Small Wonder (18 page)

From this vantage point, a dot of nothingness in the center of my bed, I understand the vast ocean of work it is to be a woman among men, that universe of effort, futile whimpers against hard stones, and oh God I don't want it. My bones are weak. I am trapped in a room with no flowers, no light, a ceiling of lead so low I can never again straighten up. I don't want to live in this world.

I will be able to get up from this bed only if I can get up angry. Can you understand there is no other way? I have to be someone else. Not you, and not even me. Tomorrow or someday soon I will braid my long hair for the last time, go to my friend's house with a pair of sharp scissors, and tell her to cut it off. All of it. Tomorrow or someday soon I will feel that blade at my nape and the weight will fall.

 

Summer light, Beaurieux, France. At twenty-three I'm living in an enormous, centuries-old stone farmhouse with a dozen friends, talkative French socialists and a few British expatriates, all of us at some loose coupling in our lives between school and adulthood. We find a daily, happy solace in one another and in the scarlet poppies that keep blooming in the sugar-beet fields. We go out to work together in the morning and then come home in the evening to drink red table wine and make ratatouille in the cavernous stone-floored kitchen. This afternoon, a Saturday, a gaggle of us
have driven into town to hang out at the village's only electrified establishment, a tiny café. We are entrenched in a happy, pointless argument about Camus when the man wiping the counter answers the phone and yells,
“Mademoiselle Kingsolver? Quelque'un des Etats Unis!”

My heart thumps to a complete stop. Nobody from the United States can possibly know where I am. I haven't written to my parents for many months, since before I moved to France. I rise and sleepwalk to the telephone, knowing absolutely that it will be you, my
mother,
and it is. I still have no idea how you found me; I can hardly even remember our conversation. I must have told you I was alive and well, still had all my arms and legs—what else was there for me to say? You told me that my brother was getting married and I ought to come home for the wedding.

Ma mere!
This is what I tell my friends, with a shrug, when I return to the table. I tell them you probably called out the French Foreign Legion to find me. Everybody laughs and declares that mothers are all alike: They love us too much, they are a cross to bear, they all ought to find their own things to do and leave us alone. We pay for our coffee and amble toward somebody's car, but I decide on impulse I'll walk back to the farm. I move slowly, turning over and over in my mind the telephone's ringing, the call that was for me. In France, a tiny town, the only café, a speck of dust on the globe. Already it seems impossible that this really happened. The roadside ditch is brilliant with poppies, and as I walk along I am hugging myself so hard I can barely breathe.

 

I'm weeding the garden. You admired my garden a lot when you came to visit me here in Tucson, in this small brick house of my own. We fought, of course. You didn't like my involvement with Central American refugees, no matter how I tried to talk you
through the issues of human rights and our government's support of a dictatorship in El Salvador. Even more, you didn't like it that I was living in this little brick house with a man, unmarried. But you did admire my vegetable garden, and the four-o'clocks in the front yard, you said, were beautiful. The flowers were our common ground. They'll attract hummingbirds, you told me, and we both liked that.

On this day I am alone, weeding the garden, and a stranger comes to the door. He doesn't look well, and he says he needs a glass of water, so I go to the kitchen. When I turn around from the sink, there he is, with a knife shoved right up against my belly.

Don't scream or I'll kill you.

But I do scream. Scream, slap, bite, kick, shove my knee into his stomach. I don't know what will happen next, but I know this much: It's not going to be my fault. You were partly wrong and partly right; bad things are bound to happen, but this hateful supremacy that sometimes shoves itself against me is
not
my fault. You've held on to me this long, so I must be someone worth saving against the odds. When I can finally tell you that, I know you will agree with me. So this time I scream. I scream for all I'm worth.

 

I'm somewhere between thirty and a hundred, and I've written a book. My first novel, but to me it seems more like the longest letter to you I've ever written. Finally, after a thousand tries, I've explained everything I believe in, exactly the way I always wanted to: human rights, Central American refugees, the Problem That Has No Name, abuse of the powerless, racism, poetry, freedom, childhood, motherhood, Sisterhood Is Powerful. All that, and still some publisher has decided it makes a good story.

But that doesn't matter right now, because you are on my
front-porch glider turning the pages one at a time, and it's only a stack of paper. The longest typed letter ever, a fistful of sweet peas, the world's largest pile of crayoned hearts. I'm supposed to be cooking dinner but I keep looking out the window, trying to see what page you're on now, trying to read your thoughts from the back of your head. All I can see is that you're still reading, and your hair is gray. In another few minutes mine will be, too. My heart is pounding. I boil water and peel the potatoes but forget to put them in the pot. I salt the water twice. At last you come in with tears in your eyes.

Barb, honey, it's beautiful. So good.

You fold me into your arms, and I can't believe it: I still fit. Or I fit once again.

 

I'm thirty-two, with my own daughter in my arms. I've sent you a picture of her, perfect and gorgeous in her bassinette. Her tiny hand is making a delicate circle, index finger to thumb, pinkie extended as if she were holding a teacup. How could my ferocious will create such a delicate, feminine child?
This one is all girl,
I write on the back, my daughter's first caption. You send back a photo of me at the same age, eight weeks, in my bassinette. I can't believe it: I am making a delicate circle with my hand, index finger to thumb, pinkie extended.

 

We've flown back to Kentucky for Christmas. I'm thirty-seven but feeling weirdly transported backward. For all the years I've been away from my hometown, Main Street is perfectly unchanged. The commercial district is set off by a stoplight on either end of a single block: hardware store, men's clothing, five-and-dime, drug
store, county jail. An American flag made of red, white, and blue light bulbs (some of them burned out) blinks to life on the court-house's peeling silver dome at dusk. Who on earth was I, in the years I called this place home?

I've come into town to run a few errands, and to tell the truth, it's a relief to take a few hours' respite from a house overstuffed with Christmas decorations and sugary fruitcakes, a kitchen stifling from an overworked oven, and hugs at every turn. How did I ever live
there?
My own life is so different now. So pared down. In fact, I haven't found a way to tell you this, but my marriage is slowly dying, and I will soon be on my own again—this time next year I'll be a single mother. I am handling this, I cope. I stop in at Hopkins' Drug to get something for my daughter's cough. The bell over the door jingles, and I wave a leather-gloved hand at Mr. Hopkins, still filling prescriptions at the back of the store. I tell him yes, I'm home visiting, and ask what he recommends for my daughter. She picked up a cold on the trip; she hasn't been sick many times in her life, so I'm worried, but only a little. In my tweed winter coat and convenient shoulder-length haircut I feel competent and slightly rushed, as usual. A woman of my age.

An elderly woman I don't recognize stops me with an arthritic hand across my wrist as I'm about to leave the drugstore. Her eyes swim toward me like dark fish as she eyes me through thick glasses, up and down.
You must be Virginia Kingsolver's daughter. You look exactly like her.

 

My nine-year-old daughter comes home from a summer slumber party with painted nails, and I mean
painted
. Day-Glo green on the fingers, purple on the toes. We drive to the drugstore for nail-polish remover.

Please! All the girls my age are doing this.

How can every nine-year-old on the planet possibly be painting her toenails purple?

I don't know. They just are.

School starts in a week. Do you want to be known by your teacher as the girl with the green fingernails?

Yes. But I guess
you
don't.

Do you really?

She looks down at her nails and states:
Yes.
With her porcelain skin and long, dark lashes, she is a Raphael cherub. Her perfect mouth longs to pout, but she resists, holds her back straight. A worthy vessel for her own opinions. Despite myself, I admire her.

OK, we'll compromise. The green comes off. But keep the purple toenails
.

 

At forty, I'm expecting my second child. Through my years of being coupled and then alone, years of accepting my fate and then the astonishing chance of remarriage, I've waited a lifetime for this gift: a second child. But now it is past due, and I am impatient. I conceived in late September and now it's July. I have dragged this child in my belly through some portion of every month but August. In the summer's awful heat I am a beached whale, a house full of water, a universe with ankles. It seems entirely possible to me that the calendar will close and I will somehow be bound fairy-tale-wise to a permanent state of pregnancy.

During these months you and I have talked more often than ever before. Through our long phone conversations I've learned so many things: that you fought for natural childbirth all three times, a rebel against those patronizing doctors who routinely knocked women out with drugs. In the fifties, formula was said to be modern and breast-feeding crude and old-fashioned, but you
ignored the wagging fingers and did what you and I both know was best for your babies.

I've also learned that ten-month pregnancies run in our family.

When your sister was two weeks overdue, I made Wendell drive over every bumpy road in the county.

Did it work?

No. With you, we were in Maryland. We drove over to see the cherry blossoms on the Capitol Mall in April, and Wendell said, “What if you go into labor while we're hours away from home?” I told him, “I'll sing Hallelujah.”

A week past my due date you are calling every day. Steven answers the phone, holds it up, and mouths, “Your mother again.” He thinks you may be bugging me. You aren't. I am a woman lost in the weary sea of waiting, and you are the only one who really knows where I am. Your voice is keeping me afloat. I grab the phone.

 

She is born at last. A second daughter. I cry on the phone, I'm so happy and relieved to have good news for you, finally. I promise you we'll send pictures right away. You will tell me she looks just like I did. She looks like her father, but I will believe you anyway.

Later on when it's quiet I nurse our baby, admiring her perfect hands. Steven is in a chair across the room, and I'm startled to look up and find he is staring at us with tears in his eyes. I've seen him cry only once before.

What's wrong?

Nothing. I'm just so happy.

I love him inordinately. I could not bear to be anyone but his wife just now. I could not bear to be anyone but the mother of my daughters.

 

I was three years old, standing in the driveway waiting for the car to bring you back from Florida. You arrived glowing with happiness.
Because of me
. I felt stung, thinking you could carry on your life of bright-red lipstick smiles outside of my presence, but I know now I was wrong. You looked happy
because of me
. You hadn't seen me for more than a week, hadn't nursed me for years, and yet your breasts tingled before you opened the car door. The soles of your feet made contact with the ground, and your arms opened up as you walked surefooted once again into the life you knew as my mother. I know exactly how you felt. I am your happiness. It's a cross I am willing to bear.

M
y great-aunt Zelda went to Japan and took an abacus, a bathysphere, a conundrum, a diatribe, an eggplant. That was a game we used to play. All you had to do was remember everything in alphabetical order. Right up to Aunt Zelda.

Then I grew up and was actually invited to go to Japan, not with the fantastic Aunt Zelda but as myself. As such, I had no idea what to take. I knew what I planned to be doing: researching a story about the memorial at Hiroshima; visiting friends; trying not to get lost in a place where I couldn't even read the street signs. Times being what they were—
any
times—I intended to do my very best to respect cultural differences, avoid sensitive topics I might not comprehend, and, in
short, be anything but an Ugly American. When I travel, I like to try to blend in. I've generally found it helps to be prepared. So I asked around, and was warned to expect a surprisingly modern place.

My great-aunt Zelda went to Japan and took Appliances, Battery packs, Cellular technology…. That seemed to be the idea.

And so it came to pass that I arrived in Kyoto an utter foreigner, unprepared. It's true that there are electric streetcars there, and space-age gas stations with uniformed attendants who rush to help you from all directions at once. There are also golden pagodas on shimmering lakes, and Shinto shrines in the forests. There are bamboo groves and nightingales. And finally there are more invisible guidelines for politeness than I could fathom. When I stepped on a streetcar, a full head taller than all the other passengers, I became an awkward giant. I took up too much space. I blended in like Igor would blend in with the corps de ballet in
Swan Lake
. I bumped into people. I crossed my arms when I listened, which turns out to be, in Japanese body language, the sign for indicating brazenly that one is bored.

But I wasn't! I was struggling through my days and nights in the grip of boredom's opposite—i.e., panic. I didn't know how to eat noodle soup with chopsticks, and I did it most picturesquely
wrong
. I didn't know how to order, so I politely deferred to my hosts and more than once was served a cuisine with heads, including eyeballs. I managed to wrestle these creatures to my lips with chopsticks, but it was already too late by the time I got the message that
one does not spit out anything.

I undertook this trip in high summer, when it is surprisingly humid and warm in southern Japan. I never imagined that in such sweltering heat women would be expected to wear stockings, but every woman in Kyoto wore nylon stockings. Coeds in shorts
on the tennis court
wore nylon stockings. I had packed only skirts and sandals; people averted their eyes.

When I went to Japan I took my Altitude, my Bare-naked legs, my Callous foreign ways. I was mortified.

My hosts explained to me that the Japanese language does not accommodate insults, only infinite degrees of apology. I quickly memorized an urgent one,
“Sumimasen,”
and another for especially extreme cases,
“Moshi wake gozaimasen.”
This translates approximately to mean, “If you please, my transgression is so inexcusable that I wish I were dead.”

I needed these words. When I touched the outside surface of a palace wall, curious to know what it was made of, I set off screeching alarms and a police car came scooting up the lawn's discreet gravel path. “
Moshi wake gozaimasen,
Officer! Wish I were dead!” And in the public bath, try as I might, I couldn't get the hang of showering with a hand-held nozzle while sitting fourteen inches from a stranger. I sprayed my elderly neighbor with cold water. In the face.

“Moshi wake gozaimasen,”
I declared, with feeling.

She merely stared, dismayed by the foreign menace.

I visited a Japanese friend, and in her small, perfect house I spewed out my misery. “Everything I do is wrong!” I wailed like a child. “I'm a blight on your country.”

“Oh, no,” she said calmly. “To forgive, for us, is the highest satisfaction. To forgive a foreigner, ah! Even better.” She smiled. “You have probably made many people happy here.”

To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from one shore to another, or even know where the mist has ceded to landfall. When I finally arrived at Ground Zero in Hiroshima, I stood speechless. What I found there was a vast and exquisitely silent monument to forgiveness. I was moved beyond words, even beyond tears, to think of all that can be lost or gained in the gulf
between any act of will and its consequences. In the course of every failure of understanding, we have so much to learn.

I remembered my Japanese friend's insistence on forgiveness as the highest satisfaction, and I understood it really for the first time: What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.

I have walked among men and made mistakes without number. When I went to Japan I took my Abject goodwill, my Baleful excuses, my Cringing remorse. I couldn't remember everything, could not even recite the proper alphabet. So I gave myself away instead, evidently as a kind of public service. I prepared to return home feeling empty-handed.

At the Osaka Airport I sat in my plane on the runway, waiting to leave for terra cognita, as the aircraft's steel walls were buffeted by the sleet and winds of a typhoon. We waited for an hour, then longer, with no official word from the cockpit, and then suddenly our flight was canceled. Air traffic control in Tokyo had been struck by lightning; no flights possible until the following day.

“We are so sorry,” the pilot told us. “You will be taken to a hotel, fed, and brought back here for your flight tomorrow.”

As we passengers rose slowly and disembarked, we were met by an airline official who had been posted in the exit port for the sole purpose of saying to each and every one of us, “Terrible, terrible.
Sumimasen
.” Other travelers nodded indifferently, but not me. I took the startled gentleman by the hands and practically kissed him.

“You have no idea,” I told him, “how thoroughly I forgive you.”