Sacred Time (37 page)

“But he'd remind you that you only quote the Bible to win an argument.”

For a moment, we're both smiling. And I see my father
arch his throat while she strokes his neck, see them lean close to each other, whispering, laughing. And I see him across the table from me at Hung Min's, playing backgammon, his eyes on the board and on the lined face of his opponent, while I pour tea for all of us into tiny cups, stirring three spoonfuls of sugar into each.

“The instructor says ninety percent of self-defense is attitude…how I carry myself.”

“Attitude? I thought it was BLT or whatever.”

“Not BLT, Daddy. TSC. Timing, surprise, and calm.”

“Right,” my mother says. “And attitude is what leads you to TSC.”

“Then why isn't it ATSC?”

“You're looking for disagreement.”

“I'm looking for security. Security for you. Can't you take some other kind of class that would make you feel stronger? Something like…aerobics? Just make sure it's low-impact. Yoga would be even better.”

“Yoga doesn't kick ass, Daddy. Grandma does.”

I ignore Joey. “One of Ida's customers—she's in her mid-eighties—took up low-impact aerobics a few years ago. She bought several books on aerobics, and she's walking better now than she did back then.”

“I'm walking just fine.” My mother looks at me, steadily. “Please, listen. Remember the example I gave you about a parent hurting a child, making the child afraid?”

“I remember.”

“I'm that child.”

I am still, cold. The sky is motionless. And I stand in front of her, defenseless, while my shadow lies on her face.

“I have been beaten. Many times. Brutally.”

My son is still holding my mother's arms. While I'm afraid of knowing…afraid of not knowing.

“It happened over the span of four years…before my father com—Before he died.”

Joey moves one hand up her arm. Strokes her shoulder.

“Working as a prison guard changed him…made him brutal.”

“God—I'm sorry….” I want to hold my mother, but my shadow still lies on her face. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“It's not the kind of thing you tell your son.” She keeps herself so straight and brittle that I don't dare touch her.

But Joey dares. Joey keeps stroking her shoulder.

“I'm so sorry.”

Joey curves one arm around my mother's shoulders. And now the two of them are facing me. I feel separate from them. Linked only to this grandfather—both of us causing harm—and as I wonder what malice I've inherited from him, I feel dizzy. I've only seen one photo of him, in a uniform, angular and somber, as if getting ready for his appendix to burst. My mother rarely talked about him. But now, in telling me about the beatings, she's ripping me far open. How can I possibly hold on to my secrets any longer? I try to hear what they're saying, my son and my mother.

“I wish I had known self-defense when I was a girl.”

“Would you have used it, Grandma?”

“Oh yes,” she says without hesitation.

“On your own father?” Joey asks her, but he's staring at me with his new defiance.

“He shot himself,” she says. “He stuck his gun into his mouth instead of going into the prison for one more day of guard duty. I didn't find out till I was twenty.”

And suddenly I have my arms around her, and we're both rocking, back and forth.

“My mother said he wasn't like that when she married him….”

Rocking, back and forth and back and forth, crying now.

“As a girl, I believed what had really burst inside my father was not his appendix but his rage. Because that's what I wished on him whenever I was beneath his fists, that his rage would explode inside his body and kill him. Then it happened…and I felt powerful and guilty and grateful that the rage had killed him. And not me. Because it could have.”

I tighten my arms around her.

“Sometimes I tell myself that my father was just a poor schmuck inside his private hell, who struck at me, was afraid of being found out, and threatened. Compliance by fear. It works.”

“But you don't have to defend yourself against him ever again. All that is over.”

“It is never over.” She steps away. “It is never over, Anthony. Because any new terror will attach itself to your earliest fear, and once you walk with fear—”

“But I want you safe.”

“You don't get it, do you?” my mother says softly. She takes me by the wrist. Leads me outside. “Put both hands around my neck.”

“Mother—”

She grasps my hands, studies my palms as if estimating my life-line, and places my fingers around her neck.

Beneath my hands, her bones feel fragile.

Her skin is papery.

It might tear.

Slip off.

Her lips move. “Tighter,” she says.

I feel huge.

And as dangerous as the evening I lured Bianca into flying.

My mother—my tiny, old mother—lifts her right arm. She points toward the cloudless sky and pivots to the left, breaking my hold. Her elbow swings toward me. But this time she does not stop. In her swing, I feel her rage at having lost me to the silence, and as she lets her elbow crash into my sternum and jab up beneath my rib cage, it comes to me that she knows about Bianca, that she's known forever how I pushed at Bianca with my words to fly, and that nothing since has been as thrilling and horrifying for me as that moment I knew Bianca was about to fly.

And now
I
fall.

Fall toward the smell of cut grass. Fall toward a startling release at both of us knowing, toward the possibility of going with my mother to that first fear of mine, toward the possibility of redemption, desire even. Fall into wanting.

Fall so hard that it rushes back at me, slams into me, the wanting. And I dare to want Ida. Dare to want our lost stories coming back into my family. Dare to
stand in front of our old apartment building and stare up at our kitchen windows, one open, one smeared with glass wax, while Bianca spins toward me—languid and beyond all time—spins and pivots, slow-moving like a dazed star, her cape flitting around her. While I pray. Pray for that pulse-beat of mercy when both windows remain closed while Bianca applies television-perfect glass-wax decorations. Pray that—beyond Bianca in our kitchen—my mother and Aunt Floria dance, their faces close as if they spent all their waking hours practicing together. Pray that Riptide Grandma and Great-Aunt Camilla join them, that my father and grandfather and Uncle Malcolm clap their hands and chant, “The tango…Do the tango,” while Aunt Floria dips my mother so far back that her black hair sweeps the floor. Snow spins around my ankles while I pray for my mother and Aunt Floria to keep dancing, the glass-wax ornaments a pale flicker across their dark dresses as they reach for me and pull me into their circle,
but when I look up, it's the sun that's spinning, not snow, spinning around my mother, who stands above me, fists raised, feet planted in her fighting stance, staging her fullest and all-out fight for my soul.