Journey, page 37
* * *
—
The only thing you took of hers, when it seemed that you could finally take whatever you wanted, was her black metal box with the old-fashioned key taped to its bottom. Mom’s Black Box, you call it, and the image conjures up visions of your mother as the wreckage of an airline disaster, scattered all around an open field, burning out of control. Inside you expect to hear her last words, panicked or sickly calm, you cannot decide, though in either case the same words: I’m going down. I’m going down. The dog has not found a way to get inside yet; the metal box baffles him, like the ostrich eggs that confuse a pride of hungry lions. He paws at it in frustration, knocking it from side to side, but there is no soft underbelly on this thing, nothing to really sink his teeth into. What is inside the box speaks of its own disaster. Newspaper clippings your mother saved over the years and felt the need to hide in the strongest box she could find. Born 10 / 09 / 62 St. Mary’s Hospital—Am I your daughter? Or, Is Someone Out There Looking For Me? Please Contact. Small, neatly cut squares from the personal columns, items that might have whispered of infidelity, of a loose and playful image of your mother you could have cultivated into a fantasy, but which instead gave evidence of an altogether different kind of abandonment. Often the cut-outs were the same, the same hopeful, dogged beseeching, as though no one were getting lucky at all, and day after day, in a kind of ritual you never noticed, your mother cut them free from their public whimpering and hid them away in her black box.
* * *
—
In your mother’s bedroom you can remember hearing the low rumbling of your father’s voice, the pauses between his sentences and breaths between thoughts that always made it sound as though he were speaking in perfect grammar, so that while you listened to him you couldn’t help but punctuate along. Comma here, question mark, period, and even the colon when he was about to list. Your mother, on the other hand, hooked herself around one particular phrase and simply repeated it in varying tones, from a falsely calm baritone to a shriek. She seemed to bring just one sentence to any given argument and play it over and over again like a theme song, so that in your memory each incident had a title. The “don’t you say that to me” fight. The “oh, is that right” battle. The war of “that’s what you think.” The very last time they fought, you remember your father leaving the bedroom and closing the door firmly behind him, his manner stiff and calculated like a headmaster’s. Inside, your mother was ranting: I will not. I will not. Over and over again, sometimes meekly under her breath like a vow, and then suddenly louder, banging the headboard or the walls with her fists. Your father cupped your head with his hands, each big palm holding an ear, holding all of you in his hands curved like parentheses, while your mother practised her idiotic lines—I will not. I will not. Even then, it must have made a kind of sense to you that even in her fighting words, her angry refrains, she would bequeath nothing. Except in the end, she left you everything. To sort through, to keep or discard, just a mess of stuff, but characteristically unplanned and disorganized, with no intention or restraint.
* * *
The dog eats through the wires of the telephone and holds the receiver between his paws like a bone. You bend down beside him and whisper into his big pointy ears: Hello? Hello? You make your voice and breath reverberate like an echo and he shakes his head from side to side. Sometimes when he is sitting straight and still, the tips of his paws a little flexed, his brown-and-yellow eyes narrowing, you let him stare at you and you hold his dark gaze, and in the quiet of this strange contest you feel his wildness coming at you like advice and instinct. Do not move. Do not be moved.
* * *
Why? said your father, long distance. And then: Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. What could you say? You knew your father didn’t trust you, that he watched you like a geologist watches a fault, looking for small disturbances in your veins that might mean something big. More than once, after your mother was gone, he found you lying across her side of the bed, or posing in front of the mirror in her torn blue kimono, repeating some phrase you might have heard her say, over and over again, amusing yourself, playing mother. I will not. I don’t think so. Get out. Your father would look at you, plainly and without expression, and say simply: No. As though you were a dog in training. He always expected that the evenness of his voice, his firm consistency, could make you reasonable. It never worked with your mother either. One time he put his hand over your mouth, as though perhaps all you really needed to understand him was a tactile aid to go with the command, and you can remember biting down hard into his hand, the small fleshy mound at the base of his index finger right around to the front of his hard knuckle. At the dinner table you watched his hand shaking salt, gripping a fork, holding the edge of his plate, and you were mesmerized by the indentations in his skin, by the impression that you had made.
* * *
—
For the longest time you thought it was your mother who had not wanted you, who only tolerated the life that slipped out from her and shattered across the floor like glass—her accident. You were something your mother was always cutting herself on, or bumping her shin against. The edge of a bed, the corner of a sharp table. Now, there are those small plastic pieces to cover the corners of your pointy furnishings, to make your house safe for children. But then, nothing in her life was child resistant. Except your father. “It was me,” he admitted to you finally one day. “Me who didn’t think you were a good idea, me who didn’t believe in having children, or believed rather that some people should not have children, should not ever cause anything to be, or to be the cause of anything.” Your mother simply wanted to fix something she broke once before, to make repairs, to tighten and adjust, make firm and secure, and so you can imagine that when she left: she might have thought she was a plumber just going out to her truck, someone who just went out for a moment to find a rare and tricky part and never came back. It was your father who on angrier days would growl: They fix dogs by ripping out their ovaries. Did you know that? Still, he sent you a cheque, a Snugli, a bright fish mobile, and an article about the natural instincts of female clams, cut out from some magazine.
* * *
In your search for something essential, your whole life has ended up in your cramped front yard. What here is blameless? Everything has been touched by you, objects hold the traces of all your vibrations, everywhere you’ve put your awful hands. You remember a story about a woman who decapitated two of her children right on her front lawn. Inside her house many more children shrugged their shoulders high over their ears. The days are still warm. Bicycles are chained to the iron fences all down your block. The days are still a little too long. The baby sits in her infant carrier on your cement stairs between an old pair of roller skates and a collection of Bee Gees albums. People come by and all make the same jokes. “How much for the baby?” Sometimes they answer their own jokes, strangers playing with each other, a regular amateurs’ night right on your own front stoop. “The baby’s free. Twenty bucks for the carrier.” “Just kidding.” They laugh and pun together, various snorts at different levels, and ride away happy in this friendly neighbourhood, on their old second-hand bicycles. Sometimes the women will give you an extra smile just to make sure you are taking it well. Some have heard of fluctuating hormones before. Really, you think of yourself as the carrier, the infant carrier going real cheap, the one who seems immune to disease but can surely pass it on.
* * *
—
It is not an official sale. Nothing is priced. Some things you give away for free, some you sell, depending on the person. That’s the way that you are. At night you can hear people or animals picking at the things you’ve left on the curb. During the days, you wait and watch. The ones who spend the most time milling about seem to be artists of some kind. The girls have scarves tied around their heads and wear jean overalls over printed cotton bras. They ask: Can we have this? Or this? You give them whatever they want. They pick up an old mirror frame, a scrap piece of paper, an old tasselled lampshade, and turn it over and over in their wondrous, practical hands. Everything they touch turns to something better than it was before. Your things are suddenly “cool,” and these people can make your trash beautiful. You watch as they stuff your house into their deep canvas sacks. The dog hunches beside you; his head hangs low and saggy and the fur around his face and the tips of his paws are smeared an oily red from a tube of lipstick he ate just this morning. They walk away in their big-soled shoes with pieces of your life sticking out from the tops of their bags.
* * *
—
“Are you moving?” asks a neighbour, leaning over her second-floor balcony, looking down on you as you sit perfectly still on your cement stairs. It is such an incredible question that you are forced to take it apart, to dismantle it for its meaning. You feel hard, marbleised like a column or pillar. The baby is dirty and her skin is patchy and rough. You have let her nails grow into spiky rodent claws and she has scratched painful little animal tracks down her face. No, there is nothing moving about you. What you mean to say is that you haven’t decided yet. Maybe, if you give it all away, free everything from your small home, you might jolt and prod all of your attachments until they fall loose like broken teeth. All these things you’ve tried to eat, to make a part of you, all these things you’ve touched and used, covered in your fingerprints, dusty with the flakes of your own skin, if you can sweep all this from you, maybe you will not be the one who has to leave. You will be the one who stays, like the dog. You will not be moved.
* * *
She is smeared with you. Her misshapen head, the small brown birthmark on the inside of her thigh. She turned inside you, somersaults and strange twists, and coated herself in you like breaded chicken. How will she ever get away from you like this? When you change her, you put her down in the middle of your bare room, and there are moments when you find your hands squeezed tight around her thin thighs. You squeeze until you can touch the tip of your thumb to a finger. You squeeze until you see a slight eruption in her face that might mean she will cry. You drag your hands and fingers across her small body, trying to leave clues. I touched you here. My nails dug here. Pieces of my skin settled on you like baby powder. A slim strand of hair has fallen across your chest.
* * *
—
In the park where you go to sit alone sometimes, you have seen women walking away from their children, screaming something like “That’s it” or “ ‘I’ve had enough.” The children fall to the ground and a cry moves so slowly through their bodies, undulating in every part of them, you can see the thing right below the surface of their skin, like fish rising suddenly to feed. There is nothing but the end of the world and a woman walking away. They stumble after their mothers, their arms stretched forward like sleepwalkers, or tiny monsters. And the women always turn back, always bend and open their arms, baring their conspicuous chest, their heavy longing. You are the mammal that is attracted to being the world to someone. A mother bear chases her cub right up a tree, something she would have done in a time of danger, but this time she does not call it back down. She will not let it know when it is safe again. It must fend for itself. She turns around and leaves the cub behind. A bear knows what kind of animal she is. She walks away shaking her big head from side to side. This time, she is the danger.
* * *
Somewhere, another girl has your mother too. Somewhere, there is an escaped sister and she is better than you, cleaner, not quite so creased from being so badly held, so badly folded. She hangs in the sun like a newly washed sheet. She is something you want to wrap yourself in and press your face against. After your mother disappeared, and you knew that somewhere there was another one like you, you found yourself giving your blood away for free. Sometimes when you sat there in the hard wooden chair of some auditorium, your easy veins giving themselves up to it, you imagined you were draining a poison from yourself and this bloodletting was your way of giving everyone permission to go. And when you got up to leave, your body slightly lighter and the back of your neck hot and damp, you would think that maybe somehow this blood would find its way to that other one, a message from your wiry veins—I am here. On your driver’s licence you ticked off all the possible organs you could give up. And because you were not squeamish, there were many. In your most gruesome fantasies, both of you need a lot of rescuing, a lot of help. You are a natural donor. And somehow she is always saved. Other times when you think of her you imagine that she is just another thing your mother has let loose on the world. Once, you got a postcard from your mother, a museum card with a sweet madonna and child, on which she had printed simply: You’ll be happy to know I’ve rid myself of all my demons.
* * *
For the last time, you dress the baby in something yellow and terry cloth and, picking her up off the floor, you put her in her carrier and face her towards the door, perfectly lined up on the slats of polished wood, as though there were invisible tracks, like at the car wash, or some amusement-park ride. It is time, you think, and you are so sleepy that if you lay down here in your bare house you might never get up. It is time now, before many things begin to happen. Before she lies on her back and puts her foot in her mouth. Before she starts to recognize familiar faces. Before she ever mimics you, smiles when you smile, curls her wet, soft lips when you do. You have to go now, you say to her. I’m no good. But she has closed her eyes and will not look at you. The dog waits, stretched out on the floor, his head resting on his front legs. He is still skinny, though much of your house is actually inside him. From the back, in her round summer cap and her reclining seat, the baby looks like a little astronaut pointed towards the stars, waiting. You watch her, half expecting at any moment that she will be lifted from you in a great fire, leaving you behind, scorched and amazed, while she grows lighter and lighter, solemnly giving up gravity. Her cap blows away. Her bald head is a white milky planet, a round pearly moon.
* * *
Someone told you once that you were alive beyond your control. And each morning when you wake up you find that you are breathing before you even have a chance to try it another way. Just by sheer will you cannot stop your heart. On and on it goes like some boring aunt at a family gathering. On the day you carry your mother’s black box and the blue rented telephone to the curb, the dog runs out into the street and is hit by the passing garbage truck. The garbage men bury their faces in their big orange gloves. You watch from the top of your stairs. One of them leans over the animal and then quickly steps back, wiping his boots along the pavement as he does. They look around, expecting some kind of screaming at any moment. When they finally notice you, one of them steps forward and starts to come up your walk. He takes off his orange glove and tucks it under his armpit. You shrug your shoulders and say: It wasn’t mine. There is no one around to verify. Somehow you sense that he expects more from you, some kind of female shuddering that might mark the passing of a life. But you do nothing. Inside the truck you can see the driver crying. They decide to take the dog away. They take off their gloves and handle him with their bare hands. They flip his body into the truck and you can see that his head is leaning against a bag stuffed with leaves. You turn away and pretend not to hear the noise of the machine as it churns and pulls everything into itself, making room for more.
* * *
Now that your house is empty, your dreams are suddenly crowded and thick. In your dreams it happens this way: they surround your house and you raise your baby above your head in surrender, saying: I give up. I give up. The social worker steps forward and, rising on her petite toes, takes her from you. In another one, you exchange her quickly in some alley, like a drug deal. When she is gone you open your palm to find a round black metal ball. You swallow it, and every time you move you hear it rolling through you, tapping against your bones, ricocheting down your spinal cord, making you clang and echo with each step.
* * *
—
You sign a paper waiving your parental rights and your hands surprise you by shaking, undulating like great white banners of surrender. You open and close your hand in front of your child’s small folded face and ask for the last time: Can you wave bye bye, Baby? In your empty house you fully expect to sit here, right where you are, and make yourself disappear into a place where touch isn’t possible, where nothing can come leaning up against you, or accidentally graze you from behind; where there’s no kneading or fumbling or accidental impact. Do not move, you think. Don’t make a sound. And with this advice it is unclear if you are prey or predator. What will happen? There are so many possibilities and the imagination is always unfaithful, adulterous, and inexact with all its curving footpaths leading anywhere. You wait in the middle of your living room, lying on the floor with your arms and legs spread out into an X, as though you were a pale painted blotch on some forest tree, a clue someone left to find their way back, something that marks a familiar spot.
Kris Bertin
Is Alive and Can Move
