The sisters were five and learned to live in and share two bedrooms between them. But they were sisters, and not paper dolls, so they swapped beds and partners seasonally to accommodate moods, dispositions, and alliances, which formed or fissured overnight. The first room, with two twin beds, lodged two sisters, while the second room, with a twin and a bunk, took in three but not always the same three, so that the legs that climbed the ladder to the top bunk at bedtime were not always the same pair that climbed down in the morning. The movable sisters did not comprehend stillness; movement was in their blood: wars, fickle regimes, and capricious kings had chased the many generations of their ancestors back and forth across borders as far back as their tattered collective memory could paste together. In a similar fashion, every few months, the sisters moved back and forth between the two bedrooms, dragging behind them their precious loads, traveling down the hallway in a lonely caravan of one, occasionally bumping into the other sister, traveling in the opposite direction, who had been gracious enough or angry enough to trade bedrooms. While desks and beds remained stationary, bed sheets and pillows, jeans, socks and t-shirts, dolls and posters, schoolbooks and crayon sets moved with the sisters, and not always without a fight, from one bedroom to the other.
The sisters were five and related without difficulty to the hand, that humble yet deft appendage, which accomplished the many chores set to them by Mother and Father, by teachers, by their own dreaming, scheming whims. With the five fingers of the hand, they washed, picked, plucked, scrubbed, rolled, knit, pried, pruned, gathered, colored, tallied, tailored, climbed, scratched, tickled, dug, tore, petted, and preened. They clipped the ends of green beans, scoured the rice for pebbles, kneaded dough for Mother’s biscuits, stitched a collar to a blouse, traced out the lines of a turtle or a ship, rubbed paint into a hated sister’s jacket sleeve, stroked the cat’s unruly fur, pulled the younger sister’s hair, stacked the toys and books neatly, cupped the hands in prayer, and drew closed the dead beetle’s wings.
The sisters knew five and understood and loved the hand, which also knew five. And so even before they learned the curious words in the new tongue, they easily adopted the gestures practiced with the versatile hand in the new land: the wave to say hello and say goodbye from a distance; from near, the handshake, which lasted too long or was too fleeting, too rigid or too limp, and rarely right in temperature; the middle finger raised to make their friends laugh and squeal (the sisters added effect by adding height to the middle finger, balancing sticks or pencils in place of or against that finger) and to make passing motorists and bewildered neighbors shake their heads and turn their backs; the thumb lifted to indicate approval or, at an angle, to stop a car in the street (the sisters were in awe of this particular ability, and equally scared of it, running away from the car as soon as the thumb had achieved its desired effect); the ringing slap of one open palm against another to share a victory, however small, with a friend; the tapping of knuckles against a hard surface to ward off evil.
In the new land it was the modest but artful hand that completed the old chores and practiced the novel gestures.
whole
And the sisters understood that they were a prime number: 5
And their family of 5 girls plus 1 mother plus 1 father was also a prime number: 7
And they were all divisible only by themselves and by the number 1, a number which they all knew was the only whole number despite what they were taught in school.
numbers
Count, multiply, and subtract. But this way through the alphabet, dear reader.
sea, tree, sky
The sisters turned and turned and looked all about them: at the earth, the sky, the sea, the light, the life, at all that was strange and new. They looked and absorbed, as children do. They gathered and shifted, as children do. And soon they were one with it all. They who were five fell in love with the new land each herself. And each loved with the ardor of five. And the love, which at first rose tentatively, precariously, grew quickly and to great proportions. They stretched out their arms and lengthened the vowels in their proclamations of love … as much as a forest of swaying trees, greater than a mountain of purring cats, bigger than the great green earth, brighter than the dazzling golden sun, deeper than the star-filled sky.
Father, Mother
In the new land, Father and Mother look about them: at their neighbors who enter and exit their homes, at the occupants of the cars that move to and fro along the streets and highways of their city, at the shoppers who push carts up and down the aisles of the grocery market, at the sun, which rises and sets daily though the war still rages on in the first land. Mother and Father look about them and quickly become wage-earners themselves.
After the girls file away to school, their books, lunches, and a few practiced words tucked under their arms and tongues, Father opens the newspapers and, in his small notebook, neatly puts down the job titles, the addresses, and the phone numbers of the companies and employers within a thirty-mile radius. He neatly writes down his own qualifications assiduously earned over the many years in the first land. He diligently calls to set up appointments and interviews. He asks Mother to iron his shirt, tie, trousers, and jacket. He gathers his papers and clicks closed his briefcase. Father travels the miles on foot and by bus to the companies, waits his turn in the lobbies and vestibules of buildings grand and modest. He proficiently uses the language of the new land that he learned as a boy, still a farmer, by the light of the moon alone, in the first land. And in his notebook he ticks off the names of the companies and the jobs offered, efficiently sets down the responses he has and has not received, and his own impressions as he goes, then returns to take tea with Mother and the girls, now home from school, pigtails and braids and shoelaces undone.
Father gets his first job in the new land and it is not the one he left behind in the old land, not the one his experience and schooling earned him. But it is a job and it allows him to buy his first used car: a car with a back seat big enough to accommodate five slender girls, all arms and legs; a car with tires filled and tread deep enough to drive his family from the valley to the beachside on the weekend, where the spray of the sea will wake him from his dream. Father and Mother buy their first house in the new land, a house just up the street from the one they rented, a house not so different from the first, not so different from the next, a house with: a tree and a lawn, a cat, a kitchen, three bedrooms, and a garage. Father plants his roses and his grapes, tends to the lawn and the shingles, reinforces a leaning door frame and pours concrete for a patio. He is farmer and engineer and it is to these occupations he returns each day after work, and he tends and builds well into the dinner hour, well into the night, well into the weekend.
Mother, who has always kept the house, herself and her girls pristine, who has cooked the beautiful meals and made her husband and daughters the matching bright outfits, who has looked after them in ways remarkable and subtle, and looked after her own mother and sisters and brothers in need, Mother too now finds a job, attends school at night to study the new language, and learns to drive a car. Her first job is that of a driver. She chauffeurs an aging widow about town, to hair appointments and lunch dates, to department stores and the marina. Mother, who fears nothing and welcomes all experiences, all people, embraces her new life and her new friends even as she mourns the loss of her first life and agonizes over loved ones left behind. She practices the new language with her daughters. She traverses the busiest highways and narrowest byways to search out and find immigrated old acquaintances. She makes new connections with people young and old, those established and those recently arrived, as she crosses paths with them, wherever she goes, at work and on the street. Mother brings home unfamiliar foods and curious flavors she discovers to share with her family, and delights in or is disturbed by them alongside the others. She learns to cook the rich and varied cuisines of her newfound friends, friends from around the globe and down the street, adjusting their dishes to suit her t
aste. And she embraces and indulges in the new life’s charms: swimming and barbecues, beauty pageants and horror films. Unlike Father, she, the storyteller, speaks to others of the horror she herself has escaped, though neither of them suffers openly in the new land.
Mother moves from job to job as the family moves from house to house. And to each job she takes her enthusiasm, her strength, her warmth, and her great heart. At each job she is a beloved and a bright star. She chauffeurs, she sells used clothing and furniture, she works with the homeless, makes donuts and computer parts, files papers and manages coworkers, opens her own restaurant and runs others’ businesses. And she brings all her experiences home to share with her family: stories about her day and her discoveries; boxes of warm donuts or cold meat sandwiches; piles of old clothes, toys, and jewelry, which her girls rummage through and find rare treasures among; women she’s befriended at night school, with their families, cakes, and stews in tow; men recently off the street and off of drugs; youth recently arrived from elsewhere, motherless, penniless, or dying.
Mother works the long hours and welcomes the weekends and her myriad friends, always growing in number. She hosts the festive parties and, with her small army of girls, cooks and bakes, feeds and entertains masses in her small home on secondhand sofas recently purchased and on the fine china she managed to bring over from the first land. She laughs and converses, speaks highly and lovingly of her daughters’ many accomplishments to her various guests as the girls serve tea and sweets; she plays the new songs on the radio, or applauds the live musicians she has gathered to sing the old songs about the old land; she tells her varied tales and avidly listens to her guests’ tragedies and humorous anecdotes late into the night. On Sunday, she launders and irons piles of her and Father’s work clothes for the week. She puts her tapes—deeply cherished and found with great difficulty in small and hidden shops in bustling corners of the city—into the player and listens to and watches the old film songs she grew up with as she irons blouses, trousers, scarves, and jackets. She listens to the melodies to commune with loved ones missing or killed, and with the old days and the keen memories always rising. She listens and she hums along or tells stories of her childhood and her youth to her daughters fortunate enough to be sitting near among the warm laundered clothes, folding or hanging them for her. She listens to the music and is transported and, when she thinks she is alone, she sheds tears that hiss when they hit the iron or are run over by it. On Monday, Mother rises before the others and before the sun to go to work. She is tireless and fearless and all heart. And it is her with whom the new land has fallen in love in return. She shares with the land of the sun a common spirit. Mother is all life, she is luminous, she is a bright star.
five
The sisters were five. They were five fingers on the same hand, a hand which knew of itself and knew also that another like it existed; over there somewhere was another hand that was a mirror image of itself, and as such was imperfect, awkward, and wrong. The arm, to which the hand was attached, was servant to it: moved, lifted, and tensed to do the hand’s bidding. The body knew of two hands and used them, though not always to similar ends. And the mind knew of the body and of its coarse ways; it knew of the hands and of their unspoken contract with each other; it knew of the fingers, the five in front of the mirror and the five behind, which were like the ghosts or shadows of the first fingers on the first hand. And so the sisters lived two lives on two continents simultaneously, in a present-that-is and in a past-that-might-have-been.
art
The family moved through space, from country to country, city to city, and house to house, a sovereign and a self-sufficient body, a renegade solar system that refused or was forced by circumstance to reject the design, laws, and limits of the universe that was its stage. The family planted peach pits and leek seeds, watered lawns and tended grape arbors wherever it went, yet found it impossible to set its own roots into any soil, even as it dug the earth beneath its fourteen feet with picks and shovels, with fingernails and teeth, in a false attempt to give the appearance of stillness. At the center of this roaming solar system was Mother, like a star, whose density of bone, voice, and will were enough to propel the family on its irregular and unruly course through spaces dark and spaces twinkling, through regions vast and regions close. About her, Father and the girls, like six celestial bodies, were held in orbit by the star’s attraction, by Mother’s immense gravitational pull. Because each had different requirements for length of day and diversity of seasons, because some needed more time or space alone than others, each body practiced her or his own spin and tilt, and chose elliptical orbits of varying lengths. But none could deny the warmth of that always-regular revolution around Mother, their central fire. The small system, unconscious of its course, was well aware of its size in the ever-burgeoning universe.
When Mother was taken to hospital for surgery, whichever surgery she underwent in that particular year, the sisters keenly felt her absence. The sisters imagined that they might be thrown asunder and out of their orbits into deep and cold space without Mother’s central pull on their outlying bodies. But when away, Mother left behind a hole in her place and, instead of the astronaut’s weightlessness, the girls experienced the crowding in of walls, the caving in of the roof. For days, the sisters labored beneath the weight of their mother’s absence. The nothingness that replaced her in the center of their home tugged at each girl and drew small objects into its dark void through the air and from all the rooms in the house, swallowing these things up forever: Father’s house keys, cubes of sugar, spoons and matchboxes, the sisters’ bangles, hairpins and socks. Even the guavas on the tree outside the open kitchen window were not secure. The sisters began to cover fruit bowls with heavy silver platters and to tie down photographs, houseplants, or Father’s slippers with bits of string or shoelaces. They locked away teacups, bottles of nail polish, toy cars, and baby dolls in the china cabinet, and when the cat came in from its neighborhood wanderings, they held it firmly on their laps or to their chests. A constant vibration ran through the house, making the windows buzz and the furniture hobble along the walls and across the rugs; the sisters used their own weight to silence the house, leaning against walls or windows, trying to occupy as many chairs, tables, and sofas as they could with their slight bodies, their extended limbs.
What troubled the girls most when Mother was away at the hospital were the walls and the roof. Each set out to engineer or craft her own contraption with which she hoped to battle the impending collapse of the house. One sister brought out her knitting needles and plastic grocery bag filled with yarn of myriad textures, thicknesses, and colors, both natural and synthetic, whole skeins, small, tightly bound balls, and bits not three feet long. And when she was sure that none of the others were looking, she also pulled out an oblong wooden box from its hiding place in the large bottom drawer of the end table, behind a stack of old magazines, past the matchboxes and ashtrays-kept-for-guests, beneath the tarnished bronze elephant statue, in the dusty far back corner of that drawer. Inside the box: her gum collection. She planted herself on the loveseat, her feet on the coffee table, and went to work knitting and chewing. She worked earnestly, stitch by stitch, line by line, her needles clicking, her jaws smacking, and her tongue pushing out sugary pink, green, or blue bubbles. The other sisters moved about her, the television flared and went out again, the room darkened, the curtains were drawn and the lamps lit. Hot food, which was set before her on the coffee table, turned cold. Hours passed, her creation grew longer, took form, developed feet and arms as she continued to smack and blow bubbles ever bigger, ever tighter, her fingers moving ever more feverishly. The multicolored, woolly tree that sprang from between her needles stretched its arms up toward the ceiling, while its roots wrapped around the table legs and inched along the rug in several directions, securing notebooks, pencils and crayons, coins and flip-flops in its weave as it went. The tree’s trunk thickened between the knitter’s legs, warming her bare kneecaps
, enveloping her feet, her toes. With woolly pressure, it leaned against the living room wall and lifted the sagging corner of the ceiling above the television set.
Looking at the upward-reaching branches of the knit-tree, the other sisters were inspired. The eldest dropped the telephone handset, which continued to transmit the tiny voice of her best friend into a hungry room that shortly consumed the voice, then the dial tone, then the telephone itself. She ran into the kitchen where, opening and slamming cupboards, drawers, and the doors of the refrigerator, she pulled out knives, pans, eggs and flour, onions and potatoes, mint leaves and chicken thighs, rice and mung beans, peas and winter squash. She peeled and chopped, rinsed and skinned, lit all four burners on the stove and filled four pots and the oven with stews, soup, dumplings, rice, and sweet bread. The steam and heat that rose reddened her cheeks and lips, plastered her hair to her forehead, coated the windows with a greasy, protective glaze, and softened and expanded the plaster in the kitchen walls, which had been chipping and forming fissures.
Above Us the Milky Way Page 5