Journey, page 36
* * *
—
It gets easier. When you leave her now, your heart slows right down by the end of your walkway and returns to its even tapping, or something more like a drip, a kind of Chinese water torture. Inside the house, the dog rages for you. Your house frays. Seams expose themselves. Fragments of materials—bedding, covers, diapers, and all types of everyday items, pieces of plastic Tupperware, spatulas, bathtub plugs, and toilet plungers—everything, scattered in colourful chunks and pieces like confetti or rice showered at some strange ceremony.
* * *
—
You drink at a neighbourhood bar. Silent television screens play European soccer games and the place is filled with reggae music. On Caribbean Night, a man without a shirt on offers to buy you a piña colada but it reminds you too much of milk spittle. Everyone looks so helpless to you, and every man calls you baby. Anyone waiting at home for you, baby? Can I get you anything, baby? It seems that no matter what you do you cannot get the smell of diapers or corn starch or that powdery infant scent from your hands. When you sweat it smells to you like sour milk. Some nights you dance by yourself on a small, crowded dance floor, swaying back and forth, your body finally feeling lighter. You can feel your hip bones again as they bump accidentally against another dancer. You think that there is something right and fitting, worthy even, in taking up less and less space. One night, after you have had too much of something water-dear but potent, a man shares with you the size of his great heart. While he twirls a little mauve umbrella stuck inside his drink, he tells you long stories of all the women he has loved, and all the women he has yet to share his enormous passion with. He cannot help himself. He is filled to the brim. He orders himself another exotic drink. It is a strange bar, you think, where all the women like their shots straight up, and all the men are stirring cocktails. He seems lucky to you, this man, with his huge and generous heart. When he finally reaches out his clumsy hand and strokes your thigh, you tell him: Sorry, I am fresh out of love, and your voice sounds almost innocent, like a dairy maid, someone peach-faced, pert, and healthy. A farmer’s daughter who has just run out of eggs. The man says something about fresh…but you are already near the door. The bartender wipes your place clean and says: Goodbye, baby.
* * *
—
When you turn your corner you always expect to see the red lights of fire engines or waiting police cars parked in front of your door, their mute lights spinning noiselessly, evil mimes, making the emergency seem too late. Each time, you are surprised by the stillness of your house, the ordinary way it sits beside the others on the block, the outside light on, making the bright blue of the door seem rich and inviting. It is always right here, at this moment, that you think you feel something, a stirring, that makes you run the last half a block and fumble a little with the keys. But by the time you reach her, whatever it was is gone, and your heart has contracted back down into that knotty pit at the centre of some soft fruit. She lies in her crib with her eyes shut tight against you. She makes hardly any noises in her sleep. Each time, you are stunned at her determination to stay alive. It seems impossible that she willed herself here, right into this world, without any encouragement at all. Sometimes, you just want to shake her out of her dumb sleep, shake her and crush her tiny chest against yours until she cries in a terrible hopeless fear. But you grip the bars of the crib hard and hold your breath. It passes. Isn’t it better to feel this dark-pitted emptiness than the other, the urge to damage and betray?
* * *
There was a man, of course, with beautiful eyelashes and the face of a drifter, a face that could be heaped up by air or water currents and carried anywhere. He said, “I’ll be back.” But it didn’t matter. You never loved him, that is, not here, not anywhere where he was with you in the same place. Not in his cramped room with the blue-painted walls and the piles of hardcover books stolen from various libraries. He was obsessed with designing the perfect world or the optimum living conditions. He drew many plans and was always talking about space. “People need their own space,” he was always saying. “Crowding leads to aggression.” People just need less people, you thought, and said to him: Some people need more space. Others need the entire universe. But you love him in Africa, where he wandered alone for two years, where he is now, probably, somersaulting down the desert sand dunes naked, sleeping beside the Masai. Washing his feet in day-old tea. You loved to listen to his stories, to his versions of himself in Africa, and you would put yourself there with him, as one woman he might have met in Niger maybe, someone he would have taken a photograph of and showed to you here, someone dear, uncomplicated, and far away. So you love him there, but he does not know that. There is a picture of him standing in the desert in very short shorts, bare-chested, just squinting ahead at dunes and dunes of spice-coloured sand. You like him best there, one man alone in the desert, hot and free, with none of his silly plans for perfection.
* * *
—
You remember holding his head against your belly, untangling the knots of his hair with your fingertips, massaging the bones of his back and shoulders. Neither of you ever ate enough. You are not soft to lean against. He said there was something about you that reminded him of camping on stony ground. Hard but worth it, something he might get used to because of other things: the night, the stars, the cold smell of moss and lake. He always talked this way just before he started leaving anywhere. Preserving you somehow. Giving himself a worldly, complicated face, a heartbroken squint that would draw women to him, to stroke his tanned forehead, to smooth him out. Stop it, you would think to yourself. There is nothing natural about me. Sometimes lying there beside him in the dark it would occur to you that you could kill someone. When he slept, you would cover his body with your own and remember stories about bear attacks; how sometimes the great animal would just lie down across the body, like a dog across his bone, and just wait, wait for the body to move again, to prove itself—that it is alive or that it is dead, but the body must prove itself one way or another. You would lie across his back, your nose pressed into his dirty hair, his breathing slow and trusting, unaware of the beast that had fallen across his back. Inside your own body, life was already starting to prove itself. You sent a letter Poste Restante to Kenya. You tried hard not to pay attention to the thing inside you, hoping he was right, that without your vital focus things would simply die or disappear. But, as it turns out, life does not need your attention at all. Only when you grew so big that your dresses swelled out like tents did you imagine him here, camping underneath you, his knife strapped to his brown ankle, listening for wildlife.
* * *
Your father used to say: Your mother is like a stain. The more you rub her the worse she gets. This was your most erotic and generous vision of your mother, as someone who spread herself around easily, who ate her way into people’s upholstery and just dried there. And for a while that was the way it seemed with her, that she had dried to some horrible texture right there on her bed. She had a certain look, sprawled out like that in her long rayon bathrobe and full makeup, not so much of an actress but more like someone who would look good on a talk show—pretty enough to make some audience imagine that there was still hope left for her. Sometimes, when you moved silently into her room, and sat just right, softly, with barely an indentation, beside her on the bed, she would grab you around the waist in something that might be mistaken for a hug, and in her best Bob Barker voice, scanning crazily through the television channels, would shout: And all this could be yours, if the price is right.
* * *
—
The remote control disappeared the day your mother left. “I’m switching stations,” was all she said, clicking the thing uselessly in the air as she walked out of the house in the early morning just as the street lights were turning off. And it was understood in the movements of your father, the way he straightened the folds she had made in the rug on her way out, smoothing the tassels with his bare feet, that he had been expecting this and was somehow prepared. You watched your father realign his world—tilting a slightly off-centre mirror back into place, moving a bowl of dried flowers a little forward on the shelf, untangling the necks of umbrellas in the copper stand—and inside your head you screamed into his dog-sad face: G’won boy, go get her. But he did not move and it seemed to you then that he had been standing at this door for a long time, leaning just like that against the handle, so firm and dense that if you reached out a fist, say, round and solid like the inside of a bell, and punched him hard right below his ribs, he might only clang and reverberate in some horrible metallic announcement. Your mother’s long coat billowed behind her, and her pumps didn’t make a sound against the walkway, and you realized, with the cold morning air coming in through the door and up your nightgown, that this was the lightest you’d ever seen her, that your mother was becoming wind, just a bare suggestion or intimation of someone you once knew.
* * *
Your house is going through a kind of fall, an early autumn where everything is changing shape and colour, letting go and piling up like leaves on the ground. Suddenly it is important to understand how everything works, the actual mechanics of everything you touch with your hands and pretend to know and understand, everything you take for granted in its everyday use, because lately you get the feeling that you have been fooling yourself, faking a sort of blase familiarity with things, everyday objects which if your life depended on it you could probably never make for yourself. There must be one thing here that you can understand fully, then maybe others will follow in a natural logarithm. It just seems so wrong to make anything a part of your life, to make anything essential, if you cannot understand it, if you do not know how it works. Life is suddenly mathematics. First you multiply. Than you simplify, reduce. You ask yourself tough questions. What is my foundation? Upon what have I built this self? What is this round wire thing hanging from my kitchen rack?
* * *
—
And so it begins. The toaster-oven. You don’t know and so you unplug it. The glass you hold in your hand, supposedly recycled from old cola bottles—how is it made? Could you do it yourself? And the answer is no, so you leave it on the countertop, beside the wilting plant you cannot name, which grows from sunlight and water—but how exactly? Hand-painted plates, coffee mugs, aluminum foil, stuff in your fridge wrapped in plastic, made with real cheese products, everything, garlic, flour, teflon-coated pans…. You make a great pile. Everything must go. You pass the dog on the way to your bedroom, he is chewing on the sleeve of a good silk blouse. You pause to consider. Well, there is a worm somewhere that spins out of its mouth…this thread called silk…and then the thread…But when you find that you can’t go on, you bend to pat the animal’s thick, oily fur and say: Good dog.
* * *
When you think of it now, you are almost embarrassed by the way you bored your mother. The pathetic way you would trap her in some part of the house and with a little curtsy begin to prattle at her something you might have learned that day in drama class while her green-speckled eyes glazed with forced interest and then quickly went blank. Ladies and Gentlemen. I will now recite for your pleasure the poem…And you always knew, the moment that smile settled in the corner of her mouth like a little scribble, that you had lost her. You cannot imagine what she could have been thinking, examining her hands and nails and then remembering, looking up at you, trying to organize her face, all her strange mismatched features, into some orderly version of a delighted mother. And you knew you could have stopped, backed away, bowing gracefully and taking whatever applause was left, but in the same way as you poked and needled a swollen gum, on and on you went, almost tasting the little spits of blood in your mouth, and the awful pleasure of cornering your mother.
* * *
When you call her, sometimes you call her Baby—please Baby, please—but mostly she is just You: Hey, you with the dirty diaper. Just who do you think you are? Who do you think I am? And just for a kind of comic relief, so that she might understand that you do in fact know how to smile: Just wait till your father gets home. She can break your heart. All the power she hands you in one small fist. Animals are born almost ready to leave. They stand and drink and wobble, and soon their mothers disappear into a pack of identical-looking gazelles, let’s say, camouflaged by all the other perky white tails who have turned away from their offspring. The shape of you, your cramped body, your tiny holes and escape hatches, your fragile, bony home, everything you are makes her frail and helpless. Doomed from the start. You should take her to the doctor one day. You really should. It is time. But you just can’t. Once you even dress her up in a flowery spring hat and attach her to your body in one of those baby carriers with so many ropes and ties the two of you might as well be going bungee jumping. You stand at the door with your fingers gripping the handle. You just stand there. The baby falls back to sleep and you untangle her from you and put her back in her crib.
* * *
When you are a little older and your mother has been gone a safe number of years, your father surprises you one day and tells you that your mother had given away a baby girl when she was younger, before she met him, a few years before you were born. When he tells you this, you are both sitting cross-legged inside the giant basement closet, spring cleaning, though later you will be sure that all this really took place deeper into the summer because you will remember feeling so hot and, later on that night, standing outside on the balcony in almost nothing, trying to imagine your mother giving anything away. You remember your mother for a moment giving you an old fur wrap, something from a second-hand store, that had little hard patches, knots embedded near the skin, as though it had once been submerged in something wet and had never quite dried properly. Take it, your mother had said when she caught you hiding in her bedroom closet stroking the thing like a pet and mumbling softly: It’s okay. I’m here. You took it back to your room slowly, almost backing away from your mother, still holding it out to her, ready at any moment to give it back. But it remained with you the whole day, though by the next morning the stole was back on your mother’s closet peg as though it had never left. It didn’t matter really. What thrilled you was the idea of your mother sneaking into your room while you slept, her perfume like a drug, covering you in a fog, a spell. Did she stop to watch you sleeping, taking note of your tiny breaths and the little whistle of air through your nose? Were your limbs exposed, did an arm or foot dangle over the side of the bed, glowing just a little from the cracked night light? Was she moved at all by your smooth child’s body or your dreamy abandonment? “I’ll give you something, honey, I will,” your mother was always saying. “But not that.” And whatever it was, it was always not that. You remember your father sitting in the mouldy closet, turning his watch around and around on his wrist, saying to you in his sad stern voice: It is important for you to know that she says she was attacked. For a long time you could not imagine what he meant and thought only that to your mother life had always been a big surprise.
* * *
Your home has taken a deep breath and expanded as things continue to disappear. The radio has waves and bands that you do not understand, your chair was once a tree, so were your books, your papers, your letters. Even your own photographs are mysterious to you, memories you tried to plan, but how they came to be here so sharp and glossy you couldn’t say for sure. So they go. The dog is taking care of other things. A small twig chair that you thought you understood is gone, a thin wooden woman someone sent you from Zimbabwe, a long strand of fertility shells, your father’s pipe, also gone. You and the dog pass each other now and again as you put another thing in the give-away box, as the dog swallows something new. You each have your ways of getting rid of everything hard and corporeal. He takes it all into himself, enfolding and engulfing each thing into his big hairy body, and you push everything away from you, thrusting. You gulp at each other, each creating more and more space for the other. The baby lies in her crib in the middle of your home, staring up at the stained ceiling while the world around her dismantles. Once, she was tightly squeezed inside you, her palms pushing up against the walls of your body, of her galaxy, snug like a star embedded in a dark sky. Now all around her only air, and a looseness, something lax and adrift, everything collapsing around her each time she reaches out a shaky fist to touch something. Sometimes when you leave the house, the dog sits staring out the window for a long time until in a panic he finds something else to destroy. You are beginning to see that there is a very fine line between solitude and confinement.
* * *
Because your mother left almost everything behind, it was not difficult to believe that she had simply cracked. It was easier to think of her that way, as someone who might have gone explosively mad, rather than as a woman fully possessed of her conscience, making her ludicrous choices with deliberate care. The pots from under her bed went back to the kitchen cupboards, but neither you nor your father could bring yourself to use them, except once, when your father made a weird, stringy chicken stew and left the largest pot of all on the stove overnight, until it smouldered to a chunky black mass that would not be cleaned. Your father’s rages were minor and contained. He could focus, and like the expensive lidded pot, he could keep any mess hidden inside himself. You hate to think what has congealed at the bottom of your father. You are sure that between the two of you, you and your mother, the way you both lump and bubble, he will never be properly cleaned.
