Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (18 page)

Amber had visited my house just once before, at the end of
the school year. She’d been dropped off by her mother and two of her sisters and retrieved by her stepfather, a man in an air force uniform who had struck up a conversation about the service with my dad. This was my first time visiting her, and the otherworldliness of ballet had so inflected my perception of Amber that I was shocked to find her home so perfectly normal. It sat on a street similar to my own, where every house was the mirror image of one of its neighbors. The rooms were plain and tidy, even a little shabby. I don’t know if it was the ordinariness of Amber’s life that caused me to feel a slight sinking sensation or if it was the fact that our entire fourth-grade class had been invited indiscriminately to the party. I felt dejected. The whole group of us sat outside around a swimming pool into which had been tossed several colored rings, but none of us swam. We ate hot dogs and potato chips. We sang “Happy Birthday” over a big snowy sheet cake, and though I had wanted it to be more elaborate and to taste more exquisite than every other birthday cake bought in the grocery store bakery section, it had clearly been picked up that morning from Raley’s or Albertsons and personalized with a hasty thread of pink piping. After the gifts were open, Amber announced that her father was being transferred overseas to Japan. This was the last time she’d see any of us.

We didn’t live on the air base, and I didn’t have many friends with fathers in the service. My brothers and sisters sometimes still complained about the ways our father’s serial assignments in the military had marred their childhoods, forcing them to surrender friendships at the drop of a hat and put down roots over and over again, knowing they’d just be yanked up later. I’d never before been able to empathize with their frustration, but Amber’s announcement put me in touch with a feeling of deep betrayal.
Finally, I could understand how such constant upheaval must have felt to my siblings. Amber appeared at once disappointed by the news but also mostly inured to it; perhaps she was already severing ties to all of us in her mind, preparing herself for the act of assimilation she’d be forced to attempt. I said a disbelieving goodbye and left the party feeling heartsick. The pastime we’d shared, for me at least, had been an urgent one, and I was left unsure as to whether our fantasies were being taken from me or whether I was to become their sole possessor.

The summer ticked past. After the entire third week with the incubator had come and gone with no baby chicks, I allowed myself to accept that something was wrong.

On a Saturday, after my father had been home a whole night and had had the chance to wake up at his leisure and eat one of Mom’s breakfasts that he liked, I delivered the news to him with a leaden guilt. He frowned, following me upstairs. There was no visible evidence that the chicks inside were dead, but as we gazed at the eggs, it seemed oddly clear that we were in the presence of nothing alive. The plastic Chick-U-Bator glared at us, flimsy as a toy. My father offered a few conciliatory words. His rural upbringing had taught him that such losses were not unusual. He understood that life, while meaningful, was also fragile. But I felt like a failure.

On the day, a few weeks later, that an even larger box arrived in the mail, I watched the eager energy return to my father’s every movement. He set it down on the floor and fished out his pocket-knife. Lifting the contraption from the box, he assured me, “This is
foolproof
!” The very word seemed to chasten and sting. I had been a fool, hadn’t I? I’d been lax in my responsibility, mooning about, bored or distracted, and as a result, the chicks had died.
They would never get the chance to stand on their feet and scour the grass for seeds; they’d never scatter into the distance out of instinctive distrust at my approach.

The new incubator was easily five times larger than the first, and it had its own heater and automatic egg turner. Inside, there were compartments for more than a dozen eggs, which we drove once more out to the feed store to collect, and then placed one by one into their cradles. We parked it near the upstairs linen closet, where it wouldn’t see a lot of commotion. All in all, it seemed a far more elaborate setup than nature itself—all lockstep order, an authoritative array of knobs and displays—but it seemed wiser, too; I wouldn’t have to do anything but wait the requisite number of weeks for the chicks to peck their way out. The enterprise was no longer a matter of faith but of science.

The job that kept my father away from home all week involved a thing called the Hubble Space Telescope. I didn’t know much about it or what he and the other engineers did each day, but every now and then, he’d explain to one of us, or one of our guests, that they were contributing to a device that would look farther into space than ever before, a machine that would tell us how the universe itself was born. An unbounded hope, like that of a child, broke into his voice at the word
born
, and it sometimes caught me up, but only briefly. I was conflicted. For if the universe had been born at God’s hand, and if no one had ever seen God—didn’t the Bible say that none can or will or should seek to?—wasn’t a project like the Hubble doomed? I didn’t think about the astounding discoveries the horde of scientists and engineers might bring into relief in examining the vast span between the present moment and the dawn of everything, only that it would surely be hard to get to the very bottom of something God had seen fit to enshroud in
mystery. Still, it was a job my father performed with the utmost scrutiny and, from what I could tell, an unflagging faith.

If I could have fashioned a model of my own imagination, perhaps it would have resembled the telescope my father was working on: heavy, made of steel and glass, and run through with lenses and wires whose work I could only half decipher, pointing off into a distance that had no shape. Perhaps there would sit, at the outer edges of that distance, something I was afraid to bring into focus, some knowledge or presence, the power or verity of which might cause the rest of me to cower. It felt like that sometimes, like there were limits to what I would let myself understand, limits to the whole to which I’d give myself access. I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright, part of what was meant by a word like
Home
. It was not the kind of beautified self-inflicted angst that can transform a girl into a swan or a doll or an ice princess in the ballet. Not even the kind of grief that, in art, can bring back the dead. No, what I felt, what I feared and discerned, even from my rather far remove, was the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war. The pain we hate most because we know it has been borne by the people we love. The slurs and slights I knew were part and parcel of my parents’ and grandparents’ and all my aunts’ and uncles’ lives in the South. The laws that had sought to make people like them—like us, like
me
—subordinate. It was a pain that could be triggered at the slightest hint that the residue of those laws still lingered, even unconsciously, in the minds and imaginations and the deepest assumptions of all the people I knew who didn’t have access to a pain like that of their own.
Who do you think you are? Don’t you wish you were white?

Almost three weeks from when we brought them home, the
first few eggs began to shake and rattle as the oldest or most intrepid chicks pecked through their shells. It caught me off guard; my fear of failing a second time had convinced me they’d turn out to be duds, like the first batch, but that afternoon, the incubator was teeming with life. The tiny birds were a wet mottled brown, dark as burnt toast in some places, sandy in others. Their markings resembled those of a tabby cat. They worked their way out of the eggs with a particular insistence, struggling, pausing, then resuming work until each egg had been scored with what looked like a lid. Then they stretched their small downy bodies and wriggled out. My father was right. It was remarkable to watch. I remembered my excitement, years before, at the yellow chicks and the baby calf at Mr. Gustafsson’s ranch, but never before had I witnessed another thing being born. They were mine, in a way, but I knew they weren’t, and I knew it was a little cruel that the birth of all these chicks should be attended solely by someone whose interest in them was at most fleeting and who could offer them little in the way of love or warmth or even safety, if those are indeed things that a chick is born seeking.

After all the other birds had hatched, I noticed there was one who had gotten most-way out of the shell but had fallen short of shaking the thing free. He struck me as stuck, exhausted, in need of help. I had succeeded at keeping all the others alive, or at staying out of the way of their surviving, and thought only that if this one last chick came through, I’d have a perfect record. If every last chick could hatch, perhaps the other eggs’ not hatching could be blamed on something other than me. I didn’t think of that last step—the chick shaking off the shell and stepping finally out of it—as a necessary rite of passage; it was merely something to be gotten past, the final obstacle to my own relief at having hatched
every last egg. My father would be pleased, and I’d feel redeemed. So I reached in to lift the cap of shell from the chick’s head. I would not be an alien observer but rather a mother, a protector. I’d carry the chick over the threshold and into life.

The shell stuck at first, as if what was left of the yolk had already started to harden. I was able to detach it with just a slight tug, but when I did, the chick slumped. Immediately, I felt a nervous unease. I wanted to watch what the chick did next, but I couldn’t bear to. So I did what I should have done in the first place, which was nothing. I stood up and walked down the stairs. Hurried, actually, wanting to get away from the feeling of what I’d done. I tried to busy myself beside my mother in the kitchen, but waves of guilt kept me from relaxing. I’d just committed a crime, and I couldn’t help wondering if anyone had seen me or if there was telltale blood on my hands.

That evening, I saw that the last chick had finally risen to its feet. The incubator was a flurry of activity, with the little birds hopping around and peeping at one another, but the bird I’d helped was hunched over, contorted, and the others ignored him. My father was home. When I showed him what had happened, he lifted the chick from the incubator and cupped him in his hands. There was something merciful but inevitable to the set of his shoulders as he carried the small thing away.

HUMOR

G
oing back to school happened the same way every year. Two weeks before the end of summer vacation, Mom would take me shopping for new clothes and a new pair of shoes, and then, on the first day, I’d make an initial assessment of the classroom in an attempt to get the lay of the land. In Mr. Samuels’s class, our desks were arranged in six-person clusters, like cans of soda.

Fifth grade was the year I started squinting at the chalkboard and getting headaches after school—like a white-hot ball stuck behind my eyes that sent me to my bed for hours at a time. The glasses I was eventually prescribed solved both problems, a pair with wire frames and plastic nose pads that kept me from having to push them up continually.

Fifth grade was also the year of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The TellTale Heart” and Farley Mowat’s
Never Cry Wolf
, of O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” We configured ourselves, cross-legged, into a big oval on the rug at the head of the classroom and answered Mr. Samuels’s questions about the previous night’s reading. Sometimes, we’d take turns reading passages aloud, so the story reached us as a chorus of familiar voices.

From the moment I saw it, sitting toward the bottom of a page in our reader, I couldn’t help but memorize a poem whose meter
had worked upon me quickly and in a way I didn’t quite yet understand. Its rhyme scheme cemented, for me, a new sense of inevitability, allowing the lines to slip easily into my ear and stay there:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one’s name—the livelong June—

To an admiring Bog!

Every now and then, when I was thinking about something altogether different, the first stanza of this poem, by Emily Dickinson, would pop into the front of my mind, drawing me into mischievous collusion with the speaker:
Then there’s a pair of us! / Don’t tell!
I liked the sense of privacy the poem seemed to urge, as if there is some part of everyone—like the imagination, the spirit, or whatever it is that gravitates toward the language of poetry—worth protecting from the world. It made me feel special, privy to magic, as if whoever was speaking had sought me out, discerning an affinity.