by Noy Holland
I was the mother—monstrous. A joke.
I was the mother shrieking at the bottom of a poisoned sea.
His father would say, What of it? So you drop to your knees. What comes?
At last I went home. I followed the sloppy, sandy track that climbed through the house to my bed. They were lying on my bed. Laughing. I was almost sure it was him.
You could have found me, I said.
He said, Mother.
The pangas are all named after women, he said, sisters, mostly, and wives.
My boy swam the mile home naked, the moon making glass of the waves. To be safe, he said. He was serious. He left a track of salt and sand through our house to the bureau where I keep my clothes. My son, my son. Did the girl know they were my clothes? My shawl. My skirt the yellow of honey. She was lying in my clothes and laughing with sand on her feet in my bed.
I wished the worst for her—a wicked uncle. A job scrubbing booths at a peep show.
She was silken, sixteen, untrammeled, at rest. She lived on nothing—on the fruit that drops from a tree. She hooked her leg around his leg to keep or climb him. Two beauties. Saved, a bullet dodged. They seemed to float there. Godly, jeweled. Salt on their skin the sun ignited.
My son was her life, her rubio now. Her movie, her catch, her prize.
She was flawless. No. She looked wolfish and her tooth was broken.
I had the arm of the doll in my pocket and if I lay it on the sheet beside her, the girl would think duende and flee. Duendes steal your socks if you sleep in them. They steal your teeth, your keys.
I pressed the fat of my thumb into the doll’s hand and the hand took hold and squeezed. It was a duende’s hand—beguiling. But the mother of the girl whose doll it had been hadn’t known the hand was a duende’s hand and by now the little girl was missing, spinning down in her sun hat through the darkening sea.
If I went to my knees?
If I called out?
Would the men I once loved beseech me? Throttle me again with their sweetness, their sudden, thrashing need?
I reached for my shawl. It was morning, but the brightness of the day had gone.
It was a yellow hat, sir. Sun in her hair.
A tasseled dress, sturdy and blue.
TALLY
I knew a sober man whose brother had died driving drunk on the high windy plains. The living brother, the sober brother, took to drink straightaway. He was belligerent and incompetent, drunk, and a gentle, almost girlish man, sober. He drank schnapps of every flavor and hue.
It was my job to pour and to tally, to feed a coin now and then into the jukebox when the quiet was too much to bear. Merle Haggard, Garth Brooks, Emmy Lou. “I got friends in low places—” every variation of that town and time is for me ferried by this one dumb song.
The man, the men—the sober man, the dead man—had a sister, inscrutable as a turtle. She appeared each night and drove her living brother home, for months in the same floral blouse. And then she didn’t. She had given up, or gone elsewhere. And so the sober brother drove home wildly, drunk, the long way around, making turns that were not in the road.
One night after several months of this I let myself accompany him home. I drove us out to the turn his brother had missed and we lay in the grass for the stars. I felt pity, yes, and alluring. Enchanted by a grief that wasn’t mine. We heard a bird in the dark we couldn’t see. Meteor, meteoroid, meteorite, we remembered. Sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic.
After a time we stood up and he kissed me. In his hair the pods of a seed caught—feathery, silver, like something spit from a galaxy, space junk—luck—that sought and found him.
HIS PLACE WAS tiny, the bathtub dragged into the kitchen—the longest claw foot I had ever seen. You could lie in that tub without bending, sink beneath the glistening meringue of foam and entirely disappear. He went under. You cannot believe for how long. I couldn’t see his face but his eyes showed—drastic, dark, sprung open. One eye disappeared, appeared again. He was winking at me slowly, the minutes slow in passing.
In bed, he moved as if blind. He was precise, and maddeningly patient. Once he whistled—one note—as to a dog.
The body opens, can be opened, a marvel, and still we live.
When he had finished, he filled the bath again. Carried me to it—not a word. Again the soap foamed up, great billowing mounds. It smelled of berries. In my cunt, a burning balloon.
The window glass shook. Water sloshed in the tub. We thought we’d caused it. We had lain in his dead brother’s ashes, in grass where he had gone on ahead. It had not been my grief but I had claimed it. The mountains shuddered. The horizon bucked, it buckled—the boulders strewn and the grasses, erratic, the path of the glacier plain. This isn’t metaphor. This was an earthquake, a moving ripple—ground I had thought of as solid warped, and returning to liquid again.
RINGNECK
He shot pheasant with his comrade from kinder-garten, flushed from the grassy swale. The men carried the birds out on their backs. They crossed the stream, the water cold, and pain flared in his toe. The gout years. Years of good bourbon beside a fire. Like a beacon, such pain, a knuckle pulsing in the night. They cut the trip short.
Took the toe, the doctors, when at last he was home, a bright nub on the heap to be burned. Brother at last to the black man. Foreskin of an infant; polyp; liver; lung—the array of what people live missing.
First the small knuckle, next the big. Next the foot—half the foot, next the whole foot, as in the song of a boa constrictor.
It hurt him, all, even missing.
Next the leg. To bear the pain in the leg he was missing, he rubbed the leg he had left in the mirror. Which helped. Some. Still he bellowed. Raged. Threw shoes at his wife.
He arranged to have lilies delivered to his wife on their anniversary for the next twenty years.
His wife was Pretty Shield—his pet name for her. Puddy Tat. At last: Doll.
The man’s name was Wing.
Wing what? Wing what?
I have loved you for years, Wing Pepper, your hands like a girl’s, your mouth.
BITTY CESSNA
Bluebird day, a fine day to fly. They taxi out, no radio, roiling dust, the airport bleak and uncontrolled. A vulture stands on the head of a cactus and displays its wings to dry. “What’s he waiting for?” the instructor jokes. Of course he’s flirting. Horny, disappointed man, too tall to fly the fighters and color-blind besides. He calls her Sunshine. A face like sunshine. First the climb, full on, the big blue he can’t see. She’s to stall, spin, recover. Pretty, a lay, college girl. She lives behind the hangars in a school bus. She turns the plane upside down. Everything in the cockpit is a missile now, launched, flying at their heads. Wallowing, sloppy, sickening plunge—the altimeter sweep, the stick clutched in her hands. “IT’S MY PLANE,” he shouts, meaning, let go, fool. That we may live. May we seem to have lived. He sees again the spines of the cactus, the brainy face of the vulture, ravenous, a dream. Bitty Cessna, yellow as the dress his mother wore. Mother war. Mary. Gone to God. Mine.
KING FOR A DAY
Ants steal other ants’ babies and make them into slaves. A fact. She cannot remember much more about it. She remembers Morocco, a man whose hand was hacked off at the wrist. He had been a stupendous musician. He was drawn into a trance at a drumming ceremony and lay down, coming home, in a heap of ants. Hours later, his brother found him. He had been eaten raw. Like meat, the brother told her. He lived another three days. A killer, the brother, the other a thief. The girl was nothing. His heart kept missing. His missing hand shook. But he was king for a day on the day he died and the ants in their perfect armor bore him in glory away. Singing. Song of feasting. Song of love.
LAST OF THE SWEET
The weather had kept the haulers off and by morning with the snow coming down as it was the mare would be gone from sight. Already she was going, her rump to the wind, her tail where she had sunk to her knees in the
field clamped to the fallen snow. First snow. Fields shorn, and stubble like teeth in dark rows. The almanac was right: winter had set in early. Spring would be brief and late coming, a year for ticks and mold. Early onset, an off year, an apple year, this last year, limbs breaking from the weight of it—bushels and bathtubs of fruit. Now wind plastered snow in the gashes the torn limbs had left in the trees, and in the grooved bark of the maple, the whitening windward face.
It was hard to feel warm, looking. But it was warm in the bright in the kitchen where the mother watched out through the snow. She counted the hours, a guess. Her daughter would be home by morning, late—grounded at some shabby airport. Buffalo, Erie. Icing and gusts and lake-effect snow and something about a boyfriend, she had said—ridiculous, unreliable, something about an old car.
What had she said, really—how hard? How hard to come home to your mother?
The last apples hung on the nearest tree and on the apples, too, the windward side, clinging: crescent of the first wet snow. The fruit was mangled but red and so pretty, the mother thought, the mother beyond hunger but thinking simply this: if only.
It was a game she could not stop playing. If only an apple falls while I’m watching, she thought. (Her daughter would reach home safely and soon. If.)
She had begun the game years—decades—ago, the baby due any day, any minute. And like something out of a fairy tale, high in a corner of the kitchen: a spider spinning her silver web. If only she has her babies before I do, the mother thought, everything will be fine.
But she hadn’t thought much about it, not then she hadn’t, not the way she was thinking now. Same game. Same unruly kitchen. Dusk coming down, a violet light the snow was slanting through. She could see her face in the window: surprise. Next of the last of the last, she thought. Last of the next if onlys. But one. But one.
Three apples. And in the corner of the kitchen a spider now in a different linty web. She had a wasp up there, its torn wings pinned; it would be shrouded and hollowed out. Food. Drawn through the straw of the mouth.
Was this so? Was this how it really happened in the world of wasps and spiders? A year for wasps and spiders. Mold.
I know, the mother thought, next to nothing.
Margaret would know, she would ask her. As a girl she picked anything up. Turned it in her hand. She kept bees now and sent a gift of honey for Christmas. The tall jars gleamed in the cellar, row on row, like a painting. A jar for every year at Christmas since Margaret had left home—not Christmas quite, Christmasish, the jar arriving weeks late in the mail.
Don’t be petty.
She remembered her daughter asleep beneath the tree, in the light from the tree, the angel treetop, with a tape player on to catch Santa. Mind of a scientist, a court recorder. She would know. Whatever it was, her daughter would know it, and if she didn’t she could make it up.
Soon—safely and soon, sun on the path, Margaret stumbling up through the snow. It would be a way to begin. A few questions. A few small things to know.
Which came first: The egg sac? The eggs?
And did the spider actually carry the sac?
And was she ever going to marry and have babies?
A papa’s girl, this girl, out in the fields with a hoe. She would burst in flushed and breathless, carrying some creature in her hat. Mud on her boots and her hair clumped up, happy, happy, a girl in her papa’s coat. It was her father who had thought to give her the mare to learn to care for and ride.
Where was he now?
End of the house. Second barn down. Elsewhere.
Once in the kitchen, tears in her eyes, Margaret spun round and asked him, “Kids don’t have to get married, right?”
Plus she would never, ever have babies, no. Not in a million years.
Tomboy, hoyden, burrs in her hair, straw.
Margaret could tolerate ten, twenty minutes—years her braids hung to her pockets. Her hair a rat’s nest, a thicket, snarls her mother worked out hurriedly with mayonnaise and a comb. Sit still, sit still—a chance to touch her. She couldn’t sit. She could sit a horse, yes, that, sit a fence post, ride the tractor on her papa’s lap.
Where had he gone, really?
The mother couldn’t recall.
The house was quiet but for the hum of a light bulb, snow tapping dimly at the glass. Snow in the sills and gashes and the mare in the field on the slope of the hill the trees seemed to bend down to. Fields frozen hard as stone. Next, snow. First snow, and the white mare going down. And now the ground had gone soft beneath her, a shallow thaw as though spring had come while the last of her life passed through. The wind bent and fluttered her coat and her legs were as straight as fence posts though she had gone to her knees like—what had he said? Gone to her knees like jelly.
Why the knees? Why did fear so plainly lodge in the knees, and was this human, only, or mammal? The joints went soft and trembled, the body’s stash blasting into itself and, if so, could you exhaust it, the mother wondered, and never be frightened again? Was this love—to be exhausted, finally? Exalted at last, unbound?
She remembered Margaret, years ago, slipping through the fence to sleep near the mare. Unafraid. Unafraid—imagine! And when September came and school again—clocks and bells and gossip in the halls, the mess of other people—Margaret braided the mare’s hair into her braid. She had her mother’s hair—dark and fine and the mare’s hair—white—maundered through it like the vein of something molten.
Molten, ashen, ice.
How long since she had seen her? Months, was it, a year?
The planet tipped on its axis: leaves: weeks of windfall plums. The mother lay in the dim among strangers, bed rest, nothing to do, daybreak and falling night. She saw tapers of light and the color changed and these were the seasons passing. She heard wind in the trees, the patter of rain.
Once a deer stamped its feet in the grass.
Once the phoebes sang in the dark of her room their lovely, stubborn song. The rest had gone on without her, seed to stalk to threshing time and the skunk with her next batch of babies—cotillion day, on parade, tidy stripes and tails fluffed up, spring at last, she had missed it. Miniature identical skunklets—marching into the sunshine in a military row.
A baby skunk was called what? She had known this once. A skunklet, a margaret. Flown, the word, the sight of them, the infant mice, the rooster, the muskrat luxuriant in the velvety green of the pond.
Soon the apples grew round and red again and leaves tumbled over the barn. So long. Until then. She had to see it all without seeing—else hate everything, everyone who appeared, little pink swabs and cartoon smocks, and grayly, at last, for a moment, there: her father—no. Her husband, hesitating at the door. The sameness of it enraged her. And the smell! That was her, awful.
Good morning, good morning, and how are we this morning?
The same people appeared with new faces and whispered around the room. And the room was a boat and a room and a nest perched on a glassy building. Cloud. And the cloud hissed and warbled, and it banked and plunged like a bird.
And now at last, delicious—alone, the nurses snowed out, too.
The kitchen brightened and the pain came back. Let it, she thought.
Let me wake awhile. Let me see.
She saw a raven spook through the leafless trees, a shadow slipping softly through the falling snow. Snow cupped in the generous boughs of the spruce, the regal blue the mother loved, sap on her hands, and the smell she loved, minty and bright and blue. Blue the shade of the bower beneath the snow would sift down through; dry still, and soft and blue, a bed of fallen needles. As in a fairy tale, the mother thought, and thought if she could find her mukluks, her musty, quilted coat—but had they given these away?
Had they gone through her things already and kept only what she might miss?
She missed her ruby. Silly woman, there it was on her hand. This is your hand, Mother. Thin, thin, your ridiculous breasts, your poochy, sut
ured belly. Better never to see it, better to keep away. Buffalo. Erie. Exhausted, and Margaret would sleep in the flickering glare, her hat across her face, her mouth open, using her arm as a pillow. Delayed. Departing flights, arriving.
Oh, this. Long ago feeling. A marvel, to be flown, lifted away, buoyant in the dark and stars.
She had crossed the ocean on a boat, long ago; she had run off a cliff with a wing. The air was bright and singing and she was not afraid, the mother, not a mother yet—that was years away. A girl. Falling out of an airplane. She was making none of this up. She was plunging through the coppery blaze of the day with her downy arms thrust out. Alien, the thrill, illicit—and the wind passed through her stinging, cold, as if she were hollow, or heat. Nothing more. Nothing, sinking, achy, trying to hold her mouth shut. Tears blew from her eyes. Her face was changing places. Air rushed in and her cheeks billowed out and now the chute, abrupt, roared open. She seemed to surge upward and hang there and everything was still. She had held her breath and now she let the breath go and when she did, as through water, she sank again, in the rapture of cold and quiet. And the quiet was cold and something to feel and the chute blotted out the sun. She was cradled, buoyant, rocking—a flake of snow on a tether. Unafraid. She was drifting above the birds; they were marks on a page, hastily drawn, rising in spirals to meet her. She fell past them and went on falling; she would go on falling. She would fall through the earth as through beaten cream, alive, and live forever.
A rapture: a marvel the dream the mind invents to put an end to the body, and to carry it on and on. Her mind made softness of rock and tree and, of the cage of her room, a cloud. And yet there were rocks, there were trees, and the rocks and trees sped upward, familiar again, and the spider shook her web.