My mother stepped back from the door, dragging her toes. He walked in, took our silent Nora by the arm, and led her out of our lives.
Months later we were sitting around the table eating dinner. Brian was playing spoons on his leg and Joyce and I were bickering when someone came to the door. My mother escaped us and walked down the hall.
“Yes,” I heard her say. “Yes,” she said again. And then, “I see. Thank you.”
I didn’t hear another voice; the message was delivered so quietly. She returned to the table and looked at her cutlery as if she didn’t know what it was for.
“What is it, Eileen?” my father asked.
“That was Mrs. Morgan,” she said.
Mrs. Morgan had a phone and she took calls, when they came, for everyone on Rumney Street.
“Nora’s dead,” Mum said.
“Oh God, how did she die, Eileen?” my father asked.
My mother tossed her hair and swung a look around to tell us that she could see our ears.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask.”
“Who called to tell you?” Joyce asked.
There was silence around the table.
THERE WERE RUMORS AMONG THE children that Nora’s brother beat her and threw her out into the street. There were rumors that she threw herself down a stone staircase. There were rumors of incest, of illness, and of alcoholism. But there was no doubt that her warm arms and hands and lips and breath were gone forever from my person.
I looked for her in crowds for years. I even went down to Tiger Bay alone when I was ten, because that’s where the lost sometimes were found, sleeping in the shacks with the prostitutes, or drinking on the docks with the poor black fishermen.
The bay was almost abandoned. I saw no sign of evil men or women. I saw an old man with skin like an eel’s, dark, and so wet with the mist. His white hair was short and neat beneath a cap. He held a pipe with a bowl shaped like a gaping fish between his lips as he sat in a chair on the dock watching the solemn waves sloping in the bay.
Because he must have sat there forever, I asked him if he remembered Nora, maybe he had seen her being dragged up from the water. The wind was loud and I didn’t know if he could hear me, so I shouted my questions. He shook his head, no, and then offered me a seat in his chair.
I walked home for long wet hours from Tiger Bay, stomping in the puddled rain and chanting to myself between bitter breaths, “I will not accept failures; I will not accept death. I will not accept failures; I will not accept death.”
Miles later, tired and undone, I fell into bed and slept off all my grief. There was never any sign of her in Cardiff and I don’t know where her brother came from that day he took her away. I forgot most of that old sadness. I guess that’s the reason I never mention Nora.
Your mother is watching JAG on TV beside me. She says to say she loves you. I like the navy cardigan you sent me and I’m wearing it now. Someone told me I look like a big-nosed Cary Grant when I wear it. I hope you and your sister are taking care of each other. Try not to imagine the way Nora ended. It would embarrass her.
Love you,
Dad
Pinhole
THEY WILL ARGUE OVER BREAKFAST and so be pensive in the car as the wipers grapple with the sheets of rain and the defogger will be broken or at least useless. The landscape will wash away and reappear and wash away, making her think of that one shot she took of the flooded Seine, how flat it was so that the water seemed like something you could walk on and the trailing branches of the tree became like fingers stroking the changed space. Still, she will think, it didn’t work exactly the way she had expected. And then she will think that the camera doesn’t ever show what she sees, but only what it sees.
He will put his spare hand on her neck under her hair to let her know that he still wants the day to go well. She will swallow and try again to close the stupid window on her side more tightly. It will be a good day, but they won’t know that until it’s almost over.
At the gallery he will pay for their entry even though she snapped over the cereal that since it was all about her work she would pay. There will be a long discussion with a fat guard about the size of her bag and what it holds. The guard will look angry and then amused and then bored and then he will just stop talking, stop listening, and she will know that everything is all right. On the second floor, she will drift to the coffee stand and search for a peacemaking pastry. With two cups in her hands and a paper bag folded into her armpit and the heavy bag of equipment in her backpack she will be awkward as she weaves through the red plastic café chairs, and the coffee will slosh out of the rip in the lid, onto her hand, making her wince. He will see this and think emphatically, I love you.
The elevator to the top of the gallery will be impossibly long and silver-colored, and the view of the city from the glass wall so broad, so lovely and wet and brown that she will forget her plan to photograph a painting from the point of view of another painting on the opposite wall or else to photograph a busy room from a central bench so that the numerous drifting gazers barely register as ghosts walking through each other and the paintings and sculptures become the real occupants. She will remember that shot of the statue preparing to fly through the window, and how, when everything is still, as it is in a photograph, then everything is equal.
The paintings will still be there to look at each other in another photograph. There is always more time. More time, but not more speed, the speedy get lost in her photographs. When everything else in a day tells her that she must get it together quickly — find her keys and the map and sort out lunch and return her father’s call and step onto the metro before the doors close — the camera will remind her that the messy details pressing for attention in the present evaporate almost as soon as they emerge. What is left behind will be a window into the brain of time. Because the camera will see things as if through the eye of a nautilus, the camera will be the companion who best reminds her that humans are only one kind of thing.
Looking back at her when she sits on the stone steps beside her camera — opens the shutter, and lives quietly as it looks — is a beach, a horse in front of a castle, a tower reflected upside down in a drop of rain, a cow turning his head, the cherry trees, so decorative over the satin river, the contrast of pointy modern buildings and the circles on a ceiling. What is it to be inside a set of walls? she will ask herself. And of course the camera will see people, but only when they stop and are still together for a little while on a bridge. The camera will show her all the things that look back at her, will wipe away the grease of errands and smooth the fractious popping culture until what is left is what was there the longest, what will still be there after she closes the shutter.
Later, when the box is opened it will be a gift. Just like the gift of discovering that the man she met by accident when she was halfway between decisions who will continue to argue with her sometimes over breakfast. But he will be waiting for her as the next paper in the next box is exposed, as she changes styles and loses things, when she is messy and when she is sad and when she is funny and when she is brilliant. The camera and he will be there as the bright world is exposed.
Happy
IN THE PICTURE THEY LOOK happier than they were and so, in a way, what the picture shows is that they were happier than they were. The sunlight shines through triangular gaps between her arms and her body. The cheery little dog pants and turns its head so that its face and tail are white blurs that speak of motion. The sound of cars along the highway on the other side of the wall is represented by a missing rock and a streak of color in that gap. The heat emanating from the rocks that was so painful against his naked shoulder can only be detected in the sweating glass he holds against her hip. The recent election and its scandals appear in headlines across the displayed papers and magazines on the cart that is only halfway in the picture and at the first specific distance where one would not e
xpect to be able to read the letters except for the boldness of their print. A regression in fashion drapes her hip to thigh in navy fabric. She turns her knee inward because she is unsure of how this bathing style suits her legs. Her too-hard-smile, which usually makes her neck look strained, is softened by a thin smudge on the lens. His smile, never more than a grimace, has been caught at a pleasing angle, and seems more than usually true. And so they both appear dreamy and the age they ought to be. The memory card is full of shots of glittering water, seagulls that barely show against the gray sky, and fields and other vehicles caught in the oblong reflection of the side mirror. Out of superstition one picture remains undeleted after a year. The strap has never been used and remains folded in the inner pocket of a jacket hung on a coat rack in the lobby of a restaurant where they ate last week. The manager has the same jacket and has not yet detected the difference. The manager’s wife is dying from cancer and he plans to tell her tonight that he wants to bury her in the cemetery where his mother also lies, where she fell after years of the same kind of silence. He counts receipts and remembers his mother as she appears in old photographs in striped bathing suits, all one piece, that begin at her neck and go almost to her knee. She also turns her knee in when she feels exposed, either because of a boy speaking or because her skin is uncomfortably hot. Her somber dog sits miraculously still and so appears clear in photographs taken with a little black box called a Brownie. And one day when her granddaughter comes to visit, chattering nonstop about wanting to join a girl’s club, she says, we used to have cameras called Brownies. The little girl frowns not knowing how quickly time passes or that this moment like most moments of every life will slip away unrecorded.
Unhappy
AFTER HOURS OF FOCUSING ON the broad edge of the two headlights and assuming there is a road ahead, after hours of the radio singing, “I Am a Mountain,” or some such thing, suddenly there is a rise in the road, a turn, and the little town appears like a cup of light grasped in the two hands of a giant.
I compare the quiet restaurant with a list of similar ones in my head, find familiar the worn runner of carpet from the door to the bar, the man in the plaid shirt behind the wooden bar, setting up the small, dishwasher-scratched wineglasses, the yellow wall lamps and wooden chairs and empty deuces, the sweet underage waitress who is likely the daughter of the cook.
“Did you hit something?” she asks.
I choose a seat in the corner by a window and sip at fresh decaf coffee. Stare out at the parking lot under the strands of Christmas lights draped between lampposts. An elderly couple, long-haired and thin, huddles at the base of one lamppost. The woman is crying and the man, with his awkward hands, pats her back and strokes her hair.
“The kitchen is closing,” the waitress says. “If you want to order now.”
I choose between the homemade chili and something with gravy. Behind me a family settles into a table.
“Knock knock,” says one child to the other.
“This is not a life,” says the wife.
I ask myself, am I dangerous to them? That young waitress — will her friends multiply or divide? I consider the possibilities. I eat.
“It’s the recession. Everyone is suffering. Dan Brown lost every contract for the Spring. You act like it’s my fault.”
“You act like there’s nothing you can do.”
“Knock knock.”
“Three monkeys walked into a bar. No, two monkeys and a panda.”
“How is the chili?”
“I am a mountain . . .”
I recall the first time I imagined an act of extreme violence. I was watching my mother’s back while she washed the dishes and I imagined stabbing her with a knife from the block on the counter. That same day I imagined grabbing and throwing my infant brother against the floor, his head breaking open like a watermelon. Then in the afternoon I thought of grabbing the wheel and crashing us all in the car. What stopped me then? What didn’t stop me later?
And there have been other times when I should have felt something, but I didn’t. I know about the feelings I am supposed to have. I see them and learn them and imitate them. This is all just idle speculation, the kind of thing that puts people into therapy. I am too introspective. What good does it do to think about yourself? Everyone thinks violent thoughts. Everyone owns a number of things that could be used to kill themselves or someone else. I’m not so special. I wonder if all this is just tiredness and the road. I heard rabbits popping under the wheels while I drove and at least once I saw half a deer pushed into the soft shoulder. That was funny.
The chili is really terrible. The little waitress has disappeared. Perhaps if the chili had been better I might left her alone. I stand and remove the beloved metal fruit and turn the timer and pull the pin and set the little sweet meat on the table and stride quickly to the exit. Maybe I’ll see a movie. I’m sure to get a good seat.
Heather Rabbit
THIS ISN’T FICTION. THIS IS me trying to talk to you not to our family or to the world. I have such a hard time writing this even though I speak the story so often now I barely react. Why does writing hurt more than speech? I just want to tell you what happened. You’re the only one who doesn’t know.
You were my cousin. You were older than me by several years. Your sister Sharon adored you. Your mother —
(Wait. I’m going to try it a different way.)
Once upon a time a little girl was born in a place where language was more valuable than religion. Her father was a giant and her mother was an angel and so, the poor little thing had no chance of living as a simple being like the other children who played in the dirty streets all around her house. This little girl was not beautiful and she had no magical gifts like the power to move objects with her mind or to walk on water. But she was a loving, good child.
One day the giant left. Giants leave when they outgrow things, but the thing this giant did that was so wrong was that he took the little girl aside and he said, “I have found another, younger child who needs me less and so I’m leaving you because you are big now and the way you love me keeps on changing and will keep on changing all your life, and I don’t like that.”
The little girl was overwrought. She fashioned a doll in the shape of her father and she dressed it in the clothes he left behind. It smelled of him. She took this doll with her everywhere and she sniffed it and it made her cry, but it made her happy too. Now, what I haven’t told you was that the little girl did not walk until she was three and did not speak until she was six. And so, when her father left her she could not rise to grasp him or raise her voice to beg him to stay or to cry out with rage at her abandonment. All her feelings went unknown, even to her mother, even to her older sister, and the other angels who tried in vain to decode the little girl’s expressions.
One day an angel came to her mother and said, “We must test her. We must know if she should be cast down with the other human beings, the imperfect ones. She does not speak or move as we need her to, and, although she is good, that is not enough.” The mother flapped her wings and made a great noise. But in the end even she could not be sure what was best and so she allowed the angels to test her daughter, thinking all the while that if her daughter was cast out then she would go with her.
A great angel dropped out of the sky. She had at her side a leather case filled with tests and books of statistics and handcuffs and other sad items that most angels never had occasion to see. This angel sat down with the little girl and put out pieces of paper and coloring pencils. She asked the little girl to draw what she felt, or to draw anything. The angel asked the girl to make a sound, any sound, happy or sad, angry or random. But the little girl stayed silent. Hours and hours of tests were unpacked and packed again before the angel sighed and placed her hands on her glowing hips. “What will we do with you?” she said.
But the little girl stayed silent, playing with and kissing her doll.
“Oh, how it stinks,” exclaimed the angel, catching a whiff of the rotten alcohol and sweat that emanated from the doll. “You shouldn’t play with that. I’ll wash it,” she said. And she took the doll and walked to the sink and filled the sink with scalding water and soap. She submerged the doll and scrubbed it. Of course she did not understand that the doll had come to represent the little girl’s father. The little girl leaped up and shrieked and let loose a torrent of the most obscene language and dark accusations that has ever left the lips of a creature of any origin. The angel, shaking and very pale, exited the room and faced the girl’s anxious mother.
“There is nothing wrong with your child,” she said. “But you should be more careful how you speak in front of her.”
(Wait. Let me try again.)
Once upon a time two kittens traveled across an ocean to a place where little trains cross little mountains and dolphins swim laps around lazy sailors. In this place lovers carve spoons and each spoon tells the story of what the lover hopes the future holds. Monks live on bird sanctuaries where they tend to the seabirds and make perfume from the wildflowers. The two kittens were tired and wired from the very long journey, but they were very glad to arrive at the house with a steep staircase where their grandmother lived.
After kisses their mother and father settled in the parlor with their aunty cat and their grandmother cat and the two kittens were left with their cousin (who was older and more like an adolescent cat). The three did not know each other well and so it was proposed that they should play a game. The game was knights-in-shining-armor and the three happily galloped on invisible horses and charged each other across the room until one kitten knocked over a box. Out of the box tumbled some strange animals. The kittens were frightened and backed into a corner together, holding each other. The animals lay still on the rug. One kitten threw a glass paperweight. The new animals in the room still did not move. Another kitten snuck forward and stuck a claw into the pile of fur and then leaped back. The animals were still. The last kitten strode forward boldly and demanded that the animals introduce themselves. When the room remained silent this kitten sniffed the pile and poked it with her paw. She laughed so hard the other two kittens became indignant.
How I Came to Haunt My Parents Page 6