Ghost Dance (19 page)

Much later, when I would try to picture the two white headlights careening into the back of the car, I would think of that early morning when my father turned on the headlights of the Oldsmobile so that we could make our way to it, through rain, in darkness.

“Everybody up,” my father chirped like a songbird early that morning, coming into my bedroom first, then Fletcher’s, then to the guest room where my grandparents were asleep. “Come on, come on,” he said with an unrecognizable zeal that woke Fletcher and me almost immediately with its strangeness.

“It’s four in the morning,” I heard my grandmother say.

“That’s right, it’s four in the morning—it’s time to get dressed.” He was already dressed as he walked back and forth from room to room. He had slept in his clothes, I was sure. They were wrinkled and tired on his body. His hair stuck up in strange places.

“It’s four in the morning and it’s pouring rain,” I could hear my grandmother saying over and over.

My mother floated into the room wordlessly and looked out the window into the darkness. She went to my closet and picked out a yellow plaid dress for me to put on. She would choose red overalls and a striped shirt for Hetcher. My mother liked to dress us in bright clothing. She always believed, I think, that if we were dressed inappropriately for the receipt of bad news, we would somehow be spared it. She herself, when she was finally ready, wore a pink suit and a large white hat, her hair pulled away from her face.

My grandparents, the first to respond to bather’s wake-up call, were the last to be ready, and, as we sat on the love seat in the hallway, my mother, Hetcher, and I, holding sweaters and raincoats in the dark, my father paced back and forth.

“Where
are
they?” Father muttered under his breath.

“Grandpa is trying on bow ties,” Fletcher said, as if he could see through the walls to the guest room.

“How do you know?” I whispered, but he just shrugged his shoulders. He was wearing brown and white saddle shoes and his feet swung back and forth in the air. They did not nearly touch the ground. He looked ahead unblinking.

“Give them another minute, Michael,” my mother said.

“Here they come,” said Fletcher, in his strange wav, and Grandpa appeared, like magic, on the arm of his dour wife. Fie looked fresh and bright and wide awake. In spite of our great curiosity and our cheerful attire, we looked like sleepers next to him.

“Well, finally!” my father said, clapping his hands double time. In his head he heard the music that would move us bravely forward. It was so unlike him.

“In the rain,” my mother sighed, as if she had just noticed it.

“Rain is good luck, Christine,” my grandfather winked. My grandfather’s whole posture suggested that he thought this was going to be one of the greatest days of his entire life. He had chosen a yellow bow tie with maroon spherical shapes on it. I le was putting rubbers over his best dress shoes.

“OK, is everybody ready now?” my father said, chirping again and clapping his hands. “Are you ready, Mother?” he asked. “Put on your coat.”

Grandma, who long ago had stopped loving my father, just looked wearily at him without saying a word. Withheld love had aged her. My father stood momentarily paralyzed in the bitterness of her stare, but somehow clapped his hands and began to lift his feet like some college bandleader, whistle in mouth, baton in hand, finally gathering the momentum to break from her and lead his colorful, sleepy parade out into the dark, wet springtime.

“But we can’t see anything, Daddy!” we screamed with a thrill. Bad weather had blindfolded us. The wind was spinning us around and around. Father ran ahead to turn on the headlights of the car for us. Without sight we could hear better, and we listened to his footsteps racing across the wet gravel of the long driveway that wrapped around our house. Fletcher took my hand. Grandfather put his arms around us, stooping with care so as not to let any part of his pants touch the grass. We looked at him through the windows of our rain slickers and smiled at his infectious smile. The lights went on. My mother, off to one side, held a large umbrella over her head and, even at five in the morning in the rain, she was an image of such beauty that I felt out of breath just looking at her and had to take off my hood.

Grandma just sighed, standing on the porch watching us in the black grass.

“It’s going to be a long day,” my grandmother said, though even she with her “negative thinking,” as Grandpa called it, could not guess how long. Right from the beginning, as my father got into the car and fumbled with the keys, my grandmother was suspicious. She had a right to be, I suppose. My father had mysteriously asked them to come from the farm in Pennsylvania to join him on a very important trip, but he had neglected to say where they were going or when they might be back. Fletcher and I, typically good-humored children and always poised for adventure, did not care so much about the details; we just watched Father, who did not seem like our regular father. For everyone but Grandmother it was enough to see the amazing color in mv father’s face that this trip, wherever we were going, had produced. Anything we were about to do seemed certainly worth it to see Father this way.

Sliding into the passenger’s seat and looking over at him, my mother seemed overcome with nostalgia. She must have thought to herself that his eyes looked as they once had, long ago, focused and clear. And for a moment my grandfather, getting into the back seat with my grandmother and Fletcher, looked up, as if he were wondering who this wonderful young man was who was driving his family in the dark, for my father was a son my grandfather had never seen before. He was taking charge. He was going somewhere.

“We’re really on our way now!” my grandfather said, adjusting his bow tie and patting my grandmother on the back.

“There are no sandwiches,” Fletcher whispered in my ear, leaning forward from the back seat. It was a sign we were not going far, for Father always made sure there was something to eat. He always fixed us the most elegant lunches to bring to school, chicken and pineapple salad, cucumber sandwiches, cinnamon and apple tea or hot chocolate with orange peel.

My father drove wildly through the early morning, flying down the suburban streets much faster than he had ever driven before, until the passengers began to complain.

“Michael, please,” my mother said quietly, “please, not so quickly.”

Taking her cue from my mother, my grandmother began in her solemn voice, “I don’t know why you feel we have to leave at this unreasonable hour but if you don’t slow down, I’m getting out right here and you can forget the whole thing. Why you need us all here in the first place I’ll never understand.”

“Just close your eyes, Maria, and enjoy the ride,” my grandfather said. But he, like the rest of us, must have wondered exactly what it was that my father was up to.

I sat between my mother and father in the front seat and noticed that he lifted his foot slightly from the accelerator in deference to his passengers, but after a while he seemed to forget and I watched his foot sink back down onto the pedal.

Every thing out the front window of the Oldsmobile was an intense blue at that hour, as we neared the highway My mother, opening her eyes, held my hand and together we looked out on the blueness of the world.

I began to worry about my father and indeed about all of us, when, with the light growing paler, I could see the expression that was on his face, and when, staring into the blue out the window, I realized w here we were going.

My father had mentioned the blue to me several days before. “It will be bathed in blue light,” he had said, and from his intonation I could not tell whether he thought that w as a good or a bad thing. I shivered now, as I thought of all the hours he had spent dreaming of this day. My father had always considered me not so much a daughter as a partner in sorrow and so had seen fit to share with me the details of the long journey of Michelangelo’s
Pietà
from the Vatican in Rome to the New York World’s hair.

“The
Pietà
is being insured for five million dollars,” he read to me from the newspaper one day.

“A Rome newspaper is urging the Vatican not to send the fterá,” he told me.

“The
Pietà
has been successfully moved from its pedestal to a packing case,” and he showed me a picture of Christ up to the waist in little styrofoam pieces.

“The
Pietà
leaves the Vatican and arrives in Naples.”

“The
Pietà
is placed in a watertight steel container and lashed to the deck of a ship.”

“The
Pietà
will be unveiled Thursday.”

And now it was Thursday. It would be bathed in blue. It would change our lives.

He turned on the radio and the back seat jumped awake. The sky was growing light. “Goddammit,” my father, who never swore, said, “we should have started earlier.” Someone on the radio was saying that massive traffic tie-ups were expected on all major routes to the World’s Fair. A stall-in initiated by the Congress on Racial Equality meant to dramatize the Negroes’ dissatisfaction with the pace of civil rights progress was planned, despite a court injunction.

“The stall-in is on!” declared a deep, resonant black voice from w hat seemed the center of the Oldsmobile. I did not so much understand the words as the tone. It was angry and sad, energetic and weary, loving and hostile, all at the same time. “Brutality, segregation, discrimination, neglect,” the voice said. It was a call for fairness. “We are responsible,” the voice bellowed. “We have a right to protest. What happens to us is unimportant. The stall-in is on!” We listened closely and looked out the windows.

My grandmother closed her eyes and put her hand on her forehead as if she already had a masshe headache. My grandfather and Fletcher sat straight up at attention. “The World’s Fair?!” Fletcher screamed with glee. “We’re going to the World’s Fair!?”

“In the rain?” my grandmother said. “Why are we going to the World’s Fair in the rain, Michael?”

“Mother, please,” my father said.

“I was at the 1959 World’s Fair!” my grandfather cried. And his thoughts raced ahead of his words. “I remember Big Joe,” he said, “the giant steel guy who stood for Soviet man! I ate caviar and drank vodka! I saw television for the first time. Television didn’t
exist
before that fair! I saw a collapsible piano made for a yacht! And they put a time capsule in the ground right here in New York! And these,” my grandfather said, plucking my grandmother’s stockings from her legs, “I saw these invented!”

“Stop, Angelo!” my grandmother shouted, slapping his hands.

“They put all kinds of things in that time capsule—nylons, for instance,” and he pulled my grandmother’s stockings again, “a can opener, a hat, cigarettes. It’s supposed to be opened in the year 6000 as a record of our time.”

“Six thousand!” we shouted. “But it’s 1964 now.”

“One thousand nine hundred and sixty-four,” my father said.

“Oh!”

“One thousand, two thousand, three thousand,” Fletcher counted.

“And I remember a row of beautiful women dancing a fan dance,” my grandfather continued.

My grandmother shook her head.

“Four thousand, five thousand, six thousand.”

“And another girl wearing the tiniest bathing suit I’ve ever seen was put inside a block of solid ice!”

“There will be no girls in ice this time,” Father said sternly. My father was the first feminist I ever met.

“Why must we go in the rain, in a civil rights demonstration?” my grandmother asked.

“Maria!” my grandfather shouted.

My mother was not sleeping but her voice was muffled, as if she spoke from some distance. “Please don’t fight,” she said, “there will be enough of that when we get there.”

My father looked at her.

“It will be OK,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

My mother smiled one of her wise smiles. “Fletcher,” she said, “there’s so much sun around you this morning, I think you may just clear away the rain for us.” My brother blushed.

When we got to the highways that were to be choked with cars, there were no cars, just large expanses of gray and long white lines. Father had set aside many hours for sitting in traffic and without it we found we were in Flushing, Queens, just after sunrise, hours before the fair was to open.

When we passed Shea Stadium and my father did not so much as turn his head toward it, as other fathers would have, I knew that we would never be the kind of family that followed baseball scores and owned dogs and went on vacation to Florida. I would like to have asked him just once, when I was eighteen, how the Yankees were doing this year and he in some chummy, sporty sort of way would say, “Well, you know, they’re slow starters, but September is their month.” But this, of course, would never be.

We parked the car in the vast World’s Fair lot and listened to the rain that was beating harder now on the car roof.

“Well, we’ll just have to nap a bit,” my father said, “and then when we get up it will be time to go in.”

“Oh, boy,” my grandmother said, closing her eyes.

Who can know what each of us dreamt that early morning in the World’s Fair parking lot? I can guess. My father—that’s easy: in his dream a grieving mother cradled her dead son’s body in silence. It was one constant image, like a slide on a gigantic screen that kept coming into sharper and sharper focus.

My brother must have dreamt of great inventions—weather or time machines, space ships blasting into the black sky, or capsules being plunged into the damp earth.

Grandfather shifted around a lot that morning in the back seat: his long dream of the fair of 1939 suddenly broken by the deep voice from the car radio, taking shape in his sleep.

My grandmother insisted she never dreamed, but I saw her as she slept swatting the air as if shooing away flies, or swatting at my grandfather who she thought still plucked at her brand-new nylons.

It was my mother’s dreams that were impossible to know. They were so tangled. When I would try to comb them, they would cascade like her hair, folding and unfolding and folding again, w rapping around each other in complicated tendrils. Does my mother drift through the rain of her dreams until she finally reaches shelter? Do her eyes fix on some simple object, something I’d never think of, a window or a wheel—or some other shape where she finds some psychic comfort? I do not know.