Love & Darts (9781937316075) (8 page)

She was caught spinning and was rhythm
witness to summer migrations. Rolling the thread up with two
fingers and dropping that spindle again she fed clouds into simple
machines after all the required rhythm to tease and coax oily
wool—full of seeds and twigs and leftover sheep curls—into
something useful.

She lays some fiber on the bed of nails.
It’s called carding. Have you seen it done? Imagine holding two
pet-grooming brushes, one in each hand, used to pull hundreds of
slight-bent wires across each other and across the wool. Over and
over and over and over those wiry cards with handles got caught in
each other’s grip as her wrists flicked, her hands flipped, and the
wires yanked through a woolen puff until every tangled twist let
go. A childhood friend might ask why. The old lady in her housecoat
all zipped up modest and warm would answer, “So the little hairs
all go in one direction.”

The kids never told.

On the deck, where flag shadows flapped on
sunny days, the gray paint was hotter than such a light color
should be and rhythm feet ran up from their swims, from their
high-tide screaming cannonballs off barnacled jetties and their
9.5-rated Olympic swan dives off smooth-topped granite boulders
into her jelly fish-strewn seaweed waves. She didn’t have to look
up and look out to see all the cousins swarming Dragon Rock and
racing to find Swim. She heard those children playing safe in the
warm rain. She heard their rhythm laughter as they ran like a
troupe of high-wire performers through beach grass along the
blistering creosote-coated bulkhead. She heard their plans to sneak
up the cliff through wild roses. She heard them chase, race, and
pant at the hose rinsing off sandy feet before daring to come
inside onto her crewel rugs.

Rhythm witness the slow heat of afternoon
sleep. Wakeful but dreaming. She didn’t care how many little eyes
watched the wheel go round or the wooden pedal pressing rubber down
over and over. Rhythm dunk lift and twist in the dandelion dye.
Rhythm dunk lift and twist all the wool-washing kinds of
preparation that she did out back in big steel pans of blue borax
water nested in deep, cool shaded sand near a feeder for birds.
Just like she did to rhythm dunk lift and twist ten swim suits at
the end of the day. Tart lemonade refreshed burnt-skin children
that stood watching the sun catch slow drips off the row of hung-up
suits. Rhythm breath and blinking.

Huge screens inhale and exhale on
maybe-a-storm’s-coming breeze. Warblers pretend to be lost in the
grapevine. The smell of sandalwood drifts through the slow-tossing
briar and locust brambles as does the sound of laughter. Some loved
ones are playing cards.

Up and down stairs. Up and down suns. Up and
down flags. Up and down drop-spindle, round and round wooden wheel,
spinning on, making wool, making sweaters, making blankets, making
hats, making mittens, making gloves, making scarves, making socks,
making enough layers to keep us all cozy. She was rhythm witness
and a BLT; one blue foot on top of the other in the kitchen.
Emphysema laughing over on you, holding your arm—with strong,
strong hands.

I
almost couldn’t bear to watch what I knew was coming.

She’s growing up fast but you can only learn
so much in twenty-six months. When it was over, and it was over so
quickly, she just screamed in agony—cried out with her
knowing—until I rushed over and grabbed her up off the floor.

“Oh. My sweet baby girl.”

Five minutes before I did, I just waited and
watched while she discovered her world. I could hardly breathe. But
I knew I had to let her do it.

From a doorway, or a window, I guess, one
may look in upon a child, playing alone. One thinks of white
canvas, and rain. Her room’s too much like a doll’s house with one
side open to the world. She is there
in toto
: Wrist. Neck.
Little folds of skin. Fingers. A big toe folded against the floor.
Head tilting—thought and compassion. Before words. Before all the
many words, she is there taking it in.

The doll, another American Girl, is ragged
with insipid eyes worn thin from bathing. Her stringy plastic hair
is pretend-brushed. Her dress is smoothed by awkward fingers. How
can anyone be expected to grip a soft plastic foot with its molded
toenails, to let a favored toy girl flop backwards upside-down with
her hair hanging, and climb, careful-toddler climb, up onto the
window-seat toy box? But my daughter did it and relegated the doll
to its little blue plastic rocking chair near the plant on the
broad sill.

Ambivalent and then decided she went down
again. A toy car drove through a wooden maze of forgotten
blocks.

Needing it. Having to have it. She grabbed a
book. Upside down. Sideways. Right side up. The fermented paper
pages were yellowed and old and must have felt scratchy to little
fingers, always learning. It is a golden-spined book called
The
Seven Little Postmen
about one special letter they each carry
for a distance through wind and rain and driving snow.

But as the sun streams in, she tires. She
lies down on her belly. Her fingers touch the carpet. For the
nursery my husband insisted on Berber with two layers of the
thickest padding underneath. So my baby girl lolls on that nice
floor her daddy made her and the hand goes over and over the places
her fingers can reach without stretching before it slows. The
little fingers rest easily against the knots in the fabric of a
pillow lying on the floor nearby. And she is still for a
moment.

The room slows. I look up and gaze around
the room. It seems the toys watch over her. Outside the window
summer hits glass like a starling stunned and the elm tree shades
that side of the house. I look down at my daughter again. She’s
almost asleep with her little cheek resting against the nubby
floor.

I was about to turn and go. Then her head
sprang to attention. Again desire. Total focus on something that
must have rolled under the rocking horse. And I’m riveted with her
in the moment. She wants it. She crawls around. She slides under.
She throws out blind hands. Not quite. She tries again. Still she
cannot reach it. So she gets up and drags the stumbling rocking
horse back enough to go in underneath and push out her find.

Kaleidoscope. And sunshine through the other
window.

She is on her back. Her feet are in the air.
They wriggle. Now they rest on the rocking horse where stirrups are
painted. Now on the pillow, then kicking the floor. And her eye
looks in as her little hand turns.

Red. Before she knows the names of the
colors they fall over her in their mixed-up rainbows. With that
sandy rattle from inside the pretty world turning.

Brilliant yellow.

Blue.

Flowers

And pink.

Enthralled, she laughs out loud.

Uninhibited.

Amazed.

Enraptured.

But curious.

To be in that world. To find one’s way into
that world. Colors tossing easily and free-falling with shaken,
circular gravity into the middle of the world. There is a drunken
moment when she believes in the place inside. She wants it.

She takes her eye away. She hits the toy on
the floor. Looking in again but her hand covers the aperture and
with no light she sees little. She hits it repeatedly on the floor.
And again on the rocking horse.

She turns it, looks in backwards, and sees
nothing. The world has disappeared. But turning it again the
furious rage dissipates; she is satisfied. And she has learned how
to hold it up once more towards the light for soothing patterns and
a falling sound. Again she is amazed. Enraptured.

But still curious.

She carries the kaleidoscope over to her toy
box. Standing up she puts the handle of the toy box lid at such an
angle so as to be able to pry the thing apart. She works
diligently. Pushing from one side and then on the other. To be
inside. To live in that world.

Finally!

A half-smile. She got it.

Then.

Beads hemorrhage for an instant.

Little one-sided plastic nothing mirrors lie
motionless.

The cardboard is bland inside the pretty
paper.

And I cannot get to her fast enough.

Kitchens breathe easily in big families. There is
a blur of aunts and uncles leaning on counters. Teenage cousins
avoid obligation in the basement surfacing only to refill a bowl of
tortilla chips. Little nephews play with string cheese on the
floor. At the end of the kitchen there is an island where neighbors
are sitting on bar stools drinking mai tais, white wine, and
sangria. They get up to take turns throwing a doll’s head (a
beloved dog toy) into the living room. Charlie, the golden
retriever, bounds back to the slow-swirling group and looks around
among different friendly faces before choosing one and offering up
his drool-covered prize.

A twenty-six-year-old woman, the new wife of
one of the older grandchildren, stands awkwardly apart from the
group. The loudest neighbor demands that she come toss the doll’s
head. She declines but so as not to seem too standoffish she
instead makes a large gesture of maturely closing the basement
stairs door in an effort to improve her political position in the
familial hierarchy. Who does that surly nineteen-year-old think he
is to let a door stand open in the middle of the way as he rushes
and rumbles down the steps?

But. Who is she to care? So she leans over
and picks up the lone tortilla chip he dropped from his refilled
bowl lest it get crushed and require whatever reprimand might come
out with the vacuum.

Mrs. Hamel from church is carrying serving
dishes out to the screened-in porch. She seems never quite pleased
with the platters’ spacial relations. The buffet under the kitchen
window goes through different permutations. Deviled eggs, potato
salad, coleslaw, orange Jell-O and carrot salad, teriyaki chicken
wings, and mint-frosted chocolate chip brownies dance, leapfrog,
slide around, and push back in her old, gnarled, manicured hands
until she’s satisfied.

No one is listening. But Mrs. Swindan
answers what must have been a question posed by that new wife of
one of the older grandchildren, “Angels on horseback are just baked
oysters wrapped in bacon,” then raises her voice to shout toward
the porch, “Mrs. Hamel. How do you make your Christmas fruit
salad?”

Mrs. Hamel hears the question but doesn’t
bother raising her voice much. She’s folding napkins
corner-to-corner and making a pinwheel pile. “The oranges are from
Central America. None of this grocery store nonsense. Mine come
directly from the grove to my back door. Lord knows what
infestations I’m ushering in on the fruit, but I don’t care. I’m an
old lady, I like good oranges, and I hate pesticides.”

When the twenty-six-year-old comes through
the doorway carrying the fruit salad, Mrs. Hamel points to one of
two empty places of honor, and the prized dish gets turned ninety
degrees counterclockwise.

“So you cut the oranges. Lots of them. Let
the juice run in too. Then the apples. I like the Gala from
Washington State, but you can be more flexible with the apples.
Just don’t use those big red ones covered in soapy wax from the
store. They’re mealy and awful. Use a good baking apple over a good
lunchbox apple. They won’t take on as much fluid and mush down on
you. I’ve even used the Granny Smith. They are tart but firm and
get balanced by so much soft sweetness in the salad. The Golden
Delicious is fine if you can’t find the Gala and don’t want the
tart zing of the Granny Smith. But the Golden will get soft after a
while.”

Mrs. Swindan only asked to be polite. She
drifts off from the kitchen to get the three-tiered cake plate from
upstairs. But. The young woman keeps listening.