Ghost Dance (34 page)

But he might very well have said, “In America they will laugh at me, they will call me a fat man, but here my weight is cause for respect. Here I am worth my weight in gold. In America I would look like an old man, but here old men are respected. Old age means wisdom.”

“But, Father, she is beautiful,” my mother would have said back. “I want you to see her.” Then she would hesitate. “Father,” she’d say in a whisper, “she looks just like Mother to me.”

This was one thing my grandfather, running across Russia, Turkey, Svria, Lebanon, could not bear to hear. He pretended he did not.

“What good are girls?” he said back to her. “All we get are girls. Always girls! Let me know if you have a son.”

“No, Father,” she said, and she did not call him when Fletcher was born the next year.

Yet despite everything, despite even his indifference toward me, I cannot help liking Grandpa Sarkis—stubborn as a bull, thick as an ox, fat as the world.

In the old country you can grow silk on trees. In the old country you are worth your weight in gold. In the old country his people were slaughtered like sheep. I miss him, this enormous Grandpa Sarkis. When I get older and begin to gain weight myself, I know I will think of him. I will watch my hips turn to gold. And in the silk dress I someday buy I w ill see him in Paterson, setting the weave all day and all night for love. As I slip into that smooth dress, I’ll think of him, wherever he is, coaxing the silkworms into productivity for me.

“Turks,” my mother hisses to the children passing under her window on bicycles, when she does not feel well. “Turks,” she screams.

I have imagined the Topaz Bird with talons, curve-beaked, its brutal feathers sharpening into points. It devours mice in front of me. It lands on my mother’s head and draws blood.

“Turks,” she screams as the grass turns to worms, as her hair catches fire.

When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone…. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.

Chief Seattle

Keep going, I think to myself. There is no substitute for pain.

We were sitting on her bed next to her, but she was in the Sung Dynasty. She was in a German forest. She was blossoming under her dress for a man we could not see. She was next to us again, then far away. She was escaping from the Turks. She was in the center of the waterfall. Her hands fluttered in front of her face. She closed the book from which she was reading our bedtime story. I don’t know where she was.

“But what’s the ending, Mom?” we said and tugged at her golden robe.

“And then the children plucked the chocolate bonbons from the tree and put them in their pockets.”

“What tree?” we asked, thrilled, confused.

“What bonbons?”

The story she had been reading to us had been of a flock of migrating birds.

She smiled. “And the stormy sky turned blue, and the ocean became still. Swim off to bed now,” she whispered, “my minnows. Press your bellies into the sand and sleep.”

“Good night, Mom,” we said, our arms undulating by our sides.

I had just sunk down, it seemed, into my fish position when I saw her, first through water but then clearly. She was coming toward my bed in her white nightgown and holding a compass. Though I was frightened a little, I longed tobe with this fluid, fragrant, beautiful creature. She seemed so wispy and strange, a figment of herself, as she walked closer.

“Mother,” I said finally, for she is my mother, my beautiful mother, my recklessly beautiful mother. “What is it?”

She points, she looks at the compass, she whispers into my ear. “Everything’s all right now, sweetheart,” she says, tilting the compass so that I might see its thin needle. She has done this before. She will sit there next to me all night, moving now and then from one corner of the bed to another, hardly ever looking up from the compass, and saying over and over, “Everything’s all right,” until the sun comes up and she disappears in light.

“Children,” she screamed, “get up, wake up! Come quickly! Get up. Hurry!” she cried, calling us from our sleep. “No questions, now,” she said, “just hurry.” And with some superhuman strength she picked us both up and ran down the hallway with us to her room. She was crying. “Sit in the middle of the bed,” she instructed, “way far in the middle, away from the edges.

“My children are not safe,” she said, picking up the receiver of the phone and speaking into it. “I would like the Department of the Interior in Washington,” she said. “Hurry.” She dropped the phone to her side, lifted it to her ear again. “Jesus Christ, this is an emergency, I don’t have all day,” she said into the dial tone. “There’s no time.” She dropped the phone, opened a drawer, turned it upside down, and spilled everything onto the floor. “Don’t move!” she yelled to us. We huddled in the center of the bed. “Just don’t move!” Papers, scarves, jewelry covered the floor. She opened another drawer and turned it over, rummaging through its contents.

“Mom, what are you looking for?” Fletcher asked. “I could help you.”

“No, don’t. Don’t get up. Just hold on one more minute. I’m coming.” The Topaz Bird swooped down. She screamed. It woke my father who had fallen asleep downstairs in the chair in front of the fire.

“I’ve found it,” she said. “Everything’s going to be OK.” In her hand she held a large bolt of twine, the kind used for mailing packages. My father came in as she knotted the string around the first bedpost. She looked over to him. “Go and help the children,” she said.

“Oh, Christine,” he said, nearing her.

“Don’t touch me!” she screamed. “I have to work fast. Go to the children—please—please.”

My father came and sat in the center of the bed with us and forced our heads down into his arms. “Don’t look,” he whispered to us. But I could see her unraveling the bolt of string and tying it around the second post, then the third, and then the last, then circling the bed again and again until we were completely fenced in by it. My father’s arms were shaking but he held us tightly to him. When my mother was finally finished she grabbed China, the cat, and jumped over the railing of string and onto the bed.

My father opened his arms to take her in. His face was wet as if he had been crying or sweating, but his gaze was even and calm.

“There now,” he whispered. “There now, Christine. We’re all here now. We’re all all right.”

My mother sighed. “Yes, I know,” she said. My father loosened his grip. We were a pile of arms and legs and hands and paws on the bed. It was hard to tell whose arms were whose, whose legs, whose hair, we were so tangled in each other.

Only her voice hovered above us, separate. “We’ve escaped,” she said. “We’ve done it.”

Was it fire this time she had saved us from? Or flood? Was it a plague of insects or something less comprehensible? The phone, off the hook, was making loud, piercing sounds. My father moved to hang it up.

“No, Michael, no,” she cried. “You’ll be eaten alive.”

Slowly the bed began to move, slowly, slowly, as we sat huddled together in its center. The desk floated by, the chair, the clothes in the closet moved back and forth, back and forth.

“Mom,” I whispered, finding her at the center. “Mom,” I said, “we’re moving.”

She nodded. “We’re safe now, Vanessa,” she smiled. “We’re all here and it’s big and it’s white and it’s taking us somewhere so beautiful!” she said.

“This ship is so beautiful, Michael,” she sighed. “It’s huge and it’s white. And the land is disappearing and it’s getting cooler and cooler but it feels so good.”

“Yes,” my father said. He looked so sad. He did not move or speak again.

“Listen, oh, just listen.” She heard a muffled foghorn in the distance, but he heard nothing and sat in silence.

After a long while she took out her compass and showed it to me. It caught the light of the moon. She smiled and closed her eyes finally.

“They can’t hurt us now,” she said. “They can’t hurt us now,” she whispered in my ear as we moved through dark water, all night, the four of us, on our sad, lonely voyage—north—somewhere.

Sibelius. Nielsen. Grieg.

She slides into her seat and rubs her back against the back of the chair as the maître d’ pulls it out and then pushes it to the table for her.

“Thank you,” she says. Her eyes are violet in this light. She taps her finger lightly on the table, brings a finger to her mouth, rubs her head against her shoulder, and smiles.

“Michael, a martini,” she whispers and edges her hand across the table to his. He puts his large hand over hers in protection. I would save you if I could, his immense hand says. His wedding ring catches the chandelier’s light. Fletcher and I stare at the ceiling, then at our parents, not knowing where else to look. My brother and I are not brave enough yet to see clearly what is obvious: neither of us matters at all to them at this moment as my father puts his forefinger and thumb around her wrist and gently massages it.

I notice there is still a trace of dirt under her fingernails from her long day of suffering. In the morning we had been banished to the garden and spent the whole day weeding and watering, mulching, digging, and transplanting. The house was turning against her, she said, waking me at
ç:oo
A.M. and, taking my hand, we had fled. “There’s evil in there,” she said, pointing to the house she loved. “I don’t know why, but it’s there today,” she said, kneeling on the ground. “Don’t go near it, Vanessa,” she said in agony. “Believe me,” she said and sunk her nails into my arm. “Believe me.”

I believed her. I knelt next to her. Side by side we pulled weed after weed together, hour after hour, our backs turned away from the dark house. “I can’t decide where to put these lilies,” she said, and we uprooted them and moved them from one section of the garden to another. “What about this lilac bush?” she asked, and we dug it up. “And the daffodils,” she said, “let’s try them over there. I can’t decide where to put the lilies,” she sighed, and she moved them to yet another section of the garden. She was searching for the secret design of flowers that might dispel darkness, evil, fear.

“These need more light,” she said, pulling up the poppies and replanting them over and over as she followed the sun across the sky, every few minutes changing the pattern of the great garden. “The work in a garden is never done,” she told me. “There’s always something to do in a garden,” she said, holding the strangled flowers in her hand, burying them in the ground finally, only a wilted petal visible here or there.

“Shit,” she cried. “I’ve killed everything,” and she turned and looked accusingly at the house. “Let’s clear out the roots, honey. Let’s start over.” She began digging, and slowly I could see her garden turning in on itself, the earth giving wav. “We’ll get rid of the roots, it’s the only way.” “It’s the only wav,” she kept saying. “We’ll get rid of the roots.”

I let her keep going, swearing into the ravaged earth, laughing hysterically as she excavated marbles and the arms of dolls from the ground. She began lining up all the things she had found on the slate path. “My treasures,” she said, smiling. I let her keep going, bather came home from work. He looked at me. I was old enough to know better.

He spoke very quietly into the ditch where we stood. We were waist high in dirt.

“Please don’t read tonight,” he said to her. “I’ll call and tell them that you won’t be able to come.”

“Oh, but I must, Michael. It’s our only hope,” she said in her high voice. “It’s the only thing that might work. Bring me my clothes, Vanessa. My black dress, my rings, my textured stockings, my new black shoes, and my manuscript, the one that is open on my desk. I will change next door. Call Sonia. Tell her that I am coming.”

My mother spoke calmly now, crouching in the dirt, fingering the marbles she had lined up.

As many times as my father saw her this way, he never got used to it.

“I’ve made dinner reservations,” he said softly, “for six o’clock, near the Guggenheim. We should probably leave soon.”

My mother laughed out loud. “I’m reading at the Guggenheim Museum,” she said. “How odd. Vanessa, my dress. But be careful in the house. Hurry through it, do you understand? And stay out of the shadows, my darling.”

I carried her voice carefully, lovingly, as if it were a child, into the house. “Mv darling,” I said, wanting to make her unafraid somehow. “It’s OK, darling,” I said to her, going through her closet to get her clothes, climbing the stairs to her attic room to get her poems. “Darling,” I whispered. “Darling.”

My father lifts his hand finally from my mother’s. The drinks arrive. She gulps down her martini, interrupts my father as he orders dinner, and says, “Another martini, please, Michael.” Then she looks to me. “Vanessa, do you want one? Fletcher, you’re still too young to drink.” Fletcher was thirteen. I was fourteen.

She finishes her second drink. “I’d like another, please,” she smiles, as dinner comes.

“Not wine with your dinner? I’ve ordered a nice Beaujolais-Villages,” Father says.

“Another drink,” she savs to the waiter. She stares at the food before her.

“You’d better start eating, Mom,” Fletcher says. “Remember the reading.” She touches his cheek and smiles vacantly.

“My little big man,” she says. “My love, my love.”

“I think that Fletcher is probably right about your dinner,” my father says.

“Don’t condescend to me, Michael,” she snaps. “Just don’t do it.”

Nothing can stop us from moving in the direction we must move. I want to stop this dinner scene now or alter it. If there must be this restaurant, then I want her to sit with us peacefully, to eat her dinner anil tell us a story, to be sweet and happy.

And if there must be this garden and there must, if there must be this ditch, then let us lie down together holding each other’s hands. May we be covered over with dirt. May it all stop. Stop. I would like to stay there with her and her collection of smooth stones and marbles, ladybugs and worms, exotic caterpillars. Let us then be covered over, smothered with earth. Let it all stop here.