“What is crazy?” I asked, just as seriously.
Niles said without pauses, “Having nothing inside you.”
It stopped us all dead. The four of us stared at him while my eleven other students buzzed in the background.
“Being empty,” he said, brisk as a math teacher.
“Crazy is being empty?” Hazel cocked her head.
“He’s talking about the Quaker thing,” Philip said.
“What Quaker thing?” she asked.
“About that of God in every human!” Fionula announced triumphantly. “About the light that’s inside everyone, that George Fox said.” The early Quaker George Fox maintained that there was “that of God” in every person, a phrase all the students who had been there for a while knew, whether they were Quaker or not.
“If everyone…has God…inside them,” Niles went on, “then no God inside you means…no center in you. No center…is…crazy.”
We all understood him instantly.
“I’m writing this down,” Hazel declared, smearing the sweat and ink from overgripping her pen across the wood of the table, “in my Vocabulary Section under C. Crazy is no center.”
“Actually, according to Niles,” Fionula corrected, “Holden is crazy because he has no God within.”
“He’s…crazy,” Niles noted.
“We all feel crazy sometimes,” I said.
“Hey, let’s write poems about…crazy things,” Niles said.
“But I thought poems had centers,” Fionula said, “so how can we make a crazy poem?”
I was stumped.
“We could have a crazy subject,” Philip said to help me out, “like dreams.”
We loved the dream idea. I began to corral the other students from their projects, but they balked. They’d just gotten into their work, and didn’t want to stop for the new assignment. How much I had underestimated their concentration, almost failing to recall my own agonies in school, continually barred from one thing because it was time for something else. I let them go on while the four of us up front turned to our dream poems.
Scrawling a line length on the board, and a number of total lines—a grid to follow if they needed one—I admonished, “And don’t say it was just a dream, you guys! Really get inside that dream and uncover it.”
Everyone was writing in relative quiet except Philip. I stole toward him.
“The only dreams I have are about my dad,” he said, looking at his wristwatch.
“Oh, is that your dad’s watch?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“So write about your dad,” I said stupidly, then remembered with a burn of regret that his parents were estranged. Philip never saw his father. But when he looked up in despair, I knew what I could say to him. “In dreams he’s part of you, Philip. It’s wonderful that you dream of him. That way you get to see him every night.”
“Does that make me crazy?”
“No,” I said firmly, “that makes you sane.”
“But that’s not the assignment,” he worried.
“No, it isn’t for everybody else. But for you the assignment is to write the sane poem.”
As the poem writing continued, the cutting, pasting, reading, and writing at the back of the room was breaking up. They were getting tired. I zoomed from student to student whispering, “OK, everyone, it’s time to put the projects away.” When they began to clatter scissors and glue tubes, I hissed, “Hey! You got to do your work—let them do theirs!” Then they crept in exaggerated stealth toward their lockers, mocking my instructions. The period, too, was creeping to its end. Soon I had to ask Hazel, Fionula, Philip, and Niles to finish their poems over the weekend. The extraordinary was passing into the ordinary. That was the way of growth—a miracle would merge into the day and somehow become it, though the day was already itself.
On these things I could depend: Every day I went to a place where there were ten minutes of benign nothingness that might be construed as God. Every day I learned how to live from children who were not the flesh of my flesh. Every day that less harm was done, somehow more good amassed. Every night I spoke on the phone with my lover whose wife had finally reappeared with divorce papers. Saturday night and Sunday morning we had sex. Every weekend I wrote a sonnet, and now I had fifty-two of them, like a deck of fortune-telling cards, and with Tilla’s encouragement I was sending them out to fancier literary magazines than I had dared before. A windy freedom blew through the big midtown buildings my bus passed on the way to school each morning, skyscrapers full of the publishers where I suddenly felt free to send my new collection of poems.
Weeks went by. The Holden Caulfield Scrapbooks were finished, and corrected, and handed back. The school trip loomed up, then sank away into a sleepy memory only the yearbook would wake, months later. We started Of Mice and Men. We cooked up a poetry reading and gave our own assembly. We finished Of Mice and Men, desolate over how they shot the dog and then shot Lenny. We were fools for Steinbeck. For the test I coaxed them into writing about foreshadowing, how the dog’s death foreshadowed Lenny’s death. Structure, structure, that’s what writing was about. And that’s what days were about, too.
The tempo beneath a line, the rhythm a sentence uncoils…The structures I had learned to secure with words I began to make in lived time. The hours of the school day passed like a Book of Hours, matins through vespers. Like evensong, I attended poetry readings, sometimes with Maggie. “There’s Howard Moss, the poetry editor of The New Yorker.” She jabbed me in the ribs as we sat upstairs at Books & Co. Maggie knew everybody. “The social spider web”—she made a vampire face, quavered her voice, and flapped her fingers—“has unseen uses.” This was what Juilliard had taught her.
With Ruta’s help, I’d devised a little rule to get me through the aftermaths of these readings. If I met and talked to one new person, then my job was done. I could relax, no matter how many other people there were to meet. While Maggie added new names to her purple notebook, I introduced myself only to Howard Moss, the close-shaven man in the sweater vest.
“Oh yes, I saw your poem in Boulevard,” he mused. “Now why didn’t you send that poem to me?”
But I did! I didn’t say to him. I just looked blank.
“But you will send me something next time?” He cocked his head to one side of his bow tie.
“Oh yes!” I replied, resisting the urge to curtsy, then marched home to correct papers and go to bed. Evensong was over.
—
No one was supposed to be put through to the dingy faculty sanctum sanctorum except friends or family of teachers, so one day when I ran to answer the ring before it interrupted the Study Hall I was supervising, I barked facetiously, “Fiends Cemetery Faculty Room.”
A cultivated voice emanated from the receiver. “May I speak with Molly Peacock?”
Instead of saying, This is she, to the unfamiliar voice, I demanded, “How did you get connected here?”
“I said it was very, very important that I speak to Miss Peacock.” The voice sharpened. “Is she there?”
“Oh,” I said, deflated, “that’s me.”
The voice belonged to an editor from one of the publishers in the skyscrapers, and he quietly asked me if anyone else had taken my book.
“No, no one has,” I answered, feeling embarrassed by what seemed my failure. Yet he engaged me in a long conversation about possible titles and the schedule and when I might finish the manuscript. My voice got surer and the editor’s reedy voice relaxed. Still, I wondered if my book had in fact been accepted.
“But,” I interrupted him, “are you actually going to publish my book?”
“Why else would we be having this conversation?” he asked, astonished.
“Well, I…”
“You just want to be sure?” He laughed. “You can be absolutely sure!”
My book was going to be published by a man in a tall, tall building. It felt as though he had reached down from that building to curl his finger around the god in me—the god the Quake
rs insisted was in everyone. The acceptance made the holiness of my new life sensuously palpable, and the next weekend the title came to me: Raw Heaven.
“Everything’s taken care of, Molly,” Gram said. “There’s not gonna be no funeral, and no announcement or nothing. They cremated your dad right from the hospital after he had his stroke. Everything’s all cleaned up. Your uncle’s here and your grandfather and everything’s shipshape.”
Gram and Grandpa’s apartment was spotless, as was their gleaming Ford I had parked my rental next to. I stood just inside the door, with a view into the living room. On the mahogany cabinet that contained the television set were thirty or so well-dusted china dogs. Gram had never allowed a real animal in her house. In her spotless kitchen a spice cake with thick frosting stood at attention on its risered plate next to Gram, who never sat down. Over her camel slacks and sweater was a starched blue-flowered apron.
“Oh, Molly, why did you come?” she said. “I told Gail not to come and she stayed home. Everything’s been taken care of, honey.”
“Hiya, Molsie,” my grandfather said, hanging in the doorway.
His favorite son, my father’s brother Uncle Dave sat at the polished mahogany dining room table, his face cheery above his beer. Like a stage set with x’s on the floor to mark exactly where each piece of furniture must be for the actors’ blocking, the dining-living room waited for a voice. As I opened my mouth, nothing came out, because I suddenly had an image of my father’s head popping through the floor. Then another Ted head, then another, popping through the floorboards, through the wall-to-wall carpet, making a mess. Being there made me want to make a mess, too. Like a real dog pissing on the carpet, my father had fouled their lives. “It was the war,” Grandpa was saying to me about World War II. “Your father was never the same when he come home from the Navy.”
Long, long before the war he’d been dirty Teddy. Their first child, named Edward, had died. The pure dead Edward got replaced by the next Edward, nicknamed Ted, who messed up. The only thing he liked in school was woodshop. He’d made the wooden cabinet that held a collection of china dolls with china skirts in the corner near the TV.
Now there were Ted’s heads, twenty or more of them, a collection, just like the dogs on the TV and the dolls in the cabinet, all popping up through the carpet. Oh, Daddy!
Once I threw my arms around him and he held me tight. Our black dog Mitzi had been sitting at my feet, watching me do the dishes, as she always did, when I messed up. I dropped a dinner plate that flukishly hit her on the eyebrow. The impact popped her eye right out of its socket. “You blinded her! You blinded my dog!” Gail screamed while I threw myself in my father’s arms, because Polly had scooped up Mitzi in a towel and was holding her while Gail stood yelling.
“We gotta get to the vet,” my dad, the vet, commanded.
“But it’s so far!” Polly despaired.
“I know where a close vet is,” I whispered into his neck. “I saw it on my bike.”
Trusting my advice, Ted piled us into the car with Mitzi, her eyeball plopped on her snout, and followed my directions to the veterinarian, who snapped the eye back into its socket with no harm done. Now Ted’s heads, like multiple dogs’ eyes, popped impossibly up from the floor. As each one sprang, I mentally hammered it down. I was popping my Pop. But he wouldn’t stay in his socket. He was messy. And dogged. He kept coming back.
Gram had taken off her apron. She meant business. I excused myself to the bathroom and witnessed, from my toilet perch, the gleaming fixtures, the scrubbed tile, the spotless glass shelf with its jar of cotton swabs.
Back at the dining room table papers had appeared.
“I want you to look at everything, Molly. It’s all cleaned up. All taken care of,” Gram said. “Want a Three Musketeers?” She pointed to a bowl of miniature candy bars, but stopped my hand before I reached. Then she selected three miniature Musketeers for me, and put them carefully in my outstretched palm.
Imagine a mother who would not let you take anything for yourself, even a candy bar. Polly and Ted’s house, before they got the store, was pleasantly messy, full of food and delicious leftovers. Nobody ever made to clean up a plate, everybody allowed to eat what they wanted, mashed potatoes to feed a navy, take what you want, gravy in big bowl, self serve—Ted must have loved it.
Now the heads were gone, pounded back into the floor and walls. But before I could concentrate on the papers, an image of an egg loomed. It was all prepared for dyeing: a hole pricked by a pin in its top, its white and yolk blown into a bowl and discarded. An ancient hand had swabbed it out with a Q-Tip.
Oh, Ted, the mess to he swabbed. The badness within them become bad in you.
Squatting before us was a short stack of documents: birth and death certificates, two marriage certificates and two sets of divorce decrees, an insurance policy with my sister as beneficiary, and no policy for me. He had told me he was cashing mine in years before. He needed the money, but he would try to replace it. He had not. There was not a single piece of paper with my name on it. I was empty as an egg.
“Now there was other money, Molly, but that was transferred to your uncle and me,” Gram said. “Me and your grandfather. Your father couldn’t take care of his own affairs, you know. He couldn’t do nothing. He never could. Now let’s get the rest squared away before dinner,” she said, rising from the table to lead me to the basement where all his clothes hung neatly on a clothesline.
“What a job!” she said. “But now it’s all done.”
A pain began to excoriate my blown-out shell.
“I don’t want anything, Gram.”
“Nothing! You’ve got to take something, Mols, it’s not right.”
“I do not want one thing.” Under the clothes stood a box of war mementoes.
“Even a photograph?”
“No.” I was bitumen, fragile, and prepared for dyeing. I would have to dye myself in every color, design myself, be the poet of my shell, gleaming in my emptiness.
“I’m not saving this for you, Molly. Once you go, it’s gone.”
“Fine, don’t save it. Maybe Gail wants it.”
“Gail has what she wants. She already took it a few months ago when she visited.”
When she visited? How did she know she was supposed to come? Who told her? I thought. Once again I was left out of some mysterious circle of communication among them. “OK, Gram,” I said. “Throw it out.”
We trooped upstairs for roast beef and I ate my dinner, everything so homey and tasty on the patterned plates. I took my spice cake neatly foiled in a special package back to my motel room and left the next morning, having slept with the television on, so Ted’s head couldn’t pop up through the floor.
After I opened my apartment door, I walked directly to my kitchen and stood in front of the oven in my coat. Then I opened the oven door and almost lay my head on it, contemplating turning on the gas. But the oven door was greasy with drippings. So I rose to remove my coat and get a towel. Ceremoniously, I lay the towel on the fat-sprayed door. Then I lay my head on it, looking into the oven. The towel was soft and the oven was dark as a womb, messy, oily, and used for creation.
Now there would be no more Ted, no more phone calls. He couldn’t do a thing to me now, not one thing more. I cried a little, in preparation for anger. The Peacock line was going to have to go on through Uncle Dave’s kids, not Ted’s—unless Gail had a baby. If anything with Peacock in it was going on through me, it would be a name attached to a poem. If anything passed through my womb, it would be art, not life. Fury allowed me to get up and throw the towel in the hamper, close the oven door, and eat the squashed spice cake I’d stuffed in my suitcase.
“Oh my God, Tilla,” I yelled from the cold, unfinished bathroom of his Williamsburg loft, sitting on a paint-specked toilet seat, looking at the bare pipes sunk through a hole in the floor where you could see his neighbor, a painter, down in her bathroom until she sealed Tilla’s peephole, “there’s a tear in this dia
phragm! Jesus, I wonder how long it’s been here.” It was an old, neglected one, the rubber stiffening and yellowing from the freshwater pink it had been when new. I kept it in his bathroom just in case I unexpectedly found myself at his place unprepared, as I did on this Sunday morning.
“No kidding, Tilla, look—this diaphragm is absolutely no good,” I said, wandering out into the loft where I rarely came. I hated taking the train to this place that Tilla acquired after his separation from Nina. It was huge and bare, and on Sundays, unheated: a long dance studio with a wall of mirrors and random heaps of sound equipment. The living area was cozier, but completely dark, built in a windowless square.
Sundays were the only time that the studio was empty of the Szabo family who retired for a day of rest in their apartments in Brooklyn or in their houses in New Jersey. The breakup with Nina had broken up part of the family art, too. Now some of them weren’t dancing, but working in offices and buying houses of their own. The family itself had not ruptured though: On Sunday evenings every Szabo convened at Tilla’s mother’s for goulash.
But on Sunday mornings Tilla Szabo and I made love, as we had been making love for five years. “I would love you if you were four hundred pounds.” He kissed my neck, saying, “I love your breasts, I love your ass! I love this!” kissing my elbow, “I love that!” kissing my knees. “I love when you do this—” I kissed his neck—“and when you do that!” kissing his navel, and so we began our own dance in bed.
Tilla took his hand to guide the small of my back, and we caught each other’s eyes in the locking look of those who must watch each other’s every move because the dance depends on it. It was the gaze of hungry love. It was both movement and food and it never, never failed month after month, year after year. Like our art, our sexual delight burst with an energy that would not quell. It never even really ebbed and flowed. Constant and steady, like our creative impulses, was the sex of our courtship.
Courtship, the mating dance before children. If we were birds we would have been bobbing our heads and flapping our wings, eternally caught in the preparation to nest. We caught ourselves in time, or time held us in a moment that lasted years. Since courtship has rules, we followed them: We did not live together. We were not committed to each other’s families. We met during the week to go to performances or openings or readings by friends. We spoke every night on the phone. We were devoted to our sacred Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings together which we never gave up no matter what. And in the summers we continued courting at various art colonies. The boundaries of courting, like proscenium arches, frame the special stasis that never bores, because in its realm is art. But children do not observe the conventions of art. Frames are broken by their burgeoning. As a matter of fact, when we are pregnant we say we are expecting, but it is the unexpected we try to prepare for.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 18