Andrea

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                   ANDREA; A NAME NOT YET PUT TO MUSIC

 

     Portland becomes her.  Portland is the grey lady of the Willamette, rain and dark clouds nine months of the year, the clear times gerrymandered in spaces between clouds, misappropriated to cold, blustery days, wasted passing over head at night, scratching branches on the windows, unveiling archipelagoes of stars twinkling between shredded cloud banks.  A constant dripping from the eaves, glistening film on shingles, primeval stands of moss lush as clover on the walls.  Puddles established enough to become geography.  There is always one sleeping on the lumpy driveway to the passenger side of the car.  Jessica has to be reminded to step across it-she should remember but she will not agree to its normalization in her girlhood; it is snobbery and girlish fantasy.  Why must she expect a resident puddle where her white tennis shoes with the long red laces land?  She has organized things much better.  Some of the puddles have earned a nomenclature, a taxonomy.  They are not puddles; they have black depths.  They are more like tide pools; property claims flagged by flood. 

     With all of its dripping and rivulets, and pale, cloud diffused sun reflecting off wet angles, the city looks as if it spent half its time sunken, to emerge steaming like the ocean floor in the Bay of Fundy.  There do exist gay, opalescent puddles that snag small patches of blue and gold, and the shallow puddles that a kid's foot can shatter into spray, but lawns are sometimes covered with grey sheets stippled with the pointy tops of grass. There are sections of her backyard where even in the dryer times, when the standing bogs of fallen leaves and grass trimmings have disappeared, a footstep will still squish and suck.  She is not sarcastic about these waters, they have aboriginal primacy.  She has moved from New York into their place. 

     She is diagnosed with S.A.D., Seasonal Affective Disorder; she agreed on it with her therapist.  It seems more justifiable than other interpretations, sympathetic to the environment, and she had to struggle with her therapist to have her sign on to this contemporary, escapist diagnosis.   

     It is a diagnosis she almost cherished.  It was like earning an Indian name in the psychological realm, proving you could move through the woods without snapping twigs.  It gained her a west coast identity.  She had to struggle for it.  She had picked her therapist, a woman in her seventies, because she was so unassimilated to Portland-there was a slight coincidence of dress styles with the local blue bloods, a quality of anachronism or heirloom, but this was due to a distrust for the transient the therapist shared with the old guard.  Detail by detail, in her way of speaking, in her dress, she was pure East Coast. Andrea chose her for her versing in traditional methodology and her brassy warmth.

     Andrea was simply sad, a dumb mammal responding to the weather with all its instinctual cues.  The call to hibernate when the planetary turn rolled the wind, ripping clouds, flooding the streets with time passing.  The astrology in simple things, their organic seance with vital impulse, pushing her to mate and cuddle. 

     One fall a deer appears strapped across the hood of a neighbor's rec vehicle.  She does a double-take just like in a comedy.  The deer cannot be reconciled with its body strapped down on the hood.  It would be a rug when she looked again.  Her neighbor must have gotten back late at night and just thought he would leave it there until morning.  The sight does not strike him as horrible, a carcass, larger than a man, a victim of violence whose gory wound must still show, left out in a neighborhood full of children.  He has children of his own.  Children will come out of their houses bundled up in bright colored parkas on their way to school.  They will pile into cars with steamy windows, carrying lunch boxes with cartoon characters pictured on them, and each of them will be wearing or carrying some personnel talisman, an athletic team's logo, special berets in their hair, an older brother's belt with new holes punched for a narrow waist.  And there will be this beautiful murdered creature slung across the hood.  With its beautiful eye staring down at the ground, a face that looks musical and sensitive. 

     She sees differently than her neighbors.  She is the most recent arrival on the block.  A row of horse chestnuts grow along the south end of the block.  She can see them from her kitchen window across a couple of back yards.  Sometimes she hears their spiny fruit plummeting through the leaves and hitting the ground with a thud.  They are unhealthy looking trees with many bare, dead branches.   Whenever she looks towards them she feels a wave of depression.  If she had noticed them at first, maybe she would not have bought the house, but then again, at that time, she would not have noticed them especially.  Noticing them waited for her to lose hope here.  Their fruit is odious.  It squashes underfoot with the sticky slide of excrement, and stinks when its shell in broken and the yellow pulp exposed. 

     She does not really understand the culture of rural depression around her. She is probably less happy than her neighbors; they must feel less displaced, but they have nothing to appease their unhappiness.  The music she hears coming out of their houses is rock or country, there were few books apparent when she picked up Jessica from the baby sitting exchanges she used to make when Jessica was small.  The television was always on.  It is surprising how preemptory a television sounds when you are not involved with the program.  Preemptory and droning. The houses would have been chillingly quiet if not for them, and the radios too, which accompanied the husbands outside when they worked on their cars or painted scaling sills.

     She could hear the music evaporating strangely in open air, loud but flattened.  The disc jockeys hammy, carny voices held together, as did the structure of advertisements-the slapstick humor, the excited voices-competing successfully against the sense of their irrelevance under cloud and pine, while the music's small and secreted sentiment, its remnant of purpose, thinned out immediately.  As with their televisions, all that was left was the heart of the machine which was to magnify.

     It was this sense of impending deafness or imprisoning privacy which chilled her: the perceived necessity if no other means were known, to resuscitate, make militant and obvious, the unread portions of the heart.  And the futility of it was chilling too, this militarizing of the shy and untended, when all gentle or wise or beautiful rapport with silence is unknown.  But, realism in it too, because didn't they know each other, and themselves too, the silence inside and out and a hostility to expression if for no better reason than a lack of means, and the artificial appearance of each means presented or at least alien, never arising from where they lived, threatening the privacy already threatened, either too comprehending or too fine?   

     Before Portland, she had migrated to Connecticut with her family.  She was six.  They moved in summer.  There is a home movie from around that time, she is sitting on a tricycle squinting into the camera, obviously indoctrinated with holding still for a camera.  She is on a stretch of glaring pathway.  The camera bobs about in the freedom a movie camera at first gives to those used to the chastening when taking snapshots, and a bright sun stains the film rose, appears as incandescent tentacles sweeping through the picture and fades images into white blindness.  When the camera lifts to catch Florence walking down the path, flinching shyly, the brick front of the apartment building in which they lived is briefly included.  Andrea remembers the tricycle, parts of the courtyard areas, and a pastiche of doorways and windows and pieces of furniture, shadowy and maze-like, an open closet she was afraid of and the dusty places under beds. 

     The movie is a clue to their moving.  Manny had decided to indemnify the family's history because the future was promising.  The summer before their move, the plan must already have been a gleam in his eye.  He must have already been imagining a wider horizon and been convincing Florence.  The new camera was a means to keep up with unfettered light and acres of now, not really a tool for recording the past but a toy of sorts, say a scooter, to whisk them along in the present.  The elements were not pinched off.  They flowed through.  If you would, it was like a windmill or waterwheel, turned by the happiness in light. 

     The camera came with them to Connecticut along with a projector and screen, but the only movies they ever shot were in Brooklyn when they thought they were practicing the style of the suburbs.  This equipment never left its boxes, winding up in the basement. Their firsts, be it barbecue, horseback ride, canoe voyage, tennis match, all seemed gloomy trials best forgotten.  The barbecue rusted through on the back porch, their tennis rackets gathered dust in the basement with the movie camera and a pair of riding boots for Andrea.  A stubborn incongruity clung to their family, a failure to blend with the color spectrum and the reigning ambience of silence.  They were not used to intervening spaces, empty quarters in rooms, quarantined privacy, separated houses hidden behind foliage, and most of all to looking down roads that ended in the vacuum of sea and sky.   

   The family record would remain curling snapshots, infrequent and badly focused, reluctantly posed for, never viewed,  stored in a shoe box.  A sparse record, padded with photos taken by others and given to them, and with front yard and back yard scenes from a single day when David or Andrea had received a camera for a gift and shot through a roll in irrational exuberance, before succumbing to self-consciousness in themselves and their subjects.     

     A shoe box survives in a basement in Connecticut which is a record of those times.  It was Andrea's.  It has not been opened for more than twenty years and will not be opened because it is in a far corner buried beneath other boxes and behind tricycles and a plastic wading pool and decayed lawn chairs and an old lawn mower and balls and bats and rackets and skis and beach umbrellas, and the family which moved in after the Mahler’s will never empty out the junk piled there and get to that box which was left when Manny and Florence moved back to the city.

     The box is warped and pulpy from the seasonal seepage when the snow thaws, but inside are shells and polished shore stones and butterfly chrysalises, and the flight feathers of mallards, Canada geese and sea gulls, and there are a few dead cicadas and the demonic armor they leave clinging to tree bark.  The record continues in mosaics Andrea pastes together to this day in Portland, still trusting the dutiful instincts of her eyes over the skill of her hands, orchestrating her collections of found objects that occupy dresser tops and window sills.

     The box also contains a notebook of jottings.  It is closer to a naturalist's notebook than a girl’s diary and more hieroglyphic than English. Some of the pages are blistered by water colors, others have photos cut out of magazines glued to them.  An example of this begins with a picture of an Irish setter pruned from an advertisement.  It also includes some tufts of wheat grass, and before the seepage dissolved it, there was a nose tickling powder made of fall leaves which had crumbled.

     The day thus memorialized she was seven years and four months old and heading out from her backyard.  It was an unfenced commons for two or three other houses, and having no perimeter fence, kept its identity as a finger of the entire surrounding landscape.  She set off that day, then, with a circumpolar adventurism which was in no way tied to puttering around the yard or desultory swings on the rusty old swing set or an ambition miniaturized with dolls.  Paddocks of marsh grass in her ken, the shabby, colorful woods filled with creatures rustling in the fallen leaves, and not ending until the dunes and flat sea where the water intoned on the pebbles and the wind sheared.  The setter made no mistake about her ambitions and though maybe let outdoors only to do his business, a dog with high, angular shoulders geared to loping and ramble-and albeit his chestnut coat was silky and luxurious, yet it was as well loose and haphazard fitting, a coat of happenstance, stolen off the peg by a vagabond who had no intention of civilizing himself to its finery, a coat that frailed the wind and glimmered with sun-and like any dog who will wander for miles in a trance of apperception but would always prefer a companion, he took the opportunity to mate up with a similarly minded creature.    

     He ranged about her those hours, a little girl from a house which among its other incongruities include abstaining from pets in a community whose visible function to the eyes of a child was maintaining a happy environment for Labrodores and springer spaniels, making wobbly spokes out from her, enlarging the circumference of her experience, making a sphere, a globe around her, which coincided at its horizon with a strip of beach with a blue line of horizon traced out on the sea where the Irish setter in a foam teased gait, cantered in a wide arc, the sun about its tip-toeing glinting on water, shellacking a gleam on his red rough as well.  Girl whelp corralled in the world by a fence of light, shepherded by a red plume painting sunlight. 

     In her notebook she wrote, "Sweeney"-that was the dog's name-"scared the sea gulls and one dropped a feather.  He sat with me but the sea gulls made him whine.  He shivered.  He scratched my leg with his paw.  He does not like to sit.  He has pretty fur.  He does not care about that.  It got muddy today and he does not care about tangles in it either.  Sweeney is not very smart.  His face is not smart.  He is nosey and happy.  He can never figure things out and he never learns.  He chased the sea gulls and forgets he cannot catch them.  He will always have fun because he does not remember anything and always wants to find out.  He forgot he already knows."

     The Labradors are boon companions, brawny fraternizers, game for field and shore, but unskilled and spared the fool and blunder only by majesty carried on breadth of shoulder; for all their thrust and prow, their bulk temporizes enthusiasm and suits them to the hearth. Though they are frequently encountered alone at the furthest reaches, theirs is not a compelling curiosity but a nearly sober persistence in a chore or propertied obligations.  The springer spaniels have the burgermeisters confident myopia, and his suede country dress, but he has a dowdy mastery in stream, dell and lee, a talent, academic and archivist, to read the wild text with his nose.  Lacking feral keenness and gait, he is still first choice to follow, flushing pheasant and deer using the amateur's faithful rote.  The cats: Covens un-convened, lounging on porches, tip-toeing over dewy lawns. They are chimeras, part reptile, heat drugs them.  They do not have personalities; they have clairvoyance.  They are possessed by a life not fully executed in substance, a symmetry radiating from balance. In the day they are like animals from out of a dream, at night, alone, they disappear back into the dream, probably the one about their own creation, not a lonely musing but the pure empty-headed reve of virtuosity.        

     Horses become ruins.  Colts frisk in the paddocks; they are snobbish and stubborn.  They have such little character in the beginning, they are all spirit and alarm and an itchiness in their legs that needs shaking out.  They canter like they were beating dust from rugs, they do not have enough humor to play.  They grow into stately monuments, but their size is always a burden to them and all their qualities of heart grow tired and their virtues which have all been mined from their weight eventually submerge in it, and they stand in stall or field with their heads sagging, enveloped in the stupidity that follows fatigue.  They are not serene; it is sad to stand beside them when they are old, when they ignored us or even younger, bolted at our approach and had to be seduced by carrots or sugar to come near, already heavier when they did but pulleys from the sky still attached to their shoulders and haunches so that as soon as the sugar was scrapped from our palms by their rubbery lips they swung away prancing. Then their visits were privileges and we stroked their silky noses and could look into their eyes where we were reflected, before they once again were beyond reach and perfect because of it, like everything lost.  They have nobility from the burden of their beauty.  They cannot love, that is their tragedy.  Only violent heroism that can bring them together, sculpted beauty encased inside itself. 

     There was a horsy set in the town with riding and boarding stables, and some of them lived on estates with stables and paddocks of their own.  She did not assume they were conceited, though it was popular to do it, and easy to deride their pedigree and snooty style.  She did not idealize loneliness and had no romance with disappointment. She wondered only the truncation of hooves, and the horses long face, sheathed in bone, muzzling any expression, and their gigantic genitals, to which expression had been relegated, chivalrous in destiny but still ineloquent,  and their great flows of urine and excrement, which evidenced a soul to her which could not be spoken for.

     Sparrows bustling in the bushes, making a racket with their collective chirping, popping from their portly little bodies into hysterical flight.  Rummaging for seeds, a cast of birds relegated to anonymity by their size and dull color and commonness, and by their unspiritual flight dedicated to escape, argument and peonage, but rewarding a longer look, and returning it too, with a birdy but still canny, street wise eye, their folded wings colored like the forest floor, carefully and cleverly done, a mosaic of browns, their tiny heads often wearing black berets or rusty reds of more esoteric sects, and their characters, fully exposed in the single web of a chain link fence, assessing and cocksure.  Wood peckers possessed by industry and mad punctiliousness, spiraling around dead tree branches, their elfin hammering giving them away.  Swallows, nearly the smallest to venture the deep blue-only the hummingbird in Dixieland deacon's iridescent tails is smaller, duelist at the feeder, angry whir, Napoleonic indignation, a blurry chevron about his shoulders, ruby cravat, zigging without inertia, and if he has not disappeared into thin air, then his too rapid evaporation foreshortens distance and puts plummet into every direction.  The swallows dart and weave and pull the stitch knotted in their flight, and it tips the blue bowl and light spills into the landscape from above and it is immediately repainted into memory.  Scythe-shaped wings, bullet body, mere barbs for legs, their wattle nests speak precision's saturation of their being, and their dorsal blue, almost a black, they sit on telephone wires like notes on the staff, foreign to the ground.

     Mallards and Canada geese, preferred to gulls by rapport; it is their embonpoints and waddling and preference for drift and meditation, and goslings all in a row, a function of their bovine diet, their spoons for beaks as well, over the gulls’ rapier and musketeer's coloratura honor.  The gulls for the final land's end, the bone bleached beaches where they fly reconnaissance and stand picket duty on the sand and levees, all of it painted with horizontal strokes, blue layered like the opened satchel of a muscle shell, the flat length of their razor edge skinning soar from the wind slipping waxy fast along the shore.  Treacherous sky of Atlantic temper, not for her, where the clouds must bunch into armadas or be tattered into rags.  Even the freshening peeling the land off the breeze does not suit her.  She has found a sunset at that edge whose beauty was tantamount to astral space, a red as thin as rose glass, a sea a single sheet of turquoise, unholy holy as the northern lights with everything solid on the fade and the peace displayed was empty forever. 

     Stout girl rowing her thighs to the water's beguiled edge, coast of lagoon, pond, and channel, where marsh grass stands and the rickety docks stick snag into the channels.  Gravity was jettisoned and the sky, the clouds, the land and sea were suspended in flattened perspective in a middle state with time and place reified and rejoined, futures were and pasts to be, fused and touchable.  She slipped into the sky at her feet, floating by all the buoyancy of her alchemized weight, just her head out of the water, her body's substance found, the land in a circle around her intervened by glint and sparkle, aloft in the horizon we glean from geese. Following where the longing in distant airy blue that shackled them to the windless of migration gathered too heavy to keep itself aloft and dipped down.  She was where the ducks and geese rest, where the light that pilots them weighs too much to carry farther, suspended at the same sea level where gravid light fell.

     These creatures seem drawn to a house: Raccoon, wasp, bunch fly, termite, carpenter ant, robin, raven, deer.  Mouse.  Moth, mosquito.  Mendicant cats, lawn desecrating dogs.  Skunk, passing in the night.        

     Is it odd for raccoons to vandalize the garbage?  Is it opportunistic?  Are the Mahler’s being victimized?  Can these creatures sense fear or awkwardness?  The mice.  They begin furtively.  Rustlings in the night.  Conditioned to a fugitive life by the former tenants or experience with the neighbors.  They test.  How was it before, traps and poison, cats?  They sense timidity.  It is trial and error.  From rustlings it goes to rattling in the stove.  They are ignored.  Their droppings appear on shelves and counters, they look like pieces of broken cuneiform.  Then the mice become hallucinations flickering in the corner of their eyes, then they are interrupted at their hair-brained schemes, and before the exterminator is summoned, they have begun pilgrimages in the light.  Their mice are beginning to awake to cosmology; they do not live on bread alone.  They are recovering from former persecution, and family members find them on the arm rests of the couch staring at them, apparently capable of spiritual curiosity, this chance forced on them, the Mahler's can see their tiny faces, all terrorized eye and peaked ear, are made for it. 

     The exterminator seems particularly malformed in the way they find all the handymen and day labor left to newcomers they hire.  His unspoken judgements seem worse, maybe they are feeling disgraced by this infestation, but his humor-all laborers are jolly and raucous, carefree and glumly cryptic, belittling, commiserating and fatalistic-his humor is sadistic drollery. It seems a little insane.  He fancies himself a technician and intellectual. He is only the worst.  The roofers shame them as well, the furnace men, the plumbers.  Their inadequacy and misplacement.  It is obvious the house is flimsy.  How could they not see that?  What was it that fooled them?  The realtor?  Did he blind them with flattery, did they fall for that?  Did he know they were ripe?  The extent of their wisdom was imagining a captain's house, an old inn, with small doorways and outsize beams and floorboards, as close as they had ever been.

     Had they bought the house because it had a weather vane in the shape of a clipper ship?  Stripped of "local" touches, it was basically a ranch house, no more than ten years old.                     They never did learn the general store, garage sale, ship chandler's style of the real New England home, that clutter of run down furniture, implements, talismans and heirlooms. They never owned a duck decoy or a fly rod.  Wondrously overlooked when they bought the house, they never even had a fireplace.  From autumn on the air had a cinnamon-anise smell of wood smoke. In front of the hearths families debauched in briary paternalism, spilling drinks and gravies on collapsed, calico cushions, incubating their pride in independence and eccentricity and understated genealogy.  How easily they did it.  He had crumbled up newspaper and stuffed it in the fireplace under a pile of wood on a rack, the paper making an exaggerated sound in the sooty chamber, and when the logs failed to catch he had doused them with lighter fluid, standing as if pissing into the flames, the fluid arcing out from his hip where he held the can.  "Progress", he had said.  The best of them were archaic. 

     Flies buzzing electrically, moths repelling against the window panes.  Flies in the summer, wasps, little beetles raining into the window troughs where they lay on their backs with their legs curled up.  Rattling shadows in lamp shades.  Cobwebs strung like hammocks from the basement rafters, coated with dust, looking like puffs of dirty smoke.  Daddy long legs, comical liter bobbing along, a consortium of fools.  The wayward cricket's piercing note from below the refrigerator. Crows heckling remaining as the rest of summer withdraws.  Cynical bird with a droit de patron for the crow's nest, razing from the lookout, the critic's view, large enough, pure black, to be an omen, a messenger from un-angelic orders, hacks who work from the police blotter where romance ends in cadavers, standing on the apex of the eaves. 

     Florence has to learn to drive. 

     Manny already knows from his years in Boston when he was at Harvard. 

        City of circles and bridges giving lyricism to wheels and circulation. Frantic, hardly dreamy, a homeland for the machinery of the mill: the geared conveyor belt.  But a lot of the otherwise buried transition from pastoral remains in Cambridge and in Brookline.  The curving continuous pieces of arc into the cycle of machinery from out their original pasturage, the sense of the older template. Horns.  Squealing brakes creating ugly panic, the crass Boston accent expectorated out the windows, but still and all, the gliding of driving, the parade of old trees sweeping past the windows, the missed turn leading to a meander through lanes with dignified old houses, and farther into quaintness, cul de sacs ending at a park where a family with thick silky hair gambols on the lawn, large teeth flashing in goofy, intelligent smiles, the children clean carved, thin and gangly graceful, mostly coltish bone, the slow turn around with the tall maple and the back stop slipping into the rear view mirror. And then parked on the odd promontory where three streets converge through a leisurely remaindering at the town’s seed: A church.  That the Connecticut suburbs might be this town before it was encrusted, left alone to be regained.

     Florence will always drive anxiously. A woman can inherit a surprising character behind the wheel; she succeeds to the throne. Generally, the speed inside the neighborhood is slow, there is a bend towards foreign cars with reserved engineering and benign horsepower. And there are the sport cars too, Jaguars, Fiats, Porches, but that usually unnoticed background of traffic noise which permeates the suburbs as a rule here is the high reving of a courageous little motor or the beep beep of toy horns.  However, the rare swashbuckler is almost always a woman, a dangerous combination of temperament, righteousness, vengeance and assumed competence; Florence does not belong to this frustrated clan, which is not really a plus, because for all of the risk they pose they are daring, and falling into the other sect, that of women who drive fastidiously, she exposes the family to ridicule, and renews each time she ferries them to store or school, the feeling the kids have for her of being a foreigner. 

     She sits far forward on the seat, they own an Opel whose speedometer has an arrow which changes color as it breaks into higher and higher speeds, and the colors gain vividness and heat as the speed increases, but with her they are stuck in the verdant hues, in spite of the gauge being marked in kilometers which should give her an advantage. On her face is the strangest expression-at home she never wears it, there she is bemused or hurt, truly she has a nuanced range of emotionally self-indulgent expressions from dreamy to pitiable, even to a nacre of tears-though her shoulders are hunched and she is peering over the steering wheel, her expression is perhaps that reached on the far side of hysteria, blousy, supplicating and beatifically resigned. A far cry from the lascivious militancy of her friends' mothers, in pants often but otherwise with their skirts hiked above their knees, cigarette in the corner of their mouths, ready for action, fully awake but always with the unmade up look of being not too long awake, one hand, even one wrist alone on the wheel, the other still snapping a shoe brad on a child, motioning threateningly or carrying a cup of coffee, always a look of pouring out heedless and armed from a home of invigorating chaotic activity, thrown out still wheeling in that energy-it was the dishabille that impressed, its self-assurance and gay hostility-to drive spangled in that same rude splendor, expansive, disdainful, habitually adventurous.       

     Maybe they learned it from their pets.  Their homes were menageries. A dog poking his head out the window to bask carnally in the wind took the treacherous aspect out of driving.  Their neighbors did better with vacuum.  They recreated in it.  It made them beautiful, as it does eagles.  They did not seem to be wallow or meditate.  Emptiness was an arena for action.

     Their home in the suburbs.  White house with black shingles.  The furnace rumbling in winter.  The house rises and falls with the seasons.  In winter it is lowered into a well, spring to summer it is lifted to a hilltop with sky all around.  They have a large screened in back porch. It is wonderfully comfortable in summer evenings.  They have purchased deck furniture for it, chaise lounges, a picnic table with benches. It is closer to pool furniture.  

     The porch is breezy and if you sit through a long evening a soothing evolution of light into darkness can be witnessed, a pine scent lifts from the boards, the glare through the screens softens to milky, the lawns and trees outside become bundled in shadows.  But, within a year only the children use it.  It has become an attic of sorts, or the sense of attic has come to it.  A few boxes are stored on it, but it is mostly that the deck furniture has been abandoned.  The cushions on the chairs acquire a musky smell.  The porch was never right.  Too big. The conception of luxury that inspired it was arriviste.  It is difficult to admit its attraction to them, that it was one of the selling points when they bought the house.  What did they imagine?  Manny remembers a wide lawn that ended abruptly and raggedly at a bluff that dropped a dozen or so steep feet onto a rocky beach.  Adirondacks placed on the lawn with drinks on their wide arms, long stemmed wine glasses.  From his days at Harvard.  The geometry of the lawn, zany, drolly arrogant against the abrupt cut to the Atlantic.  How to quite describe the feeling of civilized fatalism he felt, a hint of aristocratic, daffy, even divine madness?  The privilege, which this porch was built to emulate and which by its vulgar fortressing of this gentle obliviousness showed caution and trespass, and thus ruined.  

     Florence about her day, Manny away.  Florence rode with him to the train, drove the car back to take the kids to school.  What about her day when the rest of them were gone?  How old is Andrea when the crystals appear in her bedroom window?  The rainbows dance on the walls.  On the shelves are shells and stones and autumn leaves and dried grass stalks and pussy willows, and cobs of Indian corn and gourds.  Colored eggs.  She has filled glass jars with sand and pebbles and she has collected driftwood.  Then the crystals appear, hanging from string from the curtain rods, casting rainbows on walls and dresser and bed spread.

     She walks in on Florence naked.  The room is large, its walls seem to disappear into darkness.  Only her mother is lit.  The house is always getting larger.  It is a strange feeling to walk the rooms late at night.  A large house is buttressed by empty space.  It is mostly spandrels.  Theirs is not a mansion, but she can feel the house silently straining at night to accommodate its space.             

     Andrea discovers something then. She knows Florence is too beautiful.  Florence the humble, the dodderer, the gnomish, is too beautiful to have expended much on motherhood; childbirth did not cost her much.  And yet, it has always seemed she could barely manage it. Her body is powerful.  What shortcomings she has as a mother, her neediness, an eagerness for approval, they are from inveterate selfishness. Andrea would have guessed that, the immaturity, she did know that, but she would never have guessed it for this body.  Her mother's haunches are the most remarkable, she had judged her by her waist, its thinness which could have been frail, but she had not seen her hips.  She has never seen flesh more victorious. Here is the seat of her mother's procreative urge and motive and they are implacable.  Florence is unembarrassed by her entrance, in fact, it is the only time her presence does not fluster her. She has released herself to be an object beheld.  Florence, who flinches in front of her children, when naked has the full power of the conclusion of her meaning.  She is already in the service of her sex.  Splendid whiteness, the sway of her hips as she continues in a dazed circuit of her room, brushing her image across a mirror, passing in front of the windows, drawing the curtains, hanging a stocking on a chair-this is what she had been doing, dressing up and then undressing, who knows how many times in the day, in stockings and nightgowns, they are cast everywhere, pulled from the closet and discarded on the floor as if she had undressed under the duress of passion-the sway of her hips is hypnotic and narcotic, a slumber seems to threaten her, what could she sleep walk if she slept?  And it is then that Andrea's heart goes out to Manny, who surely is responsible for this somnambulist in the house making her naked walks when they are away in school and for her teary, hoarse pleas for affection and charity.  Manny, fine and sensitive, patient, graceful and vulnerable.  Vulnerable to disgrace and lewdness of intent, to the self being lost to squalor and vulgarity. It would be he, faced with this triumph of estrous who would have doused it with shame and withdrawal of his affection, until Florence, never having an answer for accusation was left infantile, after all that was creature true and earth true in her  was humiliated as regressive urges.

     What choice did he have? Otherwise, it would have been his qualities of fineness that were lost, and must have been anyway when he used cowardly means.  But what else was left to him who in becoming more muscular, if ever that was open to him, would have lost all those virtues of the dispassionate witness that saved them all?

     Andrea was hurt by his inevitable corruption through his own cleanliness, saw herself as another agent of his ruin, and suffered with him his hyper-awareness of his culpability in the destruction of a woman whose defeat by him proved her love for him, and proved it stronger than love for herself, and who besides, by the results shown, this creature created by him in all its misery and diffidence, had mutated into this form from innocence.  All the wiles left in Florence were blatant and ox-like, not the weapons of a calculating mind. 

     It was after this that the crystals were hung in her room, replacing another project she had begun: She had started to put her collections of things in boxes which she divided by shelves of different sizes.  She called the shelves stanzas.  The boxes "unfree verse".                             

     David played the piano.  The house was not lovely. David's music might have worked.  Music can transform any space, but it had a strange after effect, as if an odor of old cooking hung about the house.  Manny's show tunes fared better.  At least they blew cleanly out the window leaving next to nothing behind.  The ring-a-ding-a-ding of them was as close as anything came to the stoic, foppish chivalry that they sensed was the region's finest statement.  Genteel poverty was the aspiration.  The assumption of old, old money.

     They had nothing old to bring along with them, and Florence did not know how to collect furniture from the area.  Their house never acquired the eccentric collections that would have covered up their family's glaring newness.  During the whole fourteen years they lived there, up until the time Andrea went away to college and they could leave with a clear conscience, the house remained unmarked by their presence.  They did not know how to employ it, add a shed, a sky light, or a garden.   Andrea could recognize most of the things in her parent's apartment in the city as having been bought in Connecticut.  Everything was more in place in New York.      

     By his disappointment, Manny becomes more beautiful.  The family exercises his virtues.  They need his cultivation, going to seed in the hours he is absent in the city, quarrelling grotesquely, their reason for existing running down over the course of the day, until he returns and renews it.  They are there to love him and to improve until they can, until their loving him does not detract from him, when it will not require his effort or enlarging or scratch open an awareness about himself that would soil him.  He is not made for love to be difficult.  Every year they grow hardier, shriller, cruder, training against each other when he is gone until love could no longer mold them.  Looking at them it would seem they were made to pull love out of bogs or chew it from roots.  Each of them might withstand finding love muddy and septic.  

     Manny is dressed in dark slacks and white shirt and his wing tips and he is sitting in the backyard with his legs crossed at the knee, his ankle, thin and white, is exposed, and the sun is bright. He is near the oak tree sitting on one of the deck chairs he has taken onto the lawn, reading. A jay scolds, flashes blue, finds a bush where it renews its calumny.  Always for him this absurd juxtaposition with the outdoors, his gentle obliviousness. She remembers him sitting in the backyard, turning the chair so the pages will not glare too much to be read as the sun moves. 

     He is not at fault for loving loveliness.  She is at fault because she cannot bring anything to loveliness except fear.  She should not test it that way because there is nothing in it that was made for this, and every test weathers it more, and its nature is to bless and asking more of it subtracts from it, and subtracts from it what it has so little of: Endurance. 

     Loving him made her.  Loving him and being not lovely. 

     In contrast with him and his frailer love, she learned her love would not console her.  She resolved herself upon the undesirability of her desire and that this would not deter her. Her love would never be seen as kindness and charity, but would be repellent, seeming the opposite of grace.  She would always love him, that would not fade.  But, in that part left to choice and which stood in her maturity as the crux of her, her choice to love the part of him that was the cruelty he committed upon all those who loved him by the nature of his loveliness, that it could not survive loving and so did not return it, or that its nature, what others found in it to love or found lovely was its immaturity, its lack of sexual voraciousness or a generous, unaware selfishness, entranced with itself in a way that was touching and feeble, that in loving that part of him that was its loveliness because it could not love, and destined to love this in everyone else from then on, this green and open secret of them, their fear and orphaning in the world, their anger, grief, stunted longing, all these, gifts and style and types of grace which are vulnerabilities which have lovelessness as their origin, that destined to love this in everyone and to find it in each of her actual lovers-which already at nine she imagined as lovers, as physical lovers with a graphicness of detail maybe rare in a virgin and one who had no one to consult with and was not the object of curiosity or experimentation for anyone, but based on her physicality, her senses which would not exclude anything and an intelligence which then in imagination alone configured surprisingly accurately how each part must be used-she decided and knew and resolved that her love would console  her lovers.  She would console them by taking upon herself all blame for the true nature of love.  Whatever she might bring out of them which they had the privilege of never knowing because of their loveliness and around whose demise at love's coming they had created a myth of innocence lost, of magnificence lost, and autonomy and a heroism and chances for immortality, or a heroism based on the tragedy of beauty spent for love or for nothing absolutely, she would take all this on herself.  The aspects of love that might surprise them, cruelty or anger or appetite or fear of death or even happiness that cannot be justified or which is annihilating, too dumb or wise or large, she would take blame for them.   She would be the ugly beastliness in it for them.  It would be she who had brought it out of them to fit what she had been made for, and that this finally would console them and even save them. 

     Did the Mahler’s believe in a beauty alive in Connecticut?  They had enough reasons to doubt it.  Times aplenty when Manny and Florence clucked over the pall of boredom hanging over the place, and its lack of culture.  It did not offer the drama of urban life.  To generalize, people were too contented.  Of course, they were not really.  Life went on as it always does, but the ruin could be contained behind closed doors.  Making the comparisons was something you did at first.  At first, you lamented the absence of poor people and weird people, and the lack of difference in the people you saw, their whiteness and complacency and lack of curiosity and hunger, and then when you had been there long enough to know you found all these things again.  The poor people lived a few towns away and drove over in beat up cars or took the train in, and they were the same as the ones who had been left behind in the city.  You could go through the list of things that only seemed better in memory, things you had given up that turned out had never defined you anyway, and which you held onto only to maintain your sense of difference in what otherwise seemed an atmosphere of conformity, although it really was not, once you had lived there long enough to see that these similarities were only superficial, something a visitor would spot when passing through. 

     But then, Manny and Florence never could dig down to the level where being there would have a reason rather than the justification of having children.  The time never came when a snow fall would not be compared with snowfalls in the city, much more beautiful here, of course, but they never came to the time when they were not reminded of snow in New York instead of past storms and surprise October squalls or the diligent lathering of the landscape that commenced in November.  It was too late for Manny and Florence, but it was too late for Andrea and David as well.  They could not construct a perfect childhood for them, and perfect childhood, this building of perfect memories, of conifers ermined in snow, of green grass and yellow mustard waving, of puddings and lemonade, this fabrication of perfect childhoods out of the body of American literature and Saturday Evening Posts' covers, this was the suburb's art form and its nationalism.   

     And drove them to predict the fallen angel. 

     The original inhabitant.  To him and his family, and to barn and covered bridge-they attributed beauty, the beauty of the place through him.  Forest, field, shore and sea, the wildness and freedom in them, the gothic shadowing and spired crown of forest top, these inside him and he in them, the palette that painted his skin and hair and eyes made from these sights, his bones driftwood but he no ghost, but long and clean, not tidy, but weathered clean and a fossil of the elements, not the past but the past too, but replaced in all substances of migration through his generations here with the minerals and snow light and autumn light and wind of this place here.  His daughters, his sons, the Mahler’s spotted them, or ones who would have done for them and were doing, self-consciously perhaps but that did not show.  It could have been them, tall, gaunt, but glowing, and solemn and royal and simple, plain and solid.  They saw them occasionally, they were not typical of the area and lived in the hinterlands and the old town, they must, the towns not rebuilt, the churches not re-clad where they chanced to spy them on a Sunday drive, the church nearly shabby and small, and high and dry in the middle of nowhere, that is in the middle of a somewhere they could never see, a conflux of seasons and rituals and wagon roads and sea winds they would never know, fixed on that spot as the most central, that empty spot in the middle of fallow fields, in a map that was a table of the elements and was traced under all the other roads and rest stops and malls, and they gathered outside the church and they were darkly dressed, his offspring, or they were dressed for Easter and they flowed out onto a lawn and there was revealed to them even in a brief glance as they drove past an awkwardness to them, a gainful, worthy awkwardness in them as if there was in this world a grief whose presence they must bear, that they would never be graceful because they could never be excused the time, they would always be accompanied by necessity as if it were an actual presence.  And the daughters?  What is the cleanness about them that has nothing about it that is innocent but is at the same time unspoiled?-their hair, their skin, it has seemed to arrive seamless from childhood, from their childhoods which are taken seriously, which can only be imagined and are imagined as clairvoyant and delightful and brave and loyal-it is not cleanliness of body, though it is as a reflection.  It is sureness, independence from longing and desire.         

     If they had not spotted them or those who could act at being them, transients like themselves who had intuited the fallen angel and who in the suburban anomie had patterned themselves on him at least sufficiently for the Mahler's glance, they would have had to create them.  Because in all the space around them where nature had elbow room to work and where there was black shale stone in the woods like ruins, where time had had time to scour, where storms could thrash, lightening pommel, where boredom could reach to the stars, that is, where your own presence had somehow been reduced to being affronted by such things, that is, offended by majesty and terror, when after cuteness, cynicism descended and was able to negate all of creation, when shrinkage was rampant, then in all that space where the soul could no longer reach, into that had to be placed the fallen angel still worthy of wonders and meant to receive them.  

     In her teens she fell in love with Roland, again.  She had loved him when they were both in grammar school together, and they had been playmates, as much as she could make it happen since she could not keep up with him in sports and had to depend on insinuating herself into his private adventures when he was not in the company of other boys.  He was content to be alone and to wander the countryside, and he was a boy and so he was often gentle and shy and taken by moods.  He was still mostly private, and was drawn to other things, animals and places, that seemed private like he was, and young.  He was sensitive to helplessness and like many little boys, he seemed naturally virtuous.  He had a sense of what was fair and what was bullying.  Because he was content to be alone and pondered he was at first challenged in school, but he won his fights and was brave and became respected.  He kept his own counsel but he was not aloof, and though he never became popular because he was too methodical, too grown up in tempo, he was never possessed by mania as most of them were from time to time, hysterical with pure energy, he was never disdained or abandoned.  He was kind of their gray eminence of childhood, or a child emeritus.  He had a feel for a moral component in childhood, as if the license given to innocence to plunder and torture and experiment with pain, which is so much of what childhood seemed to be, getting a feel for the generic elements of experience, as if this license came with an obligation to consciously learn and remember.  It is not rare for a child to have dignity; it is a tragic stance.  What is true for an adult, the defeat of his nature and futility, is stark and exaggerated for a child who is still completely exposed, but Roland seemed aware of this condition of childhood himself and unable to give himself parole into tantrum and pouting.  He already had self-respect.                

     He had a square solid, body, already a little man's body at least compared to the eft-like bodies of most of them and when she fell in love with him as a teenager after the years when he had moved to the periphery of her attention, he was exactly as she remembered him; he had simply grown bigger inside the same symmetry he had begun with, by-passing those freaky bursts and un-syncopated thrusts into puberty which plagued the rest of them. Maybe, his moral perspective was pre-determined by his physical balance.  He was difficult to topple.

     She found him at home.  His backyard lawn was not mowed.  Dandelions grew in it.  He was rummaging.  He carried a branch stripped of leaves and twigs with a whittled point for turning over stones and measuring the depth of creeks, searching for crayfish or probing tide pools. He was not a weapon boy, he never imagined the branch was a sword, but a tool was useful.  Like her, he was short on fantasy.  He walked with the proud, monumental stride of a two year old.  He was diligent to his footfalls, to the gathering of foxtails in his cuffs, the flights of grasshoppers or moths he kicked up. To her, his concentration was admirable.  She loved the plasticity of his knees, he would quickly squat to check out a beetle and then his pants would slip up his smooth ankles with their fine, blond hairs, and his boyishness, she loved it, his total boyishness which she already by nine was losing, her girlishness, she was already only alongside of it, had nearly always been, as far as she could remember, and being along with him while he was still completely inside its sphere, it made her sad for him, and protective, but also, she was full of admiration, for his natural skill at it, and for it itself, for being entirely a boy, which was a privilege, to be something so entirely, and then boyhood itself as he did it with its absorption in activity and curiosity, its magical seriousness.  

     He could skip stones. They knew ponds that were round and glassy as a woman's hand mirror.  He knew to pick the flat stones, this was a craft he knew from start to finish, the most preferred with smoothed edges, not flakes, but with weight and thickness, and the place for harvesting them, the railroad, where she loved to see him too, because she felt with him the somberness of it, the beckoning to him of epic and saga, and thought that when there he felt the outer edge to boyhood. He had it all down, the bent kneed, side-armed, skimming toss, and like the stick, the stone was meant to reach into the thickness of the day.  He could do it, short and short limbed as he was, he was thick and it was a strong throw, a stronger throw than any of his taller classmates could have managed because he had more muscle, and the stone skated on the surface for yards, making a flat, hooked flight because of the spin it got leaving his index finger and thumb.  It skipped five, six times, each hop a bit shorter, way out there on the glassy water, until it got caught by what looked like a syrupy stickiness in the water, and its last little hops were rapid taps right on top of each other and then it looked as if it would float, that is how thick and treacly the water seemed by then, cloying at the glancing stone so that as it was slowed to a standstill it seemed it would just lay there, the water too thick to sink into.  That was one of the skills he had an instinct for and which matched his poignancy.  His own poignancy-not hers for him though she saw it in him-his own poignancy which she saw was pricked by premonitions of reverie.  They were not yet reveries, he had not lost anything yet that he pined for.  They were daydreams without fantasy, just sights and happenings that slowed, maybe by a wishing that was part of his special concentration, or maybe just on their own, but they dragged up sweetness in their sluggish course, and he had a taste for them, not morbid, but curious about this separate current he could spot.  

     She was surprised when she fell in love with him later.  He had been there all along.  In fact, he seemed to have been there more consistently than the other kids she had matriculated with from grammar school into the bigger and bigger institutions of middle school and high school.  Seeing him in this new light, she thought he had changed less than anyone else, and she thought she was being objective, that if this insight had not triggered her love, a sudden catching sight of the little boy, and if it were a symptom of it instead, going head over heels always seemed to be accompanied by the soberest sounding rationalizations, that still, if one were to step back, if this fixed attention was giving her at last a chance to really see him, then she could tell he had not become encrusted with the conformity that had hit the rest of them.  How could she know that right then when surely the proofs of it must have been there all along?  It was this special difference in the way he sat.  He was still as unself-conscious as he had always been.  In the very same way. He was there without any performance.  He must have slipped in that way, without fanfare, or being so unobtrusive, she had never had to evict him from her heart and he had been waiting these years.

     The boy she had known had ripened without distorting.  He was sitting in front of her in class and one day she noticed the nape of his neck and it looked gallant to her or that always attentive lift of his head on it did, and she knew she loved him, the burden of himself on himself he wore, which is what it seemed like looking at him from behind, that his body was carrying himself, but where this had struck her as brutal on some of her classmates, a load strapped on them covering up what had essentially been them, Roland seemed with all the skills he had practiced in childhood to have strapped his inner self to his outside, so she could see better than ever who he was and that he had gained a platform for himself, his short, solid, strong body lifting that weight of concentration he had kept, more easily now and with greater range.                   

     Swing sets quaintly small now for them as teenagers.  The small section where these small gallows stand and the nearby sand box and slide seem miles distant from the few cars that pass on the roads bordering the park whose greatest part is taken up by a lawn for football and the deep fields of a dirt baseball diamond.  The street lights throw the weakest of lights onto the park which can only be seen in long, faded shadows and in drifts on the grass. All the sounds from town sound crystal clear and elegiac, hanging like notes struck from a tuning fork and then, it is as if they have been muffled in felt to be carried off in a jewel box.

     There was a time when they set themselves a windless against the pull of ground and pumped themselves aloft and free-willed and scaled heights that had a slipperiness to them not found below.  They gladly lost their weight and reassurance of return, while scared too.  Joyous.  Flight into hilarity and breathlessness and a myth of the catastrophic fast wheeling of the straps around the beam. Flight which replaced them back on ground utterly changed through deed, changed from children into fairy tale, taken hold of by magic.  Andrea had made her swing pilgrimage in Brooklyn on identical swings.  Starting seated on that same basket-strapped saddle while mothers pushed, often a row of young mothers together pushing their serious, dazed toddlers by their plump butts in gentle pendulum rocking.  Graduating to self-propulsion and a bargaining with weight, and speculation with superstition, lightening themselves with the effort of their own arm until their weight became unknown to them and was married off outside them, and the sleigh downhill was uncanny and its swapping of the straps with you until they worked you and you were not working at all.  This balancing act of yourself against the falling, this diploma in balance, put you on the bridge of childhood.  Childhood which was all spills now conquered or not conquered but its fear even while remaining, played out and tuned to giddy, wild joy. 

     Andrea and her friends had returned many times to these places of deep nostalgia to scuff their shoes' toes in moon walking with their butts crimped in the leather sling, talking in this paradise lost about lost loves and disillusionment and intuitions of disbelief that would make the rest of life impossible. 

     Roland had that pall the skin got from the distant street lights. He sat in a swing beside her.  Roland was not presently in love, but it seemed to Andrea that when love should arrive for him it would be in character.  He would have no dreaminess to announce it, and no disappointments.  It would smoothly follow from friendship.  He had never held back as much of his presence from friendship as he would have needed to be in love, his love (potentially) being strong and lasting and smart without cleverness, which he gave already as a friend.  This friendship had pushed her to a kind of suffering that was romantic love and put her on the cusp of ruin, but she knew she would never see such melodrama in him and it was not to be waited for; they could go on this way until they graduated from high school this June.

     She was already accepted at Harvard.  Roland had not applied to college.  He might go west. He was in no hurry.  He was fixing up his motorcycle, an old Indian or something like that.  Riding it was less fun than the sculpture the bike was.  It was almost never in one piece and ready to go.  If it ever was, he might take it to Wyoming.  Why Wyoming?  Because it was Why-oming, so why not?  If he ever got it finished.  He was in no rush.  All his friends would be leaving.  That was not quite true.  He had friends all over the place.  He had fished last summer out of New London, he was friends with the captain and crew.  He had worked as a short order cook.  He liked cooking.  He was getting good at it.  There was an organic farm he had worked on, he could go there.  He did not like the pe/ople as much as the fishermen or those at the restaurant, but he liked the work.  He could do carpentry.  Blue stone work, too.  He had friends in all these trades, they all wanted him along.  She had seen him work.  Did these guys enjoy watching him as much as she did?  His hands were small and square.  He had strong wrists and his forearms were strong but at the same time not brutal, the muscles were in a sleeve of glossy skin.  It was what happened to hands engaged in their skill that pleased her:  They took on the soul of their owner.  More than eyes or words they seemed able to express the masculine soul, certainly in Roland, their concern and husbandry, a wish in men, she was sure they seldom got the chance to realize, of fostering, or which had been channeled into wage and labor, away from livelihood. 

    He had shown up on a summer afternoon with a striped bass slung across his back, its tail fin hanging below his waist, a canvas satchel hanging from his shoulder.  He had come to bake the bass and he had scallops in the satchel on a bed of wet grass and herbs on top of them which he had gathered on the way back.  He leaned his fishing pole against the wall of their house.  He had come up through the back yard, along the stream she guessed, following it up from the ocean, he must have come that way, out of the woods, mud caking over sand on his wet sneakers, leaving a trail on the linoleum and smelling of fish and brine and green.  He had plucked herbs from neighbors he knew along his path, people ordinarily extremely cherry of private property but who would not refuse a few twigs to this native scavenger who seemed unaware of their houses having been built where he walked, and who was sniffing along a path of summers there before their foundations were laid.  A mess and a caution and a throwback, his jeans sandy and salty too, he had worn them into the coves, scalloping with his toes, fragrant with wild smells. 

     He wanted for newspapers and these they had a wealth of, Manny's copies of the city paper, and he spread them on the picnic table in the big porch that was never used and he cleaned the fish there with a knife he had in the bag, not asking for that from them but for a large roasting pot, that the fish had to be arched to fit in. What a squeal Florence let out when he bulled in with the big fish and all his obsessed obliviousness in the task.  Never a rude boy, hardly ever a visitor at all, but already decided on this and not to be turned aside, not even considering it, the beauty of the fish, perhaps, not his own glory in catching it anyway, compelling him to act quickly and with eminent domain over their neat kitchen, which he requisitioned, for this gold and black stripped fish, Florence laughing and groaning.  The fish outlandish in the house, disgusting, beautiful, dead as a medieval knight, as a Swiss guard, and the boy, with his ever present hum of energy around him, a whir circling him like the charged haze of a spinning bicycle wheel.

     He could have gone home, another quarter mile, he had come much farther already.  The fish fluorescent in the house, impossible there, its flat, staring eye.  A myth.  And Roland suddenly appearing, muddy and briny and pungent in frayed jeans with a fishing pole and a golden fish, from right out of their kid's roaming, Roland flying the boy's flag, the pennant of a son in the house and made out of the stuff of their wanderings together, made of the tangibles in memory, smell and grain collected in childhood, nursery rhyme mimetic, snails and puppy dog tails, arriving on their doorstep in tact and victorious and spicy sweet.

     Newspapers spread on the picnic table, he scales the fish with the back of the knife, scales shedding like shaved ice, Roland's hands tumescent with suppleness.  He has stringers of gore to his elbows when he guts the fish through a slit he slices from a "v" below the gills to its anus, offal vomiting out and rupturing into slime, and blood is everywhere, the fish was a bladder of blood, it was a beast slaughtered, too big to be smuggled into abstraction.

     Florence puts her hands on Roland's shoulders and there is a license given by this witnessing, an excuse of horrified trance and she is pressing her breasts into the nape of his neck while looking over his head at the disembowelment of the fish.  It is perhaps hugely distracting to have a beast butchered in her house and upsetting.  It is exciting and disorienting as a time of disaster, on their porch in the afternoon, disorienting and anarchic, and she has taken advantage to press her breasts against him.  Maybe, she has not taken advantage.  It is possible she is swept up and does not know what she is doing, moved by excitement to crane over his back.  Her hands are rigid, her fingers must be digging into his shoulders.  Andrea can see a lifetime of experience with men in her mother's hands and in the way she has moved to this place behind his back, behind him as if for protection, while her hands ride the motion in his  shoulders and encourage it.  Florence knows young men, their diffidence and frozen obedience, their deference and courtliness towards older women, and Andrea is ashamed for Florence.  But, she is envious too of her confidence in seduction, at her assumption of centrality, envious of her mother's nearness to the sensual, a step is all she needs to get there, a yawn and she has entered it while for her there is only isolation.  But she is ashamed too, and angry, angry for her cutting in on her boyfriend, for shouldering her out, and ashamed of her spavined need and an impoverishment of imagination, for being seized by cliche, the raw labor of men exciting her, though it does Andrea too, but it is Roland for her, specifically Roland. She is ashamed for her mother's desperation and even debasement.  For their home, for herself, for an intimation Roland must glean from Florence of two desperately clinging women.   

     The fish in the oven with its organs replaced with herbs, Roland takes leave to go home and harvest a salad from his garden, promising to return, and meaning to she knows, he has to cook the scallops, but it is part of his generosity that he might forget to return, simply leave off the gifts and not come back for thanks, up to something else before he knows it.  She is left with Florence, the fish roasting, the scallops sitting on a counter top, two widows.  Roland stuffed the newspapers directly into a garbage can and then washed his arms and knife in the sink and the drain smells of fish and there are scales in the drain guard and threads of fish offal.  The kitchen begins to fill with the odor of baking.  What was each of them doing before?  A stillness in the house descends on them.  There is a surplus of space.  Roland not only took up all the space, he seemed to have pushed it back to make room for himself, leaving even more space behind him.  Their house is always congested and empty, filled with psychic space; their cottage industry is spinning this fabric, a clan of wizards each filling the house with the cloth of the imagination in place of the tangible, so they are always walking through spellbound emptiness and silence.  

     Roland would be gathering vegetables.  She knows that garden.  It is his mother's garden.  Andrea first visited it as a child.  It is on a hill, surrounded by a high chicken wire fence and it is already a steep climb up the path to the gate, each step higher than the one before, like on a stairway, and the latch on the gate is a chain with a hook threaded through the chicken wire and around two poles, one fixed and the other which moves to permit passage in. As a kid, summating to the garden always made her feel lighter, as if she were shedding pounds with each step, until she stepped into the garden which seemed to be floating in the sky.

     The path spiraled around the hill, and alongside at about waist high for a child, grew flowers and vegetables in a wild order which she learned was based on which plants liked to be next to each other, and the harvesting of the taller beans and tomato plants was done from the path above, and while the garden seemed to float, it was also like a fountain, colors climbing up to the top and running back down. 

     There were hollyhock and snapdragons and irises and morning glory woven through the fence, and bean plants, and tomatoes and lilac and rhododendron and peppers and garlic and mint and parsley, and fruit trees.  Seeing fruits and vegetables she recognized hanging from a branch or dangling from a vine, did not seem natural to her at first, she supposed his mother, who had turquoise eyes and was often to be found in the garden with a scarf tied over her hair, in overalls stained green at the knees with a trawl in her hands and clogs on her feet, went around placing the fruits like Christmas lights, and liked to imagine her that way.  She was meticulous and lovely and painting peppers red as they should be and screwing apples onto their limb seemed to be exactly the kind of work she was made for. 

     The top of the hill was an open park, with fruit trees  planted randomly and sun falling on grass, and when she visited recently she found Roland had built benches and placed them there, where you could sit out eating raspberries, as his mother was doing, with champagne. She put a raspberry in so they could see it spin in the bubbles, still lovely but with her cheeks softening and giving a sad list to her mouth, but her eyes unchanged, or nearly so.  And the sun sparkling to a jot in the bubbles that stippled each berry, suggesting that her warm, punctilious sympathy was going pulpy and poetic, and by a hint of a shrug she saw Roland make when they spotted her, she knew he had wished for a more remedial use of his carpentry: that her lovely acuity dissipating into velvet sherry dreams would be restored to lemonade or apple juice if he could get her outdoors.

     Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, scallions maybe, or even zinnias. They grew squash too, and spinach, and he might bring vegetables to cook, and for desert, cherries and peaches.  He could cut bell peppers into rings to add color, and he might bring yellow squash.  First he would drop off his fishing pole.  He had built a tool shed between the house and the garden gate but the fishing pole would go in the basement which had long ago been converted to a tool shop.  Were the axes, sledge hammer, wedges and saws kept out in the garden shed, or would they be in with the shop tools, the planes and files and pliers and mallets and welding torch and wrenches?  Stuff just kept pushing out of that basement.  Tables, chairs, clothes racks, doors.  Inside a metal locker they stored the house paints, blue for the outside and all the different colors for the various rooms. He would chop his own cord of wood in the fall.  The wood was stored under a flying gable at the side of the house.  He bucked the logs himself on saw racks he had built, using a two handed saw instead of a chain saw, and he split the wood on a stump rooted in the ground, usually with a single blow of the ax, making a careful study of the trees rings and the fissures that open in wood as it dries, and attacking where the wood had lent itself to disassembly, calving off faceted blocks with the seditious empathy of a diamond cutter, dissecting the square from the circle.  His iron sculptures populated the house, and he built wind chimes too, which hung from the eaves of the porch and which he had sized to throat a chord. 

     The slide.  Strange looking thing.  Like a giraffe drinking?  Somewhat.  She walks over to it wading over the sand.  She should have stayed on the swings.  She thought he would follow after her and then they would kiss.  They could not kiss on the swings.  He is not following.  The metal feels cold.  She scales the slide up the smooth trough.  She can almost walk up it, it is much less steep than she remembers slides being.  

     She feels stupid up here now; she had meant to look daring or careless, available.  Now she is up here and will have to retreat from this lookout and hope in trying to look carefree she has not broken a mood or made herself look detached.  She slides down and finds she stalls a little more than halfway down, her heels planted on the flat lip at the finish of the slide, but the slide is not really slick enough to gain speed anyway, which again is not how she remembers it.  The slide, the merry-go-round, the swings, even the jungle gym, they were all tempting falling and virtuosity over it.  You played at the spills that scared you.  

     Roland has sat down on the merry-go-round and crab walks it in a circle and she thinks he must be nervous.  She sits down on the other side of one of the metal radii and crab walks with him but is out of step and kicks him lightly a few times. 

     She can see herself for ever in the blackened playground where Roland left her.  A month later Harvard begins, but back on the playground a ghost is left who can forever see the slide, the swings, the rumpled sand and the frost of light on the grass.  Sadly, it will look forever at the supple moment iced over. Andrea felt time reach its ripeness, no, she already knew better than that, felt instead precisely and acutely time going stale, so similar to the gelling of ripeness.  Roland's nearness, night, the playground and the short weeks remaining and no sure thing to be alone with him at night again or that it would be better, surer, more ordained, though imagining ahead she could, deceptively, prism all light in the future moment and charge it with inevitability, but should it ever happen, it would thaw to chance and mischance, no better than this, this time to seize, which in all respects is right or as right as it can be, for her if not for him.

     No moment coming can be promised to even reach where this one is, its state of shed alternatives, down to yes or no, though she knows it is not true for him, that for him it remains lax, that around him the summer night is moving on with all its vastness, and he is looking at his feet which are crab walking back into the tracks they left on the first revolution feeling at most some nearly cornered instinct, some courtesy or a corollary of custodial feeling for his mother, that this evening is nearly over and he will see it through until she is done with it too, because she is the one leaving and he knows it is she who is in the hold of last things.  When she pushes her lips towards his against a tremendous resistance in the air, it is like moving in a dream, her movement is already cloaked in the past, they are in separate times.  It is perhaps his staying on in Connecticut which has already separated them, but a huge momentum is against her, it is shyness too, their whole past together, for which she loves him but out of which she would have to summon and carry along all that she was to succeed in this kiss.   But she would and would easily, welcoming that feel of resistance in the air as an anointment.  Because she would always want with him the feel of gainful love labor, all the nourishment of the real upon her, its lever and opportunity and true hold on him.  The specific gravity of him truly is already carried in this kiss. The actual consideration of him, of accounting him out there and not only dreamed of.

     He could not miss it when he turned, the ardor and sympathy in her face, when he turned and stood, leaving her leaning forward with all the miles to recover to sitting back upright and alone.   

     The backyard routes.  Possible to travel from the ocean to the hills and across the small town without ever using a paved road. If you had once been a child there you knew the trails under bridges, along creeks, beside railroad right of ways, through empty lots, quilting a path through backyard and forest patch and park and commons, behind stores, through school yard, church grounds, trails marked by cruxes, a climb down a bank whose tufts of grass had a part fleeced through them by the passage of kids feet heading towards a pile of rocks left over from the construction project that you hopped down, zigzagging from flat stone to hunched stone to pebbly ground.

     Via the mimetic that runs along Pus Creek, so called for its blooms of green algae at mid-summer which come out like green whip cream as in the song, a tadpolers paradise, an oxbow in evolutionary epochs during July and August when frogs plop into the lazy water and flat turtles barnacle snagged logs, past the good witch of the West's house, a cozy, ramshackle cottage with low eaves, a tiny white door and planter boxes in the windows, across the "gash", the gray gully where the railroad runs, and on into the "scullies"  Andrea's neighborhood, so named simply for argot and arcana, known by that name only to true locals and for no reason that anyone can remember, possibly the name of a family farm that once was here, or a harlot, or a tannery or a murder, a name savory tart on the tongue, past the no trespassing sign the Marat of a another generation has marked "toothless", comes Maud Cardiff, Andrea's friend, through the gloaming.  A girl of elfin beauty, delicate boned and pale, with violet eyes and a tracing of blue veins on her temples, and raven wing hair.  Andrea had known her since middle school but she did not begin eloping to their house until she was sixteen.  Puberty seemed to heighten her paleness, like an illness, and she looked like a child disease has made saintly.  Her thin lips were shaded lavender.

     She would fall asleep soon after she arrived, as if in safe harbor after a long journey.  They would talk for a while but sleep would start claiming her like a romantic reverie.  She would soften and look tenderly at Andrea, and was already virtually asleep. Sleeping she remained graceful, but became more voluptuary.  Andrea was envious and suspicious of Maud's dreams. She was a naiad when she dreamt, and Andrea was skeptical of her willing naivety in dreams, either her authorship of such lyrics as she seemed to bask in when she lay in Andrea's room, arms folded behind her head her mouth gently opened, frequently mouthing silent words like a child following a song, and if she were not the author, than suspicious of the seduction in their gentle obfuscation.  She could sleep twelve hours given a Saturday morning.  When she woke she would lay looking at the ceiling with a little smile on her lips.  She had slept so deeply she had forgotten who she was, and before she could remember, the expression that played about her delicate eyelids and even her fragile chin was blissful.

     Maud was included in their household.  She would stay through a whole weekend.  Maud was in the kitchen at breakfast on school days, taking her breakfast of coffee and cigarettes.  They did not ask her not to smoke.  She put her elbows on the table and stared into her coffee, or tipped her chin up and expelled her cigarette smoke in a cloud and watched it rise towards the ceiling, lost in worry and haplessness, arrestingly beautiful, slatternly wisdom sitting pretty.  She was immodest in a way either jejune or holy, revealing a nipple on a meager breast by failing to button a sweater.  More elegant than anything else in their house.  Her small pointed breast juvenile and chaste, beauty and whatever else there only in the eye of the beholder and on his conscience.

      The fullness and temperance of procreation was subtracted from her form.  Andrea saw her naked and she was like a greyhound, cast in muscle and fleetness, her breasts absolutely firm and demarcated off her ribs by compass lines of their own craft.           

     Andrea saw her with Manny's eyes.  Grace, for him, she knew, was an exemption from sentencing.  And it was lost at maturation, when nature resumed in a life.  Nature had not obviously resumed in Maud, she was still a figure in the ether.  She showed no servitude to perishing ripeness. She was angelic, in the way which was internal to him: an androgyny, a spindrift of light.         

     Maud went with them to the beach and in the sere dunes and lateral sweep of faded color, her clean limbs were harmonious with the flintiness the Mahler’s felt inhabited the edge of the sea even in summer; the empty distances, the respiration of infinity in the surf.  Here they come, tramping through the dunes, a caravan carrying umbrellas and picnic baskets and blankets who will try shielding drumsticks from windblown grit and none of whom, except Andrea will do more than wet their ankles in the bubbling churn, and that not pleasantly, disturbed by the feel of tumbling pebbles.  

     The cut of Maud against the sand and cold blue, of her thigh and shoulder and chin and the fox canny of her small, deep green eyes, her somberness, towel around her after the march from the foam, each muscle in silky slide in her beaded thigh, then fierce face with only blazing green eyes above the towel held under her chin, defiant of shiver or invulnerable, this girl was woven from the sea's humors. 

     Andrea knew how Manny would see Maud, did see it in his face, what was not there for her and so obvious in contrast.  It was spelled out as she had never understood that phrase before, letter by letter branded into her with its own separate potential for spite and pain. Maud's bypass of ‘beauty is as beauty does’ that is laid on motherly shoulders, her dispensation to continue beautiful.  To be loved while unloving, or not unloving.  And perhaps he too sensed what Andrea knew by the hugs Maud gave her which had on occasion cracked her spine-Andrea whose posture was contorted by shame trying to please-that Maud was not innocent and not libel to what innocence meant: vulnerability and the other things, disillusionment, awakening, downfall.  It was only her form, but she knew Manny's love for the ideal.  She was pure or if not pure then so corrupted by isolation and damage unrecorded on her, experience erased from her by shaping her to this perfection, this implacable transparency, that experience itself displayed a purity and ruthlessness in its motives nearly divine-nearly divine-that intervening hand called for to produce this immaculate body. 

     Maud stepping out of the sea and hiking to their towels the fluted muscles of her thighs shimmering, even the sartorius muscle defined, a high "C" shimmering above the harmony of calf and quadriceps, to stand swaddled in the towel up to her chin, her lavender lips stained a deeper purple, her hair a thick, waxy, tangle: the silver veil of the moon peeled from the sea.   Andrea plowing up behind her. 

     But, she was not a sea orphan, and after several months of these visitations she arrived at their house with an invitation from her parents to come up for cocktails.  She delivered the message under duress, it must have been the condition under which she was permitted to leave her house, and she said the word "cocktail" with a sneer.  They did not see how they could refuse; they all suddenly felt the strangeness of these visits by Maud and their own complicity in them, and they had to go over just to pantomime normalcy.  Refusing would have confirmed the illicitness in it, and while Maud coldly recited the telephone number, Manny dialed her house.  Howard answered, her father. Manny had just been given his name.  

     "They're expecting us", Manny said.  They all acted as if they were about to be punished and there was no avoiding it.  Andrea felt she had exposed her family to humiliation.  Manny seemed slightly stunned.  He repeated the conversation stupidly. "They were hoping we wouldn't call, just pop on up.  Long overdue", as if it were not going to be so bad after all.  Adding in a hollow voice, a sad voice to Maud, "He wanted me to thank you for delivering the message.  Said it was Cracker Jack of you", as if he had stopped knowing her as soon as she could be called Cracker Jack by anyone. 

     In the same vein, during the drive over, he intoned that the Japanese lanterns were already lit and they were off to a flying start, amazed, Andrea felt, by the vulgarity and their participation in it and practicing the syncopation of this new scene in which the moon child belonged.  She and what she had meant to him had its origins in this raw jollity, and must appropriately be returned there.

     The Japanese lanterns were lit, strung hazardously on extension cords coupled together to reach around the porch, and moths were already popping and fluttering against their paper sides, or their shadows were stenciled on them from the inside.  A juice pitcher with oranges painted on it was sitting on a card table along with some tall milk glasses and an open can of olives, and Maud's parents were stretched out on aluminum pool lounges, drinks in hand. 

     "Manny and Florence, I presume.  We're the Cardiffs, pere and, what? apple, at home.  We're delighted, both of us, Marjorie, my wife, and himself.  We started without you, these summer evenings, corrupting.  We meant to be good, once upon a time, anyway."

     He unfolded himself from the chair, and offered Manny his hand.  He was several inches taller than Manny, with wide, square shoulders, and he dwarfed him when he was close.  He was an architecture of bones, his large, shapely hands swallowed Andrea's when it was her turn to be greeted.  She had met him before and this formal re-introduction en famille was meant to be ironical and he smiled down on her with his fine teeth.  He had impossibly luminous blue eyes.   

     "Florence, pushed out of the house on sudden notice, and still looking...stunning?  Yes, but what else?  Exotic.  God, you must have heard that before, please pardon.  We're new fans.  A tad to drink?"  He sloshed some of the mixture in the pitcher into the tall glasses with a ladle, spilling it copiously onto the table and a trouser leg.  He was barefoot, his slacks rolled up over thin ankles, tapered like Maud's, and he was wearing a white shirt, open over his gaunt, hairless chest, and dark-transparent in blobs where he had already spilled his own drink on it.

     "Look what I’ve discovered.  If you aren't bamboozled by the word cocktail you can dispense with the ritual and mass produce perfect ones.  Necessity is the mother of invention.  Wait.  There it is, the specialty of the house", and he dropped an olive into each glass.  He pulled up some ratty looking deck chairs for Florence and Manny, while Maud and Andrea retreated to the side and leaned against a railing.  Mosquitoes hummed near her ears and cicadas droned and screeched in the trees, and there was a sound like a child's toy racer spinning its little wheels in the air until it ran down, which turned out be a cicada giving up the ghost inside the cat's mouth with a kazoo note.  The cat was skilled at this hobby, and the deck was littered with cicada carcasses.

     "Stronger than they look.  They better be.  Make yourself right at home."

     He motioned with his long arm to include the whole porch.       "We do less entertaining these days.  Since...Maud's ashamed.  Sorry, Fidalious."

     Maud glared at him.

     "Disgusted then.  Adolescence is proud.  And harsh."

     "It's wonderful out here, Howard.  We should do this, Manny.  Why don't we ever think of sitting outside?  It's like a Southern novel", said Florence.

     "That's it.  It is, isn't it?  Like a Southern novel.  Did you ever think of that, dear?  Everything gone to pot.  That's not what Maud expects."

     "Do you barbecue out here?" Florence continued.  A barbecue stood on its spindly tripod near Andrea and Maud.  The drifting leaves of several autumns had collected in the bowl, which was flagrantly rusted through.

     "Didn't we once?"

     "Too much protein", said Marjorie. 

     "That's right.  Too damn much protein.  And they've found that charing does something bad to you, too.  I forget what it is.  Makes you aggressive or something.  What's it do Manny?  He's a doctor, Marjorie, he can back you up in this."

     "I don't know, Howard, I'm a psychiatrist.  I haven't heard anything about it."

     "Nothing about aggression?  Marge, did you make that up?  Manny, we've been under a mis-apprehension.  If I'd have known there was no corroboration from the medical persuasion...We had the instincts for red meat.  I can't tell you how many times I've imagined this porch filled with my neighbors with paper plates on their knees.  A cupla' dozen of 'im at a time, talking with their mouths full of potato salad and ribs.  But, then we heard it was awful for them."

     "It is linked to colon cancer and heart disease", Marjorie said. 

     "Wouldn't you know it, Manny?  Could it be otherwise?  We do get punished for every instinct.  Right where it hurts.  Does it have to be that way, doctor?  It doesn't, does it?  Not anymore.  Not with what you guys know."

     "Daddy."

     "What?  I'm inquiring, Maud."

     "You are gouging."

     "I'm doing that again?  Manny, was I?  I get accused of this all the time, by her.  Am I just crude or is she the princess and the pea?  I think some inquiries completely justified, I can name a few I think are minimum, like where are you going?  She's my daughter, I've backed off to where, I wouldn't think to ask her why she's running off.  Can you?  Are you able to?  Does she tell you?  Because you're a doctor.  You wouldn't be accused of gouging.  He's skilled, isn't he Maud?  No rough handling over there."

     "I'm leaving."

     "Well, that's a big change.  She's leaving.  She'll be at your place when you get back.  My fault.  No right to ask.  But, listen to me Maud. Hear me?  You see I'm trying to learn.  This is my tutorial.  I want to make you feel welcome here again.  Manny will give me some lessons on how to be gentle.  What does she tell you, Manny?  What have you learned not to ask that just opens her up?  I've got to say, it must be your discreetness.  Maud is very discreet, while I.."

     "Good bye."

     "Now, Maudie, if you leave you won't be able to hear what Manny and I decide about you, and for all you'll ever know you should have stuck around to call me a fibber.  Don't you think if you lite out that we might agree you can't sleep over there anymore?  And you won't have a word to say about it, even though we both know how out of touch I am with you.  Manny, she could tell you not to listen to a word I said, if she hung around.  She could make a good case.  You see, we all live here under a spell, she could tell you.  It's beauty and the beast, from her viewpoint.  Has she told you?"

     "Howard, she comes to visit, Andrea.  She's always been welcome for that."

     "Come on, Manny.  At ten at night?  Over the weekends?  What did you think was going on here?  What did you see?  I just have to wonder at why you never asked.  How does someone become so civilized?  It hasn't happened here.  I've got some rough edges left.  You know, we love our Maudie very much.  Maudie, we do.  We're dotty over her.  Maudie we miss you.  We're proud of her.  No, Maudie, it's generous.  Maudie knows we had nothing to do with it.  We're proud for you, not for ourselves.  She's lovely.  Such a gift to be laid at our doorstep.  We just found her abandoned there, obviously, no other explanation for her in this house.  Lovely green eyes, what do you make of them?  We've given it some thought but we don't know.  Once upon a time, we thought, there must be an Irish poet involved, but we could never prove it.  And her black hair.  Was her dame or sire possibly a fairy or a bird?  And that white skin, what did you think, Maudie?  Too white, the horror of it.  Who can take custody for that flawless skin?  Poor Maudie.  You shouldn't have had to and unable to fail.  Deserving in every way no matter what you tried.  Do you think he can take you back now?  We all know, Manny, she is without sin, which is a curse.  Haven't you found that?  The rest of us know.  How blameworthy you are, and you're so domestic, amenable, for.."

     Muad's lip was curled back on her teeth, she looked like she was hissing as she swept past him on her way off the deck.  Andrea heard his glass rolling on the wood, thrummm-rhummn.  The rest happens silently.  It happens quickly, probably, if it could be timed it would be measured in seconds, a half minute at most, but it happens between moments, in between the moments that are timed.  Andrea is not used to violence, the way it has of breaking out of regular time.  She has not been prepared and cannot get set to string such a moment back onto sequence.

     It will not be forgotten and has not been, the rip and the ancient shape springing out there.  She feels it with her whole body, against all tears and memories to come, against memory and grief, scattering their shadows.  Absolutely opposed to fading and cooling.  This is the violent force that drives the tide.  She has always known it, pounding in her throat and breast.

     Thrumm-rhumm, the glass rolls over the hollow wood spilling gin and vermouth and a pimento olive, and Howard is on his bare feet in a fluid motion-look no farther to find the string Maud's grace was plucked from-and he has stretched out his arm and its span is impossible, there is no space left outside of it where Maud could go.  He must be taller than he even looks, or his tallness is servant to his reach and grace, conjuring itself out of the will in a musical chord.  His hand girdles Maud's waist, these fingers are long and white as the flight feathers on a swan, his thumb is at the buckle of her belt-one of those  "Indian" belts with geometric designs woven in little plastic beads-and his long fingers stretch across the small of her back, and he has plucked her from the porch with this one hand by the stem of her waist and furls her in to him, and this could not literally be possible, Maud is light but she is not a wine glass to be lifted with a one hand, but it is the way it is branded in Andrea's brain, because it is possible with the concurrence of will, if both bodies have already come to this through a motion of inner will that has moved them out of where they stood.  Moving their bodies along the given path with the momentum of the already done and into the place already made, gravity already dispensed with because they have begun before and drop into place.  They began with this foretold.  He has her then in the folds of his arms, against his chest, and Maud's throat is quailing as if she is holding a note, the fine blue veins swollen, and her legs drape over his arm, and her feet are relaxed, and as Andrea has seen them when she is sleeping, they fall in a dancer's point.  Maud has been choreographed while she slept.

     He carried her into the house. 

     The Mahler’s sit stunned. Since they drove Maud back here from their house, they have been acting under Howord's direction.  Pawns, tools, they did what they were asked and not the least part of it was witnessing this droit de patron over his own daughter, and by remaining silent, sealing it.  Let them represent the good people of the commonwealth of Connecticut, they have been silenced and cowed, and among those empaneled was one psychiatrist whose craft of family dynamics has been scorned as hesitation and self-pity. 

     "You know", Florence is saying, "We should barbecue.  I think we don't because it's not Jewish."

     Andrea sees Manny flinch.  Florence is removing them from blame, advertising their cultural ignorance.  They do not know what they have seen.  She means to help Marjorie.  As far as they are concerned, nothing has happened.  They could talk about anything, start back where they left off before this event happened which is so completely past their comprehension they did not even see it.   

     "Which is why we should do it.  Marge, in kosher you are not supposed to eat juicy meats.  We should let ourselves enjoy it.  You need to know sauces.  Do you know any?  Those are supposed to be secret aren't they?  Manny, we could teach ourselves.  Until we come up with our own that everyone wants to steal.  I know they use tomato sauce.  And what about lemon or lime?  And what about sugar?  Oh, Manny, I just thought of it.  They're an American sweet and sour.  I'm so proud, I figured it out.  We have to try it right away."

     Marjorie's face is locked closed, annealed, her eyes piercing through the mask.  She is not going to be pulled into this conversation, and few others either.  Andrea has met Marjorie before and her face always wears this frozen look, but now she knows it is the result of what they have just seen.  Her own face must be frozen the same way.  If she were not marked from now on-if every expression was restored with its sincerity intact-though this event was set into her very pulses, the shoe could not have fit perfectly.     

     But she had come close. Close enough to be implicated by the more vivid way of experiencing things she had near Maud, by what she had seen and wondered at and thought was a sight of fairy wonder itself, of its trap door into the world: Maud in her bed with her lips sweetly open. 

     What transpired in those dreams which had completely rehearsed her for her father's lunge?  Certainly the lunge itself, repeated night after night. Lavender lips kissing a reflection so gently they did not stir a ripple.  Except for those small recitations on those lips that Andrea could never hear but saw moving across them.  Was that recitation always the near hiss that she saw on Maud's lips just before Howard's swoop, and it a recanting finally, but too late?  And what had been seen before in dreams and invited must have included everything which Andrea saw, recantation too, even the recantation, if Maud were able to rise into his single hand as it could only happen in a dream.  It was this weight of reluctance or of reality which was practiced for, for the tugs of confusions and the traduced surroundings outside of sleep, to make waking less than what was already known and to dispense with it.  How it happened was how it was prepared in sweet slumber: The luminous eyed figure plucking her to him and carrying her off, already known, whatever violence in it accepted, longed for, inevitable.  The encircling wingspan, the strength, the imperative and righteousness and the blow itself, all this just as it was had always been received with pointed toe and a blush of color on her pale cheek. 

     And what Andrea had seen, Marjorie had, also.  The force of nightmare.  Horrors lounging familiarly, stabled at the windows.  Royal shapes taking possession of home and garden with archaic grandeur in moonlight.  Howard must have now realized for her what she had hoped for in him from the beginning, become himself a figure among the figures of nightmares, a great and terrible beauty, gaunt, pale, with blazing eyes. It was the romance of the plumb girl.  And then it was done, but she is never equal to it, only guilty for it.  There was a cold celestial in beauty but there was something else, she had thought, something else she wanted and would bring to it by the sincerity of her wanting it and would be a saving grace for them, for her, for Howard. Converting goodness to perhaps glory, kindness outshining beauty and loved by it with gratitude, its greater wisdom or holy simplicity. Drained at a single gulp and only the empty shape left-ugliness-or just not beauty. An unilluminated, illiterate prettiness, its generosity drained, left a husk. 

     Only. 

     The curtain has opened on a stage of nightmares.  While once moonlight on the snow assured a depth of feeling in her the winter was waiting for, and outside her window tree, creek and hush arranged themselves for the heart meant to receive them, now everything is set again for Marjorie's daughter, Maud's older sister, to step into that moonstruck stage of Marjorie's transmuted hope, to enter a nightmare directly out of a girl's romance, a plump, attractive girl with good color and not bad hair, like her mother, taking the role that had been left open for her, hearing the crunch-sush of each actual step in the snow with surprise for the silence reserved for her, until she reaches the black waters of the frozen pond, to look that last time through the shattered ice onto the black from which her face has been removed and there drop into that place of black myth and necromancy, through those round ponds Andrea had thought since childhood were so much like a woman's vanity mirror she had called them that from the start.       

     Marjorie having nothing to say about barbecue or Florence's confession of ignorance concerning all the constellations which have come out to speckle the sky, and the cat having stationed itself on her thighs and finishing with its toilette coiling up to sleep, the Mahler’s sidle off with a few goodbyes, Florence picking up the spilled glass from the deck and putting it on the card table. 

     Andrea and Maud had been given permission to swim at a neighbor’s pool and they had swum there at night.  Andrea remembers Maud seated by the pool with her cheek resting on her bent knees, hands braceletting her ankles, the aquamarine water heaving slightly from her recent passage through it, blue-green glow in the deep night, a broach at the collar of night's cloak. Huddled copses of trees, a town sewn into quiet tapestry, shortened distances between them seated by this minority of light and Maud's sister, dead by suicide, dissolved into darkness. Maud, looking through the pool like a skylight over the grave. 

     All the whiles.  Glades of empty longing where time never was, a where/when it is impossible to enter and was never meant to be entered.  Except in dreams.  She would realize she had entered one or that the dream was made from the substance of the empty, unlived space that had been the while-glade.  A cozy pond or golden tarn, a hill top city had been made from the space never walked in. A room, an object, a person, she had reached each of them through the while-glade, carrying the air of glade on her and each spot reached was a paradise for having been seen across the while-glade when it was unreachable and perfect harbor for her vision set out over the empty whiles between.

     The steaming fog of the dreary Willamette. The river road, cars sluicing through the night, the night falling through all the nights that had ever become emotion, dripping from eaves, gurgling in gutter runoffs. Pitch black and subterranean, passages over it landing them in the denser night at the opposite bank.

     Franklin across the long while of Portland, sump for where's unmoored.  Franklin circled by the sounds of the seepage and  sorrow, songs runnel into syllables of lamentation and eulogy, and Jessica waiting here on the river road, great beauty of life reborn, of a soul turned back from the river crossing.  Close, on the bank already, the loosed soul to find itself at its moment of creation, to retrace itself to sorrow and recover in the emptiness into which this loving throws her, from its feelings that impelled her, that were together love, as it is, carrying with it the darkness which inspired it. 

     The car parked in the cramped lot behind the three story clapboard apartment building with its layers of dripping eaves and gables, a complicated rooftop topology, distant gables, wide porch, and small balconies with their own slanting, black-green tar shingles, mossy and water stained. They kiss in the small cabin of the car which creaks with the engine cooling and pitters with rain drops, and smells from the heater and wet clothing.  A gust drives a sheet of rain against the car and the treacly water wrinkles and blisters and everything happening seems indelible to her, she can tell she will remember each thing.  The water has been peeled, the wind too, and the hulk of the apartment building with its many roofs, and the pine tree which is crazily placed in the center of the gravel and tarmac lot, they do not robe themselves in other things and will not be lost among them. 

     When they break from kissing their wet clothes are growing cold on their shoulders and thighs and in the pause she feels they are far out at sea or up in the sky, at the hub of the elements.  It is a small car, tinny, cozy only by size, but leaking cold air and threads of water at the door seams, and maybe it is because everything is renewed, but it is fairy tale-like.  Scary like a fairy tale with animation possible for each thing, because everything is as unintroduced as it was when she was a kid and the rolling away of all her years of experience has left her open to her old superstitions. Knows what will happen, but it will happen outside of her experience.  She will be like this as the rest unfolds, superstitious like a child but only by being changed and aware of the change, not like a child at all, really, except that she is loose at the center of the elements and has no place yet to put what will happen. 

     They resolve to abandon the car and dash to the entrance, and squeeze hands before they push out their separate doors.  The wind is immediately in her face, it whips her as she runs to the front door porch, Franklin joining her and barreling along beside her, and he looks powerful as he runs.  She did not realize how strong he was until she sees him running.  She expects running to lift someone off the ground, to almost make their body kite up, but Franklin runs low and compactly and tight to the ground.  He runs as if it is serious labor without temptation to frolic, and she decides she likes that.  But, it is daunting too. Because of a simple literalness in him that she did not particularly like, or really, she felt sympathetic to it in a way that warned her she would lose respect for it or already had none for it and that pandering to it or ignoring it would damage her love. That she would never love him completely because he could behave stupidly, had not yet, but would be able to because he had the same blinders, the same conviction as a stupid man although he was not stupid, he was implacable, plain in thought like a stupid man. But this literalness is a property of great masculinity, and running beside him she feels protected, that there is in his unambiguity the strength of action and loyalty and faithfulness. His lack of perception or intuition, is heroism, as heroism really is, short-sighted, uninflected, a persistence with the palpable, afflicted with face value.  And he has been male that way for her, reflexively obtuse and real, possessed of abjectness, gravid, fell, with an interior that pondered through to conclusions and then rested, and then fill up with him leaving no hollowness. 

     Never with anyone else had she felt that they might be silent inside that they might have reached resolution and coalesced around themselves. She was terrified and aroused by his eyes, they could become inert, like the eye of an animal. She knew he did not have her self-consciousness; he could be awake without having to posit a persona for himself.  He was awake without attention to the eyes of others.  He was inside himself alone, something she never was, and it was a sexual lure for her, in sex she might gain that, she thought she did; or just him, just thinking about him actually alone without a thought that she could partake of his aloneness, not his isolation but his capture of selfhood, of just being himself.  Just the sight of this man who was only himself, it aroused her, without motivation, as if he were an element, the primary element of sexuality between a man and a woman, that there it was in front of her, actually there, and from that as a start, what must follow would not be expurgated by imagination.  But forget what follows, just there he was the ready flint for the flame, and for nothing else.

     They reach the porch where the blowing rain has soaked the floorboards and Franklin has held the keys in his coat pocket while he ran and finds the lock in the dark and they step into the entryway which is a hall in smudgy darkness lit by weak bulbs with a stairway leading to the next floor, the one his apartment is on, and she loves this bleak space which must hardly exist for most of the tenants.  It is stuffy as a closet, only the front door opens on to it from the outside and even in daylight the lights have to remain on in the murk.  A strip of ratty carpeting is laid in the hall and another on the stairs, a concession to the domestic function of the building, and the tramping of wet boots has irrigated a mildew, which in the fan of light the door will open in the morning shows up like spilled ink but at night is an odor, but she loves this spot for its service to their human shapes, its tunnels and ladders for the beasts who stable here.

     They climb the flight of stairs side by side bumping together at hip and shoulder, funneled towards his door; she is in a state of sympathy for him and her conception of him as real inside his building.  They stumble out onto the second floor hallway and slide along the walls to his door, past the hanging fire extinguisher, and this is not student dwelling, she feels, although Franklin means this place to be temporary, but he is not among students here and she feels that without her this is how he would live, though he does not know it, but he is in place here.  She respects this building and its tenants she has seen in the halls.  She respects the dead end she feels this building is for them because reaching a dead end is gallant and is larger than achievement, that the failure she witnesses here, the meetings with alcoholics in the hallways, are embedded in the male body, that although from wails heard through doorways and cursing rising from the parking lot that the tenants here see it differently, as an exile, and that they are tortured by past insults, that these are great defeats, that these figures have been ranged against the monsters of the night, that she hears from them and sees in them in the brief exchange of a glance, that they suffer from the purest of guilt and believe in sin. What they have done and not done has no mitigation and stands starkly forever and cannot be bargained against, and when often that seems to be nothing more than the loss of youth, that such lamentation for it must come from the simplest, most glorious belief in its majesty, in its divine gift that had been granted to them, and if this was taken as petty self-pity the message was lost:  These figures bemoaned the beauty of manhood as a vehicle of bravery. The stylish exaggeration of their sorrows, their bemoaning and bewailing was earned by them by their raw closeness to the source of tragedy without benefit of polish and grace of worldly success.  What had befallen them even through their own agency was without cleverness and subterfuge and ultimately without self-interest. In this building Indians in their busted forties ghosted in the hallways, often large men with big hands and wrists and archaic faces, who yet in movement were often deferential to her, ineffably tender, regretful and commiserating, even once, a round-shouldered giant confessing to her the inadvertent slaughter of a man through a drunken mistake on a logging job, and only from him had she ever heard such complete humility before God.

     And she desired him again. For it was in Franklin and was his appropriateness here, his fated tenancy that he did not see, thinking he would move from here soon, not embarrassed to take her here but reiterating its transitional status, his plans for a larger campus of stability which, remarkably, he could relate with a sober matter-of-factness that had to mean he fully expected it and depended on a plan, not a miracle, and was already schooled for it- in the Indian and in Franklin she felt that purest nectar of innocent tenderness which is in possession only by those who have felt and committed violence.

     Should have known then what this promised, but certainly from that nectar they drew out Jessica, a soul at the river road most at risk and thus most beautiful, all of her father's violent drama of soul stamped on her, his soul in relief, that gentling, concentrated bewilderment and honest feral wonder and fear, from no other combination could she have engendered Jessica, salve or answer or redemption for the covert soul of him in the world. 

     Had his being African-American enabled her to believe too fully in his purity of instinct?  Truthfully, she only saw him as a black when they had sex, when she saw him as beautiful.  Other times Franklin was civilized into pronouncements of needs and hang-ups or whatever had been the current babble of relationships at the time, she could not remember them but she did know he had a salesman's glib sincerity with them and intended to make his living with them, and subsequently had, the optimism of his muscular energy and his studious directness, insuring his popularity at his trade: marriage counseling.

     The nights when each time the drippings and seepage of Portland seemed to have reached their goal and another morning was unlikely and hypocritical and all acts which engaged the heart took place in the atmosphere of descending entropy.

     Franklin's room, apprenticing for an established role.  Neat as a ship's cabin or workshop, order over personnel expression. No indulgence or luxury or sentimental objects.  Shelf of books, mostly on psychology and counseling and sociology.  A table with a desk lamp and typewriter and a stiff back, wooden chair where he did his reading.  Reading was a lesson. Books were often left on the table with slips of paper sticking out to mark pages; he underlined passages and copied sentences onto three by five cards which he kept for reference.  Sometimes, it was obvious he had used them as flash cards, memorizing sentences he thought neatly settled issues that were always recurring.  Maybe she should have suspected he would become a drinker, that is, revert to it, or expect it of himself.  That he was fending it off.  Maybe she did know it and took advantage of it, not selfishly, but took advantage of what it meant:  And of its practical effect, too.  Of both, and with sympathy for both, even admiration, even if understanding it had condescension in it, even so, there was more admiration, even awe, for a man, a person, who lived in apprehension of ruin, with that kind of faith in his centrality to morality, that his life was tested particularly and was a prize.  She took advantage too, of the more dreadful seriousness such a view puts on sexuality, but that too with admiration, and adulation, she believed it to be truthful, it was her own faith, it held the place faith would have occupied in her if she had not had plain proof of it which no longer required faith, had she had only it to believe in to remain alive and believe in life, this heavenly contest in sex indistinguishable from joy, that would have been faith. 

     To have and lose these: bare window on the second floor permitting entrance of wizened light and hearty blackness, view across pocket parking lot and vacant lot to next building, black, craggy hulk, included in the charged empathy of love-making’s aura, included, too, in this conditioned litany of things last seen each time before the act and predicting it, all of them thus illuminated and ever included-stairs, fire extinguisher, mildew smell, table, chair, hanging pants by cuffs in clamp hanger to keep pleat, kicking off galoshes, bed, grey blanket. Included and saved and held forever, the forgotten and overlooked, the measure taken by a glance or empty stare, distance of loneliness never expressed, boredom realized, housing with yardstick measure all the lives of loneliness that live in lost glances and empty stares into which the un-reprieved is poured, this despairing view included by them by joyous satisfaction in living as it is. Into the hallowed sanctum of bereavement these which have been touched by love even in its keenly known absence, the world abandoned by the loveless.

     Though she often fell asleep immediately when they were done, still tangled together, there were times that satisfaction would not surrender to sleep and then in voluptuous torpor earthly things came to her in full happiness, and she was neither awake nor asleep but had each of them in a richer state and married together so the room with her eyes closed was ringing, chiming itself crystallized. Parable had been stripped and her life was lived enough to have saturated her spirit with her days and time had flowed into her carrying its mineral realness, and of them all-stream, pond, ocean, fog and tear, tree, deer, fox and unicorn-the most certain was Jessica.

     Joined with him for hours, his blackness never disappeared and she could have been accused of using it in all the racist ways in which blackness can be made to serve sexuality-exaggeration of the other, alleviation of guilt, rebellion, individuation, historicity, drama, politics, empowerment, exploitation, stereotyping, pulp fiction, any of these, and none of them deniable because of silence.  And what she may have been to him or what he may have thought he was to her and all the other hall of mirror events that attend on any love affair could not just be assumed away because they did not engage in any exegesis of their relationship, but even through their break-up when everything pent up is spilled out and all the mirrors shatter on the floor, a more momentous impersonality held sway and smothered hysteria and tantrum.  And, maybe, this impersonality was a central core of racism, not erasable, maybe it was to her the original blackness that melanin itself was only a metaphor. This original blackness which had no conference with mutation and event, that was blackness itself without associations, an inspiration for interpretations, but preceding them, silence manifest with all its profoundest timbres of original creation whatever bastardization and poetry and variations were later made of that first complete and finished mystery.  Maybe.  And useless to protest if ever the topic had been raised by either of them, by anyone, and it was not, and neither ever by anyone for any reason or out of any need some jeopardy and advantage Franklin might be said to suffer or enjoy and employ from blackness primeval through his silence, the assumption of an initial richness congenital to him, affinity and participation in that original mysterious solemnity, and the jeopardy it put him under in terms of adequacy or measurement, of his own solemnity against expectations, the modes of expression arising from this original mystery and Franklin's distance or ineptitude at them, his sandstone color and tepid sophistication, which could have always been made to contrast with fidelity. But, his color, his hair's kinkiness, his cushy lips and broad nostrils, they were all idiosyncratically Franklin.  All the prejudices she would later develop for them, the repugnance they caused in her, were all about Franklin personally.  When she no longer could put up with the sight of him for very long and what had been the identification of his stony color with a stony silence and beautiful to her, the ancientness of Franklin, the ark of his silence, its first worldliness, became personally again the manifestation of sullen silence and belligerent insensitivity.  Personal.  Personal.  Personal.  Private even. 

     In March, counting back it was March, Jessica was conceived.  In the trough of the trough of rainy months.  Jessica listens for whispers from that time, she listens for them with Andrea and Franklin, with Manny and Florence, and with Franklin's family too, more conscious, Andrea thinks, than most children of the chanciness of her existence, probably because the parts composing it were disassembled before she was born. Not only is Franklin away and intermittent, but the ligaments of affection are also gone, and she has only shadows and echoes to piece together and the vapor they make cannot reassure a child of her necessity.

     In Jessica, the poetical, dreaming Jessica, an original element of insubstantiality running through her dreams and musings, all of the chances her mother might never have been loved and conceived her, that certainty of the tentative chance eating at her heart, a tension in her mother's face, a desperate search to this day, a querulousness, an alarm, all there to prove the impossibility of her and the predestination of Andrea to some loneliness that could not include her.  This heightened by her mix of races in which she resembled neither of her parents, and had not yet those lines of severity in her mother to prove her kinship nor color or eye shape or all that added up to this woman who might well have always been alone, nor enough of Franklin to be sure of him either.  Jessica in her silent witness to adult doings and conversations trying to piece together the conceiving moment and the inevitable logic of it and finding nothing to support her. Grandma and Grandpa cannot be enlisted to add to her materialization but riddle it with riddles, hanging it on a question whose wrong answer will dissolve her, so composed of words and words withheld are they. 

     Here is the inevitability, the quickening sinew moving through those nights out of which she came, although Andrea cannot tell her this yet, except to reassure her they were in love, which even to Andrea sounds unconvincing, and can she remember it herself and convince herself of its possibility?:

     She cannot remember it except just now when she rolled over onto her side there was a feeling, as if she turned inside herself, and she was reminded of a feeling, and this must be frequent, each time she rolls over there is the possibility of this feeling and this nearness at hand is part of the feeling, that she is always occupied by it but it is so integral to her she does not notice until it shifts in her, and then it is so inclusive it is as if all of her shifted, and it is substance, this feeling.  It shifts with its own weight, heavy enough to have its own inertia, and this feeling is directly from those nights with Franklin.  She felt it then and why does she notice it now on the gurney where she is laying in preparation for the operation?  Sluggishness, an enlightened sluggishness, it took lethargy to note it.  She is nervous and cold but she turned her cheek to the warm pocket the back of her head had scooped and curled up and when she did she had that feeling of her solidity, through and through, as she had those nights with Franklin.  It was a good feeling and when it came it made her aware that while she had not been noticing she had been drifting away, sleeping in a way and there was no saying how far she had gone and might yet go while she was not noticing.  She could remember no more than this feeling of resounding landing. There had been all the other sensations but they were gone and it was only this feeling of landing that left a marker behind, and it was not a feeling that was unique to those nights, she would not be having it now if it were, and it had not even been the first time she felt it when she made love. 

     They had gone for hours and it had been a struggle, no it had not been a struggle but what was it about?  It had seemed kind of a struggle, it might have been relieved like a struggle can be lifted.  They were looking for relief, but from a strange affliction that hurt but was sought. They were struggling towards and away, and what hurt seemed inclusive of everything, it seemed to be everything, and everything was revealing itself for what it was, all the vagaries of their lives were being revealed as forms of pain, or that must not be it, the vagaries were in anticipation of this, they ripened to this.  They were so clearly revealed, made so actual, that she knew they had now ripened and if she could not take a scene from her head or any memory, if it were not clear that way, it had been clear that this pain was the substance of memory and event in memory, this burn and scathe of the actual was what planted a memory, this sought for quickening sensation which at every point it emerged snagged itself on the inner body; and that she was so close to the truth, she was in it, that to have drawn back and known any of what she was knowing in particular would have been to resume a lie.  She would have withdrawn until her life was again an approximation of this, a preparation for it, a symbol of it.  And it was not really pain or this is what pain was, because they struggled against some habituation to it, they might have grown used to it and it was just this growing used to it that they struggled against because that would wither it, and this was pain at its most pure and of course it was not the cruelest pain or the most devastating but it was the pain you could know and be grateful for, it was the pain that had all the others in it, the essential pain, and only in this one was the beating wing felt behind the talon.

     Each suffering announced its origin beyond you, its kinship with previous existence and an original pain which was thingness itself; thingness was an egg around this yolk of suddenness waiting to open.  Their lives-coming to themselves and feeling the impatience which had been in them to arrive here, everything in them crouched and ready. Giving limbs to sleep was making love, this was making love, giving limbs to sleep to seize awaking, feeling all the eager sleep of waiting being, seizing them and itself.  It was this solidity of being that had been precipitated during love making which lingered when she turned, and this residue was love itself, the amalgam of those vapors that had been their entire lives until then when they were forever found, at last.  

     New York.  She hardly had time to get over jet lag before the operation, two days during which she had been given a minimum of follow up checkups just to assure nothing had changed since the series of big tests three months before. Formalities, they seemed, or more tests of her attitude, how pliant she was now, the surgeon asserting proprietary rights over her body in a way he had not done before, that seemed to be more the point of these token blood test and blood pressure tests and an EKG, to condition her to being a warehouse for parts. The romance of giving which had softened the doctor was dispensed with, he was ready to operate now.  His mood was changed but something else had changed as well since she had last seen him. He seemed to be atoning for his former politeness.  He acted as if he thought he had been compromising before, or did he think at the actual hour she would expect a rough and ready guy to face the gore, or did he just have to psych himself up?  Big, handsome man, handsome, now what was that, bonny on top of brutal strength, his particular type of handsome? He had lied, or let his secretary lie, probably coached her, where else had she come up with the idea the operation could be done as a laparoscopy?  He tells me, now, a day before the operation, “I'm a surgeon, cut, cut, stitch, stitch, no laparoscopy.  I have a half hour to get your kidney out and into your father.  I'm a surgeon, letting it all hang out.”  He is covering his embarrassment that he stooped to cajolery. I have volunteered for his show. What an irritation, a misfortune to have to be part of it.  Listen big guy, you're not fooling me and you never had to.  Your contempt for a woman's ability to make a moral choice pisses me off, but shut up now, I didn't just find out the risks.  I don't need your pandering and wish I didn't have to listen when I was ready and resolved and could have hoped for that to be respected just by leaving it alone and not thinking it was a cute whimsy you had to coax along.  You have been irrelevant this whole time.  I would have done this with a dwarf with big lips, an old woman, this is the company you keep to me. I wish, Jessica, we could do this without him. 

     I hated the hospital Jessica was born in. It was only hours and I was mad, I think with disappointment in myself. I was sure I would be good at this, and I had her give me the spinal so I wouldn't hear myself, my sweet obstetrician, I'm here she said, and I said, who the fuck cares? I wanted to endure the pain, I wanted it, the pain of childbirth, all of it, but I was shocked at its power.  It was a rejection. The pain should have been strength moving through me, but I resisted, I didn't have faith. I complained, I couldn't stand hearing myself. She was late getting there, I was calling for her, I thought she won't come because she doesn't believe me and worse, that she's waiting for me to be humbled, and I was yelling until they had to send for her even though Jessica was still hours away. They sent for her because I was calling her every name, and she better get there to shut me up, they couldn't take much more, they were used to moans and screams, and even swearing, they told me the husbands were usually removed so that at the blessed event they shouldn't hear their wives curse god, the baby, them, the day they were born, all while delivering them a family. They were grand blasphemers, but they weren't ready for a yenta who didn't have a shred of faith in her to rail against who was ripping apart her obstetrician, blurting out slanders as if they were confessions. There was no pause in the pain, it was waves, but their passing, like a hoop of fire, left me scorched, it was not relief. I was nauseous, my stomach was so wrenched, when the waves had passed through me I was dizzy and sick, but I managed to prolong my raving, I had heard myself, I knew they did not believe me and I was angry, if they did not believe me they were contemptuous of me, which I deserved, unless, I had been wronged, which I set out to prove, god but what came out of me as life steamrolled over me, what a calculating, diabolical advocate.  In the extreme it was not some awe and celebration of mystery that burst from me, my stuff squeezed until the essence of faith or obedience or happiness or gratitude came out of me, it was fear of being a spectacle and of being seen as justified to suffer, that I would be exposed as hideous, but really so much less, that I simply would be seen as hysterical and petty, a bitch, and so I managed, with my teeth chattering with the pain, the labor when I squeezed, it heated me up, and between I was sweating cold sweat, I told the nurses that I had foolishly trusted her personally, that it had been her frailties that had endeared her to me and now I was paying for them, that this woman who had become my friend which should be avoided now I knew why, had told me of her frigidity, her chilling at the loathsome touch of her husband who I had been gullible enough to accept her word as being insensitive, when now shouldn't I rethink that frigidity as being the cause of his uncertainty, wasn't I now being given a great example of it, she having gotten the reports of my torture tarrying in sleep and unconcern, and really I should have been more dubious when she described the circumstances of losing her virginity.  Holy viciousness they could stand, but they were not used to my Semitic altruistic venom, and they called her in for an exorcism, I believe. I grabbed one of the nurses and my grip was strong, these women are no ninnies, and they are no strangers to insanity either, and I took her into my confidence which was a place filled with the demons of betrayal right then and perhaps forever, a place abandoned by the laws of fecund nature and replaced by lacerating gossip, and asked should I hold out hope that the obstetrician would ever relent for whatever reason, considering that I had proven myself so gullible to her before?  I envy all those animal mothers. They give birth in the meadow grass among the heads of flowers, on mountain crags, the stars above, it's a love song, true, you , blue, sky, why, under the moon, the sun, the rain, seals on the sea shore with the breakers crashing, only the world waiting, Jessica. Leaving you with Franklin, no surer flotsam from my mixed up life, banished to hospitals and these florescent lights, far from the big circles I wanted, a child born on a crag to launch into the gyre, at shoreline to swim into kelp gardens, left with Franklin whose violence never needs the inspiration of rage but manages on inconvenience or ambiguity alone. I've been sure against all my experience but still have a belief it is something I might atone for, that this insertion of soul into matter is not peculiar, though every time I've arrived at the juncture I have found the fitting to be grotesque, but am trying again to cast my faith on the certainty of fleshy wisdom, that this comedy of errors rides upon a sure music of beauty and that to the actual heart when followed all this opens into the clear chorus of passion.  For all our sakes that I simply could not refuse and wouldn't even hear a thought above the chorus. We do sing beautifully together and seem to deserve that, at least it’s given to us to excuse all the rest when we do. It is natural to us and finds us out, if we can just be opened, such pain and love in it when we are opened, when we are struck, how our substance rings, just given the chance, in its nature to be itself, how beautiful, let me be struck, always trust that, let me be. I have been, what shows when we are, it has to be true, I do believe that, it will always be true then if it is complete and I'll feel everything that went into it, and have, I did, I know, it sings, sings, given the chance, take it for what it is, he had me in his arms, for what I am, for him I was only for him, what I am, no other then. Finally finished there, at last, he had me in his arms and stayed.

     Sure from the music before, the sweet sadness already there, that I needed only to be struck for it to pour in. The wind slapping the windows, rattling in their frames, the rattling was desperate, so sad and frustrated, they wished themselves fingers, and could only claw before the sadness dissolved them again, the voices of the disembodied I thought, I said cry me a river, it's crying a river, and I was just talking in the dark to say nothing.  I must have been cocky, cry me a river, go ahead, because I knew it was going to happen again as it had the night before and I should have been more than cocky knowing what was going to happen and I was, I was not really cocky but I wanted Franklin to think so because I thought I'm not a beautiful girl, I have to be an easy girl, I have to be fun and silly, and he did not turn on the lights, I said, no don't, I want to hear the rain, and I didn't want the lights on and it wasn't out of modesty, I wanted to hear better, so I told him cry me a river but I wanted to hear the night and I did not want to blink when the lights came on, I wanted to find a spot in the storm and curl up in it, I wanted to come from the storm without a light. I said cry me a river, because I wanted to come to this spot out of the whole storm naturally and I wanted the storm to continue, I wanted us to be waifs from the storm, and I wanted the storm to have thrown us together and for it to continue and we luckily found each other and were meant to by the storm, and I was listening to the rain, and we undressed in the dark and the wind rattled the windows and it was open as a belfry because we had not turned on the lights and the night came right in from as far away as it had come and deep, catching up all the sadness on its way and we made love for the whole night and light came in through the  window in the morning and the rain was dull silvery. I cried a river over you. I told him to cry me a river. The stairway left open, leave the light off and the room trembling in the wind, the window rattling, and I opened the window to let the wind in with the rain, and he would have objected but I was beautiful just then, the wind blowing on my back, I sailed to him with the wind at my back and the storm offering me, giving me up.  We're refugees, they line up for music, we line up in the dark, they had settled on me, I was a beacon, he had loved me for days, I glowed, I hardly awoke, I drifted through the days, I held to each one, each day took its every minute, they saw through me, they had gathered around me in the night and looked through me, from where they stay, clinging to a song. I had bloomed there, I was a white rose there in the dark, they grow their ice flowers here, they shear their souls into snow and we know their regret.

     Jessica, you're asleep, soon I should be plunging past you. Eyes closed, how did I look to you ten years ago, where you were, soul as you were? I came to a glen in our loneliness, where the days are buckled, I've been where the days are buckled over the dead and the light is streaming through, they're fit to burst the seams, where the birch grows and the sun stays like a tune in the branches, I've felt the seams fit to burst.  My eyes closed, my face scrunched and red, new there in your old dream world, plunging down, catch me in the reeds, maybe I'll land in some reeds, keep me for a while so I don't wake up alone.  Boy, but did you ever fall heavy, I thought you tripped, but you taught me different soon enough, determined from the start to get used to it, not liking it as much as you intended to make it yours, skeptical of the requirements and protesting them, sleeping, eating, greedy for them but more to prove you were capable. Your taste for milk was provisional and you had to be persuaded to eat, you'd have me know it was under protest and dubiously and certainly not with stupid enthusiasm, and consented to walking on your own schedule with the caveat that you were not overwhelmed with the implications of the skill and it fell far short in spite of all the patriotic hoopla accompanying your first steps of ever defining who you were, always in mind the exploration of the absurd outcome of your choice and urge to peek in which had landed you here and just had to do. It will not startle you to find me among the bulrushes red and scrunched as I don't imagine it was all that startling considering your attitude to squint into the light and see me and Franklin in such dangerous proximity to the dead, your mother having opened the window and us both laying up there like bodies in Benares fed to the birds. How did we look to you in the place where our imaginations lived, souls that have aimed into the heart of their loneliness, such arms and legs we had built to grapple us together? I imagine you tempered your wonder at the sight of souls who had built themselves vessels to find each other, and trust you to keep me with as little amazement and as much patient caution as let you step out and join us originally, the ridiculousness of me will strike you but you will not be shocked.  I cried, I remember crying, such release of captured souls, you entered at the relief of sorrows and have been moderate since, waiting until commotions have subsided to enter the room, waiting in the shadows, you have always walked into my life with bold, patient grace, and have lifted me with the size of your aloof empathy, best, I think, those journeys that start at night, cozy and bumbling and only half awake, carried outside bundled up and hugged and the morning coming and dewy and chilly and the crickets ringing a note, and a first bird wakened by our passage singing its song too soon, tender, half bodied passage into morning, gentle reiteration.  Underneath, the greater order surges where the heart moves without conscience always towards love through generations and forms, constant, and all existence breaking up and melting as it surges below, the boulevards and schedules warping into tangles and paddled colors as the heart surges towards love. We are meant for each other, strange images disgorged from the sea by surges of heart, mutating before our eyes, kaleidoscope of forms on the crinkled water, what a beautiful pond, am I crying now when I see them together on the shore, my family, dad reading a book and mom lying as lasciviously on a blanket as she can while trying to look civilized, David has brought them a turtle from the pond, what is that song, I recognize it, I've heard it before, almost, close to hearing it before but always just missing it, hearing it through a chest hugged close, so sad this heart, so beautiful...closer.

     She started to walk to them but a crevasse opened up between them and she plunged into it, blackness at the bottom.