Ghost Dance (7 page)

“Yes, we’ll only pack your hat,” I said.

“Perfect,” she said. “The fuchsia one with the feather.”

It is one of those moments frozen in my mind forever: the hat, tilted to the side, covers one eye. Her hair, pulled up, falls over one shoulder. She stands in her lacy underwear, puckers her lips, and then laughs hysterically, shivering almost, in anticipation of the windy lecture hall.

I would keep her with me. I would keep the sparkle in her blue eyes and put it back into the lake, back into the sky she was about to leave behind. I would keep her laugh, her intonation, her hat with the feather, her hair falling down her back—her hair was yellower in those days and longer. She must have been very young.

I remained through the years an almost-silent witness to my mother’s packing as I watched the mysterious rise and fall of hemlines on her lovely legs. I said very little, for language could only complicate the complicated feelings of my mother. She would sit back on the bed again and look at me and say, “I just don’t know what to take,” and soon she’d begin to cry in the white room. Holding her hand, I might then walk to her enormous closet with her and stand there looking at the bottoms of her dresses, and I too would begin to cry. Though I tried so hard at times, I would never be, as some children are capable of being, the grown-up my mother needed. I could not help thinking, through those years, that my friend Sonia would have been a better daughter altogether for my mother. Sonia, keeping the seasons straight and the occasion in mind, would have put together, from my mother’s huge assortment of clothing, outfits—one for each day she was to be away with a change of evening clothes for the nights. But not me. We would start by carefully picking and choosing, but by the end of the day we would have moved all the clothes from the closet onto the bed. We felt unselective. We could imagine needing just about anything. And my mother had so many clothes.

My mother’s attempts to stay fashionable were, I think, her one concession to life as other people know it. She worked hard not to feel out of place. We would diligently scrutinize the fashion magazines, Italian
Vogue
and
Women’s Wear Daily
, make obligatory trips to Saks and Henri Bendel, watch emaciated models walk down numerous runways. “Who writes this?” she would whisper to me exasperated, as some man with a microphone told us to “imagine you are in Bali and the sun is about to set.”

Fashion was frivolous in a way my mother never really could be. Despite her supreme effort, my mother was not good at dressing. Her heart was simply not in it, and yet, stubbornly, her whole life she insisted on keeping up with the fashions of the day and wearing them.

“Do you like these?” she’d ask tentatively, taking lizard shoes out of a striped shoebox. “Oh, they’re really quite ridiculous, aren’t they?” she laughed.

There was an urgency about her dressing. I think she believed that if she stayed current she would not get lost. If she kept one high-heeled foot in the material world, all would be fine.

I can remember thinking, after one of our many shopping sprees, as we walked down a busy street in New York, impeccably dressed, that we were misfits, and that no matter what we put on, we would never fit in. My mother must have felt that, too, but tried to douse that feeling with French cologne, to disguise it with a Christian Dior coat or a suit from the House of Chanel.

She always hated surprises, and it was some comfort to her, walking down the street, that nothing in the wide world of fashion could surprise us. When paper dresses came, we were well prepared. Fish swimming in earrings were nothing to us. And when a certain faction began dying its hair pink and green we were not fazed. My mother just smiled, pleased to be on top of the situation.

But her multitude of clothes posed a tremendous problem when it came time to pack. She became distraught, unable to put things together. I could not help. To me, in my sorrow, each item looked like every other. I handed my mother the white dress, the white shoes, the white sweater, the white scarf, the white gloves. Did you know, she said to me, that in China white is the color of mourning? She must have seen white, too. I looked at the mountains of pale clothes on the bed. The Chinese are right, I thought, to make white the mourning color.

All those times sitting on her bed, buried under clothes, the suitcase overflowing, I found it easy to imagine that she would never come back again.

The last time I saw my mother she was waiting for me under the enormous clock in Grand Central Station where we met briefly, she on her way back from Maine and I on my way to college for the second semester. She did not see me as I approached her. She wore a large hat. Bewildered, she watched people pass her and stare. My mother could have worn anything and gotten away with it paper dresses
and
fish earrings, snakeskin gloves, lizard shoes, parachutes, parasols. What other people saw when they passed was a large, beautiful, overdressed woman. What I saw, getting closer to her, was my mother, so ill at ease with her surroundings that she had to arm herself with layers of clothes and jewelry and makeup for protection. Her bulging suitcases flanked her.

“Hi, Mom,” I said quietly, so as not to frighten her. “I’m sorry I’m late.” She smiled broadly.

She was not really seeing me. “You’re very nice,” she said.

“Mom. Oh, Mom.”

“Hmmm? What is it, honey? Vanessa?”

“Mom,” I said gently. “You don’t need all of this,” I said, as I slipped rings from her fingers, slowly undressing her. She looked at me as though she were a child, this big woman. She was completely absorbed in me and what I was saying. “You don’t need all this.” Her eyes did not leave my mouth as she waited for meaning to come. I put jewelry into her large pocketbook. I removed the glasses she was wearing; there was nothing wrong with her eyes.

“How’s my makeup?” she asked.

I wiped layers of color from her face. I felt the giant clock’s sharp arm cutting into my back like a blade.

“I’ll call you on Sunday,” I said. There was so much snow—it pressed down on us. I turned to leave.

“I have loved you my whole life,” she said. “Even when I was a little girl even then.”

When I turned back to look at her, she had already taken the big silver bracelet from her purse. She picked up one suitcase. It was so heavy she tipped over to one side, her leg in the air. She waved good-bye.

All those times, sitting on her bed, buried under clothes, the suitcases overflowing, I found it easy to imagine that she would not come back again, but I did not think of it that day when we parted in Grand Central Station, she on her way home to Connecticut and I back to Poughkeepsie.

Those days of packing always ended with Father coming in to close the suitcases that neither she nor I could manage, they were so full. He would then lower them to the floor. To me at this point she seemed already to be gone, though she’d be chatting away, knowing little work could be accomplished on a traveling day. If I could have changed shape, left my human life for the life of clothing, been fabric against fabric in my mother’s suitcase, I would have—even to have been something frivolous, bought on a whim and never once worn.

My mother, now in a fitted dress, now in a billowy one, now in a hat, now in a veil, a scarf, a bit of plaid, my mother now in felt, now in lace, now in cashmere, smiles. My mother’s shoe, one year a pump, one year flat, one year alligator, one year suede, pivots. She takes my hand in hers, one year polished, one year not, one year gloved, and we go down the stairs, she first, me following. This is how I remember her best: an extravagant, exotic figure, descending stairs or getting into the car, but always saying good-bye.

I borrowed from this scene, not on purpose, for what was the recurrent dream of my childhood. For years, nearly once a week I saw this in sleep: The room is white. My mother walks to the closet and drags the suitcase out—I recognize its smell immediately; it is like the smell of the interior of a new car. I feel as if it might suffocate me. “Mother,” I say, but before completing the sentence she tells me to just relax. Breathe deeply. It’s OK. She is so comforting at this moment, so maternal, that I can’t believe this isn’t her daily role. She looks at me, her head resting on her hand. “Shh, shh. Breathe deeply. Everything will be all right.” I nod. All afternoon as she’s been packing she’s been uncertain, hesitant, sorrowful, but now, patting my head, comforting me, she is stronger than anyone I have ever seen. She moves with new confidence to one corner of the room. Her face has an exquisite pallor. Her chin is raised, her eyes are focused. From the corner of the room she takes a large heavy piece of white cloth and like an expert folds it into a triangle and, smiling, she gives it to me. It calms me down and I can breathe again. From the top of the stairs she passes the suitcase to my father. This is how I know the dream is nearly over. At the end of the staircase there is always fog. I hug the triangle to me. Through the fog I wait for the sound of the door closing. I can see the back of her head perfectly, even through thick fog. I listen for the engine. The lights go on. She turns to wave.

All night Fletcher had been awake or half awake in anticipation of his first trip to the airport. Earlier in the day he had cut airplanes from newspapers and magazines and tacked them first to his bulletin board, then somehow to his ceiling. When I left him at bedtime, he was circling his room, a truck in one hand, a giraffe in the other, learning to fly. In the morning Grandpa and I found him asleep in his chair. He had made a cape out of a light-blue blanket which was wound around his shoulders and knotted at his neck. He was curled up in it, that sweet flyer, his thumb in his mouth.

My grandfather knew what Fletcher was dreaming. He had dreamt the same things many times before his own first trip—a swirl of clouds, the sound of engines, a lifting in the chest.

My grandfather rarely missed a chance to pick up my mother at the airport. He seemed willing to drive any distance and was always sure to go well in advance so as to have time to take in all the sights. He had not at that time begun to mistake barn swallows or wasps for airplanes.

“My God, that pilot must be crazy flying so near the house,” he would shout in his last years.

“Dad,” my father would say gently, “that’s only a bird.”

He would flush then, put on his glasses, joke about being so old, then look again. “Well now, so it is,” he’d say with a bewildered look. He was shaken by his mistake, for he knew, of course, that it was much more than a simple failure of the eyes. “Well, how do you like that?” he’d chuckle, looking into our faces for any sign of alarm.

“It’s OK,” Fletcher would whisper to him, “really, it’s OK.”

Walking in the fields with me that final spring he would often say when a wasp flew by his ear, “just listen to that engine, Vanessa. It’s the modern age, all right! There’s no turning back now.”

I never corrected my grandfather. It seemed to me his hearing grew more and more acute as he grew older—sharper, more complex. In a wasp’s hum he could hear the promise of the twentieth century.

“Are we there yet?” Fletcher said, opening his eyes suddenly, looking up to where the paper DC 10’s and 727’s flew.

“Not yet,” my grandfather whispered, “but get up and get dressed. It’s almost time to go.”

Grandpa, an early riser, had already had his breakfast of melon and cereal and was dressed and all ready by 8:00 A.M. He wore a starched white shirt and extra cologne on the days he went to meet my mother at the airport, like some secret lover.

That day, Fletcher’s first day, they left hours before my mother’s plane was due, so as to have plenty of time at JFK. In the car, cinched in by a seat belt, Fletcher dozed, shifting in his seat, his arms now and then straightening at his sides like wings. “Zhummm,” he murmured.

“Come in, copilot Turin,” my grandfather would say, and my brother would relax his wings, open his eyes, and let the blue sky fill them. Afraid that he might have missed something, he looked from the sky to my grandfather worriedly.

“Relax,” my grandfather said reassuringly. “When we get near, the sky will be thick with planes.”

For another one of his unexplained reasons, my father did not like airports. If he believed in photographs, which he did not, we might have seen a picture of someone during wartime, waving and trying to smile from the cockpit of a bomber. A close relative who had plummeted to a fiery death? A good friend perhaps? We might have nodded at last, understanding why our father did not like planes and why, though he could not wait to see my mother, he avoided picking her up at the airport whenever possible. But there was no such simple clue. He refused to go; he never explained why.

So it had been decided: Grandpa who had made the trip from Pennsylvania the night before would go to the airport with Fletcher to pick up Mom, and Dad and I would make the welcome-home dinner. My father loved to cook. I could not, at age five, cook at all, but knew I was some special help to my father, who never liked to be alone on a day my mother was flying.

“Well, Vanessa, what shall we make?” he’d ask, early in the morning.

“I don’t know, Dad,” I’d say and automatically get the chair to stand on to reach the countless cookbooks he had arranged in some mysterious order on the shelf, while he dragged in piles of
Gourmet
magazines that we studied until we could decide on a menu.

I loved to watch my father cook. He was so animated on those days, so busy in the kitchen: measuring, testing, timing, my father the scientist flourishing among the food; methodical, exacting, I thought—though, occasionally, in the middle of whisking the beurre blanc or the béarnaise sauce, he would stop quite suddenly, against all rules of whisking, to squeeze my hand tightly and give me a kiss, as if he sensed air turbulence, landing gear that would not lower, a flock of birds flying towards the engine. We made intricate dinners the days of my mother’s homecomings with five and six courses and desserts we set on fire. It kept Father’s mind occupied. It kept his thoughts off flying. But I never worried about Mother when she was flying. I was not afraid of the air; I thought, like my father’s arms, it could hold anything.