I Sing the Body Electric (20 page)

She went on around the table, clearing away, sorting and stacking, neither grossly humble nor arthritic with pride.

“What do I know?

“This, above all: the trouble with most families with many children is someone gets lost. There isn't time, it seems, for everyone. Well, I will give equally to all of you. I will share out my knowledge and attention with everyone. I wish to be a great warm pie fresh from the oven, with equal shares to be taken by all. No one will starve. Look! someone cries, and I'll look. Listen! someone cries, and I hear. Run with
me on the river path! someone says, and I run. And at dusk I am not tired, nor irritable, so I do not scold out of some tired irritability. My eye stays clear, my voice strong, my hand firm, my attention constant.”

“But,” said Father, his voice fading, half convinced, but putting up a last faint argument, “you're not
there
. As for love—”

“If paying attention is love, I am love.

“If knowing is love, I am love.

“If helping you not to fall into error and to be good is love, I am love.

“And again, to repeat, there are four of you. Each, in a way never possible before in history, will get my complete attention. No matter if you all speak at once. I can channel and hear this one and that and the other, clearly. No one will go hungry. I will, if you please, and accept the strange word, ‘love' you all.”

“I
don't
accept!” said Agatha.

And even Grandma turned now to see her standing in the door.

“I won't give you permission, you can't, you mustn't!” said Agatha. “I won't let you! It's lies! You lie. No one loves me. She said she did, but she lied. She
said
but
lied!
”

“Agatha!” cried Father, standing up.

“She?” said Grandma. “Who?”

“Mother!” came the shriek. “Said: Love you! Lies! Love you! Lies! And you're like her! You lie. But you're empty, anyway, and so that's a
double
lie! I hate
her
. Now, I hale
you!
”

Agatha spun about and leapt down the hall.

The front door slammed wide.

Father was in motion, but Grandma touched his arm.

“Let me.”

And she walked and then moved swiftly, gliding down the hall and then suddenly, easily, running, yes, running very fast, out the door.

It was a champion sprint by the time we all reached the lawn, the sidewalk, yelling.

Blind, Agatha made the curb, wheeling about, seeing us close, all of us yelling, Grandma way ahead, shouting, too, and Agatha off the curb and out in the street, halfway to the middle, then the middle and suddenly a car, which no one saw, erupting its brakes, its horn shrieking and Agatha flailing about to see and Grandma there with her and hurling her aside and down as the car with fantastic energy and verve selected her from our midst, struck our wonderful electric Guido Fantoccini-produced dream even while she paced upon the air and, hands up to ward off, almost in mild protest, still trying to decide what to say to this bestial machine, over and over she spun and down and away even as the car jolted to a halt and I saw Agatha safe beyond and Grandma, it seemed, still coming down or down and sliding fifty yards away to strike and
ricochet and lie strewn and all of us frozen in a line suddenly in the midst of the street with one scream pulled out of all our throats at the same raw instant.

Then silence and just Agatha lying on the asphalt, intact, getting ready to sob.

And still we did not move, frozen on the sill of death, afraid to venture in any direction, afraid to go see what lay beyond the car and Agatha and so we began to wail and, I guess, pray to ourselves as Father stood amongst us: Oh, no, no, we mourned, oh no, God, no, no…

Agatha lifted her already grief-stricken face and it was the face of someone who has predicted dooms and lived to see and now did not want to see or live any more. As we watched, she turned her gaze to the tossed woman's body and tears fell from her eyes. She shut them and covered them and lay back down forever to weep…

I took a step and then another step and then five quick steps and by the time I reached my sister her head was buried deep and her sobs came up out of a place so far down in her I was afraid I could never find her again, she would never come out, no matter how I pried or pleaded or promised or threatened or just plain said. And what little we could hear from Agatha buried there in her own misery, she said over and over again, lamenting, wounded, certain of the old threat known and named and now here forever. “…like I said … told you … lies … lies … liars … all lies … like the other … other … just like … just … just like the other … other … other…!”

I was down on my knees holding onto her with both hands, trying to put her back together even though she wasn't broken any way you could see but just feel, because I knew it was no use going on to Grandma, no use at all, so I just touched Agatha and gentled her and wept while Father came up and stood over and knelt down with me and it was like a prayer meeting in the middle of the street and lucky no more cars coming, and I said, choking, “Other what, Ag, other
what?
”

Agatha exploded two words.

“Other dead!”

“You mean Mom?”

“O Mom,” she wailed, shivering, lying down, cuddling up like a baby. “O Mom, dead, O Mom and now Grandma dead, she promised always, always, to love, to love, promised to be different, promised, promised and now look, look … I hate her, I hate Mom, I hate her, I hate
them!
”

“Of course.” said a voice. “It's only natural. How foolish of me not to have known, not to have seen.”

And the voice was so familiar we were all stricken.

We all jerked.

Agatha squinched her eyes, flicked them wide, blinked, and jerked half up, staring.

“How silly of me,” said Grandma, standing there at the edge of our circle, our prayer, our wake.

“Grandma!” we all said.

And she stood there, taller by far than any of us in this moment of kneeling and holding and crying out. We could only stare up at her in disbelief.

“You're dead!” cried Agatha. “The car—”

“Hit me,” said Grandma, quietly. “Yes. And threw me in the air and tumbled me over and for a few moments there was a severe concussion of circuitries. I might have feared a disconnection, if fear is the word. But then I sat up and gave myself a shake and the few molecules of paint, jarred loose on one printed path or another, magnetized back in position and resilient creature that I am, unbreakable thing that I am,
here
I am.”

“I thought you were—” said Agatha.

“And only natural,” said Grandma. “I mean, anyone else, hit like that, tossed like that. But, O my dear Agatha, not me. And now I see why you were afraid and never trusted me. You didn't know. And I had not as yet proved my singular ability to survive. How dumb of me not to have thought to show you. Just a second.” Somewhere in her head, her body, her being, she fitted together some invisible tapes, some old information made new by interblending. She nodded. “Yes. There. A book of child-raising, laughed at by some few people years back when the woman who wrote the book said, as final advice to parents: ‘Whatever you do, don't die. Your children will never forgive you.'”

“Forgive,” some one of us whispered.

“For how can children understand when you just up and go away and never come back again with no excuse, no apologies, no sorry note, nothing.”

“They can't,” I said.

“So,” said Grandma, kneeling down with us beside Agatha who sat up now, new tears brimming her eyes, but a different kind of tears, not tears that drowned, but tears that washed clean. “So your mother ran away to death. And after that, how
could
you trust anyone? If everyone left vanished finally, who
was
there to trust? So when I came, half wise, half ignorant, I should have known, I did not know, why you would not accept me. For, very simply and honestly, you feared I might not stay, that I lied, that I was vulnerable, too. And two leavetakings, two deaths, were one too many in a single year. But now, do you
see
, Abigail?”

“Agatha,” said Agatha, without knowing she corrected.

“Do you understand, I shall always, always be here?”

“Oh, yes,” cried Agatha, and broke down into a solid weeping in which we all joined, huddled together and cars drew up and stopped to see just how many people were hurt and how many people were getting well right there.

End of story.

Well, not quite the end.

We lived happily ever after.

Or rather we lived together, Grandma, Agatha-Ágamemnon-Abigail, Timothy, and I, Tom, and Father, and Grandma calling us to frolic in great fountains of Latin and Spanish and French, in great seaborne gouts of poetry like Moby Dick sprinkling the deeps with his Versailles jet somehow lost in calms and found in storms; Grandma a constant, a clock, a pendulum, a face to tell all time by at noon, or in the middle of sick nights when, raved with fever, we saw her forever by our beds, never gone, never away, always waiting, always speaking kind words, her cool hand icing our hot brows, the tappet of her uplifted forefinger unsprung to let a twine of cold mountain water touch our flannel tongues. Ten thousand dawns she cut our wildflower lawn, ten thousand nights she wandered, remembering the dust molecules that fell in the still hours before dawn, or sat whispering some lesson she felt needed teaching to our ears while we slept snug.

Until at last, one by one, it was time for us to go away to school, and when at last the youngest, Agatha, was all packed, why Grandma packed, too.

On the last day of summer that last year, we found Grandma down in the front room with various packets and suitcases, knitting, waiting, and though she had often spoken of it, now that the time came we were shocked and surprised.

“Grandma!” we all said. “What are you doing?”

“Why going off to college, in a way, just like you,” she said. “Back to Guido Fantoccini's, to the Family.”

“The Family?”

“Of Pinocchios, that's what he called us for a joke, at first. The Pinocchios and himself Gepetto. And then later gave us his own name: the Fantoccini. Anyway, you have been my family here. Now I go back to my even larger family there, my brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, all robots who—”

“Who do
what?
” asked Agatha.

“It all depends,” said Grandma. “Some stay, some linger. Others go to be drawn and quartered, you might say, their parts distributed to other machines who have need of repairs. They'll weigh and find me wanting
or not wanting. It may be I'll be just the one they need tomorrow and off I'll go to raise another batch of children and beat another batch of fudge.”

“Oh, they mustn't draw and quarter you!” cried Agatha.

“No!” I cried, with Timothy.

“My allowance,” said Agatha, “I'll pay anything…?”

Grandma stopped rocking and looked at the needles and the pattern of bright yarn. “Well, I wouldn't have said, but now you ask and I'll tell. For a very
small
fee, there's a room, the room of the Family, a large dim parlor, all quiet and nicely decorated, where as many as thirty or forty of the Electric Women sit and rock and talk, each in her turn. I have not been there. I am, after all, freshly born, comparatively new. For a small fee, very small, each month and year, that's where I'll be, with all the others like me, listening to what they've learned of the world and, in my turn, telling how it was with Tom and Tim and Agatha and how fine and happy we were. And I'll tell all I learned from you.”

“But … you taught
us!
”

“Do you
really
think that?” she said. “No, it was turnabout, round-about, learning both ways. And it's all in here, everything you flew into tears about or laughed over, why, I have it all. And I'll tell it to the others just as they tell their boys and girls and life to me. We'll sit there, growing wiser and calmer and better every year and every year, ten, twenty, thirty years. The Family knowledge will double, quadruple, the wisdom will not be lost. And we'll be waiting there in that sitting room, should you ever need us for your own children in time of illness, or, God prevent, deprivation or death. There we'll be, growing old but not old, getting closer to the time, perhaps, someday, when we live up to our first strange joking name.”

“The Pinocchios?” asked Tim.

Grandma nodded.

I knew what she meant. The day when, as in the old tale, Pinocchio had grown so worthy and so fine that the gift of life had been given him. So I saw them, in future years, the entire family of Fantoccini, the Pinocchios, trading and re-trading, murmuring and whispering their knowledge in the great parlors of philosophy, waiting for the day. The day that could never come.

Grandma must have read that thought in our eyes.

“We'll see,” she said. “Let's just wait and see.”

“Oh, Grandma,” cried Agatha and she was weeping as she had wept many years before. “You don't have to wait. You're alive. You've always been alive to us!”

And she caught hold of the old woman and we all caught hold for a long moment and then ran off up in the sky to faraway schools and
years and her last words to us before we let the helicopter swarm us away into autumn were these:

“When you are very old and gone childish-small again, with childish ways and childish yens and, in need of feeding, make a wish for the old teacher nurse, the dumb yet wise companion, send for me. I will come back. We shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear.”

“Oh, we shall never be old!” we cried. “That will never happen!”

“Never! Never!”

And we were gone.

And the years are flown.