by Sarah Gorham
Be there no human here
be there here the flat marsh
before man, be there here
those bony wings.
(“Window Views,” Laura Jensen)
Every night I dream of flying. My arms pump laboriously; I rise six or seven feet above the pursuant tiger, bear, serpent. Something is always chasing me. There’s no safe place on the compound, though I lurch from barn to garage to precarious rooster-cupola. Sometimes I make it as far as the upper canopy of sycamores, catching my breath till the predator appears, thumping on the ground below. The sky is an unreal indigo. My clothes weigh me down, as if I were swimming through Karo syrup. Of the many styles of dream flying, I always revert to the breaststroke, using my hands for guidance at the beginning of each backward pull. Fatigue is a serious limitation.
Oh, to be like my husband, waking each morning dazzled, his dream flight a green-glass liberation. He describes a pin, or Superman-style: horizontal, arms straight before him, hips tilting slightly to steer. The worst he can remember is flying too high, beyond the sound of human voice, siren, even explosion. Ice crystals formed on his fingertips and eyelashes. His lips cracked and burned. Finally, he executed a midair reverse flip, which got him going in the right direction.
Flying dreams are related to the vestibular system, which regulates body equilibrium. I read this somewhere. Also, that sleep clinics have actually induced these dreams by manipulating the sleeper’s sense of balance: applying a blood-pressure cuff, rocking in a hammock, raising and lowering the bed.
But why is it so hard to get off the ground? Maybe I’m just exhausted, still processing some unsettling news from my sister. Or perhaps my marrow-stuffed bones are just too heavy, even in my imagination. Real bird bones are filled with air. Birds have no teeth, another adaptation that makes them lighter.
I often dream my own teeth are crumbling and falling to my hands. But it doesn’t make flying any easier for me.
A mist net is black, made of nylon, and resembles an extremely fine volleyball net. Ornithologists stretch them across thickets, deep in forests, and along shorelines in darkness or nearly moonless nights to capture birds in flight. They are almost invisible. Hitting a mist net, most birds tumble into a pocket of mesh, which quickly folds around them. They will suffer from wind, rain, and possibly predation if left for long periods of time, so it’s vital that nets are checked often. Each bird tangled in mesh presents a unique challenge in extraction. We run the risk of strangling them—though there is no soft spot in the bird’s trachea that can collapse (as in mammals), overconstriction of the entire body during restraint can cause oxygen deprivation. If we are worried the bird will escape, or frustrated at the snarl of fine threads around a wing, we might apply unnecessary force. If the bird struggles too much, the tangles inevitably worsen. Practice, extra care, patience, and common sense are needed to free a bird. In worst-case scenarios, we can always grab a pocketknife or pair of scissors.
Avoiding the risks of mist nets altogether, pull traps, drop traps, and walk-in traps are also available to capture ground-feeding species.
Now a mourning dove waddles into a walk-in, lured by a heap of sunflower seeds and millet, and catches the wire mechanism. The trap snaps shut, and I approach cautiously so as not to further fluster the bird. It will hurl itself against the wire mesh relentlessly in the effort to escape, tearing tissue, feathers. I slide up the door, spread the left hand over the opening, then reach into the cage to embrace the dove with the right, grasping the body without squeezing, careful to envelop each wing, its head nestled gently between index and middle fingers. I pass the dove through the rubber flaps of a keeping cage and carry the cage inside, where an assistant removes and holds the bird firmly. I gently extend the leg, press a number-stamped metal ring around with a tool that prevents overlap; record in a looseleaf binder that number, date, species, gender, any unusual features; walk the bird outside myself, open my hand and …
To our surprise, the dove doesn’t take flight immediately. It pauses, as though unbelieving. Shock at the sudden breeze when, before, death had a scent, sensation—salty, warm, and unyielding. Seconds pass.
No, I take back the “unbelieving,” “shock at the sudden breeze,” the impression that “death had a scent, sensation.” I think instead: All the lives I could live, all the species I will never know, never will become—they are everywhere. That is what the world is.
The bird flies, with an audible whistling sound.
PERFECT
Barn
Having all the required or desirable elements, qualities,
or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be.
Who named it perfect? Who made the declaration? Was it a swallow, nest mud-plastered to a piece of solid timber? Dried herbs sprouting a cottony mold? Rain that slides in sheets down the red tin roof? Wasps that appreciate ventilation but would never tell you so? Folding chairs in need of a stiff brush and paint? The straw, the long-dead horse, and its hocked saddle? The what that will take the place of rakes, dangerously rusting in a webby corner?
Soon I’ll move my chair, or run inside for oranges, or fail to sleep very well, and then humidity will lay a green slime across the siding. The barn will not resist. In this the barn is no better than fence, or catalpa, or fields of medium-brown wheat.
But for now, the barn has perfect siding the color of coffee grounds flecked with salt and a long gray wind-stroking. The door doesn’t fit and I love it so, love the shoulder lift I must perform in freeing it from its lock. I’m a little frightened of tetanus but the bottom gap that brushes grass and hedgebrook sets forth a minty smell. The tractor on blocks, the barn’s ambling house-shape with hexagonal door frames. Above, parabolas of bird-hunger chasing mosquitoes. There’s an easy reason for the barn’s abandonment. I love holding that reason back.
Woman Drawn Twice
Laura, elder daughter of two, driver of a Toyota as old as she is, occupant of the attic room, is going off to college. My friends are all sympathetic. I must be a bad parent because this imminent separation doesn’t strike me as tragic.
What’s made it easier is Laura herself. She holds the world at arm’s length. Even as a baby, Laura would allow only her father and me to touch her. Uncles and aunts, forget it. Her very first sentence was, as I tried to pry loose the flap from her diaper, “Don’t do that!”
Once we went camping and she brought her friend Rita along. For three days they were inseparable, sunbathing together on the rocks, hiking into town for sliders and French fries. Then suddenly Laura had enough social bonding. She began to sleep in, to disappear on mysterious after-dinner strolls. I took my tea to the edge of the creek one morning, and there was poor Rita, splashing about in a canoe, forlorn and abandoned.
Laura keeps a journal, leaves it on the coffee table or on the bathroom floor. Perhaps to lure us inside, perhaps not. But we don’t look. She also has a web page and there with a click of a button we are welcomed in, browsers like anyone else. It doesn’t feel like trespassing, but the voice we hear is not meant for her parents:
Hello beautiful this is Laura the 16 year old illegal permit driving, Manual High School attending, singing, dancing, romancing Ramsi’s employee. I read, write, and wish everyday that precalculus didn’t exist. I’m out every weekend, sorry to you silly fools that get online 24/7 no I don’t want to be your friend. Why do people love those bland, uninteresting talentless “artists” they see on television? That was cynical … and no im not a lesbian. Im going to NYU to be an English professor of creative writing with three novels, a wealthy, but interesting husband im in love with and a kid or two in my spare time. You have a problem with it you can call my super expensive top of the line lawyer, wherever she is.
Laura the timid one, the make-a-fort-in-the-closet girl, the girl who never wore shorts much less a bathing suit?
As a teenager, I was pure ham: spoke, sang, even whispered at high volume. No matter how subtle or insignificant the emotion, I e
mbellished it, stealing from performances I’d seen on TV, exaggerating until my audience was drawn in. At sixteen, I told my mother everything and opened my heart to anyone else who would listen too. Because in my mind, a kept secret was a festering thought, dangerous to my health.
My mother was a guardian of secrets, gentle soldier at the kitchen sink, doe with ears twitching. Always a listener, ever available, her own dark thoughts settled deep, pushed there by the flutter-kick of family. When it came time for my college lift-off, things went smoothly. A long drive west on the pitted Pennsylvania turnpike, then Ohio, steaming in late August heat. I remember this: Luggage in hand, we approached Cory Hall, my dorm for a semester. What an eyesore—tattered vinyl sofas in the lobby, graffiti on the cinderblock walls, gray-green drapes half up, half down. Something evil and stinky dripped from a balcony above. We had to dodge it to get in. “Oh, Sarah,” my mother said, her voice drooping. But this midwestern hippie school was my choice and it had to be a good one, so I chirped, “It’s OK!” And I followed two longhaired boys up the stairs. When I glanced back, she was gone.
I see my mother’s orange VW bus pull into the driveway and she enters the house again. There on the counter, the smoked turkey I love between two slices of Wonder Bread. There my jeans with their U.S. flag patches that caused such an argument. Now the hairclips, Prell shampoo, and mildewed camping equipment. Wandering from room to room, she gathers up the debris. She soaks up the silence and wonders why the storm that was her daughter’s adolescence felt so difficult to navigate.
But I am just imagining things. Perhaps she simply turns to the next child, Nancy, with less than two years to go.
Laura has lost her sculpture, which at first glance resembles a stone thumb. Upon closer inspection, it’s actually quite moving—a tiny figure stooped in prayer or under the weight of a great burden. She kept it in a shoebox on the stairs, but now only the sandpaper and tools are in evidence. She’s frantic and of course it’s all my fault, “Your incessant cleaning, Mom. Tomorrow the sculpture is due in 3D art!”
Turns out the dog carried it outside and is happily gnawing on the little penitent. We approach him and he rumbles low in his throat.
Laura in the backseat, complaining about Cézanne. “I think his paintings are ugly. He’s way overrated. His portrait of the Alps looks like a big lump of ham.” My husband suggests she look at his other work before she condemns him completely. “Yeah, yeah,” she drones. “I’m sick of the Impressionists. Public schools love them. Humanities and Impressionism. French and Impressionism. Art and Impressionism. Blah Impressionism Blah.”
Poor little melon, tossed in with the black turnips.
—CHINESE PROVERB
Years earlier, while Laura “napped” in her big-girl bed, we’d hear a complex drama in several voices, high and low. “Jesus, I’m making a lot of noise,” she remarked. Later, when she began to read, the theater went deeper inside. Folded up like a frog under her kindergarten desk, she breezed through all of Roald Dahl. Her teacher reported this with a wry smile, then added generously, “OK with me, as long as she’s reading.” By early adolescence it was Sanctuary, Laughter in the Dark, and Light in August. At twelve, she showed us her first short story, “Climbing Out,” written for an English class, about a girl who leaves a bad relationship with her boyfriend. We were surprised by its sophistication—the wry, clear voice from one so young:
Eric stood up and climbed into the back of his ’97 Ford pickup truck, his jeans clinging to the Tommy Hilfiger emblem on his boxer shorts. I had been dating Eric for over eight months and not once during that time had he ever used a belt. His idea of good conversation was a discussion on the gayness of our history teacher, Mr. Higgens.
“Hey Liz, what about his new toupee, is the horsehair real or faux do you suppose?” he called from the truck.
His pointed smile reminded me of the Trix rabbit. “Go stand in the snow,” I replied.
She’d never even had a boyfriend, as far as I knew.
My mother had a literary life. I know because I discovered her thesis, red-leather bound, carbon-copied on onionskin—Peggy Aring’s analysis of Melville’s Billy Budd. I know because of the pencil marks in her Modern Library edition of Frost and Dickinson, her poems around their poems. She read widely—Rexroth’s translations, Snyder, Williams, of course. She leaned toward the aesthetics of haiku master Takahama Kiyoshi, who believed that when a poet’s sentiments are overly visible, the audience grows uncomfortable. Better to write simply and only what is there in a scene, to make a connection by calling on a reader’s imagination. Her pencil crossed and recrossed phrases that struck her as sentimental or melodramatic.
One day a tall, gangly, middle-aged poet named Donald Petersen showed up at our front door. In his book from Wesleyan University Press, which he was carrying, he called her his muse. “And did you know she wrote too?” he said to me. My mother flushed and wished him away. The poor man never made it inside the house, though he had traveled for several hours.
She wouldn’t want me to tell you. But for the life of me, I can’t keep a secret.
My husband, a collector, purchases a “safety pen” circa 1904, its case sterling, about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. It looks like a fancy cigar tube, but twist a knob at the base and the fourteen-carat gold nib emerges from the chamber. Twist again, and it spirals back, undetectable.
An hour of solitude in my house occupied by teenagers. It’s three in the afternoon. I’m relishing Carmen on my radio, an arrangement for flute and piano. It speeds up my thinking, makes me want to dance. Laura is just now waking up.
She appears puffy-eyed at my study door in her Cabbage Patch pajamas. “Mom. Mom. MOM. Would you turn that music off? It sounds like ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’ Why would you wanna hear that first thing in the a.m.?”
By dinner Laura has noticed it’s Mother’s Day and has finally pulled something together. She swipes one of my greeting cards and attaches a tulip, snipped from a bouquet I purchased that morning to cheer myself up. Later, feeling a little sheepish, she leaves a pot of petunias on the front hallway floor. “Is this for me?” I have to ask.
I scour the literature. Romain Rolland: “The child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be healthy is to disgorge it all.” What Rolland and others neglect to say is how well adolescence readies the parent for separation. As if every transition from one stage of life to another demands a trail of stones and potholes, crests and gorges to be truly effectual. Here’s one verse to that song: “Why are you always harping on me? Do you have to eat right next to me? Why don’t you make Bonnie walk the dog? Why do you have to chew so loud?”
In Chinese characters woman drawn twice signifies “quarrel.”
Laura is working at Baskin-Robbins four days a week, despite her intention to “be as irresponsible as I can this summer.” Spare time is spent sleeping, on the computer IMing her friends, shopping at thrift stores. Obligation to family or chores gets short shrift. So too, eating. The bowl of muddy milk left on the living room floor—Cocoa Krispies and skim—is the only evidence she’s had any sustenance at all.
The pendulum begins to swing. Back. My mother was ashamed of her body. Forth. I kept a list of lovers in a little black notebook. Back. My mother picked at her food, content with the turkey back, the wing. Forth. I claimed the white meat, ate ravenously. Now, I stand guard over Laura to make sure she finishes her dinner. I thump pointlessly on the bathroom door, the only place she can lock herself in.
“Why are you such a Hitler?” she asks.
Laura and Rita want to drive to Morehead to camp, this time without us. Oh my. The eastern Kentucky woods in an unreliable, eighteen-year-old Toyota Tercel. The morning news influences our decision: A stripper in New Jersey pulled off the road when her car broke down. As she checked under the hood, she was blindsided by a passing vehicle. The driver kept going. So did the next three, even a
fter they felt the jolt of her body under their wheels.
And the young man accepted at Yale who fell asleep at the wheel and careened over a cliff in Colorado. And teenagers and country roads without yellow lines. And the dark, and the dark beer they’ll surely be drinking. And Laura last year on the spearmint lake at Disney World in her own little powerboat careening about like a demented waterbug. Rocks, pilings, piers. A ferry’s boiling wake. Other unpredictable boats. And Laura traversing the waterfall, Laura with her nonchalant springy step, her inexplicable mixture of shyness and daring. Her parents holding their breath.
So: No. No, sorry, no. While your father and I can still say it. No.
My mother said no too, and I trotted downstairs to my bedroom with its strung-up Christmas ornament like a modern-day gazing ball. Then I cranked the little wheel on my window and slipped out to Rob and his van, his pot, our brand-new sex under maniacal cicadas in the dense Washington night.
When Laura comes home one night with a red mark like a Luden’s lozenge at the base of her neck, I feel justified. She was supposed to be sleeping at Danielle’s house. Just who gave her the hickey? Danielle? Not that I have a leg to stand on, which is why my outrage is tinged with hilarity. The Chinese said it first: children are creditors collecting for the sins of our past lives.
Again, I have the dream, not uncommon among women. Back at college for the summer term. The Ohio heat is suffocating, grass brown and rigid as toothpicks. Students less than half my age move about without even a glance in my direction. I’m not interesting; I’m too old to be here. But I’ve forgotten to turn in my paper for some literature class, or take that last PE credit (here the details vary), so my degree is at risk. Where’s my family, everything I’ve accomplished? I’m nothing and the countryside too has lost its landmarks, uniform beige surrounding the college like Beirut.