The Exhibition of Persephone Q

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

  On those visits, I commanded her attention. She slipped me slices of fruit from her drinks. At home, however, I seemed not to exist for long periods of time. I lay on my back, starfished on the carpet as she vacuumed around my limbs. Rooms transformed even as I was in them. I was invisible when she cleaned the stove, polishing the burners with a dish towel. Her hair tangled and she neglected her face. She was a lover of radio and thrillers, whole worlds that bored me, and when everything was in order and to her liking, she sank into the lounge chair by the fire, opened a mystery novel, and descended into distant plots. I tried to wrench her away. I pulled all the pots from the shelves, gathered her hair into braids. Percy, she said, I’m reading. I gave up. Only in rare moments did she reveal a deep restlessness, a part of herself she rarely shared. The year before she died, she was in the habit of waking me up very late and leading me out into a night so cold we wrapped scarves around our mouths to warm the air we breathed, so as not to freeze our lungs. Once or twice we took the car in the middle of the night and drove out toward the prison, where, pulling into a clearing, she pointed to the faint stain of the Milky Way. The brief smudge of a shooting star appeared, as if someone had struck a match against the glassy surface of the sky. She brought me to the middle of the woods behind our house and here, ankle-deep in the hard crust of the snow, instructed me to remove my gloves and cup my hands around my ears, so that the whole forest came alive with sound captured in my palms. I could hear the crashing of twigs, my heart, my mother’s breath, the scuttle of squirrels leaping between the branches, a cacophony that had evaded me before.

  I imagine her accident as swallowed up in that sound. The call came in the deep blue of the night. My father was upstairs, asleep, as I padded from my bedroom to the phone. I had always been told my mother and I sounded alike. People confused us, and for a moment I thought that I had once again been mistaken for her. The voice on the other end spoke rapidly and with precision and did not ask if she was home, whether I could put her on. I stood there in my eyelet nightgown, phone pressed to my ear, looking out the window at the fir pine that rose thirty feet in our front yard. It was almost blue in the dark, and felled a faint shadow in the moonlight. I didn’t understand. I always went to the city with my mother. What was she doing, driving alone? And why hadn’t she taken me?

  I’d thought a girl became her mother as a matter of course. It was predetermined. The town was small enough to throw maternal patterns into relief, and girls became predictably pretty, or obese, or ridiculed in school. I assumed it would be the same for me. But of course nothing happens automatically. You have to work at it, I find. There I was, surrounded by the raw materials of how to make a woman, how to make a home, and yet without the manuals that show how complementary parts should fit together. Only later did it occur to me assembly was a skill you had to learn. For a long time I never touched her things. Tubes of lipstick rolled solemnly in drawers. Women’s coats hung in the halls. I would have told my father to put them away, I wouldn’t be needing them after all, only we had no idea how to talk about what had occurred, what we referred to only as the accident. We hardly acknowledged she was gone, though her truancy was everywhere. The very house seemed reticent and withholding. I missed the mystery novels hanging over the backs of chairs to keep her place as she embarked half-heartedly on a list of chores. The piles of laundry she had begun but failed to sort accumulating along the baseboards. A profound silence had settled over our lives, and I realized how dependent I had been on the bizarre commotion of her housekeeping. At night I listened for my father’s footsteps overhead and felt relief. I became especially attuned to his presence in the house, he less so to mine. When I crept into the living room at night, he cried out in alarm, as if he’d forgotten that he was not alone. Then the fear vanished from his face. Percy, he said. Come here. He took me in the crook of his arm.

  Our town was a place of forests and lakes and federal prison compounds, a single street of shops encased in pines. A supermarket spread like a fluorescent oasis just outside district lines. We never went to the city in those years. We hardly went anywhere at all, except to the grocery or the school, or for takeout, egg rolls and lo mein. At home, the silence settled like a fog.

  As if against this quiet, my father took up projects of considerable noise. That spring, when the ground thawed, he retreated to the backyard and began to build a shed. He ran a laboratory at a nearby college, and whenever he wasn’t lecturing or tending to his cell cultures and slides, he could be found outside, poring over blueprints. I could hear him in the garage, training crooked planks of wood through a machine that tore through the afternoon like a departing plane. When he was through, the salvaged two-by-fours emerged straight and smooth, each identical to the next. One day a cement mixer arrived. It sat in the grass at the edge of the woods, churning heavily. My father directed the chute over four pre-drilled holes in the earth, and into these staked four naked stilts. They stood there through the summer, ready to receive a structure that so far existed only in his mind. The radio was cranked to maximum volume. News drifted. I helped by lying in the grass watching clouds. From time to time, I handed him a hammer or a wrench. I held the leveler still above the doorway, before it had been fitted with a door. My father kept calling it the woodshed—I’m going out to work on the woodshed, he’d say—but as the structure grew ever more elaborate over the following months, it dawned on me that what he was really building was a second house. That autumn a stove was installed. A crooked chimney rose through the roof. He built himself a desk. From the lab, he carried in boxes of slides and issues of Nature magazine, carbon-copy notebooks, spiral-bound. Then he shut himself inside. I trudged up the steps and pushed open the door. My father was seated at his freshly planed and sanded desk, preparing notes for his lecture the following day. The dog was at his feet, and when I knelt to stroke its ears, my father pulled away. I felt then how ill-equipped he was to handle me, and how much more hopeless I was, besides, to be of any help to him. I imagined us cradling puppets without the strings, a pile of joints in our arms.

  When all was finished, the second house shone with lamplight through the small hours of the night. I turned onto my side, in bed, and watched the lantern of it until I fell asleep. I thought I could see my father’s shadow flicker as he typed, or when he set the kettle on the woodstove for a cup of lemon tea. Although maybe he wasn’t working. Maybe he was, like me, simply staring blankly out the window. In any case, I was glad to have him out there, awake. Though I missed the great orchestra of the carpentry tools, the motor of the planer in the garage, the hammering, the nails sinking into wood, the radio he played loud, streaming news from house to yard.

  For my part, I watched enormous quantities of television. After dark, when my father retreated to the shed, I wandered down the hall. My mother had not believed in television. She was at her most animated when describing to me the liquefying effects it would have on my brain. There was a dolly in the coat closet, and the TV sat upon it, in her honor, hidden away. Most nights I wheeled it out from behind a wall of winter wool and into the living room, plugged it in. There, on my belly before the woodstove in the main house, I flipped through the channels. I fell asleep to sitcom laughter of vague, off-screen origins, watched women latch gold chains. I was obsessed for a time with Wheel of Fortune. The tiles of the spinner glittered, hypnotic in the dark. It didn’t really matter to me what was on. What mattered was that I could imagine myself as one in a crowd, that the same scenes unfolded in distant living rooms just as they did in mine.

  I watched until the sky began to blush. I went on walks at dawn through the woods, skidded stones across the icy surface of the pond. I was spotted strolling through the snow on my own at odd hours, pausing for long moments to cup my ears, collecting sounds. There had always been some concern, among my teachers and the parents of my friends, that I was not getting on as well as I might. Certain traits were becoming more pronounced. She was just standing there, a neighbor said. I thought she w
as a deer. Imagine if I’d shot.

  The previous owner of our house had also hunted deer, and in the high branches of the prodigious pine in our front yard remained a platform where he used to aim his bow. I could see it from the ground. One day, I decided to climb to it. I was curious how far one could see from that apartment in the pine. Probably not so far. Not to the city, maybe. But why not try? The branches began low to the earth, a few inches above the rust bed of the needles, and I notched my boots against the bark. It was winter and the air was blue with cold. The mountains blurred with frost. The sun came up. When I looked down, I saw the twin houses, icicles descending in a glimmer from the eaves. I made it to the platform and kept climbing. It was an old tree, a grandfather tree past its prime, and my mother was often saying how beautiful it was. I thought of it as a friend. I secured my boot into a final foothold and reached. The branch fell, and I followed it to the ground.

  The doctors said it was the fresh snow that saved me. The breathing machine had something to do with it, too. I woke up in the hospital to find tubes snaking from my nose and chest. The doctors appeared at my bedside to explain things calmly and thoroughly, as if the better informed I was, the more likely I would be to recover. A pneumothorax, I learned, is the collapsing of that fragile purse inside the chest, and though in theory one can live quite normally with a single lung, one’s energy for life is consequently halved. The question was whether my conquered organ, flattened by the impact of my fall, would reinflate on its own. For a week, I breathed with help. Then I sank into a deep sleep as they sent a second scalpel between my ribs. After, a nurse came in to test my strength. She placed the mouthpiece of a large plastic pump between my teeth and commanded me to breathe. My rehabilitated lung complied, and she sent me home. At night, my father sat on the edge of my bed as I performed my exercises. He propped me up on pillows as I breathed into a balloon that measured the force my exhalation produced. He stood for a long moment in the dark and placed a palm on my head. Please, please, he said. Don’t do stupid things like that again.

  (My fiancé looked out the window.

  Did you ever find out where your mother went?

  I shook my head.

  You were lucky.

  Yes, I said.)

  We’d hardly left town since the accident. Once we went to Montreal, to buy a winter coat. Other than that, I went no farther than I could ski or bike. I cycled to the café on Main Street in the afternoons, where I poured endless sugar packets into coffee, or to the highway, the entrance to the ski resort. Then I turned around and traced the same path home. My world had become smaller. It was my mother who’d taken me to the World Trade Center and the Met, the corner of Twenty-Third and Tenth, and other places that held for her some power. My father resented the city. It wasn’t until I was older, and had my license, that my range of reference began to expand.

  There is a certain kind of freedom in neglect. I went where I could, whenever I pleased, and I had to thank my father for that. He taught me how to drive. When I was fifteen, he took me to the supermarket after hours to turn slow laps around the lot. It wasn’t immediately intuitive to me, which pedal referred to the gas, and which to the brake, and on those first few voyages I upturned a trash can or two. My father wasn’t fazed. That’s all right, he said. That’s why we came so late, no one’s around. I was grateful. He settled into the passenger seat, his breath rising in slow clouds, popped a tape into the cassette, and turned the volume loud. I imagine you would have been able to hear us from the freezer section of the empty store as I drew endless circles around the lot, passing dumpsters, streetlights, the pines that crept to the pavement’s edge, all the while broadcasting the muffled melodies of Bob Marley and the Who. We made an eerie scene, I’m sure, traversing our ghost rounds after midnight. In the end, I learned to parallel-park between two dumpsters, two cones, two bike racks my father had drawn together for a challenge. The first thaw, I woke very early, took the keys from the hook, and eased the Volvo over the GWB, just as my mother used to do.

  I was not very adventurous or bold, and had no money. I visited the places I had gone with her. The ballet. The Met, where there was a new painting I did not particularly like but which stuck in my mind all the same. It was there in the gallery that used to host the bather series, in which blurry women climb in and out of tubs, comb hair, dry the webbing between their toes, and otherwise perform those acts that women do when they imagine themselves to be alone. Only that day the bathers were gone, and in their place hung this small portrait of a man. He was a Russian author, I read, who’d thrown himself down the stairs. It was true that in the picture he had a tragic air. He hung between two self-portraits of an Impressionist and was seated at a writing desk. Steel winter light streamed through the pale window. I wondered if he’d managed to maintain that expression of despair for the entire sitting, or whether the portraitist had captured it all at once, in an instant. I knelt so I was level with the object label. I thought, I’d never choose the stairs.

  (You can’t have thought that at sixteen.

  Well, I’m thinking it now.)

  I made periodic trips to the city in those years. I’m not entirely sure my father knew where I was. He was in the lab, or the garage, hunched over the planing machine. When I was home he knocked on my door to ask how was school, what was I reading, would I like an egg? He served them soft-boiled, in little cups, dish towel folded pedantically over his shoulder. It was no surprise, when it came time to apply for college, that I chose the one farthest from home and closest to the city, which in the end was not so far. My father drove. I looked out the window, where the landscape grew flush and green and neat, as it always did when we crossed state lines. Most places seemed better off. The campus stretched dully in every direction. There were cupolas and tympanums and lawns that would take all day to mow, I knew, because that had been my job at home. My father helped to unload my things and drew me close. I walked to the registration hall and selected the classes he’d suggested I take. Then I returned to the dorm, lay down in the single bed, and fell asleep.

  I was still there when my roommate arrived. The door swung open, and a girl appeared. She stood with her suitcase and a set of boxes, her long dark hair plastered to her cheeks with sweat. At the sight of me, she pushed it back behind her ears. Hi, I said. She looked around the empty room. How long have you been here? I told her I wasn’t sure. She nodded. I’m Yvette. I propped myself on the mattress to shake her hand. I think I’ll unpack now, she said. She was brisk. The boxes opened, her clothes disappeared neatly into drawers. She hung posters and strings of lights. I hadn’t brought any photographs or ornaments. I had with me a shoebox of notes, a few mystery novels, a fistful of pencils my father had sealed in an empty coffee tin. When Yvette ran out of space to hang her memorabilia and prints, I let her decorate my walls, too. Pictures caked the closet doors. She hung a paper lantern. Above my bed, a map of the city appeared. That semester, when I could not sleep, I lay awake charting tedious routes from Harlem, down Manhattan, into Queens.

  I came to rely on Yvette. She’d grown up in the city, Upper East, and if there was ever a question as to who should lead our party of two, the answer was Yvette. The logic of the campus lay just beyond my grasp. I could feel that it was there, like a cliff edge in the dark, only, unlike a precipice, it did not after a series of calculated steps reveal itself to me. Instead I took my cues from her. I borrowed her clothes. I peered at her notes during lectures, to see if what we’d written was the same. One day, in the cafeteria, as we slid along the buffet line, I found myself mindlessly spooning the same foods onto my plate. Yvette paused. You don’t even like polenta. I looked at it, confused. I know I don’t, I said.

  At home, my father had taken to reading the mystery novels that had once so captured the attention of my mother. They rose in a tower beside the armchair when I came home for winter break. He summarized them for me in long monologues delivered over the phone. He loved Agatha Christie, the intrigues of the landed
gentry, anything about the Orient Express. The local library was very small, and I worried sometimes he’d run out. What would he do with his evenings then? I wandered through the stacks at school, selecting every thriller I could find, packed them into cereal boxes, and shipped the whole lot home. I called to check in. Thank you, Percy, my father said. He reminded me to focus on my grades. It struck me as unfair, sometimes, that life had turned out this way.

  After a holiday at home, where the mountains ran along the horizon in every direction, encircling the town, there was something about the campus that struck me as fake, like decorative garden rocks made out of foam. I didn’t trust it, and so, while I enjoyed attending lectures, I couldn’t bring myself to worry about where it was all supposed to lead. I was just intelligent enough to know that I was not especially smart, and this made it difficult to take my own schooling seriously. I looked around my linear algebra class and saw everyone taking notes with an urgency I could not muster. I turned to look out the window, where the first snow blurred, and wondered why I’d come to college at all. My mother had no degree. Yvette was skeptical of this line of thought. Percy, she said. At least you have to try. Alone at a carrel in the science library, I set up a Taylor series to determine the diminishing returns of a distant star’s pull on the earth. I studied the refractive bend of an Einsteinian lens, a perspectival trick produced by the celestial roadblock of a black hole, and which multiplies one star into many. I calculated base ratios of oxygen to nitrogen for organic reactions measured out in moles. Only I had internalized some fear of the body. I was afraid sometimes that mine would give way. That I would faint, or my weak lung would collapse, or my limbs act on one of the irreversible and ridiculous thoughts that frequently crossed my mind. There are moments in life when I feel the immediate future is not an experience to be lived but rather a solid object to admire or try on, like a shirt on a hanger a saleswoman holds up, saying, This would look nice on you. I tried on summer, tomorrow, one minute from now, to see if they might suit. At night, atop the astronomy building, powerful lasers made illusory points of reference on the dome of the night. I looked over the edge of the roof and simultaneously willed and resisted the urge to fall. I could feel something in me brace, like two hands about to shove. There was a sensation of pushing, leaping, and also the awareness that I stood still on a Cartesian plane. I had not jumped, I was walking across the frozen lawn to the dining hall. In our dorm, I changed into a sweater. I brushed my hair. What’s that? Yvette said. I lowered my gaze to the small scars beneath my arm. I was being stupid, I said.