by Sarah Gorham
My husband and I agree that Laura needs more than her public-school-twenty-four-year-old-baseball-coach-disaster-ofan-English-teacher can provide. We sign her up for the Reynolds Young Writers Workshop at Denison University, where she will study with Erin McGraw, a real fiction writer. She receives a large scholarship and before we know it, we’re in the airport gently pressing a reluctant sixteen-year-old toward the boarding gate. She won’t let us kiss her good-bye, annoyed that we’ve forced her into this. But a quick glance before she disappears into the plane reveals all—she’s terrified. I let my husband drive home, too upset, convinced we should never have forced her into this. “Never have ideas about children,” said D. H. Lawrence. “Never have ideas for them.”
Three days pass and her first email finally arrives from Denison. Subject heading: “Blue Haired Freaks Can Suck My Bumper.”
Family! How are things la? Last evening Erin McGraw gave a reading from her unpublished new novel. We are the first ever to hear the opening chapter. She is an amazing writer and even with the typically short attention span that dominated this particular audience, every one of us listened with awe. My story is going to be workshopped on Sunday. I’m really struggling with this one. I need to concentrate on the plot now, as opposed to character but I made the mistake of writing it in the first person instead of third…. OH, and at 2:00 a.m. we TPed the TA lounge and called random room numbers unpleasantly waking anyone who’d gone to bed.
She was knee deep in the joy of an unmanufactured epiphany. On the phone she gushed: “I’ve learned more in one day than I did in four years at Manual. Dad, do you know David Foster Wallace or Lorrie Moore or Marilynne Robinson? They are my heroes.” Denison was just the sort of experience she needed to anchor the indefinite future. Now she had a road sign to set her sights on.
On July 30, 1980, during one of the hottest summers in D.C. history, my mother died of cervical cancer. Most cases are curable; this one moved to her lymph nodes and beyond shortly after diagnosis. She was just fifty-one. Her legs and arms puffed with fluid; her belly bulged under the sheet as if she were six months pregnant. For over a month, my sisters and I had shared the task of keeping her comfortable. We said our goodbyes in caretaking—washing her hair, poaching the egg she would never eat, reading E. B. White’s letters out loud, transcribing her farewell notes, which amounted to just a few words each in virtually all—”Please know how much I care about you. So very sorry to bring this into your life.” She declined medical treatment, hastened the end by refusing to sip ice water from the tumbler we set on her bedside table. After five days of this, her irises glittered an unnatural ice blue. Her intention was to make things easier for us, but it meant there was little opportunity for the many questions we had. And no time of course for future weddings, careers, accomplishments she could share. After she was gone, I kissed her cooling forehead. It seemed as conclusive a farewell as there could be.
Little did I know that in dreams and daylight visions, she would return again, a diminished version of herself. She dressed in a blue-and-white-striped garden apron, jeans, and clogs. A mother with a prolonged cold, a chronic disease, but reasonably content in her new life. She lived in Portugal, in Southern France, or lately, in Newfoundland. Once I could feel her hanging onto the roof of our Toyota as we sped up the coast to Connecticut.
And now she appears in Laura’s long legs, splayed feet, and angled posture. My mother’s chiseled Lutheran nose catches me by surprise when Laura cuts her bangs, or ties back her hair. She hates to hear this stuff, doesn’t want to be associated with a dead person she never knew.
Besides, there’s a difference. Next summer Laura will circle back, but not as a ghost, not a diminished, but an enlarged being. This reassures and unsettles me, for isn’t it the natural order? And, isn’t it my place she’s taking?
In the new and improved dorm room at Laura’s college, complete with microwave oven, tiny refrigerator, and private bathroom (tuition has increased by 700 percent since I went to school), I’ll be steeled for the big moment. I don’t expect much—a ritual peck on the cheek, which she will instantly wipe off.
I’ll drive the van home, park under the silver maple, if I’m lucky and there’s a spot. The house will be much the same as before. There, the crumbs from her onion bagel and video games spread out on the floor. She never did learn to put them away. There, the OxiClean, Q-tips, spray of face powder across the sink. The ubiquitous collapsed pajamas. I’m not imagining things—she’s gone, and the time for grieving is underway.
Or, perhaps I’ll turn to her sister Bonnie, ready to inherit Laura’s room, her car, her status as the grown-up one. Bonnie, with less than two years to go.
PERFECT
Heaven
When my mother died, I began to smoke Kents, as she had during difficult times. It didn’t last long. I was never a determined smoker.
I tried to pray with absolute attention. I enjoyed the Our Father for its symmetry: “on earth / as it is in heaven,” and “forgive us our trespasses / as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But my mind rambled. By “now and forever,” I was making a list for the hardware store, wondering which fertilizer would save the Japanese maple by our front porch. A more practical kind of consolation.
If only I knew her intimate habits and feelings. Then the space she left behind would not seem so stark.
I pictured her figure open to the elements, birds plucking bits of cotton, skin, hair, carrying them off to line their nests. Rain drawing her blood into the soil; tissue, tendon, and muscle battered with air. Finally bone, returned to its chemical components and scattered like microscopic hail.
Perhaps a body is perfect not when it is complete but when there is no longer anything to take away.
I can’t recall my mother singing. Not even a shout or robust coughing. Was she preoccupied by minute workings of blood through her temples, an ear filament flaring out, or cells turning mean, flipped over to their dark side like microscopic playing cards?
When I think of my mother’s inner life, I see a Kleenex, its powdery edges twisted into sculpture. She gripped it while the party wound down.
After she died, I removed a crumpled one from her purse. Dry, but sudden too, as a splash in my hand.
Maybe heaven is textured like a river after it falls over rocks. Maybe it is nothing. Perhaps we are suppressed or superreal. Unaccompanied, or linked by our hair to everyone who has died.
My mother was given twelve baby-shaped beans to hold tightly as she went over, the grandchildren she would not meet in this life.
Burn her sweaters, party shoes, and skirts so she can wear them if she wants.
Neriage, or What Is the
Secret of a Long Marriage?
Once upon a time, a lump of clay was lifted from the earth by human hands. The clay was rolled into a sphere, a wormy coil, then squashed flat again with fingers and toes.
Marianne Ellison was born in 1892, in Hamburg, New York. She weighed just six pounds and immediately began to peer around. All was light and shadow, but fascinating.
Henry Piper was born two years later, a few doors down from Marianne. He had a crown of thick black hair and an operatic voice that carried down the corridor and into the street.
Because clay is impure, it must be kneaded, or “wedged,” with a steady pushing and rocking motion. Sometimes a bubble appears in the conchlike folds, spreads, weakens, finally bursts. Seeds, pebbles, roots, pinecone chips like curses or objections, all dispersed. The clay is soon homogenized, filled with a mysterious energy, smooth and springy as the predawn surface of a pond.
Marianne was a precocious child and an even more impressive adult. Her qualities? A tendency to react quickly, flushing deep scarlet all the way up to her ears. An inability to sit still, rising from her seat four times at least during a meal to grab silverware, wine, or water. A penchant for collecting miniatures, for organizing, for saving her favorite part of a meal for last. A love of short novels that satisfied but allow
ed her to get on with her day. Moving, doing, perseverance, loyalty.
Henry’s graces? Charm, social ease, a sense of humor that mixed low with the elevated. An addiction to music, tobacco, meat, bread, sugar. Extreme focus, whether the task be budget percentages, bicycle routes, or the repair of a screen door. Builder of bookcases. Forgetter of birthdays, errands, and the names of relatives beyond his primary family. Watching, being, intelligence, big hands.
Imagine a landscape of one continuous hue. Imagine clay fired year after year to a monotonous brown. It wasn’t long before someone thought to add iron, cobalt, manganese, creating difference—pattern and color. Neriage, a Japanese term meaning “to mix,” involves blending layers of multicolored clay to form teapots, vases, bowls, any vessel a person might wish.
Black is Saturn, diamonds, lead, error, falsehood, in blazonry—prudence and constancy. Red is Mars, fortitude, divine love, the metal of war, rubies, martyrdom, charity. Neriage is a wedding of opposites, hot and cold, flexible and resolute.
Marianne first met her neighbor Henry by a pond brimming with duckweed and tree frogs. She was seventeen, he fifteen, and each was seeking reprieve from the inner weather of their respective homesteads. Born of preacher and postman, respectively, Marianne and Henry were known villagewide as the independent sort, remarkable for their curiosity and acumen.
They married in a garden, surrounded by Portlandia, Star of the Nile, Will-o’-the-Wisp, though the roses were burlap-bundled against the cold. Marianne wore a black skirt with matching jacket. Henry’s suit was also plain, his one reckless move a crimson handkerchief. Their Lutheran minister had reservations about the young couple. Could they endure what lay ahead? It was storming in the South, though the rain held off for their simple ceremony.
Side by side:
her reticence
his humor
her acceptance
his suspicion
her optimism
his irony
Neriage is all about parceling out the goods fairly, then putting them back together. In the beginning were stripes, then checkerboard, pinwheels, zigzag, and so forth. Finally, the highly complex bokuryu, or “flowing ink” style. But most patterns begin with two colors of opposing hue, hunks of red and black clay, sliced with a cutting wire into slabs. Positioned on lengths of clean canvas. Intact, separate.
It was as if each room were divided into two.
Her space was small, formal, sharp cornered. A bookcase behind the door, diaries and novels piled on every available surface, but artfully, like fancy cakes. Two ancient desks arranged into a practical L: one in dark-stained oak, the other English pine with a worn spot where a farmer once rested his foot. On the wall, she hung printer’s boxes to display her miniscule tea-pots, scissors, spoons, and thimbles. Everything in its place. This is not The Box! (What exactly did that mean, printed in bold?) She longed for a dictionary stand.
His territory was more complicated. Drawings, drafts, and pithy tributes gathered dust in boxes—his desk no longer visible for the piles of books and crumpled paper. Even his leather bag bubbled and gushed with wire-rimmed reading glasses, file folders, mail he simply couldn’t bear to throw away. He bought clocks and toy cars on special order, setting some of them aside for resale. Though not obvious to the observer, he had a system. Once he found a tax-refund check for $116 he’d used for a bookmark, now several years beyond its expiration date.
Initially, the clay resists fusion. Some say pigments are to blame, each a unique chemistry that encourages autonomy, insularity. Others claim the slabs have begun, quite naturally, to mature—an hour of clay time is two years in human time. As it interacts with air, dust, water, each piece develops a skin, a definite self-sufficiency.
Saturday morning, before the chores were done:
—What a mess. How can you live like this. Why don’t you throw this stuff away.
—It’s my mess. Please get out of my mess.
—But your mess is all over the place. Can’t you clean it up?
—It’s my mess. Leave my mess alone.
Sometimes he sketched, spread out on her couch, coffee mug in a liquid mocha ring on her bookshelf, shoes splayed, socks bunched up, then she didn’t know what to do with herself and skittered back and forth like a child unseated in a game of musical chairs. He was startled to find his cars arranged in a parade across the windowsill, polished to a military shine. She had ruined them! One night, he was forced outside under the stars to dig through the trash for an early draft of a speech that now seemed better than the revision. In a burst of cleaning, she’d tossed it out.
Ethologist Jean-Jacques Petter recognized the human need for rivalry, naming it noyau, or “society of inward antagonism,” which like an alloy, gains strength from the interior clash and meld of dissimilar components. Paul Fussell calls it the “versus habit.” The Japanese have in-yō.
Masters of neriage understand that art and love both begin with violence. They put aside their squeamishness and break the clay’s resistance—desecrating, or scoring, each slab. A fork does the quickest work, the sharper the better. Scraped vertically, horizontally, no corner left untouched. Then sweep a damp brush coated with slip over the cut surface, softening, coaxing.
For Marianne, it was the loss of her mother, who died of tuberculosis. A stubborn woman, she was fearful of hospitals and allowed the disease to advance unimpeded. Marianne loved her immeasurably, had so much left to ask, and yet stood by helplessly as her mother lay parched and rasping on the bed. For Henry the pivotal event was his sister’s suicide by drowning, though tragically, she was an excellent swimmer. After a week of searching, she was found in neighboring Lake Muscatine, fully clothed, bricks and big stones in her coat pockets. In both cases, the funerals were private functions, though friends slipped boxes of food, notes, and flowers onto their porch. One left a basket containing a bulldog pup, whom they embraced, naming him Arthur.
Over the years adversity continued on and off, tearing, tempering. Henry and Marianne nearly lost their first child to peritonitis; their second fell in love with a destructive boy, who eventually committed a murder. Marianne developed early arthritis. At the tender age of forty, she found herself unable to write by hand, though she could type, pecking with one or two fingers. Henry was stalked by an unstable student, a war veteran, who finally had to be institutionalized.
There was good fortune too: an invitation to study in Rome, a financial windfall from a state granting program, newborn nieces, nephews. Their youngest was the first in her class to attend an out-of-state university with a full scholarship. She made the transition from small town to busy metropolis brilliantly, sending postcards full of exclamation points. The eldest set up a law practice in town, the only lawyer who would, when necessary, accept paintings, a dental exam, or a half-hog in lieu of payment. Marianne and Henry enjoyed his bounty too, filling their freezer with frozen raspberries and tubs full of chicken rice soup.
her outbursts
his restraint
her anxiety
his faith
her flexibility
his willfulness
The masters instruct: Nestle red on black, black on red. Listen for the suck of connection, they explain. Slice a new set of slabs, score, brush with slip, repeat, repeat, repeat, until you have a tower of red and black. Compress with the force of a hard rain, a good freeze. Flip the stack onto its side, pile up your shims, and once more, draw your wire through the clay. This is the aha moment when the singular pattern reveals itself. Note how well the stripes have knit together, elongating, swaying like geological striations or Venetian marbled paper.
After time and sufficient pressure, any boundary will fail to hold up. Unpatrolled, they leak, tributaries of river silt irrigating the fields, tendrils of campfire creeping across the dirt. Human characteristics too—of habit, perception, even physical appearance—leap their borders, muddy the outlines between man and woman, woman and man.
It’s impossible to map t
his terrain, to explain why the clay gives in one spot and resists in another.
The Pipers merged their vast book collections, and any doubles (of Tennyson, Thoreau, James) were given away. She lost interest in classical music when jazz came along; they both adored June Christy and Fats Domino most of all. Henry began to cook and she sat back, enjoying his Swedish meatballs, garlic and lemon trout, and seeded breads. They invented a new language and embarrassing nicknames for each other, which they sometimes used in public:
spodie
caucus
pintel
gutcheon
hunca
munca
He finished her sentences. She supplied the word putative when it slipped his mind, if not at the moment then a few hours later. He so understood her need to leave a party early, he too became itchy and sullen at nine o’clock. They both sunk into a gloom during heavy rains, took turns reassuring the other: it’s just the weather. Which became their explanation for any mood, dark or light: the miserable glorious weather. They tore a huge hole in a wall and filled it with glass, though it ruined the house lines and (a neighbor complained) opened their living room to the street.
In neriage, what is created from two distinct terrains is a fresh, negotiated third space. Each blended slab is unique: little landscapes of black hills and red canyons, red crests and black silhouettes, hot and cold rivers zigzagging side by side. A master handles the patterned slabs carefully, draping one into a mold as if nestling a newborn into a bassinet. Or wrapping another around a rolling pin to form a vase, stripes tumbling down like lava on volcanic rock.