by Sam Michel
Though I did not see the light.
“Light,” my mother said, having chosen finally to speak, “no light.”
True, I saw, no light. The house was dark. There wasn’t any car, no footsteps and no tiretrack, strange to say and to infer, no wife. I moved, babbled, became a spokesman for the staggeringly apparent. Must have gone somewhere, I said, must have left before it started snowing. I put the key to the door, let us in. I stripped the boy of mittens, hat, and jacket, overboots and sweater. I helped my mother with her wind-resistant sportsuit. I said the house was warm, was nice, was likely homier than she remembered. I asked my mother please to sit while I hung hats and jackets in the closet. She could sit in my chair, I said, or my wife’s chair, didn’t matter. I asked did anybody want a cup of cocoa, a night like this, would anybody like a bowl of soup? I went quickly. I must have felt that I could do without her, my wife, for the moment, could wash and rinse and stack, begin again, as my mother had begun, at the same beginning, with a difference. Just the other day it was I boiled water, measured out the powdered chocolate and stirred. What difference? What change? I went out to them. I saw my son had got up into my chair, my mother sat down in my wife’s. My mother cared for neither chocolate nor soup. A glass of water for my mother, for a pill—she wasn’t sure which one—if I could read the label?
“I’m way past time,” she said. “It’s nice you brought me here, but I’m afraid I won’t be very lively.”
Not to fret, I said; said that if she wanted to, it wouldn’t bother us, then she could go ahead and sleep. She seemed very near to sleep. The boy seemed near to sleep. I left them. I filled a glass. I filled a pot and put it on the burner. I kept moving, I was calm, I would come to things, our house, a job, our family, my story. What was wanted now was ice. Crushed, or cubed, I wondered, crushed or cubed or crushed. I stood and filled the glass and saw beneath a magnet on the freezer door a note there from my wife. Four words—three words, really, and a name—a neat scrawl underneath the drawing I mistakenly believed my son made of the lizard that was me.
Lincoln—Gone for sausage.
I read, Lincoln—Gone for sausage.
That meant me, the Lincoln, the sausage meant the butcher. I told myself that I did not know what that meant. I went. I gave the glass of water to my mother. I read her label. I tapped her out two pills. I passed the boy and touched his shoulder on the way back to the kitchen, told him, “Chocolate.”
I measured out our cups. I waited on the whistle.
I read, Lincoln—
Then I took the drawing and the note from off the freezer door, struck a match, held the paper where I stood and burned it. This seemed new to me, that I should burn it, crush the ashes to the floor, another new beginning. When the whistle blew I stirred the water in the cups, put the cups onto a tray and served us.
My mother seemed tireder, the boy seemed tireder, both of them seemed less likely to be listening, more likely to be dreaming, now that I had come to see a way to tell the boy a story. Still, I thought, I might still be heard; it made sense, this late in a day, that I be heard by sleepers. I climbed in with the boy. Here the hours were begun. From this chair I stood from my repose to man a shovel. From this chair, with this boy and with a dog I made a day of it, discovered holes that were not for digging, healers not for healing; I recalled the oceans from my deserts, recalled a tribe within a solitude, a health within a sickness, a forgotten way remembered, recalled the boy, my father, wife, and mother. There she was, across the table, made up, powdered, rouged, and scented, a long glimpse of my future bride, the drugged and slumberous look into myself. I asked myself: Am I serious? If I took a reading on myself, could I name a change? This was the moment my life changed? And then I knew my life would never be the same again forever? Here went a day, the hours passed, a distance crossed, a place I had returned to, yet I found myself no less confused, in sense, equally afraid, unchanged to myself, save for how I sounded to myself in speaking. Sure I fetched no living dog, had not managed even to provide a place in which to rest the dead one. Had no pretty bone or button, could not ask my wife to close her eyes, place a penny-candy on her tongue and tell her, Here, this here is a little token from our journey. No, I thought, here, from home, were I my wife, I see my husband has departed, crossed his distance and his hours and delivered back the same dead dog, a mute son and a husband’s mother.
Yet here I found another mother, something other than a muted son, here I sounded different to myself, at least, I really listened. I was a different kind of quiet. I heard a different kind of sound. I heard the furnace click, combust, heard the heated air pushed through the ducts to warm us, and I could not say louder, softer, smoother, grayer, only different, only I must be the difference. I sensed differently, more presently, I was present for the water resting quiet in the pipes, the wires in the wall, the expansions and contractions in the studs and joists, the loaded, groaning rafters. I could not be calm. I was remembering. I was talking. I was telling. I knew my son and mother were as good as sleeping, briefly thought that maybe I should better call it practice, what I felt, I was practicing, maybe what a person ever does is getting ready, his every act is a preparing. Sure I told the boy about my father’s horse; from me he learned about our wars; doubtless his description to you of our barn should lead you to the hayloft no less easily than mine should. Sure I said so just this day, and almost any other day, on the telephone, I loved my mother, but to say it now, what difference, Mother, just right there, I love you?
I was saying, “You could see the steam come up from off the basin, way down way below us.”
I went slowly, giddily, from my father to my mother, surface to surface of that day, one thing following another as the day began itself for me at dark, and lived on through the sun, and passed into the dark again when Mama turned the light off in my bedroom and my day was finished. I would finish, I could see that, an end now, having finally begun at a beginning. One day. A birthday. One day, I was saying, I waked up and I was five. My son’s head was rested in my chest. I turned his face to me and took his glasses off. He saw me. His cheek flushed. He pushed farther into me, seemed again to sleep. Still I think he heard. He must have felt me, the stuff at work inside me, stomach stuff and stuff for air and heart.
I kept on talking. I said and then a lot. And then I went with Mama for another look around the barn; and then the guests came and the band played; and then the snow fell; and then the guests were driving off and honking horns and happy.
I said, “You would have liked your grandad.”
I said, “Remember, Mama, what Owen gave me, the best thing from a kid-guest I remember getting—that old quiver made of stitched-together feedsack and a strip of sheepskin leather?”
I said, “Wasn’t all bad, uncle Ikey and the goats. I think most folks thought that it was pretty funny. I did. And the cows. Who was it started milking Losivya straight into the punch bowl? Folks liked the snow. Big people, hollering and running, throwing snowballs at the barn—you could hear somebody’s pickup starting up, and then another, and you heard those snowballs folks were throwing at the barn and ladies being lifted up and squealing how I didn’t know a lady could just like a girl. I think really if they were a little peeved about a cow or goat then they forgot. You could hear it in the way they hollered their goodbyes. Goodbye, goodnight, goodbye—sounding more to me like how you feel when you are stepping out to see a sweetheart. Cars warming up, wipers and smoke, those wet flakes coming down as big as hands and fingery and laceylike with spikey, lacy, fingers you could catch and run inside and study till they melted. One thing I saw, a man help out a lady with her coat. They stood just inside the barn door, looking out, and the thing I saw that made me know what kind of time they had was how she looked when he pulled back her hair and put his mouth up to her ear and told her something it was just for him and her for hearing. You know how a lady lets her eyes shut. You know how her mouth goes in a way that you would stab your own eyes out if only yo
u could see what hers were seeing. She had a night. She had herself a time, I’d say. Her night wasn’t any uncle’s time to ruin.”
I recalled a great big man who seemed to be the center of a top, a dust-devil, Papa called him, a man you saw was hardly moving but he sent the ladies spinning out and all about him so you wondered that they did not either break a neck or fly off like a scrap of something papery and blown off high and drifting down across the desert. One man limp as his scarf, one man starched as his collar. I recall a man he did not dance at all but stood outside against a post and smoked. This man waxed his mustache and he mostly ever said to folks that I heard, Yah, and Yah, could be. To me, he said, “Smoke, kid?” And he let me puff a time so I was feeling pretty green to go back in and play at war or watch those spinning dancers.
“I never danced,” I said. “Not with anybody other. What the young ones did was more like jump around or run and skid across the sawdust on the plywood. You might see a lady take a kid and push and pull its hands around a bit for pictures, but I was never keeping still enough for taking. Only picture I remember me for sure in is the one where I am blowing out the candles.”
Lighting candles, blowing candles out, second-helpings and a third I could recall of cake; I was saying I was thinking for the first time I remember I preferred a pie.
I asked my mother, I said, “Do you remember how you used to save some strawberries and rhubarb out to freeze so you could bake my pie clear in December?”
But my mother was asleep.
Mother. Mama. Ma.
Ah, ma, c’mon, ma, you remember?
We dressed together. Stood naked in her bedroom, clean; our party clothes were laid out on my mother’s bed, arranged how we would wear them. I recall I liked it that she wasn’t wearing western. Mama wore her black. Pearls and that crazy mateless earring. She asked me please to zip her. Zip her, brush her hair, hold the heel of her foot in your hand and say you like the polish on her toenails. Do not ask why polish if she’s also wearing stockings. Do not wonder why she fusses over shades of red if she is wearing shoes that do not let her toes show. Do not bother telling her you think she might do better by that second earring. She knew. Let her tell you why the best shoes are Italian. Watch her. That was the rule I understood. Listen. Learn that here was the supplest leather, an exquisite line, a poised, a modest, an aristocratic lift. Attend. The pearl rests at the collarbone. The breast must never shine. Recognize a powder. See what happens to a woman’s face to have her hair brushed. Grow up. Learn how else a woman is a mother.
But Mama was asleep.
I said, “You had such pretty hair. How come you never wore your hair down?”
But Mama slept.
The boy, too, slept.
I said, “Papa tied a Windsor.”
I told them I remembered standing in the kitchen, me, my mama and my papa, clean, the three of us, dressed, finished with my mama’s lists and waiting quiet with the kitchen clock to tell us we were ready hours early.
I said, “Somewhere we have lost a picture of the three of us together.”
Whereas I might have said I loved her. And the boy. Any time now, I was ready, I could say it, say, I love you, just like that, and trust that I would mean it. Maybe earlier had been too early. I felt it coming now, you feel it, just before you say it, you clear a way for it and know the time when it has come and when the time has passed if you have kept your peace and missed it. Though not peace. Not for me. In me, what came and went, comes and goes by my affections has not come and gone in peace, not easily, not readily, but has come and gone in worries and in dreads, an escalating, chicken-hearted question: Do you mind this, that I touch you? Are you laughing? Do you like me?
They were sleeping.
I was saying, “We took that bath together.”
Not a soak, I said, no bubbles and no steam; this day Mama drew us up a bath of coolish, glassy water. She got us stripped. She was rough, said we had to hurry, wouldn’t let me do it on my own. Knocked my head against the wall, pulled my nose and ears off with my collar, grabbed up hanks of hair without a sorry or excuse me. Yet why hurry? This was hours early, stark daylight. I recall the sky up through the window just as hard and bright as sky could be and seeming cold against the branches. The floor was cold, and the tubwalls, and my mama’s hands were cold and hard and so were Mama’s eyes though not so cold and hard that I would not want them to touch me. She surprised me. I wanted her to look at me. Time enough, I thought, for her to look a little more at me and not my fingernails so much and toenails or behind my ears and in my ears where she was saying there was dirt enough for planting in potatoes. My birthday, I was saying, feeling something must be due to me, a present, I kept saying, some respect I must have thought should be accorded my authority, without my knowing also what I might be author of or how a person came to think his being born deserved a present. I told my mama she was hurting me and she said not to be a baby. I wasn’t hurt, she said, the water wasn’t cold, she was in the same tub I was, and would I look at her, just listen, did it sound as if she were complaining? Naturally, I looked. I always looked and saw my mother as a person sees the bar of soap, the soapdish and the spigot. That body had been home, food to me and drink and shelter. I used it. Used it up, perhaps, took another, harder look at her and saw how far along her way away from me my mother had proceeded in her body to reclaim it. I wanted her to feel how hard I saw her, to respond to me in kind, to look at me and know that I, too, had proceeded. Yet she did not look at me. She scrubbed, wiped and blotted, looked and saw my body, “my hide,” she said, another needy, dirt-streaked surface. She scrubbed. She pried. She used the washcloth and the clipper and the brush. She used her thumb to lift my chin up. She looked me in the eye, I thought, and still I wasn’t there for her except as she might see a duty more or less completed. No Lincoln. Nothing like the son. She flicked, her eyes were flicking, narrowing and gray, palpably incisive. I think nobody must see by lights more surgical than Mother’s. I think nobody but Mother operates toward more isolating theaters of self.
Me, I wanted out. I wanted my boat. I saw too much. I saw my mother’s breasts. I saw Mother in those breasts, her determination, an allure, Mother’s pride, something to be dressed, lifted up and scented, lightly powdered and admired that way and wanted. Fatty things. Useless. Boo, I used to call them, pale, crinkly-tipped and wobbly. Baubles, icons, eyetraps, I was not to touch them. How was I to see them? And what of Mother’s shins, and Mother’s leg, the way she pointed her toes to shave her leg, how was I to watch my mother’s mouth, the pleasure I could see she took there from her leg, its shape, perhaps, its toneyness and its proportion, the time she saved out from her hurry to caress her leg when she was finished? Two hands. From the ankle way up past the knee. A red soap I was not to mention to my father which I figured smelled like money. She soaped her throat, under her breasts, the hair between her legs, between her legs, in that crack, where I knew I should have come from, though I did not know what to call it. I knew icky, and winky, and carrot, but I did not know what my mama’s was, not to say it, but only knew it was the place where you could see a calf pulled, or a lamb, and also where I saw my papa push it back inside itself and stitch it. I did not come from there. I knew this much. I came from Mama’s scar. Mama soaped herself and I remember thinking that I came from Mama’s scar, but here I did not see her scar and could not think if I had really ever seen it or had only ever heard it, You came out of here, through this scar, though I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t say it past the word if I had ever seen it. Scar. My mama’s word. Was it true? Or had Mama rather I had not come from the other how I ought to? Had she fibbed? She said, The doctor had to cut me. Why? I was five. I thought already it seemed long ago my papa waked me up to see the sunrise. Fast, and long ago, anything I might have said was passing much too quickly. My mother was saying for me to hurry. I wasn’t hurt, she said, she wasn’t hurting me, she was saying please be still. It hurts, I said, it hurts. Yet I did not say why a scar
, or through the belly, did not ask what the place between her legs was called if mine was called a carrot. It tickles, I was saying, let me do it, stop, and then my mother stopped, she let me, said, You’re right, you do it, you’re a big boy now, it’s your birthday.
“But I still liked for you to do it,” I was saying. “I didn’t think I was that big.”
I said that I was awkward with myself. I only wanted us to take our time. I wasn’t ready yet to learn how hard it was to feel myself without the touch of other persons. I told my mother not to worry, I was not ascribing sex, not to her, nor to myself, not desire, I didn’t mean to make of the tub the mess of Mamas-Sons-and-Papas. I meant I was growing up and did and did not want to. No fault of ours. We were clean, soaping up. I think of mine as the sex and the desire, the priapic panic that must come from being made aware of being seen alone. She knew I watched, was all. We had caught each other out, we evened, I would bathe myself from here on out, from here on out we two would mark a little closer to ourselves what we were showing to the other. After we had dressed, stood before my mother’s mirror, combed and brushed and scented, I recall that I was happy, yes, inevitably, and also saddened to be welcomed to an older age, our necessary days of mildening, shameless guilts and glancing ardors.
My mama’s talk, for instance, was returned to guests. She gentled. She toweled me dry, would touch me, hold me, kiss me on the cheek goodnight, but I believe I sensed my difference to her in how she touched me, what she said and how she looked at me and listened. I felt limits—whether suddenly, from our time there in the bath, or more gradually, less perceptibly, from sometime shortly prior to the bath, then incrementally, broadly after—I felt our time together cool, become less intimate, more mannerly, routined, as if I were another person now, a little man out on my own to whom my mother paid her kind respects in passing. She slowed. She engaged me, let me know she was attending, had her eye on me, I could not look at her without believing she must know what I was up to. She must know I thought that she was pretty. She must know I wanted her to let me brush her hair. You want first dance with me, she might have thought, you are surprised to see me eat with other men, you never thought another man might chase me. That man, I think she meant to say to me, his name is What If, and it’s for him a mother paints the nails she hides inside her shoes, “It’s for Grace Dendari,” she was saying, “why we keep our backs straight.”