Time Is a Mother, page 3
When the countryside resumed its wash of gray wheat, tractors, gutted barns, black sycamores in herdless pastures, I started to cry. I put my copy of Didion’s The White Album down and folded a new dark around my head.
The woman beside me stroked my back, saying, in a midwestern accent that wobbled with tenderness, Go on son. You get that out now. No shame in breakin’ open. You get that out and I’ll fetch us some tea. Which made me lose it even more.
She came back with Lipton in paper cups, her eyes nowhere blue and there. She was silent all the way to Missoula, where she got off and said, patting my knee, God is good. God is good.
I can say it was gorgeous now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else.
To be a dam for damage. My shittyness will not enter the world, I thought, and quickly became my own hero.
Do you know how many hours I’ve wasted watching straight boys play video games?
Enough.
Time is a mother.
Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.
In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu.
And the word for weakness is Yếu.
How you say what you mean changes what you say.
Some call this prayer, I call it watch your mouth.
Rose, I whispered as they zipped my mother in her body bag, get out of there.
Your plants are dying.
Enough is enough.
Time is a motherfucker, I said to the gravestones, alive, absurd.
Body, doorway that you are, be more than what I’ll pass through.
Stillness. That’s what it was.
The man in the field in the red sweater, he was so still he became, somehow, more true, like a knife wound in a landscape painting.
Like him, I caved.
I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. Then everything opened. The lights blazed around me into a white weather
and I was lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, into the world, screaming
and enough.
Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker
Mar.
Advil (ibuprofen), 4 pack
Sally Hansen Pink Nail Polish, 6 pack
Clorox Bleach, industrial size
Diane hair pins, 4 pack
Seafoam handheld mirror
“I Love New York” T-shirt, white, small
Apr.
Nongshim Ramen Noodle Bowl, 24 pack
Cotton Balls, 100 count
“Thank You For Your Loyalty” cards, 30 count
Toluene POR-15 40404 Solvent, 1 quart
UV LED Nail Lamp
Cuticle Oil, value pack
Clear Acrylic Nail Tips, 500 count
May
Advil (ibuprofen), 4 pack
Vicks VapoRub, twin pack
Portable Electric Nail Drill
Salonpas Heat-Activated muscle patch, 40 count
Lipstick, “Night Out Red”
Little Debbie Chocolate Zebra Cakes, 4 boxes
Jun.
Large faux-clay planter pots, value set
Carnation Condensed Milk, 6 pack
Clear Nail Art Acrylic Liquid Powder Dish Bowl, 2 pcs
Birthday Card—Son—Pop-up Mother and Son effect
Nike Elite Basketball Shorts, men’s small
Jul.
Saviland Holographic Gold Nail Powder, 6 colors
Nescafé Taster’s Choice Instant Coffee
Advil (ibuprofen), 4 pack
PIXNOR Pedicure Double-Sided Callus Remover
Bengay Medicated Cream, 3 pack
Aug.
Newchic Ochre Summer Dress Floral Print, sz 6
Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum, 8 pack
Plastic Adirondack Lawn Chair, colonial blue
Sep.
Nail buffers and files, 10 pcs
Coppertone Sunblock, 6 oz
Oct.
CozyNites Fleece Blanket, pink
Sleep-Ease Melatonin caps, 90 count
Icy Hot Maximum Strength pain relief pads
Nov.
Tampax, 24 count
Faux-Resin Hair clips, 3 pack
Dec.
Advil (ibuprofen) Maximum Strength, 4 pack
True-Gro Tulip Bulbs, 24 pcs
Jan.
Feb.
Healthline Compact Trigger Release Folding Walker
Yankee Candle, Midsummer’s Night, large jar
Mar.
Chemo-Glam cotton head scarf, sunrise pink
White Socks, women’s small, 12 pack
Apr.
Chemo-Glam cotton scarf, flower garden print
“Warrior Mom” Breast Cancer awareness T-shirt, pink and white
May
Mueller 255 Lumbar Support Back Brace
Jun.
Birthday Card—“Son, We Will Always Be Together,” Snoopy design
Jul.
Eternity Aluminum Urn, Dove and Rose engraved, small
Perfect Memories picture frame, 8 x 11 in, black
Burt’s Bees lip balm, Honey, 1 pc
Aug.
Sep.
Easy-Grow Windowsill herb garden
Oct.
YourStory Customized Memorial Plaque, 10 x 8 x 4 in
Winter coat, navy blue, x-small
Nov.
Wool socks, grey, 1 pair
Nothing
We are shoveling snow, this man and I, our backs coming closer along the drive. It’s so quiet every flake on my coat has a life. I used to cry in a genre no one read. What a joke, they said, on fire. There’s no money in it, son, they shouted, smoke from their mouths. But ghosts say funny things when they’re family. This man and I, we take what will vanish anyway and move it aside, making space. There is so much room in a person there should be more of us in here. Traveler who is inches away but never here, are you warm where you are? Are you you where you are? Something must come of this. In one of the rooms in the house the man and I share, a loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call it Proof. We’re in our thirties now and I rolled the dough just an hour ago, pushing my glasses up my nose with a flour-dusted palm as I read, reread, the hand-scrawled recipe given me by the man’s grandmother, the one who, fleeing Stalin, bought a ticket from Vilnius to Dresden without thinking it would stop, it so happened, in Auschwitz (it was a town after all), where she and her brother were asked to get off by soldiers who whispered, keep moving, keep moving, like boys leading horses through wheat fields in the night. How she passed the huddled coats, how some were herded down barbed-wire lanes. The smoke from our mouths rising as the man and I bend and lift, in silence, the morning clear as one inside a snow globe. How can we know, with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that survives? He pours a bag of salt over the pavement. From where I’m standing it looks like light is spilling out of him, like the dusty sunray that found his grandmother’s hands as she got back on the train, her brother at her side, smoke from the engine blown across the faces outside, which soon fall back to pine forests, washed pastures, empty houses with full rooms. The man clutches his stomach as if shot, the light floods out of him—I mean you. Because something must come of this. When the guard asked your grandmother if she was Jewish, she shook her head, half-lying, then took from her bag a roll, baked the night before, tucked it in the guard’s chest pocket. She didn’t look back as the train carried her, newly twenty, toward where I now stand, on a Sunday in Florence, Massachusetts, squinting at her faded scrawl: sift flour, then beat eggs until happy-yellow. The train will reach Dresden days before the sky is filled with firebombers. More smoke. A bullet or shrapnel, failing to find her. The brother under rubble, his name everywhere around her like the snow falling on your face forty years later, on December 2, 1984, while your mother carries you, alive only three hours, the few steps to the minivan where your grandmother, sixty now, crowns your head with her brother’s name. Peter, she says, Peter, as if the dead could be called back into new, stunned bones. The snow has started up again, whitening the path as though nothing happened. But to live like a bullet, to touch people with such intention. To be born going one way, toward everything alive. To walk into the world you never asked for and choose a place where your wanting ends—which part of war do we owe this knowledge? It’s warm in this house where we will die, you and I. Let the stanza be one room, then. Let it be big enough for everyone, even the ghosts rising now from this bread we tear open to see what we’ve made of each other. I know, we’ve been growing further apart, unhappy but half full. That clearing snow and baking bread will not fix this. I know, too, as I reach across the table to brush the leftover ice from your beard, that it’s already water. It’s nothing, you say, laughing for the first time in weeks. It’s really nothing. And I believe you. I shouldn’t, but I do.
Scavengers
Your body wakes
into its quiet rattle
Ropes & ropes
How quickly the animal
empties
We’re alone again
with spent mouths
Two trout gasping
on a June shore
Side by side, I see
what I came for, behind
your iris: a tiny mirror
I stare
into its silver syllable
where a fish with my face
twitches once
then gones
The fisherman
suddenly a boy
with too much to carry
III
Künstlerroman
After walking forever through it all, I make it to the end.
The rewind button flashes red __ red __ red.
I sit down and push the button. The screen flicks on, revealing a man in a pressed black suit sitting at the edge of a dirt road, staring into a Panasonic TV set from the ’80s.
I watch him rise and walk backward, down the unmarked road, past the gutted mobile homes, empty concrete slabs crisscrossed with weeds, then through a pine grove littered with dead needles, which soon opens to a field of poppies, past a ravine choked with cars rusting from another century.
He walks backward through the night-green hills, hands in his pockets as the crescent moon, an empty boat, skims the sky.
He walks backward into town, up the steps of the grand hotel, into a hall crowded with crystal chandeliers, waiters with plates of caviar spoons, flutes of champagne. The room a kingdom of light.
The man is surrounded by merry people in fine dress. They whirl backward around him, faces flushed with opulence. The tie he wears (too big) is the one his cousin, Victor, gave him outside of Drew’s package store, saying “You’re a writer now, you should look like one” three weeks before Victor checked himself into the psych ward at Silver Hill.
One by one the people hand the man a book, the artifact of his thinking. He opens each one and, pen in hand, traces a deliberately affected, illegible signature, until the name, in red ink, evaporates. Everyone raises their glasses, satisfied, mouths open as crickets start up around me, the screen flickering as the tape whirs.
I watch him walk backward through the crowd, alcohol flowing through their lips into glasses as he leaves the hall toward the empty streets, alone.
He walks as the sun rises, then falls, through days, weeks, then months.
He walks backward through airports, convention centers, dips into taxis, even a limousine, then a governor’s mansion, through immaculate foyers of leather-embroidered divans and marble mantels, Tiffany lamps, polished granite counters, rooms just for “sitting” where no one ever sat. Fresh fruit piled in teak bowls set to rot.
The tape skips and I see, on the screen, a sheet of dust shoot up from the surface of a river, then gather into a cloud under a bridge, before funneling into the copper urn cradled in the man’s arms.
His face looks unfinished. The man’s little brother rests his head on the man’s shoulder. In their oversize rented suits, they look like ambassadors from a country that no longer exists.
It is the country of sons.
//
I watch him leave another mansion in reverse, down a long driveway flanked with phlox and geraniums, down a mountain road at night, through towns whose names you hear only when a hurricane passes through, gas stations overgrown with ragweed and asters, past an alley wide as a gravestone, over gravel medians where somebody’s sister was last captured on CCTV. I see him walk backward into a row house with eight satellite dishes jammed on the garage roof. The dark of a basement. The sound of needle wrappers torn open, the occasional face from high school, thirty-twoed and sucked out under a two-second match.
A voice bashed against a wall turns to dust in his cochlea as the warmth of junk passes through him like a new spine. He can feel their laughter in his hands.
Cigarettes spark in the dark: fireflies in a bomb shelter.
He walks backward past the cornfield (where, at seven, he lost his dog, Cheetah, and sat for two hours in the corn crying) and picks up his suit jacket hung on a broken hydrant. He puts it on and continues backward toward his mother’s house, where he kisses her on the cheek in a grimy kitchen, the $50 bill going from his hand to hers, then back into her bra. He heads up the stairs, into the bathroom, and lets the vomit in the sink rise to his mouth. Snot back up his nose. Hands shaking.
//
The tape skips—I see him lying on the floor in a dimly lit room, eyes shut, the dark wetness at his starched collar drying back to tears, the tears crawling up his cheeks.
He blows his nose, rises to his knees, hands over his face. A framed medal, an ornate award, slides into his arms. He kisses it, searches the glass for his face, then gets up, flicks on the lights.
He’s in a dressing room, surrounded by mirrors. His red, wet eyes on every wall.
He walks backward through double doors, shafts of light, the award tucked under his arm. Through a foyer, down a wide linoleum hall, reporters flanking him, cameras, forced grins, stiff handshakes, half hugs, then he backs onto the wing of a stage in the baroque opera house. The crowd roars mutely, the award raised with both arms, its gold edges glimmering under clinical houselights. His heart a fish tossed into the wooden boat inside him.
The tape skips and I see him go backward out of the Stop & Shop in Hartford, the one that starts to crumble, brick by brick, as he gets further away. Bulldozers, men in hard hats—until it’s razed to the ground, then replaced by larger, irregular stones, until it becomes the walls of a century-old church, the steeple rising under the wrecking ball’s touch. Pieces of stained glass gather into Saint Francis’s haloed face.
He walks backward into the church, where Kelvin’s casket glows in the dusky light. Mothers and grandmas with heads bowed. But what he wants, or rather, what I want for him, doesn’t happen: underneath Kelvin’s button-up, the stitched pink eye in his chest, just above his right lung, doesn’t open, the .45-caliber shell doesn’t come out, won’t suspend itself in Sunday’s air, won’t make an obedient return to the barrel, splinter into lead, polymer, iron, elements, the ash of a star ejected from a cosmos into this one.
Kelvin doesn’t sit up in his casket to kiss his father, Mr. Rios, on the forehead when the man hobbles back to take the Tonka truck from his nineteen-year-old boy’s hands.
//
The dictator on TV, the noose removed from his neck as the world watches. The dictator crawling backward into the hole in the ground, his face a crumpled law.
I keep my finger on rewind, like a good citizen, and the man in the suit keeps running backward through the narrative—that is, the knowledge—I’ve forced on him.
Summer approaches spring as he walks backward, freshly eighteen, into a motel room off Route 4, where his clothes come off like bandages. Where he lies very still on the lumpy bed beside a soldier, just back from the desert, where he left his right ear. The light from the street falls into the hollow where the ear once was, making a medallion of gold on the side of the man’s head. The boy runs his tongue across it and waits to be forgiven.
On the wall, the shadows of their erections fall, then rise. We are rare in goodness, and rarer still in joy. Their clothes return to them, like crumpled laws.
He walks backward as the soldier walks backward. They smile at each other until both are out of sight. The night returns to itself, less whole. The Maybelle Auto marquee a beacon in the fog.
//
And the tanks roll out of Iraq, the women backing away from their dead, rags over their mouths.
Books disintegrate to trees as the tape roll thins. The trees rise to their feet. The drugs leave the veins of four friends in the Mazda, the car flipping nine times on I-84 and landing on its wheels, their necks re-boned to their lives as they sing Ja Rule and Ashanti’s “Mesmerize,” eyes shut in a freshman high.
The boy sitting at a desktop computer as, one by one, the words, often accompanied by unsolicited dick pics, vanish from AOL Chat screens.
