Gabriel values competition if it yields a secure and abundant outcome.
The way my father taught me to take my medicine was by stacking pills on his tongue and swallowing without gagging. The sheer number was impressive and showed me what kind of stuff he was made of, what I must copy in order to not get lost.
XXX
Mike and I were wed on Memorial Day of 2006. War made festive.
Eight years later on that date I drive to Olympia for a reading I have scheduled. Every bridge incites a pins-and-needles riot below the belt.
I had originally hoped that my husband and I would leave the kids with his folks and celebrate down there with all of our friends, the cartilage of our contact and connection getting worn to the bone. We had only recently moved from Cannon Beach, from lingering isolation and suspicious gazes of a coastal life in a watery bell jar. Our daughter suddenly gets sick and so Mike stays behind in Portland to care for her. I try to get my two best friends, Matt and Sarah, to come along with me. I want to get drunk and forget with them instead of memorializing my marriage, but they have to work and can’t come. They were my family before I married and birthed my way into a new clan.
I drive to Olympia by myself and listen to the radio. The first story is about a missing plane, Malaysia Airlines 370:
DR. PAULINE BOSS: One of the first things you want to tell families like this is that what you’re experiencing is an ambiguous loss. And it’s the most painful kind of loss there is right now because you have no assurance of the fate of your loved one. And then I add this: it’s not your fault. And I add that line because most people who suffer from this kind of loss tend to blame themselves. I should not have told her to go on this flight. I should’ve gone on this flight myself instead of her. All of these kinds of things go through the minds of the people left behind. And so, it’s very important to tell them repeatedly it’s not your fault.
ARUN RATH: But when you have that degree of uncertainty, how do you know how to move forward with coping with that loss?
BOSS: They aren’t going to move forward right now. Right now, they’re in a survival mode. Eventually, we hope, with family and community support systems that they can move forward. But the only way I found that families of the missing move forward is if you allow them to hold the paradox that ambiguity causes. At one moment they’ll say, “I think they’re at the bottom of the sea.” At another moment they’ll say, “I think perhaps they’re alive on an island somewhere.” That is normal. That is natural and typical reactions from ambiguous loss.
The vanishing of this plane is considered by the news media to be the most bizarre and puzzling story of 2014. For the people who are still waiting on proof that their loved ones are actually dead, waiting remains the only story. Victims of the missing are now hiring private investigators. The disappearance makes no sense, like in a murder scene with only traces of cleaning fluid and no hair or skin flakes. The path to the missing is too clean to follow, but also too clean to let be, since it indicates someone took care to erase the person. There is no such thing as a vanishing.
Today new conspiracy theories about the Malaysia Airlines flight suppose that the Russians hijacked it.
The second piece of news on NPR is about the gang rape of two teenage girls in a poor Indian village who went into a field near their home to relieve themselves and were plucked from the tall grasses like rabbits, skinned from the inside, and hung to drip-dry in tandem on a mango tree.
The year 2014 launched the lunar tetrad of four consecutive total eclipses. The four Blood Moons. In some Christian circles this occurrence is a sign of an impending apocalypse.
The day after the reading I wake up late at my husband’s friend’s house. His old professor’s wife is there alone when I come out of her basement. We sit in the kitchen and talk about babies, my babies and other babies she knows, always a danger with babies, always trying to keep them safe, keep them alive. “Next time I will bring them,” I say, “for sure.” Like a sack, babies are brought, or put down.
She makes me an omelet, bright yellow folds. My cholesterol is so high, I explain, my heart could burst any minute now. She takes a piece of fruit out of a bowl and says she has these delicious ripe mangoes that will fix me, they have what I need to cut the fat from my veins, and starts peeling the stubborn flesh with a dullish knife.
We talk and talk and I force two slices down my throat with a fork. My mouth is where I picked to be lost before and I will do it again. I will choose to be mute and not blind and not deaf. I can force my tongue to lick and roll around mangoes for now. I can’t tell her about the giving tree and she hasn’t brought up the story of the mango tree.
I have never seen a mango tree. I have never eaten a just-picked mango. I hate the word ripe. I can’t eat mangoes, maybe ever again, maybe not until I forget about what getting hung from a mango tree means and that it will never end. When I come home from the Olympia trip I notice that I have mangoes sitting on the windowsill and the radio is on again and it says that my children shouldn’t be in the room to hear this. I think I can let them rot, I hope they rot, the stupid fruit by the open, open, open window.
But my children are hungry, and I have a dirty kitchen and no snacks, so I cut them up. They are stringy, the juicy pulp. And the slices are thick, and the slices are wet, and they are making my fingers sticky and I can’t wash my hands right this instant like I want to. And my son takes the bowl fast because he is famished, so they are in his mouth now finally making him so full. And the story on the radio is buried and gone. The kitchen is on mute. The fruit disappears. The children are fed.
I see skinned rabbits when I close my eyes. I see the giving tree’s stump when I kiss. I see the mango tree when I fuck.
XXXI
Cézanne looked at the fields outside of his house intently. He stared at the fruit on his table until the color he saw delivered a fraction of its promise in layers of paint. Cézanne plowed his earth, tilled the wheat, and then gave it to the heavens by immortalizing his plot of dirt in oils. Much like a priest cannot take a vacation from believing in God, this servant of canvas and light could not afford to take a day off from painting, even to attend his mother’s funeral. He painted until his eyes bled. It was in his fourth decade that Cézanne had become relentless and ruthlessly obsessed with his work. He was most nourished when securing a live model. He seemed to enjoy hounding women to come over and be still for him; their subsequent countless rejections only emboldened him.
Sometimes my dad brought home a white bunny and skinned it for dinner in our Leningrad apartment. As he held it up by its feet and tore at the incision by the tail the fur seemed to turn inside out in his other hand all the way to the ears in a single motion, exposing the pink shiny meat and the membrane in between what puffed out and clung back like second skin, like saliva bubbles popping from a baby’s drooling mouth.
One of the more tender things my father did was pretend to be a bunny rabbit, sniffing in my ear and around my jawline, as though rooting around for food. He pursed his lips together and sucked air in and out fast and gentle. This was so pleasurable and exhausting. Most horsing around usually comes in the form of being wrestled, tickled to death, or thrown up in the air—our impulse for violence inverted. My kids beg me to roughhouse with them, sometimes until one of us gets pinched or pushed too hard. But the bunny breath always brings them back around.
My father accuses me of being an adamant prodder each time I mention Elena. He feels that I am married to my own blind truth and press him where he’s too sore to the touch. That I don’t know enough about our family and don’t know “what enough is.” Since I left home the day before my eighteenth birthday, we haven’t had a visit that doesn’t involve him calling my attending college in Olympia as the time I abandoned him to move to the farthest available state. “Ever since you ran away from home . . .” he begins the speech of filling me in while I suck on a pickled tomato in his kitchen. The words for runner and refugee are quite similar i
n the Russian language.
“I don’t ask you to continue in my footsteps, but somehow you end up repeating my old mistakes,” Dad tells me. He is referring to him becoming a dentist, an oral surgeon, more accurately, at what he perceives as a later-than-normal stage of one’s life. Because he felt discouraged and unable to fluently converse with people on a deeper level in a second language and didn’t have the chops to hypnotize patients in a broken English with a heavy accent that further inhibited him, he swiftly moved on from psychotherapy as a feasible path forward. When I was in high school he went to NYU’s dental school for a career change that seemed most prudent to him, especially since they offered a program tailored to immigrants whose credentials were now all but useless. Dad has displayed the misery of excavating inside of and drilling down into cramped smelly spaces in his gorgeous black eyes ever since.
Bunnies must constantly gnaw on hard wood or their teeth will never stop growing and become too sharp and long, possibly unusable. That’s what Franny’s day care teacher tells me about their classroom bunnies. Their names are Smokey and Fire and they are often used as distractions for transitioning from tearful morning goodbyes. When I peel Franny off me and hand her over to her teacher I also wave to the bunnies. “Too hot to pet, huh?” I say, looking past them, to my daughter’s red eyes.
When I was thirty-four years old and heavily pregnant with Franny, I had to have a rotten wisdom tooth pulled. I instinctively put Babes in Toyland on my headphones, Handsome Greeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetel . . . Babes, who wrote Spanking Machine, To Mother, Fontanelle, are going to the tit, biting the source of pleasure and rioting out and into their mama’s arms.
I power through. The tooth they let me keep has a big dark hole and only one sharp root. “You are lucky,” says the bone butcher. “Sometimes wisdom teeth have two roots, but mostly four, and that’s much harder to extract.”
There are four kinds of human teeth. Incisors for cutting. Canines for tearing. Premolars. And molars for grinding.
Inside my daughter’s gums her adult teeth are pushing out the babies to be put under pillows and later stored in keepsake jars.
If I needed a tooth pulled or drilled as a child, my dad’s empathy and frantic need to suck out my pain were fully on display. Dad would lie in the dental chair so that I could sit on his lap as he held my wrists with a reserved softness to get me to stop swatting at the buzzing instruments. He gave me instructions on dealing with the sharp ache and fear: to pinch, scratch, and squeeze him on the legs as hard as I could for as long as I needed to. He asked God to give him my pain. Dad believed in this transfer of powerlessness, that he could carry my load even as my own gums were ripped open.
All Russian parents recited this refrain when comforting their children after a fall or scrape: the kitty hurts for you, the mousy hurts for you, the doggy hurts for you, but you, my baby, hurt no more. They blew a kiss on the bruise and off you went, an animal able to project her pain onto other sentient beings without the means to defend themselves.
A rhino hunted for its horns runs in fear of captivity. She knows not whether the gun pointed at her from the chopper is to kill her or is a stun gun to knock her out and take her to safety. The animal only knows of being hunted. It only knows of poachers. The endangered rhino is surprised when she is in a new land being released. She is grateful but will never trust her new surroundings fully.
But I was the one who left. I parted. I divided. I conquered my fear of flight. Found my best byre to hibernate my explanations.
No matter how much my father hit me or called me a slut the way the kids in high school did, he wanted me to be someone, to make something of myself, to make him proud. He slapped me so that I would stop trying to be a person who’d fail at making him swell with pride each time he looked at me, talked about me, or thought about me, which according to him was often. Because we were of the same polarity, both given up on, with no metal to hold us together, he had to be my mother as well as my father. Because when she left, the loss of this magnetic center shifted our sense of direction. The needle caved on the dial and he went blind watching it spin.
He wanted me to sit in a vaulted-ceilinged library with knee-high argyle socks, pouring over law books, staring pensively out of a picture window as yellow leaves fell on a damp-with-dew ground in slow motion, edging limestone buildings covered in climbing ivy.
He calls me Sonechka, or Syustik—his nickname for me. Mostly, I am Sonia, the diminutive. Outside of the home, I am the formal: Sophia.
He often calls to tell me he worries about how I am doing out there and knows I could go farther still. His farther and my farther are not aligned. Father, we are not aligned.
The way mirrors are made of ghost mothers brushing my hair behind me as I stretch my arms out to tie a bow. That I came from what was gone before holding on could mend me and forge a shield against my father.
The way airports are made of blue canvas travel bags given to me by my dad’s boss in Italy. In the leaving there is the memory of getting away and not dying.
The way high school hallways are made of boys I used to kiss saying I’m a stupid whore when I stop kissing them and get recycled into a rumor.
The way these boys would wait for me outside of school and throw pennies my way, yelling for me to pick up my worth.
I don’t believe we belong to each other the way my father does, but I’m in the business of making the same polarities of magnets touch without repelling. I’m in the realm of the unbelievable.
He wanted me to know restraint and propriety. Those were only secondary to loyalty and a love of poetry.
I took his unyielding will to persevere and thrive, I took his ruthless stubbornness, I took his hunger and his yearning, I took his impatience to inject meaning and soul into the mundane, I took his unwillingness to accept injustice, I took his stanzas, I took his traveling legs craving miles, I took his brazen tongue, I took his blighted sense of self-worth, I took his conveyor belt of lovers, I took his tears on my lap, I took his chest-beating tantrums, I took the gem out of the stone of his eyes, I took his pounding fists, I took his waking to run out of strange beds, I took his berry-stained bruises, I took his bloodshot vigilance, I took his nails peeling back as they scratched and held on too tight, I took the ammonia whiff in the nose holding back liquid anger, I took his believing before seeing, I took his staying when he could have left and made it the gust of wind begging for speed at my back as I fled with his bad and his good.
When he fears that we have lost our center, Gabriel starts to tell me stories about my preschool years. I often came along to his night classes where I learned to be patient and funny sitting in the grand lecture hall. When his professor asked if it was time for a break I made a little joke to the class: We don’t need a break, we need to go home. It went over so well that there were nights when the other students would wink at me or bribe me with candy to blurt out something precocious to throw the teacher off track and get them to early dismissal. Dad would leave the room to use the bathroom and come back to a cluster of adults watching me demonstrate how I crack an egg. He picked boogers out of my nose and told me they were as good to eat as my eggs were because I was delicious. He relished leisurely cutting my fingernails with his rounded scissors. He thanked me for my competence and stamina. Moya somastayatelynay dochkah—my independent daughter, he would beam. “Her favorite phrase is: ‘I can do this on my own.’ ”
My dad seemed like the most gentle and loving man in that lecture hall, drawing me pictures and peeling my oranges while keeping one eye on the blackboard.
“I dreamed of having a father my whole life,” he would impart, eyes that spill if they catch mine. “You get to have a father, and I wish I’d known what it’s like to have the protective presence of a man around—an influencer. I used to lie awake in bed as a young boy, and dream that I was a poet in Paris, and imagined my father being proud of me. My mother never finished grade school and wanted me to fix watches for a living because it was a p
ractical trade.”
It was another outrageous myth about our uneasy dyad that I pretended to agree with, like his belly birthmark, which looks like the linea nigra of postbirth—see, I’m your ma—and him being able to reinvent the role of his own absent family patriarch while also successfully replacing my mother. His lack of a father and my lack of a mother was something that he tried desperately to bond with me over, but the hospital corners on the bed we made felt too tight.
XXXII
I found out the sex of both of my babies around the fourth month of their gestation.
There are four people in my family and we live on the fourth floor of an old brick apartment building in Portland’s northwest quadrant.
I think preservation is a dead art, but I have the need to live in old buildings and wear someone else’s old clothes, and walk in someone else’s old shoes, and put pictures of dead writers on the wall above my desk made of old doors from a remodeled house I will never visit.
Because I decided to think about you, again, around the time I was pregnant with my daughter, I began to carry a picture of your face near me at all times in my wallet. Very soon after, I watched as my son took out this small photo and crumpled it up in his little hands, the gray dust flaking off and permanently creasing the fresh young facade. I ran toward him and took it away like they coach you to push the baby out, with steady, shallow breaths so there’s minimal tearing. I hugged him to cover up the waves of resentment cracking my chest open; bit the violence into my own lip and left his body unharmed, circle bent.
Mother Winter Page 11