by Sarah Moss
‘I’ll fold up the bed,’ I said. ‘Then you can sit down. It’s time she was waking up anyway.’
Dad had brought saffron buns from the village bakery for Miriam, and one of those supermarket plastic pots of cut-up tropical fruit that we all kept offering her as some kind of synecdoche of everything from which she was debarred: sunlight, trees, choices. Go out, Adam, he said. Take a turn around the block, buy a newspaper, get yourself a proper coffee, take my hotel key and go have a long hot shower. You’ve only just got here, I said, I haven’t seen you for months. But I meant, what if she stops breathing and you don’t push the red button before you start CPR, what if you don’t know how to start CPR, or if you do know but turn out to be one of those people immobilised by an emergency, what if you think I don’t mean it when I say you must stay with her, what if you decide it’s OK to go down to the hospital shop or if you let her go wander the corridors on her own because she wants to and she’s fifteen, what if even in the children’s hospital my presence is all that can keep my daughter alive? As if it had been I who saved her in the first place, as if we had not, in fact, learnt that we could and must trust the wider world to look after her. I’ll be here for a while, he said, we’ll have time to talk. Anyway, I came to see Miriam, didn’t I, Mimi? Go, he said. Look, I’ve bought a phone and turned it on specially, and I won’t take my eyes off her, I’ve even already been to the loo. Miriam watched us talk, back and forth as words bounced like a tennis ball across her bed. Her breath sang in her chest again. God knows, I thought, she has her own fear, let me not give her mine. I went out, into the rainy streets, and walked unseeing the avenues of Christmas pop music and overheated air billowing from the doors of shops, the red and green and white lights bouncing in the wind, dyeing the rain as it fell. I found myself at the railings around a city church, whatever God’s acre it once had long eaten by stone and concrete. A jumble of uprooted gravestones leant against its wall, under stained glass windows caged against the casual rage of passers-by. In memoriam, in loving memory, here lies, near this place are deposited the mortal remains. What, I thought, what would we have done for Miriam, how would it have been to stand at a graveside, to see a coffin lowered and know that she was in it, how could we not throw ourselves on top of it, how could we not return, how could we not track day by day, month by month, the imagined fall of flesh from bone, the
how can you bear
sometimes something he later thought
My father leant back in his chair, surveyed the curtains around the bed, which were printed with rocking-horses in red and green and blue, and the bulbous cartoon fish painted on the walls in parody of those confined in the tank at the entrance. Once upon a time, my father said, a boy was born to a couple living in Brooklyn, New York. Theirs was a common story, you’ve read it before, often and in many voices. Before they met, the couple had crossed the seas to escape bad times, because they had seen their friends and neighbours and cousins killed on the streets and in their homes and had seen that there was no future for people of their blood, for people with their cast of face, in the countries they had always thought to be their own. So at opposite ends of Europe the parents had left their towns by night, scurried across unfamiliar lands under cover of dusk and dawn, sleeping in barns and under hedges, sometimes helped and sometimes hunted by those whose blood and cast of face kept them safe in that time and place. And at last they’d come to the sea, these ancestors, where they had used the end of their gold to take passage for America, and had woken one morning a few weeks later to see the Statue of Liberty on the horizon and a new life waiting for them at her feet. They found refuge, and began again.
But the boy, growing up, knew little of this tale, would piece it together later from other versions. Better, the parents thought, not to tell such stories, better their children and grandchildren should bear new names to walk new roads, although no-one, they thought, no-one of their blood should ever again imagine himself safe, imagine that his passport and his prosperity came with any guarantee that he would not some day be grateful to find himself able to escape the streets where he had always lived. Among themselves, the ancestors spoke something that was probably Yiddish. You don’t need to know, they said. You concentrate on your studies. You make yourself American. So the boy learnt French at school, for no particular reason, and not much. He had many of the rites of passage you’ve seen in films: summers at summer camp, dates with girls for which he borrowed his father’s car, a prom before which he presented his date with a corsage planned to match her dress, and by and large he enjoyed these things.
Mimi had closed her eyes, was perhaps pretending not to listen, thinking that her grandfather had forgotten that she was nearly grown up, was reading books with bibliographies and footnotes and brutal accounts of genocide and civil war. She was too old for once upon a time, but also too old to tell my father to stop talking because she wasn’t interested in his story, in the cliché of a young man’s journey to the west where he was probably going to find himself or something. But she heard him. It’s not as if she had anything else to do.
The boy, my father went on, loved to read, but did not associate reading with schoolwork, and was happy enough when a friend of his parents offered him a year’s work in a city bank to make some money before he went off to college. His mother bought him two new suits that made him look like a little boy stuffed into silly clothes for a wedding. The girl he’d taken to the prom – a nice Jewish girl, dark hair, good figure, who was going to work in her aunt’s floristry business rather than going to college – gave him a tie, amber to match his eyes. He went off to Manhattan every morning, feeling, truth be told, a little superior to his father and his uncle who were walking across town to the factory where the boy used to work summer jobs.
And then, my father said, shifting a little on the chair, which was really as poor a chair for sitting as a bed for sleeping, watching the rise and fall of Miriam’s chest under the red silk pyjamas, going on talking before she could begin to instruct him in the evils of banks and factories, then the boy, who had almost proposed to the girl at the flower shop before he left, went to college, and then the story changed. Or perhaps, then it became a story, because the one where the son grows up in lower-middle-class Jewish respectability and stays there, marries his childhood sweetheart and settles down near where they both grew up, is arguably not a story at all, and anyway you already know some of what is to come because you, dear girl, would not be here if the boy had stayed in Brooklyn.
As you probably know, the mid-’60s were an interesting time in which to begin college in upstate New York. Of course the boy had seen hippies before, and like most of his contemporaries he wore his hair long and his pants – trousers – wide. He’d kept reading, mostly on the subway as he travelled to and from the bank, and covered what was fashionable: Camus (in translation), di Lampedusa (in translation), Salinger. He’d read The Feminine Mystique, and tried to liberate his mother, and when The Group came out he read that too. He was not thoughtless, or unwilling to learn. He could see, even as he benefited from it, even as he enjoyed big beefsteaks and big cars and hoped one day to own a big house where he could raise big sons, that there were things wrong with America, and after a couple of years spent reflecting on what these things were, he dropped out, left college before he had finished his degree. He wrote to his parents, a letter of which he would later be ashamed, telling them that he couldn’t live the way they wanted him to, and taking only a canvas haversack containing a couple of books and a change of clothes, he set out towards California, not so much to seek his fortune as to lose his fortune. The fortune for which his parents had left Europe, just in time.
The young man hitch-hiked, which was not safe then and would not be safe now. He thought that having almost no possessions meant he would be all right, because no-one would see any reason to hurt him, but he had been well cared for all his life and despite his family history had not understood that there are people who have their own reasons f
or hurting others. His parents did not tell their stories, not to him. He met one or two of these people as he made his way west, but he also met a great many kind and interesting people, some of them young and also questioning the world and looking for new ways to live, others older, wiser, more cautious.
There were communes forming across America, groups of young people who rejected the nuclear family and saw that living collectively meant less work for everyone and fewer demands on the environment. It’s easy now for you to laugh at the body hair and the naïveté, but theirs are the ideas inherited by all the radical groups and protesters of the last fifty years. My generation screwed up all right, just like the one before, but we had ideas. Yes, also like the one before. Radicals and revolutionaries in every generation, Mimi, don’t forget that, don’t blame your parents or even your grandparents for the ways of the world. Anyway, I can’t say our young man had always wanted to see America, because for most of his life he’d thought that the only reason to leave New York would be to go to Europe, which he imagined as more of an art museum than a continent. But when he started out west, he wanted to keep going. One day you’ll see the big skies of the American west, and prairies so flat you can see a cloud-shadow coming from miles away, and grass rippling like a sunlit lake. Real lakes reflected in the clouds, earth and sky mirroring each other and so far apart – not like here. I’ll always miss it, my father said. The big sky.
The boy, the young man, stayed on communes, making his way from one to another, half hoping to find the place he wanted to stay but half-hoping to keep on travelling, because travel is addictive. Never having to solve anything, never having to plan more than a few days or weeks ahead. The places all had different rules, different ideas about how to live. Buddhism was popular, there was a lot of chanting and meditation. Most communities – though frankly they weren’t really stable enough to be called communities – were vegetarian, made their own bread, didn’t eat sugar, but usually there was beer. Often there were drugs, too, a lot of pot and a little LSD – well, you don’t need to know about that. OK, you do know about that. In which case I don’t need to tell you. They were all dirty. Communal living doesn’t have to be dirty, but if it’s cleaner than the dirtiest person there it’s usually a sign that someone’s being exploited. The young man didn’t see it at the time and I’m not sure the women did either, but looking back, the women were being exploited. We talked a lot about freedom and equality but we never thought to do the washing up, and we talked about raising kids communally but I never changed a nappy until your father was born. Every time you hear a man talking politics, Miriam, listen to what he says about his wife.
The young man kept going, and came to the mountains just as winter was closing in. He’d picked up a truck, what you’d call a lorry, going clear through to Portland, a grand high view from the cab and a driver not much older than himself and curious about the young man’s life, the places he’d seen. Never met a Jew before, he said, and the young man felt his ancestors at his shoulder, asking if he knew what they’d given up, what they’d done, back in the old country so that he could be here now. They passed before his eyes, briefly haunting the dying grasses and the open road, the truck stop ten miles ahead, the women shawled and hollow-eyed, the men bearded and dressed in long black coats. What are you doing here, they asked, how can you forget the price that was paid? He shook his head, shook them out of his ears like water. His father’s ghosts. The haunted genes of European Jewry murmuring in his blood and bones and brain. Look, the truck driver said, there’s snow falling up there. And on the mountains ahead, bounding the horizon and pressing closer, rising higher, with every new mile, there was already a dusting of white.
at the hearth
The young man had heard there was a good place on the mountain, a group who owned a real house and were seriously working towards self-sufficiency. He arrived at dusk, having hiked the last few miles from the town knowing that if his directions were wrong, if there was nobody there, he’d have to make his way down the road in the dark and persuade the owner of the diner where he’d drunk a sour coffee to give him a bed for the night. The snow hadn’t yet settled here, but an angry wind lashed the remaining leaves from the trees and low cloud moved fast across the darkening sky. A track led off the road. He followed it through the trees and saw a stone farmhouse in a clearing on the shoulder of the hill. There was a light in the window. A thin man whose bushy hair spread over his shoulders opened the door an inch to the young man’s knock, and the others didn’t let him in but came out into the yard to stand around him. The last few weeks, they said, had been a bad trip. They’d split over whether it was legitimate to ask people to leave, whether the principles of the commune meant they shouldn’t exclude anyone even for stealing and fighting. People needed to steal and fight, a woman said, because bad things had happened to them, and treating them as bad people wouldn’t help. Morality, she said, was a bourgeois idea, a way of passing off responsibility for injustice and harm. Maybe, the hairy man said, but that didn’t mean Bear Mountain Ridge could hold all the anger and pain in America. It didn’t mean the children had to watch a grown man banging a woman’s head on a wall, or that one person was allowed to take the group’s stereo and sell it for drugs. The young man knew that the conversation was really about whether he could stay, whether they could risk another voice and another pair of hands in the house. Winter coming on. His feet were numb with cold. C’mon, guys, he said. Just one night. My ride’s gone, I walked up here, I won’t find anywhere else tonight. I’ll be gone before sunrise if you want me to go. He didn’t know why he wanted to stay, before he’d even seen inside the house. Something about the way it settled on the mountainside, looking down over the plain like a sentry for the mountain range behind. Something about the tidiness of the garden, plants cut and staked, wrapped in sacking against the frost. Something about the woman.
She cooked that night, and he went to help her. He chopped onions – he’d got good at chopping onions – grated a block of orange cheese bought with food stamps. The garden was doing OK, she said, the beans were from the vegetable patch, and also the onions and the herbs drying in bunches in the window, but they wouldn’t get through the winter on that alone. She stepped around him where he stood uncomfortably bowed at the table, chopping. He liked the way she moved, and the smart swirl of her hair as she turned. She used to be Rachel, she said, she’d grown up in Boston, finished her degree at Wellesley before she broke up with her fiancé and headed out west with another man, a man who’d left her back in Illinois last year. She’d been saying these sentences all summer, he thought, to men who came and watched her cook and ate her food, used the bathroom she cleaned and the sheets she washed and then split when they got bored. He began to wash up while Rainbow stirred the inevitable bean stew.
Watch out, my father told Miriam, for the man who’s learnt that the way to a woman’s heart is through the kitchen sink. You will find that most men, most young men, have an ulterior motive. And how do you know, Miriam said, that women don’t have an ulterior motive, how do you know that women don’t actually want to sleep with the man who does the washing up? Hush, he said, listen to the story.
After not-quite-adequate servings of beans and onions, Eagle lit a fire in the sitting room and they sat on the batik floor cushions representing furniture. The young man listened, didn’t impose his questions, didn’t want to remind them that he was a stranger. He stretched his feet to the fire but his back was cold. A child squatted at the hearth, intent on the flames. The woman who wasn’t Rainbow took out brown knitting and one of the men began to whittle something, maybe a toy for the child. Some of the places he’d stayed had been huddles of hand-made sheds and wigwams, semi-legally built on cheap farmland. Other people were building domes, following the blueprint of a famous group in New Mexico, dropped-out architects and engineers who’d designed a structure made almost entirely of old car windshields and recycled timber, but at Bear Mountain Ridge, he gathered, they’d poole
d legacies and parental gifts and bought the house. (Aha, you are thinking, capital and property ownership after all. Yes, indeed, but maybe in a new way.) Off-grid, leaky, with an outdoor privy and a private water supply that had run out in summer and was expected to freeze in winter, but a house nonetheless, and they thought they’d make it through the winter. There was an air of relief, he thought, about the changing season, because the coming snow brought safety from visitors, allowed the group to concentrate on each other and on the life they were trying to create. It wasn’t clear to the young man when they said ‘make it’ whether they meant that everyone would still be alive in the spring or that everyone would still be here, whether the alternative was death or dropping back in to the lives their parents had built for them. The ancestors muttered at his elbow.
You can sleep by the fire, Rainbow said, if you like. The single people usually do. He hung back: some of the places he’d stayed, physical modesty was bourgeois, a sign of hang-ups and repressions. Rainbow disappeared and the three men, Scott, River and the small one whose name he hadn’t caught, pulled sleeping bags and blankets from a pile in the corner, arranged cushions into approximate beds, stripped to their underwear – firelight flickering over limbs and torsos – and settled down. Standing in the shadows, he did the same, lay in the stranger’s place furthest from the hearth. Behind the woodsmoke and the comforting memory of onions and herbs, he could smell something older and darker trickling around the leaky window, under the tattered curtain. Winter. He lay on his back, feeling beneath the big cushion and the wooden floor the bulk of the mountain, thinking about the creatures of the hills burying food and building up fat to see them through the days ahead. River and the short one were talking quietly, looked over at him. You any good in a garden, Eli? We’ll be lifting the last of the vegetables tomorrow. Sure, he said, whatever needs doing. The door opened, its shadow leaning over the firelight, and Rainbow came in wearing paisley flannelette pyjamas, pink and white, worn at the knees, and a pair of brown hand-knitted socks that made something in him soften and dissolve. She pulled two cushions into a space at the fireside that he saw had been left for her, unrolled a red sleeping bag. She climbed into it standing, pulled it up around her shoulders and then sat a moment on her cushion watching the fire sink to a glow. A moment’s peace, he saw, a time at the end of the day when everything has been done. He would have liked to know what she was thinking about.