“I brought you a present,” Marta said, unwrapping it for me like a child who cannot control her excitement when giving, who cannot wait. “It’s a dress the Indians wear. You’ll look great in it.”
I looked up from my mother’s ringed hands. It was red and yellow with a design of fish and crabs and sea horses on it, and it had a wrap for the waist of navy blue cloth covered with zebras and trees. I unbuttoned my shirt.
“It must be very beautiful there,” I said, looking at the brightly patterned dress. “You must take me someday.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, looking at me, “it’s very beautiful.”
I touched her dark face. “You are my brown berry,” I said. “Promise to take me.”
She took my hand. “Please,” she whispered, “don’t make me love you.”
The next morning Marta began work on her senior thesis; she had been given an extension by the Dean of Studies, who had always been kind to her. I watched her write the first two sentences.
I patted the top of her curly head. “I’ve got a class,” I said. “I’ll bring you your lunch afterwards so you won’t have to go out.” She nodded and whispered in the tiniest voice, “Thank you, Vanessa.” She never looked up from the page.
The class met only once a week and so was longer than most others—three hours, I think. It was art history and, looking at slides in the dark, I found myself easily falling into the dreamy apple world of Cezanne, easily blocking out the teacher’s comments, which always dissipated my pleasure. I noticed, though, as I sat there that some of the paintings seemed to be losing their color, and the teacher, too, seemed to be fading.
After class I went to the cafeteria. I was happy to bring Marta a lunch not only of carrots and celery and crackers but also a sandwich, a muffin, food that did not crunch; she was eating everything again. Walking down the pine tree path from Central Dining I heard a great commotion. The path was white, as if it had snowed. I decided to ignore the frenzy, not realizing at first that it was coming from the place I was going. I saw a flashing light through the trees, suddenly a stretcher, a car of white, then a siren. There was a crowd of people outside Gushing. And I knew she was dead.
There is a tremendous country house, I am sure of it, somewhere in the heart of France or Maine or Sweden, with so many rooms it’s been easy to get lost, it’s been easy to be seduced, for each room has seemed more fantastic than the one before it. It’s been filled with things we could not have ignored, could not have looked away from. Each table, elegantly set, held great feasts. Music played. Music plays even now, and people dance. Others cry, for they want it never to end. I don’t cry. There are so many rooms to go through, it seems they will go on forever—each one different, yet strangely the same. But suddenly we are at the back of the house, and what we see there we have never seen before. At the back of the house, at the place where the rooms end, there is an enormous porch made entirely of crystal, where a beautiful woman sits smiling a most inviting smile. She is patient, for she knows there is no one who can resist her. I have turned my face from her many times, but now I look again. It is Natalie.
Riding in the speeding taxi to Vassar Brothers Hospital, I thought of my mother—how she hated cars, how she hated riding in cars, and most of all how she hated riding in cars that went fast. What she could not bear, I think, was how quickly the world passed before her eyes. She kept wanting to say stop, wait, not so fast. She disliked how objectively the car treated the landscape, not pausing for the barefoot children carrying pails in spring or slowing down for the milkweed pods that scattered in the wind. “Michael,” she said one day from the back seat, as we passed a rosy apple orchard and she turned back to look at it, “Michael, my teeth hurt. What shall I do?”
My father just said, “Hmm,” and I imagine then he went into a meditation about dentists. There was Dr. Ledbetter who had done that terrible root canal, Dr. Brand who had committed suicide, Dr. Ellis who had run off with a pretty patient. I pictured this seduction: he pressing his white coat, his firm thigh against her legs, lowering his fingers into her mouth, then down into her throat, spraying water on her arms, taking the cotton from the inside of her bleeding mouth, the sound of the drill. How many times did she come back, I wonder. How many noncavities were filled? When did they know it was love? And pity the poor dental hygienist who had secretly loved Dr. Ellis all along, witness to the whole affair.
All my father said in the end was “Dr. William Wheeler. He’s very good. I’ll make an appointment for you as soon as we get home.”
“But, Michael,” my mother said in her swimmy voice, “it’s not one tooth, it’s all my teeth. They hurt. The actual teeth themselves hurt!”
My father knew to pull the car over then, and as we took a long walk in the woods my mother’s pain began to subside. It had been her way of stopping the car. I think she hated what the speeding movement of the car suggested to her about life—that it was all going so fast and that we were doomed for the most part just to take glimpses, never really to see.
Very often my mother developed a physical hurt of some sort when she got into the car. I always thought she did this for us. We could understand a physical malady better than a mental one; it was a way to suffer the way other people did.
A loose tooth falls through time into my lap as I race to the hospital to Marta.
Picture her dead, I kept telling myself over and over. Picture her dead.
Racing through this January, I understood finally that my mother’s physical symptoms were very real because, as I flew by children dragging sleds through snow, I felt nauseated and dizzy. Pain cracked like ice in my head. I wanted only to stop, to examine the birch’s silver, to lose myself in a flurry of birds, in a community of ants, to skim the thick sleep of the woodchuck and rest there for a while.
By the time I got to Vassar Brothers Hospital, Marta had passed through the doorway into the last room, where she stayed, sleeping, able to see Natalie, I suppose, but not with her yet.
“She slit her wrists,” the doctor said, “like a pro. She knew exactly what she was doing.…” His voice did not fall like it naturally does at the end of a sentence, and I knew there was more. “She took at least thirty barbiturates,” he said in a soft voice. “She has slipped into a coma.”
Your hair waves a million times toward me—a lovely curling sea. I move close to you and bathe in its soothing motion as it rises and falls on my face. I could almost drown in it. I could almost become its darkness, forget about everything, forget about you, Marta, as you have forgotten about me.
I take one curl and pull it taut from her head. I wrap my finger around it, feel its oily film on my thumb and on the tip of my forefinger. I slip my finger into another curl, then another, let them recoil. I pull one, I pull two, three, tighter and tighter until her head nearly tumbles from the bed and into my lap. You do not protest; you do not object—you have become so unlike yourself.
I pull your curls and they recoil, falling back into their dark nest where fish seem to swim in and out of your tangled tunnels. Snails curl around your ears in tendrils, humming their snail sounds. And there are starfish, too, that dangle at your neck. Marta, in your hair is a whole world. I see as I look closer even the butterfly shrimp in your curls, plodding on, feeding on death, a scavenger like me. I pull another curl, then another. I watch them bounce back. Marta, why? Why? It is beautiful hair, alive on your head.
I, too, fell into sleep, mimicking Martas half-life, her patterns of breath, her slowing pulse. I tried to follow her into the hallway of death and yank her back to the place where we were up to our elbows in henna. But day after day she slept, beautiful in her repose, not moving, barely breathing.
“You are my brown berry,” I whispered to her, touching her smooth, tanned face, “deep, deep inside a bramble bush, far, far off in the heart of the forest.” I could not reach her.
Sabine opens the large French windows and breathes deeply as the air of the ocean enters the house. It is strangely warm and cool at the same time. She takes my mother’s hand. She feels snow in the air.
They stare out at the smooth breast of the beach, the lovely white belly of the beach. They watch the ships yearning toward shore through fog. The land seems to extend its arm and curve around each hull, offering its pale embrace.
There’s a signal out there: a red light, then a white, then another white from the lighthouse tower. Something shines in the distance. Like a sleepwalker, my mother floats out onto the glass porch. It looks like crystal to her.
“An iceberg,” Sabine says, pointing to the place my mother has begun to go.
The lighthouse voice is filled with longing. The iceberg emits a ray of bright light. Only my mother can hear its lonely, snow tone.
When the phone call came at three in the morning with its unmistakable ring of death, I thought that it was Marta who had finally passed from the last room to the lovely porch where Natalie sat waiting. I was not thinking of my mother. I think now that I might have warned her that night, might have done something to prevent what happened. I had watched for days the world drain of color, the way it always had when she was going away; but I misinterpreted that blanching badly. I thought it had something to do with Marta, who with each hour was slipping further and further away. I thought the whiteness of the world had something to do with her whom I had begun to love.
My mother died of what they would call severe burns when our 1973 Pinto was rammed by a car at a tollbooth on the Connecticut Turnpike. The Pinto’s rear end collapsed on impact, the gas tank ruptured, and the car burst into flames. She was sitting in the back seat where she liked it best. Death was instantaneous.
My mother died of what would be called severe burns, but later Fletcher would say that when he lifted the coffin as one of four pallbearers it seemed as if it was empty. She must have exploded into bits.
Death was instantaneous.
A one-time Ford engineer testified at the trial that the Pinto’s design was not balanced. He said that, for cost reasons, it was designed to withstand only a twenty-mile-per-hour crash.
At the trial, the lawyer attempted to prove that Ford was well aware of the Pinto’s vulnerability but that after a cost-benefit analysis a conscious decision was made not to install a $6.65 part that could help protect the tank
It was at the New Haven tollbooth that the car in back, having lost control in the ice and snow, slid into ours. They were nearly home.
From behind closed doors, three loud hurrahs could be heard in the executive boardroom at the Ford Motor headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan.
They had been acquitted.
Death was instantaneous.
The Pinto collapsed on impact, its fuel tank ruptured, and the car burst into Flames. My father and brother both received second-degree burns but man-iged to get themselves out of the front seat of the car. She never had a chance.
Before her eyes the highway opened up like a field and slowly filled with snow, he looked up into the white sky at the dance of flurries. As they neared home in the small red car, the snow fell harder, transforming the landscape, suddenly she noticed that they were in the center of a blizzard. No one, not even Fletcher, had expected such a storm. He shook his head at the unpredictability of the weather. He was no better at it now, after years of study, than he was as a little boy.
“Oh, it’s so wonderful!” she gasped, and her voice ached with the beauty of it. Fletcher turned around and looked at her.
“Mother,” he said, but he did not articulate his sentence, for he saw that she was not listening: it was beautiful, and it called out to her, and she was not afraid.
Father never took his eyes from the road. He was always a careful driver. “Painfully careful,” my grandfather used to say.
“We’re almost home,” Father said. “The roads are very bad, but we’re almost home.”
Home, she thought. How wonderful to be in the center of snow and to be going home. She closed her eyes as Father pulled up to the tollbooth.
I hope that her eyes were closed and that she did not turn around in the last second and, seeing the car behind her sliding on the ice, know what would happen. Did she call out? Perhaps. It was so close to her, she felt she might call out to it and with her voice hold it back. But I hope she was too tired or preoccupied or just too settled in that tiny back seat to look out the window behind her. I hope that her eyes were closed or at least that she stared ahead into the snow, ordered the last few objects left on the landscape, and held that final word “home” in her mouth, and that the word home carried her through the explosion and over to the other side safely.
There could not have been time for my father or brother to have helped her. I hope that is true—that there was no moment in which to hesitate or make a decision, no split second for them to live with for the rest ot their lives, wishing they had done differently. No, there would not have been time to have done anything. There are a few things I know for sure: I loved her more than my own life. She was beautiful and wise. She never had a chance.
I do not know, though, whether this death was easy for her. I fear it was not. I fear, like her life, that it was hard, that she suffered exquisitely, that she turned around in the last minute knowing that it was out there in the snow, because she was so good at knowing things like that, and she w ent out to greet it, to take in its strangeness, and as the headlights tame closer and my, father took the change from the toll taker my mother knew and sighed, “Oh,” as she let death enter her. And he, I’m afraid, turned around to look at her and saw the agony on her face and said, “Christine, what, what is it?” And at that last moment she just shook her head wordlessly, put her head and her hands on Fletcher’s shoulders, slumped over, and said again, “Oh,” and then, “Oh, my!”
Or was it different from this? Did she sink her fingernails into the car’s upholstery right before the end, in terror as the brain in disorder called up random images—an aisle from a drugstore of her youth or a slant of light from her attic study—as she clung to the car and then separated from the world of tolls and cars into horrendous pain. She never imagined it would be like this—death ramming into her, death so hot it turned green and bubbled. Its fingers curled into her back, its sharp teeth sank into her. Pain so hideous the human body has no capacity to hold it, the brain in a fraction of a second casting off everything, everything, the works of Shakespeare, the poetry of Rilke, the music of Chopin, the lives of her own children, she willing to give up everything to be released—everything simply to be released.