Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (19 page)

That became Miss Emma Bishop’s project: to find another body for her bones, bones she could at first scarcely see, but which now were ridgy, forming
W
’s,
Y
’s, and
Z
’s, their presence more than circumstantial, their presence more than letters lying overleaf.

She would be buried in a book. Mourners would peer past its open cover. A made-up lady wipes her dark tears on a tissue. Feel the pressure of her foot at the edge of the page? see her inhale her sorrow slowly as though smelling mint? she never looked better, someone will say. heaven sent

Denial was her duty, and she did it, her duty; she denied herself; she refused numbering, refused funds, refused greeting, refused hugs, rejected cards of printed feeling; fasted till the drapes diaphanated and furniture could no longer sit a spell; said, “I shall not draw my next breath.” Glass held more heaviness than she had. Not the energy of steam, nor the wet of mist, but indeed like that cloud we float against our specs when we breathe to clean them. Yet she was all care, all

Because now, because she was free of phlegm, air, spit, tears, wax, sweat, snot, blood, chewed food, the least drool of excrement—the tip of the sugar spoon had been her last bite—her whole self saw, the skin saw, the thin gray yellow hair saw, even the deep teeth were tuned, her pores received, out came in, the light left bruises where it landed, the edge of the stool as she sat cut limb from thigh the way a wire passes the flesh of cheese, and pain passed through her too like a cry through a rented room. Because she had denied herself everything—life itself—life knew she was a friend, came near, brought all

Ask nothing. you shall receive

She was looking at the circular pull on the window’s shade, her skin was drawn, her fingers felt for it, her nose knew, and it was that round hole the world used to trickle into her. With Emma down to her
E
, there was plenty of room, and then she, she would, she would slip into a sentence, her snoot full of substance, not just smell, not just of coffee she hadn’t cupped in a coon’s age, or fresh bread from back when, or a bit of peony from beside a broken walk, but how fingers felt when they pushed a needle through a hoop of cloth, or the roughness of
unspread toast, between her toes a memory of being a kid, the summer’s sunshine, hearty as a hug, flecks of red paper blown from a firecracker to petal a bush, the voices of boys, water running from a hose, laughter, taunts, fear they would show her something she didn’t want to know

red rows the clapboard shells her reading eye slid swallowing solemnly as if she’d just been told of someone’s love, not for her, no, for the sea nearby in Bishop’s poems, a slow wash of words on a beach hissing like fat in the flame, brief flare-up before final smoke

Aunts trying hats on, paper plates in their laps—no—dog next door barking in his sleep, how about that? the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes I spell against my will with two
l
’s, how about that? her ear on the pull, the thread-wrapped ring, swell of sea along sunsetted shore, Maine chance, I’m now the longing that will fill that line when I lie down inside it, me, my eye, my nips, fingertips, yes, ribs and lips alined with Moore’s, whose hats, maybe, were meant in the poem, the poem, the poem about the anandrous aunts, exemplary and slim, avernal eyed, shaded by brim, caring for their cares, protecting their skin. a cloud

Now I am the ex of ist I am the am I always should have been. Now I am this hiss this thin this brisk I’m rich in vital signs, in lists I in my time could not make, the life I missed because I was afraid, the hawk’s eye, owl’s too, weasel’s greed, the banter of boys, bang, bleeding paper blown into a bush, now I urinate like them against the world’s spray-canned designs and feel relief know pride puff up for their circle jerk fellowship and spit on spiders step on ants pull apart peel back brag grope, since it is easy for me now, like sailing boats, making pies, my hair hearing through the ring the rumble of coastal water, rock torn, far from any Iowa window, now I am an ab, a dis, pre’s fix, hop’s line.

Out there by the bare yard the woodshed stood in a saucer of sun where she once went to practice screaming her cries and the light like two cyclists passing on a narrow road, the light coming in through cracks between the shed’s warped boards, the ax she wouldn’t handle, its blade buried in an ash tree’s stump the shed had been built around so the stump would still be of service though its tree had had to come down, dad said, it would have a life like an anvil or a butcher’s block because as long as you had a use you were alive, birds flew at the first blow, consequently not to cry that the tree’d been cut, groaning when it fell its long fall, limbs of leaves brushing limbs of leaves as though driven by a wind, with plenty of twig crackle, too, like a sparky fire, the heavy trunk crashing through its own bones to groan against the ground, scattering nests of birds and squirrels, but now she was screamed out, thinned of that, or the thought of the noble the slow the patiently wrought, how the tree converted dirt into aspiration, the beautiful brought down, branches lofty now low and broken, the nests of birds and squirrels thrown as you’d throw a small cap, its dispelled shade like soil still, at toppled tiptop a worm’s web resembling a scrap of cloud, it should have been allowed to die in the sky its standing death, she’d read whatever there is of love let it be obeyed, well, a fist of twigs and leaves and birdspit rolled away, the leaves of the tree shaking a bit yet, and the web

whisperating

what was left

A fat cloud, white as a pillow of steam, hung above the tree, motionless, as if drawn, as if all wind were gone, the earth still, entirely of stone, while the tree alone fell, after the last blow had been withdrawn, and the weeds which had tried and failed to be a lawn waited their bruise.

The house, like herself, was nowhere now. It was the reason why she fled facts when she came upon them, words like
“Worcester, Massachusetts,” dates like “February, 1918.” Em had decided not to seek her fate but to await it. Still, suppose a line like that came to claim her. It was a risk.

I have lost this, lost that, am I not an expert at it? I lost more than love. I lost even its glimpse. Treefall. Branchcrash. That’s all. Gave. Gave. Gave away. Watched while they took the world asunder. Now even my all is smal. So I am ready. Not I hope the brown enormous odor … rather a calm cloud, up the beach a slowing run of water

wait

They were women. They were poets. But Miss Bishop probably knew a man or two, had him inner, while Miss Moore drew another pair of bloomers on. Hardly a match. Miss Bishop smoked, drank, wheezed, stood in the surf, barefooted about, fished. Miss Moore hunted for odd words. Exercised her fancy at the track. My father would stare at my bony body. Shake his head sadly. Nothing there to raise a dick. I’d be bare. Stand there. Bedsided. Scared. Oh yes mortified. Ashamed. All my blood in two lines below my eyes. Streaked with rose like twilit clouds. I’d stand. Before the great glass. It would be to see as he saw the then smooth skin, rose lit, cheek to lay a cheek against, smooth to smooth I suppose, or wipe a weeping eye.

They were women. They were poets. But Miss Bishop lusted after love. Miss Moore cooled like a pie on a sill. Hardly a match. Not my wish to be Elizabeth Bishop. Not for me, either, to be Miss Moore. Yet alike as a pod houses its peas.

Unfit for fooling around. Like those Emmas before me, I read of love in the light of a half-life, and the shadow of its absent half gives depth to the page. My made-up romances are probably better, probably worse than reality. I am a fire at which my
swain warms his hands. I am a fire quenched by a shower of scorn. Tenderness and longing alternate with cruelty and aversion. I study how to endure monsoons of driving snow.

Let’s see how you’re coming along. I’d have to slip out of my dress. Why are you wearing a bra? what’s there to bra about. After he left I’d stand in the cold puddle of my clothes, step to the mirror to see for himself myself and my vaginal lips clasped like devout hands, praying to God to let me die before another day.

There was nothing to see, he said, so why did he inspect me as if I were going to receive a seal from the FDA? Elizabeth Bishop’s father died of Bright’s disease when she was still a child, and her mother went mad in Elizabeth’s teens. My mother took her sturdy time dying. The day she died in her bed in this house, she had washed the windows of her room, though she could scarcely stand, and fluttered the curtains with arms weak with disease. Bustling about like a bee but without a buzz. Keeping out of reach, I now know. Wiping mirrors free from any image. Staying away by pretending to care and tend and tidy and clean and sweep and mend and scour and polish. Married to a gangplank of a guy. She scarcely spoke to me. I think she was ashamed of the way she let him make me live.

I learned to read on the sly. I failed my grades, though in this dinky town you were advanced so your puberty would not contaminate the kiddies. Despite the fact that I hadn’t any puberty, my father said. But I read on the sly the way some kids smoked or stroked one another through their clothes. I read in fear of interruption. So I learned to read fast. I also read mostly first verses, first chapters, and careened through the rest, since my ear, when it turned to catch a distant tread, swung my eyes away with my brow toward the sound.

The ash came down but I never believed why. The shed was built around the stump to become an altar where my father
chopped firewood or severed chickens from their heads. Slowly the stump was crisscrossed with cuts, darkened by layers of absorbed blood, and covered with milling crowds of tiny tiny ants. Traditionally, kids went to the woodshed for a whaling. Although once upon a time I stood still as a stick by the edge of my tot-wide bed, I now went to the shed to get undressed under my father’s disappointed eye. Staring at hairs. And had he said something lewd, had he laid a hand, had he bent to breathe upon my chest, had his dick distended his pants, his point would have been disproved. I’d have elicited some interest.

He watched me grow like a gardener follows the fortunes of his plants, and what he wanted was normalcy. I dimly remember, when a child, how my father would hold me in his lap and examine my teeth. Something coming in there. He would push his finger down upon the spot. This tooth is loose, he’d say, with some semblance of pleasure, wiggling it painfully back and forth. Well, he was a farmer. And I was crop. Why not?

Getting a man was the great thing. My mother had got a man and what had that got her? Knocked up. With me. That’s what. Maybe my father hoped he’d see, when I stripped, a penis lifting its shy self from the slot between my legs. Flat as I was, he may have thought there was a chance. There was no chance either way.

I might have been a boy in his balls but I was dismantled in her womb.

Emma Bishop let the light on the table tell her about the weather. Sadness was the subject. Disappointment. Regret. The recipe? a bit of emptiness like that of winter fields when the fierce wind washes them; acceptance, yes, some of that, the handshake of a stranger; resignation, for what can the field do
about the wind but freeze? what can the hand do but grasp the offered other? and a soupçon of apprehension, like clods of earth huddled against the frost they know will knock someday, or an envelope’s vexation about the letter it will enclose; then a weariness of the slow and gentle variety, a touch of ennui, an appreciation of repetition. This sadness had the quality of a bouquet garni discreetly added to the sauce; it offered a whiff of melancholy, subtle, just enough to make the petals of plants curl at their tips. A day of drizzle in the depths of November. Not definite enough yet? All right: the quiet hour after … the nearly negligible remains … an almost echo.

The theme: leave-taking. Bidding adieu to a familiar misery. So … long …… The house was empty. The light was late, pale, even wan. The table lay in the light as though dampened by a rag. Emma Bishop saw her fingers fold up like a fan. Her lifelike light. So … long …… Nothing stays the ancients said but the cloud stood above the treetop while it toppled, still as painted, her father murdering her tree’s long limbs before they had loosened their leaves. Why then should anything be loved if it was going to be so brutally taken away? He had seen the tree
be
in Emma Bishop’s bright eyes. Beneath it, weeds where she rested and read. When she no longer had to hide her occupation.

It had been of some interest to Emma that her father had ceased his inspection of her bared body after her mother died. As if … As if it had been to distress her mother he undressed her, had walked around her like a car he might buy, had a list of factors to check for flight safety, to justify his then saying: see what you’ve given me, what you’ve grown, you are a patch of arid earth, your child is spindly, awkward, chestless, wedge-chinned and large-eyed, stooped too, not as though gangly but as though old.

She had been a ten-month kid, she’d been told. Maybe during that tenth month her weenie had withered.

Over time Emma began to perceive her parental world for what it was. Her father farmed by tearing at the earth, seeding soy with steel sticks, interested in neither the soil nor the beans, but only in what the beans would bring; interested in the sky for the same reason, in the wind, in rain. The creek overflowed once and flooded a meadow. He saw only a flooded field. He didn’t see a sheet of bright light lying like a banner over the ploughed ground. And the light darkened where the lumps neared the surface. Emma watched the wind roughen the water so that sometimes the top of a clod would emerge like new land. Crusoe in England? in Iowa. She imagined.

And her mother scrubbed their clothes to remove the dirt, not to restore the garments; and wiped up dust to displace it, not to release the reflection in the mirror or the view through the glass or the gleam from the wood. She pinned wash to its line as if she were handcuffing a criminal. Emma saw dislike run down her arms like sweat and transform the task. She didn’t say to the pan, “Let me free you from this grease.” She said to the grease, “Get thee away, you snot of Satan.”