“Such utter nonsense.” My grandmother’s voice chills the air. “Where do you get such ideas?” But she doesn’t wait for an answer. She’s blaming my mother, I know. My mother disappears for weeks and weeks. My mother hears voices in the trees.
“That is no way to live, Vanessa.”
My grandmother wished that I might take some sort of control over my life, that I not float along recklessly until death, but that I consciously choose a life and then live it. I know if she had lived to see me choose an enormous gray city to live in she would have helped me as much as she could have. First we would have memorized the thin pages of the encyclopedia under New York, learned its population and the shape of the city. She would have shown me where each borough was. We would have learned the grid system of the streets—east from west, downtown from up. She would have mastered the subway system, known that the E train crosses to Queens and the RR goes west. We would have written to the mayor and the chamber of commerce. We would have knocked on the walls to test their thickness and checked the positions of the windows and the ways of escape. We would have inspected the size of the closets, the condition of the appliances, learned something about the neighbors and the superintendent. We would have known the rights of tenants. We would have studied the lease until our heads hurt. She would have made sure that I made the most intelligent, the best choice. “Zabar’s,” she would have printed across a postcard or “King Tut” in a red pen. “Flower show at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, May fifth.”
Then, after I was settled, she would have found me the right job. It would have been in an office with a big view somewhere on the twenty-ninth floor of a building downtown in a large firm, taking up four floors with its hundreds and hundreds of offices, its dull carpets, and Xerox machines glowing in every corner. She would have seated me next to some computer, so cold, so terrible to the touch that my arm would jerk back into my body for protection. She would have wanted me among businessmen, among stockbrokers, in halls of finance, among corporate lawyers and their secretaries and cigarettes and air-conditioning, earning an honest living, saving my money, enduring this life, even though it is the only one I have.
The locusts grow louder and louder. It means more hot weather.
That is not living at all, Grandma.
We get the white cups down from the top shelf, fold the red cloth napkins. I place the fork on the left, the knife and spoon on the right. I take the pitcher from the refrigerator. My grandmother pinches some mint from the plant on the windowsill and puts it in the tea. It floats on the top. Because of the heat we wait to put out the butter, and we put the tea back in the refrigerator. We sit at the table and wait for the chicken to finish cooking. Her hands rest in her lap. They do not fly unexpectedly like frightened birds when the light in the room changes or a small breeze blows from the back of the house. My own hands are cold, even in this weather. “It’s my circulatory system,” I tell her. She smiles. I’m smart for my age. The sunlight pours in the kitchen window, making us think that it is earlier than it really is. Tomorrow I’ll be back on the train to Connecticut.
“How pretty you are,” she says sweetly. My grandmother looks so nice sitting there. I wish I could be more like her. She wipes her brow and leaves me seated alone. When she opens the oven, the heat is unbearable. The chicken is done. It falls apart on our forks. She stares at me from across the large pine table, which used to be an appropriate place to eat when the whole family was together.
What’s wrong? I wonder. She stares at me through the pitcher of iced tea. Do I eat too fast? Is my hair not neat enough? She keeps looking at me. Grandma, don’t, I say under my breath. She looks at me as if with enough concentration she could pass her brain into mine. “Grandma, don’t.”
She asks that I cut myself out from her, like a cookie from dough, like a dress from cloth, and that I be grown up about it and sensible and that I go quietly. She offers her hands in the well-lit kitchen, and to anyone it would look like a small gesture of love, a Mother’s Day card, a painting by Cassatt, a simple movement that any grandmother might make toward her grandchild. She offers her hands like two white loaves—something good, something nourishing, necessary to accept. She offers her hands in the well-lit kitchen among the thick white cups, the fruit balanced safely on the wallpaper.
“Be mine,” she whispers. “Be mine.”
But she’s underestimated me.
“Don’t leave me. Don’t. Don’t go,” she says quietly over and over in a voice so casual, so offhand that you might think the weather is the subject. And when we look to the sky the low clouds have begun to form, the storm not as far off as I once thought, already gathering force.
“They came in wagons—hundreds of them. They covered the land like terrible shadows. Many were sick. There were graves all along the way—white people’s graves everywhere. They brought their darkness. They made us sick with their diseases. They infected us with their lies, with the way they lived. They wanted to tear apart the graves of Indians for minerals, for gold. They would pull apart their own parents. There is nothing they would not do.
“The sun seemed to be going out. They came, hundreds of them, in covered wagons. They dug under the face of my father. They made my mother’s body sore. They think they can own the land. There is nothing they would not do. You cannot trade the lives of people for handfuls of gold. They came in wagons. They came to claim the land.
“But how dare they dig under my father’s skin for gold? How dare they cut my mother’s hair?”
Mary, I love your apple face—round and broad, smooth and shining on this late-fall afternoon. I can’t stay long—this old car is not mine and I’ve got to get it back to the college by dark.
“Ah, yes, the college,” she nods, trying to see it in her mind.
“This will be the last picking,” she tells me, bending and stretching—reaching, reaching. I follow her, cherishing the movements our bodies make in their last harvest dance. We hear apples like heartbeats, falling from all parts of the orchard, the only sound. “They are picking themselves,” her husband Donald laughs.
“The last time for the year,” she repeats. Donald has agreed, it is time to move inside. Let the remaining fruit go untouched. Let the children come and take it for nothing. The earth gives of itself freely; it asks nothing in return. It is time to collect the wood and enter the small house, fragrant with apples at the foot of the orchard. It is time for the final weatherproofing.
She stumbles down the hill in the dusk. Her eyes are as heavy and generous as apple trees. Her apron is filled with the fruits she’ll use for cider, for applesauce. Her rounded arms reach out to her husband for help. Apples dangle from his beard. Apples color the sound of his speech, his concerns. When will the trucks show up for a pickup? How many hundreds of bushels have been left behind?
I want to follow her into her kitchen, settle in next to the wood-burning stove, drink Gertrude Ford tea with her, separate the pumpkin from its seeds, read the
Poughkeepsie Journal
, its early snow reports, and drift into winter.
White light, bluejav, bear-sleep, split wood, apple wine, baked apple: bruised, I want to be with her now, to pass the days in her warmth, to sleep soundly through the bitter nights and dream of no one and nothing but apples.
“I can hardly find your vein,” Marta said. “You’ve gotten so skinny.”
“Please don’t,” I said. But I gave her my arms and, after those veins collapsed, I took off my socks and we examined the places between my toes. “Please don’t,” I whispered, offering her the back of my leg.
I missed her terribly even before she had gone away. I missed her as I watched her writing. I could tell she was so far away that nothing could bring her back. Watching her some nights, stretched out on the couch reading or dozing off, I missed her even then.
“Help yourself,” Jack said, wiping my brow, stroking my hair.
“I’m trying,” I said. “But I can’t seem to get myself any further.”
“Come on,” Jack said. “Try harder.”
I shivered. The weather turned colder.
I reach for her arm and she is strong, stronger than I could have imagined.
“Vanessa,” she says.
“You’ve remembered my name!” I smile.
“Of course I have,” Grandma Alice says. She lifts me up. “Everything’s going to be all right. I promise.”
“Anza-Borrego State Park in California,” he reads, “claims two unusual features: a limitless carpet of wildflowers and elusive bands of bighorn sheep.
“California,” he muses. “Disneyland,” he says dreamily. “A castle for my princesses.”
Grandpa Sarkis, born in the year of the ox, had big plans for my mother. Prom the first moment he saw her behind glass in the infant nursery, he knew there was something different, something special about his daughter. Girl babies in the old country were nothing to dance about, but he danced at the birth of my mother. Through drifts of cigar smoke in the maternity wing of St. Joseph’s Hospital, he danced, he sang. She was beautiful; she was special. He was sure of it. Without knowing anything about the Topaz Bird, he knew. She w as the most perfect creature he had ever laid his eyes on or ever would. And best of all she was
his
.
She would bring him luck. “My tamarind seed, my goat’s tooth,” he said to her and smiled. He was proud of her light hair that waved. He had made an American girl, with her blue eyes like the Pacific, her long graceful body—California. He had made a real American beauty. As unhkelv as it seemed, he had had a part in this. His brooding dark good looks had combined w ith those of his frail American wife and from this hard-fought union Christine had been born.
Everyone had disapproved of the marriage, it had seemed, but especially his in-laws, William and Anne I lauser, Germans from Germany, w ho could not bear the thought of their onlv daughter marrying an Armenian, from Armenia, no less, of all places. But even they, after seeing Christine, were appeased somewhat. She was lovely, all agreed on that.
Grandpa Sarkis accepted the compliments and took all the credit he could get, but still he could not help feeling that she was the product of something else, he did not know what—something out of his reach. She felt invented to him, a product of this new country Like the morning mist itself, rising over the land, at birth she had seemed to lift up gently from her mother’s lap and float into the air—something to admire and love but belonging to no one.
Yet Grandpa Sarkis tried. “My American daughter,” he said, showing her baby pictures to the men he worked with in the mill, showing them to the women in the grocery store, the family who owned the candy and newspaper store, the bakers where he bought his Armenian bread. “Isn’t she beautiful?” Yes, everyone agreed. Even at two weeks old she impressed them, even at two months old; even those who did not appreciate babies appreciated Christine. And this got Sarkis to thinking. In America it was true, anything was possible. In America even he could have a beautiful baby. In America, and the thought came out whole as he drove home from work one late night, you can make movie stars.
My grandfather, a weaver in a silk mill in Paterson, New Jersey, could not afford his wife’s hospital bills. He must have lived in terror of them. He worked night and day, two and sometimes three shifts, and still it was not enough. I would like to think that it was this specific terror that made my grandfather’s dark eyes, darting around the house for something to sell for money, rest on my mother asleep in her crib. In America you can make movie stars, he thought, and at six months a baby can make diaper commercials. Beautiful babies could make money just for being beautiful. This is a good country, he thought, as his sick wife called him from the other room.
“A good country,” he said to his wife, Alice, and in desperation one wintry day he took the baby from her crib without Alice knowing and brought her to the commercial studios in New York City w here photographers posed her in diapers, in other mothers’ arms—posed her in front of fields of flowers, backdrops of spring. “My sweet little silkworm,” he purred.
I hope my mother found comfort in the notion that perhaps she had prolonged her own mother’s life a little, that she provided her with a nurse when she needed one, that the medicine was always there, the tank of oxygen, the way to the hospital. I hope she believed this and not the darker things which it undeniably suggested about her father. Diapers turned to pinafores. She did it for years.
As my mother grew more and more lovely, more radiant with each day, my grandfather’s plans for her grew, too. He dreamed she might be a beauty queen one day and took her every year as a little girl to the Convention Hall in Atlantic City, that cake of a building, to watch those hopeful women strut down the lighted runways: laurels and crowns; banners and bounce; red, white, and blue; Miss America.
“Look at Miss Mississippi,” my grandfather would say, nudging her. “Oh, Miss Horida, you’re breaking my heart,” he shouted. “They’re like racehorses,” he sighed, “thoroughbreds.”
But my mother, grown out of pinafores, stepped back, aw ay from the toothy grin, the larger than life. My grandfather did not understand. Watching her walk onto the beach off the boardwalk, he shouted for her to come back, but it made my mother, only seven years old, walk faster and faster. As she ran in the sand, my grandfather dreamed her into a Rockette. He pictured the long line of women she would be a part of, lifting their legs in beautiful unison.
“That is my daughter,” he said, pointing to Christine who stood where the ocean met the beach. “One day you will see her in the Rockettes.” My mother turned to see him pointing at her and ran faster along the edge of the sea, kicking as she went—a different sort of dancer.
What was wrong with Christine? Silently, Sarkis blamed his wife. “You did not talk to her enough when she was in the womb,” he thought. “That’s why all this fuss about books, the need for so many stories. You were too weak, and it sapped the joy from her heart. You were too sick and it brought her inconsolable sadness.” Nearly immediately Sarkis regretted even thinking this, but it was too late; he could not call the thought back.