by Jacki Lyden
"Nonmetallic substances," I heard him whisper. I had no idea what he meant, and I knew exactly what he meant. He meant breasts, thighs, stomach. He meant the soft pink looseness beneath the clothes of the adults. He was crowded into the single bed with my mother, who had for some reason lain down on the mattress bunk beneath me where Sarah usually slept. Perhaps she'd dozed off there.
"That's another nonmetallic substance," the Doctor said, and his voice struck sideways in the dark, shearing off the breathable oxygen to leave a suffocating miasma. I gasped at his coaxing and supplications, and thought of my rocks and of some dirty turquoise and an opal I had, the first for the dances of the ancient Mesa Verde cliff dwellers with their handholds and kivas secreted high above the canyon floor. The opal was my birthstone. A piece of shale from the Oglala Sioux reservation. I imagined striking feldspar and iron filings together in my hand, trying to spark fire. Then I heard my mother and the Doctor rise and move a couple of feet past my head into the tiny cramped bathroom at the end of the Avion, a space like a shoebox.
The moon that night was a rock. I could see it from my Thermopane trailer window, a Lincoln penny squashed by a passing Cadillac Seville. I watched the moon and listened to the coyotes howl in the hills while the Avion creaked from its rear. The rocks I had were scarcely bigger than marbles, but the next day in a New Mexico rock shop I saw a giant's tooth of petrified bloodstone. The primeval triangle of russet and green-veined stone stood almost eight inches high. It was polished smooth so that all the veins of life that had once flowed there were clear ribbons in its deep core, exposing the visible plasma and the heart as in a medical drawing and very vaguely the same delta of shape.
"I want that rock," I said to my mother. "I need it."
Green rivulets in the dark red sandstone, flecks of gold suspended inside like trapped cavern dust. The paths of trilobites and insect life ran through the rock, and the blood of Mayan Indians, the corn growers and the ritual slayers. The rock was a dagger and a prism that held the ancient world. My mother and I appraised it in its glass case in the shabby store, cooling our slippery, salted flesh in front of a laboring floor fan. The blood pulsed in my head.
"I need that rock," I said to my mother. "Please, may I have it, please."
"Wrap it up," said the Doctor behind me.
He bought it for me. It was one of the expansive gestures he sometimes made that fell invariably and sadly flat because of its insincerity. For a moment a balance was effected, but for a moment only. He was giving me my weapon, the David stone for Goliath. My first taste of solid irony. Back home, I put the polished rock just above my bed, within reach on a shelf over my pillow. At times I put it under my pillow. It had a heft, a bulgy weight like a flexed muscle. On a summer's night when the Doctor entered my room choked with anger over some minor infraction, I was sure that the rock under my pillow was what sent him away. I pictured the rock in his cranium, and he turned and left. A mythic charm for my mythic terror. I took the rock outside the next afternoon and threw it at a tree, but nothing happened. It was completely ineffectual unless I held it in my hand. Palming it, I felt like a giant killer, both calm and fierce. Today I wonder if that is not the reserve of sociopaths, whose hearts scarcely elevate a beat when they strike their prey, coolly, sincerely, with accurate and greedy ferocity. Then again, I never did see him coming.
My friend Becker, for we girls had adopted the fifth-grade boys' habit of calling each other by our last names, was turning eleven at a birthday party that called for foreign costumes. Becker's mother was the Girl Scout troop leader; parties at her house were always wild and noisy affairs, littered with unfinished craft projects and a yelping mutt or two to add to the uproar. I thought that in my Carmen Miranda outfit I would be the most exotic Scout. I was finally big enough to wear the skirt, the red taffeta, my mother's white lace blouse, and the black lace mantilla. I had screw-on silver Mexican hoop earrings and the red maracas.
On our way out, as my mother went to the car, the Doctor summoned me to the kitchen where he was having lunch before settling down to a Green Bay Packers game on TV. He never missed them. "Try this caviar," he proffered. He had the hammer look on his face. He was smiling; he knew I hated fish. Caviar was beyond unthinkable. I stared back at him impassively, mentally transporting myself far, far away, folding my arms wordlessly. I looked at him, and he at me, and he sat chewing without affect, with no expression on his face whatsoever. Then he was on me in a second, one lunge of his enormous bulk. He held my jaws open with one hand and crammed the caviar glued on the Ritz cracker into my mouth, then forced my jaws shut.
"Eat it, dummy," he said evenly, with a deft orthopedic crack and twist to my neck. "You have the taste buds of a baby. Morons eat like you do. Farmers eat like you do. Taste it, if you think you're so smart."
He held his hand over my mouth so that I had to swallow. I felt myself gagging on my vomit, breathing through my nose. He let me go then, and I ran blindly to the bathroom where I could retch into the toilet, barely hearing my mother's voice rising somewhere down the hallway. We never did get the smell out of that skirt. I went to Becker's party in one of Dolores's old maternity muumuus, a white thing that came to my ankles, with purple pansies the size of shovels, and some big plastic leis and my summer thongs.
Not long afterward, I was rubbing my hand across my lips, remembering. Distorting my mouth around whatever sour taste remained. "Creepo," I said. I had invented an onomatopoeic name for the Doctor. "Creepo," I called him behind his back. It had to do with his hulking movements, his padded bigness. I thought the name was perfect. Put your lips together, make them creep, spit out a po. Creepo. How it must have cut both him and my mother, whispered furtively among my sisters and me. He was a bullying man, and I invented a bully's name for him. Almost a decade later, when they were divorcing, the Doctor told the judge, "They call me Creepo." The thought of him sitting there in the court dock pronouncing that word fills me with regret and shame.
"You have the manners of a pig," the Doctor says to me in front of everyone at dinner. He takes his plate and holds it over mine, as if he might drop it there. My sisters stare. My mother hangs her head. Another meal in which peace is shattered as suddenly as if a sniper fired from outside the window. The Doctor sweeps from the room, removing himself from us and retreating to his office downstairs in the clinic, where, over the plate of food my mother dutifully brings him, he makes clandestine calls to his girlfriend in a distant state. School is about to begin, seventh grade. My mother retires to her room, the master bedroom bower looking out over Lac La Jolie. She curls up in her chair, a girl like me. She sits looking out at the lake while the tears run down her cheeks. She looks over at me. There's an autumn glint in the air.
"I feel like I failed you," my mother says. I look back at her and play my game of no tears, not giving her the satisfaction. She is very beautiful, somewhere in her mid-thirties. We both know she is right about failing me, and what can you do about it, not a thing. Somewhere a veil is tearing in a faraway temple, and I hear the shouts of the neighborhood children who are chasing one another on the lawn under gas jets of summer fireflies. I hear the red maracas shaking, it all feels so long ago. My mother cries and cries as it grows dark outside while I muse on my petrified bloodstone, holding it in my hands. It is my reproach to her when I think she has been weak, to be as still as a petrified, shining piece of stone. After she has worn herself out from crying and my refusal to cry, she tells my sisters to be good for an hour, and just the two of us go out to the Scottie for an ice cream. We drive along the edges of the little lakes, two girls going nowhere very fast. We sit in the car in the dark at the Scottie, listening to the little explosions of other car radios tuning in to Milwaukee stations, the Beatles singing "Michelle, ma belle," eating our cones lick by lick, our knees touching.
We reached Mexico at last that summer. I had been sewing dresses for the trip with my mother's help. To say that I was in love at the age of twelve with foreign soil does not
do justice to my feeling of coming alive, of being free. In Puerto Vallarta I watched one evening as my mother spun in an aqua cocktail dress trimmed in matching ostrich plumes, shining in the arms of a Mexican osteopath. We were at a medical convention, free to wander by day while the Doctor attended meetings and surgeries. At night there was entertainment in a low hacienda open on one side to the sea. I watched from the sidelines as my mother danced beautifully. Ava Gardner had just made a luscious movie that everyone in Puerto Vallaría was talking about called The Night of the Iguana with Richard Burton. On this very beach in San Ysidro, she'd danced lasciviously with her houseboys in the surf. Everyone talked as though she might be out there still, shaking her hips, soaking wet. At dinner, the Mexican doctor who'd been waltzing with my mother sat beside me and offered me red snapper from the ocean. At the look on my face when I explained my aversion, he touched my hand and promised that our meal would not be fishy. Suddenly I was eating fish. I got it down, dumbstruck. After each bite, I took a drink of Coke, pronouncing it with a Spanish accent. Co-co-co-LAH. The Mexican doctor smiled.
Then the Doctor took us inland to Mexico City in an immense rented Buick, and at last I saw the great cathedral that my mother had described on her honeymoon. It was cavernous and rose like a mountain, and inside it smelled of incense and suffering. I was moved by los milagros, the thousands of tiny silver arms and legs pressed into the walls to commemorate the miraculous healing of the sick. They shone dully in the dark, as affecting as the hands that put them there. I wanted to press my own milagro, a tiny silver corazón perhaps, into the wall. A day or two later, we were walking down one of the city's broad boulevards where poinsettias and birds of paradise grew in quiet frenzy. Dappled walls with broken glass teeth held secret, ecstatic gardens. A day or two later, the Doctor walked with us and stopped with me in a park where I admired a flower seller holding a huge bunch of pink and yellow rosebuds like those in the pattern of my dress. The Doctor gave the man a few pesos, as vivid a gesture as anything he had ever done, and, grunting, handed me the flowers. I had been learning Spanish from a book all that summer, Español por los Niños, while I ate blueberries on the back porch. I said, "Gracias por las rosas," and the Doctor seemed pleased. Perhaps it was an act of conscience. Perhaps he had seen the hairline cracks in my mother which we girls had not seen and which would appear in a more obvious way just a couple of months later. We walked together down the boulevard, and I kept my eyes on a giant Orange Crush sign that glittered at the edge of the city— Naranja Crush —but it was the roses that I smelled, only a little less pungent in my imagination than the fact that he had bought them for me.
A day or two later I got lost in the Aztec pyramids at Teotihuacán, fifty miles north of Mexico City. It was deliberate and not deliberate. Teotihuacán was the deserted city of the ancients which the Aztecs had made their own long after its abandonment in the seventh century. Now it was swarming with men and women selling piñons and juniper berries to the tourists, cactus fruit and limes split open and speckled with flies. We were with a tour group of doctors' wives. We listened as Miguel, our guide, explained that this ziggurat before us was called the Pyramid of the Moon, and perhaps a kilometer away at the far end of the broad Avenue of the Dead, rose another ziggurat, the Pyramid of the Sun. The dust blew freely, skirling a veil over the pyramids and our faces. The Aztecs, Miguel was explaining, had fascinating gods. There was Tlaloc, the rain god with bulging eyes and fangs that made him look like a panther; and Chalchiuhtlicue, his consort, the deity of lakes and rivers, who wore a jade apron. There were also, according to Miguel, though I could hardly make them out, gods in the stones around us, carved as plumed serpents or hurling lightning bolts that dispensed water in the guise of a shower of jade jewels. Teotihuacan was a paradise of stone. I asked my mother if I could climb the Pyramid of the Moon, and she nodded absently, as I knew full well that Miguel and his lecture were occupying her attention. The Pyramid of the Moon was a gray pyramid, tall enough to pierce lower clouds.
Lizards ran away from me as I climbed, each step of the great terraces fairly steep. I looked back at the lowering plain of this birthplace of the gods, about thirteen miles square, pyramids and crypts and ruins laid out on a map that divined the rotation of the planets. I thought that an ancient girl my age might have climbed these very steps thousands of years before, and I was acutely aware that she would not have descended them again except as a blood sacrifice. The whole of Teotihuacan spread before me when I got to the plateau at the summit, and there was still an immense stone altar above me. I looked down at the shrunken people on the ground, and I knew that my mother would be wild with worry at my disappearance. I sat on the summit of the Pyramid of the Moon for what seemed like a very long time, wondering what it would be like to have a priest dressed as a condor or a panther seize me and try to throw me down on his altar. I imagined the moves I would put on him to reverse the situation. I wondered if the sacrificed girls were terrified or too dazed to be terrified; if they wore cloaks of feathers or anything at all. I thought if I jumped from the Pyramid of the Moon at that moment I would land in a bed of pink and yellow roses, dead but not dead, and pass straight into ancient history, speaking an unknown tongue. I felt that I could go anywhere, and in that I was wrong, because I had yet to learn that I could never follow my mother to the places in her mind, or fly off temple towers and be borne back again on the strength of visions.
When I finally climbed down from the summit and back to the Avenue of the Dead, I was in a stream of men and women murmuring Spanish in syllables that I found soothing. Boys tried to sell me postcards or lime soda, and I knew I should be anxious. For another half hour I wandered in a desultory way, smelling the sweat of the crowd and their cooking, feeling the grit scour me in the Mexican wind. It felt good to be eleven and lost in such a crowd. It felt good to be alive. Finally I saw my mother and Miguel tearing along the city's broad plaza, Miguel's face smiling and concerned and my mother's an avenging Harpy of fury, not unlike the gods around us. She needed only a lightning bolt on her head. She cuffed me and dragged me by the hand back to the air-conditioned bus, where all the ladies were waiting, late for their lunch, shooting me dirty looks, and who could blame them? So Miguel, who'd met us at Teotihuacan, offered to drive me back in his car, a dirty Nash Rambler, and we lurched over the roads far in advance of the coach. He sang "La Cucaracha, la Cucaracha," which I had learned in school, and told me not to worry because he could make his car fly, and the ladies would get their lunch and forgive me, that I shouldn't wander off, but now that I had, how had I liked the Pyramid of the Moon?
I smiled back at him. I wasn't sure how to convey what I had felt. How the world had soared beneath me, as distant as lapping waves. How I had the power to leave it behind in the company of elemental deities who could scatter jade raindrops and spill blood to plant corn. And when I think back now, I think of that as the time I began to dream of my mother at the bottom of a deep green well, while I dove down ever deeper to save her, never reaching her or knowing what she knew, her lips parted with her secret for centuries.
Then came the autumn, and with it her vision.
Hunting Season in Wisconsin
WE COLLUDED, my grandmother and I. It had something to do with the way we both loved the smell of gasoline, burning rubber, swamp water, and her cheap romance magazines. Maybe all grandmothers and granddaughters fuel each other in the liberties of self-invention, and more. "I live through you," Mabel told me as I turned twelve, and the statement terrified and thrilled me. I decided I would live twice as hard, with twice the energy, or three times more if that was what was required. I have retained her—her swamp green eyeglasses, her brogues, her stained apron and the creased postcard on which she has written her dill pickle recipe in a round hand. These things comprise my wunderkammer of Mabel—my miniature chamber of her wonders. I keep them in a wooden box and I have it right here, the last talismans that make her as alive as the curses that brought my mother and later me
such embarrassment. "Louie," Mabel would say to him after one of his provocations, "go pee in the wind." And Louie sometimes did of an evening, off the back porch if he thought we girls weren't looking, a delicate rain arcing into the lilacs. "Jesus Christ," he'd bawl at her. "Go stick your tits in the wringer." The wringer stood in the basement, under a shaft of light from a window, where its two round white dowels cleaved the darkness, like Louie and Mabel themselves. Theirs was a rough house, but not a cold one. The amazing heat of their profanity zapped the air like an electric current sizzling flies. My comfort had something to do with the words between them, slipper words flapping about and tattered like the old clothes they wore to streamers on their sun-darkened bodies. No fear of words, no fear that the language would stop.
Sanctuary meant escape. A retreat to Mabel and Louie's house on Lake Puckawasay, to the cognizant rhythms of the seasons instilling themselves in her house, as if seasons too had to dwell in some frame of human experience that made them manifest or be lost. I loved that house so much that in the summer I thought it was the epicenter of the sunrise. At night, the sluicing moon spilled wavy lanes across Puckawasay to the bungalow's back door. Mabel and Louie made fudge and meat juice jelly called silts in winter, he muttering in Czech over pans of cocoa and trays of clear congealed pork fat, leaving both of them on the unheated porch to harden. In the spring, my grandparents shouted and jabbed elbows at each other as they colored eggs with onion skins and beet peels, creating strange dozens of root-dyed eggs in baskets of swamp grass which Louie and the old men had braided. My mother was revolted by Louie and Mabel sucking on panfried squirrel bones in summer. They were forever slaughtering some animal for food, waggling bright knives at us girls, and then skimming them into the evening damp as the meat went into the pot or smokehouse or brine vat. They ate rabbit, squirrel, carp, deer, raccoon, and turde, most lake birds, except of course the herons and egrets. Anything wild, Louie caught. I waited at Mabel's dinner table, safe except for the uncertainty about the origin of the meat in the soup. "It's turde," she said to me one day. "You dassn't like turde? We got mud hen if you want."