Ghost Dance (26 page)

“I adore you,” Natalie said emphatically, stretched out on the huge bed, unreal in her beauty. “I adore you.” Marta reached out her hand but then stopped; she wanted to prolong this moment, wanted nothing to change it.

Natalie sighed. She sighed with delight at the eggs Benedict, the smoked trout, the champagne, the fresh flowers everywhere. “I wish this morning could last forever,” she said, dipping her finger into the runny yolk of the egg. Marta smiled and ran her rough hand up Natalie’s impossibly smooth back, just two years ago Marta had come to college never having been loved, not by her parents, not by anyone, and now there was this—this strange, unpredictable love, but it was love nonetheless.

Natalie turned toward Marta, and Marta ‘s hand slipped from her back. Natalie’s eyes were cold and blue, her face like sculpted alabaster.

“Light me a cigarette,” Natalie said sweetly, “will you?” Her face should have softened, but it did not.

“Of course,” Marta said, reaching for the Gaulois. Smoke only Gaulois in New York, Natalie had insisted, smoke only Marlboros in Paris. Marta lit a cigarette from the blue-winged package, held it in her mouth for a moment, inhaled deeply, and then passed it to Natalie. The bed seemed like a large boat, and they floated on it for a long time, just smoking. The chandelier glittered in the morning light. The pale pink walls seemed to sparkle.

“It reminds me of Italian candy,” Natalie said, running her hand down the glossy wall.

Natalie got up for more champagne and looked out onto New York, the city she loved. It glittered like diamonds in the morning light.

“It will be mine,” she said.

Marta came up from behind holding a pink present with white satin ribbons.

“Don’t touch me,” Natalie commanded, not turning around.

“Natalie,” Marta said.

“What do you want?” Natalie asked, turning abruptly. “What is it now?” Marta held out the present.

“For me?” she said.

“Happy birthday,” Marta said, closing her eyes.

“I wish this day could last forever. Forever,” Natalie said, and her voice dropped with a chilling finality.

“Happy birthday,” Marta said. “Go on, open it.”

She would have it all, she thought to herself. Marta poured more champagne. She watched the tiny bubbles rise in her glass. Just looking at them

made her dizzy with excitement.

“It’s beautiful,” Natalie said, holding the shining robe up to her. “It’s so beautiful.”

“I want this day to last forever,” Natalie had sighed, and for Marta in some ways it would—this happiness flung in her face, long after the happy times with Natalie had ended for good. She was not someone who could keep the past separate from the present. They existed simultaneously, always. If she could have dislodged it from her brain, this day, she probably would not have, despite the pain it would cause her as she sat in her room and told me the story. Every detail caused her pain. But it was a perfect memory, and for that she was grateful still.

“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” Marta said to Natalie, who had put on her new robe.

“How beautiful?” she demanded, rubbing up against her, intoxicated at the thought.

“More beautiful than Dominique Sanda?” she asked.

“Yes,” Marta said.

“More beautiful than Jeanne Moreau?”

“Oh, yes,” Marta whispered.

“More beautiful than Brigitte Bardot?”

“Mais oui,” Marta smiled.

“Mais oui,” Natalie laughed. “More beautiful than Marilyn Monroe?”

“Yes,” Marta said, holding her tightly, “even more beautiful than Marilvn Monroe.”

Jack looked at me, a champagne glass in the Plaza Hotel being lifted to the lips of Marta, of Natalie. He took me in his enormous hands, ran his fingers up the stem, and cradled the fragile bowl in his palm, then pressed hard, crushing the illusion to bits.

“I need you here,” he said, “now.”

“I need you, too,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

I was on the verge of tears. Whom were these tears for? Jack alone now linked me to the world, to moments in time measured by the hands of the clock. I pictured the two hands meeting like lovers at twelve and felt calmer. “I need you here,” I said. “I need you now.”

The first time I saw Jennifer Stafford, it was not in that dark, heart like chamber but in bright light, surrounded by women in the College Center. How easily the walls of her room had given in, changed size and shape in order to accommodate the contours of Marta ‘s grief. Jennifer’s own arms I assumed would be as yielding, but that was not the impression I got as I watched her putting papers into piles in preparation for the meeting. Even the simplest act performed by Jennifer commanded great attention. She did everything with such authority.

She did not look as I had imagined. I thought she would be plainer; I thought she would be more straightforward, less mysterious, but she was filled with darkness and a primitive allure, not modern in the least, though the modern world was her domain. Her hair was like the mane of a lion; her brown eyes were animal eyes; her voice was low and, since it was outside the tonal range of most voices, it distinguished itself, separated itself from others, and you could hear it though she spoke softly. She seemed distant, although she was introducing herself and welcoming the women who had gathered. She was speaking of the Women’s Center. Four years ago she had rescued it single-handedly from obscurity. She alone had made it work, shaping it into a viable union. Now, this being her last year, she wanted to make sure it would continue without her. She was tired, it had all exhausted her, and she had her thesis to do now. She would have to start giving the Women’s Center up, letting go. She sighed, surveying the crowd. No one immediately jumped out at her as a choice for a successor.

Though I was still there, sitting near her, I knew some part of me was already asleep dreaming of that wonderful light brown hair, that mane of a lion, following her wherever she asked me to go. To see Jennifer was to raise a hand and pledge allegiance to what she wanted.

I walked up to her after the meeting, my hand already raised. Whatever she wanted I had already agreed to it. I said nothing.

“You must be Christine Wing’s daughter,” she said, staring at me as she put papers into a folder.

I nodded, taking a step back. Hearing her speak directly to me and say my mother’s name made me shudder with cold suddenly.

“I’d like to talk with you sometime.”

Yes, I nodded.

“I’ve got her old room, you know,” she said. “I’m a great admirer of hers.”

I stared at her, wondering what she wanted of me.

“That’s all,” she said, motioning with her head as if to dismiss me. “Thank you.”

With her voice alone she forced the season prematurely into winter.

I could not have known that my first meeting with Jennifer would be the only time we would ever speak. As simply and as strangely as she had entered my life, she would exit from it. And the place that seemed to promise so much would become off-limits to me as she grew more and more solitary, lost in the lives of the Stafford women in the room that had been my mother’s.

So it was my mother who had brought me here, I thought. Because I was her daughter I was privy to a sad underworld that otherwise I would probably have never come across. It had been the reason for the small note, the reason for everything. My mother through Jennifer had brought me here—to Marta, to this sorrow. She had united us at this wailing wall, this place of the lacerated skin, the shorn hair. She had brought me here, as if she herself had taken me by the hand. She had brought me here to this universe of grief, though I did not know why yet.

It had not occurred to her while they were together that the lovely, branching line that looked like a delicate sprig of wheat was actually the life line and that it separated early, somewhere near the base of the thumb.

But Natalie had already stepped onto another continent, her arms outstretched, her doomed hands open, before Marta realized the truth etched in her palm, and by that time it was too late.

Pamela Stafford, second aunt of Jennifer Stafford, but only a wisp of a child at the time, stepped tentatively in front of the camera for her screen test at the MGM studios. She looked back at her new friend for luck and smiled. Her straight hair, which had been set on hard rollers all night, had already lost its curl. Her pink dress puffed out from the waist made her look like the most fragile of flowers.

“Go on,” the smiling man coaxed. “Go on, sweetheart.”

“Moon River,” she sang softly off key,

“Wider than the Nile,

“I’m crossing you in style

“Someday.”

She cleared her throat.

“Oh, dream maker, you heartbreaker,

“Wherever you’re going,

“I’m going your way.”

“What are we going to see, Dad?” we screamed.

“It’s called
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,”
he said dreamily. “It’s in Cinerama, with the screen so big that it wraps around you.” He paused for a long time. “Cinerama,” he murmured. “You’ve never seen anything like it.”

On the book jacket of
To Vanessa
is my favorite picture of my mother. She is in profile and she looks as serene as I have ever seen her—content, happy. The light is beautiful and she is smiling. I would have stopped her in my mind in this position forever if I could have, but that is the photographer’s art, not the daughter’s. My mother cannot stay still in my mind. A lovely profile turns full face, slowly the smile dissolves, and the vision breaks. Her hair grays, then changes back. She grows young, wanders through the quiet house of her childhood in Paterson, New Jersey, a little girl on tiptoe, looking in on her own sleeping mother or sitting in the dark listening to the Sunday stories of her father. I look again at her smiling profile on the back of
To Vanessa
, my book. She will not hold still for me.

“Disney land!” Grandpa Sarkis said. “Would you look at that?”

“The Magic Kingdom!”

“Look at that castle!” my mother cried.

“A castle for my little princesses in California!” their father said, patting their heads.

“Here’s Niagara Palls!” Lucy said.

“Where lovers go!” my mother sighed.

“Listen to this,” Lucy said. “About four million gallons of water per minute thunder over the lip of the falls into the Maid-of-Mist Pool!”

“Four million gallons!” my mother said.

“Per minute!” Lucy added.

My father sings loudly over the rushing water along with Louis Armstrong:

“Two drifters, off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see.

We’re after the same
Rainbow’s end
Waiting round the bend,
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.”

He raises a shiny trumpet to his lips, bends his knees, and blows. Beads of sweat fall down his face. He wipes his brow with an imaginary rag.

I
expect there’ll be rain today,” she says, flexing her arthritic fingers as we look out the back window onto the smoldering landscape.

“Oh, I don’t know, Grandma.” I smile at her. To me the farm sky looks like it’s going to hold back, going to deny the open-throated hens, the crippled corn, the old women.

“We’ll see,” she says, her eyes closed. It looks as if she’s trying to gather the strength to go on. In the darkness she pictures three white pillars. She opens her eyes, forcing herself back to the scene, back to the breeze and its empty promise, back to the weeping willows sucking stones from dirt, the panting dogs, the neighbor’s slow gaze, the memory of water lulling everything to sleep. She clears her throat, opens and shuts her hands. It’s as if those bony fingers extend out past the glass onto the earth as row s of crops. If she could only do something—she draws her fingers in, folds her hands, and puts them in her lap. The tomatoes bleed into the ground. The basil dries on its stalk. Peas shrivel. Trees shrink to shrubs. The scorpion moves in, the tortoise, the lizard glitters in the sun. Humps grow on the backs of dogs until they are camels. When I turn around, the soil has turned to sand. When I turn again, the rosebush is a cactus.

“It’s so hot, Grandma. If I was a snake I’d leave my skin.”

“Be sensible,” she says. Her voice is as old as the sand. Her throat is the bark of oaks.

“I think I’d like to take a long, cool bath”—water gushing up to the top of the tub, overflowing when I reach for the soap; water hitting my thighs, circling my knees.

“Grandma, it’s so hot. I think I’d like to go to the grocery store and stand next to the frozen foods for a while. I wish I was a TV dinner! I wish I was a fish stick!”

“Vanessa, be sensible,” she says. It sounds like a plea.

My grandmother was all good sense. A beautiful plant flowered at the base of her brain: broad-leaved, hardy, dark green. If she could have seen it, it would have pleased her, but of course she could not. She did not have the eyes for it. Only at the end was it replaced by something else—something more dense, rounded, almost luminous, something harder. I watched it happen: the flower fold into itself, the leaves curl back into the seed, the seed explode. Then my grandmother, strong willed, confident, grew backward into some tentative future and was frightened. But that was only much later.

“It’s too hot to argue with you today, Vanessa.”

But I could not think of a time when we had argued. Our conversations usually consisted of two or three sentences, a statement by one of us and response by the other, all of which was repeated a few times over. The rest of the argument must have gone on in my grandmother’s head. She always seemed more angry with me than her words had indicated.

Because I needed my grandmother most in spring, I rarely spoke to her at all then, out of fear that I might upset or alienate her. In that watery, unstable season when the whole world seemed to be changing, she did not. She was always the same: a silhouette, a dark triangle, carrying eggs and milk and wood back and forth between the barn and the house. She was a place for the wandering eye to rest. As the dogwood exploded around my head and, under my feet, seedlings sighed and gasped for air, I followed her along her hypnotic path and attempted to focus my attention, instead of letting it run on endlessly here, there, until inevitable exhaustion and then depression set in. What I was looking for was an order, and somehow I knew even then that order was the product of a self-conscious effort, it was a man-made thing imposed on the universe and involving constant exclusions. But as hard as I tried, as much as I concentrated on the print in my grandmother’s dress or the gray strands in her hair, I could not forget the complex texture of the evening or the sound of the ground breaking apart. And though the transparency of spring frightened me—the chloroplasts I could see in the leaves, the worms moving underneath the dirt, and the human body looking like the plastic models in science class—I kept it all: the exposed heart, the miles and miles of purple and blue veins everywhere; I think I had no choice.