HYPOTHESIS: SEE ABOVE. READ POETRY ALOUD (WHISPER, MOUTH TO MOTHER’S ABDOMEN) 15 MIN/NIGHT AFTER MOTHER ASLEEP.
RESULTS: FOETAL MOVEMENT APPEARED TO INCREASE WITH READING, BUT NOT STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT.
LABOUR AND DELIVERY.
HYPOTHESIS: SEE ABOVE. RECITED “THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE.” MOTHER AND HOSPITAL PERSONNEL EXPRESSED ANNOYANCE.
RESULTS: NO OBSERVABLE REACTION FROM INFANT.
The image of my father—by no means oblivious to other people’s feelings but utterly dismissive of them—declaiming sappy poetry while my mother was in the throes of labour and I struggled both to enter the world and to stay in the womb, is such vintage Alexander Kove that I guffaw and shudder at the same time.
AGE 0-12 MONTHS.
HYPOTHESIS: SEE ABOVE. READ TO CHILD 1 HR/DAY. CONTENT LESS IMPORTANT THAN INSTILLING LOVE OF WORDS.
RESULTS: INFANT DEMONSTRATES PLEASURE: CALMS WHEN AGITATED, SMILES, COOS. (SEE GRAPH.)
I swear I remember this. The feel of my father’s body as I lay on his chest. The sound of his voice and his heartbeat. The smell of him, different when he read to me than any other time. I hadn’t remembered it until now, and of course it’s not likely that I really remember it now, but I swear I do.
Daddy read to me throughout my childhood, long after he’d stopped with my siblings, because I responded. My section of the handbook is festooned with charts and graphs showing how I responded, and I do remember that, clearly.
When I was thirty months old, he began having me memorize Dickinson poems, on the theory, I suppose, that if a toddler could memorize “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” she could memorize “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass.” Which I could. By the age of four and a half, I was reading to him. I remember that.
I wrote my first book when I was not quite five, for my mother for Mother’s Day. Daddy helped me. It was a story about an adorable anthropomorphic snake who follows a little girl to school and wins over her classmates and her teacher. It had maybe six pages and a cardboard cover, and was bound with red yarn stuck through inexpertly punched holes and tied in a bow. He insisted I illustrate the cover with a smiling snake, and my heart sank and leaped and sank again at the way his interest in me intensified when he saw the drawing, for I knew he was thinking I had artistic talent. Newly remembering this, I wonder why he never added that to his experimental design, and I feel both spared and shunned. These mixed emotions are getting really old.
At about that same time, he began introducing other things. Other “mental substances.”
AGE 3 YEARS 2 MONTHS.
INTRODUCED CHILD TO ORGANIZATION SUPPORTING CHILDREN IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES. POSTED PHOTO IN HER ROOM, TOLD HER STORIES OF HUNGER AND NO TOYS. ASSIGNED CHORES FOR WHICH SHE EARNS MONEY TO SEND.
HYPOTHESIS: CHILD WILL ACHIEVE BEGINNING UNDERSTANDING OF RESPONSIBILITY TO OTHERS.
RESULTS: CHILD CRIED OVER PHOTO AND STORIES OF NEEDY CHILD, CRIED OVER BEING REQUIRED TO GIVE UP MONEY.
I had forgotten about that picture, all in shades of grainy grey, that he taped to the corner of the mirror on my closet door sternly at a three-year-old’s eye level. I had forgotten about the big dark eyes that followed me around my room, into my dreams, into my conscience and my view of the world. I had forgotten about the shiny quarters he paid me for picking up sticks in the yard, putting my baby sister’s toys into the toy box, dusting the bookshelves in the living room—stacks of shiny quarters he dropped one-by-one, for maximum effect, into my cupped hands and then made me give back to him, one-by-one, to send to the girl with the big dark eyes. I had forgotten his pride in my sacrifice, and his disappointment with my attitude about it. It all comes back to me now, and I want to tell him he was wrong, he misjudged me even then. I did get the point, and the point has stayed with me my whole life. And, though still grudgingly, I’m grateful.
AGE 4 YEARS 2 MONTHS-5 YEARS 6 MONTHS.
ASSIGNED A TO DICTATE 1 LETTER/WEEK TO SPONSORED CHILD, INCLUDING DRAWINGS, STORIES, POEMS, SIGNATURE.
I think: You clever bastard. Here’s where the inculcation of writing as a holy art form began, neatly tied to moral responsibility for a little extra punch.
AGE 6 YEARS.
ASSIGNED A TO WRITE POEMS FOR PEOPLE SHE LOVES AS HER BIRTHDAY GIFTS TO THEM.
He means that he made me write poems on my birthday as my gifts to other people. It’s a lovely, generous idea, though a bit much for a six-year-old. I’ve done it every year since I can remember, and until now had thought it my own invention. Martin keeps all the poems I’ve written for him in a blue binder, and I’ve seen how he lays his palms on it. Martin. I’m weak with missing Martin.
I think: You did have a thing about your children’s birthdays as teachable moments, didn’t you? And I wonder: For my sixth birthday, did I write a poem for him? I hope so. God, I hope so.
My section of the handbook goes on like this for many entries over many pages, and I read every word. As my recorded age increases I remember more and more of the incidents: poetry contests, pen pals (at one point in junior high, eleven of them in eight different poor countries), field trips with Daddy and then alone to soup kitchens and cancer wards in order to write about them, volunteering after school in a nursing home to write oral histories, trying and failing to organize anti-war rallies at the high school.
Reading and remembering all this takes a long time. Bella doesn’t interrupt or distract me, but it’s not as if I forget she’s here.
Chapter 14
The handbook has been carefully constructed so as to appear exhaustive, but that’s an illusion, a calculated ruse. A lie.
It does not account for the sense I’ve had all my life that my father continually reached inside my mind and—literally, palpably—altered it to suit his purposes. That at my core I was—am—his deliberate creation. That there’s nothing about me that didn’t come straight from him. That without him I am, have always been, will be nothing.
It does not account for the lifelong sensation that has variously taken the form of drowning, of kinesthetic disorientation, of deliciously and dangerously wavering boundaries between me and not-me. Of simultaneously dissolving and being granted form.
I haven’t come this far to stop now.
In a fury that feels both unprecedented and familiar, I leap out of my father’s chair, fling his handbook behind me onto the seat, and set about ransacking the house. Bella stays on the living room floor, quiet.
First I search his room. High this time on what has morphed into an extreme, intimate violation of his privacy, I strip his bed, rifle through his drawers, plunder his closet, pull books off shelves, empty bags and boxes onto the floor. Some of these things are my mother’s, hoarded all these years, affording me now the fantasy—doubly horrible, doubly satisfying—of violating her, too, coming close to her, too. I rummage through socks, underwear, tax records, old greeting cards, dime store jewellery, medications, opened and unopened mail.
Not finding what I’m looking for, I storm out of the dishevelled room, make a quick detour to check on Bella, and start on the kitchen. By the time pans, utensils, dishes, paper goods, boxes and cans of food, the contents of the refrigerator are piled on the counters and the floor, Bella is screaming, maybe from the noise, maybe not. I go to her, sit on the floor and hold her until she calms; there’s no reason to think my presence or absence makes any difference to her, and holding her doesn’t calm me, either, but I don’t know what else to do.
The rush from searching and destroying propels me into the bathroom. I pull unfolded towels out of the linen closet, dump shampoo and soap into the small pool where the shower still doesn’t quite drain, empty the cabinet under the sink of toilet paper and a half-full trash can and wads of tissue that didn’t make it into the trash. The meagre contents of the medicine cabinet, jumbled onto the sink, aren’t nearly as revealing as one might think.
The living room is quieter and takes longer. I t
ry to be careful not to disturb Bella, but she doesn’t react anyway. Pillows off the couch, magazines out of numerous racks, books off floor-to-ceiling shelves, furniture away from walls and some lighter pieces overturned. Nothing. I’m panting and flushed, have no clear idea what all this is about, but know that I have found nothing.
Searching the other bedrooms, empty since my siblings moved out, takes little time and discharges little of my mounting frenzy. Searching my room takes longer because, oddly, it seems imperative to hunt through my own things as well as the stuff that doesn’t belong to me. Nothing.
Without conscious decision then, I’m sliding the baby into the carrier and slinging it onto my back. She startles, gasps, waves arms and legs, but none of that has any effect. I’m out into the dawning woods, charging through lemon-coloured sunrise toward my father’s cave.
The woods are familiar and at the same time strange, familiarity and strangeness each intensifying the other. There’s been no kinesthetic or psychological disorientation this time. No need for Herpie as narrow guide, or for Daddy to tell me what to do. I have no trouble finding my way, even with the distraction of the baby on my back, so still and light I keep having to reach awkwardly behind me to assure myself she’s there. There’s no guarantee she’d have any discernible reaction if she slipped out or was carried off. I don’t know that I could give anybody else directions to where we’re going—explain to Bella, for instance—but I seem to know.
The rock overhang is exactly where I expected it to be, and I go right to it, as if there were a road. It doesn’t take long, either. When I get there, the light in the woods is still pale mottled lemon, shimmering on dewy leaves, sparkling here and there on boulder and pebble like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs.
Not even out of breath, I carefully shrug the baby carrier off my shoulders. Bella hardly moves as I lift her out, except for her tiny breathing and tinier heartbeat. After some trial and error, which she doesn’t protest or seem to notice, I find a way to hold her to my chest with one arm and get down onto my other hand and knees. Martin, I think once, and crawl in.
There’s no passage into my father’s hidden place, no transition from outside to inside. You’re in it immediately. Deep enough in the woods and far enough inside rock that any effect of the rising sun—or rotating earth, depending on your point of view—has dissipated before I’ve gone in a body length. The place is dusty and dank. I don’t feel even the presence of dawn behind me, though I can still hear dawn birds, the dry three-part non-harmony of doves, a more liquid three-part song whose singer I wish I could name. “Listen,” I whisper to the baby. “Hear that?”
Always orderly to a fault—though not all that clean, what with plant debris, spider webs, moulted snake skins, pollen, rock dust—the space I’ve come to think of as my father’s laboratory feels intensely organized now, and I survey it in a much more organized way than I have before. About a quarter of it is neatly filled by containers of various sorts, on the floor, stacked on each other, on rudimentary board-and-rock shelves. My attention is caught by the fact that they’re all labelled, but then I see that the labels are in some sort of code. Who did the old son-of-a-bitch think would ever be in here snooping?
The urge is strong to ransack the laboratory even worse than the house, to dump out the contents of all the fucking coded containers into one amalgamated mess that would eventually seep into the ground, to break things and destroy the order and just generally create havoc. I resist the temptation, deferring this particular gratification until I’ve either found whatever it is I’m looking for or determined beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s not here. Then, one way or the other, look out.
Ground-to-roof against the back wall are books. Some are on shelves, some stacked, some in boxes. I’d noticed the books before, of course; they’d be hard to miss. But now their cumulative presence looms.
There are also notebooks and boxes of index cards, pens and markers in a Big Gulp cup, three flashlights, a battery-operated camping lantern. In a suitcase—not in the least battered, though I’m sure it’s ancient—he’s stored pillows and pads, a lap robe I remember sending him one year for Christmas and am inordinately touched to see he’s been using, a winter jacket, gloves, knit cap, rain poncho, old-fashioned galoshes, handheld fan. A plastic grocery bag holds several rolls of toilet paper; I don’t even want to think about what that implies.
There’s no chance of creating my own space here. I don’t even want to. Intrusion is part of the point. I set about adapting his space for my use. Ambient light, produced by the lantern and two of the flashlights pointed so that their beams crisscross, stays in discrete rays, diffusing hardly at all in here. The other flashlight I use to scan the rest of the cave, its beam penetrating but in no way scattering or even muting the darkness, like an eye on a stem.
It takes no time at all to find what I’ve been looking for, and only a split second to realize that’s what it is. A green spiral notebook on a flowered TV tray, it’s labelled in black Magic Marker and not in code: HANDBOOK II: DIRECT INFUSION. I’m aware that Bella’s diaper is wet, but she can wait.
I’m not really surprised by what’s recorded here, but I am incredulous. My father’s got balls, I have to give him that. I can’t believe it, and yet it’s so in character. I was doing what he wanted. But it wasn’t enough for him. Why am I not surprised.
It wasn’t just me. Once again, he started with Galen and worked his way down in the intensified version of ordinary parenting he’d developed to such a high level. Not content with moulding us, he embarked upon a much more forthright, insidious, and effective approach. This is where things get really weird.
I carry the notebook into the pool of light from the lantern and flashlights, one of which is visibly dimming. The pillows don’t know my body, of course; my father’s body has made lumps and depressions, which are hideously uncomfortable for me. Settling Bella in my lap is a lot like arranging a stiff plastic doll. I train the remaining flashlight on the notebook, meticulously adjusting the beam before I dare open the cover.
Some of the spirals are bent. Stuck in them are fringed strips where pages were torn out. The green of the cover is mottled from long exposure. Or maybe it was always like that, came from the store like that. Or maybe the darker and lighter, rougher and smoother places result from a subtle interplay between what was already in the cardboard and what has been put into it by external forces. Or maybe I’m just making this up as I go along.
Doves coo, and that other silvery three-note song repeats and repeats. Bella coughs lightly but there seems to be nothing any more wrong with her than usual, so I just tuck the edge of her blue blanket a little differently around her ears. The cave smells like a place even more buried than it is. Already my back and knees hurt. I open the notebook and bend close over the baby to read, a position I won’t be able to hold for long.
“Alex. Wait.”
Past taking hold of the door handle, I have not moved to exit, though I intended to do so. Therefore, Eva Marie’s exhortation is gratuitous, and the fact that I remain in place until she laboriously reaches me is as much my decision as hers.
Expecting her to collapse into me, I brace myself against the wall and ready my arms. But she very lightly takes my hands, one and then the other, labouring for breath and trembling but maintaining her own balance. “I don’t know how it works, but I used to watch you do it. When you want somebody to be a certain way, you just make them be that way. It’s like you inject them with a concentrate of whatever it is—Emily’s motherliness, Alexandra’s writing—right into their brains or their hearts or their souls.”
Long having found the concept of “soul” insipid, I snort.
“Or wherever it is. Do that for me. Inject me with peace about dying.”
“You expect too much of me, Eva Marie. I myself have some trepidation about death,” I admit baldly.
“You don’t garden, either, or make music. Or write.�
��
This last, of course, is not entirely accurate, but I see no point in disabusing her of her misapprehension.
“Give me this, Alex. You have it to give. Don’t try to pretend you don’t.”
“Why would I—” But she does not stop there.
“And tell me what you’re doing as you do it. I want to understand.”
Acceptance of one’s own mortality has long been yet another on my list of attributes essential to the improvement and advancement of the human race, and utterly beyond my capacity. Until now, I have had neither the opportunity nor the wherewithal to induce it in anyone else, either, and had all but reconciled myself to this fundamental flaw in my character and will. Now, suddenly, a possibility seems to have presented itself, and I must reconsider my position, an obligation exhausting and dangerous from which, of course, I will not turn away. I have always been called to perform difficult and thankless tasks, and I have never shirked my responsibility.
Dreading this most welcome opportunity, I concede, “I am willing to make an attempt.”
“Thank you,” she breathes.
Together we make our way to Vaughn’s only two chairs, on either side of the east window. The pane is grimy, but it lets in a hint of sunrise; though light is unnecessary for the procedure, it illumines her nicely from behind and sparkles through the mist of her thin white hair. The chairs are dirty, worn, fuzzy with exposed stuffing, but might be sturdy and comfortable enough.
Standing unsteadily in front of her as she lowers herself into the grey chair, I formulate a hasty and not very reassuring plan as to what to do if she should fall. Among the few and unsatisfactory options, staying with her until Vaughn returns seems best. It has, in fact, a certain appeal.
However, she does not fall. When she is seated, she is shaking and pale, but I can see she is ready. Hands folded in her lap, legs crossed at the ankles; she smiles up at me in a shy and flirtatious manner I had not known I remembered.
The Yellow Wood Page 17