Ghost Dance (29 page)

Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, Jean Harlow—beautiful Marilyn Monroe, sexy, sweet Marilyn Monroe—Lana Turner, Carroll Baker, Dorothy Lamour in a sarong—these women populated my grandfather’s thoughts. In America there are blonde women. In America everyone has a big car, a Cadillac or a DeSoto or a Lincoln, with fins, with wings. They are the biggest and the fastest and the most beautiful cars that have ever been made, and the blonde women sit next to you in them. The windows arc rolled down and music plays on the radio. Everyone smokes cigarettes.

No one worries about cancer yet; no one wears seat belts. They cannot help this feeling: that no matter what they do, how fast the drive, nothing can hurt them. They are indestructible. This is America. Everyone will have a job. There will be plenty of money. They will bounce back when hit. Everything will be fine. When they are lonely or sad, they can call up the blonde women on the telephone and go for a ride.

My mother was not the blonde my grandfather wanted. She tied her hair back, kept her legs covered by pants, rarely smiled or spoke; still, all remarked to Sarkis what a beauty she was. He nodded proudly but received no joy from it anymore; it was not a true pride. She could not be pushed. She would not fulfill the dream.

California in those days was a long way to go, especially for a poor man. A movie filled with the stars of the day must have been playing in my grandfather’s head, maybe hospital scenes spliced between the dance numbers, as he packed the car and coaxed my mother out of the shadows of the sick house.

“There is always sun there, my little songbird. You will never be cold again.”

She was only ten then; by the time they reached Hollywood, she was eleven. She would be a child star, he thought, bigger than Shirley Temple, bigger than Judy Garland.

“Where are the bighorn sheep?” my mother must have demanded, looking out the window of the car. “Where are the carpets of flowers?” she wondered

And this got Sarkis to thinking. In America it was true, anything was possible. In America even he could have a beautiful baby. In America, and the thought came out whole as he drove home from work one late night, you can make movie stars.

My grandfather, a weaver in a silk mill in Paterson, New Jersey, could not afford his wife’s hospital bills. He must have lived in terror of them. He worked night and day, two and sometimes three shifts, and still it was not enough. I would like to think that it was this specific terror that made my grandfather’s dark eyes, darting around the house for something to sell for money, rest on my mother asleep in her crib. In America you can make movie stars, he thought, and at six months a baby can make diaper commercials. Beautiful babies could make money just for being beautiful. This is a good country, he thought, as his sick wife called him from the other room.

“A good country,” he said to his wife, Alice, and in desperation one wintry day he took the baby from her crib without Alice knowing and brought her to the commercial studios in New York City where photographers posed her in diapers, in other mothers’ arms—posed her in front of fields of flowers, backdrops of spring. “My sweet little silkworm,” he purred.

I hope my mother found comfort in the notion that perhaps she had prolonged her own mother’s life a little, that she provided her with a nurse when she needed one, that the medicine was always there, the tank of oxygen, the wav to the hospital. I hope she believed this and not the darker things which it undeniably suggested about her father. Diapers turned to pinafores. She did it for years.

As my mother grew more and more lovely, more radiant with each day, my grandfather’s plans for her grew, too. He dreamed she might be a beauty queen one day and took her every year as a little girl to the Convention I fall in Atlantic Citv, that cake of a building, to watch those hopeful women strut down the lighted runways: laurels and crowns; banners and bounce; red, w hite, and blue; Miss America.

“Look at Miss Mississippi,” my grandfather would say, nudging her. “Oh, Miss Horida, you’re breaking mv heart,” he shouted. “They’re like racehorses,” he sighed, “thoroughbreds.”

But mv mother, grow n out of pinafores, stepped back, awav from the toothy grin, the larger than life. My grandfather did not understand. Watching her walk onto the beach off the boardwalk, he shouted for her to come back, but it made my mother, only seven years old, walk faster and faster. As she ran in the sand, my grandfather dreamed her into a Rockette. He pictured the long line of women she would be a part of, lifting their legs in beautiful unison.

“That is my daughter,” he said, pointing to Christine who stood where the ocean met the beach. “One day you will see her in the Rockettes.” My mother turned to see him pointing at her and ran faster along the edge of the sea, kicking as she went—a different sort of dancer.

What was wrong with Christine? Silently, Sarkis blamed his wife. “You did not talk to her enough when she was in the womb,” he thought. “That’s why all this fuss about books, the need for so many stories. You were too weak, and it sapped the joy from her heart. You were too sick and it brought her inconsolable sadness.” Nearly immediately Sarkis regretted even thinking this, but it was too late; he could not call the thought back.

Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, Jean Harlow—beautiful Marilyn Monroe, sexy, sweet Marilyn Monroe—Lana Turner, Carroll Baker, Dorothy Lamour in a sarong—these women populated my grandfather’s thoughts. In America there are blonde women. In America everyone has a big car, a Cadillac or a DeSoto or a Lincoln, with fins, with wings. They are the biggest and the fastest and the most beautiful cars that have ever been made, and the blonde women sit next to you in them. The windows are rolled down and music plays on the radio. Everyone smokes cigarettes.

No one worries about cancer yet; no one wears seat belts. They cannot help this feeling: that no matter what they do, how fast they drive, nothing can hurt them. They are indestructible. This is America. Everyone will have a job. There will be plenty of money. They will bounce back when hit. Everything will be fine. When they are lonely or sad, they can call up the blonde women on the telephone and go for a ride.

My mother was not the blonde my grandfather wanted. She tied her hair back, kept her legs covered by pants, rarely smiled or spoke; still, all remarked to Sarkis what a beauty she was. He nodded proudly but received no joy from it anymore; it was not a true pride. She could not be pushed. She would not fulfill the dream.

California in those days was a long way to go, especially for a poor man. A movie filled with the stars of the day must have been playing in my grandfather’s head, maybe hospital scenes spliced between the dance numbers, as he packed the car and coaxed my mother out of the shadows of the sick house.

“There is always sun there, my little songbird. You will never be cold again.”

She was only ten then; by the time they reached Hollywood, she was eleven. She would be a child star, he thought, bigger than Shirley Temple, bigger than Judy Garland.

“Where are the bighorn sheep?” my mother must have demanded, looking out the window of the car. “Where are the carpets of flowers?” she wondered as they walked into MGM for her screen test. Having been powdered and crinolined, perfumed and curled, all at great expense, she looked exactly like a movie star and Grandpa Sarkis swelled with pride. “Where are the bighorn sheep?” she asked as the camera rolled, and she began to cry. Having held it in across the entire United States she could not stop.

“In the old country we drown children like you,” Grandpa Sarkis muttered as they left the studio. “Turk-breath,” he cursed, and my mother cried harder. “Turk-breath,” he said, getting angrier and angrier until he too started to cry; just that morning he had received a telegram saying that his wife had taken another turn for the worse.

During the long, lonely trip back to Paterson, my mother sat crumpled in the back seat, barely moving, refusing to talk.

I imagine that she refused to talk. My mother never told me if this trip to California actually happened. What she did say was that they were poor and the bills were high and her father had once thought she should be a movie star. But it is not enough, Mother, what you have not said. It is not enough—your sadness with no explanation, your life of solitude, your retreats.

This must have been why my mother hated rides in the car so much. This, too, must have been why she would never go to the movies with Father, Fletcher, and me. She could still see the producer, fat forever in her mind, chewing on his cigar, whispering his rotten breath into her ear, “Don’t cry, sweetie, there, there, don’t cry. What the hell is this about sheep?”

I have seen my mother in a series of dime-store photographs as a teenager wearing black horn-rimmed glasses. She must have gone into Woolworth’s for a pair, wishing, I suppose, to appear more studious, to be taken seriously, to change the image of herself her father had given to her, as if it were a gift. I can see her sitting alone in that black photo booth, the velveteen curtain pulled, she positioned in different somber, intelligent poses. She liked the way she looked in glasses. She looked like someone to listen to. She looked like someone who had something to say.

My mother was always sure to tuck her glasses away in a safe spot after school so that her father, who was home by dinnertime, would not see them. But one day when he and his friends were let out early from work because of a power failure, he saw his daughter from the back on the way home from school.

“My daughter,” he told the men, “my American daughter.”

She was caught in a serious discussion with one of her classmates and did not see her father as he pulled up alongside her in his beat-up blue Chevrolet.

“What do you think you’re doing, Christine?” he yelled from the car window as he passed her. The brakes, which did not work well, left the car a good distance in front of her. “Come here,” he said in his old-world voice. His face grew red as she walked to him. “Why are you covering up those beautiful eyes?” his small black eyes said to her. “It’s unheard of. It’s not right what you’re doing.”

She stepped back, refusing to get into the car. She recalls that day perfectly: her friend, her father’s angry face, the people peering out from the dark car.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He could see her eyes, even behind the glasses, turning violet. Her stare was incandescent.

“It’s to keep men away,” she whispered, “men like your friends, men like you.”

“Four weeks,” he shouted to her as she ran down the street. This, she knew, meant no school, no friends, nothing but the sad, dark house as punishment. It did not matter. Her father could not hurt her anymore. She had said it. “Words,” she thought, shaking uncontrollably, “words.”

My grandfather knew, too, after that day that despite evervthing, all the dance lessons at the Y, all the trips to Atlantic City, all his encouragement, that there would be no Rockette to dance through his old age, no high kicks, no lifted bosom, no spangles or sequins to relieve sadness.

When my mother was eighteen and her sister Lucy was seventeen and their mother had been dead many years already, my grandfather left his daughters, every American hope dashed, every bloated dream deflated. The movies had tricked him. No quiet, beautiful daughter had ever resisted stardom in them. No wife died of a rheumatic heart at the age of thirty-five. No family was broken into pieces.

Does he show a photo of his American daughter in a square in Russia, in a desert in Syria, as he looks everywhere for his old Armenia? No telling. Does he dream her over? In his mind, does she dance through the sorrowful landscape, Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, full screen, larger than life?

Does he hold her photo up to the Turks? I wonder. Can she alter the bloody past for him—my beautiful, stubborn mother? A defense against the death force? A survivor? Transformed now—proof of something.

Now you move westward, Fletcher, leaving this old life far behind, as if it were possible to do so, and for you, even now, I would like to believe that it might be. Months ago your angry messages scrawled across picture postcards of Massachusetts, of Michigan, of West Virginia stopped coming. Did your anger end finally or only change form, become wordless, incommunicable? I must say it straight out—I am lonely for you. Write to me if you still can.

I always wanted to believe you, Hetcher, wanted to think that somehow we could live side by side with the sadness. It was your example I tried to follow: you, with your blue blanket slung around your shoulders, dreaming of flight; you, fast asleep on top of your leaflets, your thousand prayers for the earth; you of the civil rights rally, the peace march; your armbands, your food for the poor, vour large, burning heart.

Today you burn with a different fire, and everything you see as you cross the country burns in it. You level the land with your stare. You turn forests into ash, cities into ash, even houses where people live, even yourself.

This cannot go on, Fletcher—you, an old man carrying your bitter root across the country in a jute sack. Let it go. Bury it deep in the sand. Let it grow downward into darkness now as it curls from the bag into your arms and crawls onto your back, as it wraps all around you. I always believed you, Fletcher: that somehow we might forgive them. Now you face your greatest test, to take that faith of yours when you need it most, and use it.

Last I heard from my father he was nearing some neutral country like Sweden or Norway where they are just about to enter their season of darkness. Anyone who knows him would hope a Vivaldi concerto or a Bach fugue still runs through his head.

“…there’d been the biggest motorcade from the airport. Hot. Wild. Like Mexico and Vienna. The sun was so strong in our faces. I couldn’t put on sunglasses.…Then we saw this tunnel ahead, I thought it would be cool in the tunnel, I thought if you were on the left the sun wouldn’t get into your eyes.

“They were gunning the motorcycles. There were these little backfires. There was one noise like that. I thought it was a backfire. Then next I saw Connally grabbing his arms and saying no, no, no, no, no, with his fist beating. Then Jack turned and I turned. All I remember was a blue-gray building up ahead. Then Jack turned back so neatly, his last expression was so neat…you know, that wonderful expression he had when they’d ask him a question about one of the ten million pieces they have in a rocket, just before he’d answer. He looked puzzled, then he slumped forward. He was holding out his hand…. I could see a piece of his skull coming off It was flesh-colored, not white—he was holding out his hand…. I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap, his blood and his brains were in my lap…Then Clint Hill [the Secret Service man], he loved us, he made my life so easy, he w as the first man in the car…. We all lay down in the car…. And I kept saying, Jack, Jack, Jack, and someone was yelling he’s dead, he’s dead. All the ride to the hospital I kept bending over him, saying Jack, Jack, can you hear me, I love you, Jack. I kept holding the top of his head down, trying to keep the brains in.”