All the Dancing Birds (5 page)

I brighten. “I guess it could be fun. All right, then, let’s give that Nootka place some thought. See if you can get some brochures, and I’ll see if my closet holds any come-hither fishing attire to drive those old lodge boys crazy.” Allison laughs.

We walk to the car, hand-in-hand, our heads swooning with wine and beer and thoughts of burly fishermen, black and white orcas, and pontoon-clad float planes, lifting, lifting, lifting us.

YOU SMILE. You smile at your daughter as you walk across the parking lot, plastic bags filled with cartons of leftover Chinese food dangling loosely from your hands. Those three small glasses of red wine now color the corners of your lips, making them seem to smile even when your lips have gone flat. You chat to your daughter in chirpy, breathless words, your hair swinging in the wind like the bags in your hands. You place the food on the roof of your car while you unlock the doors. You slide in and buckle up, your lips all the while broadly grinning. You start the engine and press the accelerator like you know what you’re doing. You do. You know exactly what you’re doing. Then you look in your rearview mirror and you see your bags of food spilled onto the ground behind you‌—‌your daughter standing over the mess, her face spilled into the perplexity of having been forgotten. Suddenly, you don’t know how you could cause so many things to crash and spill in such a very, very short time.

I sheepishly drive back and help Allison scoop up ruptured boxes of egg foo yung and gravy, broccoli beef, Chef’s special spicy chicken, and dollops of steamed and fried rice. We squat before the headlights of my car, scooping and laughing. We fuss over the spoiled food and the ridiculous sight of it all. At some point, we stop laughing while the silence of embarrassment falls over us like heavy dark shawls across our shoulders. There are no words for a mother who drives away without her daughter or for the daughter who’s had to then stoop and pick up the evidence of her mother’s unseemly forgetfulness.

I hold a constrained and confused posture on the drive home. When we arrive, Allison walks me to the door and pecks my cheek. Her kiss feels abrupt, as if I should apologize again and again for my terrible slight. I enter the clamorous sounds of an old house that clicks and drips and creaks across my ears. Sadly, the house seems to have forgotten its manners as it chatters on and on in every room.

The house should know I need for it to be quiet just now.

Still unnerved by my unfortunate parking lot performance, I wander to the closet with the intention of consulting my cedar box. It’s my new source of comfort and I plan to let it work its magic. I pluck out a random letter as one would pull a tarot card from a Gypsy’s deck of symbols.

I select my card and read my past.

My Children:

If I tell you anything at all, I should tell you about poetry. Your MeeMaw taught me about poetry before I knew much of anything else. Of course, it was surprising that a Southern wife of a sawmill worker would have such interest‌—‌to teach her small child about poetry‌—‌but nonetheless, that was what your MeeMaw did.

Every afternoon we sat on the porch with books spread open like birds’ wings in full flight, flashing across an endless sky of words. We read out loud, counting meter and foot, traveling worlds we knew we would never see unless we walked on the legs of poetry. I learned over heat-soaked summer afternoons that, even in its most subtle mood, a work of poetry often walks in rhythm, tapping its words out in some sort of cadence and beat.

Poetry’s legs are meant for walking, for dancing‌—‌but mostly, poetry is for traveling‌—‌to other places, other worlds. To other thoughts and imaginations.

Nearly every day, we sat on the porch, reading sonnets and free verse from the old masters and lighthearted rhymes from the moderns. We marveled over the bravery of every haiku poet and made up our own laughable alphabet poems. With every piece, Ma made me carefully count out each line. Even to this day, before I can befriend a work of poetry, I must study the way it walks, or how it dances across the floor, or if it has the strength to push my heart from here to there.

Poetry isn’t like a brother or sister you grow up with and you know their mood simply by the way they drop down into the chair next to you, or laugh with you, or poke at the backside of your arm with their knuckles. No. Every work of poetry is a stranger until you discover its ways. Its benevolence or its malice. Ma once told me that you can never go off with a stranger and expect you’ll be brought safely back home. She said it’s the same with poetry. You have to know about its character before you can go walking off with it.

I don’t know why I never taught you these vital truths. In defense, maybe it is that poets are sadly more comfortable sliding words onto paper, rather than just talking things over like normal folks.

Of course, I struggled over Ma’s books, but she sat next to me every day, her arm about my shoulder, guiding me through grand passages of words and thought from her beloved masters. Ma was diligent and urgent in teaching me the language of adults.

Ma’s eyes gave her no choice but to be industrious in her lessons; day by day, they dimmed, moving her deeper into a widening swath of darkness.

The doctor said nothing could be done. Ma seemed brave about it and Pa wouldn’t speak of it, but now and then I saw her rubbing her eyes, trying to force sight into them with all the panic of the newly blind who walk with their arms extended awkwardly in front of their bodies, clutching at the sky for some sort of bearing.

Ma’s only solution was to make me her eyes; at nine years old, I held books in my lap by the likes of William Faulkner and James Joyce, George Moses Horton and Eudora Welty. T. S. Elliott, Mark Twain, John Milton and even Edgar Alan Poe. Southern writers, all‌—‌except, of course, Joyce and Milton. Still, Ma said Joyce counted because he was Irish and the South was populated with the hardscrabble Irish, and Milton counted because he was as much a Southern gentleman as any, even though he was nearly older than God and had never spent a lick of time in the South. Still, Ma loved John Milton the most because God (whom she said was only minutes older than Milton) had struck him blind just like God had done to her.

Although we read whatever the traveling library had to offer, Ma mostly loved poetry. She said poetry was the most truthful writing of all words because it takes a brave pen to say what the lips don’t have the courage to utter.

Until I found my own brave pen and the comfort of contemporary poetry, I thought much of the poetry we read was strident and unforgiving with its hemmed-in structure and unrelenting rules. Still, I had to admire Shakespeare and Milton, along with others who wrote blank verse with such sparkling, frightening words. Within a few lines, my heart would fall into a poem’s rhythm. I was amazed that entire stories could be confined within a fence of ten syllables per line, and yet I was captured by words that seemed like pointed stones meant to pierce the skin and strike the heart.

Even before I knew the technique of scansion and marking accents that show the stressed syllables in each line, I knew that unrhymed blank verse lines, each written all in the same meter, were well more than a simple de-
dum
, de-
dum
, de-
dum
, just as my heart knew it was immensely greater than its own iambic lub-
dub,
lub-
dub,
lub-
dub.

Of course, the sonnets are another story.

I’ll leave that discussion for a different letter because sonnets need a long, unclouded afternoon and a bottle of good wine to get through all their intricacies.

All my love,

Mother

P. S. With all this talk of poetry, I’m inspired to start a sonnet especially for you. Wish me luck with that!

My letter works to distract from the way this day has surged in waves of ups and downs. Now I think only of Ma and how I wish she could have known my Allison and Bryan when they were children, wild as waves whipping up over the shore. How she would have smiled over them, pulling them into the folds of her apron, calming them inside her smiles with the scent of flour and lemon that was always deep within the cloth of that apron.

She would have patted their heads and smoothed their hair with hands that smelled of flour and lemon, just like her apron. She would have loved them dearly and carried on with them as she did with me. Most importantly, she would have sat them down with her beloved writers who were always so deeply entwined within every conversation on her Southern porch.

I wonder if after all these years, heaven placed Ma in my closet so I could read of her now, holding a letter to my breast, rocking it like Ma once rocked me.

I wonder if it’s my delicacy, my stupid, stupid delicacy that turns me over and shakes me out like salt and light across the polished floorboards of this old house.

This stupid, stupid delicate, polished body.

What I wouldn’t give right now for Ma to pull me into the folds of her apron with her hands scented with pie dough and squeezed lemon, in the midst of my pity and fright, to quietly hold me there until my rolling mind lies flat and emptied from all this catapulting misery. But I roll on.

And I roll on.

Chapter Five

I
’m clever. So deliciously clever!

I’ve discovered that sticky notes can be expanded far beyond the bathroom mirror and refrigerator door. My use of them is genius. I’ve taken now to carrying a pad of these little ingenious papers in my pocket, along with a ballpoint pen, and when I think to do something in another room, I write a note about it before going there. Then I simply stick the little snippet of paper to the top of my thumb.

If I remember to look at my hand when I reach my destination, I consider it a decidedly good trip.

I invite my children for dinner, confident that an array of sticky notes placed in strategic points will serve as little yellow squares of grace and mercy.

Yes, I’m surely a genius.

I smile broadly as I answer the door and I continue to smile as I pour generous glasses of wine‌—‌lighter fluid-flavored Chardonnay for Bryan (the traitor) and a rich-noted, chocolate and cherry cabernet, of course, for Allison and me.

We smile and clink glasses to the day.

Bryan looks at me with eyes the color of blue ice. They are beautiful and I nearly tell him so. I think better of it, though, managing to stay close-lipped about his never-ending loveliness. A mother shouldn’t disrupt the manliness of her son, even when his hands‌—‌oh, those hands that seemed only yesterday to be colored brown with mud and boyishness‌—‌are now cupped around a glass of wine and cheerfulness.

“I can’t believe you drove off and left Allison in the parking lot last week,” he says to me, grinning and winking with those glacial blue eyes that, within the last couple of years seem to have developed tiny cracks around their edges. “That is so wickedly clever of you, Mom. I couldn’t have done better myself.”

“Be nice, Bryan,” Allison says, wrinkling her eyes. “It was just an accident.”

“Accident, my left foot,” Bryan says, winking again at me. “I only wish I could’ve been there to see your face when Mom drove off without you.”

Bryan is in Sacramento for his final go-round of interviews and I’m fixing dinner for the three of us‌—‌my Southern spaghetti, which means a full half-cup of Parmesan cheese, just as much wine in me as in the sauce, and a good number of shakes of Louisiana hot sauce for emphasis.

The kitchen is in the front, painted soft yellow, next to the formal dining and living rooms with their neutral walls, and wholly separated from the cozy family room (with its one shocking burgundy wall that a friend talked me into and which I no longer have the energy to change). The family room looks out onto the expanse of the backyard that still shows off my Ivan’s gardening prowess. The layout is common in the style of this midtown Sacramento craftsman house. Certainly, the kitchen is small and separated from the bustle of the rest of the house, but I’m content while cooking to merely pop my head out now and then to ask how things are doing back there.

Sometimes I wish for a cozy, more modern great room and open kitchen arrangement, but this house is comfortably large and its walls are filled with years of memories and history. I wouldn’t give up my house for the world. This is where my Ivan and I lived; this is where we grew our children, with the occasional bowl of lazy goldfish or cage of musky-scented gerbils; where the children wrote their initials in a newly poured concrete patio with delighted little fingers; where we loved and laughed and, on the odd occasion, banged doors and words about some trifling disagreement.

This is where Ivan’s prized wisteria still spends lazy summers leaning its arms over the fence as if it’s in conversation with the back neighbors. This is a house of spilled grape juice and crayoned wall drawings, a house filled with the aromas of Monday laundry and Sunday chicken. It’s my home. I won’t be persuaded to abandon its history by either an unfortunate kitchen configuration or the number of steps it takes to travel from one end to the other.

It’s my home.

“All right, you two,” I say. “I suppose I’d better get my Southern spaghetti on the table soon. When you get busy producing some progeny for me, perhaps I’ll pass on my secret recipe, maybe I’ll even turn over my special trick for perfect greens. But until I see grandchildren, I’m not letting loose of a thing.”

I leave my children, smiling to myself that I’ve expanded my use of sticky notes to a great amount of my kitchen work.

Today, quite cleverly, I’ve written out the parts of my recipe steps on a series of sticky notes and, once in the solitude of the kitchen, I shall place each note in order like little yellow ducks waddling one after another down the path of my left arm. As I finish each instruction, I will remove the appropriate paper until my arm is clean and the recipe is done. Wherever I am, I have only to look down to find my next step.