Mother and Child

by Carole Maso

  When the play was over, the mother felt sure she knew something she had not known before. There was something of a recognition; there was no way beyond that to articulate what she felt or knew except that the play had made certain longings emphatic and would allow, she suspected, for other feelings on other evenings to come to the fore. The Palatines who had come to the Valley named everything for the Rhine, which they missed with all their hearts. It’s a history of our desires. Memories of the breathing and billowy world.

  And what we thought was central turns out to be peripheral. And what we thought was solid dissolves. Gone, the emphatic orb of afternoon. Dusk had arrived.

  SOMEHOW SHE KNEW infinite grace was available to them. The key to happiness was in trying to understand how to receive it. The Rite of Ascending should be the right of every human alive, she reasoned. She herself was a soul waiting for purification. The bat had said as much. The bat had come and set into animation what had been still and lay dormant in them. The bat had made all the rest possible and available to them, of this the mother seemed somehow certain.

  The tree had split in two, and from it had emanated an extraordinary light, like the light now in the pit where the towers had once been. The thousands of distressed souls that had blackened the day now gave way to an extraordinary void, flooded with light. It was the only place in the city that opened up like a suture—a vast cavern, but also a plain.

  How strange is the present, with all that past streaming in, and all that future seeping through. It was something exhilarating, the present—open, fluid, malleable—and it both pleased and frightened her. Moments of the past invading the present from one direction, and from the other direction, the future. All was in coexistence—there was really no way around it.

  THE BAT, AS a last gift, had made it possible to see the velvet backdrop so that one could glean information from the twilight, and from the night. Like the bat drinking the night, the mother drinks the night, as it comes on now. Like the mother and the bat, the wolf laps up the night as well and waits for the child. The mother smiles. The night magnifies and makes possible what seemed unimaginable in the day. She goes to the Mothering Place and prays.

  ON CERTAIN NIGHTS while the mother slept, an antler would sprout from the center of her forehead. The antler was soft to the touch and covered with moss, and all night the mother roamed through forest and starlight to places she had never been before. In the morning when the mother awoke and discovered the antler, she panicked, as she did not want to frighten the child, and she would, as quickly as she could, saw it off and slip it into the night table drawer. After that, many nights would often pass without incident, until the mother came slowly to forget about the antler almost entirely, and that is when another antler would appear.

  And it would go on like that: sleep and dream, sleep and dream and saw, sleep, and dream, sleep and dream and saw, and sleep . . .

  The mother and child laughed and time passed, and after a while, the mother somehow grew more capable of keeping the antler in check inside her lavish green night-roaming dream. Now and then a nub would appear, but nothing more. And in the night table drawer only, a little stardust and antler dust remained.

  From time to time now, the child would put the wrist of her hand to her forehead and then wave her fingers in the semblance of an antler, and the mother would look at her and smile sweetly.

  One night while the mother slept, the child huddled next to her on the bed and watched as the antler slowly began to grow from her mother’s forehead. The child had never touched anything like it before. It was something like a tree branch but not exactly—it was at once more solid and more hollow, a horn of sorts, covered with an indescribably soft moss, and it had the most extraordinary hue.

  At the end of the night but before the mother awoke, the child removed the antler. Gently she slipped her finger under the mossy soft base, and it felt as if she were releasing the air from beneath the pad of a suction cup. She removed it with ease, and without the least violence.

  Then the child wandered out the door and into the dawn. Maybe she will happen on the bobwhite. To build their homes, bobwhites find an impression on the ground, line the impression with grasses, and weave an arch over the cup in a tussock of grass. Carrying the antler, the child walked out into the morning and gathered reeds and dawn grasses and cattails, which she wove together into a kind of glimmering harness, and she placed her mother’s antler in it. She then went to her mother’s room, and though the mother was still sleeping, in sleep she seemed to bow her head toward the child as if she might nuzzle, and the child in one simple motion attached the antler back to the mother’s head and climbed into bed next to her.

  THE GREEN CHAPEL was a triumph of the intangible, and it was the place toward which the mother and child now walked. It was a masterpiece of luminescence, and they marveled at how the walls seemed to disappear, leaving only windows that looked out onto the flickering green world. In the distance, at last, the mother sees the transparency to complete the one in her, a shape to meet her shape. Together, the mother and child will fold themselves up into the gleaming. From a distance, the galaxy was a greeny blue. They were filled with a serene feeling. Soon they would become the next thing.

  31

  SHE DREAMS OF a lake. It’s very blue and deep. It’s fed by springs. The mother kept the child tethered to her by a silk strand of the most remarkable resiliency. The silk was durable and flexible, and it stretched to accommodate the farthest places the child would ever want to go. The mother reeled out the tether now, and the child swam far.

  The mother thinks she would like gently, gently to suggest to the child that it might be possible to sever the thread.

  You have all your teeth now, she says.

  SHE REMEMBERS THE way the South Tower seemed to buckle and bend, then blur and be gone. Perhaps it was true that where she stood on the 110th floor mesmerized, looking out onto the world, she stayed, when she might have descended the stairs. The nightmare involved the right atrium, a corridor, rising heat, a kind of inferno, a baby motionless inside her capsule. Smoke.

  At the pond, they had harnessed the fog. In the night they had placed an almond inside a cake and waited. They had visited the Boy in the Glen and the child had danced. Had it all been a dream? Anything was possible, she supposed. But for the smoke—so dense, so dark—they might have jumped into that blue lake of sky and survived. It’s very deep. And no bats skim the surface. She looked to the child for a sign.

  MAYBE THERE IS time to separate in advance, the mother to her fiery, already transacted fate, and the child to her own blue lake of sky, free to live out an entire life, unburned. Every child, the mother murmurs, deserves to grow up.

  Perhaps it would be possible for the child to chew the tether now and jettison herself away—

  Don’t be absurd! the Vortex Man bellows. And he is back, just like that, in full, lavish form.

  But I thought you were dead, the mother says.

  Don’t be absurd!

  ON THE NORTH Pole of Mars, liquid water is being searched for tonight. Beneath the polar ice, well into the permafrost underground, deposits of water are believed to lie. From this distance, it certainly does seem as if those smooth, bluish areas on the crater floor could be ponds.

  I can’t wait to get there, the Grandmother from the North Pole says. She thinks about the planet’s obliquity—the angle at which its Poles tilt toward the sun. Liquid water, she smiles, and she opens her mouth like a baby bird awaiting a droplet. I can almost taste it.

  Still the crust is thicker and colder than previously thought, says the child. And the liquid water, if it exists at all, is a lot deeper below the surface than once thought.

  You might as well stay here, the child says, a while longer.

  IN A TRANCE she makes her way to the Flagship. She skittles across the frozen tundra to the vault where the world’s seeds are being laid to store. There, beneath the shining ice, seeds and sprouts from every plant on eart
h will slumber, protected until the end of time. No earthquake or nuclear catastrophe or funnel or any other heartache or sorrow, including the heartaches and sorrows yet to be invented, will harm this bank of seeds and nascent growing things. After the end of the world, there is another world.

  I know, the Grandmother whispers, that we are losing biodiversity every day . . . She is talking in a sweet and swaddling voice to the little dreaming seedlings.

  The Grandmother from the North Pole has been consumed by a lifelong mission that is only now revealed to the child. All her life she has scoured the earth collecting seeds from every plant in the world to be stored in the great vault beneath the snow, singing to them as she goes. One by one, she cradles and then drops them into liquid nitrogen where they are preserved in frozen, suspended animation. The seed crib strapped to her back.

  Legions of grandmothers carrying sacks of seeds from every position on the globe can now be seen. They nod and wave to one another as they pass.

  Having traversed once more the entire world, the Grandmother from the North Pole arrives again at the Global Seed Vault, only six hundred miles from her home at the North Pole. She waits for admittance. No one person knows all the codes. At last the door opens, and she unstraps the seed crib from her back. With this the Grandmother’s head grows pointy, and she bores through the hard, smooth ice and deposits the seeds inside the earth. Over and over she does this in silence, until she is finished. The crib is light now, and she will stop home for a moment before resuming her toil.

  Once the Egyptians saw her pass on a papyrus raft. Once the people in GinGin asked her what she was looking for. Once when her children wandered down for breakfast, she was not there. Things begin to make more sense to the child. Open your eyes, she says, tugging at her grandmother’s sleeve, and she puts her hand to the Grandmother’s glassy forehead.

  The seeds will sleep in the climate control far beneath the permafreeze for something like an eternity. With each deposit now, the Grandmother lingers longer and longer under the earth. She is more and more exhausted now. Luckily, the child has finally gotten a picture phone. Luckily, the picture phone has been vastly improved so it can still reach the Grandmother who is now surrounded by a fog of dry ice, five hundred feet beneath the surface.

  She smiles for the child and waves, even though she is so tired. Luckily the child can recognize her even when she has assumed the shape of a barge, or a lozenge, or a seedpod, or a toboggan. Luckily, the child can picture her even when the picture phone clouds and the reception is bad and the fog of ice does not lift. When the Grandmother, surrounded by seeds, falls asleep, no one can blame her. Eventually an automated voice will say to please hold. The child doesn’t mind. The child can hold on for a long time.

  SUDDENLY THE ATRIUM is flooded with sea light and we are helpless before it—at the mercy of it—its perfection, its splendor.

  Come out. It’s safe now, she whispers to the Girl with the Matted Hair, you don’t have to hide any longer.

  THE GIRL WITH the Matted Hair stands naked before the gilded mirror. This is the evening she has been waiting a lifetime for—the night of the Hamster Ball.

  She tiptoes over to the ancient pine tree armoire where she begins to select her adornments. Never has any choice seemed so grave before. Never has so much been at stake. She selects her undergarments first, made of silk from the most precious silkworms in Persia. She steps into them and already she has begun to transform. Next she takes out the sea otter skirt, heavy with salt, then a corset of crane, and the wolverine bodice.

  In the drawing room, her white-maned father in elegant foxtails waits, checking his golden pocket watch every few minutes. At last, he walks down the dark hall and knocks on the Girl’s door. She reaches for the swan wing cape, puts on her cloven-footed shoes, grabs her pony purse, and opens the door.

  Father!

  She has never seen her father look like this—so elegant, so handsome, so at ease. He offers his arm, and she takes it, and he escorts her to the next station of the evening. One more minute, the Girl whispers, and she puts on, at last, the final crucial garment—her gleaming ermine head. How resplendent the Girl with the Matted Hair is now! She takes her father’s arm.

  The mother understood that after having a mother, the next best thing to have is a Sacred Animal Totem, and she has to admit that the Girl with the Matted Hair has chosen beautifully. Slowly, she walks in her ceremonial garb down the palace path and into the ballroom. She feels a little topply; thank goodness her father is there.

  The band begins to play. Dall Sheep take the floor along with Snow Geese. In the rafters there are owls. It is a charmed night. A night of extravagance and consequence, and she knows not what to expect, but for once, among the beautiful creatures of the night, the world seems entirely open to her.

  She nods to the snow bear and the Arctic Cat on the dance floor, and the Red Fox, and the Egret, and the herd of Caribou, and suddenly her dance card is filled. No one comments on, though everyone notices, the conspicuous absence of bats. It is nighttime, after all, and the vessel for bats.

  Shining from the corner are fragments of Rabbit, and Whooping Crane fledglings, and also in the gleam, one can see a soldier licking its hind leg. Sorrow is iridescent and the whole room is glistening. Human troops in turtle shells make their way to the fore. Their mothers accompany them wearing kidskin dresses—the softest dresses in the world—more soft than anything anyone has ever touched.

  The Armadillo escorts some children across a floor festooned with exploding things. Above them flies the Gray Goose. The Grandmother appears and rubs her lucky rabbit’s foot, courtesy of the cat. Maybe the Girl with the Matted Hair will never see day again—she could live like this forever, she thinks, with the night creatures, protected. Love floods the room. A Reindeer nuzzles her; lichen silently grows on its hoofs.

  The Bat is a gentle creature, it is true, and everyone casually scans the rafters. Inside the body of a mother, a small creature is lepping.

  In the great swells of music, the Girl might be carried anywhere next. The Mantis, Archivist of Lost Mothers, takes the Girl’s hand and leads her to a clearing in the music.

  In the clearing, the Grandmother from the North Pole in sealskin now stands. She bows deeply and says to the Girl in the Ermine Head that she has, as recently as yesterday, seen her mother. The girl peers at the Grandmother through her shining, ferocious Ermine eyes. It is a night of fear and awe, but also a night of unspeakable splendor, and it unfolds quickly now. First the Grandmother gives the Girl a living sled dog to hold. When the child is settled, the Grandmother continues. Your mother, she says, calmly and directly, is an Arctic Tern, who flies from Pole to Pole and back again, traveling the entire globe every year, twice. She sees now on her flights all there is to see. The Girl thinks her mother must be very tired by now. On the contrary, the Grandmother smiles. The Grandmother from the North Pole touches the Girl’s shoulder blades and feels the first inkling of wings. She has been watching you all this time.

  With this news, a very deep sleep-like state overcomes the Girl, and her heartbeat slows to almost nothing. Because it is winter, her ermine head is thick and white.

  Mother, she says, and she reaches her hand up toward the tern, who had materialized, and sure enough, the tern comes to her. How easy it all is. Though she is afraid, she knows, if invited, she would not hesitate to fly away with her. But before the Girl can give it another thought, the mother has swooped down and taken her child high, high up into the sky. From on high, she scans the floor for her white-maned father, who is little more than a speck. There he is in the distance, foxtrotting, nonetheless. His horse hoofs gleam in the moonlight.

  How very much I love you, the feathered mother says through her beak. And how very lucky I have been to see you twice in every year!

  Later when the Girl takes off the ermine head, her hair is not matted anymore.

  And they fly like that for some time until the mother grows large and white like a
stork, and carries the Girl for a moment longer, then opens her beak, and allows her to drop.

  32

  wings

  THE JACKAL HAD returned. But it was okay, the mother said—it had not come for them this time. The activity that had once attended them had ceased. Perhaps they were no longer in transit. Perhaps they had now crossed the line, the line of accessibility; perhaps they were closed off now, the mother thought, sealed off—it was difficult to take in, but it was now how she felt. They had already been come for. Anubis had been the usher, the go-between, and had taken many shapes: coyote, jackal, bat. Silently he had walked between the shadows of life and death and lurked in the dark places. Perhaps they had crossed over, but if so, when, when had that happened?

  Still, she could not help but think it—perhaps they were no longer in the in-between state.

  IT WAS THE fluttering sound behind the walls of the house, or outside on a pure clear summer night—the flapping of unseen wings—that had once made it so hard to go on. Or the wing-beat that seemed to come from within her, and which she had always dreaded—that inward movement, that imperceptible fluttering. She wondered whether it was wrong to move without fear now, because anything could happen then.

  ALL SHE COULD do was notice. Now the step into fearlessness was as easy as crossing the rabbit path. It was that absence of fear that would make it impossible to understand exactly what the bat exacted.

  Sensate life was falling away. The mother could not help but notice and feel a tremendous gratitude. She was not far now.