For my grandmothers, Constance and Ewa,
who are beloved.
• Last News About the Little Box •
The little box which contains the world
Fell in love with herself
And conceived
Still another little box
The little box of the little box
Also fell in love with herself
And conceived
Still another little box
And so it went on forever
The world from the little box
Ought to be inside
The last offspring of the little box
But not one of the little boxes
Inside the little box in love with herself
Is the last one
Let’s see you find the world now
—VASKO POPA (trans. Charles Simic)
The Daughters
Prelude
All my grandmother’s important stories took place in the Polish countryside. Like this one:
A woman sits nude on the branch of a tree and lets her brown legs dangle into the open air. The bark ridges cut pleasantly into her thighs, and she presses her palms down, curls her fingers around the bough.
A man walks towards her through the woods, pushing aside whip-thin limbs of birch and beech, sidestepping shrubs as he searches for his lost path. The woman hums a song, and the man’s feet begin to fall in time with the music. He does not realize that this is happening, does not yet feel his body in thrall to her.
It is a surprise, then, when he catches sight of her legs. He’s far from his village, tired and thirsty; the last thing he expected to find here was another person, particularly a woman who is naked and glorious and alone. Her feet are callused, the soles covered in dirt, and they hang before him like clothes left to dry in the wind. He follows the smooth blue ridges of her veins up to her calves, her fingers, her breasts, her neck. To the soft and downy lobes of her ears. When he looks into her face, she smiles, and his surprise becomes recognition. His thirst disappears as the scent of a nearby river fills his nose and mouth, wets his tongue. The man knows that he’s met the love of his life, and she is going to devour him.
This is an old story. While the aroma of clean water lingers in the air, the woman asks the man for a gift of bread and salt, which he will feed to her with his own fingers. He’s already trembling, imagining it. His body is vibrating with desire.
The man shimmies up the trunk of the tree and swings onto the branch beside his beloved. The closer he gets, the more she smells of river currents, the rush of waves over mossy rocks releasing the green musk of water plants. Tilting her head to the side, the woman beckons him with her fingers. He leans in to kiss her: closer, closer. He bobs his head in time with her song, and as they embrace, her humming rumbles through him. He has never felt so entwined with someone, so protected. After a moment his heart stops beating, and his body drops to the forest floor with a muffled thud.
What happened next? I asked my grandmother, my baba.
That, she said, depends on who is telling you the story. Most people don’t understand the rusalka, and so they wouldn’t tell you that she has tears in her eyes as she jumps down from the tree and lands softly in the leaves. They wouldn’t tell you of her heaving sobs of regret as she walks back to the river, her body light as air.
But then again, my baba said, what most people would tell you is also true. That she will find another man; that she will do it again. She will sit in the trees and sing her song as often as she needs to, take as much strength as she requires to survive.
Part One
1
Last night I woke up in a panic, convinced our apartment building was beset by tornadoes. My bed shook beneath me in response to a distant whump, and in the cup of water by my nightstand I saw rings echo outward on the liquid surface. The whole room retained a shimmer of movement, the afterglow of impact; a hint of wind groaned through the trees outside, and my eyes filled up with tears. I’ve always been afraid of storms.
We live on a high floor, among the top branches of the courtyard ashes and oaks, and if I peer through the bedroom window I can usually see a sliver of Lake Michigan, sometimes the indistinct forms of people running on the lakeshore path. But from my pillow I could only see the sky. Dark and roiling, bleary with water. Another strong shake hit the building, as though every front door were slamming at once, and I winced. Beside me in the dark bed, John turned and mumbled something unintelligible, tugging the blanket over his ear. And then Kara began to whimper.
I’m still not used to infant cries, which always sound, to me, terribly lonely. As if they know they can’t be understood, and this is the larger part of their woe. Kara’s were soft, though, uninsistent, and I waited to see if they would melt away. Perhaps she’d just woken up to find herself unfettered in bed, the swaddle tossed off by her own sleeping limbs. I held my breath.
Another thump thump.
She might not hear it, I thought. She might be too tired to really care, and fall back asleep with her head resting beside her fist. My heartbeat sounded in my ears, drumming in time with the rain and wind. During elementary school tornado drills, we were taught to shield our faces behind elbows and forearms as we filed into the cold concrete shelter below the gym. I wanted to pull the pillow over my head or tug John’s arm over my eyes and ears to mute the sounds and give me some measure of protection. But I lay still, listening. And hoping: don’t let her really be awake. As though being unaware of a storm could save you from it. As though sleeping babies were routinely picked up by twisters and set back down gently, unharmed.
I could lie here, afraid, and watch the windowpanes shatter inward. I could watch the ceiling rise, prised off by giant unseeable fingers. I could feel time slow down and then speed back up, the certainty of death upon me. I could do this, if only she went back to sleep and kept up her deep, unshuddering breaths.
Something banged against the window. A tree branch maybe, wrenched free by the violent air. Kara inhaled sharply and then really cried, a begging, a bellow in the moonless night. The sound seemed to come from my own chest, and I jumped up, grabbed Kara from the cradle to try and fit the cry to my lungs. If anything broke through the windows now it would slam into my back, sticking me with glass shrapnel. I wrapped my head and shoulders over my daughter so we were one body, double-face hidden below the curve of the torso.
But nothing came. John continued sleeping, air easing through his lips. And Kara, snug against my shoulder, shushed. Her eyes trembled shut. The building quivered. And I found my wish granted, me the only sentinel against the night.
The truth about possibility is that it is boundless. I could just as easily have been sucked into the sky to fly with cars and billboard shards as ignored by the gods for another day and left to fall asleep in a chair with a child clutching my hair in her sweating fingers. I admit that singing opera provides me with a taste for the dramatic. But in my daily life I prefer a degree of peace—time to luxuriate in the shower or bath, space to run scales until my voice is warm and elastic.
I just happen to know that sometimes the world gives a little twist and everything changes. A shout percussing across the mountain stones until one falls down and the rest tumble after. There is danger in small things.
This morning I woke up to an electronic bip. John stood above me holding my phone, flipping through the settings.
“There you go.” He handed it to me—I shook the stiffness out of my fingers before accepting. “Volume is up to the max. You should be able to hear it from anywhere in the house now.”
“Oh joyous thing.” I yawned. Then I caught myself. “Wait. You found my phone?”
“Wasn’t lost.” He shrugged and smoothed a navy blue jacket over his
shoulders. “We’re doing an open rehearsal for a set of local elementaries today. And then I have to meet with Stan, so maybe seven?”
“Okay.” I scrolled through my missed calls. Nothing essential. At least, nothing I wanted to return.
Nothing from my baba Ada. Though that was natural.
Kara stirred, and I adjusted her so she could begin nursing. Her quiet supping sounds. John leaned over and kissed her ear and then, after a split-second pause, mine. I couldn’t help but shift. So many mouths occupied with my body.
One possibility is that my husband knows the child we’ve just brought into the world is not his. Another possibility is that he doesn’t. After all, John loves her. That is not in dispute.
I watched him pull his gray wool coat over the blazer, wrap a scarf around his neck, and make sure he had the right music in his leather satchel before putting on his gloves. Then he waved. Slipped through the door and was gone.
Most people in my position would take comfort in the fact that conception dates are approximate at best. The, shall we say, soft-focus view of my daughter’s provenance is that no one can be sure about it. And there are moments when I can almost imagine him at the source of her. Hollows left in the pillows by the weight of a head, John hefting himself off the mattress to walk naked into the kitchen for a glass of tap water.
Still, I can’t help but know what I know. I know when my heart rate increases by a single point, know the placement of my ribs with chiropractic precision. Feeling a child wake up inside me was as obvious and instantaneous as a slap to the face.
What I didn’t know was where my phone had gotten to, and it disturbs me, the ease with which John plucked it from the ether. If he’s aware that Kara’s blood is not his own, then the question of what he might do next is still an open one. Why hasn’t he said anything? Why does a part of me wish he would? I’m sitting on the edge of a precipice, legs dangling into the dark.
Small things: a lost phone, the unnaturally blue eyes of a child.
Outside the storm is still raging, the sky shedding snow. Not as loud as last night, perhaps, but just as angry.
A cross the room, out of my reach, our stereo sits on a shelf with recordings and ruffled sheaves of sheet music. A thin smattering of selections on vinyl, which is John’s pretension, not my own. I’ve never understood his fascination with how music is preserved. I’m interested in how it’s made. Living inside music that lives in me, so that we, the song and I, are a continual unfolding out of one another, a growing vastness, an emerging pattern.
John left this morning to rehearse La Bohème and I did not. For now, this is the way of things.
It seems odd to me to think of my voice scratched into a wax cylinder, trapped like a spirit caught in a jar. Worse still a computer chip: the tip of my tongue striking my teeth, the glottal contractions in my throat, even the air that circulates through my lungs and my blood, all somehow frozen onto a thumb drive that I can toss into my purse. A song is best sustained through performance, where it can respond to the world around it. Be shaped by its surroundings. Made new. In that way it’s like a story, never so alive as when it’s being told.
From my seat I take stock of the operatic scores I’ve lined up to read as I nurse, each with a variety of recordings tucked beside it. Just tools. Their usefulness predicated on the belief that this pause in my career will end, and end well. When I take on a new role, I like to read the full score of the opera first, sing it through, to let my body interpret the notes on the page. Then I listen to all the recordings I can get my hands on to make sure I’m not imitating someone else’s voice.
Kara observes me, fighting off sleep, and I wonder what I could say to her to help her relax. Release her hold on the details she’s drinking in from around her so we could both get a moment or two more of rest. The doctor, after all, told me that rest was what I needed. “Your body has been through a struggle,” she said. “You need to take some time off to get your strength back.”
I could tell Kara a story. She has a lot to learn about me, about the past. Where she comes from, where she’s going. And anyway, isn’t that the function of stories? To teach our brains to dream? It would be daunting to fall asleep into the noise of complete darkness, infinite probability. Without the guide of a little narrative, a little magic, how would we know where to go when we closed our eyes?
Despite her restiveness, the baby barely makes a sound. Sometimes soft snufflings, yawns that expand her entire body so she seems to be unkinking at the joints. We named her Karina, but I haven’t called her that since John and I made the official declaration for her birth certificate. She’s Kara, plain Kara. In the muted light of day, she doesn’t mind that it’s snowing outside, that a slick mix of sleet and ice and rain is tapping on the tall windows of the living room. To her, the entire world is the chair I sit in, or perhaps just the length of my arm where she lays. To her, the sun is a bent lamp at my elbow, and the whole of existence is quiet, because I made it that way. Tappings, stockinged footsteps, hush, the baby is sleeping.
Since Kara was born I haven’t sung a note. I’ve lain in bed with her soft weight splayed across my chest, and I’ve inhaled the milkfat scent of her hair. I’ve passed her to my husband and watched him press his nose against hers, stare cross-eyed into her pupils, smile his smallest, truest smile. I’ve seen other, more complicated shifts in his expression too, but we don’t talk about them. I wrap silence around myself like a blanket, like I’m always cold. Looking at my scores makes me shiver. Waking up with Tosca in my head fills my lungs with ice. Kara is so small, just a creature of cheeks and folds, eyes and rumples. I wrap silence around her, too, and tell myself it is to protect her. To keep her core temperature high, so the breath she sighs out at me will heat my neck in tiny bursts.
My grandmother Ada, babenka Adelajda, tells me that when I was first born I blinked my eyes with the regularity of a metronome. As a child I ran down the tiled aisles of the grocery store leaping in time with crescendos in the piped-in music. If the song was up-tempo I got mischievous, pinching all the grapes in a bunch to find the crisp ones and popping them in my mouth when no one was looking. Sometimes I tried to sneak one bite of every kind of fruit and vegetable in the store: a bean sprout; a lettuce leaf, with its torn green taste; an apple, bitten down to the white on one side and placed back on the pile with its shiny, unadulterated face forward.
If the music was slow, I lost the will to walk. My baba Ada held my hand and asked, “Is that the weight of the world I see on your shoulders?” I leaned into her, burying my face in her side and letting my knees buckle ever so slightly. But it wasn’t sadness, exactly, that stilled me. I wanted to lie on the floor and progress at the same pace as the chords. Toss an arm out, then rest. Roll onto my stomach, then rest. My body was starting to ascertain that the quiet moments between notes, between sounds, were as important as the sounds themselves.
The wind blows water against the window in waves, as if it were a body heaving backwards and thrusting itself into the glass, demanding entrance. We’re close enough to the beach to be a target for the lake effect, frozen raindrops assaulting our building in droves, snow accumulating at a magnitude. Ours is a nice neighborhood in the north of the city, but there is no protection anywhere from the weather. You just get used to it. The pounding is so regular it’s almost soothing, at least with a radiator near my knees, hissing steam in concert. My spine cracks as I stretch in my chair, and the child stretches her fingers, which look boneless.
I’m on hold. Alone with a baby girl I have reason to be wary of, a baby girl whose birth I can’t remember. Her first hours are a black space in my body’s history that leaves me feeling as if I woke up in the wrong skin.
John asked me yesterday if it was really going to be okay for him to go back to work and leave me alone. He was worried, he said, about me not rehearsing.
“Doctor’s orders,” I told him. As if he didn’t know. When my contractions got intense we hailed a cab to the hospital, a
nd I hoisted my bulky body into the car easily enough. But partway through the drive something went wrong. I felt warmth spreading over my thighs and cursed, thinking that my water had broken, and we would have to pay the cleaning fee for the cab. When I touched the wet spot, though, my hand came up red. I remember the earth tilting. Inside me something gave way, clicked, cracked, and I can’t recall anything else until the moment I found myself in a hospital bed, strange hands affixing an IV to my arm. Then I lost consciousness again.
“She was a little too eager to come into the world,” my doctor said later. She sat beside me with her hand on my arm while John slept in a chair nearby. Apparently this is what happens when you trip unknowingly close to death—you cause physical sympathy. The baby was in an incubator, the doctor explained, for observation. “Tried to push through the wrong way.” She pressed lightly on my stomach with her free hand, checking the dressing, and I gasped out an aah. “You see. It’s unusual. But not unheard of.” She frowned. “You’ll have to be careful with yourself. Are you in a position to do that?”
The proper term for what happened to me is a rupture or dehiscence, an event usually reserved for flowering plants. Spontaneous opening of the fruit. Splitting to spit out seeds and flesh. Dehiscence also occurs with old wounds.
When I draw a very deep breath I can feel the place where my body is torn, a hairline scoring in the womb. By now it’s supposed to be healing, but I can’t picture it that way. I can only imagine the tear as fresh and electric. After all, it responds to me with great sensitivity, whenever I do the things I most wish to do. Like breathing in. Exhaling. Reaching for a high, clear sound.
Supposedly I will absorb this pain like a gong absorbs a blow. First it will radiate through me, in waves. Then I will settle into its absence, perhaps a little warmer with the memory of the vibration. Supposedly I’ll wake up one day soon and my lungs will open as sails do in a high wind. I won’t need to worry that singing will cause renewed dehiscence. Or that there is something dangerous about my daughter. Something inherent, that she cannot control.
The Daughters Page 1