by Amy Benson
You left the motel when he left, unable to stay in that room alone, unable to be the one left behind, no matter the richness of your life. You left your story, your damp nest, and agreed to be a part of someone else’s story, because someone always tells.
You drove home, south, back into the belly of the country, down. And it was fall and that was just a coincidence, but my god everything was dying around you—the corn, the light, your smile, your pride, your conviction that no matter what, you would never do anything really, really bad. You would. You would kill to make this story your own, to keep just one brief eyelid kiss, to make believe any moment in this trip really happened. But on the outskirts of town, under the hard morning light, all truth in this story withered and fell.
Dearest Boy, (Take 1)
I could love you like a fossil, a bit of stuff caught in a gesture held forever, valuable simply because it is and it has survived. My gesture would be a hand held to your cheek with all the adoration that hand might feel for that cheek, but it will last, held in mud, turned to stone.
I could love you like a spotted touch-me-not, my delicate orchid heads bobbing in the wind, my arms rich with juices. And under my leaves, small sacks that, if touched, snap and curl and shower their seeds. If you came down this gravel road right now and touched me—it wouldn’t matter where—I would turn inside out like that, in an instant.
I could love you like a hawk with a smooth brown head, significant claws, and a chest you might consider proud. Sometimes you will notice me, a stain against the sky. But mostly I will be very quiet, buoyed by air, until, my eyes having never wavered, I am upon you, tasting your heart.
I could love you like a poplar tree, trying hard to catch your eye with the silver undersides of my leaves. When the wind blows them up, the whole of me is aflutter, flashing just for you. I am hopelessly feminine. It does no good to blush, though. Men will call my wood junk no matter what.
Or, most likely, I could love you like an island, something welled up from the deep. I am all alone, surrounded by not-my-kind, and missing you. But I can grow my own species—a coarser marsh grass, a deeper blue to my spruce, and brand-new beaks on birds I teach to sing nothing but your name.
Part III
Toward that Oxymoron, A Personal Ethics
Ornamental Nature
I guess when I was a kid I thought nature happened only when it could lie down, stretch out, and exhale acres of trees and clear, open water. Farms weren’t nature; neither were city parks, and certainly not the suburban scalps of grass we all showered with chemicals and weekly shaved down to bristle. When nature got too close to humans, it seemed to fester with secrets about how we were all one breath away from falling down and letting the roots of a tree or that stifling network of grass climb over us. And so, momentarily having the upper hand, we cut it, hemmed it, powdered it, and pinned it up.
I hated the shrubs around my parents’ suburban Detroit house: sharp, pungent juniper, square yew with their red berries sticky when crushed—their skins, much more vulnerable than ours, gave at the slightest touch. They oozed onto the sidewalk in a mess of a bad omen that couldn’t be swept up and drew clouds of ants. The point at which the walls of suburban houses meet the lawns is apparently unseemly and must be covered up with these stunted trees. They are forever circling, circling. When we look at a shrub we should see a wolf in a zoo, a Lothario in a marriage—things made sad and mean in confinement.
I wouldn’t have noticed, I suppose, if the Upper Peninsula hadn’t taught me to compare so ruthlessly. The stunted cedar tree at the corner of our suburban Detroit house smelled like death to me; it hunkered darkly, full of spiders. Up north, the same cedars, multiplied and swollen, together formed the darkest part of our forest; their bodies had a velvety look, their hairy bark barely hanging on, their scent all shadow and spike. I was a visitor to their drama, these progenitors of fairy tales—and the story changed with the trees, the background music from minor to major. The cedar and balsam rose to spruce and white pine, which rose further to a happy ending of ridge peaks with birch and black-eyed Susans and sunlight, pale as butter, reflected off the powdery trunks. Except for the trail, which we cleared of fallen trees and brush, we left things as they were because the forest was not our story. I admired the patternless angles of fallen or half-fallen trees, the race to fill gaps where sunlight shot through the canopy, the random surging of limestone through the soil.
Children are desperate for mystery, for a world to stumble into that is bigger than the one they’ve known, that tells them they might never get to the bottom of it. The suburbs are not, in fact, a safe place to raise children. They are a carefully arranged netherland that prunes out chaos. We tend our parcels of land and shelter, and our imaginations stop at our lot lines, the end of our ownership. I didn’t know as a child that it was fashionable to decry suburbs, but I felt keenly the hubris of choosing shrubs and flowers, then planting and pruning them to precisely the size and shape we wanted. Up north, the inconsequential role we humans seemed to play in the larger drama was no secret—humans perched on the edges of forest, shore, ice, island. They ate fish, venison, blew limestone and dolomite up out of the ground, tore through the woods on snowmobiles and four-wheelers. They built small houses or parked trailers in the fields near woods and planted vegetable gardens they could barely keep from raccoon, deer, and frost. They tucked away tourist oddities, like The World’s Largest Seashell Collection and The Mystery Spot, into the forests; they sometimes put lawn ornaments featuring the rumps of large old ladies in front of their houses; they left old refrigerators, boats, and propane tanks behind their barns, and burned everything else at the county dump—kitchen trash, tires, batteries. Often, they didn’t pave roads or name them. But they didn’t seem to plant shrubs or build ornamental mounds or asphalt nature trails. They just lived with nature, in it, sometimes carelessly.
I loved everything about that place. I thought that to step lightly was good, to erase yourself completely and start over in a dream of a garden in which no human decision had yet been made, no fingernail yet torn a leaf, was best. And I was unborn there, prehuman, a pair of eyes, an unhinged mind. I knew it. And it was good.
But it is then difficult to grow into a world full of so many people and their miniature beauties, and the small patterns they impose on the malleable things around them. My inheritance from summers up north was a conviction that it is better to let the things that spring out of the ground create you than to create them, it is better not to know the end of the story than to have written it yourself, it is better to hate your home and its square shrubs than to let your mind waver and then shrink.
And yet I know that we are always writing the story, especially when we try so hard not to, especially when we think we love nature. I know that the current recommended yearly allowance of Great Lakes whitefish is one serving, and that we ate the fish we caught almost every night. We could not imagine mercury, PCBs, DDT, penetrating our wild place and drifting into the bellies of fish. I know that my lakes, Huron and Superior, are clear and cold and perfect and as polluted as any fetid, shallow pond. I know that as close as we were to Canada, I must have been standing out in torrential downpours of acid rain. I know that my favorite part of the forest, the birch ridge, is not our land and could be, if the owner wanted, fenced off or cut down at any moment. I know that I edit out the other cabins down the road and the ocean liners and ore boats that loom past in the channel of the St. Mary’s River because they don’t fit the mental picture I like best. I know now a new corporation might dig a limestone quarry just a mile down the shore from us and across from Lime Island, which hasn’t wholly healed from its earlier gutting in the mid-1900s. I know that the entire Upper Peninsula was logged to nubbed dirt little more than a century ago, that “virgin timber” is a quaint phrase. I know that our national parks have borders, and bears addicted to junk food, and entry fees, and the sharp elbows of tourists like me. In other words, I know how much fantasy there is in t
he word nature and I know how much we have constructed this world, shrubs being the most benign example. And I know if there were such a thing as a wild place, we would remake that, too.
Much is made of the imaginations of children—how fertile, how powerful, how inspiring. Perhaps we’re wrong about them; perhaps their imaginations are not more potent than ours. When we grow up, the world shrinks to the size of our own brains, and we must imagine ourselves delighted. We have to work so much harder to imagine the products of our hands bearable, to gather enough small strips of beauty to tie into a rope that holds. The Japanese maple at the end of my block is not cold and far away from home; the potted plant on the back of a bicycle moving down Eighty-second Street is lovely.
Funeral
First it was the monarchs. I was six and thought that the world was finally right when the butterflies descended. They were melodramatic in their numbers, obscene. The air was thick with them, fanning my sun-fevered skin with their wings. Everything was at once uniformly ablaze, pulsing in the same orange and black. When I lifted an arm or kicked a leg, I could raise up a hundred flutters. But then they began to die. Our little gravel road—the one with the grassy center and two wheel ruts—became one great clot of twisted insects. The bodies of dead butterflies deflate and shrivel, their wings disintegrate from the edges in. I remember picking up a few and tossing them into the air, willing them to twitch their wings, pretending I really didn’t understand death.
Some of us are born with a great capacity for nostalgia and idealism (which are actually two breeds of the same species). I was born willing myself to unknow almost anything I learned. And what the monarchs taught me was that, truly, the right amount of melancholy for the indelible sadnesses of the world is not available to us. I shed tears, stroked some of their wings, but then I took to the cabin rather than acknowledge a slackening of my grief.
…
Six years later it was the frogs. Every summer a frog or two would get caught under a wheel on that gravel road leading out of our family land. Even though only a few cars go in and out every day, it was inevitable: the little road twists along the marshy shore that’s home to many deep-throated water creatures. But that summer, the summer I turned thirteen, something was different. There were never fewer than six or seven dead frogs on the road at a time. I counted them as my sister and I walked to the county dock to swim with the boys. At least two new frogs were splayed on the road every day. They were perfectly symmetrical and stiff. If my sister and I had been boys, we might have picked up the bodies with the tips of our fingers and thrown them at each other—tiny, frog-shaped Fris-bees. If they had caught a good thermal, I imagine these flattened frogs might have glided off into the bull rushes, down into the water, which would reconstitute them too late. But since we were girls, we stepped around them with our stone-callused feet.
None of the other local swimming boys ever came home with us from our daily trips to the dock. Encountering girls’ parents—particularly our suspicious, old-fashioned parents—is simply more work than most young boys care to take on without substantial rewards. And so they roared away on their three-wheelers or piled into one of the boy’s ancient pickup trucks, which no one was old enough to drive legally, and rolled back into the lives we would never quite share. The sparkling-eyed boy, however, became part of our lives. He walked back with us often, pushing his bike, my sister usually a few yards ahead of us, clarifying the pecking order. First sun and then water, wind, and then an exasperated, quick-tongued older sister, a tongue-tied, mooney younger sister, and finally a teasing, freckled boy with a crush who would, when he reached the girl’s summer cabin, move rocks, stack wood, shovel dirt, weed the garden, or help with whatever other chores her father had lined up for them while they were away. Pleasure must be earned, and he worked, laughing all the while, to be the one “good kid,” the faithful companion, the golden son-in-law, to be the boy next to the girl for the longest.
I suspect if he’d been alone on the road and encountered that clutter of dried-up frogs, he might have kicked them absentmindedly, or even put some real effort into it, found a stick and hit them like hockey pucks. But he wasn’t alone. He was with me. And I decided one day that such a holocaust could not pass unnoticed. For life to remain precious, I must have reasoned, the least scrap of it—down to these hardened slices of amphibian, their deep glugs flattened in their throats—must be mourned. I probably thought that I was a very soulful young lady; I probably hoped that everyone else would think so, too.
But in truth, I was motivated more by fear than by image. I was afraid that I actually felt nothing, that I could have gleefully kicked every single frog from one end of the road to the other just for a moment’s amusement. I was willing myself not to know what was all around me: little deaths everywhere (just look at the living branches I casually snapped on walks through the woods; the broken cedar waxwing eggs; the walleye’s mouth hooked clean through, my proud eyes). I was avoiding the knowledge that to notice any particular death more than any other is to indulge in pointless, self-serving pathos. In another time, say seventy years ago, this rage of mine to unknow what I knew would have made me an excellent German haus frau, serving up painstakingly etched eggcups and daily airing out my feather ticks, inhaling all the while the scent of scorched flesh.
Instead, with perfect repression, I told the sparkling-eyed boy that we should hold a funeral for all of these frogs. The key, I knew, was ritual. In order to be sure, sure you understand, that the stray threads of emotion and thought that made up our brains mattered, that we were not going to dissolve and become something else in moment (a flap of skin, say), that we were even alive, we needed to make our response to these frogs public, if only to each other. We needed to be appreciated. We needed a ritual. The sparkling-eyed boy could have teased me, as he often did, but he too made a decision in that moment. We would have a funeral. We probably gathered tiny flowers out of the ditches, moved with bloated stateliness, and said a few words over the frogs, having learned early that every ritual must have a script. And then we launched a little barge of the dried carcasses into the river. We sat and watched the barge drift off in the wide, almost currentless St. Mary’s River until we could no longer make out the dark spot on the water. It was thrilling and pathetic at once: two small human beings at the end of a dock, compelled by gravity, shocked to have made meaning on their own for once, shocked at how hollow it was.
We were both pretending to save our souls, pretending that we weren’t too old for this silly display, that we hadn’t already learned a different truth about death—that it’s far too easy to care not at all—and a different truth about the meaning of our lives—that we couldn’t give each other what we really wanted, no one could, not for long, anyway. And he was pretending that because he had gone along with me that I loved him best, and I was pretending that I didn’t. So there we were—a pathetic liar and her accomplice. I think I could either thank him or apologize to him for the part he played.
I don’t know which species died en masse six summers later, or six more summers after that, because I wasn’t there. What I do know is that I haven’t changed a bit. I am still willing myself to unknow what I know: people grow up; one identity disintegrates as another is forged; people don’t love each other forever; just because I write it doesn’t make it so. I am creating the most elaborate shrine to unknowing I can imagine. No, I haven’t changed a bit: here I am, a liar and her accomplice.
My Sister
The sparkling-eyed boy did not love my sister. He loved knowing things. He loved basketball, lathes, making up names for people (Dudley, Fishack, Chicken), cheating with me at euchre, the drama of his own constancy. But he didn’t love my sister.
She curved in circles of eyeliner and shiny red belts. She wore plastic sunglasses in the shape of hands and painted her lips in fierce colors. She had never been mistaken for a boy. She said things like “T and A” and wouldn’t tell me what they meant. Her first instinct was to lie, but sh
e was more than willing to confess. She took a lot of blame that both was and was not really hers. She taught me how to sneak home after our curfew on summer nights, inching the car’s tires along the popping rocks, the headlights turned off. We barely breathed. Was she thinking about bruising pressure on her lips? About the syrupy tang of peach schnapps and orange juice that matched, somehow, her heavy red-brown hair? Did she wish I weren’t there? I wouldn’t have been late if it hadn’t been for her. She spoke like a girl who likes most boys, who understands them, who thinks they’re funny, who knows just what they’re up to. She spoke for me because I couldn’t possibly have spoken for myself. She let me hold the wheel of the car sometimes as we sped over the ice-broken roads up north. When she stroked a mascara wand over her curled lashes, her face caught in the rearview mirror, I felt as if I was watching a music video. She lived her life and I watched. She gunned for a seagull with her car once, screaming with laughter, but she didn’t expect to hit it. We saw a cartwheel of feathers fly up from the back bumper. She hit a deer once, too. And she didn’t cry—not because she was cruel (she wasn’t), but because she was honest. The only thing she pretended about was how little she needed anyone to love her. And at night? After midnight she hissed and flamed over the night sky and fell to the earth in a field of sparks I’d swear would set something on fire.