The Bride of Catastrophe (16 page)

We howled, I laughed until I cried—tears of relief, really: Ma was back, not lost forever in the slough of despond. Sweetriver had been a nightmare, but now I was awake. We were all together and nothing else mattered. If we'd laughed earlier, we would have been counted as heartless, but now that Ma was happy, laughter was the only appropriate thing. It was proof we were family, that we all understood life the same way.

“At least there's no chicken,” Sylvie said in my ear. She was trying to stretch and lifted herself on an elbow, sticking her feet out Ma's window, and as we turned a sharp corner, one of her sandals flew off into a cow pasture.

“Now why would anyone put a fence so close to the road?” Ma asked, pulling over and backing up to the spot. The sandal with its thin white straps was on the wrong side of this fence, in the trampled muck. “This kind of thing must happen all the time.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

Sylvie found a stick and tried to fish over the barbed wire, while a mildly curious cow chewed lazily and watched her from a few feet away. “Such pretty shoes,” she said longingly. “That's not a bull, is it Ma?” It began to move toward us, maybe wondering if we had some corn.

“I'm going in,” Sylvie said, pulling two strands of wire apart and squeezing between them.

“A bull,” Teddy said—he was Ma's natural-born straight man—“has horns.”

“Some cows have horns too,” I pointed out, in my prim older-sister way.

“That's no cow,” Ma harumphed. What an idea, a scenario of hers, peopled by a mere cow!

“My hair!” Sylvie cried. She'd gotten through, but stood bent to the fence, her fine blond hair snagged in the barbs. Ma and I started trying to untangle it but it was painstaking work of the sort Ma had no patience for, and the cow had begun snorting in a remarkably bull-like manner.

“It's pawing the ground!” Ma said.

“Come back through,” I told Sylvie very calmly.

“I can't!”

“You have to.”

“It's going to charge!” Ma said, abandoning her work in laughter. “Look! This is like my whole life, isn't it?” she asked. “Caught in the barbed wire with a snorting bull about to…”

“Ma,
work
at it!”

“And still I can't help laughing! When my life, my whole life…”

“
My
life!
My
life, mother,” Sylvie said.

The bull or cow, unnerved by this creature with its three loud heads, had moved away from us and was looking off toward the valley, bashing away flies with its tail. Sylvie ripped her hair away from the barbs, grabbed the sandal, and flicked it out between two strands of wire, giving us a look of stubborn superiority, then climbed back through behind it.

“Why do these things only happen to
us
?” Ma asked.

The field curved over the top of a steep hill, from which we looked over the valley where those poor, beautiful, silly people had died in their little plane years ago, leaving their children to the fates. Now it was a settlement of ranch houses, and Ma flung her arms wide as if she expected that the people in those houses were all looking up at us. An audience confers respect on the thing it watches, gives it an extra measure of meaning. A mother feels her baby's forehead with the sympathy of the room around her, an old woman who has managed to pour tea in spite of her palsy knows her triumph is felt by all. All the excruciatingly ordinary crumbs, that one by one lead to the moment when you find your lump or whatever and begin earnestly to die: on stage they add up to something, they make their point. Then the velvet curtain closes, the squalid set is forgotten, the actors run out into the applause. Ma laughed in the sunlight—her life was as glorious as a truck full of fireworks at the moment the match is dropped. She might have seemed to rail against the heavens but in fact she was thanking them, preening before the gods.

Or before the people in the valley, it came to the same thing.

“These things only happen to us, Mother, because nobody else is trying to squeeze four big people into a Karmann Ghia,” I said. Other moms might have lovers, but I was sure they didn't jam their huge families into the sportscars those lovers inspired them to buy.

“I suppose you're right,” Ma said. “They have no joie de vivre.” She went wide-eyed with sadness, like a princess visiting the poor.

“Beatrice,” she said suddenly, “your knowledge, your wisdom is an amazement to me. I don't know where it comes from, but you say things I would never have thought of, you understand so much, honestly it's as if you were the mother and I were the child.” She blinked dazedly, smiling into the sun. A Volvo came around the bend with a family nicely belted in, and she eyed it with pity.

“No joie de vivre,” she repeated, gathering Sylvie and me in for the cast picture. Freedom had appeared to her suddenly; all the possibilities occluded by marriage—the loves, the professions, the plays she'd wanted to see, and the cities, cups of espresso, tangos, distant sails—they were out there. And we, as always, were filled with her feelings, here at the edge of the highway with the pasture arching up behind us, soft with timothy and buttercups and the yellow and orange flowers whose plain, clean smell meant summer to me, which Ma had called Indian paintbrush. In this as in everything she'd been wrong. “Hawkweed,” Ross had corrected me with curled lip. I had to sentimentalize everything, didn't I, but he knew the shabby truth. And there was no point in replying that my mother had taught me wrong because she didn't know right, and because she was determined to deliver me into an entirely beautiful world. I had to start from the beginning, learn everything over again.

*   *   *

“
HONESTLY, SYLVIE,
I have
never
been so frightened as when that bull started charging, it was just like Pamplona!” Ma was saying as we turned up the driveway at home. She had not of course been to Pamplona but
I
must see it, and Paris, and fame, fortune, love with a capital
L
, and
all
the splendors of which she (who had so richly deserved them) had been deprived.

“It didn't charge … and we don't even know it was a bull,” I said, but no one heard me. The house stood there forlorn, the paint not even peeling, just worn away, the screen door with its broken gingerbread, one window still boarded where the tree broke it three years ago, and books piled in a high jumble against another window so you knew no one ever opened it. Seeing this, you could tell there would be no freedom in this divorce, that my parents were bound not by marriage but by psychic disability.

The willow trees seemed to be pouring golden light into the brook, and my eyes stung with tears to think this had all been mine. I went up the front steps in a daze, as if I were going to meet a lover, but as I set my hand on the door Sylvie called out:

“You can't get in that way. It's stuck!” And indeed, the door hit some obstacle an inch or two in and wouldn't budge further. Teddy looked at me as if I'd just tried to walk through a wall, and Ma shook her head.

“I'd nearly forgotten there was a door there,” she said, laughing. A low yowling set up overhead: a gray cat, not one I recognized, was glowering down over the gutter at me.

“It's
this
way,” Teddy said self-importantly, a child playing grown-up. A child whose curls have been daily tousled, whose innocent observations have been repeated as bons mots, whose mother has breathlessly attended, for eight years, every movement of his face. A child like me.

“This is our goldfish pond,” he said, acting as tour guide, pointing to the cracked cement pool where I'd tried to keep a goldfish years ago. The water had leaked out and with it the fish: I found the poor thing gasping, wedged in a crevice, the next morning. We went around to the back.

“And that's the factory.”

The ping-pong balls—striped as novelties, yellow and orange, or red, white, and blue—were set out in the sun to dry like produce in a village market. Teddy gave one tray a knowing shake.

“They need turning every few hours or they fade,” he explained. “Now, there's the brook.”

“I used to live here myself, you know,” I said finally, but he seemed skeptical. He'd been four when I left for Sweetriver and I was a kind of ancestor to him, more legend than reality.

“There's a tear in the pen,” he said, stepping over a chicken to let me in the kitchen door. It was the same tear the chickens made use of when I was a child. The room was nearly empty and there was dust as thick as carpet where the sideboard had stood, grease stains furred with dust dripped down the wall by the stove, as if some awful truth of our lives was bubbling out from where we'd kept it hidden so long. Hope abandoned, a resignation to dirt, which, like failure, age, death, would creep over us, whether or not we fought it.

Walking into the living room with the late afternoon light slanting in felt like entering a chapel. They'd forgotten about the possibility of furniture; the piano was alone on the old blue carpet, an object of defiance like a boulder in the sea. My father's globe—the last thing from that solid place where Ma had fallen in love years ago—stood there, along with a papier-mâché sculpture Teddy had made in school. A leak along the west wall had peeled the paint off in strips and crumbled away the plaster so that insulation fell out between the laths, and the wide floorboards had warped and buckled, jamming the front door shut.

Ma had given up her piano lessons due to a foreboding about the instructor, who had not been sufficiently outraged about her job loss, and to Pop's sneering at her aspirations, which reminded her of Ivan the Terrible. She sank onto the bench now and rested her head on her arms, and Sylvie sat beside her, stroking her head.

“It's going to be okay,” she said. “Really, Ma,” but Ma shook her head, and, unable to speak, resorted to pageantry, folding up the piano cover and starting to play: “Lara's Theme.” Lush, doomy romanticism filled the room, the house, the world—it was Ma's sense of the tragic ruin of her life, a sense she carried with her and could inflate fully in an instant, like an air mattress, except that this felt more like a full-scale replica of the cathedral in Red Square, onion domes and all.

“Why is she doing that?” I asked.

“She does it all the time,” Sylvie said.

“It's deafening,”

“I think that's what she likes about it. Anyway it's kind of a step up from ‘Danny Boy,' and beside that, Chopin's ‘Funeral March' is the only other thing she knows.” We ran up the stairs to escape the visions of lovers torn from one another's arms, and ragged children scavenging in the snow.

“You can have my bed,” Sylvie said. “I've moved out, did Ma tell you?” She looked sweet and tender and very shy, the way she had when Pop had put the new lamb in her arms so long ago. “I'm … I … 'member Butchy Savione?”

“Sure,” I said, thinking of him hunched into his jacket, shouldering his way to the back of the school bus on a cold morning. I remembered Donna saying their dad “went too hard” on him—until one night when Butch hit him back, with a baseball bat.

Sylvie smiled joyfully. “Butch has his own place now and I moved in last week.”

“Sylvie…” I said. “Are you…?” She was sixteen years old. I'd never seen anyone give so much affection, or long for so much affection, as she did, with her broken-winged birds and orphaned rabbits and hangdog boys. The piano got louder—Pop and Dolly had just turned into the driveway.

“Where?” I asked, hoping I sounded happy for her.

“Back of the ball field, in the valley. I mean, it's a trailer—but, he
loves
me, Bea.” She said these magic words in a fervent whisper as if afraid they'd evaporate with the breath she spoke them on. Downstairs the music swelled—old women were breaking up their heirlooms for firewood; the enemy marched through the frozen streets.

“We're home!” my father called in a parody of cheer.

Ma kept playing. Pop knew, as I did not, that “Lara's Theme” was also my mother's theme for her motorcyclist, who lived behind the movie theater, where she had gone to see
Dr. Zhivago
for seven consecutive days, hoping she might bump into him. Night after night, she sat alone, her eyes, ears, heart filling with music and color and feeling, all of which she attributed to this boy, instead of to Boris Pasternak or David Lean. And later, by flashlight, she wrote letters confessing her passion and trying to explain why it seemed such a wonderful, vital thing, though she knew it must be wrong.

She had not, of course, sent these letters. If she had they'd never have reached the man they were truly intended for, the man whose love had proved such thin shelter from a world of Muscovite cold: my father, who discovered them in her lingerie drawer only slightly less promptly than if they'd come in the mail.

She'd thought he'd be filled with remorse—how could he have let her live in such poverty of feeling, for so long? His heart would sweep open, spilling tenderness.

But no, he'd been crushed and appalled.

*   *   *

“‘
WHEN YOU
looked in my eyes I felt as if something wonderful was pouring out of you into me'?”

Pop sat at the end of Sylvie's old bed, trying to give us his side of the story, quoting one of Ma's letters with incredulity. “That she could write such a thing, to a boy, her own student.” His voice was thin with grief and he repeated the words again and again as if hoping to dull them, as the music went on downstairs. She was playing with increasing violence, maybe hoping the music would change something. Her energy could have powered a mill, lit a city, defended a nation—but it was devoted to this, the larger-than-life-size model of her inner world, created to help us understand her. Did she need to play louder? All was lost, nobody loved her. She would live all her days in all the raging woe of a motherless child. The music reverberated through the whole empty, echoing house.