Mother and Child Page 7

  When it was late and the family of Cecil Peter was sated and the child’s shoes showed wear from all the dancing, they wrapped what remained of the cake in shining silver foil, and the child put a fancy red ribbon on top to signify the fire, and the consensus was it looked like a space capsule, and they lifted it into the mother’s yellow wagon. It rivaled the moon in its brightness, and as it traveled down the hill, the moon did call to it, and the family of Cecil Peter and Wise Jean, including all their children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and other relations, began their glinty way back down the hill.

  What a night, the mother thought, and while they made their way home, she thought of Cecil Peter who fell from an apple tree as a child and hurt his arm; Cecil Peter who had been Apple Tree Cecil, then Falling Cecil, then Cecil of the Gangrene. Like a saint the mother shuddered; now he was Cecil the One-Armed Handy Man, filled with cake, and celebrated for saving the house from cinders again.

  9

  rose

  FOR YEARS THE Queen stood in the darkest part of the garden. Over time she grew more and more weak as she reached for the sun. She had been a regal rose once—tight, beautifully shaped, upright, tall—and when the old cherry tree that shaded her finally fell down and light flooded in again, her natural beauty once more began to flourish.

  The mother had always watched the Queen but had never given in to her many demands. She had observed her struggle with a kind of detachment, noting: tall, gangly, remote, prone to thrips. As the child followed her mother on her rounds, she could not help but notice that every other rose in the garden was lavished with attention: water, light, food, deer repellent, insecticidal soap, compost—but not the Queen.

  The rose is the most precious of all flowers, the mother said, for out from its stem of thorns blossoms the sacred heart where the red cross of Mary’s son is forming.

  The mother remembered now the men who carried heavily thorned roses into battle, where they perished.

  But what about the Queen? the child asked. Where is her food? Where is her compost? Why do you pay attention to everything but her? Even the Monkshood you have doted on, the child says. Why the Monkshood?

  Because it is a living thing, it must be revered as such.

  Yes, but what about the Queen then?

  To tell you the truth, the mother says, I am a little ambivalent about the Queen. I have some ambivalence.

  What’s ambivalence?

  It means you’re not sure, the mother says.

  Maybe that’s why the bat came, the child said. Your ambivalence about the Queen.

  The mother looked at her curiously.

  How can you not be sure about a rose?

  YOU GAVE ME too much medicine tonight, the child says.

  No, I did not.

  You did, you already gave me two teaspoons and now you have given me two teaspoons more. Before I know it, you will be forgetting the two plus two and giving me two teaspoons more. You must hear the ambulance going by. You must see the men in white coming now to the door. They are here to rescue me.

  No.

  You must have some ambivalence, the child said.

  I SAW A bobcat in the grass. Or a mountain lion—some big cat, the mother sang. And a giant Blue Heron!

  You did not, the child said. Without me? Not without me!

  I did.

  Remember the lake, and the Venetian explorer?

  I do.

  And the beautiful blue tether made of silk?

  I do.

  WHEN THE MOTHER gets dizzy and has to go upstairs for a minute to lie down, what is left is this: on one side of the kitchen door is the child alone finishing her papier-mâché vase, and on the other side of the door is the head of a squirrel on the welcome mat, the only part of the squirrel’s poor anatomy Bunny Boy has left behind. There was a ferocity in ordinary things and suffering around every bend. The mother closed her eyes and saw its gray head blooming, crimson roses streaming from the neck.

  The whirling mother upstairs recalls the green rain of frogs last spring. At night the night creatures had come and eaten off their legs, leaving their torsos for the mother to find the next morning, their hearts still beating.

  But today while the mother is dizzy, the child does not know about the squirrel just feet away on the other side of the door, or the rain of frogs, or the real reason for the mother’s vertigo—her beautiful vase is ready—and when she sees the mother descend the stairs restored, anything in the world can be weathered.

  THE VIRGIN APPEARS to the mother and gestures for her to come into the forest, a place the mother loves to see the Lenten Rose.

  The mother shakes her head no. I’m not ready yet.

  The Virgin smiles and around her a little fawn prances.

  Above all, the mother wanted more time. She sat at the edge of the dark wood and wept.

  EVERYONE IN THE Valley knew that the man drank, and that sometimes his eldest daughter would come by to check on him, but lately she came less and less. During moments of enthusiasm, the man had kept a vegetable garden, but the garden now had gone to gloom, and if you did not know there had been one, it would have been better, because then it would just seem like another sad patch of land and not a garden that had been taken back while the man sat inside. It was particularly sad to think of that: the time when the man still had enthusiasms. The child felt that she understood something about the man who lived in the closed house and could never come out. The child heard that he liked to drink, and she left bottles of water by his door in case he got thirsty.

  People in the Valley sometimes talked about him, but it was usually in the past tense, as if he were already dead. The man had been a baby in that house, and he had not begun drinking yet, and he was not already dead. Someone had cared for that baby. The Valley must have been even more beautiful then—so expansive, so wide, so pure, so many places to roam. Someone lifted the baby toward the impossibly blue sky. He had been taken out for fresh air and sunshine and walks. Once someone had taken a photograph. It showed a woman pushing a black perambulator, and inside it, protected from the sun, was the man.

  A THREE-RING CIRCUS of sorts had made its way to the Spiegelpalais, and the child watched as it slowly assembled. Hildy the German Juggle Boy, Tavis the Silent Clown, and Rosalie’s Racing Pigs—they were all there. Even the Dock Diving Dogs featuring Hanson’s Hounds. In one corner a Mad Science Millennial Chess Match had been set up, and the child, who excelled at chess, sat down. And in the rafters above their heads, already caught in the kleig lights, the Flying Child.

  THE CHILDREN FROM the city had come for the day, and the neighbors invited the mother and child over as well. The mother and child brought them a bouquet of roses from the cutting garden.

  The children from the city had roller blades and wheelies and cell phones and did the newest dances, and they taught the child all the moves. They also talked about skyscrapers and anything else the child wanted to talk about. The child liked the oldest boy most, and his rollerblading, break dancing, and skyscraping stories. The day was hot and the children swam and played, and they liked each other very much. In the garden, the children from the city were astonished by all the heart-shaped leaves there were to find. When it was late in the day the children went into the barn, but the mother forbade the child to go up to the barn’s loft with the oldest boy and his sisters.

  She was unequivocal about it. There were days like that where the mother possessed such a terrible incandescence that the child had to look away from her or be burned up.

  Under no circumstances may you go into that barn’s loft, the mother had said, and the child thought to herself: bat face, fish emulsion, vapor—for vapor is what the mother was, everyone could see, and what the mother fought so hard against being.

  Why must she be so unfair? the child wondered. Shouldn’t she be allowed to do what other children did? Shouldn’t—but before she could complete her thought, the boy, twelve, began to fall, and continued to fall in what seemed slow motio
n, through the barn, having stepped on a rotted floorboard.

  Next a helicopter came and took the boy away creating its own weather: heat, wind. After that, back at home, every box started to look like a receptacle to hold a falling thing: the dollhouse with the roof that could be taken off, and the piano bench that opened, and the rain barrel.

  Certain things, once seen, cannot be unseen. She felt the world had changed and it would not change back.

  Now she cannot stop seeing boys falling from the rafters. She lines the floors with shoeboxes. Children are falling from the sky all the time. She lines the earth with anything soft. She looks out the window and sees the mother is in the garden. Cut flowers were the most beautiful, the mother said, because they live such a brief time.

  THE MOTHER’S GARDEN unnerved some who saw it because it seemed to exist always on the edge of disarray, barely contained, at the place where any moment, it might be reclaimed. There was something exciting about this cusp to the mother, that place in the day where at any moment the garden might return to chaos, but did not. It held its own. Looking down from the second-floor window, she could see its architecture clearly: the boxwood, the dwarf spruce, the pergola, the birdbath, the circle of stones.

  She loved what people thought to do with the small plots of earth allotted them. She was making a pattern, a design, a dwelling, a haven for their small time on earth—that much was clear from her perch.

  Even though the child was holding a stone, she easily rose up two flights to the window where the mother looked out. The mother waved, and on the Aging Stage, she cast herself centuries into the future where she could see that a few rocks they had arranged in a circle remained. Another mother and child had unearthed them, and for a moment, they had intimations of a garden perhaps that once existed, and they reached back toward something ineffable but real, holding the rock the mother and child had once chosen for the circle and caressed.

  Further even into the future, when the circle is taken apart and the rocks have scattered and gone back to the forest, something still of the mother and child has been left behind. For a moment it stayed in her, the full weight of the feeling, of what survives, a momentous feeling, a rock in the forest that someone had once held; it was a prolonged moment, momentous really, and then it was gone, and the mother resumed her day. Only figments of the feeling remained in her after that—flight, design.

  Something about this comforted the mother. All effort passes, everything of us and who we were disappears as though we never existed, falling back into obscurity. What remained was perhaps an intimation.

  The universe is drifting away from, not toward, the center of gravity, though no one knows why. It was all right. We will not understand it, not in a thousand human lifetimes.

  THE CLOCK ARRIVED from the North Pole and the next day the mother swooned in the Children’s Garden, and for minutes in a row she could not be revived. This terrified the child who stared at her mother even after she had gotten up and was talking again. She had left an indent of her body in the Lamb’s Ear. Though the wooden box the clock had come in was shaped like a coffin, it was too narrow and too long to hold the mother comfortably. Still, it might have worked in a pinch. It lay now in the clover with her name and address on it.

  THE BOYS WERE up at the top of the hill throwing Frisbees in the last moments before they were called back to the skirmish. When summoned, the boys rolled down the hill like little rag dolls. They tumbled into the vale where the mother and child tried to help them up. They had little smiles on their faces and they said they were just having a Tumble Down, and that they would get up soon, but not yet.

  THE CAT LAY in the catmint and the bee was in the beehive and all seemed right with the world. The schoolchildren were in school, the painter was painting, the farmer was farming, and the drinker was pouring a drink. Only the lover, returned from the war, and renowned in the Valley for his love, was trying to find his way beyond it, because as his beloved had told him it was necessary for her to leave, and she would not be coming back.

  The lover went out to the garden. He knelt down and it looked as if he might be praying or staking the tomatoes. There was a secret sadness in all things that he would never understand.

  The mother walked in the Sterling Forest, recalling the story. It was a long walk, and ephemerals covered the forest floor. The next September, the beloved would be trapped in the burning tower, and she would not make it out.

  A fox crossed the mother’s path. The bee burrowed deeply into the heart of the rose.

  10

  dream

  SLEEP WAS A biological imperative for every creature on earth. It was essential because it did something the awake brain could not do. The mother knew as she watched the sleeping child that the brain was taking what it learned during the day and placing it into more efficient storage regions. To consolidate all the memories, certain genes up-regulated during sleep and got activated. Memory tracks were laid out, categorized, distilled. The brain synthesized some memories during the day, but these memories were enclosed and concretized in the night. Synaptic plasticity strengthened connections, and it was a beautiful thing. In the night, new inferences were drawn leading to insights the next day.

  The limbic system, she knew, amps up during REM sleep, and the brain’s emotion streams fear while rational thought is dormant. The secondary Visual Cortex, striving to decipher, ricochets through it. In REM sleep, a small region in the brain that paralyzes the body is alive. Immobile, the streaming video of one’s life passes by.

  The mother loved the drama of the night. Had she not had the child, she might have been a Scholar of Sleep, she thinks, a Professor of Sleep, or at the least, a Sleep Advocate, tirelessly working for the Rights of Sleepers in the hospital’s deepest recesses.

  In the night, the sleepers might be closely monitored and observed, and experiments might be conducted. The object would be to scramble, detoxify, and discard old fears, so that there was room for new ones. Circadian rhythms could be measured by testing saliva. Open your mouth; sleep researchers might serenely take a swab.

  Dreams take the day and cannibalize it, using real life, such as it is, for props and spare parts, defanging fear—making it stupid, useless, harmless. Close your eyes, says the mother to the child. Everything was changing. Sleep was the ingredient for change.

  Melatonin, as a child grows, makes it harder and harder to go to sleep early—teenagers need as much sleep as toddlers but cannot begin their descent until midnight. It’s science, the mother says.

  The child loves the idea of it—that she one day might be the one to keep the night vigil, while her mother sleeps.

  VOCABULARY IS SYNTHESIZED by the hippocampus early in the night. During slow-wave sleep, the motor skills of enunciation are processed. In slow-wave sleep, we practice our French. Auditory memories are encoded across all stages: the song the bird sang, the music from chorus, the piano lesson, the mother’s voice.

  Memories that are emotionally laden get processed during REM sleep: the mother upstairs dizzy, for instance, or the way more and more, the Grandmother from the North Pole seems to tip away from them on her axis.

  The more you learn during the day, the more you need to sleep at night, and earlier and earlier the mother and the child grew sleepy.

  A WOLF DRESSED in a tuxedo with the moon under its feet, and on its head a crown of twelve stars, rose in the sky. What to make of this wolf in a prom outfit surrounded by a halo of stars? the mother wondered. Emblazoned behind him was Jupiter, larger than it had ever been, closer to the earth than in all recorded time.

  Next a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and diadems appeared in the west. Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hauled them down to the earth.

  And after that in the east: Mr. Min. How are you doing, Mr. Min? He waves to her and motions to the box he holds.

  What an unusual night, the mother thought to herself.

  When the visitations were over, she sloshed
through stars, back to the house, and wiped the florescence off her feet before entering the room where the child was sound asleep, dreaming. The wolf stood over the child’s bed. Sleep spindles and the presence of Complex K told the mother that the child would not be waking for some time yet.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Mr. Min appeared again, tapping the mother on the shoulder. What is it, Mr. Min? He asks if he might take the bats that are asleep beneath the mother’s shutters. Be my guest, the mother says. Curled into small balls, he plunks them in a bowl; there must have been a hundred. My son, he says, he loves them very much.

  Come, Mr. Min, and pluck the sleeping bats, the mother whispered. Come and pluck my sleeping bats from underneath the shutters for your son. He smiles and is gone. Gone to pluck the bats and plunk them in a bowl. His son, he loves them very much.

  AS THEIR FRIEND down the road grew smaller inside the dark house, the hole outside grew larger and deeper. Mute boulders had been excavated and served as a reminder of the severity and silence at the heart of the earth. Just when it seemed the great cavity could not get any bigger or deeper, it was lined with concrete. At the time the concrete was still wet, the man inside could still walk a short distance, and he went out into the day with his wife and infant son so that they could press their hands into the smooth wet surface and make a permanent imprint of their lives together. A little while after that, the hole lined with cement, along with the family’s hands, was filled with water.

  The man’s wife dips the baby again and again into the blue, and the baby squeals with delight. Often the priest comes now to talk with the man, and afterwards the priest walks out to the cement cavity filled with water where the woman and baby are waiting.