“Well, what are they then?” one kitten asked.
“Wigs,” she laughed. “The lady who lives here wears wigs.”
They spent the rest of the day trying on the wigs and making up roles to play. This is how they became friends.
(Wait.)
Something terrible happened and I can’t get there, can’t even name it. I love you. You are you were my cousin.
(Wait.)
A man had a child and he did not stay with his child. Actually he had two. And he had a dog. He loved his two girls when they were small. But when he saw that they were beginning to know how imperfect he was he left them. For years they courted him. But he gave his love to the dog. When at last the man died from lifestyle-related illness, the poor dog howled with grief. The youngest of the two girls could not bear the sound; it made her feel exposed. She took the dog, which was, by now, old and sick and blind and smelly. In fact it was a pile of stink that barely moved at all. She loved that dog as if it were her perfect baby.
(Wait.)
Once upon a time I had a cousin. She did not walk until she was three and she did not speak until she was six. She lived on the estates in Cardiff, which is the ridiculous thing that we call government housing. The estate where she lived was the worst in the country and every day someone’s life got broken there. But she had a deal with her landlord that she could keep the dog, even though dogs were not allowed (a small measure to limit ferocity). And so, when a transfer came through to a safer place she refused.
(It’s not the dog’s fault.)
I wrote my first book and when it came out she read it and she asked me, why do you write sad stories? Are you sad? That night she ran through the garden with her niece and nephew and they chased her with the hose on.
“Stop it!” their mother called. But they were all so happy. Later they scraped mudpies out of the flowerbeds and served them to us. She kissed me when I left and hugged me and said, “I’m so proud of you.”
(Wait.)
There are castles decomposing everywhere. There are children sitting in classrooms learning a language no one anywhere else can speak. There are open books under glass in the memory book rooms. My husband says Snowdonia isn’t real, but I say it is in the North.
(Wait.)
There was a hare who lived in a field overrun with hares. All around the field lived people in nice houses who were afraid that the hares would come into their gardens. One day my hare drank too much and went out too late and she crossed the path of a very young hare who stood with his friends. He said something to her and she said something back. The very young hare lashed out and struck her and she fell to her knees. And then the very young hare took the my hare’s head, so like his own, and put it against the sidewalk and punched one side until the other caved in. One or more of his friends helped to drag my hare into an alley so that she wouldn’t be found for hours. She lay there and her brain swelled until it filled all the spaces in her skull and pushed apart her temples and spilled onto the asphalt that was filled with her blood.
In the hospital my hare’s mother sat at the foot of the bed and stared at her child who looked like meat. The sister hare, who was always heroic, handled the police, saying, “My sister has been assaulted. Look at her. What are you going to do?”
But the police lived in nice houses and they were afraid that the hares would come into their gardens and so they said, “We think she fell. It looks like she jumped much too high.”
The sister found the ring print of the very young hare on her sister’s eye and she said, “Look. You look at her eye and then look at me and tell me that she fell on both sides of her head and dragged herself backwards into an alley.”
The police could not look at either of them.
The doctors said that they could think of no reason for hope. But hares are full of hope: it’s what keeps them going when the foxes, wolves, dogs, owls, eagles, hawks, lions, and coyotes come. It is what makes it hard for them to understand the kind of pressures that make a very young hare want to kill someone in front of his friends. My hare slept in her coma and considered her options. The stars stayed the same and the moon lit the black alleys and the green forests alike. We worked and we slept. Nothing seemed good anymore but we couldn’t stop. We couldn’t fall apart in front of our kids and we were less good than we wanted to be.
(Across the ocean I cried and my little bunnies held onto me.)
My hare (you) woke up and screamed.
You came back to us. You came back to us. At times you were a demon’s version of yourself, screeching and thrashing against the restraints, screaming obscenities. The nurses became afraid even though they could walk and talk and go home. Finally you spoke. You said, “What happened to me?” and you were told and a few minutes later you asked again, “What happened to me?”
You were stuck in a loop. You knew that you were not the same hare, but you couldn’t remember why. Everyone explained, but it was like handing sand to a lobster; you couldn’t grasp it.
You suffered. Your brain hurt and you felt lost and angry. The things you were told were not fair. You could not go back to your apartment and you were sure that all the answers were there. People you didn’t know told you that what you felt was normal and you wanted to kick them in the balls. You thought you recognized me. I thought you did too, but in fact you called everyone from that side of the family by my name.
On the third floor of the brain injury clinic you met someone who reminded you of your ex-boyfriend, Bob. This patient was an older hare who thought that you were his dead wife. Every day you had tea together and chatted — you with Bob, and him with his wife — it made things a little bit better. The other thing that made things better was that your mother and her sister stayed with you and cried and held you and said how scared they were, how much they needed you. You found friends in the groups and clinics that dominated your days and people were encouraging. You were strong in a way that we didn’t know you could be. You fought and fought and fought and I don’t even know what kind of energy it took to come back to us. You were amazing, so amazing, Heather.
Eighteen months passed and we started to relax. It was a miracle; don’t some of us have miracles? If there is always one story that defies the general narrative why couldn’t it be ours? In the pictures you looked the same as you did before you were killed. Your mother and I sent emails every day and she said that you were happier and in safer housing and that the last night she saw you, you were skipping and you said that your whole life was turned around.
(Wait.)
My hare (you) died getting into or out of bed and you were dead before you hit the floor and so we think that it was quick and not painful. But let’s admit we need to think that. It’s better for us that you did not die alone in an alley after a beating. Instead, you came back you fought all the way back from that alley to show us how to cope, how to be good, how to be both gentle and strong. You told us to be happy and you forgave your killer, which I don’t think I can do.
(Wait.)
I need to tell you something. All I can think about is how good you were. How hard it must have been to be so good. I am not as good as you and even if I tried forever I couldn’t be. But in answer to your long-ago question, I’m not sad. Sometimes I feel that I could fall off this world. Sometimes I think I am totally okay and then I read an article about some terrible world thing completely unrelated to you and I spin out with grief. I can’t absorb what has happened or why. But, no matter how sad I get, or how angry, very shortly I become happy again. I think I write sad stories because I feel guilty for always recovering. Because it crushes me to think that something terrible could happen to you and we could lose you and your mother and sister could live every day with the memory of you, beaten and dehumanized, killed by a posturing child, while I could be happy again. I want to record how important you were and how wrong it is that your life was hard
and then it was destroyed, for absolutely nothing, before my happiness starts to make you disappear. I’m afraid that you will disappear because I am happy. I love you still and I am sorry that my life has been so much easier than yours, Heather.
The Little Seamaid
FAR AWAY FROM THE FIELDS where the bent bodies of women pull sticky cotton, far away from the castles where naked princesses lament their solitude in turrets, far away from the sidewalks of cities where children dress as adults and offer their arms up to monsters from hell, out in the ocean where the water is deep and blue and moved by the great bodies of ancients live the beautiful seamaids in a library as vast as your imagination. The water is very, very, very deep, so deep indeed that no cable can fathom it; all the windmills and church steeples and lighthouses of the world stacked upon each other to make a great tower would drift apart and disappear before the bottom was ever conceived. This is where the seamaids live together as each other’s subjects, never alone and yet each one no more under the control of the others than a neon tetra shoaling through the dark river of the Amazon.
The library is a vast network of caves carved from the movement of water over millions of years. The most singular flowers and plants grow there. In each closed bell or furled leaf another story awaits release. The slightest agitation of the water causes them to stir and open, and intermittently release stories into the surrounding landscape with silent sighs of satisfaction. Fish, big and small, bright and dull, glide between the chambers of the library, through the cascading marine narratives. In the deepest spot of all sits a chamber that contains a flowing coral lacework like an underwater rosebush, which is the master network of all the narratives. The walls of the chamber are like long, Gothic windows of the clearest amber. And the bush inside is reflected as a slow-moving creature acting out the stories in shadow play. The roof of the chamber is encrusted with thick-lipped shells that open and close as the water flows over them. In each shell lies a glittering pearl, which would be fit for the diadem of a monarch, but whose removal would mean the death of its maker and world.
The seamaids are capable of changing sex when it seems amusing and they intermarry at will taking from among themselves dear companions until each one has known the face of the other in all its expressions and has kissed the sweet faces of all her peers and felt devotion in all its measures. The rosebush plays out their love stories as well as the love stories of strange land creatures until it seems as if love has threaded the lives of every creature that has ever existed onto one shining necklace that hangs about the Earth. The stories from the land people are not all happy; they also warn of times when love has been scarce and even forbidden. The land creatures have seen dark families disrupted by light ones, separated and never rejoined. Marriage has been at times a fierce and dangerous net. Men have been bound to women and women to men. Love has been contorted to fit painfully narrow forms. Love has been disregarded completely. These stories send shivers of passion across the dithering bodies of the youngest seamaids. These are the ghost stories, the horror tales that they devour with the most appetite, but that they never quite believe to be true.
Seamaids stay deep below the surface until they reach an age and size when they are less vulnerable to gulls and fishing lines and lightning storms and the churning blades of ships. They live in groups that join and break off from the larger school to explore and play. In one of these little groups there are six equally beautiful seamaids whose bright colors and sweet movements are delightful. All day long they play in the library, swimming in and out of chambers, eating tiny flowers, and chasing each other. The seamaids are swift and light, darting about as sparrows do in the air outside our houses. These seamaids tempt fish to eat out of their hands, and stroke the fish and tickle their bellies until their little tails wiggle and wiggle against soft palms.
Surrounding the library there is a garden that stretches for acres, in which grow swaying grasses and bright red and dark blue flowers, and blossoms like flames of fire and globes like brilliant stars; the fruit glitters, and the leaves and stems of every plant dance continually with eddies and furls of water. Over everything in the garden lies a peculiar blue radiance, through which light from the blue sky above the water showers the dark depths of the sea. In calm weather the paradigm of the sun can be seen, looking like the glimmering pupil of a cat’s eye.
Each of the seamaids has a quiet space in the garden where she may cultivate whatever she pleases. Many of the seamaids prefer to let their plots grow free and simply delight in twisting the marvelous creations that grow around their wrists and tails for decoration. Some go to their plots to rest, cushioned and peaceful in the arms of plants. A very few arrange their flowerbeds according to some form. One makes a bed into the form of a whale; another thinks it better to make hers like the figure of a little seamaid; and one makes abstract patterns that mimic the churlish waves on the surface of the ocean. One little seamaid is a collector of things fallen from the wrecks of vessels. On her plot are stacks of china plates and silverware, boxes of jewelry, handbags and suitcases, the little bones of lost pets in shiny cages, broken violins and oboes, statues and statuettes and watercolor paintings washed clean. The seamaids often use these items for play and she enjoys distributing them. But of all these sources for make-believe, she cares most for the statue of a land boy.
He is blacker than the sand, carved out of stone. His curls fall around his shoulders and his eyes are smooth and blank. He wears a complicated suit and holds a sword at his side. She plants the statue in the center of her bed and surrounds it with anemones, which grow splendidly. The little seamaid invites all the seamaids to imagine a different life for the land boy. Some cast him as a hero and some as a villain. Each imagining contains information gleaned over many generations about the distant relations that live on the land and their bizarre culture. Nothing gives the little seamaid so much pleasure as to hear about the world above the sea. She makes her old grandmothers and aunties tell her all they know of the ships and of the towns, of the shells they call houses, and the animals that work. To her it seems most wondrous to hear about this world above and everything that is in it. She struggles to grasp the harshness of the seasons and the distances between landmasses that can only be crossed aboard objects. Music is a concept that makes her brain ache. Because their stories have such a powerful effect upon the little seamaid, the other seamaids begin to exaggerate and expound upon spaces and happenings they could never have seen. The land people, they say, eat each other in the winter and are regurgitated as children again when the ice melts. They only make love with their siblings and never with all the other marvels of their species. Their children are helpless at birth and have to feed off the bodies of their mothers. They worship a creature (or in some cases creatures) that they cannot see or hear or touch. They use boxes with wheels to moves their bodies because their legs do not flow through the air as smoothly as a tail flows in water.
“When you are just a bit bigger,” the grandmothers and aunties promise, “you can swim to the surface and sit on the rocks in the moonlight, while the great ships are sailing by, and then you will see the forests and towns for yourself.”
MANY NIGHTS THE LITTLE SEAMAID looked up through the dark blue water, and watched the shadows of fish as they splashed about with their fins and tails. She saw the faint shimmer of stars move, glowing and spraying light for a few feet below the surface before being swallowed by the dark. At times she saw a whale swim overhead or a ship full of human beings, none of whom ever imagined that a seamaid stood beneath them, holding out her white hands towards the keel of their ship.
Indeed it was difficult to wait to see the world. The seamaids sent each other up with a mixture of apprehension, excitement and dreaminess. Each seamaid returned with a different story. Because of the depth of their kingdom there were many different points at which they could break through to the air and open their wide eyes. One of the group could hardly speak she was so moved at her r
eturn. She said that the stars and the moonlight were unbearably lovely in the soft wet air. The loveliest thing, she said, was to lie in the moonlight, on an island, in the quiet sea, near the coast, and to gaze at lights twinkling where people lived. Because she could not go near to those wonderful lights, she longed for them as if each one were another heartbeat in her pale chest.
Another seamaid rose to the surface as the sun was setting, and this, she said, was frightening. The whole sky looked like gold, while violet and rose-colored clouds, which she could not describe, floated over her; and, still more rapidly than the clouds, flew a large flock of wild swans towards the setting sun, looking like a long white veil across the sea. She swam towards the sun, thinking it a being; it sunk into the waves, and when she swam down it was gone.
The third seamaid was bolder, and she swam up a broad river that emptied itself into the sea. On the banks she saw hills covered with green vines and flowers that opened and closed with the day, and castles surrounded by stone walls to keep out the poor people from amid the powerful trees of the forest; she heard larks and pigeons and all sorts of birds singing, and the rays of the sun were so powerful that her eyes ached, and she was obliged often to dive under the water to cool her burning face. She took a great risk swimming into a narrow creek where she found a troop of little human children, quite naked, sporting about in the water. They kicked and splashed and laughed and turned as they stood upright on the earth, moving as if they never imagined any current pulling on their little limbs. She wanted to play with them, but when she flipped her tail and called to them they screamed and fled in a great fright; and then a little black animal came to the water; it was a dog but she did not know that, for she had never before seen one. This animal barked and snapped the air and growled at her so terribly that she became terrified and fled back to the open sea. But, she said, narrating to her sisters, she would never forget the beautiful forest, the solidness of trees, and the pretty little children who could walk on land or swim in the water, although they had no tails.
How I Came to Haunt My Parents Page 7