They were women. They were poets. But Miss Bishop lusted after love. Miss Moore cooled like a pie on a sill. Hardly a match. Not my wish to be Elizabeth Bishop. Not for me, either, to be Miss Moore. Yet alike as a pod houses its peas.
Unfit for fooling around. Like those Emmas before me, I read of love in the light of a half-life, and the shadow of its absent half gives depth to the page. My made-up romances are probably better, probably worse than reality. I am a fire at which my swain warms his hands. I am a fire quenched by a shower of scorn. Tenderness and longing alternate with cruelty and aversion. I study how to endure monsoons of driving snow.
Let’s see how you’re coming along. I’d have to slip out of my dress. Why are you wearing a bra? what’s there to bra about. After he left I’d stand in the cold puddle of my clothes, step to the mirror to see for himself myself and my vaginal lips clasped like devout hands, praying to God to let me die before another day.
There was nothing to see, he said, so why did he inspect me as if I were going to receive a seal from the FDA? Elizabeth Bishop’s father died of Bright’s disease when she was still a child, and her mother went mad in Elizabeth’s teens. My mother took her sturdy time dying. The day she died in her bed in this house, she had washed the windows of her room, though she could scarcely stand, and fluttered the curtains with arms weak with disease. Bustling about like a bee but without a buzz. Keeping out of reach, I now know. Wiping mirrors free from any image. Staying away by pretending to care and tend and tidy and clean and sweep and mend and scour and polish. Married to a gangplank of a guy. She scarcely spoke to me. I think she was ashamed of the way she let him make me live.
I learned to read on the sly. I failed my grades, though in this dinky town you were advanced so your puberty would not contaminate the kiddies. Despite the fact that I hadn’t any puberty, my father said. But I read on the sly the way some kids smoked or stroked one another through their clothes. I read in fear of interruption. So I learned to read fast. I also read mostly first verses, first chapters, and careened through the rest, since my ear, when it turned to catch a distant tread, swung my eyes away with my brow toward the sound.
The ash came down but I never believed why. The shed was built around the stump to become an altar where my father chopped firewood or severed chickens from their heads. Slowly the stump was crisscrossed with cuts, darkened by layers of absorbed blood, and covered with milling crowds of tiny tiny ants. Traditionally, kids went to the woodshed for a whaling. Although once upon a time I stood still as a stick by the edge of my tot-wide bed, I now went to the shed to get undressed under my father’s disappointed eye. Staring at hairs. And had he said something lewd, had he laid a hand, had he bent to breathe upon my chest, had his dick distended his pants, his point would have been disproved. I’d have elicited some interest.
He watched me grow like a gardener follows the fortunes of his plants, and what he wanted was normalcy. I dimly remember, when a child, how my father would hold me in his lap and examine my teeth. Something coming in there. He would push his finger down upon the spot. This tooth is loose, he’d say, with some semblance of pleasure, wiggling it painfully back and forth. Well, he was a farmer. And I was crop. Why not?
Getting a man was the great thing. My mother had got a man and what had that got her? Knocked up. With me. That’s what. Maybe my father hoped he’d see, when I stripped, a penis lifting its shy self from the slot between my legs. Flat as I was, he may have thought there was a chance. There was no chance either way.
I might have been a boy in his balls but I was dismantled in her womb.
a residue of rain
Emma Bishop let the light on the table tell her about the weather. Sadness was the subject. Disappointment. Regret. The recipe? a bit of emptiness like that of winter fields when the fierce wind washes them; acceptance, yes, some of that, the handshake of a stranger; resignation, for what can the field do about the wind but freeze? what can the hand do but grasp the offered other? and a soupçon of apprehension, like clods of earth huddled against the frost they know will knock someday, or an envelope’s vexation about the letter it will enclose; then a weariness of the slow and gentle variety, a touch of ennui, an appreciation of repetition. This sadness had the quality of a bouquet garni discreetly added to the sauce; it offered a whiff of melancholy, subtle, just enough to make the petals of plants curl at their tips. A day of drizzle in the depths of November. Not definite enough yet? All right: the quiet hour after … the nearly negligible remains … an almost echo.
The theme: leave-taking. Bidding adieu to a familiar misery. So … long …… The house was empty. The light was late, pale, even wan. The table lay in the light as though dampened by a rag. Emma Bishop saw her fingers fold up like a fan. Her lifelike light. So … long …… Nothing stays the ancients said but the cloud stood above the treetop while it toppled, still as painted, her father murdering her tree’s long limbs before they had loosened their leaves. Why then should anything be loved if it was going to be so brutally taken away? He had seen the tree be in Emma Bishop’s bright eyes. Beneath it, weeds where she rested and read. When she no longer had to hide her occupation.
It had been of some interest to Emma that her father had ceased his inspection of her bared body after her mother died. As if … As if it had been to distress her mother he undressed her, had walked around her like a car he might buy, had a list of factors to check for flight safety, to justify his then saying: see what you’ve given me, what you’ve grown, you are a patch of arid earth, your child is spindly, awkward, chestless, wedge-chinned and large-eyed, stooped too, not as though gangly but as though old.
She had been a ten-month kid, she’d been told. Maybe during that tenth month her weenie had withered.
Over time Emma began to perceive her parental world for what it was. Her father farmed by tearing at the earth, seeding soy with steel sticks, interested in neither the soil nor the beans, but only in what the beans would bring; interested in the sky for the same reason, in the wind, in rain. The creek overflowed once and flooded a meadow. He saw only a flooded field. He didn’t see a sheet of bright light lying like a banner over the ploughed ground. And the light darkened where the lumps neared the surface. Emma watched the wind roughen the water so that sometimes the top of a clod would emerge like new land. Crusoe in England? in Iowa. She imagined.
And her mother scrubbed their clothes to remove the dirt, not to restore the garments; and wiped up dust to displace it, not to release the reflection in the mirror or the view through the glass or the gleam from the wood. She pinned wash to its line as if she were handcuffing a criminal. Emma saw dislike run down her arms like sweat and transform the task. She didn’t say to the pan, “Let me free you from this grease.” She said to the grease, “Get thee away, you snot of Satan.”
Emma ultimately preferred her furniture tongued and grooved, glued rather than nailed, for the nail had not only fixed Christ’s hands to the Cross, it had driven Eve into labor and a life of grief. Her mother wouldn’t cry over spilled milk, but she would silently curse, her lips retreating from a taste. Emma learned to see the spatter as a demonstration of the laws of nature and as a whimsical arrangement of pale gray-blue splotches. When she read that infants sometimes played with their stools, she knew why.
Maybe her father stopped inspecting her when he saw her watching, simply watching him; when his naked face and naked gaze were gazed at, gazed at like urine in the pot, yellow and pearly; when his hard remarks were heard like chamber music.
He wore boots on account of the manure, he said, though they hadn’t had horses or any other sort of animal in Emma’s time. Except the chickens. The rooster’s crude proud cry rose from the roof of the coop and from the peak of Bishop’s poem. Perhaps it had a line that would do. He’d pull the boots off and leave them on the back porch, where Emma would find his handprints on their dusty sides. The handprints, thought Emma, were nice. There were prehistoric handprints placed in caves. Her father’s boots w
ere four hands high. Maybe five.
As a young girl, Emma had run around barefoot until she began to loathe any part of her that was uncovered, her face and hands first, her feet finally; and she realized her toughened undersoles had little to no sensation. Now her feet were both bony and tender and could feel the floor tremble when the train passed, three fields and one small woods away.
She herself was a residue, her life light as the light in her inherited house. Emma’s mother had died in the bed she had no doubt grown to loathe, a bed full of him every night until her illness drove him out, lying there in a knot, staring up through the dark at death—who would not want it to come quick? Emma wondered whether her mother had ever had a moment of … exultation. Little cruelties cut her down. The rubadubdub of every day’s labor, always going on as long as there was light. Same old cheap china on the table. The same old dust seeping in to shadow the mirrors and coat the sills. The same old rhubarb brought from the patch, the stored carrots and apples and sprouting potatoes. The same unrelenting sun in the summer. Then deep cold and blowing snow. The three of them in different corners of the house. Emma would sit on the floor of her room, reading, her back against a faintly warm radiator, afghan over her knees, squinting at the page through inadequate glasses. She would occasionally hear her mother sweeping or washing, or the rhythmic treadling of her sewing machine. Her father would be busy with his figures, rearranging, recalculating, hoping to improve the columns’ bleak assessments, since outgo regularly threatened to overtake income. But they sewed their own sacklike dresses; they ate their cold stored root crops; they killed and plucked and cooked their own chickens, though Emma didn’t eat dinner those nights, not since she’d fainted in front of a fistful of freshly withdrawn innards; they scavenged pieces of firewood out of their neighbor’s woods; they picked berries and crabapples and dandelion greens, and jarred elderberry and made apple jelly and canned beans and tomatoes, and even fed the chickens homegrown corn: so what did this outgo come to? Not much, her father allowed. But they were eating from their kitchen garden like squirrels and rabbits, out of the nut-and-berried woods like the deer. The soybeans weren’t fertilized and they couldn’t afford those newfangled chemicals. The only machine still working was her dad’s arms and legs and cursing mouth.
on morning grass,
I’ve died too late into your life, her mother said to Emma, who was rocking slowly in the rocker by her bed. Emma wondered what she meant, it sounded like a summing up; but she knew an explanation wouldn’t be agreeable to hear so she didn’t ask for one; she didn’t want to wonder either, but she was haunted by what seemed a sentence of some sort, and kept on wondering. Her rocking was not a rocking really. It was a little nervous jiggle transmitted to the chair. Emma would never have a husband to stare at her body, she had her father for that; she’d never have to do for anybody, never have to sew buttons on a shirt or open her thighs or get him off in time to church. But her life would be like her mother’s just the same. They’d endure until they died. That would be it. Over the world, as far as she could see, that was it.
The dying had enormous power. Emma wondered whether her mother knew it. Everything the dying said was said “deathbed.” Everything the dying said was an accusation, a summation, a distillation, a confession. “I died too late into your life.” Which was it? confession, distillation, delusion, summation, provocation?
Her mother tried to get God to take her part against her disease, but churchgoing did no good; prayers went as unanswered as most mail; the days came and went and weren’t appreciated. She couldn’t keep anything in her stomach. She was in the bathroom longer than she was in bed. “Maybe I should be like Emma and not eat,” she said. Was it a gift, to have been given a life like that? Close to no one. Never to see delight rise in another’s eyes when they saw you. Dear Heavenly Father, let me suffer a little while longer. Let me linger in this vale of tears and torment. I have potatoes to fork and rinse, windows to wipe, dishes to do, rips to mend.
Her father fell over in a field. Nose down in the dirt. A dog found him.
At his funeral somebody said well, he died with his boots on, and some mourners appeared confounded by the remark, some looked puzzled, and some smiled as much as was seemly, but none of the mourners mourned.
The world was a mist and black figures slowly emerged from the mist as they had in one of the few movies she’d seen, when the townsfolk were burying a family who’d been murdered by the Indians. It was a moist gray day and most people wore a dark coat against the chill. Emma in her horror held herself and stood far away from the hole so she wouldn’t see them lower the man who’d brought her into the world and made her ashamed to be seen and hacked her ash to bits and cut the heads off chickens and left her a few acres of unkempt land and a dilapidated house. There was a hole in her memory now almost exactly his shape.
Emma sat on the front porch and greeted darkly dressed unaproned women while the men stood about the yard in awkward clumps waiting the decent interval. A few wives had brought casseroles of some kind. Emma never lifted the lids until she realized they’d expect their dishes to be returned. Then she dumped the spoiled contents in the meadow—smelling of mayonnaise and tuna—and wiped the bowls with grass. Forgot about them again. Only to come upon the little collection on a walk a week later. Now she couldn’t remember to whom the bowls belonged. Emma huddled the crockery in a plastic sack and tottered the mile and a half she had to totter to reach the house of a neighbor she knew had brought something, and left the sack on the front steps. They had been trying to be helpful, she supposed, but what a trouble people were.
During the evening the air grew damper. Moonlight and mist, as Bishop wrote, were caught in the thickety woods like lamb’s wool on pasture bushes. Except there was very little moonlight. It was the headlamp of the late train which allowed her to see the fog like gray hair in a comb, but only for a moment before all were gone: woods, fog, trainbeam, lamb’s wool, gray hair, comb.
She sat in the same chair she’d sat in to greet grieving company, sat through an evening in which only the sky cared to snivel, and sat on after they’d left into the deep night’s drizzle, hoping to catch her death; but in the morning when the sun finally got through the fog to find her sitting in the same chair, as fixed as the leaves and flowers burned into the slats of its back, it flooded her cold wet lonely frightened immobile face impersonally, as though she were a bit of broken statue, and moved on to the pillars of the porch, knurled a bit to be fancy but picked out of a pattern book to be cheap, and then found a grimy windowpane to stain as if the grayed flush of dawn were drawn there. The sun made her open eyes close.
snow in still air,
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Emma remembered with gratitude that lesson. But she took it a step further. She lost the sense of loss. She learned to ask nothing of the world. She learned to long for nothing. She didn’t require her knives to be sharp. Her knives weren’t her knives anyway. She gave up property. She didn’t demand dawn. When the snow came she didn’t sigh at the thought of shoveling. There was no need for shoveling. Let the snow seal her inside. She’d take her totter about the house instead of the narrow path around the woods. She moved as a draft might from room to room. She ascended and descended the stairs as silently as a smell. Not to keep in trim. Not as if bored, caged, desperate. To visit things and bring them her silent regard.
Emma made her rounds among the mantises. Tending the garden in her teenage days when she’d been put in charge of it, she would find a mantis at its deadly devotions. And she discovered that the mantis rarely ventured far from its holy place. Mantis religiosa. It slowly turned the color of its circumstances. There was one on the roof of the shed the shade of a shingle. Another among the squash as green as most weeds. Motionless, she watched the mantis watching, and now Emma understood the difference between its immobility and hers. The mantis was looking for a victim, her father was making his assessments, her mother was doing her chores, while Emma was
watching … why? … she was letting the world in; and that could be done, she learned, anywhere, at any time, from any position, any opening—the circle of the shade’s pull. She ate her fill of the full world.
No wider than a toothpick, a mantis would rest on a leaf so lightly it never stirred from the weight of the insect. The mantis rose and fell as the leaf did, a bit of leaf itself, its eye on the shiny line a little spider was lowering. Emma Bishop rose and fell as well, soft as a shadow shifting across the floor, weightless as a gaze, but as wide as a rug, as good underfoot, as trustworthy in the pot as tea.
Large snowflakes slid slowly out of a gray sky. A lot like a winged seed, they wavered as they came and lit on grass or late leaves still whole and white as doilies. They fell on her hair, clung to an eyelash, melted upon Emma’s extended tongue so a thrill shivered through her and she blushed. She also tottered out in the rain when the rain was warm and fell in fat drops. Her cheeks would run and ears drip. And her hair would very slowly fill with wet, and whiten gradually the way her hair had grayed, till it became a bonnet, not her hair at all. Her outheld hands cooled until, like butterflies did a few times, the crystals lay peacefully on her palms.
Her father found out that, though Emma tended the garden, she didn’t pull weeds or kill bugs. So he removed her from that duty and made her hold the guts he pulled from plucked chickens.
Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas Page 15