 that I, too, have slept always and only with one man, who navels artfully from one lover's \xxIy w another, like a cir~ cus performer, a scum man, wondering if I will recognize him in each of his virile costumesr How many lovers' bodies can carry one man? Shall 1tell her yes, I think it's sad, terribly sad, or shall 1tell her that the love-making I have known with my traveling-circus lover is not joy, exactly, or nOt joy at all, but only its perfect inverse? And what will she tell me about the life I will not lead, the life of a daughter who has become a mother, with her daughters waiting for her across the dis~ tance? Time is shorr. Traffic is heavy. The Village is buzzing with light and in an instant, Jessie and I must exchange lives. 1 know it's pos~ sible to do this, as the physicists confirm. We have only to become two particles, two complementary natures acknowledging one another from opposite ends of the universe, each sending out to the other all the data of our existence in small losses of heat that navel at the speed of light, in a mutual flash of energy, in the absence of language or of dreams, like a fluttering of eyelids, or of hearts, and then there will be silence and calm. It's as simple as two hands, reaching across open space. Jessie reminds me that our mothers cried and then laughed aloud when their own mother died, how they began w tell us kids a swry that seemed to fall out of nowhere. Their voices had changed as they told it, as they wssed the story back and forth between them like something light and alive, although they were dressed for their mother's funeral. There was a dance party on the shore of Lake Ontario, they be~ gan, where their mother---our grandmother-had taken them one summer to meet boys of a marrying age. There was a hotel, with a wide verandah, where the young men and women gathered at dusk, and lights shone out across the lake, and five musicians played on the lawn. My mother was sixteen, a slender beauty, and her sister was ten, rough and funny. "I wore a gorgeous dress that night," my mother exclaimed, touching her funeral dress absently, and my aunt said, "Oh, that dress, with that sequin snake on the front," and my mother said, "What a gorgeous dress, the sequins picked up the moonlight and I glittered! My dance card was filled, but I snuck down to the lake with that one boy and we sailed off in the canoe till we could hardly hear the music anymore, and we just drifted out there on the water while couples came down to the shore and danced. The moonlight was reflected on the lake. And that boy, he recited a poem about the 134
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moon. I'll never forget the waltz they were playing that night." ''And I never told Mother where you were," my aUn[ said "You were a good scout." "Yes, I was, but," she added, "1 really couldn't stand being left
behind." They stood watching one another in silence for the last time in their mother's house, and then moved gracefully together in their black dresses, on their way to their places in the cemetery. This is how r remember my mother: not the way she looked co me when I watched her perishing in a hospital gown like her mother before her, but the way she remembered herself in the momcll[ I believe must have been her greatest joy, as a girl drifting across a lake in the moonlight. And when she grew older, she may have seen herself the way that her sister saw her that night from far across the waterunreachable, growing smaller, less and less distinct in the darkness until she was invisible, dissolved into the night air. In her last years, when she slept (and like me she slept fitfully on most nights, and on. some nights like the dead) she dreamed of a dark water beckoning her, of a young lover whispering verses about the moon, and she woke knowing she was truly gone. "She was a creative soul," people have said of my mother, a poet disappointed by a prosaic life. And what she left behind, my inheritance, seemed so small it went undetected for years in a cardboard box beneath her soft sweaters-just a short letter she composed when she was forcy, twenty years before her death. Goodbye, my poems, my loves, she wrote. I can't su.slllin you anymore. I don't know you anymore, or
myself Perhaps if I grow old, I will remember you, the souna of words I once loved. Sequin. Moonlight. Waltz. Sometimes at night, instead of sleeping, I make long lists of the things that I believe will bring me joy as I stand apart from the moments I've been living. I want to walk along the Grecian shore of the Mediterranean Sea, my feet burning in the sand; I want to swim with a school of dolphins and look into one keen eye that sees beyond my Ixxly into my permanent spirit; I want to hear the poetry of Rilke read to me in the German, until by the last poem I can speak the language in my sleep; I want to stand in the Sistine Chapel and look up at the hands of God and Adam, reaching for each other, and to see the divine spark of joy as it was offered by God to the first man. And where was the woman? Waiting patiently in the darkness for her own first spark of life? These things I long for could still happen, but what Summer ZCQ4
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Wolff
happens first is that I leave Jessie and the city and return to my place upstate, and Jessie leaves me and returns to her place in Oregon, and no, we do not know when we will see one another again, although we have stcxxl hugging on a street corner, feeling our small losses of heat in the embrace. As she departs I call after her, "Do you think our mothers are watching us?" "We're here," jessie says, turning gracefully and raising her hand. "That's what matters now."
Back upstate, I swing my duffel bag over my shoulder as I walk the dirt road toward my home. I see my lover beckoning to me from the high open window of the barn he has been building. He has completed the outside structure, a solid design of simple lines and repeated patterns in a European style, and now he is at work on the loft, a smaller space with only one window where he is perched and grinning boyishly. He looks five years younger than when I left. "Hey!" he calls and waves to me, and points to a wobbly ladder he has propped against the wall. "Come on up!" I hesitate for a moment, doubting the ladder, doubting him, doubting myself, suspended between what looks easy and what looks difficult, wondering if I remember how to c1imb---and then, one, two, three, and up, and I'm sitting perched with him on a single jouncing ooard he has stretched across the open space that will become a solid loft floor. "Wow," he exclaims, "I didn't expect you to do that! That's not like you!" I shrug and look out at the shadowed valley and know I am not who he thinks I am. Time is not terminal. And joy is not an illness. And my body and Jessie's are the solid life made of the dust that was a star, and these bodies have circled the sun forty times. And five million years agoa mathematical thought-two bipeds walked across a rain swept sand, and left their footprints behind, one set moving in a straight path, the other wandering to the left, as though lost. This, I think, must have been the woman, wondering if some other way, lit by the Pleiades rising in the eastern horizon, might not have been the wiser path as the sand keeps sifting beneath her feet. But she returns, resumes her walking, and the man continues singing, pretending he has not noticed her straying off like that, or perhaps not even noticing at all that she went looking for herself. And again and again her lost self sweats and prays and dreams itself into being through words shaped by the senses, words sent as a thread, a lifeline, to what has been and ended, words 1J6
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J<ry
the body whispers, and which I translate now, listening sage of my puttering heart.
to
the
mes~
Lilac. Wind. Hayloft. Lake. Mo,her. And what is passed down from woman CO woman through the years in the guise of gloves and garters and prayer books and foot~ prints and poems is only this, the essemial self, moments of remem~ bered joy that make it possible to live. There is my mother drifting away across the lake, where nQ[hing bue moonlight and music can reach her. And there is my grandmother, at the side of the road, holding her candle and waiting to learn.
Now. This. Always. My mother was not my mother. She was water. My grandmother was not my grandmother. She was a flame. And I am a swallow, startled by light.
Summer 2004
137
Faith S. Holsaert -Third Place StoryFreedom Rider, circa 1993 My son Robbie phones me