Ghost Dance (27 page)

I remember how the animals howled, not just at night but all day long, too—high pitched, at the edge of control. Sex turned their bodies liquid. They seemed to swim inside each other, with their curving backs and gleaming eyes. Could you see it in me, Grandma? The sex of animals? The fur on my arms? The hair standing straight up on the back of my neck? The swollen glands? The friction under my skin? I frightened myself. But you kept walking; the chores kept you busy—the hens, the hogs. You were tireless, your head bent, your arms overflowing, insisting in your every action that life made sense, life made good sense. I thought it was wonderful that someone who had lived as long as she could still believe that. But when she was seventy, I was only twelve and just learning how the bed could float around under my hands. I noticed the sweating men in the market, their thick arms, their large muddy hands. They began to stare at me. How beautiful a young girl’s neck can be, one whispered, how smooth her skin. I fingered my lower lip and pretended I did not hear. At night I could feel the weight of those words like hands all over me. Is that why she disliked me? Could she tell that one day my eyes would be able to make anyone melt? That freely, and without guilt, I’d open myself to them?

Plants pushed through the cracked earth. Fish twirled in the air, their scales reflected light in every direction. Thousands of ants moved together like black shadows across the yard.

But none of this seemed to bother her. “Dinner,” she’d call from the kitchen window. “Dinner,” she’d say, ringing a large bell, wiping her hands on her apron. I loved you best in spring, Grandma, if I ever loved you.

In the dreams of my grandmother the barn looks enormous—a red cutout against the stark sky. The sky itself is almost white but not quite; there’s a hint of gray, a touch of blue there. Somewhere in the cloudless, birdless sky, my grandfather lies—somewhere I can’t see, he’s lost in gray-blue.

“How much longer?” I ask the sky. I feel myself to be an ancient instrument upon which someone’s fingers play slow, sad music, hesitantly, careful not to touch the wrong note. It’s something eerie and difficult, something I’ve never heard before, and yet I feel a part of it. The music continues as I look out the back window and see the hay he stacked in huge piles before he died, still there, about to ignite. There’s a message among those brittle bales. I study them from every angle. The notes fade. Or perhaps he forgot to leave one as he moved closer and closer to the place where messages no longer count. Does a twelve-year-old girl make any difference at all to him now? Maybe in the overall pattern there’s a larger truth, a design I can’t yet see. He tells me something—the best way to reach him or how to live a better life. Some days I think I hear his voice coming from the center of the stacks, the voice I’ve kept vivid and perfect in my mind. It’s softer than in life, muffled, but distinctly his. “Why do you make your grandmother walk so far?” it asks.

“Why don’t we just sit for a minute, Grandma? Why don’t we just rest?” I place my hands on the tops of her shoulders, wanting to push her down. Already I am as tall as she. She sits for a minute to tie her shoe. Her bones are brittle. She could break so easily under my hands.

“I can’t, Vanessa. My feet won’t do it.” She rises. Quickly, I lift my hands up.

“Thank God I’m able,” she says, as we begin the walk to the cemetery on the other side of town. I suppose she believed that soon enough her shoes would fill with dirt for billions and billions of years, too heavy to lift.

Grandma would have buried him on the farm. Wheat would have sprung between his bones. The lacy leaves of tomatoes would have formed a crown for his head. Fruit would have grown in his mouth. His fingers would have fed the flowers.

It was my father who objected when my grandmother suggested a plot of land left of the silo in the north pasture behind the barn.

“I will not,” his pale hands looked like two smooth fish, “I will not eat my own father’s flesh.” He stared at his mother, the stare of the orphan, the stare of the terrified child left totally alone in the world—the stare that much later would become the permanent face of my father. But now the look changed: the grown man came back; his eyes grew darker; his pupils opened; his mouth seemed to curl in sarcasm or anger. Did he think then, looking at my grandmother in her yellow apron, why was it she—pacing in the kitchen, now lighting the oven and complaining about the price of oil—who continued while his gentle father in the next room could not even get up? As he sat there at the table, his eyes bloodshot and wide, did he wish to trade their deaths? Her hair that had not yet completely grayed seemed an insult, her feet that would not drag. I thought of my own tenuous position in my father’s heart. He looked to me. I thought he wanted to touch me; it seemed his body moved slightly forward in my direction but then pulled back. I think he wanted to be forgiven, for he was sorry he would never be a father like his father, and he didn’t know how to make it up to us. He stood up. His face went blank.

“I will not eat my own father’s flesh.” He turned toward the window. The wheat quivered in the wind. “Bury him somewhere else. The dead grow enormous without our help—so huge you cannot swallow them, you cannot choke them down.”

Already when my father looked out onto the land that his father loved so much he could see him there, his hands folded across his chest in the slopes of the hills. When he walked on the land he thought he heard my grandfather sigh. In the cow’s brown eyes he thought my grandfather watched him. In the wind my grandfather whispered requests my father could not keep.

I remember wandering into the barn one night very late and seeing him, lit by the moon, kneeling in the hay. Was I just sleepwalking? Was I only dreaming? I still do not know for sure. His arms were bent to his chest, and he held something gently, carefully, close to his heart. At first I could not see. And then he laid them down in the hay. They were two white eggs. Anyone might have thought my father crazy then. But I understood. He thought they were his own father’s fragile testicles.

My grandmother shook her head the way horses do, trying to cast something off, and peered at my father as if he indeed were some stranger, not her child at all, some madman, some insult.

Although my father could never stand the slaughter of hogs, now he cried. He thought he heard his father wailing in their throats.

“I don’t know where we went wrong with him,” my grandmother sighed one day as we weeded the peas. “I’m afraid there’s not much sense to your father.”

He had perplexed her from the very beginning. She remembered the nine months he lay inside her. “In all that time,” she said, “he never moved, never gave one kick, never turned. Not even I knew whether he would be born dead or alive.” And then there had been, after the final contraction, that awful silence. So it was over, she thought, before it had ever really begun. My father had taken one look at the world through his mother’s blood and decided he did not care to live here. Given one moment, he knew he did not want to take air into his lungs and breathe. But the young doctor, bent on preserving life no matter how reluctant his subject, saw this right away and spanked my father repeatedly until finally he gave a small yelp, then a cry of protest, and then a long full-bodied scream.

After his tentative start my father was a quiet, brainy child. He could spend day after day working on a single problem of mathematics or lose himself in a dream of fission. He could entertain himself for weeks with the details of the big bang theory or the concept of black holes. By age ten he had mastered geometry; by twelve, algebra; by fourteen, advanced calculus. He grew bored with it after that, though, and did no more—no algorithms, no studies of number theories. Mostly, he listened to music alone in his room in the farmhouse attic: Poulenc, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky. “Music saved my life,” he confessed to me on one of the rare occasions he allowed himself to reminisce.

“He could have been a pioneer in genetics,” my grandmother said.

“No, Grandma,” I said, giggling at the thought of my father in pioneer clothes, sporting a rifle or a bear trap.

“He could have worked in aerospace. He could have found the cure for something.”

The dream of my father’s greatness was the only dream my pragmatic grandmother had ever cared to keep. After all these years, it still shone in her eyes like a light, but it served no purpose except to make the reality of my father’s life almost unbearable to her. She had wanted to be intimately related to greatness and not just a mother-in-law to it.

“He could have been a chemical engineer,” my grandmother whispered, “had she not been so beautiful.”

“I don’t think so, Grandma.”

“Don’t ask me why he chose to study philosophy, of all things, in college! Imagine! Philosophy! But by that time there was no talking to him.” To his parents my father was a walking mystery.

And indeed, had my mother not been so beautiful, my father might have had a very different sort of life, but the minute he saw her across the hall at a college dance, he had already dedicated the rest of his life to her. Good-bye, Kierkegaard; good-bye, Nietzsche. The problem was solved. He would love her even if she would not love him back. He would love her despite everything—before she said one word, before he knew one thing about her and her tremendous talent and the sadness that wore everyone out. In his mind he saw himself closing the
Investigations
of Wittgenstein, Heidegger’s
Being and Time
, Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
. Au revoir, Jean-Paul Sartre; farewell, Aristotle. Good-bye—no need for philosophy anymore, no need for any of it. As he glided across the college hall he pictured himself beside the girl in the organdy dress forever.

“That dress was quite simply hideous,” my mother once told me. On another occasion she said, “If only my mother had lived, I would have known how to act, what to wear.”

“It was a beautiful dress,” my father said. “You could never see a dress like that today. Its sleeves were like wings and blew in the breeze, and it was the color of the sky at certain dusks.”

“He could have been a nuclear physicist,” my grandmother said. To her, my mother was the worst sort of person you could be, a selfish one, for, as far as my father was concerned, she kept what could have been from being.

“He said he was happy,” my grandmother said, “but I never saw it. It was as if your mother was dragging him further and further into her own private world.

“I don’t think your father was ever really happy until you and Fletcher were born.” Then, for a minute, my grandmother told me, things changed for him. Our small lives asked to be loved and he loved them. He left his job to care for us. He fed us, he changed our diapers, he sang to us, he made us toys, he played Vivaldi and Mozart for us.

“Your mother, it seemed, never had any time for you,” my grandmother said, as if I was hard of hearing. “She was always too busy, though she never seemed to be doing anything.” My grandmother kept talking and talking, but I couldn’t exactly hear her.

“Yes,” I finally said, wiping my brow and clenching the weeds in my fist, and responding in the best adult voice and language I could manage, “I already know that. For your information, Grandma, I’m already aware of that fact so you don’t have to tell me anymore,” I said, tears in my voice. “Just stop telling me that.”

The pea plants looked like veins that led to some invisible heart in the ground. “Daddy,” I whispered into the porous earth, “help me.”

“Don’t make a scene,” I thought I heard my grandmother say, but when I looked up she was far down the path, her back turned away from me, guiding some plants up a fence. I was glad she had not seen me. Excess emotion always embarrassed her. She didn’t know what to do with it.

At night my grandmother stands over my bed and repeats things she thinks I should know—useful things like when to sow vegetables. “Sow hardy vegetables when apple blossoms show pink, tender vegetables with the first color in lilacs. Some cucumbers retard the growth of weeds.” Life is understandable was what my grandmother was trying to say. You can understand your life.

“What good are your dreams?” she asked, pushing the hair from my face. “You dream you are the water and then cry when you cannot do what the waves do, when you cannot fill any container. I don’t want to see you hurt, Vanessa. It’s the last thing in the world I’d want to see.” She paused. “You and Fletcher—you kids are everything to me—everything. I love you kids. I do.”

I nodded. “I know, Grandma.” I looked into her pale eyes. Her hands were shaking. In one way or another we would both disappoint her.

Life is comprehensible: it is the clothes flapping in the wind on the line; it is how the cat bristles when frightened, how steam rises from the kettle. That was the only truth to my grandmother—the observed life. She gathered her strength from the sunlight reflected on the bread pans, the cheese grater, the butcher block, the beehive. She collected her observations like rain in a barrel and used them when she needed.

“It’s so hot, Grandma.”

Tiny beads of sweat form on my grandmother’s forehead. Her hair is damp and sticks to her head. It’s so hot.

“Grandma, imagine the snow.” She is fanning herself with an important issue of
Time
or
Meusweek
that my grandfather insisted she save. John F. Kennedy is on the cover. His eyes seem to roll into his head and back out again as she waves him in the air. Her thumb rests on the base of his skull.

“Grandma, the snow is so high we can barely stand in it.” I take her hand and we tumble down the hill for what seems forever. My brother Fletcher glides by. His feet are like the red runners on sleds. Snow in slow motion falls on our shoulders. Snow settles on our knees. I can see my grandmother’s breath. Our hair goes white, silver white, our faces so bright. Grandma, come back. She disappears in white. Something cracks like ice. Snow piles in my throat. We fall to the ground. We sink in the snow. We move our arms and legs and make angels like the old days. Fletcher flaps wildly. I prefer a slower, more graceful technique. Our arms make the wings, our legs make the dress. And there’s mother, too, from out of nowhere, right next to us now. It’s snowing so hard that our angels seem to fill up even as we stand, turning to look at them. Mother shivers in the cold. The snow has soaked through her coat. “Oh! You make the best angel of all, Mom,” Fletcher sighs, looking at hers, which the snow does not seem to cover over. And he, too, begins to shake. The hills swerve into us.