Ghost Dance (36 page)

My grandmother waved her arms above her head in some private choreography now, bending over and brushing her ankles in a wide, delicate sweep, a graceful rhythmic gesture.

She was humming the tarantella again. She separated from us and whirled and whirled, moving one hand to her eyes as if shading them from some brutal Italian sun.

“Piccolini,” she said. “The piccolini—” I thought those tiny fish must be tickling her childhood ankles. “The piccolini,” she smiled. To whom was she speaking? Not to us anymore—to her mother, I think. There was wonder in her voice, the wonder a daughter has for her mother when they are seeing the same thing for the first time. She pointed into the grass. “The piccolini.”

Already explosions could be heard far off. Something would burst in her head as bright, as spectacular as the year’s bicentennial display.

She danced now more quickly and continued to sing louder and louder as she whirled from one side of the large nursing home lawn to the other, spinning away from us, further and further away with each gesture. But then she came closer and seemed to focus for one moment, halting the dance with this last memory, arrested by it. She looked right at us. “We used to make little Christmas cakes of honey,” she whispered. “We called it strufoli. It was very good.” Slowly she began to dance again.

She shook her head with amazement. “I can taste it right now,” she said. Her eyes were wide. She stopped. One foot was pointed into the earth, one arm raised toward the sky. “It tastes so sweet,” she said, “just like I remember.” She closed her eyes and smiled.

Though it is the middle of the night and we are both in our nightgowns, our meeting is formal. She appears in the doorway of my bedroom holding a fistful of pens and pencils as she has so many times. Her hair, as always, is falling from the bun she wears to work. As always she looks exhausted. But this time is different. This time my mother steps forward. This time my mother is going to speak. She sits close to me on the bed. I look into her face and, much to my surprise, I see things I have never seen before, though I thought that surely I had memorized that face. There is new beauty there—or more beauty, though that scarcely seems possible. The moon is out, the stars, but it is Venus that dominates the sky, and I watch my mother intently against that fantastic backdrop. I love you so much, I will love you forever, I think. I watch her put her pencils in her pocket. Her lovely white hand falls to the bedspread.

I am surprised to hear the voice she has when she finally speaks. I expected it to be dreamlike and soupy, but it is not. It is as if she is someone else entirely, not my mother but the woman who gives interviews, the woman who has written six books, the one who gives readings. Her voice is strong, bell-like on a clear day.

I could easily touch my mother, but I do not want to frighten her away or make her feel as if she’s trapped. I do not want her to misconstrue the situation or to think that I am changing.

Though I have made no move, she seems to back away, and I feel as if I have taken such care to keep her next to me that I begin to cry. Why must she always be leaving? Her face is pained. Why must she suffer so much?

My mother looks at me as if she sees some weakness of hers in my face and grows fierce.

“No one,” she says coldly, putting her hands on my shoulders, “should feel sorry for me. I’ve had a very good life, Vanessa,” she whispers. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m a very lucky person,” she says slowly. “I wouldn’t have wanted it any different. No one should feel sorry for me. People
read
what I write. Don’t cry for me, Vanessa. Don’t you dare cry for me.”

She sits back as if she is getting ready to tell a long story. She brushes the hair from my neck.

“Sometimes, you know, when I have just finished a poem or have gotten a glimpse of another, made some connection I’ve never made before, felt some wholeness that has eluded me and everything falls into place, I think to myself I must be the luckiest, the happiest person in the whole world. It’s important for you to know. It’s true. I’d never lie to you.” She kisses me, hugs me, rocking me in her arms. “Oh, Vanessa, don’t you cry for me.”

“No crying now, Marta.” I bend down to her. Her face is in the pillow. I touch her curly head, its unspeakable darkness. “You’ll feel better after this,” I say. We have run out of drugs. Everything about the world bruises us—its color, its shape, its sound. It is painful for her even to move. Still she turns to me, ever hopeful.

“Come on,” I say, helping her up. She is an old woman, I think. Her foot steps are loud as we walk down the hall. I lead her into the curving w hite room. “Here now. Sit down, Marta,” I say, placing her on the edge of the bathtub and slowly undressing her. The old woman turns into a child. She looks up at me with large brown eyes, all hope, as I run hot water into the sink. She is hunched over. She says nothing, rubs her eyes. Is her head still in the pillow? Is the walk down the dark hallway, the warm water in a sink, my hands that skim the top, is it all a dream? I empty what looks to be green sand into a jar and add warm water. We are little girls playing in mud, in clay. She does not take her eyes from my hands. Her eyes are dark—almost black—beautiful, her long eyelashes, her thick eyebrows. I watch her as I mix the paste in a jar.

“It‘s the magic of plants,” I say.

She shakes her head no in some disbelief.

“Yes,” I whisper. “It’s henna. It will make your hair beautiful, silky, soft.”

She smiles slightly. She can’t help being a little amused. She has been awakened for this, she says, forced down the cold hallway into this cold room for this?

“That’s right,” I say.

“An appointment at the beauty parlor? Jesus, Vanessa—the magic of plants—what’s wrong with you?”

“I’m not kidding,” I say. “You’ll feel better.”

I put on a pair of rubber gloves. She just stares.

“This is some outfit,” she says. I am standing in my underwear, rubber gloves on up to my elbows.

“Shh,” I say, dipping my hand into the warm glass jar, the warm paste of plants. I smooth it on, beginning at the roots and gradually working down.

“I like this,” she smiles. “This isn’t as bad as I thought.”

I rub the henna into her hair. I feel the bones of her skull, the line of her neck. I touch her lovely curving back. I cradle her head, feel its bumps. I find my mind drifting. I find myself thinking that I would like to hold this head forever. I work more diligently.

“This feels good,” she says. “Do I get a mud pack next?”

“I wonder how you’ll look as a redhead,” I say.

“What?”

“Well, will I like you as a redhead? Want to hear a redhead’s stories? Want to sing Billie Holiday songs with one? You know.”

“You’d better not make me a redhead.”

“Didn’t they have
I Love Lucy
in Venezuela?”

She grins.

“Lucy, Lucy!” I say.

“Yes, Ricky?” she shouts and then does Ricky’s part, too, in the Spanish I love to hear.

She becomes weary, bone-tired, suddenly. “Don’t make me a redhead,” she says sternly.

“Don’t worry. We won’t leave it in long.”

Her head is nearly completely covered now. The smell of henna fills the bathroom. It smells of luck to me, of long life.

“Shall we henna this?” she says, touching the fine hair under my arms. She laughs. “Let me have those gloves.” I submerge them in water. She takes them off my hands and puts them on.

“Will I like a redhead?” she asks as she puts her hand into the jar. “This stuff feels good,” she says. Delicately she applies the paste to each tiny hair, and the plant warmth radiates through my body.

“I think I will like a redhead,” she says.

“It tickles,” I say.

“It’s not working if it doesn’t tickle,” she says. I step back for a second.

We are so at ease with each other at this moment, so happy, so much ourselves here, green everywhere, so natural, that we almost forget that this all must be strictly timed, that we must watch the clock, that it cannot go on forever.

She turns to me abruptly as if she can read my thoughts. Her hands are covered with henna. I’m turning away from her when she grabs my arm, leaving her large handprint. Her eyes are black and fierce. Her hair is plastered to her head, a warrior’s ancient helmet. She’s hurting me. “Don’t make me love you,” she says bitterly. “Vanessa, please—don’t make me love you,” she begs.

O
n the train home, on the way to the last Christmas in that string of Christmases, where was the sign, the clue? The impossible blizzard, the closed road, the red bird in the snow, the man in the black coat? Where was the symbol that in its perfection would have told us to prolong our gazes, extend our thank-yous, hold our embraces a moment longer?

We were all students on that train, it seemed—exhausted students, silly students, students in love—nothing unusual, and as the train pulled out of Poughkeepsie and followed the frozen Hudson toward New York, some talked of the exams which in their minds they were still taking, again and again, perfecting each answer. Others slept. Some must have dreamt of home. I was thinking of Marta who was Hying now into a different winter. Henna still stained my hands and arms. I had made no attempt to get it off. It would be a month’s separation.

Snow had begun to fall. The snow wrapped around the old train like the wings of an angel, and my thoughts shifted to my mother. I was flying headlong through the December night into her favorite season. It was the only time of year when she could lift herself out of the pull of her work and become for a month someone quite different. Some star rose up in her, a perfect, luminous shape, and she seemed to us intensely happy as she shopped and baked and wrapped presents and mailed cards. We had seen it many times now. Each year my father would follow her around asking her not to push herself so hard, begging her to rest, reminding her how easily she tired. December was almost always followed by a January filled with misgivings, depression, lack of focus, lack of feeling sometimes—sometimes worse. She never listened to my father. “It’s Christmas!” she would say, as if that explained everything, and she would continue her frenzied preparation. “Shoo!” she’d say to my father as he persisted. “Shoo, Michael.” These words always bothered me, the way she batted him away, the way she wiped her brow, though it has taken me a long time to figure out why.

For one month each year my mother and my grandmother would become friends. They sat side by side, putting cloves in oranges, hanging boughs of pine, discussing the Christmas Eve dinner. Each December my mother tried to assume some of those practical, worldly mannerisms. There they sat, the two of them, contented, shoulder to shoulder in our kitchen one week before Christmas—my grandmother laughing with the woman who had ruined her son’s life, and my mother festive, manic, in a flowered apron, asking my father, of all things, to be sensible. Journeying in opposite ways around the world, each year they met for a month on some magic, neutral ground where they embraced and forgave. My mother must have missed her own mother very much; she clung so tightly to my grandmother’s rigid life.

There were other miracles: the dark house transformed magically into a house of happiness and light, a place where gingerbread men walked from the warm oven in happy rows, a house that rang with laughter and music and bells, a house where a perpetual fire burned, giving a dramatic warmth, the smell of pine flooding the whole living room.

The star that rose up in my mother at Christmas seemed to hang over our house, protecting us. We were all happy, I am sure of it, even Father. He would sit for hours at the piano and play the songs of the season, asking for requests.

“We Three Kings,” Fletcher shouted from another room.

“Un Flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle,” my mother cried.

“Oh, please play ‘White Christmas,’” I would sigh. I would sit on the piano bench next to him and turn the pages when he nodded. Often he would slow it the hard parts to ensure he touched the right notes. His touch was tentative, is in life. I watched his hand as he reached his long finger up to a black key where it lingered for a moment and then pulled back. For hours I would sit lext to him, watching him, listening to his halting Yuletide songs.

“We’re quite a team, you and I,” he would smile when he was finally done, touching my back lightly, applying just the slightest pressure. He looked into he other room, lost in some melancholy melody—“Away in a Manger” or “Silent Night.” I could feel the snowy bones of his hand still on my back even is I was losing him. I looked into his eyes, those remote, cold fields. I studied them hard as I tried to comprehend the mystery of love, for, as we sat there on he piano bench—my father, far, far off and then back, then far off again, then returning to discuss his ideas for a hot punch with port—I loved him fiercely, inreasonably.

“Come on,” cried Fletcher, “it’s almost done.”

Even as a little boy Fletcher liked to assemble the crèche. In the early years Grandpa had assisted him. First they put together the barn, then carefully unwrapped each Hummel from its tissue paper. They had been bought by my mother’s friends Florence and Bethany, one by one each year, and given to Fletcher and me as Christmas presents. It was only last Christmas, with the youngest shepherd taking his place far left, that the scene completed itself.

“The wise men,” my grandfather said, his eyes shining. “These, children, are the wise men.” We stared at the kings, purple robed, dark skinned, holding wisdom in their eyes and gifts for the baby in their hands. I looked at the baby, just a regular baby really, then back to the wise men, then to the baby again, then up to Mary. Her bowing head, her glowing face seemed happy and sad at the same time. Her open hands were shaped like hearts. I turned to Joseph. My eye lingered longest on Joseph usually, standing off to one side. I studied every wrinkle in his rough robe, touched his face. He was so lonely, I thought, so separate from the rest—lonely as faith itself. I touched his sandaled feet with my thumb. He faltered. His pain was unspoken, difficult to name, his carpenter’s hand raised in front of him as if he could not view this scene, could not view his wife and child except in this way. He never moved. I have thought of him many times throughout the year in that large box in the basement labeled “crèche.” Wrapped in tissue paper, his one hand raised, slightly open, he looks through his fingers in awe.