by Unknown
Such a banal, imprecise description: “a good mother.” Yet it seemed to bring her back: she perked up in the chair across from me, picked up her chopsticks and began to swipe them together as though sharpening knives—it’s what she would do when the dumplings were served. What was her cute, idiosyncratic tic for the serving of the soup? Something to do with the spoon, the napkin? I could not for the life of me remember. My good mother wasn’t yet cold in the ground, and already she was disintegrating from my mind. I wanted to ask the waitress if she, returning the ladle now to the large bowl, remembered what my mother would do when the soup arrived. Or maybe we could just talk for a while, the waitress and I—a serious conversation between strangers—such things happened, right?—the way Chekhov’s clerical student, after a hunting trip, when the temperature plummeted and the wind picked up, approached a pair of widows, a mother and daughter, and commenced (warming his hands over their eerie, much-crackling fire) a conversation about the Apostle Peter: “‘At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,’ said the student, stretching out his hands, ‘so it must have been cold then, too. Ahh, what a terrible night it must have been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!’” The waitress, however, half-bowing, had already made her leave.
I panicked. I cleared my throat in a grumpy, staff-beckoning way. Breathily I whispered: “She’s dead. My mother.” Though the waitress continued walking, I believe I detected the subtlest hesitation in her gait, the subtlest turn of her head. Probably she had heard me clear my throat, nothing more, and preferred—rightfully, I can now admit—to be beckoned otherwise. Serves me right. (You appreciate the pun, don’t you, Mother?) Yet I felt at the time intensely wounded: I had reached out and been denied. I had made myself intimate and vulnerable and in need of help, and the waitress had thoughtlessly, strutting away, tossed me into the fireplace.
A fairy tale is staunchly impersonal, if not ruthlessly cold: the tone is hardboiled, apathetic; the language is simple, maybe too simple; tragedy simply occurs; nothing about it is romantic, or poetic, or lyrical. One morning the girl didn’t get up out of bed. Despite the fact that—or rather precisely because—the teller doesn’t try to make the reader-listener feel even a pinch of sorrow, as is only proper, we feel impelled to rush to the girl’s bedside, to fold her hands in our hands, to make up for the absence of authorial empathy with our own empathy. This is very different from a so-called “conventional” story whose teller attempts to make its reader-listener feel, or lead its reader-listener toward, emotion; in those stories, the teller is (we believe) helping us through the tragedy, even if he or she has invented the tragedy in the first place and then made us its invisible witnesses, its ghosts, as it were. No one’s helping, much less guiding, us through the “real” world. For this reason, fairy tales, despite their inherent marvelousness, sometimes more closely resemble life.
When I entered my mother’s apartment one late spring Thursday morning, for example, and received no response to my bushy-tailed tootleloo, there was neither frightening silence nor the high, suspensefully held note of a violin. I set on the kitchen counter the almond croissant from La Boulange (her favorite), of which I’d taken several surreptitious nibbles, and listened to the ever-so-faint squeal of the muted TV: a mounted cowboy squinted in the shadow of his hatbrim. I was certain my mother lay dead somewhere in the apartment, but did I hurry from room to room, as in a dream, calling and calling for her? Quite to the contrary. I stood for a long time blinking in the fluorescent light of the kitchen, holding my keys. Then I started toward the front door—I was going to leave, I can now admit—I was frankly too scared to face my mother’s lifeless body—when the balcony door inched open in the breeze. No scent of pollen-laden air, no line of sunlight slanted across her faux Persian rug. I stepped out onto the balcony. I wiped my eyes with my sweatered forearm. Yet there she was, my mother, alive, leaning against the cast-iron railing in her white silk robe (which neither slithered in the breeze nor caught the light briefly), watching the passersby three stories below.
I touched her shoulder. Cold, bony. She seemed not to feel my hand, or to even know that I was standing there behind her, until she asked very quietly: “Do you think we know each other?”
“It’s me. It’s me, Mother,” I said.
“Your grandfather never knew me. Not really.” Her voice sounded dreamy, far away.
“Let’s lie down for a bit.”
“Very somber fellow, your grandfather,” she said, peering over the rail and frowning at something down below. “Wore a black hat all the time. Have I told you that?” (You have.) “The brim was so huge and round and flat. It was like the rings of a planet.” (I know—you’ve told me a gazillion times.) “Sat immensely straight, too. Straight as a Roman column.” My arms were around her, hugging her almost, trying to guide her back inside. There was an unusual disparity between her physical weakness and her ability to talk. “Even at night,” she said, “on the porch, listening to the radio in his shirtsleeves. Still wearing that hat.”
I had managed to turn her around now. We took a step in tandem.
“He was a godhead,” she continued, clinging to me. “Strangers thought he was a pastor, a snake-handler maybe.” Her bathrobe slipped open, revealing her pale loose awful nakedness. I fumbled with the silk. “My boyfriend once saw him in the street and took off running, losing a brown loafer, the coward.” She laughed breathily in my arms; then, as we crossed the threshold together, her voice grew once again faint and dreamy. “Do you think I could have talked to him?” she asked. “Do you think I could have spoken to such a man?”
(No. You couldn’t have spoken to him, Mother. And his loneliness was not your fault.)
I ought to have uttered the words. But the language is simple, maybe too simple. So I guided her, I said nothing. All the way back to her small, turquoise-curtained bedroom, I said nothing at all.
At the end of a fairy tale, there is a slight, usually subtle, turn—a volta, as the sonneteers say—as when the teller of “The Three Kingdoms,” a Russian fairy tale, suddenly peeks out from behind his curtain: “…and they began to live happily together and are still living. I was at their wedding and drank beer. The beer ran along my mustache but did not go into my mouth”—an indication that the teller was sober and is, I suppose, credible. Anyway, this turn must be slight, seeing as detail (which is not at all the domain of the fairy tale) is essential to a turn as elaborate as the now ubiquitous “plot twist.” Too, this slight turn should echo, ring out, linger in its reader-listener’s mind; it should, in fact, haunt him or her. The fisherman lumbered in and found the child dead, but looking very womanly. When the time came, four days ago, I found my mother in her lavender La-Z-boy in front of the TV—the cast of Gilligan’s Island huddled (as the yellow credits rolled and the nauseating, sea-chantey theme song yo-ho-hoed) on the Technicolor shore—having spilled across her muumuued lap a plastic cup of prune juice, so that she appeared to be sitting in a pool of blood (among other things). I already imagined myself, months later, at a string-lighted porch party, telling some friends-of-friends that I thought for a split second she had committed seppuku, or else been “gut shot”—did I think that could be funny, or interesting, or sympathy-inducing?—whereupon, noticing their startled, offended, horrified expressions, I’d emit a nervous titter and instantly comment upon their blouses. I was haunted indeed.
My mother, by her own account, handled the death of her father with far more aplomb. Late one night, on the near-empty 38 L, she turned to two teenaged girls buckled over with laughter at the back of the bus and said—the neon lights of Geary Street playing across her face, her bunned-up hair, her almost-teary eyes—she said: “Please stop laughing. My father has just passed,” then continued to stare regally out of the rattling Plexiglas windows, turning up the collar of her black velvet coat.
I had a vague inkling (setting down my pen and watching the double braids of steam rise from the bowls) that I was trying to accomplish the same thing�
��that is, I was trying to make my mother’s death more external: make the clouds blacken in mourning; make Brahms’ requiem issue from the highest windows; make the flowers of Asphodel shriek forth out of the asphalt-covered earth—only I never truly learned how to live without my mother (and therefore floundered), whereas she had learned to live without her father long ago. I also suspected that, later, alone in elevators, or peeing in public restrooms, or standing in line at a hipster-filled Philz Coffee, I would often ask myself: How could the entire world just go on, business as usual, oblivious to or heedless of my mother’s absence? How could she of all people just disappear? Just drop down through a hole in the earth, no sound at all?
Oh, yes, now I remember… When our waitress lowered the large bowl of wonton soup onto the center of the table, my mother would at once scoot it toward her with both hands and then, taking up the ladle as though it were a spoon, ask after my soup’s whereabouts. She loved corny gags so much, and repeated her repertoire of them more and more as she aged, which, to my surprise, never embarrassed the hell out of me: there was in fact something perennially endearing—touching even—about them. Now, having moved aside my notebook and small bowl of soup, I commenced to scoot toward me (not as a gag, of course, but rather as a gesture of mourning) the larger serving bowl in which thronged wontons, bok choy, shrimp, thinly sliced pork, scallions, the caps of shitake mushrooms, as well as my own ever-so-slightly rippled face staring up at me. I cried quietly for a while. I sipped my tea. At some point, glancing once more at the four waitresses still half in the shadows playing cards, it occurred to me that no one in a fairy tale reflects upon his or her life; stares out over the ocean from a rock promontory; stands out on a balcony in her white silk robe; sits up panicked on her knees in a sunlit tent; gazes out of a rattling San Francisco bus or third-story bedroom window; slouches in a wheelchair remembering the stage on which he once stood, as a ten-year-old, alone, gripping a Hohner 64 chromatic harmonica. Reflection, remembrance, reminiscence, one’s ever-deepening, ever-beckoning interiority—none of it exists. A fairy tale is all action. A fairy tale does not in this sense explore relationships. Even so, more useful than an artifact of reflection, I realized, lifting the Chinese spoon and staring back down at myself staring back up at me in my soup, a fairy tale is—as my mother must have known—the loose ends of a wonton skin waving ghostily in the broth—a fairy tale is an artifact upon which to reflect…
In memoriam D.G., 1930–2014
ZACHARY DOSS
The Season of Daughters
The daughters wake for the first time on his front porch and he will never know where they come from. The first daughter he finds is naked, trembling, and white as paper. She does not cry. When he picks her up she is so small it is like holding an egg that is larger than a regular egg. Her back is covered with small abrasions that he thinks must be from his doormat, the kind of doormat that is bristly, the kind that might hurt the sensitive skin of a baby. He thinks about the daughter beginning her life on such ungentle terms. He holds this small egg-like person in his arms for a moment and decides to take her inside.
The man is not lonely. The man has never wished for a child, for any children. He has never sat at a window while his wife slept, praying for an end to barrenness. He has no language for barrenness. This is just how things are. The man has no wife, does not wish for a wife. The man has no wishes. The man might, if the man were the kind to wish, wish that he had some wishes. This is very complicated and the man is not complicated.
He swaddles the daughter in blankets and places her in his spare room. He briefly sets her on the floor, but then thinks better of it. He makes a kind of nest out of couch cushions and decorative pillows from his bed. The spare room is unfurnished. There was once a plan for the spare room but it never got farther than carpet, fresh paint, and cheerful window dressing.
He does not want the daughter, but he does not want her to come to harm while she is in his care. This man is responsible. He flips the curtains up over the curtain rods, out of reach, but she is a baby and can’t move her head on her own, definitely can’t sit up. She rolls and gurgles.
The second day he wakes and tries his best to clean the daughter’s mess. He makes food and mushes it up, hoping she can eat it. He considers the girl and decides he has to go to work. It is an important day. There will be contracts and paperwork. He is in charge of the paperwork. The man does not wish and does not fear, but he realizes if he does not supervise the paperwork, someone at work might realize that the paperwork does fine on its own. The man would not be much without the paperwork. He recognizes this.
He considers tying the daughter to something, but he doesn’t do that. He assumes she’ll be fine where she is because she is a baby. He covers the power outlets with heavy tape, but then reminds himself that she can’t stand up. Better safe than sorry. She is still just a large egg. She won’t get into trouble, she’s just a baby. He swaddles her, in clean blankets, tighter than he needs to, and leaves her resting in the fort of couch cushions.
On his way home from work, he picks up diapers, baby food, and tiny pink onesies. He has to ask for help at the store: What do I get a baby. The woman at the store wears a red shirt with a collar. He thinks she is not beautiful. She tries to explain about babies. She asks him about his wife. He makes up a story about his brother dying, an orphaned niece, it all came out of the blue, he says, holding a pink onesie and a yellow onesie. The woman in the red collared shirt helps him find what he needs for a baby. He considers a crib, but decides to wait. He does not know what he is waiting for.
The second girl is waiting for him on the doormat, like the first, and like the first she has marks on her back. The second daughter has dark skin, her head already growing a tuft of black hair. It is hard to carry the second daughter and the handful of bags inside together, so he makes trips, stepping over the girl to drop the bags in the dining room before going back to pick up the new daughter.
With the arrival of the second daughter, the first daughter seems to have grown. He does not know how old babies are supposed to be to do certain things, but the first daughter is sitting up, looking around, making the first few struggling attempts to lift her whole self at once and walk. An ambulatory daughter makes him not afraid but nervous, very nervous. Two daughters make him nervous. He is afraid they will hurt one another, the larger daughter will crush the smaller daughter, or choke her, or give her poison to eat. He is afraid there will be jealousy, rivalry, that the two daughters will be close friends until they grow older, maybe one is pretty and the other not so pretty, maybe with time they are not so close. It is possible for two sisters to be enemies, he knows this, although he never had siblings. The first daughter looks at him with wise eyes, too big for her head and bright blue.
The onesies he bought fit the second daughter but not the first daughter, so he cuts holes in a pillowcase until there is a makeshift dress the first daughter can wear. It is white with gray and green leaves on it. The first daughter tugs at it unhappily. It is much too large, and it looks strange with her white skin and white hair. She looks like a drawing of a girl.
The second daughter he bathes and tucks into a onesie. She seems inchoate to him, like unless the onesie gives her shape, she is formless, a blob. Unlike the first daughter, she smiles, and gurgles happily. He feeds them both from the jars of baby food: puréed carrots and peas, sweet potatoes and squash, apples and peaches.
The next day there is a third daughter. She has fine red hair and broad features. He goes inside and the first daughter is older, like she should be talking, but she just stares at him with her wise eyes. The second daughter is starting to walk and laughs when she falls down. It occurs to him that he should stop leaving them alone, that he should pay attention. They are at an age now where they can get in trouble, and he does not want to explain dead children to the police, to child services. He imagines this is some kind of test. The daughters have come here to prove something about the man.
A
t night, he researches child development. The first daughter plays with his shoe like it is a toy. The second daughter sleeps on a pillow. The third daughter he cradles uneasily on his lap, and sometimes he forgets she is there. He wonders if the first daughter can’t speak because he has never spoken to her. He is used to it being very quiet in the house. According to his research, the first daughter seems old enough to speak, but perhaps she does not know any words, or does not know how to make sentences.
He decides he will talk to the daughters, in order to teach them to speak. Conversation is initially awkward. He tells them about contracts and paperwork, the proper offices to file your paperwork with if you want it to do any good. The man knows how much good the right paperwork could do, and feels like this is preparation for life. He tells them about deadlines, and how if you file too late you might be out of luck. He uses those words, says, Out of luck. The first daughter never speaks, nor does the second, but the third daughter says, ’Uck!