The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  After breakfast that day Pop left and returned with a newborn lamb. Its mother had rejected it, so the farmer had given it to us. Sylvie took it into her arms as if she finally had a baby of her own, naming it Forsythia, feeding it from a bottle. We were going to become sheep farmers—we’d build up a flock, sell the wool, learn to spin it, to make cheese from the milk. Why had we never thought of it till now? Lambs in the fields, three sisters spinning in the firelight—all this, while, not far from us, in the suburbs to the south, wives were being swapped, Valium swallowed, malls built, gas guzzled, life and love wasted day by day.

  * * *

  SO HOW was it we were the crazy ones? The house was giving way to nature—vines grew in through chinks in the walls, opening them wide enough for snakes, then mice, then squirrels. The chickens had gone from fluffy Easter gifts to flea-ridden nuisances—they stepped delicately into the kitchen through the tear in the screen, to peck at the bugs in the corners. The cats were afraid of them and moved up to live on the roof, forgotten and starving. One summer night, we were managing to act like a regular family—having a barbecue—when they came swooping down from the eaves over the grill, snatching chops out of the flames and hunkering under the porch to eat, and lick their singed paws.

  “It’s a madhouse!” Ma said, arms out, ready to leap into the fountain of wrongness that watered everything we grew.

  Not the first time desperation has been mistaken for ecstasy. That night the sheep found a gap in the fence and, panicked by freedom, ran around and around the house all night, hooves clicking on the stone path. Ma dreamed the Brownshirts had her surrounded; they were about to break down the door.

  The next morning, her headache was back. “I wish you could just stick a screwdriver right here, in the corner of my eye,” she said, jamming the heels of her hands against her eyes. I looked out the window: the sheep were trying to push back into their field, all at once, so they were bunched in a woolly knot at the fence, their bottoms wiggling urgently.

  Pop had business in the city. “You’d rather I was dead,” Ma wept, hoping this was terrible enough that he’d have to contradict her, but he told her to stop exaggerating.

  I wrung out the hot washcloth while Sylvie went up to deal with the sheep. I walked Ma to the brook so she could lie on the bank and dip her head into the icy water, put her back to bed, and went up the willow tree with my book, trying to read, waiting to hear her call from the window. She looked out and saw I didn’t care what she endured, how overwhelmed she was, by all these little children who needed her until there was none of her left, by this pain slamming in her skull. I thrived while she suffered, and why? Because I had a mother who loved me!

  “You might have thought to pull my curtain,” she said when I went in, her eyebrow quivering over a cold stare.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t sound sorry.”

  I kept still for a minute so as not to say, “I’m sorry I don’t sound sorry,” and asked if I could get her a cup of tea. Which amounted to the same thing—I knew she didn’t like people who drank tea. Had I joined the other side? And the dog was baying; the collie up on the mountain was in heat. I dragged ours to the barn by the collar, shut him in, and turned on the fan in Ma’s room, but all night we could hear him whining and suffering. Next morning, I went up to find his nose poked out under the barn door; he’d clawed it to splinters and his paws were bleeding. I got his collar with both hands, but as I bent down to hook the chain on he looked up at me with such pleading anguish that I felt it was hateful to hold him against such a power, whose enormity I only realized that day.

  Ma’s headache had become nearly constant. We tried morphine: “Look, Beatrice, look at all the butterflies!” she said, joystricken, like a child. My mind raced: How to fill the room with butterflies before the drug wore off? I couldn’t bear to see her disappointed. But already something was twisting and she looked at me suddenly with strange cold eyes and said, “I can see right through your face.”

  Her blinding headache had given her new sight, and she noticed I was becoming a woman—her natural enemy. She herself had armed me, filling me with strength and confidence; now I’d use these powers to strike her down.

  I felt the slap of this, the injustice, and I knew she must be right. There was something in me that didn’t give a damn if her head ached, that would have trampled my sisters and even little Teddy, just to get my own way. If she’d been right to have me, against the advice of the doctors, if she was right about my brilliance (I rolled my eyes at this only because I cherished it too deeply and secretly to let it ever be known), if those intuitions were true, then this despicable thread she’d found must be just as real.

  The headache over, the butterflies were forgotten and she became defiant—she did not miss my father and when she met a man on the street her posture changed, her laugh deepened, her smile hinted at great adventures in store.

  “I’ve discovered the secret of sex appeal,” she confided. “You just have to be thinking about it all the time. It shows, it comes through in your eyes.”

  One day she said: “I’m writing a novel.” I must have looked skeptical, because she added, defying me instead of Pop for a change, “It’s about sex. You wouldn’t understand.”

  She adored me, would support me in anything, told me fifty times a day how beautiful and brilliant I was, how much beloved, bought me dresses covered in ruffles and lace while she herself wore an old silk bathrobe cinched with a necktie for special occasions. If only her mother had loved her this way. She made sure I had all the advantages, like the girls she’d envied and despised, and no, of course she didn’t envy and despise me, I was her daughter, her own creation.

  Besides, she had something I didn’t: sex, the golden key to the door of adulthood, which she intended to lock behind her now.

  * * *

  LATE ON a March night; the windows so thickly feathered with frost we couldn’t see through, I thought I heard something crying, up the hill. We’d been “snowbound”—held in the house by Ma’s fear of icy roads—for days. Ma had gone to bed with her ache, and Sylvie and I had been playing cribbage on the floor in front of the woodstove before facing the cold upstairs.

  Sylvie put her hand to the window and melted a palm’s worth of space to look out. “A light,” she said, with Ma’s portentousness. “What could it be?”

  We went to the back door, praying she was right, that a strange light—a mystery—was visiting us; that Danger and Excitement, seeing we could not get out to meet them, had come to our back door. I put my head out into air too sharply cold to breathe.

  “Nothing,” I said, but then I heard some kind of grunt and of course whispered breathlessly, “You’re right! There’s someone up there. Put on your boots.” We scrambled into our things and up the hill, to meet our intruder, but coming around the sheep shed, heard a commotion and went in to find Forsythia lying in the straw, in labor a month before her time. She kicked and groaned, surprised by each pain, then forgetting it completely, looking on mildly as the contraction rolled through her wool in a deep wave.

  “What should we do?” I asked Sylvie, whose empathy had grown so strong by then it had become a sixth sense, a great competence. That she had “seen a light” just at this moment didn’t surprise me; she was rooted in nature like a woman ought to be, so of course she was drawn to this birthing. It wasn’t fair, that all my schooling, all my ambition had cut me apart from this. And I hated deferring to her, when I had studied everything so carefully.

  A shadow crossed Sylvie’s face when she saw me in doubt. “The cats just do it by themselves,” she said.

  Something appeared then—the lamb’s folded knees. Sylvie knelt to touch them, looking up at me with awe. Here it was, and fate had chosen us to see! Only fitting—we’d done the work, borne the responsibility day by day, now nature would reward us with a marvel. We glanced at each other in bold complicity: after all, we’d been told not to disturb Ma for anything less than a ca
tastrophe. We’d keep this for ourselves. There was another contraction, and another, but still only the knees were visible, and Forsythia looked bewildered and bleated as if she was asking us something.

  “Do you think I should pull?” Sylvie asked.

  I knelt in the straw beside her.

  “I think…” I said, stalling, and heard the lamb’s neck snap as a final contraction forced it out through the ewe’s torn vagina. Then came Forsythia’s uterus, tangled in the lamb’s back legs. She gazed at us, over the bloody inert mass of her body, with immense liquid eyes.

  Sylvie screamed—as if she could scream loud enough to put things back the right way. The vet said there was no point in his coming, Forsythia would be dead by morning.

  He was wrong, though. She survived another day, struggling back and forth across the barnyard in search of her baby, her bloated womb dragging behind her through the snow.

  “What were you thinking?” Ma asked, with her persecuted glare, the headache warping her eyes out of alignment. “Taking things into your own hands like that, when a life is at stake?”

  We’d sold all the living room furniture by that time and the huge empty space felt more like a stage, with her as a Greek apparition.

  “When will you understand that your actions have consequences? Life isn’t a game for little girls to play.” She turned from us in revulsion. The veil between us and all that was dreadful was no more than gauze; it would tear at a touch. Why couldn’t I, who was alive only by the most incredible stroke of good fortune, see that? Now had I finally learned?

  Sylvie stayed in her room all day. In the evening I went up to the barn and found Forsythia dead at last, curled against her trough.

  In her grief Sylvie looked suddenly like an old woman. She blamed herself; Pop knew the fault was mine. Wasn’t I supposed to be the smart one? “You’re always so sure of yourself,” he said, between his teeth. “You may not care, but what about your sister? Look what this has done to her.” He looked at me with bewildered disappointment, as he had looked at me so often. Where was all the kindness, the natural softness one seeks in a woman? At least Sylvie was crying—as if she’d lost her own child, and he comforted her while I stood there numb.

  “I—” I said, but guilt swallowed my voice. Why indeed was Sylvie unable to look at the things I was so curious to see? What was the coldness in my nature, this selfish stubbornness that made me refuse to look at life through his eyes?

  * * *

  SPRING CAME; its beauty would keep us safe in our trance a little longer. Ma took her coffee out to the back steps in the morning, picked a tiny child’s bouquet of white violets and set it tenderly in a vase, as if it represented the gentlest part of herself, the part she had to guard with bared teeth, the part that was like Sylvie.

  I at least had learned not to attach myself to soft and fragile things. I would be straighter, prouder than the rest of them—I’d bear what they could not. I walked down the dirt road, crouched beside the spring from the hillside and pulled up a flower that seemed to bleed in my hand, opened its curled leaf and with it a cocoon: a transparent unborn spider unfolded its long legs and clambered desperately away. Now that no one could see me, I cried and cried. Downstream there was an island, maybe ten feet long, moist and dank and overgrown with skunk cabbage and ferns. I read The Yearling there in one long day, listening to the brook split and rejoin itself around me. It was the first time I’d ever read a book without meaning to please my mother—it felt like the first time I’d ever really been alone. I smoothed each page open with the feeling I could dip my hand into the text as easily as I could trail my fingers in the current beside me.

  Three

  “AN AUTODIDACT,” Philippa said sharply. “Everyone is, really.” Sadness, lostness, were not qualities favored by the Italians, and trailing one’s fingers in a current … well, it was not the act of a conqueror. She did me the kindness of ignoring my pathos so I could step out of it and push it aside. In my pale face with its eager, uncertain expression, she saw something she’d long been waiting for—a tabula rasa, on which the volumes of Sayresian discovery ought to be inscribed.

  “Excellent, though,” she said, “excellent that you cast a cold eye already at such a young age.”

  “Excuse me?” Casting a cold eye did not come under “excellent” at home.

  “That you can look closely, you’re not blinded by feeling.”

  I glanced across the desk at her, furtively—I wanted to see the face that valued my estranged curiosity.

  She saw I was moved, and waved it away. “Pray continue, Beatrice,” she said. “I mean, we have Clytemnaestra with her axe, we have—”

  “It was,” I said happily, “it was Greek! Straight out of Aeschylus!”

  “Euripides,” she corrected me. “Bloodier.” She blinked. “Beatrice, why didn’t you have any furniture?”

  “Oh, you know…”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  “Me neither, really,” I said. “I mean, we had to sell it.”

  The people who bought it had come from the continent of reality: they’d sold their dairy farm to be developed as a golf resort, and now they were buying things—our furniture, and a small plane. They were young and vital and their six kids went to school with me. The father talked about his pilot lessons while his wife smiled a beautiful red-lipsticked smile and shook her head over men and their toys. I stared at them with what I knew was naked hunger. I’d have liked to hypnotize them, so I could examine them and find out what made them the way they were. They laughed very heartily with my father and then they got up from the couch and their men came in and took it away.

  A few months later, the man took his wife up on his solo flight, and descending for a better look at their old place, he lost control, crashed the plane, and they were both killed. It seemed as if they’d died of their prosperity. My parents couldn’t get over the magnitude of this folly—they gathered us and held us all tight there in the empty living room, their heads bowed over us as if we’d narrowly escaped such a crash ourselves.

  Success wasn’t going to get its hooks into us. Pop’s last venture, a radio station whose signal barely reached as far as the Poconos, had gone belly-up, but he had a new idea: he was going into ping-pong ball manufacturing. The sport was wildly popular, after Nixon’s opening to China, and the balls could be bought ready-made—in huge, featherlight boxes, from Japan. We poured them into big machines like concrete mixers, tumbled them in pumice until the seams were smoothed, then dried and sorted them, and shrink-wrapped them on cards printed THEODORE WOLFE SPORTING GOODS, INC. ValuSpot was going to carry them in all of its 235 East Coast stores. At dinner Pop would take out the Sotheby Parke Bernet catalog of Distinctive Homes and tell each of us to choose our favorite estate.

  “Sweetie, I can’t afford that kind of thing!” he exclaimed, peering at me as if in fear for my sanity, when he caught me assuming I’d go off to college.

  He’d said it would only be another year before we had to choose between the saltwater farm in Maine, and the miniature castle in Bermuda. I had to go away from there, I had to. I’d die if I had to live in a miniature castle with him.

  “I don’t suppose you remember,” Ma said, “that your father and I lost substantial income when we had to give up the farm.” She was constitutionally unable to love me and my father at once—now I was the murderer and the whole story of the car crash had fallen out of her mind. I tried to remind her, but she said not to be ridiculous, it happened years ago, for heaven’s sake, everyone makes a mistake now and then. And rabbits were an awful hazard: she’d seen three dead in the road while driving home from work that day.

  That’s right, work: Had I thought she wasn’t up to it? Well, she’d show me, and anyone else who dared to question her. Her zeal had trumped her timidity, and all the fears I’d lived to protect her from had evaporated one day. She was teaching remedial English at my high school suddenly, but I pretended not to notice.

&nb
sp; After all, I was in advanced placement. From the moment my freshman English teacher had explained to us that the reason we were reading “irrelevant” books (the Bible; The Odyssey) was that all people need to have some common ground, I’d read anything that might count as a classic. I was going to exorcise the family metaphors (rabbits, Nazis, and all), and learn the language of the civilized world. Nothing pleased me so much as lifting some huge famous book down from a high shelf, thinking how I was going to absorb it and become like its characters. I was too young to understand Anna Karenina’s plight, or Russia’s, but I pushed on chapter by chapter, thinking “So, that’s how love progresses,” and stumbled out of my room in the evenings vaguely expecting to see the peasants coming up the dirt road with the hay. I was diligently preparing myself, for life in the nineteenth century.

  One morning I came downstairs in my nightgown, beat an egg, put a match to the front burner, and a flame as if from a blowtorch whooshed up into my face.

  “I don’t know why,” I sobbed to Sylvie, “but whenever something bursts into flames I just go crazy!”

  She commiserated so sweetly, holding an icepack where my eyebrow had been. I’d always been anxious, for some reason—some people are just born that way. Sylvie lifted the stove hood to reveal a mouse nest thick as a pillow; building it, they’d run back and forth over the gas line, leaving tiny tracks that finally wore it through.

  Oh, to live beyond reach of spontaneous combustion! My mother was pulling fistfuls of mouse-nest fluff out of the stove, hips moving to “Stoned Soul Picnic” on the radio, when I decided to get away for a few days, take the train to New York to visit the Poet-in-the-Schools who had turned me on to Coleridge that winter. “Red, yellow, honey, sassafras, and moonshine,” Ma sang, with all the promise of the times in her voice: yes, the age of Aquarius was come, it was a paradise like childhood was meant to be, with bright colors and sweet smells and something warm in the oven—only this time, the grownups got to play. She bid me a distracted farewell.