On Looking: Essays (3 page)
Read On Looking: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
One afternoon, because she does not have a job (except, of course, for the caretaking) she and the baby were sitting together on the front porch of the place they live when a planet came down, a tiny
planet
she thought, or maybe a jewel, a lit spangle; it was
something
amazing. It came to rest on the baby’s head, light as snow but it didn’t melt. It traveled, jittery, over the wrinkles on his forehead. She said the circle was M&M-sized. M&Ms were the rule she used. This was the year laser-pointers were all the rage and you could buy them cheap and affix them to anything. Someone had a bead on the boy and held his stillness in place with crosshairs. He must have been an easy mark. I once looked through a gun’s scope and knew that crosshairs whittle a viewer’s world down to a manageable thumbnail. I remember how purely relaxing it was to see in that way, everything cropped, in focus, contained.
planet
she thought, or maybe a jewel, a lit spangle; it was
something
amazing. It came to rest on the baby’s head, light as snow but it didn’t melt. It traveled, jittery, over the wrinkles on his forehead. She said the circle was M&M-sized. M&Ms were the rule she used. This was the year laser-pointers were all the rage and you could buy them cheap and affix them to anything. Someone had a bead on the boy and held his stillness in place with crosshairs. He must have been an easy mark. I once looked through a gun’s scope and knew that crosshairs whittle a viewer’s world down to a manageable thumbnail. I remember how purely relaxing it was to see in that way, everything cropped, in focus, contained.
The target shone three concentric rings and made of the flare that could have been pain, a little red spot on the baby’s head. The men weren’t using the gun as a gun, just as a scope, but I knew, as she herself was learning daily, all it takes is one slip. (And, as if to support this point, I heard later that day from a friend who, distracted by coughing, shot himself in the knee with a nail gun while fixing his fence.)
This was the week my son loved the word “knee,” and touching mine, his father’s, his, spoke the word like an incantation, until it lost sense and began to sound like cheers at a rally. We loved the way an ordinary word collapsed its meaning into pure sound; it made us fall together, laughing.
The red lingered on the child’s forehead, then moved to the soft spot where the bones had not yet knitted up. As a mother, of course, one reads with both shuddery interest and fear about the fontanel and about being careful, but it always felt remarkably strong when I stroked it. Still, I kept sharp things, heavy things away. A laser, though, will roam anywhere and project the shape of anything at all: Mickey Mouse ears; a glow-red heart over the place a heart should go; a cloverleaf; a lucky 7. Anything with its small heat can dance over the body.
I have known the heat of the morning to swell the old wood of stairs, baseboards, molding, and release from within the deep core of a house something of water and dust and age. Even as a child I was pleased by that scent. As it lifted and floated on air, I’d feel I was not alone, that the scent was of my history, there in my grandmother’s house, and was conjured anew every day by the heat. I love that smell, still. It catches light and fixes time: early mornings especially, when I stayed at my grandmother’s house to get over a cold at my leisure while my parents were working. As I came down the stairs the scent would rise and I’d move through it, toward the couch, to settle in for the day with my fever. My great aunt—it was her house, too—would start cooking, before the pace of the day overwhelmed, the scents would further complicate, and there, my body, warm with its manageable aches, repaired.
Later in the day, after I heard the girl’s story, my son and I were playing in an overgrown field. And because I live these days at a crouch, I found a four-leaf clover. I wasn’t searching. Nor was I hoping. It was a big one, the size of a quarter, with a shirring of very light, almost white rick-rack along the edge of each leaf. The clover was heavy and moist with dew, the stem a beautifully taut little straw of lighter translucent green. I used to press things like this flat in a book or keep them preserved between two strips of clear tape, but that day I told my son about clovers and luck and then gave it to him to play with however he wanted.
The laser on the baby’s head was a cherry lozenge, a button, a tack. The color of holly berries, chokeable, dangerous, we keep from our son. It was all a joke. Intended to be, and no, no one was shot. Not the girl who was learning to be a mother, not the baby on whom the light was training.
The laser on the child’s head, she learned by their laughter, was “just a joke.” And in fact, the men parked at the curb repeated the phrase later to the police. From what the girl said, they were somewhat indignant (though she didn’t say it exactly that way) as if she, out of stubborness, refused to admit it was funny. As if she, and not the joke itself, was causing the trouble.
The men in the car parked at the curb laughed at her confusion; in particular how at first, in awe, she followed the light back to the source to be sure it wasn’t a holy event she just saw: something alighting. Something bestowing. What they liked especially was the way she jumped up when she noticed the light, and with one arm scrambled the air while screaming and holding the sleeping baby. It was slap-stick funny, lowly as pots and pans clanging down on the head of, say, a bachelor, trying to bake his first cake. And the cake a wedding cake at that! One that, later, would turn out, surprise, to be his! But first, the messy scenes with skidding, twists and turns, a flour-cloud rising, the amusing vertigo that comes from keeping too much in the air at once. They found her thus, heavily up and out of the lawn chair, holding the baby tight, hair a mess, kicking the Coke, crashing in through the meager screen door.
And that’s not all; there’s more, a kind of backstory: she had been undressed by their sight, which, after it touched the boy’s head, traveled up her arm, over her shoulder, and bounced breast to breast. (Maybe they poked one another and said
follow the bouncing ball
and sang a simple, bawdy song. Funny to see her try to brush the beam off like an insect. Perhaps one of them thought she moved delicately then, as if she were a milkmaid, a shepherd girl, wearing a bodice of lace in which some scratchy hay was caught.
Dishabille
might not have occurred, but
kind of messy-pretty?
Maybe. For a moment, maybe. Then he would remember where he was and put the thought out of his head. Because to keep it there would mean he had seen her differently. That she was not exactly funny. And since she was trying to swat her breast and not swat the baby’s head, and everything was flying apart, that was enough to think about for now, and he would just laugh along with the rest.)
follow the bouncing ball
and sang a simple, bawdy song. Funny to see her try to brush the beam off like an insect. Perhaps one of them thought she moved delicately then, as if she were a milkmaid, a shepherd girl, wearing a bodice of lace in which some scratchy hay was caught.
Dishabille
might not have occurred, but
kind of messy-pretty?
Maybe. For a moment, maybe. Then he would remember where he was and put the thought out of his head. Because to keep it there would mean he had seen her differently. That she was not exactly funny. And since she was trying to swat her breast and not swat the baby’s head, and everything was flying apart, that was enough to think about for now, and he would just laugh along with the rest.)
But that’s my take. My story, not hers.
“Why would they do that?” she asked me.
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