Madeleine Grant - 1 Story
GENESIS
In those days when I believed that to escape is to become free, I would climb into the tire swing that hung low from a vaulting apple branch in my grandmother's front yard and thrust myself out into the air, arcing high over the sloping embankment that dropped far beneath me. I ascended over and again in perfect surrender to the blue: weightless energy I arose, higher and higher, until at the pinnacle of my flight I broke free. The weathered twine that suspended me slackened; the terrible gravity concentrated at Earth's center had not yet overpowered my propulsion. I reposed in the sky for an eternal moment, there suspended between outer space and my grandmother's yard: Solomon's infant, torn between worlds. At last the tree would collude with Earth's downward pull and resume its tether: the twine choked taut, straining, and reeled me out of the sky. Earth's terrible mass made my will as nothing and drew me, struggling, to her bosom.
Dinner, love, my grandmother called from the porch, when I was seven, and eight, and on. Her tranquility warmed me, as surrender to sleep warms the freezing. Her voice stoked some remote yearning and I lunged again for the sky, pure will. I lurched crazily within the swing, unable to stop or to break free. I dared the aged twine to snap - lunging, twisting. I hoped that one day the audacity of my attempts would dismay the earth, and she would let go. Then I would shoot upward and sweep past the moon, and then the sun, finally to enter the cold sea of stars: never again to see my own world. But perhaps I would sling about the earth in an appalling circuit for a thousand years, or a million.
After dinner, the lamp cast a glow on the needlework under my grandmother's fingers, and I told her stories of mighty girls who beat the Dodgers in the World Series. She always nodded. I learned never to ask where my grandfather was. Such a question would startle her and she would bustle off: perhaps to gather an apple, a paper towel, and a paring knife. Flaying the red skin of the fruit and enshrouding the strips within the towel, she would offer me a bit of the golden flesh. I would place it on tongue and savor its cool tartness, unmindful of the orchard that had cast it off, where trees purged their fruit to blossom still more. I stayed with my grandmother many days and nights, when my grandfather was away, and my mother was at home, hiding emptied vodka bottles.
I lived with my mother most of the time, with my younger sisters, in an apartment a few miles from my grandmother's house. Ours was an enormous complex, uniform and patrolled, where runny-nosed children ran yelling through the buildings. Here at home were no fruit trees - there was only gray pavement connecting each rusty door to the next, and the next. Sullen teenaged boys watched from their mothers' porches and lobbed dirt clods with practiced accuracy. Here wakefulness chilled my bones. Earth allowed no pretense of escape. In the evenings, my sisters and I ate fish sticks and drank grape juice for dinner while my mother made phone calls. She would laugh and drink from a glass that clinked when she brought it to her lips. From her elegant fingers always protruded a Virginia Slims regular. Arched and poised, those fingers brought the smoldering wick to her mouth again and again. She punctuated her sentences with hissing expulsions of smoke, her teeth resting on her lower lip: pvvvvhh. She laughed, ignoring for a time the complaints of whichever of us was being kicked under the table, until the noise became too much and she said Hold on, Linda (pvvvvhh) I said shut up and eat! (pvvvvhh). She never ate with us. I never saw her eat.
She went out in the evenings, and often in the morning there would be a man sleeping in her hide-a-bed in the living room; always a different one, but identical in sleep to all the others: bare-armed and gape-mouthed upon her pillow, with dark, unkempt hair: wheezing slightly, filling the room with the odor of his flesh and breath. He was a dead weight, stupid and vulnerable. She always denied having slept with him, even before I understood why she bothered. Still the scarlet shame crept up my torso, to my face. He's an old friend, and it got late... My sisters and I would creep past him in the curtain-darkened morning, our only wish to pass without his waking, for he would perceive our shame, the naked embarrassment of our presence.
These days and nights at my mother's, where my bed was, seemed merely visits to be survived until my grandmother arrived again in her Ford to take me back to the house with the apple tree. The emptiness of my grandmother's home was amplified by the ticking of the ancient grandfather clock in the entryway, and I had time there to devote to my worst fears. I knew I was destined for hell - perhaps after I grew up, or perhaps very soon. This would be my just reward for the billowing evil that, lurking just beyond my consciousness, I was unable to identify. I had never been to church, so the genesis of my certainty of damnation remains a mystery. But I knew that one descended to hell upon death if she was not sorry for her sins, or could not change them. After a million years in the fire, I could not imagine what wretched soul would fail to be sorry. Who would not promise to do better? But at eleven, sorry and alive, I could not change. My eyes and nose and flesh would melt into a shocking ooze one day, and I would swirl in a ghastly eddy for eternity. Obsessed, I whispered the word over and over to myself. H-e-l-l. Its sulfuric aroma swam through my sleep, through my schoolwork, and through the stories I told myself about my classmate Raquel Rojas. In my quietest moments Raquel and I would be kidnapped by Russian spies. I daydreamed through the sulfur of how I would endure torture to save her, and how we would escape and live together as best friends. I never spoke to Raquel at school.
I was twelve when my grandfather returned. My grandmother accepted him back without demands; my mother would not speak to him. Hey, Killer, he would say to me when we passed. He wore too much cologne; his pores exuded day-old gin. He wore white pants and Hawaiian shirts: a tourist in his own home. He didn't work; he was 51. He had his own bedroom with a private telephone line at the end of the dark hallway, toward the back of the house. When his phone rang, he closed the door and spoke quietly. His walls were covered with mementos from World War II: photographs of aircraft carriers and fighter planes, and sailors draped over Asian women. In black and white they smiled at the camera. Hawaiian girls performed the hula in grass skirts. Their eyes reminded me of my mother's on mornings when strangers awoke in her bed. We bombed the shit out of the Japs, my grandfather said to me one day as I passed his open door. His words arrested me; I stopped in the doorway. His eyes narrowed and fell upon me like a net. Hey Killer, you're looking coy, he whispered. His voice was like the faraway rumble of an unknown engine, coming closer. I did not know what coy was. Something about the word reminded me of a schoolyard rhyme about naked ladies. From now on, call me Uncle, he said. I'm too young to be your grandfather. His expression reminded me of a beggar I had seen downtown, when my grandmother held out a dollar to him. You are too old enough, I told my grandfather, and backed away.
One Sunday my mother took us to church. She bought pantyhose for me,
and she made me wear a pale pink dress she recovered from the depths
of my closet. When the service began, people all around me began singing,
and then raised their hands high above their heads, like toddlers wanting
to be picked up, or prisoners of war. Ashamed, I locked my eyes on
my mother's hands. They clutched the pew ahead. After the service she
bought a paperback bible in colloquial language, with hippies on the
cover. After a few weeks, I removed it from the pile of ladies' magazines
where it lay forgotten and secreted it in my bedroom. I read from the
beginning how Eve, my ancestor, was the ruin of everything. She listened
to the serpent and ate the apple, proving that the vilest action may
appear harmless, even mundane. But her desire — to find out what God knew —brought
a sentence of hard labor to her husband and death to her children.
Eve herself was punished with her very womanhood: childbirth would
be agony. I could feel God's anger as my own uterus cramped with the
onset of my womanhood. And Adam would rule over Eve, because she spoiled
everything when she tried thinking for herself. The Garden, the bible
taught me, was for people who were so innocent they didn't notice their
own nudity. But I was always aware of my own, even with my clothes
on.
At church, I asked my Sunday school teacher where hell was. In the center of the earth, she said. But we don't have to worry about that if we live to please God. She went on with her lesson about Lot's wife.
At home my mother began to talk about The Lord. Unsaved, she said of my grandmother. Praise The Lord! she said when she married a brown-eyed salesman from church. I was relieved at my mother's salvation. Seeing her in eternal torment, I knew, would be far worse than merely enduring the flames myself. For Christmas, shortly after the wedding, my sisters and I received imitation leather bibles with The Lord's words printed in red. Sulfur wafted from the course pages and burned my nostrils, my frontal lobe. My new father said little to my mother and less to us girls, but brought a jug of wine home every night. The Lord drank wine, my mother slurred.
My muscles strain in outward thrust, and I hurtle west, toes first.
My back arches; the wind takes me. The twine lifts and I ascend. My
body snaps into a vertical line, my head back and trailing. I rocket
skyward, fast and taut, perpendicular to the ground. My feet carry
me wildly beyond — away, out of the atmosphere, far from Earth's smoldering center —until
the missile that is my body slows. The earth and I remember. I cease
struggle, and plummet.
Part Two
Soon after that Christmas, at my grandmother's house, my grandfather pours himself a gin. Hey Killer, he says when I enter the kitchen. You know how I know there's no God? The question startles me, and I want to leave. Hold up a match, he says, and ask God to light it. You'll wait a million years, and that goddamn match will never light. He swills his drink and staggers out. It is precisely this divine apathy that terrifies me. But I cannot tell my grandfather this. It's easier to hate God for not existing than to know he won't give you a light if you ask for it.
Sometimes now I dream of my grandfather in his sailor's uniform, dancing with a grass-skirted girl in a nightclub. An orchestra swings on a large stage. The girl holds a glass to his lips and smiles. When he tilts his head to drink, the roar of planes fills the room and there is a brilliant, red-gold flash. The dancers disintegrate, exploding into a million bits of bone and teeth and hair. The glass at my grandfather's lips drops, intact, to the floor where he had stood.
My hips become womanly in high school, too womanly to squeeze through
a child's tire swing, and I meet a boy named Brad. He picks me up in
his Mustang and takes me to a dance, where he drapes his body over
mine. I relish his weight, his sweat: I take in his musk as if it is
a magic potion that can make me like the other girls. When Stevie Nicks
begins to purr from the speakers, I close my eyes and see her, feeling
her delicious weight draped over me. I am bathed in unspeakable desire.
The next day my mother asks me how my first date went. Fine, I say.
She swirls her gin. At least I don't have to worry about you getting
pregnant, she says, her tone a marriage of scorn and disappointment.
She has resigned herself to my secret, although I have resolved that
no one will ever—ever —find out.
As I get older, my mother begins to drink even harder. At night I hear her smashing her empty bottles to the pavement outside, perhaps hoping to free the demons living within them. She has by now been divorced from my own father, the cop; from the salesman from church; and from the businessman with the fast car who said he loved her. When I leave home at 18 her skin turns a greenish yellow, and she has no more boyfriends: still she denies that she drinks too much.
She disappears one day, and finally I find her wretched and dying in a county hospital. I am twenty. She has been out of her mind for weeks, and impossibly demands to be allowed to climb a tree outside her window. Maybe later, I say. Can I have an apple? she asks. But she cannot. The nurses forbid it. I sit with her for days as her breathing slows, until the last molecules of air she will ever draw find their way into her slack mouth and float, unbidden, down to her impassive lungs, where in some secret exchange she is granted another moment. My mother's chest rises almost imperceptibly, and I respirate for her, willing breath into her yielded lungs, and willing it back out again.
I call my grandfather and tell him to come say goodbye. When he enters the room, she opens her eyes and says Hi, Dad. For one moment he is sober and she is coherent. It is a miracle. See ya, Killer, he says to her. He whispers something in her ear and walks out.
Then her breasts rise vaguely under the white hospital sheets, and do not fall again. I wait for a gasp or a sigh - the purging of this world, but it never comes. She hoards her last breath within her jaundiced body as if she might yet need it. The weight of her hand in mine does not change. But after several moments, when the nurses disconnect the labyrinth of tubes that hold her suspended between this world and the next, my mother jerks violently, as one who dreams she is falling. Her body is still then, and a nurse loads her clothes into my arms. I suck my breath in as the thread that holds my mother to this life snaps and coils back to Earth. I hold my breath with her for a long moment, until gravity turns aside and we explode into the sky, soaring together in blinding light past the treetops, through the atmosphere, and beyond it, until the earth reminds me that I am still hers and I drop back, releasing my mother to sweep alone into that ancient, gloriously untetherable cosmos.