An Annie Dillard Reader (17 page)

O
UR PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS, AND
all their friends, seemed insensible to their own prominent defect, their limp, coarse skin.

We children had, for instance, proper hands; our fluid, pliant fingers joined their skin. Adults had misshapen, knuckly hands loose in their skin like bones in bags; it was a wonder they could open jars. They were loose in their skins all over, except at the wrists and ankles, like rabbits.

We were whole, we were pleasing to ourselves. Our crystalline eyes shone from firm, smooth sockets; we spoke in pure, piping voices through dark, tidy lips. Adults were coming apart, but they neither noticed nor minded. My revulsion was rude, so I hid it. Besides, we could never rise to the absolute figural splendor they alone could on occasion achieve. Our beauty was a mere absence of decrepitude; their beauty, when they had it, was not passive but earned; it was grandeur; it was a party to power, and to artifice, even, and to knowledge. Our beauty was, in the long run, merely elfin. We could not, finally, discount the fact that in some sense they owned us, and they owned the world.

Mother let me play with one of her hands. She laid it flat on a living-room end table beside her chair. I picked up a transverse pinch of skin over the knuckle of her index finger and let it drop. The pinch didn't snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge. I poked it; it slid over intact. I left it there as an experiment and shifted to another finger. Mother was reading
Time
magazine.

Carefully, lifting it by the tip, I raised her middle finger an inch and released it. It snapped back to the tabletop. Her
insides, at least, were alive. I tried all the fingers. They all worked. Some I could lift higher than others.

“That's getting boring.”

“Sorry, Mama.”

I refashioned the ridge on her index-finger knuckle; I made the ridge as long as I could, using both my hands. Moving quickly, I made parallel ridges on her other fingers—a real mountain chain, the Alleghenies; Indians crept along just below the ridgetops, eyeing the frozen lakes below them through the trees.

 

Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.

I loved this thought, and repeated it for myself often. I don't know where I got it; my parents cited Adam and Eve only in jokes. Someday I would count the trapezoids, with the aid of a mirror, and learn precisely how many dust specks Adam comprised—one single handful God wetted, shaped, blew into, and set firmly into motion and left to wander about in the fabulous garden, bewildered.

 

The skin on my mother's face was smooth, fair, and tender; it took impressions readily. She napped on her side on the couch. Her face skin pooled on the low side; it piled up in the low corners of her deep-set eyes and drew down her lips and cheeks. How flexible was it? I pushed at a puddle of it by her nose.

She stirred and opened her eyes. I jumped back.

She reminded me not to touch her face while she was sleeping. Anybody's face.

When she sat up, her cheek and brow bone bore a deep red gash, the mark of a cushion's welting. It was textured inside precisely with the upholstery's weave and brocade.

Another day, after a similar nap, I spoke up about this gash. I told her she had a mark on her face where she'd been sleeping.

“Do I?” she said; she ran her fingers through her hair. Her hair was short, blond, and wavy. She wore it swept back from her high, curved forehead. The skin on her forehead was both tight and soft. It would only barely shift when I tried to move it. She went to the kitchen. She was not interested in the hideous mark on her face. “It'll go away,” I said. “What?” she called.

 

I noticed the hair on my father's arms and legs; each hair sprang from a dark dot on his skin. I lifted a hair and studied the puckered tepee of skin it pulled with it. Those hairs were in there tight. The greater the strain I put on the hair, the more puckered the tepee became, and shrunken within, concave. I could point it every which way.

“Ouch! Enough of that.”

“Sorry, Daddy.”

 

At the beach I felt my parents' shinbones. The bones were flat and curved, like the slats in a venetian blind. The long edges were sharp as swords. But they had unexplained and, I thought, possibly diseased irregularities: nicks, bumps, small hard balls, shallow ridges, and soft spots. I was lying between my parents on an enormous towel through which I could feel the hot sand.

Loose under their shinbones, as in a hammock, hung the relaxed flesh of their calves. You could push and swing this like a baby in a sling. Their heels were dry and hard, sharp at the curved edge. The bottoms of their toes had flattened, holding the imprint of life's smooth floors even when they were lying down. I would not let this happen to me. Under certain conditions, the long bones of their feet showed under their skin. The bones rose up long and miserably thin in skeletal rays on the slopes of their feet. This terrible sight they ignored also.

 

In fact, they were young. Mother was twenty-two when I was born, and Father twenty-nine; both appeared to other adults much younger than they were. They were a handsome couple. I felt it overwhelmingly when they dressed for occasions. I never lost a wondering awe at the transformation of an
everyday, tender, nap-creased mother into an exalted and dazzling beauty who chatted with me as she dressed.

Her blue eyes shone and caught the light, and so did the platinum waves in her hair and the pearls at her ears and throat. She was wearing a black dress. The smooth skin on her breastbone rent my heart, it was so familiar and beloved; the black silk bodice and the simple necklace set off its human fineness. Mother was perhaps a bit vain of her long and perfect legs, but not too vain for me; despite her excited pleasure, she did not share my view of her beauty.

“Look at your father,” she said. We were all in the dressing room. I found him in one of the long mirrors, where he waggled his outthrust chin over the last push of his tie knot. For me he made his big ears jiggle on his skull. It was a wonder he could ever hear anything; his head was loose inside him.

Father's enormousness was an everyday, stunning fact; he was taller than everyone else. He was neither thin nor stout; his torso was supple, his long legs nimble. Before the dressing-room mirror he produced an anticipatory soft-shoe, and checked to see that his cuffs stayed down.

Now they were off. I hoped they knocked them dead; I hoped their friends knew how witty they were, and how splendid. Their parties at home did not seem very entertaining, although they laughed loudly and often fetched the one-man percussion band from the basement, or an old trumpet, or a snare drum. We children could have shown them how to have a better time. Kick the Can, for instance, never palled. A private game called Spider Cow, played by the Spencer children, also had possibilities: The spider cow hid and flung a wet washcloth at whoever found it, and erupted from hiding and chased him running all over the house.

But implicitly and emphatically, my parents and their friends were not interested. They never ran. They did not choose to run. It went with being old, apparently, and having their skin half off.

T
HERE WAS A BIG SNOW
that same year, 1950. Traffic vanished; in the first week, nothing could move. The mailman couldn't get to us; the milkman couldn't come. Our long-legged father walked four miles with my sled to the dairy across Fifth Avenue and carried back milk for the neighborhood.

We had a puppy, who was shorter than the big snow. Our parents tossed it for fun in the yard and it disappeared, only to pop up somewhere else at random like a loon in a lake. After a few days of this game, the happy puppy went crazy and died. It had distemper. While it was crazy it ran around the house crying, upstairs and down.

 

One night during the second week of the big snow I saw Jo Ann Sheehy skating on the street. I remembered this sight for its beauty and strangeness.

I was aware of the Sheehy family; they were Irish Catholics from a steep part of the neighborhood. One summer when I was walking around the block, I had to walk past skinny Tommy Sheehy and his fat father, who were hunched on their porch doing nothing. Tommy's eleven-year-old sister, Jo Ann, brought them iced tea.

“Go tell your maid she's a nigger,” Tommy Sheehy said to me.

What?

He repeated it, and I did it, later, when I got home. That night, Mother came into our room after Amy was asleep. She explained, and made sure I understood. She was steely. Where had my regular mother gone? Did she hate me? She told me a passel of other words that some people use for other people. I was never to use such words, and never to associate with people
who did, so long as I lived; I was to apologize to Margaret Butler first thing in the morning; and I was to have no further dealings with the Sheehys.

 

The night Jo Ann Sheehy skated on the street, it was dark inside our house. We were having dinner in the dining room—my mother, my father, my younger sister Amy, and I. There were lighted ivory candles on the table. The only other light inside was the blue fluorescent lamp over the fish tank, on a sideboard. Inside the tank, neon tetras, black mollies, and angelfish circled, illumined, through the light-shot water. When I turned the fluorescent lamp off, I had learned, the fish still circled their tank in the dark. The still water in the tank's center barely stirred.

Now we sat in the dark dining room, hushed. The big snow outside, the big snow on the roof, silenced our words and the scrape of our forks and our chairs. The dog was gone, the world outside was dangerously cold, and the big snow held the houses down and the people in.

Behind me, tall chilled windows gave out onto the narrow front yard and the street. A motion must have caught my mother's eye; she rose and moved to the windows, and Father and I followed. There we saw the young girl, the transfigured Jo Ann Sheehy, skating alone under the streetlight.

She was turning on ice skates inside the streetlight's yellow cone of light—illumined and silent. She tilted and spun. She wore a short skirt, as if Edgerton Avenue's asphalt had been the ice of an Olympic arena. She wore mittens and a red knitted cap below which her black hair lifted when she turned. Under her skates the street's packed snow shone; it illumined her from below, the cold light striking her under her chin.

I stood at the tall window, barely reaching the sill; the glass fogged before my face, so I had to keep moving or hold my breath. What was she doing out there? Was everything beautiful so bold? I expected a car to run over her at any moment: the open street was a fatal place, where I was forbidden to set foot.

Once, the skater left the light. She winged into the blackness beyond the streetlight and sped down the street; only her
white skates showed, and the white snow. She emerged again under another streetlight, in the continuing silence, just at our corner stop sign where the trucks' brakes hissed. Inside that second cone of light she circled backward and leaning. Then she reversed herself in an abrupt half-turn—as if she had skated backward into herself, absorbed her own motion's impetus, and rebounded from it; she shot forward into the dark street and appeared again becalmed in the first streetlight's cone. I exhaled; I looked up. Distant over the street, the night sky was moonless and foreign, a frail, bottomless black, and the cold stars speckled it without moving.

 

This was for many years the center of the maze, this still, frozen evening inside, the family's watching through glass the Irish girl skate outside on the street. Here were beauty and mystery outside the house, and peace and safety within. I watched passive and uncomprehending, as in summer I watched Lombardy poplar leaves turn their green sides out, and then their silver sides out—watched as if the world were a screen on which played interesting scenes for my pleasure. But there was danger in this radiant sight, in the long glimpse of the lone girl skating, for it was night, and killingly cold. The open street was fatal and forbidden. And the apparently invulnerable girl was Jo Ann Sheehy, Tommy Sheehy's sister, part of the Sheehy family, whose dark ways were a danger and a crime.

“Tell your maid she's a nigger,” he had said, and when I said to Margaret, “You're a nigger,” I had put myself in danger—I felt at the time, for Mother was so enraged—of being put out, tossed out in the cold, where I would go crazy, and die, like the dog.

 

That night Jo Ann alone outside in the cold had performed recklessly. My parents did not disapprove; they loved the beauty of it, and the queerness of skating on a street. The next morning I saw from the dining-room windows the street shrunken again and ordinary, tracked by tires, and the streetlights inconspicuous, and Jo Ann Sheehy walking to school in a blue plaid skirt.

W
HEN SHE WAS IN HER
twenties, my mother's taste ran to modernism. In our living room on Edgerton Avenue we had a free-form blond coffee table, Jean Arp style, shaped something like a kidney and also something like a boomerang. Over a heat register Mother hung a black iron Calder-like mobile. The mobile's disks spun and orbited slowly before a window all winter when the heat was on, and replaced for me the ensorcellizing waving of tree leaves. On the wall above the couch she hung a large print of Gauguin's
Fatata te miti;
those enormous rounded women, with their muscular curving backs, sat before a blue river in a flat and speckled jungle. On an end table she placed the first piece of art she ever bought: a Yoruba wood sculpture, a long-headed abstract woman with pointy breasts and a cold coil of wire around her neck.

 

Mother must have cut a paradoxical figure in her modernist living room, with her platinum-blond hair, her brisk motions, her slender, urbane frame, her ironic wit (one might even say “lip”)—and her wee Scotticisms. “Sit you doon,” Mother said cordially to guests. If the room was too bright, she asked one of us to douse the glim. When we were babies, she bade each of us in turn, “Put your wee headie down.” If no one could locate Amy when she was avoiding her nap, it was because she'd found herself a hidey-hole. Sometimes after school we discovered in our rooms a wee giftie. If Mother wanted a favor, she asked, heartrendingly, “Would you grant me a boon?”

This was all the more remarkable because Mother was no more Scotch, or Scotch-Irish, than the Pope. She was, if anyone cared to inquire, Pennsylvania Dutch and French. But the Pittsburgh in which we lived—and that Pittsburgh only—was so
strongly Scotch-Irish it might have been seventeenth-century Donegal; almost all old Pittsburgh families were Scotch-Irish. Scotticisms fairly flew in the air. And Mother picked up every sort of quaint expression.

She delighted in using queer nouns from the mountains, too. Her family hailed from Somerset, the mountain-county seat near Pittsburgh: Whiskey Rebellion country. They were pretty well educated, but they heard plenty of mountain terms.

“Where's the woolly brush?” “I need a gummy”—that is, a gum band, or rubber band. She keenly enjoyed these archaisms, and whenever she used one, she stopped enthusiastically in midsentence to list the others: “And do you know what a poke is?” We did indeed.

Her speech was an endlessly interesting, swerving path of old punch lines, heartfelt cris de coeur, puns new and old, dramatic true confessions, challenges, witty one-liners, wee Scotticisms, tag lines from Frank Sinatra songs, obsolete mountain nouns, and moral exhortations.

“I'll show him,” she'd say. “I'll show him which way the bear went through the buckwheat. It'll be Katy-bar-the-door around here.” “He'll be gone,” Father would add wistfully, “where the woodbine twineth.”

 

Mother woke Amy and me in the mornings by dashing into our room, wrenching aside the window curtains, cranking open our old leaded windows, shouting mysteriously, “It smells like a French whorehouse in here,” and dashing out. When we got downstairs we might find her—that same morning—sitting half asleep, crumpled-of-skin in her soft bathrobe, staring at her foot in its slipper, or even with her eyes closed. If we began to whisper, we soon heard her murmur affectionately if unconvincingly into her bathrobe collar, “I'm awake.”

She moved vigorously, laughed easily, spoke rapidly and boldly, and analyzed with restless force. Her moods shifted; her utterances changed key and pitch. She was fond of ending any long explanation with the sudden, puzzling kicker, “And that's why I can't imitate four Hawaiians.” She stroked our heads tenderly, called us each a dozen endearing names; she thrilled,
apparently, to tales of our adventures, and admired inordinately our drawings and forts. She taught us to curtsy; she taught us to play poker.

Mother's Somerset family were respectable Millers and good-looking, prominent, wild Lamberts. The Lambert women were beautiful; they married rich men. The Lambert men were charmers; they drank hard and came to early ends. They flourished during Prohibition, and set a dashing, doomed tone for the town.

Mother's handsome father was the mayor. He was so well liked that no one in town voted for his opponent. He won a contest by writing the slogan, “When better automobiles are built, Buick will build them.” He and a friend journeyed to Detroit to pick up the contest prize. The trip was a famous spree; it lasted a month. He died not long after, at forty-one, when Mother was seven, and left her forever full of longing.

 

Late at night on Christmas Eve, she carried us each to our high bedroom, and darkened the room, and opened the window, and held us awed in the freezing stillness, saying—and we could hear the edge of tears in her voice—“Do you hear them? Do you hear the bells, the little bells, on Santa's sleigh?” We marveled and drowsed, smelling the piercingly cold night and the sweetness of Mother's warm neck, hearing in her voice so much pent emotion, feeling the familiar strength in the crook of her arms, and looking out over the silent streetlights and the chilled stars above the rooftops of the town. “Very faint, and far away—can you hear them coming?” And we could hear them coming, very faint and far away, the bells on the flying sleigh.