by Carole Maso
With her voice alone she forced the season prematurely into winter.
I could not have known that my first meeting with Jennifer would be the only time we would ever speak. As simply and as strangely as she had entered my life, she would exit from it. And the place that seemed to promise so much would become off-limits to me as she grew more and more solitary, lost in the lives of the Stafford women in the room that had been my mother’s.
So it was my mother who had brought me here, I thought. Because I was her daughter I was privy to a sad underworld that otherwise I would probably have never come across. It had been the reason for the small note, the reason for everything. My mother through Jennifer had brought me here—to Marta, to this sorrow. She had united us at this wailing wall, this place of the lacerated skin, the shorn hair. She had brought me here, as if she herself had taken me by the hand. She had brought me here to this universe of grief, though I did not know why yet.
It had not occurred to her while they were together that the lovely, branching line that looked like a delicate sprig of wheat was actually the life line and that it separated early, somewhere near the base of the thumb.
But Natalie had already stepped onto another continent, her arms outstretched, her doomed hands open, before Marta realized the truth etched in her palm, and by that time it was too late.
Pamela Stafford, second aunt of Jennifer Stafford, but only a wisp of a child at the time, stepped tentatively in front of the camera for her screen test at the MGM studios. She looked back at her new friend for luck and smiled. Her straight hair, which had been set on hard rollers all night, had already lost its curl. Her pink dress puffed out from the waist made her look like the most fragile of flowers.
“Go on,” the smiling man coaxed. “Go on, sweetheart.”
“Moon River,” she sang softly off key,
“Wider than the Nile,
“I’m crossing you in style
“Someday.”
She cleared her throat.
“Oh, dream maker, you heartbreaker,
“Wherever you’re going,
“I’m going your way.”
“What are we going to see, Dad?” we screamed.
“It’s called It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” he said dreamily. “It’s in Cinerama, with the screen so big that it wraps around you.” He paused for a long time. “Cinerama,” he murmured. “You’ve never seen anything like it.”
On the book jacket of To Vanessa is my favorite picture of my mother. She is in profile and she looks as serene as I have ever seen her—content, happy. The light is beautiful and she is smiling. I would have stopped her in my mind in this position forever if I could have, but that is the photographer’s art, not the daughter’s. My mother cannot stay still in my mind. A lovely profile turns full face, slowly the smile dissolves, and the vision breaks. Her hair grays, then changes back. She grows young, wanders through the quiet house of her childhood in Paterson, New Jersey, a little girl on tiptoe, looking in on her own sleeping mother or sitting in the dark listening to the Sunday stories of her father. I look again at her smiling profile on the back of To Vanessa, my book. She will not hold still for me.
“Disney land!” Grandpa Sarkis said. “Would you look at that?”
“The Magic Kingdom!”
“Look at that castle!” my mother cried.
“A castle for my little princesses in California!” their father said, patting their heads.
“Here’s Niagara Palls!” Lucy said.
“Where lovers go!” my mother sighed.
“Listen to this,” Lucy said. “About four million gallons of water per minute thunder over the lip of the falls into the Maid-of-Mist Pool!”
“Four million gallons!” my mother said.
“Per minute!” Lucy added.
My father sings loudly over the rushing water along with Louis Armstrong:
“Two drifters, off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see.
We’re after the same
Rainbow’s end
Waiting round the bend,
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.”
He raises a shiny trumpet to his lips, bends his knees, and blows. Beads of sweat fall down his face. He wipes his brow with an imaginary rag.
Part Four
I expect there’ll be rain today,” she says, flexing her arthritic fingers as we look out the back window onto the smoldering landscape.
“Oh, I don’t know, Grandma.” I smile at her. To me the farm sky looks like it’s going to hold back, going to deny the open-throated hens, the crippled corn, the old women.
“We’ll see,” she says, her eyes closed. It looks as if she’s trying to gather the strength to go on. In the darkness she pictures three white pillars. She opens her eyes, forcing herself back to the scene, back to the breeze and its empty promise, back to the weeping willows sucking stones from dirt, the panting dogs, the neighbor’s slow gaze, the memory of water lulling everything to sleep. She clears her throat, opens and shuts her hands. It’s as if those bony fingers extend out past the glass onto the earth as row s of crops. If she could only do something—she draws her fingers in, folds her hands, and puts them in her lap. The tomatoes bleed into the ground. The basil dries on its stalk. Peas shrivel. Trees shrink to shrubs. The scorpion moves in, the tortoise, the lizard glitters in the sun. Humps grow on the backs of dogs until they are camels. When I turn around, the soil has turned to sand. When I turn again, the rosebush is a cactus.
“It’s so hot, Grandma. If I was a snake I’d leave my skin.”
“Be sensible,” she says. Her voice is as old as the sand. Her throat is the bark of oaks.
“I think I’d like to take a long, cool bath”—water gushing up to the top of the tub, overflowing when I reach for the soap; water hitting my thighs, circling my knees.
“Grandma, it’s so hot. I think I’d like to go to the grocery store and stand next to the frozen foods for a while. I wish I was a TV dinner! I wish I was a fish stick!”
“Vanessa, be sensible,” she says. It sounds like a plea.
My grandmother was all good sense. A beautiful plant flowered at the base of her brain: broad-leaved, hardy, dark green. If she could have seen it, it would have pleased her, but of course she could not. She did not have the eyes for it. Only at the end was it replaced by something else—something more dense, rounded, almost luminous, something harder. I watched it happen: the flower fold into itself, the leaves curl back into the seed, the seed explode. Then my grandmother, strong willed, confident, grew backward into some tentative future and was frightened. But that was only much later.
“It’s too hot to argue with you today, Vanessa.”
But I could not think of a time when we had argued. Our conversations usually consisted of two or three sentences, a statement by one of us and response by the other, all of which was repeated a few times over. The rest of the argument must have gone on in my grandmother’s head. She always seemed more angry with me than her words had indicated.
Because I needed my grandmother most in spring, I rarely spoke to her at all then, out of fear that I might upset or alienate her. In that watery, unstable season when the whole world seemed to be changing, she did not. She was always the same: a silhouette, a dark triangle, carrying eggs and milk and wood back and forth between the barn and the house. She was a place for the wandering eye to rest. As the dogwood exploded around my head and, under my feet, seedlings sighed and gasped for air, I followed her along her hypnotic path and attempted to focus my attention, instead of letting it run on endlessly here, there, until inevitable exhaustion and then depression set in. What I was looking for was an order, and somehow I knew even then that order was the product of a self-conscious effort, it was a man-made thing imposed on the universe and involving constant exclusions. But as hard as I tried, as much as I concentrated on the print in my grandmother’s dress or the gray strands in her hair, I could not
forget the complex texture of the evening or the sound of the ground breaking apart. And though the transparency of spring frightened me—the chloroplasts I could see in the leaves, the worms moving underneath the dirt, and the human body looking like the plastic models in science class—I kept it all: the exposed heart, the miles and miles of purple and blue veins everywhere; I think I had no choice.
I remember how the animals howled, not just at night but all day long, too—high pitched, at the edge of control. Sex turned their bodies liquid. They seemed to swim inside each other, with their curving backs and gleaming eyes. Could you see it in me, Grandma? The sex of animals? The fur on my arms? The hair standing straight up on the back of my neck? The swollen glands? The friction under my skin? I frightened myself. But you kept walking; the chores kept you busy—the hens, the hogs. You were tireless, your head bent, your arms overflowing, insisting in your every action that life made sense, life made good sense. I thought it was wonderful that someone who had lived as long as she could still believe that. But when she was seventy, I was only twelve and just learning how the bed could float around under my hands. I noticed the sweating men in the market, their thick arms, their large muddy hands. They began to stare at me. How beautiful a young girl’s neck can be, one whispered, how smooth her skin. I fingered my lower lip and pretended I did not hear. At night I could feel the weight of those words like hands all over me. Is that why she disliked me? Could she tell that one day my eyes would be able to make anyone melt? That freely, and without guilt, I’d open myself to them?
Plants pushed through the cracked earth. Fish twirled in the air, their scales reflected light in every direction. Thousands of ants moved together like black shadows across the yard.
But none of this seemed to bother her. “Dinner,” she’d call from the kitchen window. “Dinner,” she’d say, ringing a large bell, wiping her hands on her apron. I loved you best in spring, Grandma, if I ever loved you.
In the dreams of my grandmother the barn looks enormous—a red cutout against the stark sky. The sky itself is almost white but not quite; there’s a hint of gray, a touch of blue there. Somewhere in the cloudless, birdless sky, my grandfather lies—somewhere I can’t see, he’s lost in gray-blue.
“How much longer?” I ask the sky. I feel myself to be an ancient instrument upon which someone’s fingers play slow, sad music, hesitantly, careful not to touch the wrong note. It’s something eerie and difficult, something I’ve never heard before, and yet I feel a part of it. The music continues as I look out the back window and see the hay he stacked in huge piles before he died, still there, about to ignite. There’s a message among those brittle bales. I study them from every angle. The notes fade. Or perhaps he forgot to leave one as he moved closer and closer to the place where messages no longer count. Does a twelve-year-old girl make any difference at all to him now? Maybe in the overall pattern there’s a larger truth, a design I can’t yet see. He tells me something—the best way to reach him or how to live a better life. Some days I think I hear his voice coming from the center of the stacks, the voice I’ve kept vivid and perfect in my mind. It’s softer than in life, muffled, but distinctly his. “Why do you make your grandmother walk so far?” it asks.
“Why don’t we just sit for a minute, Grandma? Why don’t we just rest?” I place my hands on the tops of her shoulders, wanting to push her down. Already I am as tall as she. She sits for a minute to tie her shoe. Her bones are brittle. She could break so easily under my hands.
“I can’t, Vanessa. My feet won’t do it.” She rises. Quickly, I lift my hands up.
“Thank God I’m able,” she says, as we begin the walk to the cemetery on the other side of town. I suppose she believed that soon enough her shoes would fill with dirt for billions and billions of years, too heavy to lift.
Grandma would have buried him on the farm. Wheat would have sprung between his bones. The lacy leaves of tomatoes would have formed a crown for his head. Fruit would have grown in his mouth. His fingers would have fed the flowers.
It was my father who objected when my grandmother suggested a plot of land left of the silo in the north pasture behind the barn.
“I will not,” his pale hands looked like two smooth fish, “I will not eat my own father’s flesh.” He stared at his mother, the stare of the orphan, the stare of the terrified child left totally alone in the world—the stare that much later would become the permanent face of my father. But now the look changed: the grown man came back; his eyes grew darker; his pupils opened; his mouth seemed to curl in sarcasm or anger. Did he think then, looking at my grandmother in her yellow apron, why was it she—pacing in the kitchen, now lighting the oven and complaining about the price of oil—who continued while his gentle father in the next room could not even get up? As he sat there at the table, his eyes bloodshot and wide, did he wish to trade their deaths? Her hair that had not yet completely grayed seemed an insult, her feet that would not drag. I thought of my own tenuous position in my father’s heart. He looked to me. I thought he wanted to touch me; it seemed his body moved slightly forward in my direction but then pulled back. I think he wanted to be forgiven, for he was sorry he would never be a father like his father, and he didn’t know how to make it up to us. He stood up. His face went blank.
“I will not eat my own father’s flesh.” He turned toward the window. The wheat quivered in the wind. “Bury him somewhere else. The dead grow enormous without our help—so huge you cannot swallow them, you cannot choke them down.”
Already when my father looked out onto the land that his father loved so much he could see him there, his hands folded across his chest in the slopes of the hills. When he walked on the land he thought he heard my grandfather sigh. In the cow’s brown eyes he thought my grandfather watched him. In the wind my grandfather whispered requests my father could not keep.
I remember wandering into the barn one night very late and seeing him, lit by the moon, kneeling in the hay. Was I just sleepwalking? Was I only dreaming? I still do not know for sure. His arms were bent to his chest, and he held something gently, carefully, close to his heart. At first I could not see. And then he laid them down in the hay. They were two white eggs. Anyone might have thought my father crazy then. But I understood. He thought they were his own father’s fragile testicles.
My grandmother shook her head the way horses do, trying to cast something off, and peered at my father as if he indeed were some stranger, not her child at all, some madman, some insult.
Although my father could never stand the slaughter of hogs, now he cried. He thought he heard his father wailing in their throats.
“I don’t know where we went wrong with him,” my grandmother sighed one day as we weeded the peas. “I’m afraid there’s not much sense to your father.”
He had perplexed her from the very beginning. She remembered the nine months he lay inside her. “In all that time,” she said, “he never moved, never gave one kick, never turned. Not even I knew whether he would be born dead or alive.” And then there had been, after the final contraction, that awful silence. So it was over, she thought, before it had ever really begun. My father had taken one look at the world through his mother’s blood and decided he did not care to live here. Given one moment, he knew he did not want to take air into his lungs and breathe. But the young doctor, bent on preserving life no matter how reluctant his subject, saw this right away and spanked my father repeatedly until finally he gave a small yelp, then a cry of protest, and then a long full-bodied scream.
After his tentative start my father was a quiet, brainy child. He could spend day after day working on a single problem of mathematics or lose himself in a dream of fission. He could entertain himself for weeks with the details of the big bang theory or the concept of black holes. By age ten he had mastered geometry; by twelve, algebra; by fourteen, advanced calculus. He grew bored with it after that, though, and did no more—no algorithms, no studies of number theories. Mostly, he listened to music alone in hi
s room in the farmhouse attic: Poulenc, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky. “Music saved my life,” he confessed to me on one of the rare occasions he allowed himself to reminisce.
“He could have been a pioneer in genetics,” my grandmother said.
“No, Grandma,” I said, giggling at the thought of my father in pioneer clothes, sporting a rifle or a bear trap.
“He could have worked in aerospace. He could have found the cure for something.”
The dream of my father’s greatness was the only dream my pragmatic grandmother had ever cared to keep. After all these years, it still shone in her eyes like a light, but it served no purpose except to make the reality of my father’s life almost unbearable to her. She had wanted to be intimately related to greatness and not just a mother-in-law to it.
“He could have been a chemical engineer,” my grandmother whispered, “had she not been so beautiful.”
“I don’t think so, Grandma.”
“Don’t ask me why he chose to study philosophy, of all things, in college! Imagine! Philosophy! But by that time there was no talking to him.” To his parents my father was a walking mystery.
And indeed, had my mother not been so beautiful, my father might have had a very different sort of life, but the minute he saw her across the hall at a college dance, he had already dedicated the rest of his life to her. Good-bye, Kierkegaard; good-bye, Nietzsche. The problem was solved. He would love her even if she would not love him back. He would love her despite everything—before she said one word, before he knew one thing about her and her tremendous talent and the sadness that wore everyone out. In his mind he saw himself closing the Investigations of Wittgenstein, Heidegger’s Being and Time, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Au revoir, Jean-Paul Sartre; farewell, Aristotle. Good-bye—no need for philosophy anymore, no need for any of it. As he glided across the college hall he pictured himself beside the girl in the organdy dress forever.