"You are not concentrating,” he says, with a disappointed sigh.
"What's a physicist?” I ask to distract him and he comes to a stop.
"A physicist studies the forces of the universe and their inner workings,” he says without hesitating because Lao knows everything about everything, even though his answers aren't usually very helpful.
"Forces ..... like armies and economics?” These are the only forces I remember from my studies.
He folds his arms and looks at me thoughtfully for a long time, which surprises me. I am sure he knows everything I am going to say before I actually say it. “No. Forces like gravity and electricity."
"Oh.” That doesn't sound like the countries rolled up that Jack was talking about, but I remember, now, lessons about gravity and the hidden things that hold us down and together and connect us.
"Maybe it's time we moved on to Calculus,” he says. “If you're interested in physics. That could prove useful. A prince should know about the universal forces. I think your grandfather will approve."
I nod, a wild sort of joy erupting around and inside me at the thought of understanding this other strange language Jack and Winnie speak with each other.
Lao's eyebrows rise and he uncrosses his arms. “But first, movement and arts.” And we begin the slow, steady build of the dance that isn't.
* * * *
That night, after dinner, I sit alone trying to remember when I was a girl. There aren't many mirrors in Granddad's house and the only one I'm allowed is a tiny, blurry square that is barely big enough to check the knot in my tie. My body doesn't belong to me anymore. I am a prince, which means that everything I am belongs to my country.......and Granddad. I remember Mama's softness and I've seen women on the street in tight tops that squeeze, but my chest looks nothing like that—even in the bath, without the suit. The few times I've seen myself in shop windows I was all angles and straight lines. But Winnie thought I was a girl and maybe still does.
I slowly remove the jacket and loosen the tie, intending to use the small mirror to find some answers, but the lights flicker. It is only for a moment, but the moment is terrifying in its newness and momentary dark. The last time something new happened, I never saw Mama again.
I run out of my room to look for Lao. There is no one, not even a servant in the hall. I can hear the impossible sounds of shouting downstairs and I feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The silence here is like the light—incessant and invasive—no one can stop it but Granddad and he wouldn't.
There is a loud crash and I drop the suit jacket and tie to the floor. I'd rather take the punishment than miss whatever is happening.
When I reach the landing above the entrance foyer, they are all standing there very still. Six of them. Lao and Granddad on one side, four gray-clad strangers facing them.
"You tried to hide him from me in a girl.” Granddad sneers coolly and Lao moves to stand just behind him, his hands folded carefully in front. “But I won't be fooled. He's mine,” he says and taps his forehead with a bony smile. “He's the prince we've been waiting for and you hadn't taught him a thing. He was defenseless.” Even though we can't hear the shout in his words, it's there.
"The only thing she had to be afraid of was you,” she shouts. “And you're wrong,” she says, her face twisting in a smile that looks like his meanest. “I did teach her and she'll never be .....” and I wonder what I will never be, but she has finally seen me on the stairs and the words stop. Her face goes blank like Lao's.
"Grace?"
That was what she called me then, what everybody called me, but I haven't heard it in years, since that long highway they used to separate the parts of my life. I remember it, though, have even written it down on the wall behind the bed—and other secret places—so I will never forget it. But it wasn't mine until she said it again.
"Mama?” She looks different; the shadow lines I used to catalog at night have multiplied and divided. She looks tired. Worn out.
The tears start again without warning, as if it hasn't even been six years since the barn and the long drive away from her.
"You selfish, crazy old man,” she hisses and shakes her head. “I won't let you keep her here, just so you can be free.” Lao's arms unfold then like the wings and legs of insects and I recognize the start of the dance he has taught me for years.
"It doesn't matter what you want, he will take his rightful place,” Grandad says in that voice that allows no questions.
I want to scream a warning, but I can't do anything but stand there on the steps above and between them, terrified because I know Lao will win. He always does. And I will never see her again. I study Mama, looking for some sign of secret strength she might have that will give her a chance against them, but she is just a woman like Mrs. Mowett or the maids. Small and thin and no match for the terrible things they keep. Even though she is so much more: warm warms and voice and safe. A house with dark and light and dandelions growing in between the cracks in the sidewalk. Even if she won, if she could somehow take me back, I wouldn't fit in that world anymore.
I am already forgotten. A slushy quiet descends on the room and the lights begin to flicker as the six of them stand frozen until it is not the lights that flicker, but them. They blink on and off, their hard eyes never leaving each other. Granddad's mouth is open now as the flickering increases. So is Mama's. They face each other in a frozen argument, the lights blazing as the room becomes a blinding furnace of bright like sunlight, only without heat.
Shielding my eyes, I see it then or maybe I hear its whispers just inside the thundering silence that fills the foyer: the soft rectangle of the open door and the darkness just inside. I try to take a step toward it, but am held along with them, caught between the flickering moments of light. The burning cold white is a physical force that holds and separates me. But my body or a part of me remembers the training and the everyday lessons for years and I start to move. Not in the forward and across, but in that long, slow, out and through of the underwater dance movements, the foreign guttural sounds of the language Lao has taught me that aren't sound really. As the sounds leave me they are no longer Lao's or Granddad's, they are mixed with Mama's sad lullaby, my only defense for years against the relentless light.
I understand what they have done: Lao has taught me the language, but not the rhythm of it. They have taught me to talk in a loop and I have been caught for years in a long, stuttering spiral of a spell, unable to move beyond it.
The unwords smooth into Mama's delicate melody and it all opens up just like that, the dark rectangle from the door unrolling to meet me, pulling me into the street and the soft world. There is a dull, gray glow to everything that I know somehow is Jack's bright night. I move again without meaning to and see him from the shadow places, the closet in his room, the corners, and the cool dark inside a drawer of clothes that smell sweet and vaguely medicinal. I am all the hidden places the light can't reach, but then it all slips away too quickly, like a memory, like a name or face you want to remember.
Jack is lying across a race-car bed in blue pajamas under a poster of the planets, everything emerging in deep twilight tones of sleep. Except the icy darkness in and around his eyes that I see now will only get harder and bigger as the world is made bright. But it doesn't have to. It could be another kind of dark if I only knew what to call it.
Winnie is here, too, her long legs folded to fit in a child's chair beside the bed, where she reads in the dim dark, books piled around her. I think or maybe I hope that she won't see me or hear the humming, but she gasps and jumps up from her seat. Then she sits back down. Her eyes narrow and I am expecting that intense stare, but she just studies me like she is still reading. I watch the recognition run over her like relief and she lowers the book slowly to the bed beside Jack.
"What are you .....?” I think it is a complete question, not the start of something and my eyes begin to burn with the tears I've been holding onto for so long. I wonder if I reach out
will I be able to touch the book under my mattress and the words she wrote?
"You said you knew.” My voice is a muffled whisper.
She looks puzzled and more than a little afraid.
"I know your name's not Jack,” she says. She looks at her brother to make sure he is still asleep. When she looks in my direction again, her eyes move over and around me like she can't find me in the dark. “And even if you wear a suit all the time, you're still a girl."
My breath catches in a hard sob and the edges of the room begin to feel blurry so I hum again to keep it all there.
"But I'm a prince.” I wipe at my nose with the back of my hand, hoping she can't see me in the dim light.
Her head tilts slightly to the left and I feel things begin to tighten, the dim light blinking faintly. I know he is close—Granddad.
"So?"
With sudden clarity I remember a day before they took me from Mama, playing in the fields with friends, the wind knocked out of me for a moment. Because it is like that, but without the roughness and the hard ground. The blinking stops and the humming seems to unfold inside me, becoming more of a song with those unwords I am just beginning to understand, that have meaning outside Granddad's house. Meaning that is just out of reach but that has everything to do with the dark, the light, and the third kind that is so close.
Something unrolls or unravels around me or maybe it is me who is unraveled—away from Winnie and Jack and back to that bright house.
"Run, Grace!” Mama's voice is loud and wild, but I am already sliding through and around Granddad's and Lao's fluttering forms and out into the street. The hollow dark edges toward me in elongated fingers of shadow, leading me to the park that waits behind the street lights in endless voices of pitch black, each muttering in its own familiar rhythm.
Still singing Mama's sad tune, I move the way Lao taught me, but softly, sliding in and through the curled up spaces to finally claim my country. And the trees lean down to me whispering the dark's long-lost name.
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Workshop
Laura Evans
"Can we see your basement?"
I don't know which of the writing workshop students asked the question, but I think it was one of the high school boys, maybe the one with the startled black hair who'd said he wanted to write horror. That would be ironic, wouldn't it?
"No.” Frank, the writing professor, turned back to making herbal tea. We stood around in his kitchen during a break, leaning against the counters, mostly waiting to use the bathroom. The house was old, built in the late twenties, with a two-bedroom second story added some years after that. I'd told him I liked it. The house had a good feel, and he'd smiled and told us—me, really—that the house had a basement.
"A basement?” I said. “Wow. Not many houses in California have basements.” Frank was reheating my coffee on the old gas stove. They didn't have a microwave. They. He said his wife was out of town that weekend, which made sense because surely he planned these all-day workshops for a time that worked for his wife and his teenaged daughter.
I'm not sure who first started joking around about what he had down in the basement. I was uncomfortable with the silence while we waited for Frank to tell us why we couldn't see it, so I may have said something like, “Maybe he doesn't want us to see what he has down there.” Then somebody else said something about bodies wrapped in burlap. Then somebody else (probably the kid who wanted to write horror) said something about aliens, and we all laughed. Frank wasn't laughing. He poured my reheated latte back into the Starbucks cup.
"That smells good,” he said. “See if it's warm enough."
I sipped it and told him it was perfect. We followed Frank out of the kitchen, and went to sit in our places.I was sitting in the dining room, next to the floor register that pumped heat from—well, I suppose from the basement. I'd chosen to sit at the end because it was better than sitting in the middle of the row with men crammed in on both sides, elbows touching mine, breath smelling of onions and cigarettes.
Frank was at the other end of the tables, his back to the fireplace that hadn't been lit even though a fire would have been nice on a cold rainy day like this one. “Rainy” really doesn't tell it right. It was raining like it rarely does in southern California, hardly any space between the big swollen drops. I wondered if the basement flooded. Maybe that's why he doesn't want us to look in his basement. It was probably wet and dank down there, with piles of old stories he wrote long ago in musty cardboard boxes. His wife must hate that, all that soggy cardboard down there.
It was then, thinking of his wife, that I started to notice little things—there were no photographs in the room. There were lots of objects on the walls, just no photographs. One of the workshop students, an older woman, was taking too long to tell about a story she was writing. My attention kept drifting to the strange—now I noticed they were strange—things Frank had on the walls, shelves, and bookcases around the room. There were carved African masks and dusty dreamcatchers woven of yarn and feathers. There were little black bottles with small rounded stoppers in a splintery wooden box hung above what looked like twigs set on rows of tiny nails. Frank might have been traveling since I'd seen him last, back in college when he was my very young and intense writing professor. He must've been all over the world by now to have acquired all these unusual things. I wanted to get up and walk closer, but now the other high school boy was talking about a screenplay he wanted to write, and so I sat, too warm now, by the floor register, and tried to pay attention.
Frank was like he'd been all those years ago in his writing classes; he had a way of helping a writer find the true story. He did it with great care, but I just couldn't stop thinking about what he had down in that basement.
Why had he even mentioned the basement to begin with, if he didn't want anyone to see it? He should have just reheated my coffee and said nothing. But he'd said it, and now that I thought back again, he had been talking to me. The others hadn't been listening, they just stood around on the worn linoleum floor, waiting to use the bathroom. It wasn't until I'd said it—"A basement. Wow. Not many houses in California have basements."—that the others joined in. And I have to be honest; it was because I spoke too loudly that the others heard it, and that boy asked to see it. Maybe Frank did have old stories down there, stories he wanted me to read, and that's why he'd told me he had a basement. Stories he didn't want to share with teenaged boys, other women, and middle-aged men who'd just recently decided they wanted to write. He knew me from when we were both young, and seemed to think I had talent. Maybe he wanted me to stay after everyone else left and sit on a red corduroy sofa and read some of what he'd written over the years since I'd seen him last. Maybe it was his retreat, the basement, with warm wood paneling and lamps that glowed and a beige woolen rug. It was my fault that the others even knew about the basement, because, now that I thought about it yet again, he'd spoken in a low intimate tone when he'd said it to me. Maybe that was why he was so abrupt—because I had been careless with his confidence.
As the afternoon wore on, I got warmer and warmer in my seat by the floor register. Someone had closed the front door, and now the room was stuffy, the rain's fresh coolness shut out on the porch. I took off my leather jacket, even though I thought I looked cool in it, like a writer instead of a forty-nine-year-old woman who'd just decided recently to write again.
Now the black-haired boy was telling us about the book he was writing about cats on board a spaceship that crash-landed on a planet in another galaxy. They were exposed to something toxic, and started to mutate and walk on two legs and then, in general, to wreak havoc on other life forms in their vicinity. It was pretty good, the idea, and just then a large orange cat came into the room, walked over to me, and started yowling. No one else noticed as they were engrossed in the story. The kid started to describe his main character/antagonist cat, and sure enough, it had orange fur. The orange cat, the real one, was now yowling even louder and rubb
ing against my legs. The guy sitting next to me, a doctor who'd sold seven stories in the past two months, saw the cat by my feet, and just smiled, like “Oh, look at the cat,” seemingly unaware of the irony right in front of him.
Frank heard the cat finally, scooped it up and into the kitchen. Maybe he keeps the cat down in the basement, I thought. He probably had one of those little kitty beds and a litter box, and food and water dishes on a placemat. He hadn't changed the litter box lately. It's embarrassing, I suppose, for a cat owner to admit he hasn't changed the litter in a while, and that's why he'd said quietly that there was a basement. He thought I'd be discrete, and when I wasn't, he'd just said “no."
I got really hot about then, from the dry hot air wafting up from the basement, the caffeine from the coffee, and probably some hormonal fluctuations. The umbrella I'd left propped up by the register when I came in was completely dry. I looked around to see if anyone else was hot. The guy with the baseball hat and graying scraggly beard, was talking now. He wanted to write science fiction, too, and had me forgetting about the register, my umbrella, and the hot air with his story about aliens showing up in a small desert town. It was funny, the way he told it, how the animals in the town figured out what was going on way before the people did. One storekeeper's old dog kept barking and growling and baring his broken yellow teeth whenever certain “strangers” came into the store, but neither the storekeeper nor his plump little wife ever caught on until it was too late.
When we moved on to the moon-faced guy and his story idea, I kept thinking about aliens in a little desert town. Frank had told me he'd been going out in the desert a lot, to old Native American sites, so that he could think out there. It's like a desert in here right now, I thought, the hot breath from the register blowing little dust particles in my face. My eyes burned and I couldn't remember if I'd taken my pills that morning. I take meds now and then to take the edge off. When I need them. Only then. Since I decided to be a writer again, I really haven't needed them as much; I can feel the electric connections in my brain again, words spill onto paper without effort. But when I have to be in small, crowded spaces I try to take them.
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 Page 7