Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (10 page)

“Oh, girls, you know how your mama gets.”

I clenched my hands on my thighs, seeing my niece’s mouth go hard. She clamped her teeth as I remembered clamping mine, looked away as I would have done, not wanting to see two tired, half-drunk women looking back at her with her own features. I shook my head once and caught her glance, the wise and sullen look of a not quite adolescent girl who knew too much.

“Pretty girl,” I said. “Don’t look so hard.”

Her mouth softened slightly. She liked being told she was pretty. At eleven so had I. waved her to my hip, and when she came, I pushed her hair back off her face, using the gestures my mama had used on me. “Oh, you’re going to be something special,” I told her. Something special.

“My baby’s so pretty,” Anne said. “Look at her. My baby’s just the most beautiful thing in the whole wide world.” She grinned, and shook her head. “Just like her mama, huh?” Her voice was only a little bitter, only a little cruel. Just like her mama.

I looked into my niece’s sunburned frightened face. Like her mama, like her grandmama, like her aunts—she had that hungry desperate look that trusts nothing and wants everything. She didn’t think she was pretty. She didn’t think she was worth anything at all.

“Let me tell you a story,” I whispered. “Let me tell you a story you haven’t heard yet.” Oh, I wanted to take her, steal her, run with her a thousand miles away from the daddy who barely noticed her, the men who had tried to do to her what my stepfather had done to me. I wanted to pick her up and cradle her. I wanted to save her.

My niece turned her face to me, open and trusting, waiting to be taken away, to be persuaded, or healed, or simply distracted.

All right, I thought. That will do. For one moment, this moment leading to the next, the act of storytelling connecting to the life that might be possible, I held her attention and began.

“Let me tell you about your mama.”

My niece looked from me to my sister, and my sister stared at me uncertainly, wondering if I was going to hurt her, her and her girl.

“Sit down, baby. I got a story to tell you. Look at your mama. You know how she is? Well, let me tell you about the day death was calling your mama’s name, death was singing her song and luring her away. She was alone, as alone as only a woman waiting to birth a baby can be. All she saw was darkness. All she heard was her blood singing death. But in the deepest part of that night she heard something else. She heard the baby in her belly crying soft, too weak to make a big noise, too small to know it was alive at all. That’s when your mama saved her own life—by choosing it, by claiming it, alone and scared as she was. By pulling you into the world and loving you with her whole heart.”

I watched my sister’s eyes go wide, watched her mouth work. “Now you telling stories about me?”

I just smiled. “Oh, I got one or two.”

That night I sat with my niece and watched my sister going in and out her back door, picking up and sweeping, scolding her dogs for jumping up on her clean work clothes. My niece was sleepy, my sister exhausted. Their features were puffy, pale, and too much alike. I surprised myself then, turning my niece’s face to mine and starting another story.

“When your mama was a girl,” I told her, “she was so beautiful people said the sun shone brighter when she walked out in the day. They said the moon took on glitter when she went out in the night. But, strangest of all, people said the June bugs catching sight of her would begin to light and try to sing an almost human song. It got to the point she had to stay home and hide to keep the sun from getting too hot, the moon from burning up, the June bugs from going hoarse and dying out.”

“Ahhh.” The two of them looked at me, almost smiling, almost laughing, waiting. I put my hand out, not quite touching my sister’s face, and drew my fingers along the line of her neck from just below her ear to the softness of her chin. With my other hand I made the same gesture along my niece’s face.

“See here?” I whispered. “This is where you can see it. That’s the mark of the beautiful Gibson women, both of you have it.”

My niece touched her cheek, mouth open.

“Here?” she asked.

Yes.

 

 

TEN DAYS AFTER MY SON, Wolf, was born, my sister Wanda came to stay with us. “Gonna make sure you know what you’re doing,” she’d joked before she came. “Waiting till you’re forty-two to start a family, what you think? You think it’s as easy as reading a book? You think it comes natural, raising babies and not going crazy? Lord!”

I didn’t argue. I put Wolf in her arms and let her pull his belly up to her chin, let her tickle his ears and kiss his neck.

“I thought boys would be different,” she told me. “But he smells like my girls.” She grinned and licked his cheek. “Tastes like them, too.” Wolf giggled and I laughed with him, and only then saw that there were tears on Wanda’s eyelashes.

“Babies!” she teased. “Get you every time.”

Later she told me she’d only come to save herself another pregnancy. “Got to where I’d started dreaming about having another one, breathing in that talcum smell, feeling those little arms hanging on my neck.” She sipped at a beer and grinned at me over Wolf’s extended fingers.

I waved a diaper at her and laughed. “Wasn’t it you that told me mamas go crazy from sleep deprivation?”

“Oh yeah. Sleep deprivation, sex deprivation, and the simple lack of adult conversation. Drive you out of your head in a matter of weeks. Make you act silly when it an’t making you think you dreaming all the time.” She cradled Wolf’s bare feet in one hand as if she wanted to lick them the way she’d licked his cheek.

“Used to think people were talking to me when there was nobody else there.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “The other night I even thought I heard Mama, just outside the window, talking to someone else.”

Wanda’s eyes turned up from Wolf’s toes to my face. “Might have been, you know.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Just the same. Might have been. Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been. You the mama now, you’re gonna think different. Hell, you’ll be different after a while, all the time more than what you thought you were. Or maybe a little less.”

I gave her a careful look. Asked, “You get religion again when I wasn’t looking?” And waited to see if she’d joke her way out of saying more.

For a moment she was quiet, her fingers gently stroking my boy’s feet, her eyes still looking into mine.

“Nothing’s different and everything’s changed. That’s all. You’ve moved to California and got yourself a baby. I’m an old married woman with two half-grown girls of my own. When did we think this was gonna happen to either of us, huh? When did we believe we were gonna live this long?”

“Two or three things and nothing for sure, huh?”

“Yeah.” And she kissed Wolf’s head.

 

 

More than a decade ago I had to quit karate. My body broke in a way that stubbornness could not heal. The notched indexes of my vertebrae, separated only by the thinnest cushioned lining, met and grated loud enough to echo in my nervous system.

These days I go to strange places, cities I’ve never been, stand up in public, in front of strangers, assume the position, open my mouth, and tell stories.

It is not an act of war.

 

 

OTHER NIGHT I WENT over to Providence to read in a line, a marathon of poets and fiction writers.

Afterwards, as I was sipping a Coke, a young man came up to me, fierce and tall and skinny, his wrists sticking out of his sleeves.

He said, “Hypertext. I’ve been wanting to tell you about it.”

“Hypertext?”

“Your work. I’ve read everything you’ve ever published three or four times—at least. I know your work. I could put you in hypertext.”

There was a girl behind him. She reached past his sleeve, put her hand on mine, said, “Oh yes, we could do it. We could put you in hypertext.” She spoke the word with conviction, passion, almost love.

“Hypertext?” I spoke it through a blur of bewilderment.

“CD-ROM, computers, disks or files, it doesn’t matter,” the boy said in a rush of intensity. “It’s the latest thing. We take one of your stories, and we put you in. I know just the story. It goes all the way through from beginning to end. But all the way through, people can reach in and touch a word. Mouse or keyboard or a touchable screen. Every time you touch a word, a window opens. Behind that word is another story. You touch the word and the story opens. We put one of your stories behind that story. And then maybe, maybe you could write some more and we could put in other things. Every word the reader touches, it opens again.”

The girl tugged my arm urgently. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “After a while it’s like a skin of oil on the water. If you look at it from above it’s just one thing, water and oil in a spreading shape. But if you looked at it from the side, it would go down and down, layers and layers. All the stories you’ve ever told. All the pictures you’ve ever seen. We can put in everything. Hypertext.”

The boy nodded.

I reached for a glass of wine. I took a long drink, rubbed my aching back, said, “Yeah, right, I’ll think about it.”

That night I had a dream.

I was walking in a museum, and I was old. I was on that cane I had to use the whole length of 1987. My right eye had finally gone completely blind. My left eye was tearing steadily. I saw everything through a scrim of water, oily water. Way way down three or four corridors, around a turn, I hit a wall.

My story was on this wall.

I stood in front of my wall. I put my hand on it. Words were peeling across the wall, and every word was a brick. I touched one.

“Bastard.”

The brick fell away and a window opened. My mother was standing in front of me. She was saying, “I’m not sick. I would tell you if I was sick, girl. I would tell you.”

I touched her face and the window opened.

She was behind it, flesh cooling, still warm. Hair gone, shadows under her eyes. I was crying. I touched her hand. It was marble, it was brick. It fell away. She was seventeen and she was standing on the porch. He was sitting on the steps. She was smiling at him. She was saying, “You won’t treat me bad, will you? You’ll love my girls, won’t you?”

I touched the brick. It fell away.

He was standing there. I was holding my arm. The doctor was saying, “What in God’s name happened to this child?”