Tell Me a Riddle (14 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 56
straining to hear.) It's for Disaster, Grandma.
(Children trust.)
Vivi in the maze of the long, the lovely drunkenness. The old old noises: baby sounds; screaming of a mother flayed to exasperation; children quarreling; children playing; singing; laughter.
And Vivi's tears and memories,
spilling so fast, half the words not understood.
She had started remembering out loud deliberately, so her mother would know the past was cherished, still lived in her.
Nursing the baby: My friends marvel, and I tell them, oh it's easy to be such a cow. I remember how beautiful my mother seemed nursing my brother, and the milk just flows . . . Was that Davy? It must have been Davy. . . .
Lowering a hem: How did you ever... when I think how you made everything we wore... Tim, just think, seven kids and Mommy sewed everything... do I remember you sang while you sewed? That white dress with the red apples on the skirt you fixed over for me, was it Hannah's or Clara's before it was mine?
Washing sweaters: Ma, I'll never forget, one of those days so nice you washed clothes outside; one of the first spring days it must have been. The bubbles just danced while you scrubbed, and we chased after, and you stopped to show us how to blow our own bubbles with green onion stalks. . . you always. . . .
''Strong onion, to still make you cry after so many years," her father said, to turn the tears into laughter.
While Richard bent over his homework: Where is it now, do we still have it, the Book of the Martyrs? It always seemed so, wellexalted, when you'd put it on
 
Page 57
the round table and we'd all look at it together; there was even a halo from the lamp. The lamp with the beaded fringe you could move up and down; they're in style again, pulley lamps like that, but without the fringe. You know the book I'm talking about, Daddy, the Book of Martyrs, the first picture was a bust of Spartacus . . . Socrates? I wish there was something like that for the children, Mommy, to give them what you. . . . (And the tears splashed again.)
(What I intended and did not? Stop it, daughter, stop it, leave that time. And he, the hypocrite, sitting there with tears in his eyesit was nothing to you then, nothing.)
... The time you came to school and I almost died of shame because of your accent and because I knew you knew I was ashamed; how could I? . . . Sammy's harmonica and you danced to it once, yes you did, you and Davy squealing in your arms. . . . That time you bundled us up and walked us down to the railway station to stay the night 'cause it was heated and we didn't have any coal, that winter of the strike, you didn't think I remembered that, did you, Mommy? . . . How you'd call us out to see the sunsets. . . .
Day after day, the spilling memories. Worse now, questions, too. Even the grandchildren: Grandma, in the olden days, when you were little. . . .
It was the afternoons that saved.
While they thought she napped, she would leave the mosaic on the wall (of children's drawings, maps, calendars, pictures, Ann's cardboard dolls with their great ringed questioning eyes) and hunch in the girls' closet on the low shelf where the shoes stood, and the girls' dresses covered.
 
Page 58
For that while she would painfully sheathe against the listening house, the tendrils and noises that knocked, and Vivi's spilling memories. Sometimes it helped to braid and unbraid the sashes that dangled, or to trace the pattern on the hoop slips.
Today she had jacks and children under jet trails to forget. Last night, Ann and Dody silhouetted in the window against a sunset of flaming man-made clouds of jet trail, their jacks ball accenting the peaceful noise of dinner being made. Had she told them, yes she had told them of how they played jacks in her village though there was no ball, no jacks. Six stones, round and flat, toss them out, the seventh on the back of the hand, toss, catch and swoop up as many as possible, toss again. . . .
Of stones (repeating Richard) there are three kinds: earth's fire jetting; rock of layered centuries; crucibled new out of the old
(igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic).
But there was that otherfrozen to black glass, never to transform or hold the fossil memory ... (let not my seed fall on stone). There was an ancient man who fought to heights a great rock that crashed back down eternally
*
eternal labor, freedom, labor. . . (stone will perish, but the word remain). And you, David, who with a stone slew, screaming: Lord, take my heart of stone and give me flesh.
**
*Alludes to the myth of Sisyphus. who was punished eternally in Tartarus for reporting the whereabouts of Zeus. king of the gods, to the father of the maiden Zeus had seized.
**Alludes to the biblical story of David's triumph over the giant Philistine, Goliath; Samuel 1:17. The quotation, which Olsen heard in a black church, paraphrases Ezekiel 11: 19: ''I shall remove the heart of stone from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh."
 
Page 59
Who
was screaming? Why was she back in the common room of the prison, the sun motes dancing in the shafts of light, and the informer being brought in, a prisoner now, like themselves. And Lisa leaping, yes, Lisa, the gentle and tender, biting at the betrayer's jugular. Screaming and screaming.
No, it is the children screaming. Another of Paul and Sammy's terrible fights?
In Vivi's house. Severely: you are in Vivi's house.
Blows, screams, a call: ''Grandma!" For her? Oh please not for her. Hide, hunch behind the dresses deeper. But a trembling little body hurls itself beside hersurprised, smothered laughter, arms surround her neck, tears rub dry on her cheek, and words too soft to understand whisper into her ear (Is this where you hide too, Grammy? It's my secret place, we have a secret now).
And the sweat beads, and the long shudder seizes.
It seemed the great ear pressed inside now, and the knocking. "We have to go home," she told him, "I grow ill here."
"It's your own fault, Mrs. Bodybusy, you do not rest, you do too much." He raged, but the fear was in his eyes. "It was a serious operation, they told you to take care . . . All right, we will go to where you can rest."
But where? Not home to death, not yet. He had thought to Lennie's, to Clara's; beautiful visits with each of the children. She would have to rest first, be stronger. If they could but go to Floridait glittered before him, the never-realized promise of Florida. Califor-

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