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Chapbook Selections From Web Del Sol

Excerpt fromWe All Fall Down

Kristy Nielsen

Voices

Mother

I have given up all my children just so I can fly on blue silk wings, just for the taste of highest night and the feel a marionette must get when its strings are cut.

I have given up all my children one at a time because they betrayed me. They lied when they didn't have to, they stuck to their stories. I could read their minds, read the truth in their eyes, and I threw away everything I couldn't quite swallow.

For a few months they were each mine in turn. I could barely notice their weight in my arms. Whenever they weren't sleeping, they were gazing at me and moving their lips.

And I gave them up. One at a time. Over and over.

I remember afternoons on the quilt with the girls. They were impatient for me to wake up and I'd bribe them. Just scratch my arms awhile, I'd say, then I'll wake up. Just brush my hair for me and rub my feet.

That pattern of material on the quilt never repeated and I had a story for each square. A family, a city, maybe a planet with several moons. The characters traveled across the quilt adventuring and I told myself all about them until I fell asleep. Until my girls awoke and gently, lightly ran their nails up and down my arms, one on each side. Have you ever felt such bliss?

And I said good-bye to all that.

Here is what else I gave up: the possibility of ever traveling out of the country. College. Books and museums. Colors. The sense of being alone in the world, admired by people who don't know me. The freedom to create myself with each new meeting. This time, you be the mother.

I have only what I can create in a small square. I embroider using the spines of fine ladies for my frame and the tinted blood of their menses to dye my thread.

Here is what I tried to teach them. There is no meal that doesn't merit the use of candles, no lie that couldn't be truth in different circumstances. Don't believe what your father says, I told them. Don't believe that if you go to sleep in an empty room you'll wake up in one. Remember that if there's no one behind you, you are still not alone.

I used to make sweet rolls on the weekend. Cinnamon Buns with a glaze. Sometimes in the evening, I'd whip up a batch of fudge.

But of course, I was not a good mother. I know that. I don't deny it.

When they were babies on the quilt with me, I'd touch their heads, the soft spot pulsing as they slept. I'd suck their fingers or put a whole foot in my mouth. They were that small.

Later, but before they were school age, I remember how they'd touch my hair and trace my features as if I were another species. What hair. What skin. As if they were already trying to memorize me. I tried to fight it, the colors, the need to leave. It was too strong for me. No, I admit, I was too weak.

I know they wonder why. Why I gave them up, why I gave up on myself. Survival is the easy part, I would tell them. Survival is a serrated stone that you must swallow, cough up, and swallow again. You must fish it out of your excrement, sharpen it, and eat it again. Survival is in the body and that's simple. It was faith I choked on. My throat filled with it and I stopped breathing.

The whole world was always trembling in the balance, it's just that suddenly I became aware of it. She weepeth sore in the night and her tears are on her cheeks; among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her.

I tried to teach them the reason for being good: because you will always find in yourself a space still small enough for the little truth-teller you once were. When she sees what you've become, she'll fill your throat just like she filled mine. Say good night.

Light dies slowly. My love doesn't.

Sound disappears. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting.

It's not a question of whether I will be remembered. No one will be remembered.

Father

I don't understand what the big deal is. Everyone moping and complaining what life's given them isn't fair. Do you have two arms? Two legs? How many fingers am I holding up? There's plenty of people doing worse off than you, so get off your pity pot.

When I was your age, I knew how to make everyone laugh. Everybody knew me and smiled when I walked down the hall. Wasn't anyone pointing at me and wondering was I screwy in the head. No social workers came knocking in the evening and if they had, I wouldn't have been there because I knew how to get out and enjoy life.

Sometimes, when I didn't have a lunch, I'd go up and down the hallways at class breaks asking each person for a nickel or a dime. Now, who's gonna say no to that? Just a nickel, I'd say. If they gave me a penny I'd skip it down the hall like rocks over the Detroit River. If they gave me a quarter, usually it was the girls, I'd say, "Now aren't you my special angel?"

By lunch time, I'd have enough nickels and dimes to go across the street for a burger. Smoke a cigarette with the other guys.

I was elected Class President in the Ninth Grade.

It's easy. Learn a couple of jokes. Always listen to the other guy because when someone thinks you find them interesting they'll put their back to the wall for you, almost like they were defending themselves. You have to know how to punch someone in the nose, too. Nothing too serious, just a sharp jab to the schnoz so they know you mean business. You don't want anyone thinking just because you kid around you can be bulldozed over.

I don't know how these kids can be mine. I mean, I know they are, but they are nothing like me. Evelyn could have gone somewhere, made something of herself. She had more smarts in her pinky finger than most people have in their whole hand. But she hasn't used it really. I can't say I'm disappointed because of course I'll love my kids no matter what they do.

I've always said: if being a garbage man makes you happy, then you be a garbage man. All I care about is that you're happy. But Evelyn, with her smarts, she could have been a leader.

The kid's mother, on the other hand, she was a real loony bird. Christ, some of the things she said sent chills up my spine they were so weird. I didn't know how to talk to her. I remember one time we were having an argument, all in good fun though, in front of the kids. I was just kidding her really. I said, women can't back up a car. They can't add in their heads. Women can never keep track of their keys. They're just not efficient. I was just trying to get her goat, you know?

But you know how she responded? "Your father," she said to the kids, "doesn't know the difference between a zucchini and a cucumber." What the hell is that supposed to mean? How can I respond to that? She just didn't know how to have a normal conversation.

Then she follows it with this whopper. "The stones of the house," she says, "will come alive and kill the owners." Then she flips her scarf in front of her eyes and backs out of the room. I'm telling you, she scared the kids half to death. In front of the whole fam damily she said these things.

Once upon a time there was a girl who drew these wild pictures, pictures you felt you could step into and have an adventure, like the chalk drawings in Mary Poppins. It was the damnedest thing.

Once she had this beauty that you knew you couldn't touch. She was a real tomato. But then she withdrew so much you couldn't touch any part of her at all. She almost wasn't real and the only things she cared about were colors, books, symbols.

Symbols! That one really kills me. That's not living! That's letting something else do your living for you. She was always comparing one thing to another to prove a point. "Compared to horses," she said, we're human." Then here's the kicker. "But," she says, "compared to automobiles, we're animals."

Okay lady, I thought. You've got the whole universe figured out in that little nugget of wisdom haven't you?

Now myself, I believe in action. You can't do anything about indecision, but you can always correct mistakes. What more do you want? You've got the power to do whatever you want with your life. Just get up and do it. Quitters never win and winners never quit.

Dee (sister)

Here's what I remember about my father. When he was a child, he tried to cross a train trestle over a river and when he was half-way across, a train started coming. He thought about his options, my brave father. He calculated that he didn't have enough time to reach the end by running, so he climbed over the railing, his feet on the few inches of railroad tie that extended, his fingers gripping the railing for dear life. He hung on, even when the train rushed by and the wind sucked at him. Even though there was something inviting about the water hundreds of feet below.

He loved that story. It always made me wonder what would have happened if he hadn't made it. What would have happened to whatever it is that makes me me? I get myself caught in these cycles of thought sometimes. Not worth it.

Here's what I remember about my mother. She would always light candles at dinnertime. I felt so safe then, all my choices made for me--beans or carrots, more potatoes. Bits of charred paper flew wildly when the tip of a napkin caught the flame. What I wouldn't give to hear her out-of-time voice now, to smell her sweaty and anxious hands in my own after she'd grabbed my hand.

My father taught me to sniff the escaping air when he first punctured the aluminum on a new can of coffee. "Aah," he said, waving his hand over the opening as if he could persuade the molecules to take the path to my nose. "Time to wake up and smell the coffee." He winked.

I remember my mother yelling to me in the mall over a crowd of people, but I couldn't hear what she said. "Meet you where?" I asked. "What time?" When I was small, she just put me in front of the pet store to look at all the kittens and puppies and left me there while she did her shopping.

About Evelyn, I remember the most from before she went to junior high. After that she didn't need me to spend time anymore. I remember we used to walk to the candy store and throw our pennies ahead of us knowing we'd lose some. We figured little kids would find the other pennies and then feel lucky. We never felt lucky when we were little kids.

Here's a moral question, my father told me. You're running down the train tracks and the train is gaining on you. Are you the responsible one who pushes your friend out of the way and leaps second? Or do you climb over the side of the trestle and then yell encouragement from safety? I am neither, I would tell him. I wanted him to know that he could never imagine my thoughts. He would never know me like he knew Evelyn.

I like riding a bike. It reminds me of freedom. I ride out with my three-legged dog now. She was the only one they let me keep, only because no one else would take her. I call her Footstool because of her three legs and I don't mean it in a nasty way. She's really coordinated for a dog who's missing a leg. She keeps up with me when I ride out by the old tracks and she doesn't even lose her breath.

At night, she sleeps with me and doesn't close her eyes until I'm already asleep. I like that.

Does every man have a picture of his wife dressed up like a whore? My father had one hidden away with his socks. Mother wore hardly any clothes, but armsful of bangles and lots of lipstick. Is that how he likes to remember her?

In her secret drawer, my mother hid birth control pills, an old picture of my grandmother who I never met, and a piece of blue cloth which is almost threadbare from rubbing. I don't have a secret drawer. All my secrets are inside me where no one can touch.

Alexandra (therapist)

It is possible to begin again, to drop everything behind you and move on. Of course you must still honor and acknowledge your scars, but you need not be ruled by the past. You live in the future. Forget the past. You left that country.

You start today. You will find it. Right now, go, in the clothes you're wearing now, with only what's in your pockets.

It's only your life, I tell Evelyn when she acts like she doesn't care what happens to her. Hey. It's just your life. Sleep through it if you'd like.

One must stand behind another; stand, sit, sleep, patiently awaiting the revival of the spirits in the one we love.

What do you think it's about? I ask her. How far back does it go?

It is possible to let things unfold the way they are supposed to, to find the right path after you've woken up in the woods.

There is no substitute for observation. Three birch trees growing together. Two metal chairs painted white. A three-tiered bird house. Say "I will remember," I tell her. Blue/green picnic table and bench. Rocks and driftwood set aside for no discernible purpose. Waist-high daisies in a foot-wide circle. Mist.

What do you have to praise? Let's take turns. How about complaints? What do you say? Anything at all.

If you are angry, it will be difficult to be happy. If you are afraid, or greedy; if you are resentful, carrying the past before you like a mural to tell the world your story. The world does not care. If you live in the country called grief, you will be invisible to those who are alive.

Drop your anger. Pick up your knowledge and wear it. It will make you attractive. You will find a place among people again.

You don't know if what I'm telling you is false. You must test it and see for yourself. I support that.

A line from a favorite movie of mine, a Fassbinder film. "It's wrong to give all your love to a single person," Maria Braun's mother says. "If you don't have potatoes, you eat turnips."

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