Luminous Airplanes (14 page)
Much later I found a story that the Chinese
had
discovered America. It was in a book on the history of Santería in Central and South America, don’t ask me why I was reading about that. There was a chapter on the nature and purpose of chicken sacrifice, in which the author, one George F. Carter, discussed the difference between the European and the American chicken: the former has white feathers and white flesh, whereas the flesh and feathers of the latter are black. In this the American chicken resembles the chickens of, yes, China. “Since the Asiatic chickens are very different from the Mediterranean chickens and most of the traits that reappear in the flocks of the Amerindians are found in Asia, the obvious conclusion would be that the Amerind chickens were first introduced from Asia and not from the Mediterranean …” You can hear Mr. Carter growing excited here. “When one considers the total data available on the chicken in America, a conclusion for a Spanish or Portuguese first introduction of chickens into America is simply counter to all evidence. The Mediterraneans, as late as 1600, did not have, and did not even know of, the galaxy of chickens present in Amerind hands …” A galaxy of chickens spun through my imagination; white European hens shone against a black mass of Asian wing- and tail-feathers. Mr. Carter went on to observe that in China, too, the chicken was thought to have magical properties; the Chinese used to read the future by dripping chicken blood on parchment. I watched the blood spatter on the page, and what it showed me was not the future but the past: I was back at Nederland, telling Matt Bark that I’d found something really good.
I
gave the report on the Chinese;
I
had irrefutable, unsuspected proof that Eriksson and Columbus were latecomers; Mr. Savage nodded his approval, and when I sat down he declared that if we learned only one thing from American history, it should be that if you trusted yourself you would get there in the end. I won; I went out for pizza; I was not expelled. Of course none of this would ever have come to pass. Even if I had somehow stumbled on the Asian-chicken hypothesis back then, Matt Bark would have laughed it off. Chickens? Dumbfuck, who cares about chickens?—But … —You think chickens discovered America?—No, they were carried on ships …—What, to start a chicken farm? Chicken-shit! Chicken boy!
had
discovered America. It was in a book on the history of Santería in Central and South America, don’t ask me why I was reading about that. There was a chapter on the nature and purpose of chicken sacrifice, in which the author, one George F. Carter, discussed the difference between the European and the American chicken: the former has white feathers and white flesh, whereas the flesh and feathers of the latter are black. In this the American chicken resembles the chickens of, yes, China. “Since the Asiatic chickens are very different from the Mediterranean chickens and most of the traits that reappear in the flocks of the Amerindians are found in Asia, the obvious conclusion would be that the Amerind chickens were first introduced from Asia and not from the Mediterranean …” You can hear Mr. Carter growing excited here. “When one considers the total data available on the chicken in America, a conclusion for a Spanish or Portuguese first introduction of chickens into America is simply counter to all evidence. The Mediterraneans, as late as 1600, did not have, and did not even know of, the galaxy of chickens present in Amerind hands …” A galaxy of chickens spun through my imagination; white European hens shone against a black mass of Asian wing- and tail-feathers. Mr. Carter went on to observe that in China, too, the chicken was thought to have magical properties; the Chinese used to read the future by dripping chicken blood on parchment. I watched the blood spatter on the page, and what it showed me was not the future but the past: I was back at Nederland, telling Matt Bark that I’d found something really good.
I
gave the report on the Chinese;
I
had irrefutable, unsuspected proof that Eriksson and Columbus were latecomers; Mr. Savage nodded his approval, and when I sat down he declared that if we learned only one thing from American history, it should be that if you trusted yourself you would get there in the end. I won; I went out for pizza; I was not expelled. Of course none of this would ever have come to pass. Even if I had somehow stumbled on the Asian-chicken hypothesis back then, Matt Bark would have laughed it off. Chickens? Dumbfuck, who cares about chickens?—But … —You think chickens discovered America?—No, they were carried on ships …—What, to start a chicken farm? Chicken-shit! Chicken boy!
Even in my daydreams I lost the argument. But the chickens remain, all over Central and South America, black, silky-feathered Asiatic chickens that lay blue-shelled eggs. So, Matt, what do you make of those chickens?
On Monday morning it occurred to me that I hadn’t visited my grandfather’s grave. The cemetery was at the other end of Thebes, on a gentle slope that steepened farther ahead and became the flank of the ski hill. An iron fence surrounded it, though the railing was falling down in places and lengths of baling wire had been strung across the gaps. The Rowlands were buried at the back of the graveyard, in the shadow of a pair of maples that were slowly pushing up the earth with their roots, so that, if they continued, the oldest skeletons would eventually be exhumed. Jean Roland lay beside his wife, Anne, who had outlived him by a decade. Small gray stones, their heads flush with the earth, remembered children who had not survived. Their son Oliver and his wife Claudine, born a Gerer, kept a respectful distance. Not all the Rowlands come back to Thebes in the end—my great-great-uncle Othniel, for example, is buried at the foot of a cliff in New Mexico—but I used to wonder, if my mothers came back, what distance they would keep from my grandparents. I passed the white column erected by the citizens of Thebes to John Rowland, who had turned the failing Rowland Mill into the profitable Thebes Furniture Company, manufacturer of the three-legged “Thebes stool,” of which my grandfather had a few examples, and found the rough gray stone my grandfather had picked out when my grandmother died. Its shape was suggestive of a naturally occurring rock, as though the Rowlands, having reached the zenith of their humanity with John, were sinking back into the natural world. Mary Rowland, born Ashland, 1924–1990, and the inscription,
Beloved Wife
, which enraged my mothers. It was just like my grandfather, they said, to turn my grandmother into another of his possessions.
Beloved Wife
, which enraged my mothers. It was just like my grandfather, they said, to turn my grandmother into another of his possessions.
Oliver lay between Mary and his father, John. There was no stone for him yet, only a wooden marker, to which a sheet of paper in a plastic envelope had been stapled. Oliver Rowland, it said, 1922–2000, and the words,
May He Be Remembered,
which, as they were printed in twenty-four-point Helvetica on a piece of paper that had been warped by the rain, undermined the sincerity of this wish, even though there were fresh flowers on the grave, indicating that people still remembered him. Here he was. I put my hand on the bare earth. I tried to imagine my grandfather lying beneath my hand.
Body
, I told myself,
this is a body.
But all I could think was that I should have brought flowers, and that my knees were cold. I stood up and brushed dirt from my pants. I walked past the graves of people who had died fifty or sixty years ago, mill workers, probably, covered by last year’s leaves. Their children were not buried here, no one wanted to be buried in Thebes anymore, except the Rowlands and the other old families. The town must have shrunk almost to nothing, I thought, when the last of the mill people died and their children moved away. What a grim place it must have been when no one came to the lunch counter, when the meeting hall stood empty and the musicians stopped playing at Summerland. Left on its own, Thebes would have died too. It would have become a place like the ones you pass on Route 23B, settlements so small they no longer merit their own post offices or general stores, Main Streets with nothing on them but a garage or the offices of a Bible study association. Who would want to live in a gloomy town hemmed in by mountains, cut off from the rest of the world? It was only when Joe Regenzeit arrived, when he opened Snowbird and made the snow fall, that life flowed back toward Thebes in the form of weekend visitors from New York City, who liked what they saw and rented houses, caused antiques stores to open, demanded Chilean coffee, created, out of mud and rock and poverty, a branch of the TrustFirst Bank, the Kozy Korner and Kountry Kitchen, the organic grocery with its bins of glistening fall apples. Regenzeit had rescued Thebes; he fixed what my grandfather could not fix. No wonder Oliver hated him.
May He Be Remembered,
which, as they were printed in twenty-four-point Helvetica on a piece of paper that had been warped by the rain, undermined the sincerity of this wish, even though there were fresh flowers on the grave, indicating that people still remembered him. Here he was. I put my hand on the bare earth. I tried to imagine my grandfather lying beneath my hand.
Body
, I told myself,
this is a body.
But all I could think was that I should have brought flowers, and that my knees were cold. I stood up and brushed dirt from my pants. I walked past the graves of people who had died fifty or sixty years ago, mill workers, probably, covered by last year’s leaves. Their children were not buried here, no one wanted to be buried in Thebes anymore, except the Rowlands and the other old families. The town must have shrunk almost to nothing, I thought, when the last of the mill people died and their children moved away. What a grim place it must have been when no one came to the lunch counter, when the meeting hall stood empty and the musicians stopped playing at Summerland. Left on its own, Thebes would have died too. It would have become a place like the ones you pass on Route 23B, settlements so small they no longer merit their own post offices or general stores, Main Streets with nothing on them but a garage or the offices of a Bible study association. Who would want to live in a gloomy town hemmed in by mountains, cut off from the rest of the world? It was only when Joe Regenzeit arrived, when he opened Snowbird and made the snow fall, that life flowed back toward Thebes in the form of weekend visitors from New York City, who liked what they saw and rented houses, caused antiques stores to open, demanded Chilean coffee, created, out of mud and rock and poverty, a branch of the TrustFirst Bank, the Kozy Korner and Kountry Kitchen, the organic grocery with its bins of glistening fall apples. Regenzeit had rescued Thebes; he fixed what my grandfather could not fix. No wonder Oliver hated him.
I drove to the grocery and picked out a bouquet of white flowers, lilies, I hoped, from their small, expensive floral department. I took them to the cashier, who turned out to be the pretty girl I’d supplied with beer two days earlier. I asked if she’d had fun at the party.
“It was OK,” she said, mistrustfully.
I told her not to worry, I wasn’t going to report her. In fact, my friends had stood outside the same gas station when I was younger than she was, trying to get college students to buy us beer.
“I didn’t know you were from here,” she said. I could see from the change in her expression that she’d admitted me into her human race: I was no longer an anonymous beer-donating adult. I thanked her for the flowers and went out, whistling. A Subaru Outback pulled up as I was getting into my car, and Yesim got out. She was wearing a black parka and a pair of night-black sunglasses that hid half her face. She looked like a secret agent, or rather, like a person dressed in a secret agent costume, someone who was making no secret of her secretiveness. I sat in my car with the door open and my legs stuck out. I wanted Yesim to see me, but she came out of the store holding a cup of coffee in its brown paper sleeve and got into her car. I decided to follow her. She took Route 56 out of town, past the main entrance to Snowbird, and turned onto a service road. I turned too, wondering what I was doing, but not really wondering. The road climbed steeply, and Norman Mailer’s car began to rumble and thump, as though Mailer himself were in the engine compartment, duking it out with the forces of inertia and rust. The temperature gauge crept toward Hot and I had to slow down: fifteen miles an hour, ten. I came around a curve and saw the Outback ahead at a fork in the road. For a moment I imagined that Yesim had stopped for me to catch up, then she took the left branch and I thought she’d been moving all along. The road switchbacked through a pine forest, climbing what was, from the Theban point of view, the far side of Mount Espy, the side that looked north to the next ridge of the Catskills. A break in the trees offered a momentary panorama: the flatlands through which the Hudson ran, an almost invisible silver strand. There were people down there sitting on their porches, mowing their lawns, walking their dogs. They had never seemed so far away, and also, curiously, they had never seemed so happy, those invisible people in the valley, but I wouldn’t have changed places with any of them. I coaxed Norman Mailer’s car up the hill, toward Yesim, who was out of sight.
I found her at the summit of Mount Espy, standing near the shed that housed the machinery for one of Snowbird’s chair-lifts, her hair blowing in the chilly wind. We could see the whole valley from there, with Thebes tucked away at the end of it like a cluster of pale cells stuck to the wall of a dark-green womb.
“I wondered if it was you,” Yesim said. I couldn’t tell from her tone of voice whether or not she was pleased.
“I hope I didn’t frighten you,” I said.
“No,” Yesim said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not very frightening.”
“Oh, yeah? I frighten plenty of people. My neighbors in San Francisco think I’m a ghost.”
“Really?”
“At least, I think they do.” San Francisco wasn’t what I wanted to talk about, and I regretted having mentioned it.
Yesim turned away from me, and walked toward the shed.
“What happened on Saturday night?” I asked.
“It’s complicated. I tried to explain.”
“About Mark? It sounds like you’re having second thoughts about him.”
“Mark is only part of it.” Yesim took off her sunglasses, which were, in any case, unnecessary: purplish cumulus clouds were coming over the mountains from the east, their bottoms dark and unpromising. She touched her eyes with her fingertips. “Did I tell you I was in love with Professor X?” she said. “Not platonic love, not love from a distance. I washed her when she couldn’t move. I washed her stomach, between her legs. I fucked her with my hand.” She watched me to see what reaction this new word,
fucked
, would provoke.
fucked
, would provoke.
“OK,” I said, “but you don’t love her now.” I had never formed a mental image of Professor X, so Yesim’s words had little power to disturb me.
“No,” she said, “not anymore. But then there was my therapist, Dr. Y. Nice man, he showed me pictures of his grandchildren. We fucked everywhere but on the couch, he said he didn’t want to look at one of his other patients and think of me lying there.” She said
fucked
as if it were a technical term borrowed from another language, like
cogito
or
Geist
. It was a pretension, a word that didn’t belong to her, although it might have belonged to Professor X or Dr. Y. “Then there was Miss Z, who lived with me after the Pines,” she said, “and her friend, Mr … . shit, I should have started earlier in the alphabet, now I have to call him Mr. AA. I couldn’t say no. Do you understand?”
fucked
as if it were a technical term borrowed from another language, like
cogito
or
Geist
. It was a pretension, a word that didn’t belong to her, although it might have belonged to Professor X or Dr. Y. “Then there was Miss Z, who lived with me after the Pines,” she said, “and her friend, Mr … . shit, I should have started earlier in the alphabet, now I have to call him Mr. AA. I couldn’t say no. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you had sex with a lot of people, but so what? Does that mean I can’t like you?”
“Mr. AA liked me,” Yesim said. “He was very nice. He had a daughter in Wisconsin, and he sent her a postcard every day. He played classical guitar. He gave great massages.”
“So what was wrong with him?”
“He wasn’t the most stable person,” Yesim said, “although he was better than Mr., what should I call him? AB? BB?” Yesim looked up at me. “Now you know.”
Just then, as if to prove some idiotic hypothesis about the world, it started raining. There was almost no warning: the clouds were just on top of us, and a fat cold rain was falling. “Fuck,” Yesim said. She fiddled with the padlock on the shed. By the time she got it open we were both wet. “What are you waiting for? Come in.”
The shed was cold and dim. A few chairs, or benches, dangled from the curved track that would send them back down the mountainside, their safety bars open as if they’d been waiting for passengers since the end of the last winter. The air smelled of dirt. Yesim said she had to check to make sure the power was working, that was why she’d come up here. She tugged at the cover of the fuse box but it wouldn’t open. “Fucking stupid thing,” Yesim said. I pointed out that there was a catch; Yesim released it and the cover opened. She peered into the fuse box and flipped a switch and the lights came on.
We sat for a while on one of the chairs, not talking, just swaying back and forth, our feet dangling in the air, listening to the enormous sound of the rain. Yesim said she was sorry, she hadn’t meant to burden me with her tale of woe. I said I didn’t mind. She smiled. Was that the turnaround point? The place where we stopped struggling against gravity and let ourselves be carried downhill, toward whatever there was at the bottom, the lodge, home, life together? No. All we’d done was to turn on the power. We sat in the shed until the worst of the storm had passed, then we went out. The sun was shining again, lighting up the edge of the clouds like a curtain; red and yellow trees on the northern mountains stood out and seemed almost to sparkle.
Yesim said she had to go to the office, Kerem was probably wondering what had happened to her, and we walked to our respective cars. The flowers I’d bought were still lying on Norman Mailer’s passenger seat. I took them back to my grandfather’s house and rinsed out a vase; I set the vase full of flowers on the kitchen table, but it was too wobbly so I moved the flowers to the windowsill. They looked good there, their white petals taking on subtle color in the daylight. They made the house look as if someone lived in it.
The next day I ran into Kerem at the Kountry Kitchen. He was waiting in line to pay as I came in, and he embraced me. He had a black eye, which he’d tried to cover with makeup, but it didn’t work. The puffy blue flesh around his eye stood out like a burial mound seen from the air. I asked what had happened to him, and he told me he’d been in Philadelphia over the weekend. “Man,” he said, “there are some assholes in Philly!” He told me how this
homeless
—he used the word as a noun—had called him a
sand nigger
. “You should have seen what I did to the guy, though. I think I busted his collarbone.” Then: “Hey, you talked to my sister.” I nodded. Kerem asked if she had shown me her poems and for some reason I said yes, she had.
homeless
—he used the word as a noun—had called him a
sand nigger
. “You should have seen what I did to the guy, though. I think I busted his collarbone.” Then: “Hey, you talked to my sister.” I nodded. Kerem asked if she had shown me her poems and for some reason I said yes, she had.
“Did she show you ‘Uyum’?”
“Sure,” I lied.
“‘Uyum’ is incredible,” Kerem said. “You have to admit I’m right. People are going to be reading it a hundred years from now.”
“They might.”
“She’s a genius!” Kerem said. “What I need you to do is hook her up. Do you know anyone in publishing?”
I thought of the people at Marina’s salon: Holly the graphic designer who wrote a zine called
Hollylujah!,
sullen Ted who kept an online diary about the girls he hadn’t slept with. “I don’t know if my friends will be much help,” I said, but Kerem wasn’t listening. He leaned close to me, and for a second I had the strange feeling that he and Yesim were two parts of the same person.
Hollylujah!,
sullen Ted who kept an online diary about the girls he hadn’t slept with. “I don’t know if my friends will be much help,” I said, but Kerem wasn’t listening. He leaned close to me, and for a second I had the strange feeling that he and Yesim were two parts of the same person.
“I don’t believe in fate or anything like that,” he said, “but I do think you showed up just when you were needed.” He hit my arm. “You should stick around until winter! I’ll hook you up with free passes to Snowbird.” He patted my shoulder one more time and left. I ate my lunch, a bowl of chicken soup and what the menu referred to as
Yankee pot roast
, though I doubted it had seen the inside of a pot, or an oven, or anything the old Yankees used to prepare food.
Yankee pot roast
, though I doubted it had seen the inside of a pot, or an oven, or anything the old Yankees used to prepare food.
I went home and called Yesim and told her about my conversation with Kerem. I said I wanted to read her poems, and Yesim said that was very flattering, but she didn’t know how she felt about the part of her life that had ended in Cambridge years ago. I said of course I understood, but I still wanted to read the poems.
“You have to be patient with me,” Yesim said. “I have good parts and bad parts.”
“Everyone is like that,” I said.
“That may be true, but I’m a little more so.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I want to see you again.”
Yesim said I could come over anytime. After all, I knew where she lived. But I said I meant just her, alone. There was a longish silence, then she said she would stop by on her way home, but just for a minute.
I spent the afternoon on the sofa, reading in
Progress in Flying Machines
about Screws That Lift and Propel. Outside, the sky got darker and darker. Just when it seemed like Yesim wouldn’t come, the Outback arrived in my grandfather’s driveway, and there she was, a brown paper bag in her arms. She’d brought food, she hoped I didn’t mind, she hadn’t eaten all day.
Progress in Flying Machines
about Screws That Lift and Propel. Outside, the sky got darker and darker. Just when it seemed like Yesim wouldn’t come, the Outback arrived in my grandfather’s driveway, and there she was, a brown paper bag in her arms. She’d brought food, she hoped I didn’t mind, she hadn’t eaten all day.
Yesim paused on the doorstep. “You know I’ve never been here?” It hadn’t occurred to me but of course it was true. “All these years,” she said, carrying the bag to the kitchen table, and unpacking a plastic tub of soup and white Chinese-takeout boxes, “I’ve wondered what your grandparents’ house was like.”
“Come and see,” I said. I showed her the dining room, the parlor, where she admired Mary’s watercolors; my mothers’ room, my grandparents’ bedroom, the study. Somewhere on the second floor Yesim stopped talking, and she didn’t speak again until we were back in the kitchen.
“Excuse me for asking,” she said, finding bowls, plates, forks and spoons, carrying everything to the old scarred kitchen table, “but I thought you were supposed to be packing up?”
“I should be. But look at this place. I have no idea where to start.”
“It’s not hard. You just make two piles, one for things to give away and one for things to keep. Anything that’s too big to go on one of the piles, you tag with a sticker. Color coded, red for keep, green for sell or give away.” Kerem was right: Yesim was a born manager.
We opened the takeout boxes to reveal chicken and peanuts, broccoli, some kind of eggplant, this last, I thought, an almost Turkish touch. There was a little silence: so much not to talk about.
“So,” I asked, “how was your day?”
“Not bad,” Yesim said around a mouthful of chicken. The terrain park was almost finished but the contractor had gone AWOL. He didn’t have a regular phone; Yesim imagined that he was some kind of elf, hiding in an enchanted forest of concrete. “What about you?”
“Oh,” I said, “things with me are pretty quiet.”
We finished dinner in comfortable silence. It was as if we’d always been there, the two of us, as if all the contradictions of our history were dissolving in cheap broth and brown sauce, and what remained was just this image, the Rowland child and the Regenzeit child at the ancestral Rowland table, eating soup from my grandparents’ chipped white bowls.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get it,” I said, as Yesim stood, plate in her hands, headed for the sink, but she was already washing the dishes.
“I like your kitchen more than mine,” she said. “It’s cozy. I never understood why my parents made ours so shiny and, you know, chrome-y. On the other hand”—she nodded at the clock in the shape of a cat, with a wagging tail and eyes set with rhinestones—“that’s a weird clock.”
“My grandfather bought it after my grandmother died. I don’t know why.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean to imply that he had bad taste. I’ve just never seen a clock like that before.”
“Get rid of it, you think?”
“I would,” Yesim said.
So it began. It seems ironic that the one thing Yesim and I could talk about was my grandparents’ possessions, the stuff that had brought me to Thebes in the first place, but it makes sense: everything else was too dangerous. When I had unplugged the clock and taken it down from the wall, it made sense to both of us that she would point at a ceramic beer stein, which had been full of pennies and nickels for as long as I could remember, and ask, “Are you going to keep that?” I asked if she thought I should.
“It looks kind of dirty.”
“OK, stein,
Achtung!
” I said. “To ze garage mit you!”
Achtung!
” I said. “To ze garage mit you!”
When I came back she was looking at the coat tree. “I know,” I said. “I’ll take it out later.”
It made sense that I would call Yesim at work the next day, to ask if she could spare an hour or two. Because I was cleaning out the library, and I could use her advice. Yesim came over and we spent the evening picking things up, showing them to each other, asking, Yes or no? Her advice was good, even if it tended to the nonaccumulative. That boat-shaped ashtray? Forget it. The box of matchbooks? The china shepherd? The green-shaded lamp? The lamp, maybe. It was a nice lamp. After a couple of hours, Yesim looked at her watch and said she had to go. Maybe she suspected that something else was happening, less innocent than the division of my grandparents’ things into two heaps, because she drove the fifty feet that separated her house from mine, as if she wanted to emphasize that we were not together. But she came back the next night. We worked in the dining room, then in the living room, with increasing sureness and speed. The great mass of Rowland stuff gave way before us, like ice breaking and spinning away into a warming river, and what was, from my point of view, even better, Yesim and I learned things about each other. I discovered that she had no use for the kitsch that people in San Francisco liked (“Please tell me,” she said indignantly, “what you are going to do with
Cooking with Pineapples?
”), but she showed a strange reverence for old-fashioned things (“You’ve got to hold on to these letter openers”), which I would have been happy (“
Five
letter openers? Yesim, I don’t get any mail!”) not to keep. We agreed about paperweights, planters, anything crocheted. These weren’t the things we would have chosen to reveal about ourselves, but somehow that made them even more intimate, more revealing. They were the secrets we didn’t know we had. How else, short of living together, would I have learned that Yesim didn’t like pillows or mirrors, that she hated curtains and only grudgingly tolerated blinds? How would she have discovered my strange fascination with the electric toothbrush?
Cooking with Pineapples?
”), but she showed a strange reverence for old-fashioned things (“You’ve got to hold on to these letter openers”), which I would have been happy (“
Five
letter openers? Yesim, I don’t get any mail!”) not to keep. We agreed about paperweights, planters, anything crocheted. These weren’t the things we would have chosen to reveal about ourselves, but somehow that made them even more intimate, more revealing. They were the secrets we didn’t know we had. How else, short of living together, would I have learned that Yesim didn’t like pillows or mirrors, that she hated curtains and only grudgingly tolerated blinds? How would she have discovered my strange fascination with the electric toothbrush?
With the things came stories. Yesim wanted to know about the Catskill landscapes in the dining room; I told her about my grandmother’s expeditions into the mountains, in all seasons, all weathers, expeditions that caused my grandfather furies of worry that didn’t end until she came home, sometimes in the middle of the night, the back of her station wagon full of diminutive canvases.
“She was really talented,” Yesim said.
“It’s true,” I said.
But my grandmother’s interest in painting ended when my mothers went to New York to become artists: as if she couldn’t stand the competition, or maybe it was just that, with her daughters gone and her son on his way to Vietnam, she didn’t have anyone to run away from anymore. After that, my grandmother put her energy into her garden, almost as if she’d become the one who was rooted to the spot.
“She sounds interesting,” Yesim said. “Not like my grandmother, ugh.” But Yesim didn’t talk about her grandmother: my house, she said, my stories.
On Saturday afternoon I found a box of my grandparents’ records. Here was Gil Gideon and the Two-Time Tunesters with a double album of
Moonlite Melodies
, here were Benny Goodman, Harry James, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb and all their orchestras. Some of the records were thick, ten-inch 78s; others were regular 33s, in bright, busy album covers that belonged to a world untouched or unretouched by the airbrush. I put on Gil Gideon and turned the volume up, and his songs became the soundtrack for our work in the parlor, which went faster now that there was music playing. “Give me a sign,” Gil sang. “A spoon. The month of June. A reason to be fallin’ in love.”
Moonlite Melodies
, here were Benny Goodman, Harry James, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb and all their orchestras. Some of the records were thick, ten-inch 78s; others were regular 33s, in bright, busy album covers that belonged to a world untouched or unretouched by the airbrush. I put on Gil Gideon and turned the volume up, and his songs became the soundtrack for our work in the parlor, which went faster now that there was music playing. “Give me a sign,” Gil sang. “A spoon. The month of June. A reason to be fallin’ in love.”
“How did they meet?” Yesim asked.
“Gil and the Tunesters?”
“No, your grandparents.”
The way my grandmother told the story, I said, Oliver had fallen in love with her at a college dance contest. He was no kind of dancer; his first words to her were apparently, “Is that your foot?” Mary was disposed to tell him off. She already had a beau, a Baltimorean named Brett, also an undergraduate at Bleak, who possessed a widow’s peak, jet-black hair, commanding eyes, a sterling white waistcoat and one of each kind of foot. But something about Oliver stopped her. That was the word she used,
stopped
, as if it meant more than it did, as if Oliver stopped not only her lips but some crazy clockwork that had carried her from boarding school to boarding school, from state to state, from boyfriend to boyfriend, because young Mary was wild, or restless at least, very much like her daughters in that regard. If Oliver hadn’t come along, she didn’t know where she would have ended up. A lost woman, she said. Probably. Oliver stopped her. He was a talker; before the song was over he had told her how he came from a long line of tree exploiters: his great-great-grandfather had run a sawmill, and his grandfather had run a furniture company and his father made walking sticks and other wooden souvenirs for tourists in the Catskills. First trees, then chairs, then walking sticks: the only thing left for Oliver would be toothpicks, so he’d left home before the family business whittled him down to nothing. He got Mary to tell him her story. He listened, as though to him the music were no music, as though everything in the world were still except her voice, which grew still in turn, and the band stopped playing, and they lost the contest, and went outside for a breath of air.
stopped
, as if it meant more than it did, as if Oliver stopped not only her lips but some crazy clockwork that had carried her from boarding school to boarding school, from state to state, from boyfriend to boyfriend, because young Mary was wild, or restless at least, very much like her daughters in that regard. If Oliver hadn’t come along, she didn’t know where she would have ended up. A lost woman, she said. Probably. Oliver stopped her. He was a talker; before the song was over he had told her how he came from a long line of tree exploiters: his great-great-grandfather had run a sawmill, and his grandfather had run a furniture company and his father made walking sticks and other wooden souvenirs for tourists in the Catskills. First trees, then chairs, then walking sticks: the only thing left for Oliver would be toothpicks, so he’d left home before the family business whittled him down to nothing. He got Mary to tell him her story. He listened, as though to him the music were no music, as though everything in the world were still except her voice, which grew still in turn, and the band stopped playing, and they lost the contest, and went outside for a breath of air.
Then came the Second World War. Oliver enlisted in the Army, hoping to see some action, but he was clumsy, clumsy, and in the interest of everyone’s safety he was posted to a base in Florida, where he excelled as assistant quartermaster, and then quartermaster, and probably he would have made it all the way to half-master and master entire if the war hadn’t ended when it did. He went back to Bleak and married Mary, and for a few months they lived in New York City, while they decided what to do with the rest of their lives. Mary argued for London; Oliver wanted time to think. They were still and moving at the same time. It was a strange experience, like being on a ride at a fair; you sat there and the lights went past, then passed again. Where were they going? Thebes, as it turned out. Oliver’s father had died and left behind him a fat dark skein of unresolved business, which looked from the outside as though there would be money in it, but unraveled, and unraveled, until Oliver was left holding nothing, only the thin end of a thread that led to someone else’s pocket. The Rowland Mill was bankrupt; the mill closed down. All that was left were the houses in town, and some securities, enough to live on if they lived in Thebes. Oliver liked the idea of having some more time to think, and besides, Mary was already pregnant with Charles. They moved to Thebes.
Instead of English hills, Mary got the Catskills, and not the busy Catskills, where the Jewish resorts were, nor the majestic Catskills as painted by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, but Thebes, a town in the northeastern corner of Espy County, which she’d never heard of, a place so remote that the inhabitants spoke a foreign language. How good Brett and his urbane charms must have looked as the car stopped and the cold air came in, and Oliver explained to her that the house had been built in stages, that the original house had been only the kitchen and what was now the dining room and one of the bedrooms upstairs, that the parlor and library and the big bedroom had been added by John Rowland I, and his son added the bow window, a mistake, in Oliver’s opinion … A commentary that did not cease until she fell sick and Oliver took her to a teaching hospital in Syracuse, forty-five years later.
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