Daddy is and I will go and live with him. I’ll get out of here. I’ll find my father and a life a person with a brain can stand to live.
What was all that bullshit about her not wanting to marry him before I was born? Of course she wanted to marry him any way she could and any time. It’s the oldest scam in the world. Fuck your professor or your boss and get pregnant and make them marry you. I bet he hated her guts. No one would want to be married to that boring, whiny bitch.
Ariel stopped off at P.J.’s coffeehouse and got an iced coffee to go and paid for it with the twenty-dollar bill her mother had given her the night before. Then she left the car where it was sure to get a parking ticket and walked onto the Tulane campus and over to the old stone building where a woman from Oregon was teaching eighteenth-century literature. She would write to W. S. Merwin and her father would come rescue her and she would no longer be a fatherless girl who was fifteen pounds overweight in a hot, boring city where nobody thought about a thing except how much money somebody’s father had or if they were going to be the Queen of Mardi Gras.
What I have to remember, Ariel’s mother consoled herself, is that I was happy once and she was part of it. I was happy when I loved Daniel and I was happy when I was pregnant with her. I was ecstatic all those months when we lived on Octavia Street. I loved to stroll her down the broken sidewalks underneath the live oak trees and breathe the soft, sweet air and eat coffee snowballs for breakfast and put her to my breast and let her suck. She could taste the sugar, maybe the coffee too. She tasted me seven times a day, or eight or nine or ten. I did not wean her until they made me do it. Until Mother went crazy when I got the lumps in my breast. They would have gone away. And she wouldn’t have been sick all the time from drinking cow’s milk. I made mistakes. How could I help it? I was a child with no real education. I had no money, no power, no knowledge of the world. Only my husband and my child and I lost him and now I’m losing her. I do not know how to keep her. I do not know what I am doing wrong.
She put on her old shoes and walked out into the yard to weed the flower garden. I’m too young to garden, she decided. I hate getting dirt in my fingernails. Where is my gardener? Where are my bells and shining whistles? Where are my maids?
At noon she went into the house and made some toast and ate it and then got into the tub and bathed herself and cleaned her hands and toes and fingernails. She got out of the tub and stood in the warm air thinking about the water evaporating. She went into her room and put on her best white skirt and a navy blue polo shirt. She put on sandals and makeup and a string of pearls and then she sprayed perfume on her hair. I’ll get laid, she decided. Since that’s what she wants me to do.
She went down to the Oak Street Bar and Grill where the poets had hung out in the seventies. There was no one there but the bartender, who knew her from the old days. “Hey, Sally,” he said. “Come on in. You’re looking great. What’s going on?”
“My nineteen-year-old hates me,” she said. “She told me to go get laid.”
“Ariel? Ariel is nineteen years old? Don’t tell me that. I must be a hundred. It’s strange that you came in. I was talking to someone last night who saw Daniel. He’s teaching at Hattiesburg now. Did you know that?”
“In Hattiesburg, Mississippi? My Daniel? Ariel’s dad?”
“You didn’t know that?”
“I haven’t heard from him in three years. Since I called the cops on him for not paying my child support. He disappeared. He sends me money but he sends it through other people. My lawyer gave up looking for him. I don’t care. I’ve been making plenty of money. I work for the city four days a week as a welfare checker. Did you know I was in the workforce?” She sat down at the end of the bar where the bartender was drying glasses with a cloth. “You think I ought to have a drink this early in the day?”
“No. Do you want one?”
“Not really. I was hoping someone would be here.”
“Here I am.” He looked her in the eyes. He was a sixty-year-old man who had taken one too many hits from life. Cancer three years before. Then losing half his teeth. It cheered him up to have Sally come walking in the bar at noon right after he heard that Daniel was in Hattiesburg.
“So he’s teaching at the university there?”
“That’s what Frank Hanley said. He’s going up there to read next fall. He was really excited about it.”
“Where can I find Frank?”
“Right here if you come back around four or five. He comes in as soon as he quits teaching.”
“Don’t tell him I was here. I want to surprise him.”
She drove over to Tulane to look for Ariel. She went to the administration office and looked at the class schedule and then she went to the building where Ariel had a class at two. She sat down on the stairs and let the young men admire her legs. The sun was warm on her arms and face. It was nice to be back on the campus with funny beautiful troubled young people all around her hustling each other as they walked by, young men ready to hustle her if she batted an eyelash at them. She almost forgot what she had come there for by the time Ariel showed up ten minutes late for the class. She looked up and Ariel was sprinting down the sidewalk for the building. “Stop,” she said. “I know where your father is. Meet me here as soon as your class is over.”
“What?” Ariel said. “What are you talking about?” They stood face-to-face, almost exactly the same height, their blue eyes saying many wonderful things while Sally babbled out her story.
“I won’t go to class.”
“No, don’t do that. Meet me here at three. I’ll be waiting.”
“The class lasts two hours. It’s a lab.”
“Then meet me at four.”
“I don’t know.”
“Go on. Don’t miss a class. We might have to miss them all tomorrow. If you want to go and find him.”
“Okay. I’ll go. I like this lab. It’s editing. I need it. I like the guy who teaches it.”
“Go on. You’re late.”
At four Ariel emerged from the building and Sally took her arm and they walked to the car and got into it and drove down Saint Charles to Carrollton and turned and headed toward the Oak Street Bar and Grill. “What about my car?” Ariel asked. “I’ll get tickets.”
“We’ll pay them.” Sally looked straight ahead. It was the strangest thing, perhaps it was the campus, perhaps her short skirt, her clean fingernails, but she didn’t feel that Ariel was her child. No longer her child, but her accomplice, her ally in some forbidden adventure.
“If this guy knows where Dad is we are going this afternoon.”
“I think it’s certain. I think he’s teaching at Hattiesburg. It’s a two-hour drive. We could wait until tomorrow.”
“I can’t wait. It’s all I think about. I haven’t seen him in three years. I dream of him. I cry for him. I have to go, Mother. I have to face him and see if he hates me. If he does, then I hate him too. If he wants me to stay with him, I might do that for a while.”
“Ariel.”
“I’m his daughter. He’s my father. I have to have this. I can’t do without it anymore.” She looked at her mother and Sally knew it was true and she took one hand from the wheel and put it on her daughter’s hand and stroked her fine young smooth thick golden beloved skin.
Frank was at the bar when they arrived. In his accustomed seat at the far end near the Laundromat door and within hearing range of the pay phone. He was a poet and liked to eavesdrop on people’s drunken telephone calls as that kept him from thinking he was alone in sadness and also helped him develop an ear for dialogue in case he ever gave up and started writing fiction.
“Frank,” Sally said. “It’s Sally Donohue. Do you remember me? This is Ariel. I think you were at her christening. If you remember.”
“My God, Sally. I saw Daniel two days ago. He’s in Hattiesburg, but I think you knew that.”
“No. I didn’t know. We stopped speaking. Ariel wants to go and see him. Is there any reason why we shouldn’t go there? Tell me the truth. For the sake of the old days. Don’t lie to me.”
“He’s doing all right.” Frank paused. “There isn’t a woman with him, if that’s what you mean. He’s alone. He looks old, Sally. Real old. I don’t know what’s happened to him. He’s very thin. Well, he was always thin. He quit drinking. Said he had to for some reason. I don’t know what. Don’t look like that. It isn’t AIDS. Hattiesburg wouldn’t have hired him. He wouldn’t have applied. Anyway, there isn’t any reason why she, why you shouldn’t go. Was I supposed to keep it a secret, that he’s there? There isn’t some legal thing, is there?” Frank sighed, started to retreat, then marched on. “I don’t get in the middle of things. How did you know of this?” He looked down the bar. “Oh, Redmond. He told you, didn’t he? Well, no one told me to keep this a secret. He’s got a good job. Visiting professor. He’s been teaching in Hawaii and then in Washington State. I didn’t mean he looked bad. He just looks old. I look old. We all look old, don’t we? But not you, Sally. You look wonderful. Not a day older and it’s a pleasure to see Ariel. Of course I remember her christening. Have a drink. How about a drink or a Coke for Ariel?”
“Not for me. You don’t look old at all. You look like you always did. I hear good things about you. I hear the students love you. I hear that everywhere.”
“Hope it’s true. I try. I always keep on trying.” He lifted his martini glass to them, then drained it. He set the glass down beside two empty ones. He had gotten away early that afternoon and had a head start.
Sally leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He was an endearing man, a gifted man, a very special friend and man.
They walked back to the car and got in. “What do you want to do?” Sally asked. “It’s your call. I’ll do what you want.”
“Drive up there now.”
“Do you want to call and tell him we’re coming?”
“No, I just want to go.”
“Then we’ll go. Can we stop at the Camellia Grill and get a sliced turkey sandwich to go? I haven’t really eaten all day and I bet you haven’t either.”
“I don’t need to eat. I’m too fat.”
“You are not fat. You are not one bit fat.”
“Okay, go by there and I’ll go in and you can drive around the block if there’s no parking.”
“Get some money out of my purse.”
“I have money. I have the money Grandmother sent me for my birthday. Let me pay.”
Sally considered it. She came out with the best response. “Wonderful,” she said. “Treat your old mother to a Camellia Grill sandwich and I’ll split a chocolate freeze with you if you like.”
“I’ll let you drink it. I’m too fat.”
Sally let her daughter off in front of the restaurant and eased her car into a parking space in front of the florist shop next door. She watched Ariel move in and through the door like the spirit she was named for and then come back out in a few minutes carrying the white Styrofoam boxes and the drink. “Let’s go,” Ariel said when she got into the car. “You don’t know how this has bugged me. You don’t know how sad I’ve been.”
Sally continued down Carrollton to the I-10 exit, took the ramp, and drove up and out onto the four-lane highway going north across the lake. They went over the causeway and across the long bridge to Slidell, then headed up Highway 59 to Hattiesburg. Ariel played the radio. Sally drove.
Daniel thought he had already been saved. After two dead-end jobs with no tenure track he had been offered this job when the woman who had it was injured in a car accident. She was laid up in a New York loft with a broken back. It would be two years before she would even walk. So the big job fell open and the head of the English Department, who had been a colleague at Tulane, had called him and he said he’d come. That had happened fast. He had come in the middle of a semester. It had been tricky, but he had pulled it off. One thing about getting hepatitis. After they made you quit drinking you could get things done, what with all that time on your hands.
I can go and see Ariel soon, Daniel told himself. I can beg her to forgive me. Perhaps she will forgive me. Perhaps she never will. Perhaps I will only get to look at her and know that she is mine.
He was sitting at his desk in the half-furnished rented apartment with the boxes all around him and his clothes still lying on chairs in the bedroom and not a bite to eat in the refrigerator. He had been there for a week but all his time had been taken up with talking to the students and the woman whose job he was taking. She had been in New York visiting her lover when she was injured. She had to talk to Daniel on the phone using a headset, telling him where things were in her office, who the students were, what she had been doing with them. Daniel was half in love with the woman lying in the bed in New York. She was so brave, so forthright, so terribly compromised and scared and still so brave. He had begun to fantasize that he would fly up to New York and take her away from the man she was living with, a painter who couldn’t possibly appreciate a poet of her skills and talents, one who could talk so rationally on the headset when she was on all those drugs and in so much pain.
“It’s all right,” she kept telling him. “This is it. This is what happened. It’s what I have. It’s mine. I’ll deal with it.”
“You’ll walk again,” he kept saying.
“Or I won’t. Now tell me if you found the folder with the autobiographies they wrote in March. Some of them may have copies but I wouldn’t count on it. We have to find it. I know I didn’t bring it up here with me. It has to be in my house or in the office. . . .”
Sally stopped at a filling station in Lumberton and filled the car with gasoline and offered to let Ariel drive. “I’d be too nervous,” Ariel said. “You better do it.”
“It’s your day, honey. I’m following your lead.” Sally meant it. She kept having the strange awakening. That Ariel was a grown woman, that her ideas and plans were valuable and true. That she loved herself and knew what she needed and worked in her own best interests. Ariel could take care of herself. It was a revelation of the highest order.
Outside of Hattiesburg Sally stopped at a service station to use the telephone. “I’m going to call information and see if there’s an address,” she told Ariel. “Should I call if he has a listed number?”
“No. Let’s just go to where he is.” They went into the station and Sally called information and was given an address.
“Fifteen forty Hazelhurst Avenue,” the operator told her. “You need anything else, honey?”
“No thank you. Tell me again.”
“Fifteen forty Hazelhurst Avenue, apartment ten.”
“We need a map of Hattiesburg,” Sally told the girl behind the cash register. “Do you have one?”
“Right over there by the newspapers.” Ariel pulled out the map and Sally paid for it and they spread it out on a table and found Hazelhurst and wrote down the streets leading to it.
“What if he isn’t there?”
“Then we’ll sit there until he comes home.”
This is about our need, Sally was thinking. This is about how much we are divided, how much we need to find our missing parts. We could look inside ourselves, but only Tibetan monks know how to do that. I will help her find him. I almost said help her rope him in. Well, what he wants doesn’t matter. He fucked me and we had her and now he has to deal with it. If he hurts her feelings I will kill him with my bare hands. I will tear him apart like a cat dismembering a captured bird.
She drove the car. She picked up speed.
Daniel started to go out to eat, then changed his mind and called and ordered a pepperoni pizza. It didn’t matter. The main thing was to put all the books and clothes away and get some order in his life and then maybe go to the grocery store or else over to Dominica’s house and look for the autobiographies again. He got into the shower and noticed that he hadn’t had a hard-on for three or four days. That was strange. See what change and apprehension would do to a man. So thin, he thought as he dried himself. What has become of me?
He dressed very carefully in khaki pants with pleats and a blue-and-white-striped shirt he had bought years ago in Paris. He went out to sit on the stoop and wait for the pizza delivery man. He wanted to be able to call Dominica back before she went to sleep for the night and tell her he had found the folder. It didn’t really matter. There wasn’t a student in the class with real promise but it mattered to Dominica so he would get it done. Strange, funny how we become involved with people we have never met. All he had of this woman was a voice on the phone and an office full of books and posters and desk drawers stuffed with pieces of poems and disorganized folders. “Put everything in cardboard boxes and have it stored at my house,” she had told him. “Just say which drawer it came from. I’ll figure it out when I get home. You can live in my house, you know. You are welcome to my house. You don’t have to rent an apartment.”
“I’m seduced enough by your office,” he had answered. “I don’t think I’d dare live in your house.”
“You’d be doing me a favor. It will fall apart with no one there. Will you think of it?”
“I will.” She had started laughing then. He couldn’t decide why and he was seduced again, as he had been every day he was in Hattiesburg. He sat on the stoop and wondered if he should move into her house. He wondered at the power of imagination. He wondered at his love of women, their breasts, their smiles, their lovely hands.
It was seven o’clock. Above the apartment buildings a flock of starlings were turning and turning against the clouds. “Ambiguous undulations as they sink, downward to darkness on extended wings. . . .” The clouds are moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, from New Orleans where my child lives.
He watched the small white car pull up in front of the building and come to a stop. Sally got out of the driver’s seat and waved to him. He stood up, then Ariel got out of the passenger’s seat and walked around the car and began to run toward him. His Ariel, his lost meaning and purpose and dream. His child, that he had loved and resented and almost loved and stopped loving and feared and loved and had been afraid to write to or call.
She kept on coming, looking him squarely in the face and then she moved into his body and he began to weep and kept on weeping. The pizza van arrived. Sally paid the delivery boy and carried the pizza into the house and put it down on a kitchen counter where it stayed untouched for many hours. No one wanted to eat a pizza on such an evening. But they were hungry and began to say so.
“I’m starving,” Sally said.
“I’m starving,” Ariel echoed.
“I’m famished,” Daniel added. “And I would not say metaphor for all the iambs in the English language.”
Sally was stunned to remember a world where men said such things and knew that they were funny. She was living in a world where people asked each other questions and gave nothing away.
They went out to dinner in a restaurant near the campus. Waves of tenderness were all around them. They talked very softly to each other, almost in whispers. We are here, they wanted to say. Where have we been instead of this? What have we been thinking?
“How are you?” Daniel asked Sally, when Ariel left the table for a moment. It was the first time they had been alone.
“She says I need to get laid,” Sally said. “She says I’m a nervous wreck.”
“So am I,” he answered. He was not laughing. “So do I.”
“Well, she wants to stay here with you for a few days. Do you think she should miss two days of classes? I could bring her back on the weekend. Or she could drive. She has a car, not good enough to drive on the highway for any distance, but I could lend her my car. Or you could come to New Orleans. What do you think?”
“Let her stay. She can make it up. I’ll bring her home. I can leave Friday morning after my eight o’clock class. So she could make her classes that day if they’re in the afternoon.”
“We better let her decide. I had an epiphany today. It was after she knew you were here. I touched her and I knew, suddenly, that she was an adult, able to make her own decisions. She’s a powerful girl, Daniel. Able to take care of herself. She always has. She always will. If I can only hold that thought. I don’t know if I can. Anyway, what were we saying? Oh, I’d like for her to stay here so I can think about all this.”
“I owe you fifteen hundred dollars. I’ll be able to pay it to you in a month. As soon as they pay me here.”
“It’s all right. I’m doing all right about money.”
Ariel was returning to the table. She walked slowly toward them. I ruined their life, she decided. My psychology teacher says children invade a marriage and challenge it. Mother was too young to have me. I should leave her here with him and I’ll go home. They look so good together. They look beautiful together. Oh, God, why do you treat us like you do? I hate you for your failed creation and your jokes and tricks.
She sat down at the table. She reached under the table and took her mother’s hand. Then she turned to her father and took his hand and held it on the top of the table. Then she began to cry. “Don’t anybody leave,” she said. “I have to have you here. I don’t care if it’s crazy or not. I want our family. I want both of you. I want to stay here and take you with us to New Orleans. I want you both here.”
“We’ll stay,” Sally said.
“I’ll do anything you want if you’ll forgive me.” Daniel put his other hand on hers. “Whatever I can do. There’s only one bed in my apartment but I can sleep on the floor. There’s a sofa.”
“What time is it?” Sally asked.
“Eight-thirty.”
“Let’s go to Wal-Mart and get some air mattresses. You’re right, Ariel. We’re spending this night under the same roof. All three of us. You and me and your father. You are our child. We are the ones who made you and we made you out of love, didn’t we, Dan? Out of the greatest, sweetest love and sex in the world and we were glad I got pregnant and we adore you. Let’s go and get those mattresses. They’re cheap. I’ve been wanting some for Mother’s summer house.”
At the Wal-Mart Superstore they got silly. They bought two air mattresses and some blankets and a pillow. They bought a box of Sam’s chocolate chip cookies and Häagen-Dazs ice cream and cereal and orange juice and milk. They bought napkins and paper towels and dehydrated soup and crackers and a hundred dollars’ worth of other things they decided Daniel needed for his apartment. They went back over there and blew up the beds and made them up. They put Daniel’s clothes away in the closets. They brushed their teeth with the new toothbrushes they had bought. Ariel and Sally put on Daniel’s old T-shirts for pajamas. Sally borrowed his oldest summer jacket for a robe. They sat on the air mattresses and ate the cookies and ice cream and Daniel told about his life in Hawaii and Washington State and Ariel told about her classes at Tulane and Sally told about her welfare clients and the insanity of the Louisiana welfare system. They talked about the seventies and they told her about Merwin and Daniel searched through the boxes of books and found The Lice and The Carrier of Ladders that Merwin had signed the day before she was born. “We were waiting for you to be born,” Daniel told her. “I was dreaming of you every night. I knew exactly what you would be, how you would look, it was as if I already knew you.”
“We will never hate each other again,” her mother vowed. “No matter what transpires between us we will not hate each other. I will not make your father hate me ever again. This is all my fault. I made him leave. I drove him to it.”
“I want you both in my life forever,” Daniel said. “I have always loved you both. I have suffered your loss like the loss of my limbs. Forgive me, it is all my fault. It won’t happen again.”
“It was my fault for being born,” Ariel said. “You were all right until you had me. I got Dad in trouble at Tulane.”
“No, no, no, no, no,” both her parents said. “You are the reason. You are the good thing, the spirit. Merwin knew you would be special. He came and blessed us all.”
“It’s God’s fault,” Ariel said. “He made this mess and all of us just have to deal with it.”
“There isn’t any god,” Daniel answered. “There is consciousness, and the central nervous system and our desire to be whole and well. And it isn’t a mess, it’s our lives. We are alive and well, thank goodness for this day.” He went to his daughter and gathered her into his arms. “And forgiveness, for which I beg.”
“Let’s sleep on it,” Ariel said. She was giggling and also trying to act wise. “Seize the day and all of that.”
Daniel slept on an air mattress and the two women shared the bed. Late in the night, when she knew Ariel was asleep, Sally took her pillow and went into the living room and found Daniel and climbed down into his arms. He was awake. He had been waiting for her.
“What do you think?” Sally asked. “Does she seem all right to you?”
“She seems fine.”
“She has problems. She never finishes anything she starts. This desire to find you is the first real passion I’ve seen her display in months. She’s lost her enthusiasm. I don’t know. Maybe I watch her too closely.”
“We weren’t good parents, Sally, because we didn’t know how to be. I was the main villain because I gave up and left, but you weren’t much better. We were both nuts. Driven nuts by our culture. Every time I read an article about early childhood development I get crazy thinking about how little we knew.”
“We did the best we could. At least we had her. Most of my friends got abortions. I don’t know anyone else who had a kid if they got pregnant without wanting to.”
“She’s supposed to be grateful for that?”
Sally pulled away from him. “I’d forgotten what it was like to talk to you, how unpleasant you are. The problem is how to help her now. She’s got to finish college. If she has that she’ll begin to believe in herself.”
“That’s simplistic. I counsel people her age. If they aren’t doing well at something, often it’s because they don’t really like it. If they are truly interested in what they’re studying, they will do well at it.”
“Oh, God, don’t go preaching that to her. That’s the line that got half the people we knew into trouble. The ones who thought they would be poets.” It was mean and she knew it but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from saying it. She moved off the bed and sat cross-legged on the floor looking at him. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean you. I don’t know why I came in here. I guess I thought we’d make love and everything would be erased. I thought you’d kiss me and it would all fall into place. Sleeping Beauty, although it’s more like Alice in Wonderland. I keep shrinking and expanding. She’s all right most of the time, except for hating her body. She’s okay. And I’m glad you’re here so she can see you.”
“Don’t go getting down on poetry.” He smiled and sat up and began to quote a poem of Merwin’s that had been taped to the refrigerator in the house on Octavia Street.
“Long afterwards
the intelligent could deduce what had been offered
and not recognized
and they suggest that bitterness should he confined
to the fact that the gods chose for their arbiter
a mind and character so ordinary
albeit a prince. . . .”
“You always did that when you wanted the last word. Well, I’m going back to bed. It’s too late for this.”
“If you want to get laid I’m available.”
“Good night, Daniel.” She stood up, then walked to him and kissed him and then went back to the bedroom and got in bed beside her child. She rolled over on her side and covered her arm with the old red wool blanket Daniel had owned as long as she had known him. It was one of the few things he had taken when he left. It touched her somehow that he had kept this same old blanket for so many years and kept it clean. He must have washed this thing a hundred times, she decided, and it’s barely faded. She began to sink into sleep. She was thinking about the chapel at Tulane and Merwin reading and the hushed excitement of the night. I’m glad I had that, she decided. Or my whole life might have been as dull as the last few years. She began to tell herself the end of the poem Daniel had been quoting, a poem she had been so proud once of learning and understanding. A poem about human love, a force so powerful the Greeks had believed it was a goddess.
then a mason working above the gates of Troy
in the sunlight thought he felt the stone
shiver
in the quiver on Paris’s back the head
of the arrow for Achilles’ heel
smiled in its sleep
and Helen stepped from the palace to gather
as she would do every day in that season
from the grove the yellow ray flowers tall
as herself
whose roots are said to dispel pain