Dry Your Smile

by Morgan, Robin;

  Peach-brazen snapdragons exulted next to hardy petunias; the basin with gypsophila and cornflowers rallied a miniature women’s suffrage garden—white, green, and purple. Strawberries, tomatoes, zucchini, watercress, sorrel, and green snapbeans promised a lush harvest. The cactus collection bristled its spines with pride. Rosemary, parsley, basil, the mints, thyme, catnip, bay leaves—I could smell the herbs’ pungency green on the river breeze.

  “To us, little garden,” I toasted aloud with my teacup. “To this moment.”

  If it were possible to immerse oneself wholly in the present, tragedy couldn’t exist. Tragedy requires the past and the future. Tragedy requires history.

  So I offered another toast. “To Laurence. And to Iliana. And to Hope.”

  Goodbye, I thought, goodbye to all my loves and selves and masks and the loss of them, there, where they recede in rose-lavender light bled by the sunset. Goodbye …

  I was not surprised to see them appear from the three other corners of the roof and slowly approach me where I sat, behind the nonexistent fourth wall of the set.

  Out from behind the hibiscus, the little girl, a tattered book under her arm, her dress torn and muddy, her face grinning beneath a long scratch from under the eye to the chin.

  Out from behind the jasmine, the young woman in a jade-green suit, clutching a piece of paper and carrying beige high-heeled shoes but walking in stockinged feet, hair touseled as if by a high river wind.

  Out from behind the rosebush exclaiming crimson glories, the middle-aged woman clasping the Tibetan Book of the Dead in one hand and hefting a suitcase in the other, looking as if she hadn’t slept much lately.

  “Welcome,” I said to them. “Welcome to the garden. Thank you for coming in person to say goodbye.”

  The child broke her formal advance and ran straight into my arms so we could burst into tears together, the blood and dirt on her small round face smudging onto mine. When she finally wriggled back to peek at me, I thought with a shock: Why, she’s shy!

  Then she smiled, and it was her own smile, one I’d never seen before. Wordlessly, she shoved her book into my lap. I looked down at the flyleaf. “For Bunker,” she had scrawled, “with love, your friend, Julian Travis.”

  My child. My real child, hiding your loneliness, secreting your rebellions, laughing where you can, making it up as you go along. My littlest, fighting self.

  When I looked up to thank her, she was gone.

  But the young girl stood near now, hair parted in the middle and brushed loosely back, the way her mother had worn her hair when she too had been young. Chin tilted proudly upward, shoulders squared, feet sure-footed on the roof surface, free of their rejected shoes.

  Neither of us knew quite what to do, embrace or shake hands. Then, in a gesture at once obsequious and imperious, she thrust at me the paper she was carrying. It had a city registrar’s seal on it, the words Birth Certificate printed across the top. Just underneath, she had neatly lettered: “Notes for a Novel.” The rest of the page was blank.

  My daughter, learning as you go, seeking the phantoms and slaying the ghosts, fearing your life ahead but wanting desperately to get on with living it, already loving words on a page.

  When I glanced back to thank her for her long-ago clues left so painstakingly about, she too had disappeared.

  The last of the three trudged with a weary step. But even as I reached to help her with her suitcase, she moved past me unseeing, her eyes fixed on how color died along the sunset, darker amethyst now slashing the heliotrope of the lower sky. Intent on placing one foot in front of another, she didn’t acknowledge me, her twin, her doppelgänger, her double, unreal as her shadow cast on a moonless night.

  My … sister. Obsessed with discovering what is real, then preoccupied with raging against what is false, now are you ready? But I couldn’t catch her, reach her in time to fold her in my arms before she dimmed into the river sky and vanished.

  Dear Julian, dear professional, so expert at ventriloquating yourself into others’ realities you have never faced your own, are you ready?

  Dear burned-out baby star twinkling in the American dream firmament, now can you chart your splendid new constellation?

  Dear coward, dear tactician, trooper, counterfeiter of the affirmations and the subterfuge, now can you concede who it was your deadliest battles were staged against?

  Dear guilty sullen martyr, now can you see where you stand in the chain? What longs to be visible but is erased, what vows to survive but is converted, what yearns to hide but is displayed, what strives to contain but is broached. Hope, David, Laurence, Iliana. What preens to disguise but is exposed. Julian. And all of us were simply children once.

  With every breath, we try to endure by spilling over the borders of others. Infiltrations. Occupations. Annexations.

  But I refuse to believe in borders. Borders are delusions. I affirm one planet, interdependent, unified.

  Ah. Well then, Julian.

  In the clarifying dusk, a lisianthus flower abruptly detaches itself from its stem, unfurls white organdy appliquéd wings, and flits to the Crimson Glory, then circles my head once and shimmers off. Blossom or butterfly? Artifice or art? By the eclipsing light I can barely make out the title of the book the child has given me: Dry Your Smile.

  “Too late,” I laugh aloud, and can taste in my laughter the smart of salt washing my face. “It was Kafka—in the book Momma gave me when I was only ten—who wrote The catastrophe we fear has already occurred.’ Momma gave me. Momma. Too late, too late,” I laugh.

  The sun surrenders its splendor to the horizon. Unafraid of me now, the finches and sparrows return to their feeder, alighting upwinged, innocent, in victory silhouettes. A frond of wisteria, wind-detached from the trellis, waves, reaching for me unthreateningly. The dwarf Japanese maple settles into evening, dowager in her burnt-sienna lace. Each of the succulents is something else: an emerald rose, Zen pebbles; one cactus sports a bishop’s mitre, another postures itself a Doric column draped in ermine. Somewhere, the chameleon who lives among the cactus pots is blatantly invisible. The begonia and the willowy freesia belie their squat bulbous origins. A first evening star winks—from the past, where it novaed long ago?

  At the edge of the day, at the edge of the stage, at the edge of the grave, at the edge of the self, at the edge of the world.

  Oh, exquisite theater of the universe, trickster, illusionist, there is nothing you cannot perform. Dear Blue Planet, theater in the round, dear Life, play-within-a-play. Give me to know that I am blessed by being rooted so firmly in my unreality as to now dare celebrate the self who never was and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

  I know now that I need not worry how to finish it. I would go—defiant, laughing, freely celebrating what I will never understand, to build a fire in the fireplace, right in the middle of summer—and burn the manuscript, page by lying, truthful page.

  If there were such pages. If a manuscript had ever existed.

  I know, too, smile streaming with tears, that I need no longer worry about writing this particular book. We are free of each other, it and I, forgiven, at peace.

  There is no reason now to write it at all.

  The miracle we seek has already transformed us.

  About the Author

  Award-winning poet, novelist, journalist, and feminist leader Robin Morgan has published more than twenty books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful and Sisterhood Is Global and the bestselling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages, among them Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Persian. A recipient of honors including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and former editor in chief of Ms., Morgan founded the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, and with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem, cofounded the Women’s Media Center. She writes and hosts Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, a weekly program with a global audience on iTunes and WMCLive.com—her commentar
ies legendary, her guests ranging from grassroots activists to Christiane Amanpour, Anita Hill, and President Jimmy Carter.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by Robin Morgan

  Cover design by Mauricio Díaz

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3910-9

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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