One morning in January, when patches of snow he frozen along
the edges of the sidewalk, one of the narcissus blooms. "It's out,"
Annie says, coming to lay her head on the pillow next to mine.
Her mouth, a little open, shows the place where her tooth is
chipped. Together, we go to look. Beyond Astoria, the sun is rising.
On one side of the front room the wall is deep rose. In the pot
where we have placed them on a bed of pebbles, four long green
shoots rise from the crinkled layers of bulb. Three are swollen at
the top. The last opens white and fluted.
"Soon I'll be an old woman in a sweater," my mother says to
me while we are fixing dinner, the night she gives me the bulbs.
She says it lightly, not wanting to be taken too seriously. But the
remark is altogether out of character. It's my father who likes to
point out the single red leaf on the dogwood tree in late July or
remark how much shorter the days are getting as he sits, drink in
hand, in the wicker rocking chair on August evenings. "Your mother
always said you were the oldest young man she ever knew," my
mother tells him impatiently. "It's morbid, all this talk about the
deepening gloom."
Instead my mother will call during a warm week in December
to say she's found a yellow blossom on the forsythia bush outside
the house. She knows that, living in the city, I have no way of
seeing these things. They get all mixed tip when it's warm this
late in the year. I've found some pussy willow, too. They think it's
spring."
"An old woman in a sweater? What do you mean by that?"
I speak to her as if she were Annie, asking for a pemission I'm
determined not to grant.
We are in the kitchen of the house in New Rochelle where my
brother and sister and I grew up. She is washing lettuce and I am
standing behind her, slowly chopping an onion into small pieces
on a board her own mother used. There are deep scars in the wood, blackened into grooves where they crisscross at the center. If I ask, my mother will tell me something about the board; in what cupboard it was kept when she was a child, from which nail on the
wall it hung. Like her children, my mother grew up in the house.
When she was twelve, the age Annie is now, her own mother died
in one of the rooms upstairs. But when I question her about my
grandmother for whom I am named she can tell me nothing. "I
must have some kind of block," she says. "I know she loved children. Everyone tells me that. But I can't remember her."
We are silent. My mother will not be allowed to talk with me
about getting old. Nor will I be allowed to ask if she, as a child,
watched for new lines in her mother's face, for the slide of her
body downward.
"What kind of beast was at these?" she asks, after a moment. I
put down my knife and look over her shoulder. The leaf she is
holding is brown and shrivelled around the edges. Otherwise, it
looks like the ones she has washed and put in a colander, delicate
green with a white rib down its center. "I guess like us, some of
the time," she says meditatively. "Leaving behind a trail of malignancy."
This is the kind of remark, spoken half to herself, that either
intrigued or enraged me as a child, depending on whether or not
I knew what she was talking about. In either case, I was likely to
respond as if I didn't.
"Slugs," I say.
Then, turning back to my onion, looking for some offering to
make up for my refusals, I am reminded of the old woman in the
Russian folk tale. "Do you remember?" I ask. "Like the beast on
the lettuce, she destroyed whatever she touched. When she died
she was thrown into the lake of fire. Her guardian angel thought
and thought how to save her. Then he remembered that once, in
an unguarded moment, she had given an onion to a beggar. So he
carefufly lowered the onion so she could catch hold of it and pull
her out." Then I remember the story has an unhappy ending and
am silent. The other sufferers tried to hang on to the old woman
so they would be pulled out with her. As she turned to yell at them
to let go, the stalk of the onion broke, and they all fell back into
the burning sea. "Where they remain to this day," the story ends.
"Sounds simple, an onion," my mother says. "I'll remember
that."
I scoop up the chopped bits and put them into the frying pan
with the handle that never gets hot. COLD HANDLE is written
on it in raised letters. The pan, too, belonged to her mother. At least I know that when my grandmother snatched onions from the
fire she didn't bum her hand.
"And Mike?" my mother asks, still with her back to me at the
sink. "Any word since he's gone?"
"Not yet," I say, and turn to put the pan on the stove.
My husband is in Africa for a month. The week before he went
away we. slept with our arms and legs wrapped around each other.
If one of us rolled away in our sleep, the other would follow. We
woke up in the morning with our faces pressed together. The night
before he left we had sat on the sofa drinking to his departure. It
was very late, Annie was asleep, and we were listening to jazz on
a local station. At one end of the room the sheet of glass in a picture
frame reflected the little white lights on the Christmas tree standing
in the opposite comer. Mike was lying with his head in my lap
and his eyes closed, a glass balanced on his stomach. I was looking
back and forth from one livid patch of light to the other, thinking
about the people I would see while he was away. Then, dozing a
little, subdued by the music, I dropped my head and saw that
Mike's eyes were open and that his thoughts were as far from me
as mine had been from him. He could have been anywhere, with
anyone. If I asked what he'd been thinking about, he might tell me. Then again, he might not. Climbing out of sleep in the morning
we often told each other our dreams; but not all. I knew that very
well. Alerted, I remembered the story of the man, married for
years, who was sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Mexico City when
a young woman in a yellow dress walked through the door. He
left his wife and children on the spot. And stories of disease: typhoid, malaria, yellow fever. You could wake up happy and well
one morning and by nightfall smell of death. Our whole life together - Annie, quarrels, nights in bed - had been lived in a trance.
He could vanish in a moment and after a short time I wouldn't
even be able to remember what he looked like.
"The mails take a long time," my mother says, shaking the colander. "Such a distance. So many places to be lost or delayed
between here and there."
"If something were wrong, I'd hear," I say. It's my turn to reassure her. She never says so, but I know she waits to hear from
her children that their marriages have ended.
Her own marriage has not. "He's upstairs, working on the ceiling," she had said to me earlier when she met me at the door after
I'd dropped Annie at a friend's for the night and driven out from the city in the late afternoon. I knew my mother meant I should
greet my father, let him know I was there, before joining her in
the kitchen. It would be impossible for her to know her children
were in the house and not immediately want to see them. My father, she likes to think, is the same.
We had stood at the door an instant, looking outside. "It's supposed to snow tomorrow," she said. "After such a warm December, I suppose we can't complain." We gazed across the street at
an unlighted house, hunched against the orange glow. The oak
trees around it looked black and brittle. Their branches crossed,
making it hard to see which tree was which. In spots, clusters of
dry leaves held on. "Lights," my mother said, and with a flick the house across the
street was engulfed in darkness. We closed the door and I looked
briefly in the mirror on the wall next to it. Never, whfle I was
growing up, had people remarked on a resemblance between my
mother and me. It was my brother, everyone agreed, who looked
like her: the dark hair, the pointed chin, the slope of their shoul-
ders. But now, more and more often, I am startled by my mothees
face rising from the depths of a mirror; the forehead touched by
anxiety, the lines around the eyes gathering into a similar pattern,
the neck, exposed and uncertain. Yet when I comment on the
resemblance, my mother has a hard time seeing it.
My father, when I went to find him, was on a ladder, smoothing
putty over a crack from which he had removed the peeling paint.
I knew he had heard me coming up the stairs because he made
the same sound he made when we were children and approached
him while he was reading or, as my mother said, "thinking." "Un
Hmm," he'd say, his voice rising at the end, agreeing prematurely
so we wouldn't interrupt him. Sometimes he'd break in with this
note on a visitor who was in the middle of a story and we knew
his thoughts were elsewhere. Usually the visitor would hesitate an
instant, puzzled, then, deciding to take the interruption as a sign
of interest, plunge ahead. My sister and I would rapidly exchange
glances and try to catch the attention of our mother, who would
be looking with increased interest, nodding and smiling, at the
visitor. "Un hmm," my father said, as I reached the top step, and
I knew he was engaged. Another moment and his eyes cleared.
"Good to see You," he said genially, looking down at me, standing
in the doorway. "Cold out there, isn't it." His eyes shifted to the
darkening windows then up again to the ceding, away from me.
My father's wandering attention is not the same thing as withdrawal. He longs to be followed into his world, to be asked the question that will allow him to speak. With a little encouragement,
he will reconstruct from the beginning of the century to the present
any given block in New York City, or explain in precise terms why
the sun in winter sets farther to the south than in the summer. He
will describe which parts of the cathedral at Reinis were destroyed
by bombs and how Caravaggio's face looks bleakly out from his
canvas atop the figure of Nicodemus, placing the dead Christ in
the tomb. But all his subjects, really, are the sime: life is short.
Once my father spoke to me unasked. We were sitting together,
a towel stretched beneath us, on a scorching rock on an island in
the Long Island Sound. I was four and he was pinning up my hair,
as my mother had directed, so it wouldn't get in my eyes when I
went swimming. She was at home, recovering from an illness that
had kept her in the hospital for months. As a treat, my father had
taken my brother and me one Sunday for a ride on the launch and
a swim.
The launch, bouncing hard against waves raised by passing motor boats, had moved slowly enough for Charlie and me to look
over the side into the churning green and white below. We had
knelt on the benches, our fingers clutching the creaking wood, our
tongues out to taste the salt. The launch rocked from side to side,
throwing us backward then forward into a spray that dampened
our hair. Beside us, our father sat in a tan bathing suit, one hand
clasping the ankle crossed on his knee, his foot, in its dirty white
sneaker, jiggling a little. The other hand was raised to shield his
eyes, squinting toward some distant point. Every now and then,
his attention shifted to Charlie and me and he told us not to lean
out so far.
As the launch made the sweep around Pine Island, people sitting
on the rocks had waved to us in welcome. The boy at the wheel
threw back the throttle and the motor subsided to a gentle putter.
In the center of the stretch of rock were the three or four trees,
twisted and scruffy, for which the island was named. Underneath
them old men were throwing horseshoes. Intent on their game,
they didn't look up. There was a little house, too, lowbrowed and
shingled, where people changed their clothes. In front of it women
in hats with wide brims sat in slatted chairs and talked. The children were mostly in the water, the bigger ones swimming, the little
ones with their arms stretched over black tire tubes.
Later on, as we sat on the rock, my father pinning up my hair,
we could faintly hear the clink of horseshoes as they hit the iron
stake. Below us the water slapped against the rock, exposing in its
pull backward barnacles and floating seaweed. A starfish, white eye agape, remained fixed against the slippery tangle. We could
hear the cries of children rising from the beach and, impatient, I
twisted my head to took. My father told me to sit stfli. I turned
back, then, to the broad expanse of the Sound. "Look," he said,
fixing a pin in my hair. "The water is so bright it hurts your eyes.
You can scarcely look at it. But in a little while it will turn black
and you'll be able to look without squinting. The sun will be lower
then and the tide will be in."
These, in fact, were probably not his words at all. But he had
told me, for the first time, what I would hear from him again and
again: see how it changes before your eyes. Far from desolation, I
experienced my first moment of conscious joy. It would last forever,
I knew: the fly buzzing round my knee, the trickle of sweat running
down my back.
At six o'clock, exactly six, my father comes downstairs and joins
us in the kitchen. "Your mother's getting thirsty," he says, winking
at me. Raking the onions around the pan, I can see him through
the door as he takes the little key with the square head from the
edge of the mantlepiece in the dining room. He leans over to fit it
in the lock of the liquor cabinet and carefully puts it back after
drawing out three bottles. "One more day and that will be it," he
says, returning to the kitchen. "It's not the painting that takes the
time. It's sealing up all the old cracks in the ceiling." On his little
finger he is wearing the platinum ring that my mother used to
wear on her fourth finger as a wedding band. On her hand, the
ring seemed always to be under water, resting briefly on a child's
head, raised to lower a shade at night. On his, the ring looks like
an ornament, an indulgence that has come late. He picks up an ice
cube and hesitates a moment before opening his fingers and letting
it drop in the glass. He pours some bourbon into a shot glass and
spills it neatly over the ice. Then he brings it to my mother, who
is still standing at the sink. "I have to make sure she gets what she
wants," he says, raising the glass to her lips.
He fixes a drink for himself and for me. "Happy days," he says,
raising his glass. My mother turns toward him and they touch
glasses. The older my father gets, the more cheerful he becomes.
His fears of advancing age have been justified; no one can tell him
he was wrong. My mother, on the other hand, who almost died
when she was young, has until recently lived as if she had been
granted a permanent reprieve. Death and leaving were unlucky
subjects for conversation.
"Let's drink to Mike," my father says. "Safe return." Before turning back to the onions, almost cooked now, I raise my glass
vaguely in the air. Drinking to a safe return implies the possibility
of no return at all, quite a different thing from delayed letters.
Clutching the handle, I give the pan a shake and turn off the flame,
wondering if anyone wished my grandmother good health as she
lay staring upward at a crack in the ceiling.
"On that ladder for so long," I ask my father, "doesn't it get
tedious?"
"I was just thinking about my aunt Jennie," he says, taking a
long sip from his glass. "rhe one who lived down on Prince Street.
She looked out the window about now, I remember, at the begin-
ning of January, and said that spring was on its way. Of course
spring was a long way off, but she was right, you can already see
that it stays fight in the afternoons longer now. The sun has been
setting a few minutes later every night since the beginning of December."
My mother is wiping off the chopping board, putting things
away. We are waiting for her to finish so we can sit down with our
drinks.
"But I thought the solstice was the 21st of December," I say.
"Isn't that when the days start getting longer?"
"When the actual minutes of daylight begin to increase," my
father says. "That is correct. The balance is tipped toward more
daylight after December 21st. But the sun continues rising later
until the beginning of January. We're getting up in mornings that
continue to get darker a whole month after the days are lengthening in the afternoons."
"It's like being married to Mr. Monet," my mother says, her back
to us. "All this talk about the light."
My father looks flattered. He pours out another shot and empties
it into his glass, then uses his finger as a swizzle.
"At the summer solstice," he says, "the long evenings are already beginning to shorten. And at the winter one, when the cold
weather is getting started in eamest, the nights of earliest darkness
are already behind us."
My mother slides the board upright against the wall of a cupboard. "Small comfort," she says, and, picking up her drink, turns
to face us. "Let's go sit down."
As we are eating dinner, it begins to snow. My father gets up to
look out the window and sees a few flakes failing beneath the street
light. "Stay here tonight," my mother says. "Annie's taken care of
and you can drive back to the city in the morning." I am tempted
for an instant, but say no, I have something planned for tomorrow. The truth is that this is no longer my home and as a guest I sometimes feel Iike an intruder. Their children gone, my parents have
established rhythms of intimacy that bind their days. Their life
together has become the occasion for snatched greetings in preparation for departure. One night I did stay and in the morning
started downstairs to make myself a cup of coffee. Hearing the step
on the stairs my father, already in the kitchen, emerged from the
doorway, his face lifted in welcome. "Oh," he daid, catching sight
of me, and folding the newspaper he had been carrying extended
between his hands. "I thought you were your mother."
"Come with me to the cellar," my mother says when we are
finishing washing the dishes. "I want to give you something before
you leave." She opens the door with the key that is hanging from
the knob by a piece of string. "You'll see," she says as I follow her
down the stairs. The cement floor is smooth and cold under our
feet. My mother leans over the pile of wood stacked under the
stairs. "You'll see," she repeats and turns toward me, a paper bag
suspended from one hand, four crisp bulbs in the palm of the other.
"Put them in a sunny place and in a few days they'll bloom. That's
all they need, January or July. Sun." Then, on our way up the
stairs, she calls over her shoulder, "My onion."
When I am standing at the doorway in my coat, my mother
turns the collar up around my neck. "And your scarf," she says.
"You better put it around your head since you don't have a hat."
Obediently I wind my scarf over my ears and lean forward to kiss
her goodbye. "Love to Annie," she says. My father pats me on the
shoulder and opens the door. "Be careful driving," he says. "The
roads are slippery." I nod and say yes but have ceased to listen. I
will drive no more carefully because my father tells me to and once
out of my mother's sight I'll take the scarf off my head because I
like my hair to get wet in the snow. They are telling me to go safe
in the world just as I tell Annie to wear her mittens, knowing she
stuffs them in the bottom of her pockets to leave her fingers free.
In fact my thoughts have been drifting toward Mike ever since
my mother turned up my collar to protect me from the cold. Outside, wiping the snow from the windshield, I imagine him asleep,
oblivious to the mosquitoes clinging to the net tucked in around
his mattress. The four comers of the net are attached to the ceiling
by strings tied to hooks. There is no breeze at all, the white gauze
hangs perfectly still, but the air is heavy with the scent of frangipani, hibiscus, bird of paradise, jasmine. Here at the equator where
the curve of the earth tilts steadily toward the sun, where light
follows dark always in equal measure, I suppose everything must
be at once in bloom and perishing.
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Fiction from Web Del Sol