The Worlds Within Her (35 page)

SHE RESISTED PLACING
blame on her daughter. What blame there was surely belonged only to her and Jim.

How many little exchanges, the inconsequentia of daily life, had gone half-spoken or unshared during those years of interruption? How many threads left unspun? Was that when the silences began settling in, like little holes appearing in the web that bound them — with all the conversations that began
Guess what I read
or
heard
or
saw today
only to peter out into
Tell you later
— a later that never came?

From the soothing silences of nothing to be said to the sullen silences of words left unsaid: When had they exchanged one kind of silence for the other?

He did not call her. Instead he drove home, ashen, from the hospital.

And at home, he told in a voice gone insensible how he had driven up to the schoolyard, parked across the street.

How the teachers hadn't seen her.

How he hadn't seen her.

But how she had seen him. He told of the blur of her clothes catching his eye, and the sudden fear that came to him. That caused, perhaps, the seat belt to jam, his fingers beating useless at its mechanism.

How his attention was diverted by the seat belt. How he heard the squeal of brakes.

And looked up.

And up.

To see: “She was flying, Yas. Her coat open. Like wings. Flying,
like a bird. Her face — startled. No more than that. Startled. As if in wonder at this sudden flight.”

She drove as if crazed. She was not stopped. Had she been stopped, she did not know if she would have been able to make the policeman understand: that her daughter was at the hospital; that she had flown like a bird from the bumper of a car; that she had come down on her head, remaining miraculously unmarked except for a bruise where the neck had snapped.

That she had to cradle Ariana in her arms.

To comfort her for the last time.

Forever.

As her husband had not done.

CYRIL, WHO WAS
far better at such things than my husband, arranged the funeral. He did have a certain managerial ability, you know, but for the smaller things; politics was too large a sphere for him, he found it unmanageable. Two days later, under the direction of a pundit, they both performed the cremation ceremony.

I wish I could say that it had all the dignity befitting the circumstance. But I cannot. Someone — not Cyril or my husband, I am sure; most likely one of the hacks or hangers-on — arranged to get some political mileage out of it. Reporters and photographers clustered around the pyre like flies around excrement. Even family members were elbowed out of the way.

And afterwards, at a reception back at the house, the flashbulbs kept on popping as my husband — and only my husband — received condolences. Poor Cyril, who had arranged all of this, was off in the kitchen being consoled by Celia. I caught him at one point, you know — peering out at my husband standing there like a one-man receiving line. And watching him — watching the mixture of disbelief and resentment that marked his face — was for me, as strange as it may seem, the saddest moment of those sad days. That, I think, was when I learnt to be careful about underestimating Cyril.

When the newspapers ran photos in the coming days, you'd swear that it was only my husband who had lost his mother, and that everything — all the sadness, all the mourning, all the arrangements — had fallen on his shoulders alone.

Also, an almost imperceptible change came to my husband — near impossible to describe, in fact. Many words come to mind, none of them accurate in itself. But if one were to take a pinch of one, a smidgen of the other, and a whiff of the next … You see what I mean? A new dignity, a new strength, a heightened remoteness. An imperiousness you saw only swiftly, when his gaze shifted right or left. A sense of a heavy stillness that had lodged at the very centre of his being. My husband was never impetuous in action, and something — perhaps just an immeasurable lengthening of the pause before he spoke — told me that he was now no longer impetuous in thought either.

A few days later he put his hand on my shoulder and said with great seriousness, “I'm not afraid of death anymore.”

And you know, my dear, I wished he hadn't told me that. His words depressed me. For death, it seems to me, is something that should be feared. Not to fear it is to diminish life itself.

YASMIN REMEMBERS LOOKING
at her daughter run.

Remembers the jaunty, stiff-legged run of the toddler. The heedless abandon, the ragged sense of self.

Remembers thinking that one day her daughter would be graceful.

It was the sight of her mother that added another level of horror and grief.

Trembling in her embrace, cheek palpitated by the rugged beating of her mother's heart, Yasmin felt from behind a wind coursing through the hole ripped in time.

Its chill settled on the nape of her neck, a frigid blade vibrating a whistle of emptiness.

And for the second time in her life she was given knowledge of the infinite.

YOUR SON LOVES
you, does he not, Mrs. Livingston?

Ah, yes, my dear, it is plain to see — as plain as the pleasure that the thought gives you.

But do you have any inkling what he thinks of you as a mother? Would he hold you up as a paragon of motherhood, or would subtle resentments overwhelm his esteem?

You would say no, wouldn't you. Hmm, extraordinary …

As for Yasmin's view of me — a certain measure of selfawareness is among my acknowledged faults, as you well know. While I do not pretend to read all the shadows that inhabit Yasmin's heart, there is one that … that we share.

One that is of my own creation.

That is beyond my understanding.

Inexplicable.

It began the moment Yasmin held out to me her newborn baby —

Yes. My … my granddaughter.

The moment my fingers touched the swaddling blanket, there, in the hospital room. With the pink curtain drawn against the despair of the woman in the next bed and the nebula of bouquets that mocked her baby born premature and incomplete. With the bassinet at the foot of Yasmin's bed like a formation of rock crystal with a pillowed hollow. With my son-in-law on the other side of the bed, still in the grip of time arrested. There, as I took the baby in my arms, it came to me, this …

This … indifference.

You know, my dear, I am not generally given to regret. I regret in my life only those things before which I have found myself powerless. They are not many, but they remain open wounds, not suppurating but raw.

That indifference towards my granddaughter, you see, was to remain with me for the rest of her short life. Why it should have come to me I cannot say, and all those details of the moment remain with me in a way that suggests I am looking to them, and not to myself, for an explanation. I am looking, in other words, to place the blame on them because my muted feeling has always perplexed me so.

I played the role of grandmother to the best of my ability. I babysat her occasionally. Or rather, I watched her and she
watched me — we kept an eye on each other. I might help her complete a jigsaw puzzle or sharpen a crayon now and then. I made sure she never went hungry or thirsty. And at times when she was a toddler she would climb onto my lap and fall asleep — but this was always at her request, never at my bidding. I was not averse to it, just not enthusiastic. I gave gifts, of course, at the appropriate occasions. When I went visiting, it never occurred to me to bring along a treat — which upset Yasmin enough that, one day as we drove up to their house, she slipped me a bag of candy with which to surprise the girl. She was puzzled, Yasmin, and probably hurt, although we never spoke of it.

How does one explain it, my dear? How does one justify such detachment from one's own grandchild?

The girl was a charmer, you know. She fairly radiated happiness in her slightest movements. Rare was the time she would simply walk across a room. She skipped or she danced, and she cartwheeled across lawns, as if the energy of her happiness could barely be contained. It was the kind of childhood happiness that one envies, that one wishes would never be lost. And because of this, it was also the kind of energy that prompted more sober moments, for one could not help reflecting that life itself, circumstance, would cause it to diminish. Life, after all, is not a dance across a field.

But what perhaps imposed on those moments an even greater soberness was my realization that she reminded me of Yasmin before she lost her father, before she and I came alone to this land. That change — the suddenness of it, I assume — had heightened Yasmin's natural watchfulness. It had made her quieter —

Level-headed, you say? Yes, she has always been a thoughtful child. But that change, from exuberance to pensiveness, was marked. And one day I saw the promise of it in her daughter.

It was a little thing, really. She had not long been in school when she picked up that dreadful habit of nail-biting, which had plagued Yasmin well into her teens. I had finally succeeded in breaking Yasmin of the habit, and when I saw her daughter ripping at her nails with her teeth, I said to her with some exasperation: Am I going to have to break
you
of that habit too?

The little girl said nothing. she folded her hands on her lap and gave me a lengthy, saddened gaze that emerged from deep within, a gaze that was neither challenging nor rude but which managed to suggest that I had overstepped my bounds. I saw Yasmin so powerfully in her eyes — in her reflected understanding of the limits to our relationship — that I let things be. When I saw her again some weeks later her nails had grown back and her fingertips were no longer mangled, and I understood that the child, like Yasmin, married a capacity for joy to a capacity for sorrow to — most important of all — a capacity for moving on.

This was knowledge that would serve me well. When my son-in-law called with the dreadful news, my insides felt seared, my brain as if set afire by the setting sun. But all that conflagration of feeling was for Yasmin. For my granddaughter, beyond the painful knowledge of life severed too early, there was still this diffidence — strengthened, if anything, by the nature of the personality I had glimpsed.

I cannot tell you, my dear Mrs. Livingston, how deeply I continue to regret that strange lack of grandmotherly feeling, how deeply I hate that part of myself over which I have no influence.