Mother and Child Page 13

  Sometimes the child would carve a little figure out of a carrot from her snack for her friend, and the Girl with the Matted Hair would put it in her pocket. Together they wandered past the prickle bushes through the vale of tears, over the river of sleep. They crossed the bridge and saw Billy Goat’s Gruff and the place of the trolls, the witch’s den, and they went down to where Rumpelstiltskin and Rip Van Winkle slept, and past that to where the mothers slumbered.

  Awake! the Girl with the Matted Hair commanded at the Place of the Slumbering Mothers.

  AS IT HAPPENED, the Girl with the Matted Hair’s mother died when she was only eighteen months old. She had been so young that her age was not even counted in years yet. How is that fair? she asked, and a fury filled her.

  Some days, the Girl with the Matted Hair forces everyone to pet the dead crow on the path, to pet the feral cat or the mange of the dog—to put their faces close to the white moths that come from its bark—its circus of fleas, its clown cone collar, its disturbed sleep, but the child refuses. How is that fair?

  Shunned by her mother, forsaken, on these days the girl felt mocked. She held a bouquet of crow feathers in her fist.

  YES, BUT I do not have a father, the child said. All I have is a Glove!

  True enough, the Girl with the Matted Hair says, but a father is not an Absolute. No one absolutely needs one. The Girl with the Matted Hair looks to her forlorn white-maned father on the periphery. And it was true in the Valley that with each passing year, there were fewer and fewer fathers to be had. Sometimes a Glove is enough, she said. Sometimes a Glove will suffice. A father isn’t a Necessity. A father isn’t a Requirement. The child shrugs. The potion: shed skin of snake. River water taken at the place it changed from fresh to salt, the rind of the elder tree, the carcass of the crow, the blood of a child. She ran a silk ribbon through a bowl of milk and then suckled the tether.

  THE GIRL WITH the Matted Hair had already begun going far off in an attempt to assuage her grief by the time the child met her at the Winter Bear School. Soon enough, Resurrection Science would become all the rage, but it wasn’t yet. In certain ways, it could be said that the Girl with the Matted Hair was in the forefront of such science.

  AFTER HER MOTHER died, the Girl had begun to display Matted Hair. Someone said it was her father’s fault for never combing it, but the mother did not think that that was the reason, and sometimes on particularly difficult days, the girl grew a pelt for additional protection.

  At the very least, the child’s mother might offer to drag a brush through that thicket of hair, that wilderness of grief, that sorrowing. Poor Girl with the Matted Hair (no mother), the others whispered. If her mother were alive, she would have licked and licked until the fur was sleek and smooth.

  Everything would have been different then.

  The child admired the pelt. It was cool in the summer. It was warm in the winter. In the rain it was like a raincoat. Those who might try to break her spirit or her resolve or her heart, it frightened, and they would not come near. And she could always wear it when she visited her mother’s grave, which was when she needed the most protection of all, and there it served as a kind of armor. Even though she pretended otherwise, she could not take it off—a pelt was permanent after all. The child did not mind her friend’s pelt. The child was impervious to pelts.

  THE GIRL WITH the Matted Hair lived some distance from the child, and so there was always the matter of transporting her, which the mother happily did, and sometimes on the way home when the children sat together in the backseat and chattered in their own language saying boden and pish-pish and wimple, and the child would sniff the girl hard—the forest and wind and sadness on her skin—and like a mother monkey, she would pick the nits from her pelt.

  The girls spoke in their code in the backseat and dreamt their dreams and planned their plans. This was in the time that they were still mini-bodens, and not bodens yet.

  ON THE DAYS the Girl with the Matted Hair came to play for the whole day, they would build a tent together out of the mother’s diaphanous clothes, and when it was time for her to go home, she would hide in the crimson recesses of the house and she would not come out. At these times, when the Girl disappeared, her white-maned father wept because the story was that the Girl with the Matted Hair resembled exactly his deceased wife—but weeping did no good. After the house was searched, her white-maned father would roam the forests disconsolately looking for her. The child knew that the Girl with the Matted Hair would leave her baby teeth sunk into the trunk of a tree and they shone in the dark, and at night the child could always find something of her friend again that way.

  ON SOME DAYS the girl felt mocked by the world, and mocked by the mothers and mocked by all the girls with mothers, and with extreme reserves of rage, she would turn on the child’s mother, and pouring out the potions, and destroying the endless offerings, she would peer out at her and say, not a single mother will be saved today.

  Forsaken, she had been forced by their existence to the place of the humiliated. By the time the mother and child had met the girl, she had already made several forays into the forest.

  She pronounced it definitively; she could locate your utmost fear. Not a single mother will be awakened by any child today. The mother pats the Girl’s head. If she could help to wake her mother just once, even for an instant, she would—there would not be a moment’s hesitation.

  Still no one who was there will soon forget the Girl with the Matted Hair glaring that afternoon in front of her pyre, stating most gravely to the mother, you are getting sleepy. On these days the mother is cursed, and she whispers and hisses from the cursed place where she is negated, cancelled, erased. Some days the Girl with the Matted Hair would put a Frozen Charlotte spell on the mother and bring her to the infirmary and wait until she was pronounced blue and dead. Nonetheless, the mother would rise up from the shabby hospital where she had been placed in a row of Charlottes, frozen solid. I’ve had it, the mother says, with the Furies today, and she gets up effortlessly. There’s a flame at her shoulder and she rises as she always does, enormous and bright from the curses and cold, uncondemned.

  I’ve had it with the potions, the cold, the sleep, the spells, she says, and she gets up and walks out, just like that.

  THE GIRL WITH the Matted Hair eats from a bowl like a small dog, too hungry to hear the admonishments. Doesn’t your mother feed you? the mother asks. Hasn’t anyone taught you how to eat?

  As for the orphans, the mother does not know what to do about the orphans. The world is full of problems she does not know how to solve.

  The GinGin girls long for the Starfruit Tree and the Scholar Tree. Understandably, the mother says, patting their heads.

  FOR THE GIRL with the Matted Hair, it was the unresolved absence that proved so difficult. An absence where the mother continued to reside—a space in the Girl that had never been sufficiently emptied. It was an absence always on the verge of filling, always on the verge of presence, always at the precipice, always at the cusp; the Girl with the Matted Hair, in a perpetual state of longing and hopefulness and sorrow, set out. She was tired of waiting. She knew where she had to go.

  SOME DAYS THE coast seemed clear; the mother thought at last she could walk around without worry—free of sad and longing children, or enraged and spiteful children who wished her nothing but harm. At last the mother thought she was safe. She imagined a place free of the world’s harrowing grief, where everything was accounted for and taken care of, where all seemed right with the world, and that is when the Girl with the Matted Hair would appear. What was hard was not the appearance of the girl, whom she had grown to love, but the mother’s assumption that she would ever be safe.

  THE GLOVE MARRIAGE is named for the custom of allowing a bridegroom’s glove to stand proxy at the wedding in his absence. In the absence of the beloved, it is always possible to wed a glove by proxy. If the woman accepts the proposal, the bride can hold the glove instead of the groom’s hand at the cere
mony.

  PUT THE LID on the pot to ensure nothing climbs or flies in or that no one comes and steals the meats, the Girl with the Matted Hair says, tapping her on the shoulder. The sect members are gathering in the glade right now, she whispers.

  THE SECT MEMBERS gather in the glade. They inquire after the Rabbit and the other deities in the Valley. They fear the Mantis, they despise the Dormouse, and so on. After they gather in the glade, they make their way to their Pyramid. They meditate on the Seven Aphorisms. They contemplate the Bog. Where is Bog Belly by the way? the mother suddenly wonders. They speak of making the Secret Nectar. They stand in their sacred circle of mummified pets.

  When no one is looking, Bunny Boy or Bog Belly, as the mother sometimes calls him, examines the corpses: a cat named Mimsy, a Doberman named Butch, Felicity, the guinea pig.

  Meanwhile the members meditate on the Third Aphorism: Nothing rests, everything moves, everything vibrates.

  Everything vibrates?

  Not Mimsy, Bunny Boy thinks to himself.

  FIVE YEARS PASSED, and the Girl grew and the matted hair was not quite so apparent to human eyes. Civilized, to a point, she put away her witch’s brews and began to search on Match.com, and PlentyofFish, and Cupid.com, and Chemistry.com, and LavaLife for a stepmother. She hoped her white-maned father might oblige.

  19

  RUMOR SPREAD IN the Valley about the Girl in the Reading Trance. There was a girl, it seemed, who couldn’t get herself out of her book. She sat in the front of the school bus and sometimes she waved to her classmates as they got on and off, but she herself didn’t move, and though she recognized them as they came and went, she could not make further contact with them.

  At night while the others slept in their beds, the girl stayed on the bus in the bus field, and the next day she would wave to her classmates again. Only when the book was over did she get up and stretch her legs a little and get off the bus and look at the stars. Then the girl, lost in the book, accompanied by her dog Shimmer, would jump and play and run by the river.

  The next morning the girl would begin another book, and even though it was the same book, each time she read it, a different story emerged, or something she had not seen before came to the fore—for the right book and the right girl are endlessly replenishing. It was the magic of the girl and the book. The children grew old and were replaced by other children, who passed her and waved and grew old, but the girl in the book was eternal and eternally new, and forever all things were possible.

  THE PIANO TEACHER arrived all right angles and flying hair, and the child immediately adored her. The piano teacher stood stern over the child and divided the air into beats and measured phrases, and the silence was flooded with music and numbers and beauty. On some occasions, the piano teacher had to stop the child from getting up and dancing. She pressed with her long fingers on the child’s shoulders every time it looked like she might rise up.

  More and more the mother felt she had to struggle to stay alive in any room, but not in the room filled with music and the child crooning and the lithe fingers of the piano teacher. In that room for a moment all human genius moved through the child, who was belting out the Ode to Joy as she shimmied on the bench.

  The piano teacher revered the great composers and had spent a lifetime with them. The child recognized this from the moment she had stepped into the house. Like the great river, it was a privilege to sit next to her. She handed the child Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, a child’s version of Mozart to play. Some things vanish, the mother thought, but not all. A few things will never die.

  And one day, the teacher said, she would teach her to play Bach.

  AT FIRST ALL the children flocked to the side of the tiny crushed girl who was their classmate. In a matter of a weekend she had gone from a tiny, running, laughing girl to a tiny crushed girl in the hospital. The first word had been in the form of a cry heard ringing through the stables. One of her horsey classmates had gotten the news first.

  The helicopter came and took the girl away. She had fallen off an enormous horse. As if that were not bad enough, the enormous horse had then fallen and landed on top of her. Word from the hospital where she lay in a world of white was that there was to be one operation and the possibility, sometime later, of another. After a long time, the girl returned to school and the children fought to be near her, to wheel her around the periphery of things and to slip her sweets. They knocked each other down trying to get to the little broken girl first.

  Later the children learned from the tiny girl that before she had gotten on the enormous horse for the last time, she had developed a fear of horses, a horse phobia, but her mother urged her back anyway because that is what one did in a new country such as this. The mother who was from a different, sadder country encouraged the girl to get back on the horse, as it was, she said, the American Way. In her first country, it would have been okay not to get on the horse again, but here it was not an option. This made it all the worse, somehow.

  And it was only a matter of time before the children tired of the tiny crushed girl—in part because it is how children are, always ready to move on to the next thing, and in part because the tiny girl in her crushedness was becoming a tyrant. No one could give her what she wanted, which was two legs walking again, and so she would demand other things, and after a while when the children saw the big, slowly moving wheels of the wheelchair, they would pivot away and run in the opposite direction before the tiny girl could spot them. Increasingly it was only the girl, her mother, the teacher, and a tiny horse, which had somehow insinuated its way onto the crushed girl’s lap.

  In the solitary, increasingly hostile place she finds herself, she tries to recall a time only a short while ago when she felt impervious to pain. In her mind she goes out into the fields in search of an echo from her other life. She works to recall when she had friends for real, and there was pliable ground. Pity this suddenly isolated, crushed child. She yearns for the time before her mother failed her, the time when she ran in the field with the others, the times before she was not broken or crushed—still a whole girl.

  THE TEACHER DESPISED the children, a fact that the mother was well aware of, and now the first Parent-Teacher Conference was upon them. The mother entered the room and sat in the small chair and waited for the teacher to speak. All was silent. She had drained the room of all ambient sound so she might hear more precisely every word the teacher had to say.

  The teacher believed it was her task to point out what she perceived as the weakness in each of the children and locate it for the parent. She would call one child disingenuous, another dimwitted, yet another ingratiating. She despised each child in his or her own unique way, and she was determined to find a way to slip this disdain casually into the conference, as they sat across from the other on the small chairs. Gleefully the teacher would wait for the perfect chance, the exact right place so as to create the maximum possible shame in the parent. It was this utterly mesmerizing moment in each conference that the teacher lived for; it transfixed and sustained her.

  The mother sat silently waiting for the inevitable pronouncement, but while she waited, she isolated the skinny, mean-spirited teacher on the ever-darkening stage of her psyche. Soon in the quiet, the teacher began choking on a fishbone and was forced to excuse herself. While the mother waited, she focused on the small Bunsen burner in the back of the classroom.

  When the teacher returned, the mother began her polite inquiry. Where most parents were rendered helpless in the face of the teacher, the mother enjoyed such encounters, as she was not reluctant to assign the word evil where it applied. Identified as such, the mother serenely proceeded.

  Woe to the teacher who abuses her station, the mother thought to herself. A teacher possesses great power and so had to be held to a more rigorous standard than others in the community, and as such, a teacher’s trespasses when they come are far greater than most of the trespasses of others. She holds a child’s life and self-esteem in her hands, and as
a result, a teacher must always be prepared to pay. Please rise, the mother commanded her, and the teacher, caught off-guard, got to her feet.

  Isolated that way and standing against a blackboard, the mother took away her poker and eraser, her pink slips, her dunce caps, her reason to be. Woe to the teacher who abuses her station. It is unpleasant, the mother thought, but sometimes necessary, to watch an entire teacher go up in flames. For a moment the teacher stepped behind Miss Archway, the headmistress, her firewall, who had come in to help, but alas, to no avail.