Ashley’s gaze drifted from Joey to the improbable blue water in the pool, the green trees nearby, borders of vivid flowers . . . She felt as if reality had undergone a shift of a magnitude she could not yet grasp. A sharp memory rose in her mind of her grandfather releasing a little fish and putting it back in a lake. “Too small,” he had said. “Not a keeper.”
Mockingbird
MY SISTER AND I ARE ON THE PORCH at our grandfather’s house. Beyond the expanse of lawn before me, the land slopes down to a lake, ringed by cattails and some brambles. It is a small lake, hardly more than a pond, blue in the sunlight, with silver streaks where the water is riffled by a breeze. On the far side is the Holt farm. Closer, butterflies and bees are giddy from nectar and pollen, hummingbirds hum. I don’t know the names of the flowers in bloom: yellows, reds, pink, too many, too untidy, a mass of blooming plants; white clover dots the lawn, birds call from the nearby oak tree. The countryside is not silent, never quiet.
I am in a low-slung chair, my sister on the swing, lazily moving back and forth. There is a squeak with each forward motion. Amidst the random music of birds and bees, the wind in leaves, the squeak is as regular, as monotonous and predictable as a metronome. I wish it would stop. I have things to think about, decisions to make, and the regularity of the squeak interferes.
My mind is a sieve. I fill it with words, with images, pages to be written, great thoughts to ponder, none of them related to the present dilemma. When I wander through the maze of myself, look again, the miracles of my mind are aswirl, as if caught in a tidepool of receding water, forever gone.
I open my dissertation, still in manuscript, and see the words as if written by another, alien to me. I nod as phrases summon concepts, the way one nods at strangers who take on familiarity when they draw near, but they are not my words; I have no claim on them. When my gaze moves on, the passed phrases leave a blank space.
Birds fill the empty space and twitter and chirp and cry raucously. Random noise, like the noise in my head. When one approaches me, I close my eyes.
The mockingbird says, “Why do you close your eyes?”
--So you won’t pluck them out.--
“Why won’t you speak to me?”
--No one talks to birds.--
“Look at me just once.”
I don’t close my eyes tighter, but I think
tighter
and it’s the same thing.
Across the porch my sister murmurs, “Express, address, redress, compress, repress, suppress.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What God does with trivialities.”
“Impress?”
She gives me a pitying, or possibly scornful, look. I close my manuscript and put it aside, and she continues to swing gently with her book in her lap, murmuring in a voice too low now to be intelligible. Back and forth with the jarring squeak.
“What on earth are you doing?” Irritation, exasperation, frustration: I hear them all in my own voice.
“I’m catching butterflies. They are so beautiful.”
I walk across the porch to see what she has been reading; it is a dictionary. Just that. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
“Fluorescent blue, amber and scarlet, magenta, gold . . .”
“What are you talking about?”
“The words. The beautiful words, butterflies in my net.”
Her mind is a net that catches and holds them, and mine is a sieve that lets them escape.
We both love Bobby Holt, and have loved him since we were children. He looked at us with a yearning expression, first one then the other and, in apparent confusion, retreated. He loves us both. He has not married. If she catches him in her net, he will never be released again.
We were awed by our grandfather, who looked like a giant when we were young, visiting on his farm. When we returned home, I thought of him as big enough to hold both of us in the palm of his hand. By the time we were eleven, we had overgrown Grandmother, and I thought of her as doll-like. My sister put words to my thoughts: “He’s a roar and she’s a whisper. A tree and a twig. A willow and a wisp.”
When they came to our graduation from high school, I was shocked to see that Grandfather was not a giant, but just an ordinary tall man.
“The enchantment stopped at the farm gate,” my sister said.
One summer at the farm we watched smoke rise, and we smelled fire throughout the day and into the night when the sky glowed in the east as the fire moved over the dry forests. Grandfather glared at the flickering eastern lights, and he said it would not reach us; it would stop at the lake. When it moved around the lake and drew closer, he said it again: it would not reach us. The rain would come first. And it did. The fire burned Mr. Holt’s cornfield across the lake, but it did not reach us.
“With his will and his eyes he held the false sunrise at bay,” she whispered that night. “The enchantment is restored.”
When I recall him now, it is that image: he is facing the fire in the east, his face fierce, fists clenched, and he is a giant again.
We came this time for his funeral.
The first time I realized we were not exactly the same was when we were eight or nine. Always before, looking at her had been like gazing into the mirror, but that afternoon, looking at her I saw someone else. Someone strange and foreign. I ran to the bathroom and stared into the mirror; she followed. And there, gazing at us side by side in the glass, I saw again the difference in the reflections.
She was alien, a dreaminess in her eyes perhaps, an expression I could not copy. “What do you see?” I asked in a whisper.
“Me. You. Us. Yin and Yang, before and after, hard and soft, opaque and transparent, alike and different.”
I stopped her. She couldn’t explain what she saw any more than I could. “Good and bad?”
She shook her head. “Incomplete.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, and that was the real difference I discovered that summer. I often didn’t understand what she meant. I didn’t know what opaque meant, and when I tried to look it up, I couldn’t find it in the dictionary. Later I wondered who was transparent, who opaque.
Our mother treated us like dolls, her precious, animated dolls, she often said. She also talked about how difficult it had been to carry two, how difficult labor had been, how she had suffered, but of course none of that was our fault. We must not blame ourselves. She bought identical everything for us. When we turned twelve we stopped wearing our identical clothes. My sister wore pink, I chose blue; she dressed in jeans and a yellow shirt, I wore jeans and a green top. I cut my hair short, hers was still long. That was the only time I could remember being first. Mother said she was very disappointed in us.
Born thirty minutes before me, my sister was first to cut a tooth, first at potty training, first to talk. Always first. At twelve she declared that when she grew up she would marry Bobby Holt.
I could do math and science; I understood process, physical objects, the abstractions of algebra. She did poetry and art. She understood the labryinth of her psyche and could translate the impulses and images she found there. I have a dissertation not yet finished; she has published two slim books of poetry. I don’t understand her poetry or the illustrations she did in water color. Neither does she. I asked her once and she said the poem was what it was, what it meant was what it was. I didn’t understand that, either. She hasn’t read my dissertation. It has formulas and graphs.
I tried to explain quantum mechanics to her: probability, indeterminacy, chaos theory, photon as either wave or particle, right spin, left. Her eyes glazed and her expression became soft and blank. If one electron has a right spin, its matching electron has a left spin; change one, the other changes . . .
Destroy one; does the other languish and die? I didn’t know the answer, especially when applied to the macrocosm.
She lives in the sun, I in her shadow, yearning for sunlight.
She could not write a short story for our class. I told her if a, then certain things must follow, until you end with
x,y,z
. Cause and effect. She looked at me in wonder, then wrote something, and I wrote a story. Hers was considered brilliant, an incomprehensible prose poem, mine a story with a beginning, middle, end. Competent.
My dissertation will be competent. An old joke on campus: What do you call a medical student who finishes at the bottom of his class? Answer: Doctor. What do you call a physics major who finishes in the bottom of the class? Assistant.
Grandfather left the farm jointly to our father, my sister, and me. “We’ll sell it, of course,” Father said, and my sister shook her head. She wants to live here. “Talk to her,” he said to Mother, then included me in his indignant glare. “Talk sense into her.” The will of any two of us will prevail.
Mother never talked to us or with us. She sometimes talked at us. Father went back to his middle-management job in a high-tech firm in Seattle. He will return tomorrow for the weekend, and on Sunday he and Mother will both go back to Seattle. Now we are here, Mother, my sister, and I, and no one has mentioned selling the farm again. Mother is relying on me to talk sense into my sister. An impossible task.
It has taken me twenty years to learn what my sister grasped intuitively when we were children; we are both incomplete. When the ovum divided to form two fetuses, the brain cells were unfairly distributed. Matched particles, one spinning left, the other right. One brain housed in two separate skulls.
Across the lake I can see Bobby walking through meticulous rows of grapes. He is wearing shorts and a tank top. I wish he would look this way, but he is concentrating on the vines. Mr. Holt did not replant corn in his field after it burned. He tilled the ashes into the ground and the next time we came to the farm, there was a vineyard. Now Bobby owns the vineyard. It is very productive, pinot noir, much in demand.
We buried Grandfather on Monday, and as the casket was lowered into the ground next to Grandmother’s plot, Mother said in a tremulous voice, “Now they are together again at rest.”
That night I dreamed of him. He was a giant, walking away in his deliberate pace, hand in hand with a little girl. They were both nearly transparent. Not at rest, not yet.
I can’t bear to watch Bobby, and close my eyes, wishing I could block my swirl of thoughts. The mockingbird is back.
“What did you see in her sketch book?”
--Nothing.--
“Liar!”
She left it on the sofa last night. I looked. There was Grandfather, a giant, hand in hand with a little girl, walking away. The oak tree was visible through them. Has she gone from
a
to
x,y,z
, the way I did? I doubt it. She arrives without making the journey.
We will stay here together, I understand and accept finally. I’ll find the answer: if one particle is destroyed will the other wither and die? Who is transparent, who opaque?
The Late Night Train
I AM SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE in my parents’ house with an open book, but I am not even trying to read the words. It is too cold in my upstairs room to take refuge there. I never gave a thought to how small the house is when I was growing up in it. Four downstairs rooms, kitchen, dining room, living room, a short hall with the bath and staircase on one side and my Dad’s room on the other. And two unheated bedrooms upstairs. My sister and I shared one of them, my bother had the other. It seemed room enough then.
When I plugged in a space heater in my room, it threw a circuit breaker and I don’t dare try that again. There is no escape from a blaring television announcer, shouts, screams, cheers, commercials: a basketball game. Dad likes to watch basketball, and Mom is pretending an interest. They both have significant hearing loss and probably don’t realize how painfully loud the sound is. I should buy some ear plugs, I think, and wonder why I didn’t do it before. For upstairs, earmuffs would be more appropriate.
I am trying to resolve our dilemma, to all appearances one that has already solidified beyond resolution during the past seven months, since Dad’s stroke in June. Now he is in a wheelchair, and my mother and I are in straitjackets. Also, I am trying to decipher the curious message my own brain is sending me by way of a train whistle.
The first time I heard the train whistle in the night, I paid little attention, simply rolled over, pulled the cover up and returned to sleep. I gave it scant thought the following day. Just a fluke of a wind current carrying sound abnormally, I decided. I knew no train track was within miles, far too distant to hear the trains.
The next time I heard it, a week or two later, I sat straight up in bed. There was a line of light showing my door from the downstairs hall. It was three in the morning and it was very cold in my room. As children we left the door open for heat from below to drift in, but when Eleanor reached puberty, she kept it closed, because Roger’s room was right across the hall. Now I keep it closed at night. If Dad got up and saw a light upstairs, it would set him off in a rage.
The whistle sounded, drew closer, faded away. In the silence that followed, I heard Dad going to the bathroom. His wheelchair makes a squeal at random intervals. He claimed not to hear it, and my mother agreed. If he said black was white, she would nod.
I must have been dreaming, I thought uneasily, and translated a squeal to the sound of a train whistle. I knew it would be a long time before I could go back to sleep; I was too sore and it had been hours since a hot bath had relaxed my muscles enough to allow sleep in the first place. I had spent much of the day in the orchard, trying to rake up the fallen apples. Dad had insisted it had to be done.
By way of mild protest, I had said, “I thought Mr. Garry cleaned it up when he did his.”
“They had a falling out,” Mom said, even as Dad started one of his ranting ranges, cursing their neighbor Garry for being nosy and insolent, and me for being too lazy to earn my keep.
“Let it go,” I ordered myself in bed, wide awake, listening for the squeal on his return to bed, thinking of how my feelings for him had changed. What had been fear had become simple hatred.