by Liza Nelson
Sitting cross-legged on my living room rug, Louise looked entranced when I got out my book, lit the candles and removed the pennies one by one from my satin box. She giggled before she wrote her question out. I took the slip of paper without reading it. I didn’t need to. The frizzle of her nervous hilarity electrified my hands as the pennies rolled on the stitched satin square.
They came up k’un under ch’ien—stagnation. Shit, she looked so vulnerable, smoothing her wrinkled shirtwaist over her radishy knees. How could I tell her? The next page happened to be Community, a much more optimistic sign for new endeavors.
Yep, I compromised the I Ching. Not a red letter day in my life, was it? Maybe that’s why the pennies fell out no better for me. Fire above excess: Contradiction. No answer at all. Either the I Ching had no opinion or there is no right answer. Either I tell Dylan or I don’t. Damn Louise. Those filings of doubt she left behind cling like magnets however much I try to dust them away.
Meanwhile, across from me Dylan is eating her carton of yogurt. Her pudgy hand wraps around the spoon like a much smaller child’s, hardly bigger than David’s or Philip’s clutching mine in the ambulance. She is sitting farther away from me at this moment than they were that day. Yellow yogurt dribbles down the side of her chin. If I try to dab it, she’ll jerk away; I certainly would have at her age if my mother tried. Not that I am to Dylan what my mother was to me: the bane of my existence.
We often eat in companionable silence this way. I assume she’s thinking about what girls her age always think about. School, boys, the magic art of popularity. But I want to know how she thinks. She doesn’t think in straight lines anymore. Girls don’t after puberty. I’ve tried to myself, but it goes against the sex. So I have to wonder, if I showed her Hank’s picture, how would Dylan react? A year ago I know she’d have been tickled. Now, though, I’m not sure: Would she care or would she be embarrassed at being connected to such a man? Inevitable adolescent embarrassment. “You mean, people could have walked into the post office and seen him!” I can just hear her.
When she was little, Dylan loved me to tell her stories about herself as a baby. All kids do, don’t they? The day came, as I knew all along it would, when she started asking about a daddy. That spring we were living in Magic House, a commune of artists and artisans near New Hope, Pennsylvania. She was no more than three years old, maybe four, and the only child. One of the potters was particularly nice to her. Dylan asked me if he could be her father and I had to explain that no, Jake was only a friend. Friendship was all I wanted from him. Don’t get me wrong. I was no righteous celibate, but Jake the potter made me nervous. His dark Jesus eyes never seemed to blink, and he’d begun demanding the illusion of permanence; that’s all it is between a man and a woman—smoke and mirrors. I was not interested. One thing about Hank, he never pretended to offer more than the moment at hand. Not casual, not grab-someone-to-fuck, but life in the concentrated present, so intense the air was heavier around him. No yesterday, no tomorrow.
Of course, parenthood, that’s the long haul. A whole truckload of yesterdays and tomorrows, a fleet of trucks. No illusion there. The bottomless glass is always full. Love as infinity. The deepest subject if women were the composers, painters, poets.
When Dylan came back from playing in Jake’s studio one morning—God, was it over eleven years ago?—she asked me about fathers. I was tempted to make up something respectable to carry her into the middle-class acceptance I had already rejected for myself. It would have been easy enough. Instead, I pulled out the old scrapbook I’d been carting around since high school. My own childhood was on the pages already. I told Dylan we were going to bring the scrapbook up to date and then keep it current. She didn’t completely understand but she was thrilled. Children are always thrilled by the smell of truth.
So, for a couple of weeks we collected newspaper clippings, ticket stubs from concerts, photographs, doodles I’d sketched while bored in lectures or meetings or sit-ins. There was Dylan’s infant foot print, her first paintings, the frayed book of nursery rhymes. Then I tried to sketch Hank from memory, but it came out all wrong. I’m an artist, I can draw for godsake, but Hank’s face kept eluding me. I could see him in my head, could describe him, but I couldn’t capture him on paper. He’s on paper now, isn’t he, though not captured. Dylan loved the sketch, of course. She colored a big messy heart frame and taped it on its own page.
Those were the days of my mother’s weekly, we’ll-keep-this-a-secret-from-Daddy calls, before he was diagnosed. Daddy refused to speak to me, and she always swore he was out of the house, as if I could not hear his voice bellowing a running commentary in the background.
“How could you be so irresponsible?” she wailed as soon as I took the receiver from Dylan. For weeks, months, she called and asked the same question.
“What would you prefer I tell her?” I teased with my new possibility-of-the-week, each more elaborate and less likely to satisfy Mom than the one before: “Your father died.” “We got divorced and he disappeared.” “He moved to Canada before you were born to avoid the draft and became an Eskimo.” “He is a prisoner of war in Hanoi.” “He has joined a religious cult and moved to India.” “He’s a bomber for the Weather Underground.” (Oops on that one as it turns out.) “He’s an international spy, code name Zebra.” That some of these suggestions were actual possibilities I neglected to mention or really did not know.
“Why don’t I tell her she’s the result of a virgin birth and be done with it?” I suggested finally.
“Really, Judith, you are a trial.” She slammed down her receiver but quit badgering.
Soon after, Jake the potter moved to Oregon, and Daddy’s cancer was diagnosed. I moved us back to Connecticut, and Dylan’s interest shifted from her parentage to printing her name in snaky, unsteady lines. I never really had to confront the issue again. Dylan and I have lived exactly the way I always envisioned we would. Plenty of time and space. The Blues against the world if it ever came to that. Not that it ever has.
After Daddy died and we moved down here, I worried at first how the good people of Esmeralda would take to an unwed mother working in their schools. I filled out the application honestly enough, leaving certain spaces blank. No one noticed. At least, no one chose to ask. The Esmeralda Board of Education had a job to fill and no other applicants. Otherwise, they’d never have taken a woman in the first place.
Dylan has lined up her apple cores in a row on her plate. The peelings are in a neat pile. She is ready to leave the table. But we have not shared our nightly “cuppa.” That’s when to talk things over with her. I set the kettle on the stove.
“So, anything new at school?” Does every mother begin every conversation the same way?
Dylan shakes her head. That feigned boredom I know so damn well. She’s not about to admit she’s been spending more time with the holy rollers in their choir, but I know she has. What attracts Dylan, that’s what I cannot figure. How could she be infatuated with a plastic purse of a woman like Elvira Brasleton?
It will pass. I know my Dylan. Despite the Elvira Brasletons of the world, Dylan is my constant, part of myself, as permanent as my hand. As permanent as Hank was not. The man who happened to be her father is merely a face on a poster, a scrap to cut out and paste into a collage of the past. A story I might tell on myself to explain how then became now.
A story I might tell. Louise was warning me, wasn’t she, not to live by a rule no one could follow to the letter anyway. That’s the kicker. Honesty only goes so far.
The tea kettle begins to whistle. The little cap over the spout shoots off like a bullet, hits the wall inches from my head.
“Watch out,” Dylan shouts, startled.
“Too late,” I laugh. We’re both laughing. I reach over and tousle her hair. “You are growing so fast.”
“Oh, Mother,” Dylan says.
I pour the boiling water into a ceramic pot I threw for her years ago to resemble a sleeping cat because she w
as too allergic for a live cat and too old by then for stuffed ones. The tea steeps in the cat’s belly, the scent of orange peel rising in the steam.
Dylan has taken down two mugs from the open shelf. She fills our cups and stands beside me in the mauve shadow of dusk. What a joy it is to have a daughter in my life, what a comfort. Lightly, lightly, I rest my arm across her shoulder. She does not pull away. She sips her tea. She may actually be smiling. To hold such a moment, even briefly, should be enough, to have such a moment at all.
Six
WHAT IS HAPPENING to my universe? What door did I leave unlocked to let the gremlins in? They’re running all over, poking around where they’re not wanted, mucking up my clean ordered life. Okay, maybe there are no gremlins, but something is wrong, off, out of whack. Up until now, my life has always run in declarative sentences. Sure there have been plenty of adjectives and adverbs along the way and maybe the punctuation was by exclamation mark. But basically the sentences were straightforward subject-verb-predicate. Now I’m all questions. What to tell about what? Who to talk to? What to feel? I don’t like it one bit.
Not one bit. Evangeline Pinkston was so damn right about men. Why have I ever bothered with them? Shit, another question. Well, here’s another: Why have I ever let them bother me? I must be crazy. Once a man slips into your brain, the circuits twist and the cells atrophy.
Damn Hank’s picture. As if I needed that reminder, that unnecessary intrusion. Well, I’m not going to let him muck things up.
At least I can fold Hank away until I’ve decided what to do, and I will decide soon. I will. But Joe Rainey is another matter. I can’t fold him up and I don’t seem able to make him go away, either. He’s like a crab that won’t let go. The more I resist, the more he hangs on, gripping with those pincers tighter and tighter. If I could cut off his claw, maybe then I could flush him out of my life. He made me so mad this afternoon I swear I almost did cut him, or would have given half a chance.
It was my weekly visit to David at the hospital. (Damn all the men but bless the little boys.) I try dropping by other days when I can, but Fridays always. I need to see David at least once a week to reassure myself. David’s such a stoic, his pain is hard to gauge except by the degree his freckles pale or brighten. So I need to touch him, hear his voice, make sure he is not hurting unduly.
Not more than five minutes after I sat down by David’s bed, in sauntered Joe Rainey with this shit-eating grin on his face and a gigantic, I mean gigantic, stuffed gorilla under his arm.
“What a coincidence,” I said and stuck out my tongue. Fortunately, no one but Joe saw or heard me. His smile just widened and got more crooked than ever.
“I had to be down this way for work,” he told Myra Franklin, who stood up and started straightening the room as soon as she saw him. “Thought I’d stop by and see how the boy is doing.”
“Now wasn’t that the most thoughtful thing. And Mari over with Philip only two days ago.”
“Well, yes.” He nodded. She’d thrown him a curve, but he recovered quickly enough. “As a matter of fact Philip picked this fellow out.” He held up the gorilla to David. “If you poke him in the stomach like this, he lifts his arms and sticks a banana in his ear. If you poke him here, he sticks it in his eye. What do you think?”
“Cool.”
Cool all right. Chilling would be more like it. A regular ice cube dropping into my glass of life. Who was he trying to impress exactly? It was exactly the kind of oddball, crazy, useless toy I’d love, as he damn well had to know. David, too old for regular stuffed animals, couldn’t put it down. Even Myra laughed, Myra Franklin who wears flowered blouses with lace around the collar and tortoiseshell hairbands. She seemed to think it the most natural thing in the world that Philip’s father would visit her boy.
“How nice of you.” She twisted the rings on her fingers the way she does whenever she’s trying to find something to say, which with me is most of the time. “Have you met Godiva Blue, the woman who found the boys that day?”
“Yes, we met in the emergency waiting room.”
“Of course you did.” She blinked and twisted some more.
“But it’s nice to see you again,” he went on, nodding in my general direction.
“Uh-huh,” I said, avoiding his eye, aware of the color rising in my cheeks. What did he think he was doing there? What was he trying to prove? I was not going to be invaded upon. I quickly turned to David and pulled out Treasure Island.
“David’s not much for books,” Myra Franklin had said with a sigh the first time I suggested reading aloud. It took all of ten minutes to capture him completely. Myra, too, for that matter. I have a hunch my Treasure Island visits are the only time that the TV looming over David’s bed is ever turned off.
I am a damn good reader aloud. I even mesmerize myself, and you should see the two of them, mother and son, David lying still under his covers, watching me while Myra holds his hand, her eyes glued to the intravenous tubes running silently from his arm to the machine. The three of us enter a state of grace, into that circle of light I’ve entered before only with Dylan.
I was not going to let Joe Rainey pierce that magic circle. When he pulled up a straight chair and sat down just behind me, I opened the book where I’d left off last time and began as if he were not there.
I had reached the moment when Jim is fighting for his life.
“The hammer fell, hut there followed neither flash nor sound; the priming was useless with sea water. I cursed myself for my neglect. Why had not I, long before, reprimed and reloaded my only weapons? Then I should not have been as now, a mere fleeing sheep before this butcher.”
With Joe Rainey’s eyes boring into my back, the inevitable was closing in.
“Wounded as he was, it was wonderful how fast he could move, his grizzled hair tumbling over his face, and his face itself as red as a red ensign with his haste and fury. I had no time to try my other pistol, nor, indeed, much inclination, for I was sure it would be useless. One thing I saw plainly: I must not simply retreat before him.”
On and on I read, dread and anticipation knotting at the base of my spine. I knew when I stopped I would once again find myself walking with Joe Rainey out of a building into the electricity of twilight. I had not seen him since the night at Cleo’s but there had been the phone calls. They were disconcerting but at least I could hang up. Lately, worse offense, he was sliding into my unarmed dreams. Another kind of premonition. Shit, what a disaster.
I have told myself repeatedly, for weeks, that I do not want Joe Rainey in my life. God knows the question of what to do about Hank’s picture has been bad enough. I do not need the complication of another man, especially one who comes with moral complications. So I have told myself, but who am I kidding? His phone calls have hooked me. I sit with the phone on my lap, watching the moon through the kitchen window, wondering where he is, trying not to imagine. As,the righteous Nancy Reagans of the world have been warning, it is only a matter of time until I move up to the hard stuff. I mean Joe showing up in that hospital room was no coincidence. I probably mentioned David and my visits in one of our half-awake, half-dreaming conversations. But I fervently wished that he had not brought that gorilla.
The nurse came in with David’s supper tray.
“Aren’t you ahead of schedule?”
“No, right on time.”
I glanced at my watch. So much later than I thought, almost five. My God, I’d promised Dylan to be home early.
“Oh shit.”
Myra’s head jerked up.
“I’m sorry. Have to vamoose.” I stood up and pushed out my chair, too hard evidently. It fell into David’s bedside table. Over went a vase of half-dead daisies, the TV remote control, a pitcher of water, a pile of comic books and my open purse. Dimes and quarters rolled under the radiator and halfway across the room. The remote control cracked into pieces and began to squawk. First it was me down on hands and knees, then me and Joe.
Shoulder-to-s
houlder under the bed, among wet dust balls, sogging up the few dollar bills that had wafted there, we stared at each other, my heart galloping like a herd of butterflies. Myra passed down a towel; David began giggling in short hiccupy gulps. Puddles of water spread everywhere I put my hand, stagnant, stinking of dead flowers. Wet scraps of paper and petal stuck to every available surface. We’re talking gigantic fucking mess.
Somehow I got myself out of there, but talk about frazzled. I kissed Myra goodbye, which I never do. I almost forgot to kiss David. And I shook Joe’s hand. Shook his hand, for God’s sake.
Then who should be in the elevator when I stepped in but Louise Culpepper.
“My heavens,” she said, evidently as surprised as I was.
“Small world.” I tried to smile. “Sometimes there’s nothing like a good cliche, is there?”
“What are you doing here, Godiva honey?”
“David Franklin.”
“Oh, yes.”
“And you?”
“My neighbor, Dorothy Bander, has cancer.”
“Oh, is she here for chemotherapy?”
“She’s been through the chemo and the radiation. She’s finished with treatment now.” Louise seemed oddly distracted, lost in her own thoughts. “I have known Dorothy Bander all my life.” Louise opened her purse and started rummaging, then glanced at me almost as an afterthought. “You want to get a cup of coffee?”
“I’d love to but I have to get Dylan over to First Baptist.”
“Oh yes, the lock-in,” she repeated absentmindedly. “Is Dylan going? That’s nice.”
“Despite my better judgment, but I’m sure she’ll have a ball even if it is all a crock.” Dylan’s simply experimenting. The attraction of the group norm. Shit, the vibes over there must be thick as the incense, if Baptists even use incense. “What do they do, anyhow, all those adolescent hormones locked in the church basement all night?”