Essays

Riding an Elephant ~ Rachel Toor

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Perhaps it was because of “Seymour,” a pony I rode on the beach.

I hadn’t wanted to ride him; he was too small. But the hectoring Thai guys hawking pony rides convinced me to take him out for an hour for 500 bhat, more than the cost of a good meal. I couldn’t resist the idea of galloping through the surf in the Gulf of Thailand. Seymour had short legs and an eggbeater gait, and while it was kind of fun to gallop through the surf in front of scads of belly-heavy sunburned northern Europeans, I probably could have run faster and with less discomfort on my own. Plus Seymour—I knew that wasn’t his real name, but I liked that whatever it really was, the way the Thai guys pronounced it made it sound like my great-uncle’s name—was kind of a jerk, pinning his ears and throwing his head when he didn’t want to accede to my requests.

So when, after spending too much time at the bridge on the river Kwai—because the train that was to be the continuation of our tour was delayed for more than an hour—and then boarding and traveling for another hour of noisy rumbling, past fields of sugar cane and what our guide called “sweet potato”; after a buffet lunch of pad Thai, Indian sweet curry with don’t-ask-don’t-tell meat, and fried chicken and bananas; after getting back in our air-conditioned mini-van (now more appreciated in the afternoon sun); after getting to the elephant park and climbing the stairs to mount, I was disappointed to see that my elephant was not the biggest.

She was not, to be sure, small. I jittered like a kid at the state fair preparing for her first time astride a pony. With awkward steps—like boarding a small boat from a dock—I managed to climb onto her back. I settled onto the bench and was seat-buckled in for the event.  A long line of elephants with tourists on their saddle-benches and young Thai boys on their necks followed each other on a short path through the jungle.

I have sat bucking horses more easily than I remained seated on the elephant’s back. I held onto the sides of the seat, my arms aching as I felt each of my vertebrae smash against the padded back of the seat; each step lurched me to one side, and then the other. It made the beach pony ride feel like gliding.

I asked the guide how old the elephant was.

He said sixteen.

I asked how old he was.

It was a question he seemed unaccustomed to answering in English and it appeared to take some calculation.

Sixteen he said, finally.

Yes, he was a sixteen year old boy, and an asshole in the way that sixteen year old boys often are. He called out “I love you!” to young Asian tourists as they passed us in the other direction  He whooped Yeehaw when we went downhill, and cut the line in front of other elephants, urging his—our—steed to go faster by kicking her hard behind the ears. He and his fellow guides carried on long and loud conversations that cut into the heavy jungle air.

Then, toward the end of the ride, he stopped, climbed back from the elephant’s neck, and sat on the bench beside me. When we arrived at the park I’d seen a sign listing the rules. The second one, after the customary caution about keeping an eye and a hand on your valuables, was “Not allow to sit on the neck of elephant or other parts except specific place only.” I said to him, “I get to ride on her neck?”

He said “Yes, you want.”

So I slid down, reaching my legs behind her ears. I asked her name, and what I heard was “Chopin” like the composer and the writer.  I urged Chopin forward, but she didn’t move. Instead she drew her trunk to the top of her head and searched for my hands.

“She hungry” said the guide, her conspirator, and then mentioned something about 500 or 1000 bhat, as I wished. I’ve been swindled in Thailand before so I said, “Sorry, no money.” Chopin lowered her trunk and ambled off.

Sitting on the neck was far easier than on the bench. It was, in fact, thrilling. My riding muscles are well developed and my body responds instinctively, able to balance without thought. I no longer feared falling off. I started to understand her rhythms, began talking to her with pressure from my legs. I didn’t want to stop.

But eventually, of course, I had to stop. After the elephant ride, we tourists dismounted and, in the middle of a jungle in Thailand, we were funneled into a line to see photos of ourselves displayed on a computer screen. I hadn’t understood why, shortly after boarding, we rode the elephants into the muddy river. I thought that perhaps it was for them to have a chance to cool down and get a drink before we ventured on a long jungle trek. I was wrong. Now I saw that it was just for a photo op before we set out on the short well-trampled loop around the camp.

I have never bought souvenir photos of myself—I am either unphotogenic or simply less attractive than I would like to believe—and wasn’t even going to look at this one, but I was standing there in line for I didn’t know what and it popped up on the screen. I have few documentary impulses, but I felt compelled to purchase it.

I look happy in the photo, though you can see the tendons in my arms straining as I clutch the sides of the bench. My light orange shirt—I’d bought a button-down Thai schoolgirl shirt because it seemed more modest than the beach wear I’d brought for my two-week stay at a friend’s borrowed luxury condo in Hua Hin—picks up the yellows in the leafy background, compliments the red in the blankets piled underneath the seat.

But the focal point of the photo is not me, and it’s not the elephant. The eye is drawn to the tee-shirt on the guide. This 16-year-old Thai boy setting astride the neck of an elephant is wearing a black tee-shirt. In the middle is a swastika, black in a white circle, framed on a red square.

Because I was so excited, looking only at the elephant, I hadn’t noticed the boy’s tee-shirt, not until I saw the photograph. I showed it to the Thai guide who had taken us on the trip, who had booked the tickets to this elephant park. He looked embarrassed, laughed a little. I waited for more of a response.  He said it was a symbol in eastern religions.

Yes, I said, I know that symbol. This is not that. Look at the colors. Look at the design. This is a swastika.

There were five of us on the tour, the others were German women, likely two lesbian couples, who talked mostly to each other in a language I’d been taught as a child to hear as ugly. One of the couples came over having just bought a print of their elephant-riding photo. They showed it to me; it was a romantic setting, indeed, a good photo opportunity.

Then I showed them mine. At first they cooed, commenting on how happy I looked. Then one of them gasped.

“Not gut,” she said. “This is not gut.”

We all turned to the Thai guide, who tried again to make his argument about it being a religious symbol.

The quietest of the German women delivered a lecture. Yes, she said, in the cadence of an academic, there is a symbol like this that you often see in India. It signifies new beginnings. But that is not what this is. She shook her head. She kept shaking her head.

Two nights before I had watched, with Thai subtitles, the bad American movie Valkyrie, about a plot to murder Hitler. Seeing Tom Cruise in a Nazi uniform—even as a member of the resistence—was unsettling. The imagery of the Third Reich can’t not rattle you.

I had booked this tour, to go to the bridge on the river Kwai, because after two solitary weeks at the beach reading and writing, I needed more than sun and surf, excellent cheap food and daily massages that cost seven dollars an hour. I needed a little history, a little culture, a chance to get out of my own head.

We’d spent the morning immersed in World World II. Everything we had done and seen that day was tied to the years between 1939 and 1945. Our first stop, after a two-and-a-half hour mini-van ride north, was a cemetery built by the Thais for the British and Dutch dead. Our second stop the JEATH War Museum in Kanchanaburi.

It was, we learned, established in 1977 to commemorate the horrors of the construction of the “Death Railway,” an appropriate nickname for the strategic train line the Japanese built connecting (what was then) Siam to (what was then) Burma. Most of us know one small segment of this history from the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai. As it turns out, JEATH is a curious acronym of the names of the countries involved: Japan, England, America (and Australia), Thailand, and Holland. The poorly-copied museum brochure explained that “The Japanese were the controllers of the railway project, Thailand was involved as the conquered country and the other four countries were involved as PoW’s on the actual construction of the 415 kilometre long Death Railway and the bridge over the River Kwae.” It continued on the next page, “The word JEATH also replaces the word Death because it sounds too horrific.”

The museum consists mainly of a replica bamboo hut with a display of photographs of the POWs, more than 16,000 of whom—plus 100,000 impressed laborers—died during the construction process which Japanese engineers first reckoned would take at least five years. The railway was completed in sixteen months.

The last paragraph of the brochure read as follows: “Dear visitors, JEATH museum has been constructed not for the maintenance of the hatred among human beings, especially among the Japanese and allied countries, but to warn and teach us the lesson of HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS.”

After leaving the museum, riding on a railway that had been hacked into the jungle by men fighting off disease and starvation, I thought about what I thought about World War II. Growing up Jewish in a rural, agricultural community, my father taught me that the most important thing about my ethnicity was that there was always somebody who wanted to kill me. My great-grandpa Max, a giddy and sweet man, had numbers tattooed on his arm. He didn’t talk about them. Once, during my childhood, someone painted a swastika on the sidewalk in front of our house. At Yale, because of my blonde hair and pale eyes, my “Ellis Island Special” last name, I got to overhear the scions of Robber Barons make anti-Semitic comments. When I thought about World War II, to be honest, I thought about the Jews.

In my twenties, as an editorial assistant at Oxford University Press, I worked on a joint US-Russian authored book about the collaboration between US and Russians forces during the war. (In a small world moment, I later dated the US author’s brother. He turned out to be a toad.) I’d thought about the dropping of the bomb, about Rosie the Riveters, about the internment of Japanese Americans, but I confess to not knowing much about what was happening in Southeast Asia during that time.

So this winter I spent a sunny morning in Thailand feeling abashed by my ignorance, learning in visceral ways about what had happened here during WWII, and hopped off my elephant and looked smack into a photo of a happy me with a swastika-wearing Thai boy.

The German woman urged me to take the photo back.

No, I said, I’m keeping it.

I’m Jewish, I added. Somehow, this was something I needed to say.

The Thai tour guide said, “He doesn’t know.”

I don’t know what he knew, that teenager, that elephant-riding, trash-talking, rambunctious boy. I wanted to ask him, to talk to him, but he had already loaded another tourist onto Chopin’s bench and taken off on the loop, whooping and hollering. His English was limited. How much, really, could I have learned from talking to him? Was that swastika just another incomprehensible symbol of the far-off West, like the ubiquitous tee-shirts from American universities that didn’t exist? In Thai tourist markets there are often vendors selling tee-shirts with unutterably nasty English messages. Was this just another example of rampant commercialism with no content?

Thailand, so long a country known for its tolerant and accommodating people, is undergoing change. The beloved king is ailing; there is now gang violence.  Did I want to know what, specifically, this young boy knew? Was it meaningful? Did it matter? There is no such thing as global political correctness. I have no more right to question his appropriation of cultural and political symbols than he does to accost Americans who adapt Buddhism to suit their needs.

For years I have been thinking about the commemoration of atrocity. A decade before this trip I’d gone to Asia with a college friend, and we had dinner with friends of hers, expat Americans living in Hong Kong. They were giving us advice on our itinerary. The guy, well-educated and well-spoken said, “I’ve been to Auschwitz, I’ve been to Dachau, you gotta go to Tuol Sleng. No one does concentration camps like the Cambodians.”

I never saw him again but have always hated him for that remark, though I understood, when we went to Tuol Sleng a few days later, what he meant. It was an awful experience, moving and unsettling and tear-filled. We had gotten lost on the way, consulting our guide book but unable to negotiate the streets of Phnom Pehn. My friend wanted to stop people on the street and ask them for directions. I blocked her. I couldn’t imagine asking locals to think of a place like that—a former school where just 25 years before their families, their friends, their teachers, had been imprisoned and tortured—as a tourist site. How do you commemorate atrocity? How do you keep people informed and aware of the vicious vicissitudes of the past, how to educate young people in ways to foster tolerance? My intolerant father often quoted, without attribution, Santayana’s remark about the condemnation of repeating the past. How do you do this in a way that is not ham-handed?

I look at that cheerfully-framed picture of myself on the elephant, smiling and unaware, seated behind a Swastika-branded teenager. I think about the contemporary genocides, and how so many of my college students have no idea about things that have happened in their lifetime, that, as those of us who are steeped in history know, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” It makes me wonder what the best way to engage and instruct people about “HOW TERRIBLE WAR IS.”

The Authors

Ingrid Wendt

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Ingrid Wendt is the author of four full-length books and one chapbook of poems, and a book-length teaching guide. Co-editor of two anthologies, including the Oregon Poetry Anthology (OSU Press) and In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts (The Feminist Press and McGraw-Hill), her many honors include 3 Fulbright professorships to Germany, the Oregon Book Award, the Editions Prize, the Yellowglen ambien online safe Award, and  the D.H. Lawrence Award.  She is a poetry consultant for the NCTE and was “featured poet” in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of the online journal Valparaiso Poetry Review, with three new poems, an essay, and an interview by Barbara Crooker.  She and her husband, Ralph Salisbury, divide their time between Eugene and Seal Rock, Oregon.

The Authors

Richard Hoffman

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Richard Hoffman is the author of two collections of poems, Without Paradise (2002), and Gold Star Road (2007), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Book Award from The New England Poetry Club. Half the House: A Memoir won the Boston Athenaeum Readers’ Prize in 1996. His latest book is Interference and Other Stories (2009). He has twice been a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow in fiction, and recently received a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation. He is a Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston.

The Authors

Steven Harvey

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Steven Harvey is the author of three books of personal essays, the most recent entitled Bound for Shady Grove from the University of Georgia Press. He edited an anthology from Georgia called In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age and has published pieces in many magazines including Harper’s, DoubleTake, Hope, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and The Georgia Review.  He teaches English at Young Harris College and creative nonfiction in the Ashland University MFA program.

Essays

Blood Mountain ~ Steven Harvey

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Standing on the stone ledge of Blood Mountain, I have to check a foolish impulse to fly.   I put my hand to my eyes, surveying a blue that looks pristine simply because it hangs above a horizon line that is so far away, and see a soft blanket of treetops a half mile below spread in lumpy folds to a misty horizon, promising me a safe landing somewhere in Tennessee.  I inch closer to the edge and plant my feet, drawn by the power of the panorama and buoyed by an unearthly feeling of calm.  The urge to spread my arms, lean into that emptiness, and yield to infinity is hard to resist.

Just a step, I think.  It would be easy.

“Go to the mountain top & cry for a vision,” an ancient Sioux poem says.  Blood Mountain is a place where that can happen.  It looms above the Dahlonega Plateau, forming one of the last great peaks at the southern tip of the Appalachian chain where mountains give way to the wide, flat expanse of coastal plains.  The poet Byron Reece, who grew up near here, liked to lean his “elbows on the sky” that the mountain delivered to him daily and contemplate life.  A convenient guardian spirit of the place, Reece farmed a field in the mountain’s shadow, the surrounding peaks marking off what he knew of the holy.   “My heart is native to the sky,” he wrote in one poem, thinking about the hilltops of his home.  “I feel,” he added, the “wide sky entering my heart.”

And that is how I feel as I hover at the tip of all I know about the here and now, perched on the rocky outcropping at the edge of forever, the wide sky entering my heart.

I hold my breath and close my eyes.  Oh, yes.  I want this.

 

The long path to this mountain precipice began at Walasi-Yi, one of the last outposts on the Appalachian trail, the path winding uphill through hardwoods.  My older boy, Matt, and I have hiked it several times, and once, when he was seventeen and his brother, Sam, about ten, the three of us walked it together, one of those events that sinks a spike deep in the shifting sands between fathers and sons.  When we drove from our house to the trail head that day we rarely saw Blood Mountain itself, even when we were right up on it.  Unlike Brasstown Bald, the tallest peak in Georgia which stays in view along much of the highway, Blood Mountain remains hidden shyly behind a ridgeline of smaller hills that hug up to it. The tallest peak on the Georgia portion of the Appalachian trail, it is formidable, if for nothing else than its history.  According to legend, Creek and the Cherokee battled here, the blood of the dead making the streams run red, consecrating the place and giving the mountain its name.

Starting at the marker dedicated to Reece, my boys and I headed deep into the woods, the path winding wide and flat through thickets of laurel and rhododendron.  When we crossed a steam and began our ascent, the path narrowed into a sequence of switchback trails that, clearly visible in winter, stitched their way up the mountainside.  At no point could we see the mountain top, our vision obscured by the canopy of tree limbs, but I could feel our upward movement in the tug of gravity on my legs and back.  The universe was calling.

I answered with heavy breathing.

My sons didn’t seem tired at all.  They hopped from rock to rock, leapt small streams, dashed ahead and waited, laughing and talking.  I paced myself.  My eye wearied  of verticals.  Once old growth poplars and towering chestnuts shaded this landscape, and several times the boys stopped on the path ahead and gazed into the rotted circle of an enormous stump.  Blight and lumbering had killed the old trees, so we trudged an uphill trail surrounded by a young hardwood forest, oak mainly, stretching ahead like an endless series of mirrored images, vertical lines as far as I could see.  A disorienting monotony sunk in and my universe shrunk to the narrow path, the rhythm of my footsteps, and the rasp of my breath.  By the time we crested the foothill, our walk along the ridgeline relaxed into a saunter, my legs happy for the flat path, and  I longed for an overlook so that we could see what we had left behind.

 

Eventually we found one.  My boys and I stepped onto the enormous rock slabs near the summit of Blood Mountain, and I walked to the ledge where I had my insane vision.   Crows flew below me, and a small Cessna buzzed into the distance at eye level.  A hawk cut a lazy circle overhead, dragging a flittering shadow across the treetops.  Fly—yes, it looked so easy.  I saw the universe spread before me, not just mountains and streams and a blanket of trees, but the whole mighty thing, and even when I reached my hand out tentatively to break the plane of this apparition of infinite depth, I could not put the vision in perspective. The lesser hills seemed to emanate from me, the topography of the land wrenched into submission like a supplicant at my feet by a grand trompe l’oiel, even though I knew that the view was not created for my eye.  I was created for it.  I stood on the porch of the earth, and holiness held me.  The sun and moon paused high above a world lit as far as I could see.

Only when Matt shouted “hey Dad, it’s over here,” his voice the call of the familiar, did I step back and, reluctantly, turn away.

Matt had found the trail and was waving us on, but as we picked our way through boulders and gnarled, wind-stunted pines along the last stretch of path, my mind still clung to the ledge.  What is the pull of holiness?   No God had spoken to me—of that I’m sure.  When I stood at the brink of a hundred-mile view, tracing the light blue humps of hills in the distance, I did not see the hem of God’s sleeve in the ridgeline and imagine, in the spume of clouds gathered in the sky, his face leaning benevolently my way, and if I had I would have dismissed it as an illusion of my own making.  Okay, no God spoke to me, but clearly I felt something.  What exactly?

 

The word ‘holy’ offers a clue.  It shares the ancient root word kailo with the word “health” as well as a host of words we associate with well-being:  “wholesome,” “heal,” “hallow” (as in bless) and “wassail” (as in cheers!).  In its most ancient form ‘holy’ meant uninjured in the sense of complete.  Built into its earliest meaning was the idea of wholeness, the word ‘whole’ being yet another word that shares a root with the word ‘holy’.  Until we are in a holy state our lives feel fractured and undone, but in holiness we are made whole and no longer yearn for completion.

I envy those who can feel a deity’s love in such holy moments. St. John of the Cross wrote that on “one dark night” when “fired by love’s urgent longing” he left his quiet house, his only light being “the one that burned” in his heart.  With the sky moonless and the path dark, the glow within lit the way, a guiding light, he called it, more lovely than the dawn.  Eventually the radiance led to God—“Him I knew so well”—who appeared as a lover waiting at the end of the path.  “I abandoned and forgot myself,” he wrote, as he kissed his “Beloved” and lay his head on God’s breast.   Gender no longer mattered—the pronouns become confusing here—and his old sense of himself was suddenly shattered.  At that moment, “all things ceased,” he wrote, and “I went out from myself.”

All things ceased, yes, but who would not trade all he had to brush up against the lips of God?

St. Teresa, a friend of John of the Cross, suffered the stabbing pains of Christ’s lance at her breast. Sometimes in her visions Jesus wore a crown of thorns and showed her his wounds, and once he took her rosary into his hands and recast the stones into diamonds that no one else could see.  Her visions of Christ flashed so vividly before her eyes that she feared they might be from the devil, and when she explained what she saw to her superiors they agreed—and chastised her.  At their request, she snapped her fingers in the face of the next apparition of Christ, trying to make the sight go away.  It did not work.  Jesus spoke to her and gazed at her with sublime sympathy.  Afterward she could not put what she saw into words—she could not tell the color of those eyes—but she knew they watched her lovingly.  The look, the divine gaze, was real and, eventually, she came to the conclusion that these visions could not be illusions.

Who, I wonder, would not gladly suffer steel under the flesh to see the colorless all color of the eyes of God?

There was a time in human history when God spoke to everyone.  The primitive mind made little separation between itself and the rest of the universe.  Much of the lives of the ancients was spent, as the aborigines put it, in “The Dreaming.”   Able to set aside consciousness, they passed through the world the way we do through dreams, each object animated in a way that we, who understand history and are adept with language and science, cannot imagine.  In this state their lives unfolded, much as the lives of animals do I suppose, with little intention. It is not that trees spoke to them or the wind whispered any more than trees speak to us in our dreams.  Rather, they were the trees and the wind, in much the same way that all the characters in our dreams are actually us in disguise.

A vestige of this dream state clings like trailing clouds of glory to our purest religious mystics.  Jesus learned God’s will at Gethsemane.  Sioux cries for divine visions were answered.  Allah delivered the Koran to Muhammad.   Moses did hear the voice of God in the burning bush—of that I am convinced.   I believe these holy scriptures.   Modern minds, by trance or intoxicants or flagellation or fasting—by myriad devices to transform consciousness—can hear God as well.  The exhausted can hear God.  The desperate and zealous can hear God.  Even the insane can hear God.

But I can’t.

 

At the top of Blood Mountain, a stone sanctuary lies nestled among enormous slabs of rock that rise, cantilevered, out of the mountain’s summit.   Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s, it shelters hikers who need a resting place along the trail.  Ever since my first trip up the mountain, the stone cabin has held some inexplicable allure for me.  Now that I was past the precipice, it stood squat before me like the answer to some question I had been trying to formulate all of my life.  My boys and I looked through the rough window openings and saw a fireplace against the wall, a small broom, some firewood off to the side, and a doorway to a back room.  During a sudden blizzard here in the eighties, we heard stories about hikers who weathered the storm in the cabin until a helicopter crew could rescue them, and, I realized, looking inside, what a blessed haven this must have been for someone buried deep in snow.

The boys lost interest in the drab stone interior and ran off to leap the high rocks, but long after they went their way I kept looking.  Shafts of light, sprinkled with dust, cut heavy triangles into the stony space, carving out several shades of ochre in the darkness.  Light puddled on the middle of  the floor revealing ridges and textures in the stone, but the corners remained hidden in shadows.  Yes, if God could visit me, this stone cabin would be the place.

What if I told the boys to go back without me, and I spent the night here alone?  Would God visit me in this chamber?  What would he look like?  The gash of a sunbeam would cross the floor, I suppose, and glow briefly on the far wall while the shadows of broom handle and firewood grew long in the soft light.  Later, as I huddled in a corner, awaiting the divine presence, the light would dissipate and the darkness in the room would spread like an oily puddle, filling the cabin. Wind would whip through the rocks offering a sad, inhuman moan.  A rat might scuttle along the far wall and squeal.  Would God call my name?  Would the Beloved appear in the cold to warm me?  Would the eyes of God look down on me with loving sympathy?  When God visited the cabin, would he stand regally before me, his countenance shining, or would he come dressed in nighttime and cover his eyes behind a cloak of spectral moonlight?

Turning away from the cabin, I felt incomplete and yearned for that kiss against my cheek.  I saw bright blue above the thrusted rocks and wanted to gorge myself on the sky.

 

When Reece claimed that his heart was native to the sky, I think he was admitting to himself that he wanted to go home.  I don’t mean his home in the valley.  He was, by all accounts devoted to his family, taking care of both his mother and his father who contracted tuberculosis, the disease that plagued Reece and contributed to his death by suicide.  He always called himself a mountain farmer, firmly rooted in the earth.  “These hills contain me as a field, a stone,” he wrote in one poem.  When asked by a correspondent why a poet struggled to farm when “anybody could plant potatoes,” he replied that “nobody is willing to plow mine but me.”  Much of the way he saw and dealt with the world was bound up in his strong sense of place.  So, when he searched for a metaphor for the title of his poem, “Elbows on the Sky,” he found the familiar posture of philosophical farmers who “lean their weight upon a wall” while looking over their fields ripe for harvest, as they attempted to “dicker with close-fisted fate.”  No doubt Reece himself spent a good deal of his time leaning against stone walls, too, grumbling at the sky, a man driven to farm and write poetry who could support himself with neither.

But, being married to poetry as well as farming, he knew that his earthbound view was not enough.  To complete himself he had to lay claim to his birthright in the heavens, relinquishing other claims on his heart and following the lonely path of the poetic line away from the familiar.  Reece’s poetry asks for a wrenching change in perspective, a celestial vision that draws on the imagery of the land but sees our accomplishments on earth as ultimately insignificant and fleeting.  Like the crops he planted, it grows out of the soil but stretches toward the sky.  So, after the break in his sonnet, Reece asked his farmer to turn the telescope back on earth and, taking a God’s eye view of himself and his world, find relief from earthbound suffering:

Yet if he leaned but once upon a star

And saw his earth, and himself fugitive,

As long as breath could keep life’s door ajar

He would be happy but to breathe and live,

With little care for what he shall be when

Of death’s gray waste he is a citizen.

Notice the phrase “but once” hammered into these sturdily crafted lines.  “Yet if he leaned but once.”  It doesn’t take much.  A door left ajar is enough.  When Reece surveyed the world from this lonely celestial perch, the wide sky entered his heart through the opening door of his true home where he could be “happy but to breathe and live,” and death itself was irrelevant.  A glimpse was all it took.

Reece toed the poetic line on the ledge of the world that “contained him,” looking longingly at the crack of light before him, and then, when he couldn’t stand it any more, he took a step.  He was teaching at Young Harris College when he died, the same college where I teach, living in the dorm.  After he shot himself,  anxious students ran to his rooms.  Mozart was spinning on the turntable and graded exams were stacked neatly on his desk.

 

The boys and I looked around a bit, tossed a few stones into the vast open scenery about us, and decided to head back down the mountain before darkness fell.  Along the way we came across the stone ledge again, my launching pad into holiness, the rock slab facing now on a dusky sky. The sun hung low, and I knew that we had to get down the hill in a hurry, but I paused anyway.  No longer tempted to fly, I felt instead the planet’s slow turn, as its enormous penumbral shadows spread over the land, and I imagined what this scene must look like at night when the darkness above filled with a spray of stars.

It was time to go home.

That night long after the family had gone to sleep, I walked out on the porch of my house and thought about my moment at the precipice.  Stepping up to that stony edge, I had felt an impulse urging me out of my familiar—my familial—world.  I am not suicidal or depressed or heaven-haunted.  But something happened up there.  Trying to shake the thought, I stepped out from under the porch to look at the stars, but a mist had fallen over the valley obscuring the sky.  So I closed my eyes, imagining myself again on the precipice but at night this time, a map of the night sky forming above me, marked off with those familiar dotted line-drawings of godlike heroes including Orion, Cassiopeia, and the Twins enshrined in the zodiac and gliding eternally through the milky way.  Why do we fill the empty spaces with pictures of ourselves?   Why do we hunt for a familiar face in the stars?  What would happen if I erased the lines?

In the end, I did not spend the night in a mountain sanctuary isolated from those I love.  My wife slept beside me as usual in our warm and comfortable bed.  For now, at least, I live my life in the valley enveloped in work and job and family.  I harvest my own tomatoes and grade my exams.  When my son calls my name, I turn to him and cannot imagine a day that I wouldn’t.  I am no saint, to be sure.  I keep my elbows planted firmly on the porch rail and leave heaven to others.  It is the universe I feel on my cheek—not a kiss.  “Yet,” as Reece liked to say in the double vision of his poems, the hike offered a moment of aboriginal dreaminess, a glimpse of a reality on the mountain top that cannot be dismissed with the snap of the fingers.  It was a crazy impulse to fly, but I can return to it any time that I close my eyes, look hard at god walking toward me dressed as the night sky, and, yielding to infinity at last, disconnect the dots.

The Authors

L.E. Miller

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 L.E. Miller has published short stories in The Missouri Review, Scribner’s Best of Fiction Workshops 1999, and CALYX.  One of her stories was also selected as a PEN/O. Henry Prize Story for 2009.  L. E. Miller holds an M.A. in fiction writing from the University of New Hampshire.  She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and son and is completing a collection of short stories.

Fiction

Peacocks ~ L.E. Miller

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We had values.  We had Le Creuset pots.  We had fold-out couches in our living rooms, where we slept with our husbands at night.  Beside these couches, we had books stacked on the floor:  Modern Library editions of Kafka and James Joyce and Georges Sand.  Beneath these high-minded selections, we had Lorna Doone and Anne of Green Gables, touchstones from a time when reading in bed was our guiltiest pleasure.

We had blue jeans long before other women wore them.  We had degrees in literature and anthropology and biology, hard-won in night classes at City College.  We had aspirations but did not yet have careers.  We had cookbooks with French recipes that confounded us.  For a few years, we tried to muddle through until we gave up on the fancy dinners our children despised and turned back to the roasted meats of our childhoods.

And we all had children: two or three apiece, whose strollers we tucked beneath the stairways in our buildings.

 

We were individuals, of course, but we seemed so much alike, I still speak of us today in the plural.  Each of us had endured bookish, lonely childhoods in the outer boroughs; we had been the pride and bane of our immigrant parents’ lives.  When we found one another along the broad avenues of what, growing up, we had reverentially called The City, we recognized one another as landsmen, all of us dark-haired women who carried the inflections of our parents’ Yiddish in our speech.  Our cramped apartments were fine with us; we would never in a million years live in some bourgeois outpost in Long Island, and the only way we’d return to Brooklyn was in a coffin.  We called ourselves The Quorum.  We called ourselves the Collective Unconscious of the Upper West Side.

Our children played in a bleak little playground near the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.  We invaded the place with our sand toys and tricycles, the bags we packed with apples and breadsticks.  While we pushed our children on the swings, we talked about Carl Jung, whom we understood in a handful of telegraphed phrases, and Ingmar Bergman, whose films played downtown and which we desperately wanted to see.  On the grounds of the Cathedral, several peacocks wandered freely.  Sometimes, we took our children over to see them, although the great birds frightened us with their manic darting, their unholy screaming and reputation for viciousness.  The hens were a dull gray, nothing much to look at, but the males were magnificent.  I think we wished to see ourselves in them: rare and graced, transcendent in their vaguely shabby setting.

It was during this time of strollers and failed cassoulets that Rebecca Redl moved into the building where I lived with my husband and our two boys.  I first saw her sitting on the stairs, reading a book.  Instinctively, she shifted her body while men in brown uniforms lifted chairs and bookcases up and over her head.  At first glimpse, I took her for a girl of twelve or thirteen, because at that age, I, too, would have read through the apocalypse.  Her hair fell to her shoulders, black as obsidian.  My first impulse was to touch it, the way it shined.  Although the shirt she wore was so big and loose it nearly swallowed her whole, her loveliness had a sleek economy, as it is with certain lucky girls before their bodies assume an adult’s heft and gravity.

A few steps below, a little girl with the same dark hair smoothed and re-smoothed her skirt over her knees.

On the second-floor landing, a man smoked a cigarette and gave curt direction to the men who carried the furniture up the stairs.  This man was tall and lean and had cropped silvery hair.  Later, I would learn that he was her husband, his name was Eric Redl, and he was a professor of philosophy at Barnard, some ten blocks north.  I don’t remember how I came to know these things.   Rebecca and I never exchanged such information about our lives.

The little girl buried her face in her hands when I introduced myself, and Rebecca, with some reluctance, it seemed, told me her own and her daughter’s name.  I asked Rebecca what she was reading, and she held up a thick hardcover.  Buddenbrooks.  I hadn’t read Buddenbrooks, but I told her I had loved the hundred and twenty pages of The Magic Mountain I had managed to complete while my sons napped.

“I wouldn’t say I ‘love’ this book,” she replied in a way that foreclosed further discussion.  Nonetheless, I was willing to look the other way.  I felt generous then.  I had a husband whom I both loved and respected; I had two healthy, vigorous boys; I enjoyed the company of like-minded women.  I told Rebecca about us, how we met at the little playground near the Cathedral every morning, and how her daughter would have instant friends.

“Instant friends,” Rebecca echoed, and I heard in the blankness of her voice the simple-mindedness of my presumption.

Later, I made soup for her, my mother’s vegetable bean.  The day after I delivered it, she left the pot outside my door, scrubbed clean and without any sort of note inside.

 

I was surprised, then, when Rebecca showed up with her daughter at the playground a few days later.  The little girl, whose name was Vera, wandered over to the edge of the sandbox.  Clutching her doll, she watched the other children dig.

In a manner of speaking, Rebecca became part of our group, but she held herself above it, like someone who refuses to join the party and demonstrates her refusal further by waiting outside the room on a wooden chair.  The two of them would arrive late in the morning, Rebecca wearing a man’s shirt and Vera a perfect little dress.  Rebecca would nudge her daughter to go play, but Vera stood to the side with her doll while her mother read on the bench.  Sometimes, one of us prompted our children to give her a turn with a tricycle or shovel, but whenever she was offered, Vera just shook her head and gnawed on her doll’s soft arm.

It crossed my mind that Vera might be mentally retarded, and I told myself that would be a terrible thing, a tragic thing, for a clearly intellectual woman like Rebecca.  But one day, Vera approached as I was unpacking my boys’ snack.  Her eyes widened as she watched me hand out Fig Newtons and pour juice from the Thermos.  She stared while Joel and Peter devoured their food in thirty seconds flat.  Over on the bench, Rebecca turned a page in her book.  I handed Vera a cookie, and she wolfed it down.  I thought nothing of it.  We mothers fed and comforted one another’s children all the time.  I handed Vera a second cookie, which also disappeared in the wink of an eye.

“These cookies are my favorite kind,” she piped in a voice as pretty as a bell.  Then she skipped away, back toward her mother.

“I gave your daughter two Fig Newtons,” I told Rebecca at the bench, when I saw her fold down a page to mark her place.

“Oh.”  She glanced up in my general direction.

“I hope that’s all right.  I know people feel differently about sugar and so on.”

Rebecca laughed sharply.  “I have no opinion about sugar.”

Vera looked down and raked her fingers through her doll’s hair.

“I wasn’t sure what to do…she just seemed so hungry.”

“She had breakfast at nine.”

“I just know that some days, my boys get hungry every hour….”

When Rebecca blinked, I noticed, because her gaze had been perfectly steady until then.  With that blink, I knew, she’d put her essential self out of reach.

But I pressed on, with a dogged insistence on good will, at which I both marvel and cringe today.  “What are you reading?”

“La Nausée.”

It took a moment for the information to compute.  “I admire your powers of concentration.  Most days, I wouldn’t trust myself to get through a fashion magazine.”

Rebecca stood up.  “You’ve been very nice, but I think it’s best to be honest.  I am not interested in friendship.”  Her voice was neutral, not unkind.

“Fair enough,” I said, as lightly as I could manage.  I walked back to the sandbox and called my sons out for lunch.

 

“I want to be friends with you,” my husband said when I rehashed the exchange that night, after the boys had gone to bed.

“I know, I know, but it’s just so rude.  I mean, what did I do?  Gave her kid a couple of cookies.  The crime of the century.”

“She wanted you to know what you can expect from her.  At least she was direct.”

“You’re no help.”

“Like I said, I like you.”  Harry pulled me toward him.

 

It was a temptation I couldn’t resist: letting drop a few sideways comments to the others while she read on the bench in the park.  La Nausée!  Why couldn’t she just say it in English?  Dresses her daughter up in fancy clothes but can’t be bothered to bring a snack.  Why do some people even have children?  Even today I wonder: why was I so undone by this woman’s refusal to count me as one of her own?

One memory I’d almost forgotten but seems important now to recount: once, at the park, I heard Rebecca singing softly while Vera danced around her, swooping and twirling like a top.  When I moved closer, I recognized it, the same wordless, minor-key melody my mother used to sing to me.  Rebecca met my gaze, soft and open for just a moment, until she turned away and closed her arm around her daughter.

 

It was fall, then winter.  The weather and a spate of colds kept me and my sons away from the park.  The colds turned into croup, and I spent several nights with each of them outside the steaming shower and many days trying to keep them occupied in our small rooms.  By this time, Rebecca and I exchanged only brief nods when we passed in the hallway.  Often it was easier to feign absorption in the mail or my grocery bags and pretend I never saw her at all.

One day, Eric Redl appeared at my door, dressed for work and carrying a briefcase.  It was a Tuesday morning, nine-thirty, and already my living room looked like a shipwreck.  Vera stood beside him, clutching his arm.  When I stepped toward them, she sidled closer to her father, as if she’d climb inside his body if she could.

“Would you mind?” Eric asked.  “I have to teach a class at ten, but I’ll be back after that.”

“Of course.”  I reached for Vera’s hand, but she pulled away.   She wore a mismatched skirt and sweater.  Her chin was streaked with jam.

Eric leaned toward me.  “Rebecca’s gone,” he whispered.

“Gone?  Where did she go?”

“Apparently Paris.”

“Paris?”

“That’s what it said in her note.”

            She took off for Paris without so much as looking back…Already, I’d begun composing the story I’d tell the others, but then I saw Eric kneel down and rest his hands on Vera’s shoulders.  I caught the terror in his eyes.   “I’ll be back in one hour.  The big hand will make one circle around the clock.  Not too long, right?”  He spoke quickly, as if he could build with his words a fort no grief could enter.  But children always know.  Vera clung to him and sobbed.  Even Joel and Peter came over to stare with alarmed curiosity.

Over coffee in one other’s kitchens, we floated theories about Rebecca’s disappearance.  Most of these centered on a secret lover.  Didn’t we all dream of sitting in a Left Bank café with some dapper Jean-Pierre?  About this we agreed: she was a terrible mother to have done such a thing.

 

I might have left it alone, chalked it up to the unfathomable mysteries of the human heart and forgotten her entirely.  But one afternoon, while the boys were napping, I went out to the common storage space beneath the stairs to look for the gifts I had previously hidden for Peter’s birthday.  Crouching there, I retrieved the items I had stashed in a shopping bag—a toy truck, a picture book, a rubber ball—but I couldn’t find the clown doll I had also purchased.  When I looked in a second bag, stuffed behind our neighbors’ box of Passover dishes, I found not the doll but a stack of ten or more composition books.  I believed at first the books were mine.  I had filled dozens of such books for my college courses, transcribing my professors’ every word about the Krebs cycle or the atrocities of Robespierre.  By doing so, I believed I was freeing myself, fact by fact, from the narrow expectations that had confined my parents’ lives.  But when I moved into the light and opened one of the notebooks I found not my own tidy print but a script so sprawling and wild it burst beyond the lines on the page.

            March 26, 1954.  Weltschmerz.  Literally, it means world-pain, but Professor Redl told me it is the distance between the world as you want it to be and the world as it really is. Why doesn’t everyone feel this?  How can one have a brain and not feel this gulf?

Professor Redl?  On the journal’s inside cover, I found printed in somewhat neater block letters:  The Journals of Rebecca Zaperstein, November 1953-July 1954.  Then one of my boys called me back, and I had to leave everything under the stairs.

 

When Eric stopped by to ask if I could watch Vera again while he taught class, I could have pulled him aside and told him about the journals.  But I did not.  I did want to part with them yet.  I was curious.  I was nosy.  I was what my mother used to call a kokhlefele, a meddler.  That afternoon, while Joel and Peter napped, I went back under the stairs and pulled out one of the notebooks.  I read hurriedly, hunched with the flashlight, poised for the sound of footsteps.

            September 14, 1953.  Mama was wrong.  Barnard is no different from anywhere else.  I have nothing in common with the other girls.  All they care about is finding a husband.  By now I should know better.  Very few people care about books and ideas, which are as essential to me as air and water.

I had little sympathy for rich Barnard girls.  I myself had worked six days a week as bundle girl at Abraham & Straus through my years at City College; I’d studied for exams during my lunch hour.

October 17, 1953.  I have never been one to cry but these days I am crying all the time.  Today I was reading Wordsworth and I felt such a strong yearning for the kind of quiet he said is necessary for one truly to perceive the world.  I wish I could be happy with what I have in front of me: the leisure to read and write and think.  But it is my curse to want more, to yearn for something higher, something I can’t even name.

           

One afternoon, Eric stopped me in the hallway with a brush of his hand.   “Did she ever mention another man?  A lover?”

“No.  Never.”

“But you and she were friends.”

Friends?  I recalled Rebecca’s blank, incredulous voice.

 

Three mornings a week, I watched Vera so Eric could teach his seminar.  I bundled up the children so they could play outside after a snowstorm.  I made play dough for them out of flour and salt.  But like a drinker who wakes each morning with the best intentions to stop and loses his resolve by lunch, I left the apartment every afternoon with my flashlight to read more from Rebecca’s journals.

 

November 5, 1953.  Today is my birthday.  I am eighteen.  I feel nothing about this because all my life I have felt old. 

            January 15, 1954. Come out with us, my roommates keep telling me. You’re so pretty, they say, as if that has anything to do with it.

 

            A woman with her head on straight: that was how I was always known.  And I would have described myself in much the same way.  It seemed I’d been born knowing there was a gap between our ideal vision of the world and its untidy reality; the matter had never caused me great pain.   But in the process of reading Rebecca’s journals, I began to mistrust my own balance.  Were my own bonds flimsier than I knew?  Was my contentment about to shatter under more rigorous scrutiny?

 

            January 28, 1954.  I asked Professor Redl why he thinks modern thought begins with Descartes and not with Locke or Hobbes, and he explained that Descartes applied rigorous science, in essence, to “doubt-proof” his ideas and that he treated knowledge itself as a measurable property.  I told him I find Descartes bloodless and he said Montaigne will be my reward.

            February 13.  When I asked Professor Redl why he gave me a B- on my paper, he told me I had under-explained the Mind-Body Problem.  He told me I took too modern a view in my discussion of it and did not adequately look at the question of faith.  He said he always grades hard on the first paper and he was especially hard on me because he knows how much more I can do.    

            March 20.  Professor Redl said to be careful of falling too much in the thrall of Schopenhauer.  He warned me against confusing alienation with freedom.  He said refusal is seductive but it takes much more rigor to arrive at a genuine, soundly reasoned yes.

            March 31.  Professor Redl speaks the most beautiful French.  When he read aloud in class today, all meaning vanished in the music of the language.

            April 4.   Where does desire dwell?  I’d imagine Descartes would say in the body, along with hunger, thirst and the need for sleep, but I cannot imagine it as just a physical impulse, at least not for me, since in my (limited) experience there is always the mental element, which, though unrelated to bodily sensation, I have felt as strongly as anything in my body.

April 16.  Eric was right about Montaigne.  I see what he means about his startlingly modern aesthetic.

Had they already crossed the line that normally separates professor and student, or had Eric simply begun to occupy a more intimate place in Rebecca’s mind?  I, too, had fallen for several of my professors, not because they were especially handsome, but because they had introduced me to the suppleness of my own intellect.  Although these crushes were not rooted in the physical, I noticed every physical aspect of those men: the slant of their handwriting, whether or not they wore wedding rings, the rhythm and sonority of their speech.  It was men like Eric who affected me the most, the serious, unyielding ones, whose terse words of praise kept me nourished for weeks.

            June 16, 1954.  Today Eric took me to see the sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.  A revelation!  I sat for an hour just looking at “Bird in Flight.” Eric is like the sculptures of Brancusi: very spare, abstracted, but underneath writhing with a wild force.  We walked back through the park talking about how art is a much more powerful medium than language for expressing the complications of human perception.  Suddenly we realized that fifty years ago today Leopold Bloom walked through Dublin’s streets.  Eric bought me a rose to commemorate.

            July 7.  Making love is absurd and freeing and profound all at once.  I pity all those girls their preoccupations with rings and respect and reputations and who owes whom what.  

            July 19.  E. and I talked today about going to Paris.  We could just go, he said.  He said I shouldn’t worry about finishing my degree.   I will learn much more just reading and being sentient in the world.  He said in Europe men and women live together all the time without the formality of marriage.  To be free!  To read!  To walk!  I said yes!  We drank wine to celebrate.

            August 27.  Pregnant.  I can’t believe my body betrayed me this way.

            August 31.  I talked to Eric about getting an operation, but he cried when I even mentioned it.  I love you.  I want to marry you, he said.  These are the words other girls wait their whole lives to hear.  Even though it was 95 degrees out, I began to shiver.  I couldn’t stop, not even when Eric put his arms around me.

            September 12.  City Hall wedding.  Grotesquely fat clerk, Professor Steinsaltz as witness. We went out for lunch afterwards, but as always I felt too sick to eat.

            February 27.  E. took me shopping for baby things.  The layette. The lady kept piling things on the counter and no matter what she showed him Eric just smiled and acquiesced. By the time we were done we had so many bags we had to take a taxi home.   At home I let him unpack everything.  Afterwards he just stood and stared at me as I lay on the bed.  He asked, are you not happy at all about this?          

            April 13, 1955.  Home with baby.  Feed her, change her diapers, try to comfort her when she cries.  These things should be simple but she stiffens and screams after her bottle and there’s nothing I can do to soothe her.

Vera colored at the table while Joel and Peter built houses from blocks and then torpedoed them with toy airplanes.  Unconsciously, she stuck her tongue out when she colored, as if reaching for some bit of knowledge that dangled just beyond her.  When I went over to see what she was drawing, she covered the paper with her hands and twisted her body toward the wall.

One day, though, she came over to me and tugged gently on one of my curls.  I crouched to let her twine my hair around her finger.  That was all she wanted, to twist my hair and watch it spring back when she let go.

 

            May 3.  Tried to read “Ward 6” but kept loosing the thread of the sentence by the time I got to the end.    Comprehension swims within my grasp then V. starts to cry again.  E. says to forget Chekhov for now and concentrate on Vera.  He gets to continue with his work.  Am I supposed to give up everything just because we have a baby?

            May 6, early morning.  Up all night with V.  Every time I put her down, she cried.  I was the one who got up each time because E. has to teach class today.  He says I can sleep when she sleeps.  But she only sleeps when I hold her and yesterday when I fell asleep in the chair I almost dropped her.

            June 25.  Why don’t you take a walk, E. keeps saying.  Fresh air will do you good.  So today I put V. in the carriage and walked up to campus.  At first it felt good to walk in the sunlight, but I’d forgotten the semester was over and the place would be deserted. Still I sat on the steps of Milbank Hall and hoped to see anyone who might remember me. 

            July 1.  At dinner E. talks nonstop about his work.  He drones on and on and on, so in love with the sound of his voice.  I count the minutes until he’s done and I can wash the dishes in peace.

            July 16.  E. is angry that I no longer want to sleep with him but he is too much of a coward to have it out.  I cannot stand the feeling of his hands, his hunger, on my bloated body.  He is weak in the same ways I am weak.  I have no respect for him, no love, no affinity.

 

“Have any of you read The Red and the Black?”

“Ha.  That’s a good one.  I don’t think I have the brain cells anymore.”

“I think Danny has some kind of inner alarm that goes off whenever I pick up a book.  He can be in another room, but the moment I turn the page, it’s ‘Mommy, Mommy.’”

“It’s moments like that when I think putting them in Skinner’s box wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

“Is it really possible to live on peanut butter sandwiches?  If so, Jenny will be living proof.”

“I put dinner on the table and give everyone two choices: take it or leave it.”

“Rebecca what’s-her-name would be rolling her eyes at this conversation.”

“She’d only care if it were in a book written in French.”

I said that.  Everyone laughed, but the satisfaction I got from laughing flickered and died.

 

            August 8.  The ring of flame around the burner, the knives in the drawer, the mouse pellets under the sink.  Escape beckons in every corner of the house.

 

When Harry played with the boys, their shrieking laughter sounded muted to me, as if I stood apart, behind a wall of thick glass.  When Joel and Peter bickered, I barely heard their rising voices; I sat at the table, adrift in Rebecca’s words, until Joel hit Peter on the head with the birthday truck.  I shouted at him.  I dragged him by the arm into the bedroom and it gave me a small but terrifying satisfaction to slap him.  While Joel howled behind the door, Peter began crying, too.  I didn’t go to him.  I just sat at the table with a can of Harry’s beer.  Had I once been a hungry, nervous student at Bronx Science with my sights on medical school?  Peter crawled into my lap, wiped his face on my shirt, claimed his comfort.  All I could do was rub his small, hot back.

And there was Eric.  He had enrolled Vera in a nursery school, but every few days I saw him in the hallway, leading her by the hand.  How are you, I’d ask.  We’re getting by, he’d answer, but his face was abject.  Sorrow deepens some people’s beauty, and this was true of him.  His gleaming surfaces had been abraded, and I detected something passionate, almost devotional, about his grief.

How are you really? I asked him one day when he was alone, and he told me Vera had wakened several times in the night, calling out for her mother.  It’s very hard, I offered in reply.

Eric grabbed me and pinned me against the wall.  I braced myself for a slap.  I did not try to shield myself or shout at him to stop.  Whatever happened next would be the logical result of my trespasses.  He pressed himself against me and kissed me, with all of Harry’s ardor and none of his tenderness.  I felt Eric’s erection, but I understood this as a purely physical response, nothing to do with me.  His kiss was as good as a slap.  I brushed my teeth five, six times that day, but all day I tasted his smoky breath.

 

            January 14, 1956.  V. began crawling today.  She looks like a crab with her left leg stuck out straight.  As she made her way across the floor she laughed her low bewitching chuckle. I know one thing: I love this girl.

            September 28, 1956.  Vera loves to hide her doll under a cushion or behind the window blinds.   She shrieks with glee every time she finds it.  I’m surprised at my own enjoyment of this game.  V. is thrilled to find her doll every time!

            February 12, 1957.  I see now that the answer to my survival is to live a divided life.  While I did not choose my current circumstances, I can accept them.  I can play the wife, iron E.’s shirts, proof-read his papers.  Meanwhile I can hold myself apart:  private, inviolable.

            May 3, 1958.  Our new apartment is sunny.  V. loves to run up and down the long hallway.  The extra bedroom will be my study.  I think I’ll hang white curtains in the window.

            July 18.  Today was a perfect, cloudless summer day.  Decided to take V. to the carousel at Central Park.  We walked all the way, and the air smelled of pressed linen.  She chose a white horse, and I took the black one beside her.  We rode the carousel three times.  Simple pleasure, what other people feel all the time.  Before we started back I bought us each an ice cream.  When the man handed her the cone, V. pressed her lips against it.  I love today, she said, and I told her I did too.

            Oct. 26.  V. and I played tea party and then we played school and then hospital.  When I finally told her I wanted to read, she lay on the floor and cried.  I locked myself in the bathroom but of course one cannot escape oneself.   

            December 3.  I hope to God E. never reads this.  V. horrible all day, whining about everything.  Dragged her shopping and when I was done she planted herself in the middle of the aisle and refused to move.  No matter what I said she refused.  Finally, I walked away.  She didn’t move.  I walked up to the door, but she kept standing there.  I waited a few more minutes then left the store.  I thought she’d come running after me but when I reached the end of the block she wasn’t there.  I watched the cars stream past thinking I should just go on; she’d be better off without me.  How do people do it?  How did Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary find the courage to do it?   Someone honked and I realized where I was and what I’d done: I’d left my daughter alone in a store.  I ran back and found her up front eating a lollipop.  She’d been crying so hard her eyes were red.  The clerk’s face was filled with silent accusation.   I hugged V. and told her I love her, I never meant to leave her.  On the way home I bought her an ice cream, but it just made her shiver to eat it.  A few blocks later she got sick all over everything.  Back home I cleaned her up, but I was not as tender as I should have been.   No one knows what it’s like to fail every day at the thing that comes so easily to everyone else.

The journal ended here.  On December Fourth, Eric had come to me with the news that Rebecca had left.   I pressed my palm against her careening script and remembered how, at the park, she had sung just for Vera, how they’d shared their private dance.  I wished my touch could travel through those pages to offer her some measure of peace.  At the same time, I wanted to be rid of her.  I closed the notebook.  I left everything as I’d found it under the stairs.

Back at the apartment, I’d left the front door wide open.  I rushed into the boys’ bedroom, where they were still napping.  I nearly fell to my knees to see them there, unharmed.  Sleep revealed the residual plumpness in Peter’s face, but in the past few weeks, Joel’s body had assumed lankier, more grownup proportions.  For almost an hour, I stood in the doorway and watched them sleep.  I could not stop drinking in their beauty, but I knew I had to wake them or else they’d be wild all night.  Finally, I roused each one with a kiss on his sweaty hair.

That night, Harry and I sat together and listened to Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet.  When the yearning second movement came on, I took his hand.  I always loved Harry’s hands: their square, honest shape; the printer’s ink that ringed his nails despite his daily washing with a pungent soap.     I moved closer and inhaled his scent: the cleaning solvents, the metallic tinge from the type and slugs, the Schlitz beer he drank after work.

“Let’s move this operation to the bedroom,” he murmured.  We unfolded our bed and began undressing as the Quintet ended.  We made love for the first time in several weeks and afterwards, I felt both absolved and chastened.  I had, in a manner of speaking, committed an infidelity.  I had been unfaithful to the person I had, until recently, believed I was.

 

The next evening, I told Harry I was going out for a walk.  I put on my coat and boots and then retrieved the bag of notebooks from underneath the stairs.

Behind Eric’s door, swing music played.  My heartbeat was louder and more insistent than my knock.  The music went quiet, and a minute later, Eric appeared, in stocking feet.  His face looked bloated with sleep.  I could not place him in the same universe with his urgent lips and tongue two weeks earlier or the Glenn Miller he had just shut off.  One of his toes poked out from a hole in his sock.  I could smell the spirits on his breath.

He said, “What can I do for you after you’ve done so much for me?”

I recognized but did not traffic easily in irony.  “Rebecca left some journals under the stairs.  I just found them.  I thought you’d want to know.”  I held out the bag.  My voice was as fast and nervous as a child’s.

Eric took the bag, and everything else fell away, all his cleverness and courage and rage, everything except the sorrow that was always present in him, like the bass line in a song.

“I looked all over the apartment for these.  She wrote in them feverishly, you might say obsessively.  After she left, I looked everywhere for them and when I couldn’t find them, I assumed she burned them.   It seems like something she’d do, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, of course not.  Why would you?”

I began worrying the skin around my fingernails.   “Anyway, I thought you’d want them.  I knew they were hers because she wrote her name in the front.”

Eric didn’t register this evasion.  He was muzzy with inebriation.   “She was only eighteen when we met.  Yearning and intense.  The kind of student professors wait for and dread a little.  The material was difficult, but she thrived on the difficulty.”

“I wish I’d had the chance to know her better.”

His laugh was a strangled yelp.  “You can reach her at the poste restante.”

I smiled, baffled by the foreign words.  I still wanted him to think highly of me; I wanted to be able to think highly of myself.  “Come over for supper sometime.  You and Vera.”

He rubbed his eyes.   “Marvelous idea.  Thank you.  We will.”

 

Not long afterwards, Eric and Vera moved out.  The same uniformed movers arrived, but this time they made the trip in reverse.  They whisked the furniture down the stairs to the van double-parked outside.

I told myself I had done the right thing, giving him the journals.   While many of the passages had to have caused him pain, the pain would be resolved with time, whereas his not-knowing would never be resolved, and he and Vera would be stuck in a perpetual state of waiting.

One thing was clear:  Rebecca loved Vera as best she could.  Didn’t they have the right to know?

 

That spring, a young woman began taking Vera to the park.  We couldn’t help staring: this new woman was tall and full-bodied.  She glowed with sunny good health.  She helped Vera climb to the top of the slide and cheered her on when she slid down.  She looked like a Swedish film star, a completely different species from us.

Vera had a pail and shovel for digging in the sand.  She now played as children do, ferociously and without any trace of self-consciousness, until the blonde, whom we’d secretly named the Big Swede, called her home.

One afternoon, Eric Redl appeared in the park.  His hair was trim again.  His eyes caught mine, but he maintained the smooth, impersonal look of a man whose desires were being satisfied.  I stood with the other mothers when Vera ran over to hug him.  We watched him swing her around and we watched him kiss The Big Swede on the lips.

He didn’t let the grass grow, we said to one another.

 

Over time, many of us, the old guard, the Collective Unconscious, have spoken of our children’s earliest years.  We have spoken of our fatigue and boredom and the aspect of performance, which is one of motherhood’s dirty little secrets, and of the loneliness we felt even in one another’s company.  We entered a more confessional age, and so we confessed: our rage and despair and lust and envy, our abortions and affairs.  From time to time I thought of Rebecca and her courage to write the unspeakable, and I thought of Eric and the secrets we never should have shared.  Although I always thought of her with regret and good wishes, I never spoke of finding my dark double in those pages until now.

Many of us live in the suburbs where we swore we’d never set foot and also have condos in Florida.  Many of us are dead.  Harry died last year, and although people say the pain does ease, I am still waiting for this to be true.

I continue to live in the old building.  After a period of decline, the place is full again with children.  The mothers, and a few stay-at-home fathers, use the same park as we once did, near the Cathedral.  On warm days, I like to walk over there, although I’m nearly invisible now, a woman of eighty, sitting alone on the bench with my cup of deli coffee.  I watch the children playing—the wild ones, the preternaturally kind ones, and the silent observers—and their parents watching over them: all of them beautiful, preening, fragile.