A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

  Megan Miller spends the afternoon on the south field where the irrigation canal is. She studies the book of birds with its intimidating glossy pictures. She can’t identify anything. They all look like big black birds or medium sized black birds. There is more to classification than she anticipated. She spots magpies and hawks. The golden and bald eagles are easy, and the oriels and robins, pelicans and seagulls. Everything else eludes her. How does it fly? It flies well, she thinks, furious with the text. It flies with authority.

  Later, she hears her brother Matthew say, “She’s got binoculars.” He is talking to her father, reporting in. “Looks like one of them tourists from California. Dressed up like she’s on safari.” There is laughter.

  The city where she now lives is a region of collective contempt for her family, a contagion. For a moment, Megan feels she has been ambushed when she least expected it. But that’s the point of an ambush, after all, she remembers.

  Matthew is engaged in a singular process of subtraction and reduction. He is continually divesting himself of what he learned in school, even to the level of grammar. They used to read plays out loud together. She recalls a winter of Tennessee Williams in the basement. They memorized and recited their lines with conviction, acted them with cleverly assembled props. They had lighting cues. Martha designed and sewed costumes. Then it was another winter. They had aluminum paper crowns and swords. Matthew glued on a beard. Perhaps it was Chaucer. Her brother had a beautiful voice. Some actors can read the telephone book and bring tears to your eyes. Matthew could do that, naturally.

  His hold on words is each season lessening. They have failed him. Or perhaps he is growing in reverse. All the attention to the ground is pulling him in. Soon he will communicate in a sequence of grunts and slaps. Then he’ll be ready to marry someone like Martha.

  In the late afternoon she drives the old pick-up to town. She is going to call Karen Kaplan, her partner and best friend. Megan promised to telephone but she hasn’t. There’s no cellular service in the valley. And she cannot physically force herself to use the one telephone in the kitchen at the farm. She senses her mother in the air, in the wires, in disguise, tapping in, listening and recording, saving words for a future sabotage. Megan exists on the farm in a paralysis, as if she’s had a stroke. She must separate herself by seven miles of interstate before she remembers how to use her credit cards.

  “Why do you do this?” Karen Kaplan asks. She is talking about the farm, Idaho, and her summer ritual that has nothing to do with purification. “It’s perverse. You could have had Shelly’s condo in Kauai. Dylan’s in camp. You could have gone anywhere. You do it to make yourself feel worse. Admit it.”

  Megan considers the possibility that her summer returns are an obvious propitiation. It is her ritual supplication, her unique blood letting to insure her own crops. Harvests of clients with injuries. Fields of clients who are victims of fraud, irrefutable negligence, breech of contract, misconduct that has a criminal code clearly attached to it like a price tag on a suit. And the bad faith that is someone else’s fault. Megan glances at the river across the street from the phone booth, the river slow as if damaged slides through the center of town. It looks dull and beaten in early August. She is prepared to tell this to Karen, to reveal this as an absolute confession, but she doesn’t.

  “I’m collecting Jewish lawyer jokes. They’re Neanderthals but they have rocks and clubs. And there are so many of them.”

  “As your attorney, I advise you to stay out of the mashed potatoes and gravy,” her partner offers, voice too light. Megan detects her concern. “Limit your biscuit intake. Remember Los Angeles lent. It comes the spring of your 15th year and it lasts through your first grandchild. Keep your priorities, dear.”

  A small corridor of laughter. It feels sticky and contrived. Her words and reasons are weak, exposed and inadequate. The inside of her mouth is dusty.

  “I always used to know what you were thinking,” her mother says. She holds a cotton cloth for washing or dusting. It’s a prop.

  Her father is watching television. Her mother looks directly at her and the words are an accusation. Her mother rinses dishes and smokes. She brushes a strand of gray hair from her eyes, barely glances out the window at the view she has memorized. At the end of the barley fields are two silos stranded above an irrigation ditch. Then the purple etch of Morris Road with the railway crossing and cemetery and the roof of the new high school. They were building it when she left for college. She remembers enormous piles of bricks.

  “I used to be able to read your mind,” her mother says. There is sorrow in this, but Megan cannot determine why or for whom. “You’d be looking out at the potatoes. But I knew you were seeing bridges and cities on the other side of the ocean.”

  “Yes,” Megan says. “I was.” Is this the door she must walk through? Is this the sudden portal you cross and find the other and more vivid world?

  “But now. . .” Her mother pauses, lights another cigarette, straightens an invisible wrinkle in her apron, loses her train of thought. Her mother looks each year increasingly like Central Casting sent her for a farmwoman crowd shot. They all are. Her father and Matthew and Martha and her children named after detectives and districts.

  Outside is a sunset that dust has turned into unexpected strands like lava. There are islands of purple embossed above a molten orange that might be Hawaiian. Summer opens like an oven. Megan waits for her mother to remember that she is speaking. “Now you’ve been those places,” her mother points out, turns to examine an area of linoleum near the door. She extracts an envelope from her apron pocket. It’s a stack of postcards Megan sent in what appears to be chronological order. Her mother places them on the kitchen table. They are merely another set of cards. But there are more than fifty-two. Oahu. Paris. Venice. Bali. Amalfi. Tahiti. Shanghai. Prague. Rio. Bora Bora.

  “Was it worth it?” her mother asks.

  That’s the question, of course, the matter of worth. You bring in your acres and what is the yield? There is the computation of planted field to pound, to ton. People are no different. Is that what her mother is attempting to measure? Did she plant at the right time? Were the seeds spoiled? Was the effort appropriate to the product? Or is there something else, more primitive than even the biblical? After all, Megan has sacrificed her blood, her kin, the village of her birth, her ancestors, the incontrovertible rituals and borders, the bones of the ancient ones. She violated them on a molecular level, brought the black haired daughter from the foreign tribe into the world. This is unforgivable.

  When a witness is encouraged to engage an unnecessarily ambiguous question, particularly one with an implication of damnation, it is best to equivocate. Megan can negotiate this obvious treachery. “Worth it?” she repeats. “Well, that’s difficult to say.” In the morning, Martha screams at her. “You don’t come at Christmas when we could use some decoration.” Her sister is following her down the driveway, into the road. The three standard issue children she has spawned are in various stages of ambulation behind her. Megan walks toward the road that leads to a trail with a marsh. She has her binoculars around her neck and the book of birds under her right arm even though she rarely identifies anything with certainty and wants to abandon the entire project. Big and black, or is it perhaps merely charcoal gray? How large must it be to be considered big? What of other markings, colors around the neck, the bands on the legs and, of course, how it is flying? It’s using its wings, she wants to scream. That’s how it’s flying.

  Megan cannot master the book of birds. She cannot articulate flight patterns and body characteristics. It seems incredible that she grew up in this region and can barely name what is flying or growing, trees or bushes or birds. How did she manage to miss all this? Did she spend her adolescence sleepwalking? Was she already living in Los Angeles, surrounded by another vocabulary of vegetation and necessity, even then?

  “No. You don’t come at Christmas when we could use something festive,” Martha informs her
. She has left her three children in the gravel roadside and they sit down, reach out for small stones, and dig with them. Soon Martha will leave her children at a daycare facility in town while she returns to her job in the photo developing section of Smith’s Supermarket. That’s what she did before her disastrous marriage. She spent her days in an enormous blue cotton smock counting out pictures of men exhibiting their rainbow trout while smiling sunburned from boats and docks. And women at barbecues, holding up spatulas and infants, raising them to the camera like banners or trophies. Megan remembers photographs muted by too much sun, all the backyards, lawns and moorings blunted, beaten into conventional submission. Even the water looked barely alive, undernourished, anemic.

  “Don’t you dare look at me like that,” Martha sneered at her in the supermarket once. “Don’t stick your nose up. It’s an honest living.”

  Now it’s a high plains August, baked green with flashes of neon white lightning in the night storms. Megan remembers thunder after midnight, how the air was vacant after the strikes and the shake. She considered the possibility that the house might collapse. She felt not bruised but numb.

  “No, sir,” Martha screams. “ You got better stuff to do for Christmas. Hawaii with your boyfriends of the Hebrew persuasion. Skiing in that town where Oprah does with all the movie stars. You come when the river is low and the air stinks. That’s how you remember us. You come with the dust. You come to feed in a famine season.”

  She crosses the highway, a demarcation she suspects Martha will not venture and she doesn’t; she turns back to her three gravel-sitting children. It’s always a disappointing yield with not enough to go around, Megan thinks. Who are you kidding?

  Suddenly, she remembers an August when she was ten. She went to Y camp in town for theater week. They put on a production of Little Women and she was Jo. Later, she won the summer county library award. The prize was dinner at the pizza parlor and a game at Bowlero in the mall next door. She had to read forty books to win, including The Yearling and the entire Anne of Green Gables series, nine in all. Megan thought her achievement was worth more than a slice of pizza and twenty minutes of bowling. That’s why she stood in the parking lot crying. There is the matter of worth and value and the moment when we set our price per pound.

  Martha stands on the edge of the highway. “You pretend you’re coming to see us,” she says, voice high and wavering. Behind her wind is blowing. “You come back for us to see you. Your new implants and hair-dos. Don’t pretend.” Martha laughs and it is harsh, brush and wire, gravel and wild fires. “But that’s what you do. That’s what keeps you in feed. Lying and pretending.”

  Martha is experiencing a contempt so vast it’s completely beyond the known human range of expression. She is rocked with a silent laughter that makes her body violent. It is swollen and mute and terrible. Then she starts crying.

  Megan walks toward the trail that leads to the marsh where there are bird feeders on poles and numerous nests and she is certain she will not classify anything. We become the landscapes we inhabit, she thinks, the molecules in the air we allow to enter our lungs. There is nothing random about this. It’s volitional. We consort with textures and fragrance, the shadows they cast and what they imply. We are infiltrated and redesigned. Of course there are spirits of rock and sky, reasons to worship eagles, hawks, the flight of geese and cycles of the moon, all moons, those named and charted and those still encased in their unmolested and hidden sleep. But this is only a partial explanation.

  In the afternoon, Megan rides her bicycle out Lincoln Boulevard past the town limits to the ridge where she can see the Oregon Trail markers, the two pieces of mountain she considered indisputable as a child. They were what she would always navigate by.

  It is mid August and patches of barley on the low hills are round as wells. Wind rolls through them like waves. Everything is some gradient of yellow, a golden swirl in unceasing motion. It is precisely the hay fields van Gogh painted, the dried grasses battered by their own hurricanes, perpetual, rising and falling as the Earth breathes. It occurs to her that, if she watches the barley field long enough, if she finds the one absolutely accurate angle, she will know what van Gogh was thinking.

  It had nothing to do with absinthe or inhaling fumes from turpentine. Such an interpretation of van Gogh is trivial. The fields actually swirl as if painted and lacquered. They reveal the entire history and etiology of yellow and the wind is a hieroglyph a lucky woman might decipher.

  For six consecutive days, just at sunset, one lone black elk passes a few yards in front of her parked bicycle, almost brushing the wheels. He crosses the highway, ambles into the scrub around the barley. It’s the color of twilight then, a suspended washed out purple that elongates and has no edges. The moment of borderless held breath. Megan is waiting for an indication, perhaps magical, like a stumbled upon enclave of lavender scented with prairie rock no one has seen before. If she could discover and resolve this, it might be possible to determine where home actually is and go there.

  The next morning, Megan witnesses a storm form around her. She rides her bicycle into a squall and finds herself in the absolute unblinking yellow center of it. The gold bull’s eye. It’s like a nest. She is in the barley field on the top of the ridge where she spends afternoons attempting to determine what van Gogh knew. The sky is black, she is surrounded by it, but she stands in a circle of sun. Then it comes at her, gray and black clouds distinct like bats flying at her face, moving like predators, shockingly fast. She watches them approach and thinks, Then come, already. Come. And the squall is wind and rain and then a sequence of sudden pink lightning she simultaneously smells and hears. The air is a wound you put sulfur in, she thinks. You can put it in me.

  She lies down in wet barley. Her bicycle has fallen over. It is raining hard. There are so many women within me, she realizes. Women with histories of tin and feathers. Women with veins of infected yellow water. Women abandoned by their fathers and mangled by August, by voices that ricochet through screen doors, by sirens and cursing. There are dialects of stones and bullets. Then she puts her head against the ground and lets the rain enter her.

  On the plane the next morning Megan takes a window seat. Her mother and sister are standing against the fence waving handkerchiefs. She wishes her mother would ask her now, as the plane races across asphalt, what she is thinking. Now, at the juncture between ground and air when all things are possible. She is thinking van Gogh knew we are less than islands. We are anomalous rock in a stretch of bad ocean, one boulder in a thousand miles of aggrieved waves. We stand as long as we can, dreaming of yellow, our feet bleeding in sand. Then we collapse.

  Her mother and sister, the fence and landing strip are gone. The sky is an immaculate blue like the painted capes of certain saints on cathedral walls. Megan knows women are traditionally traded for a string of beads and a few cows, a horse, maybe. Where is the surprise in this? It is a perpetual cycle of poor harvests when you consider drowning the girl children.

  Of course, rumors persist. There are ambiguous disappearances. A woman here or there invents techniques to elude detection and escape the compound. There are trails in mountains and methods to extract water from cactus. Some women scale the walls and reap years of fortunate seasons. They don’t count livestock, measure grain or define themselves by harvests and droughts, floods and contagion. They refuse to save discarded fabrics like they were holy relics. Some women reject induction into the society of females who stitch quilts. They change their names and destinies, slip off their shoes at 27,000 feet, ask for a scotch on the rocks, close their eyes and wake up in another millennium.

  COCKTAIL HOUR

  Bernie Roth is not going to get his twenty-year service plaque in the lobby. The hospital he founded has been purchased by Westec Medical Division. Bernie Roth is merely the former figurehead of an ad hoc insurrection that has no meaning in the realm of litigation. The project coordinator makes it clear that his presence is unnecessary, in fact, it’s into
lerable.

  He leaves the merger meeting three days early. Bernie Roth takes a midnight flight and his green-tinted contact lenses sting as he drives from the airport directly home. The house is perched on a cliff of purple succulents above the ocean that is, today, a dark blue like certain fabrics where you see the grain and stitches.

  Chloe designed their house with an architect from Milan. It’s a three-story Mediterranean villa with arches, balconies, a turret, orange tiles on the roof, and graceful windows of leaded glass that face interior courtyards enclosed by Bougainvillea draped walls. And it’s not painted pink, Chloe has meticulously explained. It’s a salmon terra cotta.

  Chloe’s car is in the driveway. It’s a weekday and she should be out. He notices her car with surprise and relief, realizing that if she hadn’t been home, he would have called her and asked her to return immediately.

  He finds Chloe in the bedroom, standing inside her closet, apparently arranging clothing. She is wearing a silk kimono imprinted with red Peonies, her blond hair is tied back in a ponytail and she seems startled to see him. She actually touches two fingers to her throat in a gesture of surprise when she looks up, and her mouth is momentarily wide. He starts to embrace her but, but for some reason, stops, and lays down on the bed instead.

  “You’re three days early,” Chloe says. There’s something accusatory in her tone.

  “I was invited to leave,” Bernie explains, prone. “I’m not getting my plaque.”