by Noy Holland
Those shoes—skinny, strappy things—and the snow some inches deep by now and she has left our George out in it, please, to gather up her bags. “It’s like cream of wheat,” she says, too loudly, “mercy.”
It is a game they two have been playing, I guess, passing the time from the airport.
“It’s like walking through frozen beer—” that’s George’s, and he laughs, and water pools as he walks in his footsteps and slops across the porch. He tips his hat.
“Hello, rabbit.” He kisses me. “Hello, mother. Made it.”
The trick must be in knowing who to be afraid of, what.
Our spotted dog, pent up, neglected, pokes her nose around the corner, suffers a paroxysm of joy—somebody fresh to love.
“So how is it in Mississippi?” I ask.
“Nice. Very nice. Flowers and such. But cold at night. Mercy.”
She shakes the wet from her head, teasing, at the dog who quivers and blinks at her feet.
“So where is he? Where’s that baby?” She throws her hair back. “C’mere, young’n. Come here.”
SOMEBODY FRESH TO love; somebody new to harvest.
I am watchful, and sick in my heart to see the boy calmed in even his father’s arms. What use, to see it coming? Bed down one yellow afternoon when the tide is in your favor and you begin the long moving away. Months pass; joints soften, slip; veins give, the blood in you doubles and quickens.
And yet this was not the feel of it—not of quickening, not to me, but of paths begun to silt and pinch, to slow, and, slowing, close. My neck swelled; my lungs rode up.
I fell into myself calmly, besotted and sufficient.
I was sufficient and am no longer, will not be again. Any mother knows.
The body remembers, seems to insist—there was something it meant to do—to lose him, to birth him. To finish what it had begun.
I wake, and find the boy beside me in the ripening bed, my bed, I keep him near me, the nightlight on, the barn beyond the window gone tossing out to sea. I drag the sheets back. His eyes are sprung open. His skin is twisted on him, rubbery and slick. He is not mine, is not the real baby. There is one yet still to be born.
There is everything still to go through again—my belly a stained translucence, the doctors in their starched blues.
Stupid, I know, to think it, want it. But even now, these weeks gone past, the small hard snaps of milk in his chest—witch’s milk—dissolved; his lazy eye, the slackened lid, begun to draw up and quicken, so soon: I would go through it all all over again: the idiot howling, blood sliding from me in hot strings. Hours of this and then nothing, the needle pressed into the spine. The limp pale drape someone hung at my chest to keep me from seeing.
His little face had tipped up, watchful.
Somebody whistled somewhere in the greenish bright and quiet and someone was asking, Ready? They’ve already begun.
I felt nothing but that they moved me, crudely, my sloppy haunch, hardly mine—the drape seemed to hang to mark the place where my body detached at the sockets.
I listened: this was his being born.
This was the sound of a hand wedged in, and then the small bent head popped free, quick as a tooth you are losing. This that I felt backed into my throat was the body shoved into the cage of my ribs, brief, and how surprising: the rest had seemed so distant: a ditch cut into a distant slab, spongy and geologic, marsh, a bowl of softened bone. Then the baby, the bawling sight of him; then the staples driven in.
NOTHING LASTS, BUT nothing is finished, either. The brain boils and cools, same as many things, heals with the slickness of scars. Nothing’s lost; no grief, unspoken, forgotten.
Yet we hold our tongues. Not a word, these years, about it. Hardly a word between us, even then, my sister and me, the very day, those hours, the long before and after in the back seat to Atlanta, after Phoenix, Daddy driving, after Mother, I think it pleased him, the look of it, his girls, his new wife neatly beside him. He wanted to stop and look at things: Chickamauga, Antietam, the cannons in a row.
Of course I think of it—how it must have been for Sister, closing in on Atlanta. In the morning, plain tea. The righteous out in the early heat, their foetuses wrinkling in jars. Our father moved to her to take her arm to steady her along. She seemed to straighten: he had noticed her being brave. Had she seen the fluted columns, he wanted to know, the Corinthian scrolling above? She looked up, we all did, and listened, he spoke so little, and spoke of Sherman that day as though they were friends, as though we had him to thank for it, my father, that the building still stood, Georgian and grandly columned, spared—handsome, I remember thinking it then, he was as handsome as when we were girls.
We needed so little from him. To be spoken to, to be steadied, that was extra, that was gravy. Because here already was bounty, I thought, her own crisis, here was her chance to be Daddy’s, to be brave, to be seen being brave, being ready.
Here was her act of love.
The worse the march the better. The righteous who strained at the roped-off yard, rattled their jars, a child on a hip, how lucky—something more to endure. Half a year’s neglect endured, the wiggy pitching months of it, and now, this late, late as it was, the danger, the night’s long labor ahead. The toddlers in the leggy grass, writhing, moaning, Mommy.
The day a blaze, the early heat. The bodies yawing sweetly in their lettered jars.
They did not hurry. They were solemn, the two of them, processional: a girl on her father’s arm. There was something of a lilt and quickening, something graceful—vaguely—supple, fierce, something punitive and bridal in the way she moved to the door.
She had worn her heels, our mother’s pearls. She had worn the dress our mother used to dress for parties in.
I held my tongue; this much was easy. I began for a time to feel it, too, a queer sort of pride in myself: I had gone to Phoenix and fetched her home and here we all were with him, quietly, soberly walking. To what, walking to what, it seemed all at once not to matter. What mattered was that we were doing as our father asked. He made it easy, provided; he gave us our instructions.
I FLEW OUT. The desert bloomed. I was to fetch her home.
I withheld him, the threat of him, the name in my mouth, to try her. But nothing else I could think of in the days I spent in Phoenix, not love—I trotted out every homily I had heard of the family romance, sacrifice, devotion, the kindness of a kindhearted man (my mouth: I was moving between lovers, snorting junk in the sumac behind the corner store)—her own unreadiness, it did not move her, and not the ghoulish stories I knew of babies grown in wrong—the ones who lasted, babblers, maimed, stood up, shipped out to Mississippi.
MY GOD, THE lavishness of her Mississippi. Any outrage I could think to relate was an insult, a pittance against it. But I did not know so then. Mississippi was years to come—bodies dropping in the viny woods, hula hula, somebody new: a curdling, lunatic glee. We held our ground, the field in bloom, the gate swung shut behind us.
A gate swings shut behind you, going in, if you go, coming out.
They came to us over the open field, toothy, threnodic, multiplying as they moved.
“THE BABY’S FINE,” she said. “It’s going to be fine.”
I said, “That baby grows in you.”
We roomed for days in a motel in Phoenix, a dry wind scratching the door.
I said, “I was in the airport. I was on my way here to you.”
It was something I had heard in the Ladies’, talk of the boy, women tipping toward the mirror to slide their lipstick on. I said I had seen the boy, coming to her, his hand in his mother’s skirt, a blinker of flesh hung over one eye, eyebrow to nose, the skin crusted and thick and frilled. I went on, I could feel my voice rising—his eye yellow in its socket, wild, what I saw of it, who saw nothing, and the flap as brown as potato, gouged, stiff hair hatching from it.
None of this moved her at all. We drew the curtains, hardly spoke, and watched
daytime TV. When the day came for us to leave Phoenix, I said what I had been saving to say, to have it on me, to feel that I had convinced her. It was easy.
“Daddy’s on his way.”
DADDY HELD HER arm, to guide her, to keep her on course for the door. Sister reached behind her back and fluttered out her hand and I—I think it must have surprised me: that she had thought to reach for me, and then that she had not. I took her hand. She drew me up from behind her to walk along up the walk with them, on Sister’s arm, Sister on our father’s arm, the new wife trailing behind us. I had not heard her. I had not likely listened. I was hearing, I think, the rest of them—the fathers, daughters, churchly men, the sisters hissing scripture, a vast unholy throng.
I saw her face then: I saw our mother’s. I saw her face in the face of another mother gone to her knees in the uncut grass with her baby hugged against her chest in the litter of all they had brought there.
They had labeled the months, the stations: Here is your baby at three months, here is your baby at four months, here is your baby at five.
They were reaching in under the rope strung up to keep them off my sister, to keep them away from me. They were snatching at the hem of our mother’s dress. I kicked at their arms, their faces.
“Mother—” she said it loudly, and let my hand go.
I thought she had meant it: Mother.
I heard Sister all along, I know, walking along: “Mother.” But I had not thought of it. This is how I came to think of it—it made it easy, easier for me: we were sending her baby to Mother. There were not enough babies among the dead for all the mothers to mother.
Sister turned from me; she fluttered her hand behind her back, teetering on her heels.
They bent their heads; they were kneeling, rocking on their knees. I thought maybe they meant to drink from the jars, maybe they meant to sing.
I thought, going on—I knew better: I understood it, the news of it, the reason they had come—but then I thought they had come in need to her; they had come to her to be tended to—it was stupid—to be answered—I knew I was being stupid—to be dropped to their knees and saved.
I saw they had saved out a jar for her.
She began to throw them coins.
“One more.”
She touched a forehead. She tossed away a ring she liked. She kissed a boy they offered.
“One more baby more,” they said.
I saw her knees give; she was turned from me. She was reaching for the new wife’s hand, calling the new wife: “Mother.”
And this surprised me. It was nothing, it was the way of things.
I fell behind some. If it had been me. She tried to lie down. I might have let her.
She was to let them cut it out of her, the easy way, who can say now, what she thought of it, what I had brought her back over the country to do, what Sister thought she was meant to be doing?
He got her moving. Daddy was gentle. I could see Daddy meant to be gentle. He had her by her hair. He hauled her up some. He had her by the braid his tidy wife had made of the mess of Sister’s hair to keep our Sister nice that day, to keep our Sister tidy.
You think it’s easy?
The way she tries you. The way she—listen. You think it’s easy? You think she means to make it easy?
Sister, Mother, holy Joe. To be our father? To keep her moving, swung to her feet and gone?
MY GUESS IS they gave her Pitocin, a drip, same as what they gave me. They give you your fishnet panties. Then they send you to wander the halls in your socks until the contractions begin.
There are other mothers out there: it’s insulting: that it is not only you. But it must have calmed my sister—to have somebody new to talk to, to lap the nurses’ station with.
In time, I talked, too. Stood in the gaggle in the yellow glare rubbing the drum of my belly. Not because I thought I had to (talk)—decorum, no, nicety, not then, not yet again. This was our blessed respite. Nothing decorous about it. Only lassitude, rapture, a flaunted animal pleasure. I’ll go on, I went on, I have never been quite so sweet on myself, and talky, in time, and shameless—avid, giddy, apart. I might have told anyone anything. I think talking made me hope to prolong it, stop it, hedge some way—I wasn’t afraid, much—the table, the curtain drawn, not even the room, the stirrups, the blank chill of the day outside, none of this really shook me—not the pain, quite, the prospect of pain: I thought, Come on, come on: What is the pleasure of what does not cost you, hurt you?—no, the room, I think, thrilled me, the wide belts, the tools, the dim medieval look of it.
When he was in me—that was when he was easiest to love.
They let me blather on, the others. We all of us mothers did. We scrutinized, amazed ourselves, the hearts we grew, the milk, the bone, the ax to wield; the father, yes, come in, do, gently—there—helpless there, supremely: remote, absurd, refined. Our faces swelled, our eyes withdrew; we spoke our old lost tongues. This of course was later; this was the fabled room. We were lucid at our station, patient in the yellow glare, divulging in our measured tones the blanching gape of cervix, vying some, even then, predatory, preying, somebody’s sticky plug spit out, somebody’s bloody show.
Had your bloody show, dear?
Yes, yes—then nothing. Instructions. Nurses, nurses, somebody always grinning from the corner of my room.
I lost hours; they might be years. The grasses sang. The riverbanks shrilled and buckled. I know I wandered. I saw a white horse burning. I saw my mother sleeping in the bend of a yellow road.
Pieces missing, syllables. The living thinned to shadow, droned, busy at my knees. At what?
But who could know?
Even now I worry George to recall to me the day’s events; I want orderliness, a story, the discrete before and after.
And after, before the room, the wide window over the Merrimack, dark then, the coming dawn, before they brought him to me—these are the questions that flare in me, petty, absurd—I had not seen him but to see him, plump and bawling, thrashing in the sick light and in whose scoured arms? Who is it who went off with him? What surly, immigrant nurse, mistaken for a mother, bathed him, while I in my decorum lay in the cool with the curtains drawn chatting with the postmaster’s wife?
What difference? And yet I think of it.
Ought to think instead of Sister, yes, be a good big sister. Easter in the morning. Ought to bundle up in the morning, stash my boiled eggs. It being Easter. Since she is my sister.
Sit her down—she claps at me—show her how to hold him, show her what to do.
Her own, she could have held—a guess—in an open hand, small as that, if she wanted, if she was lucky, if the nurses were on their rounds.
Of course I think of it.
I hardly think of it—except that she is here.
I think of us in the blaze of heat and of the room where we waited, the chairs we took, side by side, the row of scaly bucket seats bolted to the wall. We tipped our heads back. People do—and there were years of people before us, drooping in those chairs. How lucky: a single salient detail: the plaster worn smooth behind us, stained: years of hair, the press of heads, oily, elongated patches. We were resting, had been, those of us who came to help, to fill out papers, if help was how you thought of it, who waited there, dozing, until we were certain the job was done.
It was done—this is as much as I know or want to. Do not know or ask so much as even was she on the potty, the sheeted bed, the floor? Was it dead or living? Did she have a look at it? I would think you would have to look at it—see was it a boy, a girl, have a name to call it by, count its fingers, toes. Or maybe this is me. Or maybe I don’t know. But I think I would want something from it—a thumb tip, a twist of cord, we keepers, not to have nothing at all from it, anything small to show.
She turns her palms up. Supple as he is and weak—what harm? And yet she is my sister. And yet she is my sister.
And there is the favored wingback, stou
t of arm, of wing, of foot.
I pass him to her. “Watch his neck.”
“I know, I know, I know.”
HICKORY, GINGKO, WILLOW, elm.
Sweetpea, wicker, junior mint. Little man, I call him, honcho, buster, sugar boy. Almost never Reno, sometimes kid Reno, buckareno, buckaroo. She calls him Binny.
Heeey, Binny. It’s your Aunt Kathleen.
The bird dog she calls Honey Gal and, before long—because much of the time we call her Snoot, for her snoot—my sister calls her Snout. This gets us laughing, George and me, helplessly, until we are falling out of our chairs.
“NOSE,” SHE SAYS, and touches his nose. “Ears. Cheeks. Chin. What’s this?”
She spreads her hand on the crown of his head and gives it a turn to show me. “Look.”
But it is only the scabbing rash he has had, yellowish and common, thriving between where his eyebrows will be. “And this, what’s this?” on the slope of his nose, the puggish end, the hard pale knots of acne. “Uunh.”
She lets his head tip back and fingers his neck and it is in my mouth to stop her but I am thinking I understand it, suppose I do—the hope of finding a flaw in him, some lasting crimson blemish. Even a terrible wrongness, I think—it is not such a stretch to think of it: she is hoping to find her mark on him, evidence of kinship, even if, or especially if, it is the kinship of the maimed.
I stoop over her, look to see what she sees: there is vernix still, I have missed it, gray and ripe and gummy, lumping up in the folds of skin. My sister draws her finger along a crease and the baby squawks and gags. “That’s enough.”
Too much for me already.
I gather him up. Remember to kiss her. I remember the place at the bend in her arm Mother used to rub before Sister slept, to help her sleep, and I touch it.
“Love you great big,” I remember.
Then make my slow way to bed.