Saturday's Child (78 page)

In the garden, the witch hazel is already in bud and the lenten rose unfurling. Soon crocuses will rear their gallant lavender heads, and winter aconite, and nodding snowdrops. Before this page reaches your hands and these words light on your retina, the daffodils and creamy poets' narcissus will have trumpeted and gone, as well as the stately, claret-black Negrita tulips and milky drifts of azalea. The lilacs will have exhaled and brittled, the magnolia flared and dropped, the Cardinal de Richelieu and Peace roses blown to full riot. In summer jewel-spangled dragonflies will swoop above lilies of the valley that grow along the little waterfall and pond I built from old slate and stones. By the time page proofs have been corrected, the tomato plants will be higher than my head and in flower, the herb bed a cacophony of fragrances when you brush its leaves, the
grapevine heavy with sweet green fruit. When bound books finally arrive, it will be harvest—time to dry the herbs, eat the grapes and tomatoes, churn the latest batch of compost back into the earth for overwintering.

I love the sensuality of soil on my fingers. It's alive—not only with red wrigglers and nematodes and microscopic beings—the soil itself is alive. Did you know that if you strike an ordinary lump of clay with a hammer, it blows ultraviolet energy for a month? Though I've never grasped the concept of owning land or, in truth, owning anything, I comprehend the
borrowing
of things, the
using
of things, and in turn the
being
useful. That, it seems to me, is the most we can manage in the brevity of our days, and is all the more reason we ought to leave what we use in decent shape for those to come. Native Americans urge that, in everything we do, we consider the impact it will have in seven generations, a mind-stretching exercise.

When I was perhaps twelve, I had a glimpse of it, the Mystery—from the distant firmaments to the grain of tweed in the coat lapel of a man on the street corner—and it was so vast it was unbearable. Yet that glimpse has remained lodged in the corner of my eye every day for almost half a century. I think of a fresh-faced young woman in some Polish-Russian border village, her eyes agleam with excitement when the marriage broker returns, announcing that the young rabbinical student
is
interested. I can see in her something indomitable that years and circumstances might coarsen and corrupt, but never kill. And I see Blake, a man now, her genetic mitochondria alive in him.

Looking along time like this, I notice that my self-consciousness has drained away—the consummation I so longed for back when I was young and beautiful and unaware of being either. Always too outer-directed—relationships, actions, impressions—maybe I've earned the right to be, in Cervantes's words, “the joyful solitary person I am,” attuned to the inner (as uninterruptedly as possible, that is). Now I can let others decide whether I'm working or playing, since I know I'm continually doing both, another reason to be grateful for the gift that work is.

As for what's to come, like the lacy leaves of the Japanese maple, I plan to crisp bright red and gold before I die. If it turns out there is an afterlife, and even a Deity, then I'd like Her to greet me saying, “It's all right, sister. I know, I
know
. I'm an atheist, too.”

Things I'd like to do before croaking
:

Dare write the poetry I was born to write.

Finish at least fifteen more books.

Tour a grandly mysterious archaeological site: perhaps the Plain of Jars in Laos.

Visit a society of extremely old people—maybe somewhere near Bhutan—and ask them about life. (Cancel that: I wouldn't want to find out they're as clueless as the rest of us.)

Visit a polygynous society—and try to find a polyandrous one. (Cancel
that
: the first would make me crazy since it would be one big harem. The second would make me crazy because one woman would have to please multiple men.)

Get my Himalayan blue poppy seeds to
grow
.

Visit a nudist camp. (But go clothed? Wouldn't work.)

Start playing the piano again. Learn the harmonica. Build a harpsichord and play it.

Angkor Wat, yes. The Galapagos Islands, yes. Actually
be
there when ice breaks on the Neva. Machu Picchu—or is that too high, dangerous, uncomfortable? Iceland—oh
yes!
—for the geothermal region and especially to see the Northern Lights.

Peer into an active volcano, preferably not when it's erupting.

Scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef.

Get to watch Blake's face when he first sees Venice.

Ride naked, bareback, on a fine horse along a beach at sunrise.

Things it's highly unlikely I'll ever do now but would have liked to
:

Learn to sail a boat.

Go snowboarding.

Speak Spanish fluently. Get my French and German back. Learn to read Greek.

Ride a goddamned bicycle.

Things I definitely will never do now
:

Hang-glide.

Conduct an orchestra.

Learn to fly a plane.

Have a second child (whew).

Marry again or share living space with a lover (
whew
).

Yeats wrote, “All life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.” Oh dear, he got it wrong. It
is
happening, right now, a marvel of details, a mystery in perpetual motion.

Each summer, fireflies sneak in through the screen door to the garden; at night I lie in total darkness and watch them winking on and off in my own bedroom. Each winter, after the smaller potted plants have been shifted indoors and the garden sleeps a foot deep in snow, the white night-blooming jasmine flowers again. Isn't this miracle, in one's own bedroom to breathe jasmine flowers in winter and watch fireflies dance in summer?

For the entirety of my life, every moment except the one I was actually living seemed real. Now, every moment preceding this one, as well as those still to come, feel imagined.

Only Now is utterly alive.

So it is possible, after all, to have a happy ending.

It just depends on knowing when to stop.

¹
R. M. translation.

²
“The International Crime of Genital Mutilation,” in
The Word of a Woman
, also collected in
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
, by Gloria Steinem (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983).

³
“Col Tempo,” in
A Hot January
.

⁴
“Katherine Hepburn: Getting On With It,”
Ms
., January 1982.

⁵
Lady of the Beasts
and
Upstairs in the Garden
.

⁶
Besides, it seems I may have wound up having hundreds of daughters.

Image Gallery

The prize-winning baby, around age one and a half.

Sally (Teitlebaum) Berkley: “Aunt Sally.”

Faith (Teitlebaum) Berkley as a young woman, visiting Mexico.

RM as a model age three and a half or four.

Giving a speech at a benefit, age four.

In the Powder Puff tutu, age seven.