“So, Sara?” says Carolyn.
“Sara O’Sara.” As my husband used to call her.
Of all the children from their group and all the groups their group overlapped with, schools and camps and sports and piano, neighborhoods and buses and somebody’s cousins: I lie awake at night and remember entire rosters of third-grade classes. I remember leafy flowery names on phone trees. Children’s names that, at first, seemed to belong to their parents. Always somebody going out on a limb—Solveig, Seven—somebody hyphenating, somebody going with a Jr.
Look at me. I staved off the “h” in Sara.
“Boo,” says Carolyn.
Our walk takes us past their first preschool. Carolyn’s Noah, my Charlie. Later, Sara.
“Sorry.”
I force an up-tempo. “So does he think research or teaching?”
“Dimitra is research,” says Carolyn, sighing.
The jealous mother of boys, always.
“I always think of him drawing.” I pause generously. “And drawing,” I smile. He’s ended up in marine biology.
I see him throwing handfuls of the driveway gravel. Noah. I see his elastic-waist corduroys. I see him simulating a Tonka crash with Charlie. I see Miss Anne, the teacher, in her snack apron, the preschool whore, my husband called her. Awful husbands in those days. In this mood, I miss them.
“I think about Sara.”
“That’s sweet,” I manage. My compression tank is riding up under my fitted T-shirt.
“How much time today?” She treads on the balls of her feet to keep her heart rate, looking in two possible directions. “An hour? If we go around Montlake?”
There’s a loop around the playfields. The good city was always providing. There were so many things to do, so much for Sara—
When she was six months old her eyes were completely clear and knowing. The dark hair on her head was as fine as the hair on my thighs where I’d never shaved them. It’s what you always think, but it overwhelmed me with Sara: what would happen if I ever lost her?
I felt like I had invented death in the form of my baby.
Sleepless became fretful became neurotic. My scalp seemed to release its hold on my hair, and I pulled out birds’ nests of it with my fingers. Charlie was against the new baby, my husband was working constantly, up for a promotion. It got so I believed in it completely, the fear of losing Sara.
One morning I took her on a long walk through the arboretum. I found a bench half in sun and I took her out of the carriage. Her legs were stiff and her arms were woodenly perpendicular. She could sit up, a recent development, with her new stiffness, but I thought she was like a tiny chair that floated. She could sit, but there was all this space around her.
I propped her beside me on the park bench. It was the middle of the morning. Charlie might have been at school, he might even have been at Carolyn’s. We shared a babysitter for a while.
Each moment was endless. That’s what I remember clearly.
There was no time, in fact, so that my fear for Sara never lessened, was never halved and halved again by “moments.”
When she went over it was all in one piece like a tiny tree. “Tim-ber,” I whispered. I pushed her up against me. We sat there with our four eyes regarding the separate world. Honey grass. Big blooms of trees. Late September.
I got up from the park bench, and Sara fell sideways, softly, behind me. She didn’t say anything.
I stood with my back to the bench looking into the trees with yellow-brown edges cut into the cloudless blue universe. Sara never made a sound. As if she understood the whole thing already.
When I finally turned back, the sun was fully on the park bench.
It must have been because of the sun that I didn’t see her.
The bench was empty. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I felt for half a second as if I could start all over.
And then my whole body turned to water. I was wearing tights and so the urine was forced around my legs, all the way down to my ankles.
When I looked again Sara was lying sideways, just as I had left her.
“Boo again, sweetie,” says Carolyn.
Were we talking about Noah? Funny, I think now. I never liked him. He never seemed very innocent. The corduroy trousers like a little boy costume.
It seems unfair to dislike a child, but it happens. What I’d never do is hurt Carolyn’s love for him.
“I said I saw Sara.”
What?
I feel the heat prickle below my collarbone where I’m newly old and dented. Carolyn is the mistress of the steady pace, though.
Can love be loftier than the person upon whom it’s lavished? I don’t want to know what she saw when she saw Sara, or where, or if the baby.
“Last week,” starts Carolyn.
I cover my ears and duck my head a little. The way Sara used to.
Carolyn has to stop talking.
She laughs to give herself time to decide whether or not to be offended.
It was my own mother’s position that she had paid her dues. Some people still owed the world their struggle—not my mother. She would not separate newspapers and cans, she would not turn off the lights when she went out, and she would never take a multivitamin. She found such cultural nods to suffering and hardship disgusting. She found cans and newspapers some kind of cruel parody of herself as a skinny child in a skinny dress pulling a wagon along the curtain-colored sidewalk looking for scrap between buildings and underneath the paper blown up against fences.
I’d picture her at the kitchen table with her jar of peanut butter and her tumbler of clear liquid. My husband laughed when we first met and I said that. Her fat brassy curls like a doll’s wig, breasts like a massive overbite.
My husband would decide I was maudlin about her. Actually what he would say was that there seemed to be some competition, between East Coast people, about who came from the lowliest circumstances. He insisted he didn’t think her wreck of a life was anything special.
In the home—we moved her across the country to be closer to us—in the diapers, seeds of hair on her shoulders, she relished saying she had sold her soul to bitterness when she was a babe without a cradle. My husband thought she must have read it somewhere. She was a great consumer of dime-store novels.
I can never decide which way she would have gone about her great-grandson, Christopher.
He looks like her. Sara pointed it out to me. “He’s grumpy too,” she laughed on the phone, almost warmly.
“Yoohoo, my goodness,” says Carolyn. I try to catch her last words but it seems I was still listening to the baby banging the pot in the kitchen. The pot I brought over.
We’re on the homeward side of the loop now. This September has been crackly, the sky a sparkling blue, bright nervy lines in the leaves and branches. Suddenly I fall back and sit down on the long, low retaining wall of concrete.
“I’m so sorry, Caro. I just can’t keep your pace today. You go ahead. I’ll call you.”
Carolyn stands there astonished, hands on hips, all the trim and determined vanished. She has even momentarily forgotten to lift her shoulders off her breasts, something we all must do now. Her tight green sports top shows dark sweat shadows like eggplants. Her chin is like a doorknob, all these years I’ve studied its odd shape and only in this moment.
“Seriously,” I say. “Go on without me.”
The sun is a lump of clay at the top of the noon hour. We both know the walk hasn’t gone smashingly, we both know I won’t talk about Sara. We both suspect we wouldn’t have lingered for lunch at one of our places afterward—but who eats lunch now, anyway? Lunch went out with the last crusts of a child’s cheese sandwich.
The baby’s screaming in the background. “How could you do this?” rages Sara, and it has so many meanings. The baby has lobbed the plastic cup of juice off the table.
How could I have brought her into this world?
Would I have chosen pain and bitterness for her? If I’d known it would
go hand in hand with everything else the world had to offer?
Suddenly I remember her face when she waved to us one last time, off to Cornwall, Cornball, my husband called it, why did she want to go there? Eighteen, behind a bar, I don’t think so, O’Sara. It’s restocking and stuff, she’d told him. When she waved, in the airport, her face was like a locket of itself, a memory already.
“I have a completely free day and I’m coming over.”
“I’m drinking,” says Sara.
I wail, “How’s the baby?”
I’m still sitting on the cement wall, Carolyn’s still standing over me. The wet yarn of my guts, choose a tree, any tree, hard and bright with September, you’ll see it hung with gooey insides.
“Leave me alone, Carolyn,” I say. Finally. She winces.
Driven to it, she says coldly, “Well I hope you’re all right, then.”
It occurs to me I’m acting out Sara. My own mother. Carolyn will have to go half an hour with no one to yabber. Love to Jason and Noah. Love to William, still at home, carrying his homework in his soft mouth like a dog with the Sunday paper. She has the fat below her bra straps. Who doesn’t. Who told you you look good in light green, sweetie?
She’s stalling a little, she still hopes I’ll come up behind her, breathlessly apologetic.
A car passes, shining brightly. The sky is snapping blue, the sky should be a car color.
So she’s drinking.
I’m afraid to say anything compared to her suffering. I’m the only one in the world who has a spare key to her apartment. She knows very well the power is all hers in giving it to me. She can change the lock like a change of heart. The moment is hers, any moment.
I whisper over the phone, “Is the baby napping?”
The baby is no longer a baby. Christopher is two, but still a baby to me because I see him so rarely. He has big dark eyes, like his father, presumably. Secretly I think of him as a fairy tale. I only know one of Sara’s secrets.
She was pregnant in Paris. The father worked as a porter at Charles de Gaulle airport. They lived with his mother on the far side of the airport, the outskirts, says Sara. Yes, he spoke English. Some English. They went boating one Sunday. They rented a boat at a public launch and they set out with their picnic for some duck-covered island. Sara was seven months pregnant. It was only a lake. Not an ocean. Halfway out he was fooling around. He stood up for some reason, says Sara. It was like the boat shrugged him over. I picture a flat-bottomed rowboat. It was, says Sara. He couldn’t swim. She didn’t know he couldn’t swim—couldn’t conceive of it, had never met anyone—and she laughed as she circled him in the boat, as he drowned, blowing bubbles, thinking he was trying to get her laughing.
GREEN
This morning, before your arrival, a blond boy with red knees called out to me imperiously, “Your feeder’s empty, Mevrouw Bon! You should fill it!”
I tamped my loose hair—the color of a speckled egg, I have observed lately. A proper gardener, I thought to myself, sits to lunch with wine, silver, and fresh cucumbers after her toils. Now which boy was this? I beckoned and he leapt across the street with no heed for traffic. A rather quiet suburb, it’s true. Some distance—as you know—from the city.
I held him up to unhook the feeder from a branch in the pear tree. On the back of his neck there was a raised freckle. They used to tell us to catalogue our children. The boy poured the black seeds in the plastic tube quite capably. Bravo, I told him. But I thought to myself it was a sound like wind in heavy grasses.
The garden reaches around my house in a profligate embrace. My neighbors call it a jungle. You must have heard the morning uproar of birds, Naomi, for you arrived, suddenly, in the morning. This cacophony also shocks my neighbors. There goes Anna Vong, they say, the old colonist. Dripping water from a can with the throat of an insect.
My house is like me, isn’t it? Tall and narrow. Vong was not my husband’s name, but one he composed, his pentatonic ear, from our separate histories. This new name would hide his heroism in Indonesia—not his modesty but his desire to forget war altogether—and my van de Something, my whiteness. He kept Wayan, which only meant firstborn. I kept Anna.
I laugh at myself in your company: as a young woman my skin, too, was pearled abalone. Of course I appear quite an old woman now, who shares the tics and habits of all elderly. We sleep poorly, like cats. At night we scavenge memory, in the day we doze in armchairs. We cannot remember yesterday, but a given day sixty years ago is a cool oasis. I must apologize for my faded complexion—as they say, colorless. When I reach up to touch my face I am reminded of the stucco sheath of a house: my own house, one of many identical houses in the development.
You see my forearms mottled with scaly sunspots from years of exposure, long straight bones from knee to ankle. I do not belong to a generation with calf muscles.
I confess. I no longer find it necessary to wash upon waking. But perhaps you believe, as I do, that age is only a veil, a curtain.
Before I could speak to the boy who had attended to my bird feeder, his father was bearing down upon us dressed for a city office. A puppy with a shampooed fleece followed and the boy dropped and tumbled away with it. I thought to myself, I know the boy’s father. He bathes in the morning. In winter the steam rises off his northerly seal head as he strides to the commuter station.
You do not have to know the East Indies to fall under the spell of light filtered through chlorophyll stars, tentacles of green like dragon tails. These Dutch are children who follow their noses, A to B, even before they know their alphabet. But I have seen for many years now how they can’t help slowing when they pass my garden. I do not, Naomi, see light in children unequivocally. Or goodness. I see light—but it’s a science!—in leaves, and flowers. One day my knees will simply give way as I hoist a neighbor child to a berry in my bushes.
Across the street you see Mevrouw Van Daale’s garden and its centerpiece, a tidy, skirted windmill. No one lets on it looks like that same little boy, about to be whipped for trying on his sister’s dresses. Their concern is great for the male progeny. They would not look kindly on you and your female companion, Naomi. Keep her to yourself. There you lie so sweetly against her clothed shoulder, your hair an aureole—if radiance can be dark. Of course you’ve kept your shirts on. For my sake, isn’t it? I’m an old woman, you’ve considered. What if I were to look in on you? But you’ve whispered deliciously to each other in my presence, even held hands, because of course you’re also children, and want me to notice.
No doubt you have told your Krista that as a child, for that singular year of your father’s sabbatical, the outskirts of Amsterdam, this very street, how estranged you were, how homesick. So that when you return—today! Is it still?—you are surprised the street is not like the view one has from an airplane. Of farmland, for example, patchwork greens and browns, made abstract by distance. You are surprised that the child’s bicycle stitched carefully in the grass in front of Verdaasdonk’s—the exact house your family rented—is not, to scale, a dragonfly.
Perhaps it is not what you wanted, that the street appears so cozy, that I am still here, in fact waiting for you at the gate of my garden. But here you are asleep in my spare bedroom. I’ve folded fresh towels in the bathroom: did I forget to tell you?
The hollyhocks bend over the fence in front. Living alone has its own order. Why bother returning the garden shears to a crooked nail? There, the scent from the row of potted jasmine. It transports me. And to prod behind it with the fork of my hand for the small green cucumbers like crisp caterpillars.
I will confess my aptitude for drink, which is well known as a comfort for heartbreak, a balm for loneliness. You can see it on my face if you come closer: the flared pores, bone swelling. Oh it’s not so terrible, is it? A single distraction?
I was never trained in the art of cooking—the colonist. To Wayan, all food was paste in this European country. Anna, please do not affect Frau Housewife. He used the German. He waved his
hands. He could bend his hands backward like a dancer. Give me what you’ve prepared for the baby. He did not understand that mashed carrots, for instance, did not flow from my body. This same kitchen, so narrow.
Of course I remember you, Naomi! You were a shy girl of seven with long brown hair the color of brown skin in my native country. You were a precocious reader. You had made a pact with yourself not to smile. You arrived in autumn, your father’s academic calendar, and you reminded me of an autumn firefly, brave and chilly. I said, Can you read those bright signals? I remember your brother too. But he was at ease with the children from the American school who moved like a herd of antelope.
Naomi Lee! How glad I am to see you! Your mother was white and your father, as they say, Asian American.
But I confess I dreamed someone else returning. In the same manner. I belong to a generation for whom the ring of the telephone is jarring. And the voice on the other end, as they say, is tentative. Is that you? Either too colloquial or too formal for the wires.
The hour arrives and I am at the gate. I step into the street—witness! Black eyes, a certain freckle...
Are every mother’s senses so particular? His skin was wrinkled like a cocooned leaf, damp, and so soft as to be almost furry. The lines around his eyes reminded us of a pouchy grandfather. His scalp smelled of cream and curry which is a smell of new earth in a garden. If he was in my arms he would search out Wayan with his eyes and smile with the unflinching love we call innocence. I prefer to call it joy.
I have been here all along, waiting.
You look down, embarrassed and delighted. I say, You must be twenty! Imagine! Come in, and your companion! Hello, Krista. Ah, the hollyhocks need a heavy glass. Tell me in English, is it pitcher? My kitchen, excuse me, a dim aisle. The wallpaper of auburn willow trees is stained with oil and shadow. My windows are screened by the trees of my garden. I don’t bother pruning. Look how the leaves cover the glass like a living petticoat, suffuse the house with green. I have replaced doors with bamboo curtains. These are Hindu thangkas hanging in layers, depicting the sexual exploits of gods and goddesses. My rugs are worn dark and shiny. I wear my slippers in the garden.
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