Something Rising (Light and Swift) Page 12

  Laura paused, and Cassie listened to the kitchen clock tick. In the Airstream bathroom a light came on briefly, then went off.

  “I haven’t seen or heard from Shirley in years; I did hear she takes care of her husband’s elderly mother full-time and has gotten quite fat. This is America in a nutshell, I think, Puritan America, capitalist, land-owning, the State has an interest in the life of every person from infancy on, because we’ll all be taxpayers. We’re driven by biology to reproduce, that’s a truth no one can argue with, and then perhaps we’re driven by biology to move on, to reproduce with someone else or cease, but the State, the Church, can’t allow that fundamental fact to rule our lives, because the bureaucracy couldn’t withstand it. Couldn’t withstand the freedom. And so I wanted to end my marriage, and some people said I couldn’t because of the Hebrew God. And I said, I don’t know this God anymore, He makes no sense to me, that isn’t my life or my world. And others would say I couldn’t because of Jesus Christ, a dead man, and I would say, What are you talking about, this Jesus? I lost Him years ago. I have no idea what you’re saying”—Laura waved a cigarette in the air—“it’s like telling me I can’t change my life because the Jabberwock says no, or the elves, or someone’s late uncle Marvin. And finally poor Poppy and Buena Vista pulled out the stops and said,You can’t leave because it will destroy the children, the experts all say so. I looked around, my children already destroyed, and I didn’t see a single expert peering into my house, not one. I was here alone night and day, nothing but my library job a few hours a week and the books I read, nothing to convince me there was even a world beyond my sight. And when that didn’t work, your grandma cried, this was her son, after all, and said, Look at your jackets hanging side by side on the hook next to the door, his and yours and the little girls’, look at these plates you got as a wedding gift—”

  Cassie closed her eyes, swallowed.

  “—wouldn’t they break your heart later? He knows what you like in your coffee, you have albums of photographs, there is half of him in your children, this is your life. I tell you, sweetheart, people will say such things, they will say anything to keep you at odds with your own human liberty. I said, Buena Vista, I love you, but those are jackets, plates, it’s just coffee, I can make my own. Those are photographs, little deaths, they are not my life. I said to her, Can you imagine if I were living in Paris and said to someone, anyone, my neighbor, My only begotten life is being seized from me second by second, can you imagine what she’d say? She’d say, Darling! Take a lover! Get out of here, take your girls and move to Italy, get a job, how silly you are! But here everyone says, What about your pots and pans? And what was I to do, I finally grew so weak from argument, and being alone so much made me think I was crazy, and so I stayed, just like everyone else. Cassie.”

  He turned in to the cornfield and began to run across the stubble, a scuttling sort of run that caused the arms of the straitjacket to dance like two drunken men. He ran behind the old power station, into the black woods behind, and the police cars skidded to a stop on the dusty shoulder, raising up clouds. Wally had driven on; the man didn’t stand a chance.

  “Cassie, look at me. My point is that women live the lie from birth on, and then one day they realize that it’s too late for them, they’re too old to write a book or solve a difficult problem in math, they’ll never learn to sing or play the piano, they showed such promise early on. So they run to the priest, their voices take on a hysterical edge, like the one mine has right now, and the priest tells them they have lived righteously and their reward will be in heaven, and he could certainly use someone in the kitchen for the potluck Sunday night.”

  Laura carried her empty glass over to the sink and stepped in front of Cassie to rinse it out.

  “I’m going to see Belle tomorrow,” Cassie said, watching Laura’s reflection in the window over the sink.

  “Oh, she’ll appreciate that.” Laura looked up, dried her hands. “I found your knife, by the way.”

  “I didn’t need it after all.”

  Laura turned and faced her. “When I was growing up, women weren’t made like you, so hard and strong.”

  Cassie breathed in her mother’s smell, the same as ever: mothballs on the sweater, cigarettes and cloves. “I could say the same. There’s no one left like you, either.”

  ALL SAINTS

  Belle lived in one place in Cassie’s imagination and another in the world. She should have been, Cassie thought, in the cell of a visionary nun: rough whitewashed walls, the stark crucifix above the single bed, a mattress stuffed with horsehair and resting on ropes. Soup and bread twice a day, which Belle would refuse. Only there, in that depth of silence and austerity, could her work truly be done. Whatever that work was. Cassie was no longer sure, and it was something she missed: first the book reports, then the complicated Olympian family trees. By the time Belle left for college, she could recite what seemed to be hundreds of myths, along with the variants of different historians. Last summer, the summer after her freshman year, she’d added a kind of interpretation to the mix, and now her papers and her conversation felt to Cassie like a walk on a long road in overhead sun. She wasn’t sure where the road started or where they were to arrive. She still sometimes studied a diagram Belle had drawn for her one night at the kitchen table, in an attempt to explain the aspects of the god Hermes. Hermes, it said: the son of Zeus and the nymph Maia, daughter of Atlas and one of the Pleiades. Stole Apollo’s cattle, killed a tortoise, made the first musical instrument, the lyre. (Belle had written: lyre, i.e., liar. Cassie asked, Do you mean he didn’t steal the cattle?) God of shepherds, measurements, poetry, travel, athletes, and thieves. Cassie was following along fine, but then Belle moved on to the psyche, the way Hermes reveals himself in the colors green and silver, in tricks and robbery, escorting us from one realm to another, through liminal states. She said the archetypes were autonomous. Cassie asked, Where are they then? And Belle said they were wherever they wanted to be. All this to explain why Hermes was the key to understanding a favorite short story of Laura and Belle, Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron.” Cassie had read it, thought it was what it appeared to be, a story about a little girl who loved the woods, loved nature, and had to decide whether to betray the location of the rare and beautiful bird to a hunter. But no. It turned out to be a coming-of-age story, and the bird was actually an aspect of the girl’s psyche, and would she betray her Self to the man, who was himself an image of something else, on and on Belle went until Cassie didn’t like the story so much. And what about Hermes, after all? Well, the story was thick with green and silver, and there He was, waiting to trick the girl into adulthood.

  Cassie had tucked the diagram and the copy of the story Belle had given her into her desk drawer, with the thought that maybe it had been a trial of her patience. But a few nights later she’d had a dream that she was driving her truck through the streets of Roseville and everyone was gone, the end had come. She was wondering: had it been a plague, a sudden flash of light? when down the street a troll-like figure appeared, coal black with green hair, wearing a flannel shirt and red pants, almost like a monkey dressed in Poppy’s clothes, and he was hopping madly, dancing. He gave a shimmy to every step. He stopped and knocked on the door of a house, and Cassie had thought, No, a thought like quicksilver, and as soon as the door opened and the face of a frightened woman appeared, the little man jumped up and down like Rumpelstiltskin, and the woman vanished. Cassie closed her eyes in fear, and when she opened them again, the monkey man was gone. She reached for the gearshift and looked in her rearview mirror and up he popped! an elated, sinister face wrinkled like a raisin. Cassie jumped awake, got completely out of bed. She paced to clear her head, then sat down to record the details in her notebook, and that was when she’d seen it: a shrewd trickster figure, taking people from life to death, his face still present at the very moment Cassie went from being asleep to awake. His green hair. She’d never told Belle that she had gotten it, maybe, understo
od a little that what Belle had given her life to was a magical art. Belle said that deep in the hearts and minds of all people were secrets, like a safe filled with treasure, and there were combinations known to some, and Belle was one. She said it, and within days the safe in Cassie had opened. But she wouldn’t tell Belle; she’d put it in the safe instead, like a letter opened and read and tucked away.

  In Cassie’s mind, Belle lived in a room suitable to her work and her temperament, but in fact she lived in a dormitory built of concrete and shared with girls Cassie would as soon kick as look at. She climbed the stairs to the second floor, aware, as she always was when visiting her sister, of the requirements of housing transients. This building was like an enormous dog pound: everything was bolted to the floor and made of materials that could be sprayed down with a hose. Belle’s room was at the end of a hallway, a single. No living, unrelated person could accommodate Belle’s frank limitations. Cassie passed doors cluttered with pictures cut from magazines, collages that meant nothing to her; they all seemed to be advertisements. The smell in the hallway was dense and disheartening: cologne and hair spray over unwashed laundry and old shoes. There seemed to be a film of such products over everything. The floor was sticky, the lights in the hallway were dim. Loud music from one room was competing with a soap opera from another. It was here that Belle wrote her precise sentences and puzzled over the traces of what time left for us to decipher.

  On her door Belle had left a note: C., I’ll be back from class at 1:30. The key is under the hood of my car. Nothing on the table is secret or private. B. Cassie looked around. The key wasn’t on the floor. She walked over to the window, and there it lay in plain sight, on the sill above a radiator clanking and hissing against the November cold. People will look long and hard for what they can’t see right in front of them, Laura said.

  The door to Belle’s room was heavy and scarred. But inside she’d done her best to fulfill Cassie’s wishes for her. The twin bed was made up with a plain white coverlet alleged to have survived the Civil War—a subject on which Hoosiers were famously neutral—left to her by Buena Vista. The only decoration was a single fragment, framed in black and hanging above the large window:

  —Virgil, Aeneid VI, 126-29 … easy is the descent to Avernus: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this is the toll!

  Between the built-in dresser and the wall was a metal rod, functioning as a closet, and Belle’s few blouses, a single dress, and three pairs of pants hung there. On the shelves above the dresser, where other girls probably kept photographs of friends and trinkets from home, Belle had only books. Running from wall to wall under the window, ten feet long and three feet wide, was a wooden desk, no drawers. Just an enormous surface, and all of Belle was there.

  Cassie closed the door, and most of the sound from the hallway disappeared; only a residual thumping in the floor remained. She slipped off her pack and her coat and laid them on the bed, careful not to disturb the quilt pulled tight. When she’d called Belle this morning and said she’d be leaving around nine, a two-hour drive, Belle hadn’t mentioned that she’d be gone until after one. Just like her, Cassie thought. She walked around slowly, not touching anything. Belle’s former dorm room had been this ugly but had felt more like sickness. There was less light, and Belle’s medications had always been visible on the dresser, along with a plastic pitcher of water. The pitcher had come from Buena Vista’s hospital room, and Cassie didn’t want any part of it. Belle hoarded it, probably had it in here still. In that other dorm there had been girls on either side who tortured Belle, who woke her up in the night to tell her Laura was on the phone in the hallway, who threatened her with antique hats and handbags, knowing that Belle feared threadbare fabrics more than snakes or spiders.

  A portable stereo sat in one corner of the desk, and a box of radio dramas Cassie hadn’t seen before. She wondered where Belle had gotten them. There was a grainy reproduction of a painting. Cassie leaned forward and read the title: Saturn Devouring His Son by Goya. Horrible. She recognized some of the names among the stacks of books on the desk. Ovid, Hesiod, Homer, Apuleius, Aeschylus, Aristophanes. James Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld, which Belle had carried around her last year at home and quoted from until Cassie threatened her life. “Let us say vesperal” was one of her favorites. Cassie shook her head, remembering. The IBM Selectric typewriter Uncle Bud had given Belle as a graduation gift was silent and cold; Cassie lifted a corner of it: heavy. Belle was working hard on something, from the look of her desk. The wooden bowl she kept her image phrases in was brimming with slips of paper, and there were six or seven arranged in a sentence next to the typewriter. Cassie hesitated to look at it. A tarot card was lying faceup next to the bowl. The air in the room was thick and still; even the thumping from the floor had ceased. Cassie leaned over and studied the card: an old man, hunchbacked, walking over a dry landscape, carrying a sickle and an hourglass. On a piece of paper below the card, Belle had written:

  Dominus Necessitatis Suit: Swords

  Element: Air

  Tempus, rerum edax. (See Ovid, Met., xv 234-6)

  Omnia fert Aetas, aminum quoque. (Virgil, Ecloga 51)

  Deities: Cronos, Saturn

  Dice: 2+6 ₌ Virtue + Offspring (water)

  5+1 ₌ Time + First (fire)

  Lambda, Lachos (fate), Leukophrus (white eyebrows)

  Cassie’s left hand hovered above the card, but she didn’t pick it up. She moved on to a book lying open, and this written in the margin of page 36: “Nigredo—alchemy, the pain of assimilating shadow characteristics. Parental complex. Kore. The via regia.” There were stacks of photocopied articles from various encyclopedias and periodicals, all neatly stapled in the upper left-hand corner. From the first page of each, Cassie could see the story emerging. It was the Greek creation myth, she guessed, Chaos, then Gaia (Earth), who gave birth to Uranus (Sky). Uranus slept with his mother, apparently, and she gave birth to the Hecatoncheires, the Cyclops, and the Titans. But Uranus hated all his children and cast most into the Underworld. No surprise there, Cassie thought. Belle had drawn, on a sheet of pale green paper, a sun with a face and the hands of a clock; she was no artist, but there was something in the face that interested Cassie.

  Gaia was angered by Uranus and called upon one of the sons, Cronos, to punish his father. Or so said Hesiod in the Theogony on page 165. Cronos rose up and castrated Uranus, and many were born from his severed genitals, including, Belle had carefully noted, Aphrodite. Cassie sat down in Belle’s desk chair and picked up the thread. Cronos was the next ruler and swallowed his children so they wouldn’t destroy him as he had destroyed his father. But one child, Zeus, was spirited by his mother to the nymphs to raise, and Cronos was given a stone to swallow.

  Cassie looked out the window at the bare branches of the trees. Swallowing children, swallowing stones. There was a lot more to go through, but she thought she could see where Belle was heading. Cassie tapped her fingertips on the arm of the chair, tried to imagine Belle explaining the law of cause and effect, something so simple, to a visitor from another planet. Belle, who didn’t understand the application of most practical principles, and who, even though she’d lived in the same house as Cassie, same parents, had probably never seen one colored ball strike another.

  There was a stack of paper next to the typewriter: Cassie took a few sheets and chose a mechanical pencil from the cup on the windowsill. Belle seemed to be collecting them; there were ten or twelve, all with pastel barrels and unused erasers. The room was warm, and the view from the window was actually nicer than Cassie would have expected: meandering lanes around an open grassy space. The lanes intersected periodically and led off into other directions. Belle had said in a letter a few weeks ago that she could walk as far as the library, but beyond it was a field of resistance that hit her like wind. Cassie drew the rectangle of a table on the top sheet of paper, and the Chinese characters fr
om the hanging red lamp. She had practiced the characters many times but still found the act awkward. Belle had found someone at the university to translate their meaning: Bird in Flight, Wish Me Luck. She began a letter to Belle, or something like a letter. Cassie didn’t know how far the library was, but she hoped for all their sakes that it was miles and miles away.

  I couldn’t have known, Cassie began, that Jimmy would show up there that night. In the year after he left home for good, there were a few furtive phone calls made from gas stations or rest stops. He told Cassie he wanted to come home, but Barbara wouldn’t let him. One call had been in the middle of the night, and Jimmy was drunk, said he had gassed up the Lincoln and was heading to New Orleans, did Cassie want to go. She did; she gathered a few things, wrote a note to Laura, and waited on the porch the rest of the night. He never showed.

  Once he’d actually come by the house (but wouldn’t come in) and left a bag for Cassie. Inside she’d found three hundred dollars in rolled quarters.

  “What in the world?” Belle said.

  Laura leaned over, looked inside. “Hmm. He must have ambushed a vending machine.”

  What did he mean, what did he want? Laura said she thought Jimmy was probably torn. A simple thing. Or else he honestly didn’t want his children but didn’t want anyone to say he couldn’t have them. He was like a child himself, Laura said, who ran away from Barbara, then went home when it got dark. He’d been scarce all over Cassie’s life that year, even when she fought it and fought him. Uncle Bud had the locks changed, and Laura did the same, so Cassie wasn’t expecting him to show up that night, she wrote, then realized she was repeating herself and erased it. Belle never erased.