That Said (20 page)

slid my feet into the machine:

my right foot and my left foot

were twin mummies, skeletons visible

through their wrappings,

bones glowing ghostly green and webbed

with grayish flesh, cloudy ectoplasm

of squeezed ligaments and tendons.

 

Like my mother, I was wearing myself inside out.

Like her, standing in that pan of plaster,

I was stuck with myself forever,

wincing, rocking backward on my heels.

When my daughter was two,

watching
The Wizard of Oz
on television,

the moment the Wicked Witch appeared in a scene,

Emma would walk, as if hypnotized,

to the glowing screen and kiss

the witch's luminous green face

in the same placating way

my mother used to kiss the little silver hand,

the charm she wore on a chain around her neck.

 

The day Emma was born, my mother

bought a yard of narrow red satin ribbon.

She tied a bow, several bows,

and basted the loops together

until they formed a big red flower

she Scotch-taped to the head of Emma's crib

to protect her while she slept.

My mother made a duplicate

to pin onto the carriage hood.

“You can never be
too
safe,” she said.

 

My mother used to coo in Yiddish over the crib,

“
Kineahora, kineahora,

my granddaughter's so beautiful.”

And then suddenly, as if remembering something,

something very bad, she'd go
“Pui pui pui,”

pretending to spit three times on the baby's head.

My mother wasn't some fat
bubbe
from the shtetl.

She owned a business, drove a car.

I'd never seen her act this way before.

 

Sitting at her kitchen table, she lit another Kent.

“You should have given Emma an ugly name

to ward off the evil eye.

Harry Lebow, the brilliant young concert pianist

from Guttenberg?

The evil eye was jealous, so it killed him.

Mrs. Cohen, who won the lottery

and went on a spending spree?

A week later, her house caught fire.

Remember Bonnie, the doctor's daughter,

your girlfriend who died of leukemia?

Her mother wore a floor-length mink;

they had a pinball machine

in their basement rec room.

That's practically an open invitation.”

My mother stubbed out her cigarette.

 

My hand fanned the smoke away.

“Ma, You don't really believe

in that hocus-pocus, do you?”

“Maybe not,” she said, “but it wouldn't hurt.”

We climb the stone staircase

of the red-brick Victorian building,

my father, my aunt, my husband carrying our baby,

escaping from the mid-July heat.

My mother is missing, dead one year.

 

Downstairs the museum, upstairs the planetarium;

we've waited over an hour

for the next star show to start,

rejected the brochures and guided tour,

killing time, instead, with the souvenir shop's

boxed binoculars and plastic bugs,

rocks and minerals, and packages

of stick-on, glow-in-the-dark stars.

We loiter past the Information Desk

where they've set up a card table with an exhibit

of local flora, each wildflower—

stuck in its own glass jar

propping up a smudged typewritten label:

QUEEN ANNE'S LACE, COW VETCH,
wilting
BLACK-EYED SUSANS
—

sprinkling pollen on the tabletop

like pinches of curry power.

 

The high barrel-vault ceiling is made of oak,

the oak woodwork and oak balconies

shiny as the beautiful cherry-and-glass cabinets

the janitor just finished polishing,

but all the exhibits inside the cases

are falling apart, from the loons' moth-eaten

chests molting like torn pillows

to the dusty hummingbirds' ruby bibs.

 

We interrupt a custodian vacuuming

a polar bear with a Dustbuster.

The bear's down on the floor with us, on all fours,

pinning a seal under his mauling paw.

Shuttling the baby between us,

we shuffle past a grizzly

rearing up on his pedestal,

his shin fur scuffed and shiny

where visitors' fingers have touched.

He's in a permanent rage, his bared teeth

stained yellow-brown, as if from nicotine.

 

The Information Lady hands us over

to the Tour Guide.

And though it is only ourselves, and a grumpy

French-Canadian family with three wired kids

detoured from the Cabot Creamery,

she ushers us up the wooden staircase where we meet

the people from the twelve o'clock show

staggering down.

 

French doors open and close on the planetarium

barely bigger than a living room,

rows of wooden benches

orbiting the central console

where our bearded, ponytailed Star Guide stands

and personally greets each one of us

with a damp handshake and a “Hi.”

 

My family sits together in one row,

obedient children on a class trip.

Present, all eyes and ears.

The sun sets, the darkness intensifies.

Our eyes adjust, our heads tilt back.

Suddenly the starless night sky, pitch black,

dark as the inside of a closet,

makes me feel like crying.

Not a splinter of light squeezes out

from under the French doors' crack.

My father and my aunt immediately doze off.

They're tired, tired of missing

his wife, her sister. Now there's nothing

but a big black hole to hold us all together,

grief's gravitational pull.

 

“Tim” tells us his name.

With no higher-up to direct him,

he's got his chance to play God.

He pivots at his podium, clears his throat,

and casts his flashlight baton

across his orchestra of incipient stars,

no music yet, just warming up;

only his voice and a thin beam of light

about to point out areas of interest.

My husband hands me our daughter

and I unbutton my blouse to nurse her.

 

Tim tells us how he used to chart the heavens

from his bedroom window in Ohio when he was a boy,

then he rehashes the
Star Wars
trilogy—

that's what first hooked him on astronomy.

He tells us about his courtship of Annie,

the home birth of his baby...

Every once in a while he remembers

to mention a star.

 

My father softly snores. Nights and days

are swirling all around us, moons rise and set,

seasons turn, constellations twinkle

on the cracked ceiling above our heads.

Over the planetarium's slate roof

floats our familiar sky,

two Dippers, Big and Little,

and Jupiter, Mars, and the same old moon,

big and yellow as a wheel of cheddar,

preparing to rise from behind our hill.

 

An hour later,

like the paired fish in Pisces

swimming in the sky, the baby and I

are still at sea, too exhausted

to crawl along the bleachers and escape.

The sun pops up, pure Keystone Kops.

My aunt startles awake, gropes for her purse.

My father snores louder.

Fading, the Milky Way shakes over his bald spot—

covered, one year ago, by a yarmulke

as he stood in the cemetery under the trees—

under the big dome of heaven

where my mother now lives.

Rummaging through the old cassettes my father

taped off the classical radio station,

my daughter finds, among Mozart and Bach,

catalogued and labeled in his elegant hand,

Jane and Howard's Wedding: 1984.

I didn't know my father taped that, too!

Disappearing with the boom box, my daughter

shuts the master bedroom's door. An hour later,

I walk in on her gate-crashing our wedding,

sprawling on our marriage bed, ear to the speaker.

When she was younger, she used to insist

she was
there,
at our wedding, and we've told her

it's impossible, she wasn't born yet, that she

was there
in spirit
. She's not convinced—hasn't she

always
been with us, even when she wasn't?

 

She laughs at the Wedding March while her dad

and I shakily walk down the aisle

under the rented yellow-and-white tent

filling Mike and Gail's Walnut Ave. backyard.

Eavesdropping on the prayers we repeat

after the rabbi, phrase by Hebrew phrase,

she claps when the rabbi pronounces us

husband and wife and we kiss to applause,

her future father stomps on the goblet

wrapped in the caterer's cloth napkin,