Farewell Navigator (2 page)

DRAGONS MAY BE THE WAY FORWARD

The year James Agee died, my mother was finishing high school. She could have read his obituary in the paper but she was probably dropping the needle onto a record instead. All those sock hops—a relentless schedule—meant a girl had to practice. Her legs are so swollen now they couldn’t dance if you paid them. While watching her rocket program, she props the knurly white logs on a milk crate. Look, she yells, he’s hanging in the blackness from just that tiny cord and what if it snaps?

I say from the next room: It’s made of steel. It won’t.

James Agee had a drinking problem. He slept around on all three of his wives. He was a socialist obsessed with Jesus. He criticized the government and other writers and his own failed self. By the time he died—of a stopped heart in a taxi, age forty-five—he was in every sense a stray.

And so smart you could hear his brain tick ten blocks away.

And so louche you could lick him off the bottom of your shoe.

It would be better if I didn’t think about him. But I do.

My mother is blattering about grace and bravery. They have launched a new rocket and its astronauts are so graceful and
brave. Her favorite channel shows their faces, miles above Earth in airless air. That one’s a schoolteacher, she says. Far left—see? She’s got guts, that teacher. Maybe she’ll write a book about her adventures.

I was stretched on a towel in the backyard, fourteen and no friends, when I first read
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. When the page said, “And spiders spread ghosts of suns between branches,” a nerve I’d never felt before throbbed between my legs.

She shoves her hairdo into my room: Shall I open a can?

It is not soup we are talking about. It is not beer or tuna. Tapioca is the canned good of choice in this house. You wouldn’t think it was a great idea to pack pudding in tin, but they do, and my mother eats a few cans a night under the pretense that I am sharing them with her. Two bowls, two spoons, one mouth.

Some speck on the wafer of her brain tells her that this rocket is traveling
now
. It is not, says her brain, a space mission that took place in the early eighties, but in fact an event of today. As we learn about the astronauts, observe their watery movements in the capsule, my mother refers to their moods and personalities in the present tense. When she gets up—slowly, slowly—to make another cup of hot water, I see worms dance on the purpling backs of her knees.

A question from
Famous Men
is burnt onto the skin behind my forehead: “How was it we were caught?” I know a little about caught. I know enough. There is this house. There is my mother. There is until she is dead.

She loves to plump the pillows on her Ku Klux furniture. Each pringly tassel must fall just so. She doesn’t sit on the sofa anymore; she will cause too big of a dent. She uses a folding metal chair. I go on the striped wingback, rest the dictionary on my thighs, and read aloud. Her ghouly eyes listen. Sometimes her mouth, on its way to the pudding spoon, says: Read that part again.

The word is
moxa
, I say, and here are your choices: a medieval fortified keep; a small instrument used to brush hair off the South American goose; a preternaturally skilled hoagie maker; or a flammable material obtained from the leaves of Japanese wormwood.

Hoagie is a disturbing word, my mother says.

You have ten seconds.

Well, she says, I don’t know what hoagie means so how can I choose?

It means submarine sandwich. In other parts of the land.

Then there’s that goose—

Five seconds, I say.

I’ll go with flammable material.

Are you sure?

Ha! she says happily, knowing she’s right, since on wrong guesses I never ask.

A chewy cackle from the bathroom and I find her crouched near—but not on—the toilet. Massive gray panties swarm at her feet.

What the fucking fuck?

Don’t say fuck so much, she says. No wonder you’ll die a virgin, filthy mouth like that.

And no wonder she will die beached, left to drown yelling in the tide.

The word is
umbelliferous
, which might mean: excessively warlike; belonging or pertaining to the
belliferae
family of plants, including parsley and carrots; carrying an umbrella; or that which feeds from the underside.

Hard one, she says.

I’ll give you an extra five seconds.

Maybe umbrella, she murmurs. Maybe parsley.

Don’t forget that which feeds from the underside, I say casually, proud of this phrase. It’s one of my best ever. A long belly seamed with nipples and the sucking, splittering mouth—

She guesses umbrella.

Sorry, I say,
belliferae
family of carrots and parsley.

Oh, damn. That was my close second.

Kitchen, late morning, matching yellow bathrobes.

The poison lake is awake!

Stop shouting, I shout.

She says, The wedding announcements page is especially interesting today.

Who?

Two girls from your year at St. Pancreas. It’s gotten me thinking—

Do you want more coffee?

About how lonely you must be.

I’m not, actually. Hand me your cup.

Of course you are, beechnut. And it’s not your fault. Well,
some
of it is your fault, because if you don’t leave the house how can you. . . . But some of it’s just plain bad luck. You’re unlucky in love.

No, I say, I’m just waiting.

Her mouth makes a sickle of
Go ahead and believe that
. Yes,
mother, thank you, I will go ahead. Her haught is terrible, but when she dies, that chin won’t jut any longer. Its meat will turn to powder on her collarbone and she’ll have no chin at all.

She will die of tapioca. Of tassels. Of watching too much space travel.

Here are your choices:
jipijapa
means a Brazilian hummingbird; a hat made from tender young leaves; Hawaiian bread pudding; or—from the Australian colloquial—to be in high spirits following the beginning of study at a college or university.

She asks, Did you feel
jipijapa
when you started college?

So that’s your guess?

Not necessarily. I am pausing to ask you a personal question. Were you in high spirits?

I don’t remember, I say.

Sure you do, corn nut.

It was twenty years ago. I don’t.

Your father got very excited when he went off to school. He wrote gushing letters.

What is your guess, Mother?

You’d have thought that college was a goddamn cathedral.

Time is up.

I love a good bread pudding.

Wrong, I say.

I know, she says. It’s the hat of young goddamn leaves. Are you aware that the sluttish postman has not been bringing our mail?

It’s not his fault if we don’t get written to, I remind her.

He is a slut, though. I’ve been watching him. He makes house calls on this very block, if you know what I mean.

I really don’t, I say.

Please don’t act like the virgin you are so bent on remaining.
Anybody with one eye could see what he’s up to. Mrs. Poole in the split-level? Mr. Brim in the Oldsmobile? They’ve been getting their fill of our most venturesome mail carrier.

Who
cares
, I say.

She grunts: It’s almost better than television.

On the flickery screen, people in jeans and puffy shirts are learning to waltz. An instructor taps out beats of one-two-three.

I put down the grocery bags and ask, Why are you crying?

I’m not, she says, turning wetly away.

What, do those people all have cancer? Are they dancing to distract themselves?

Isn’t it shocking that nobody wants to marry you, with a sunshine attitude like that! Those are just some idiots on public access. I had to switch from my regular channel because (with thumb and forefinger she kneads the loose skin at her throat), because there was an accident.

A crash?

Yes, a crash. The ship crashed. The ship has been lost.

Did the schoolteacher parachute to safety? I ask.

Is this the day your brain decided to stop working?
There are no parachutes in space
. There is cold air and death.

Sorry, I say.

The galaxy is too big out there, my mother says.

The word tonight is
flocculence
—

Don’t be coarse, she says.

Your choices are thus: the silence that follows a bad joke; the state of being covered with a soft, woolly substance; the crunch made by teeth on potato chips; the rate of torsion in the flight of seagulls; or an Icelandic sleeping porch built of marble and walrus tusks.

Be nice to have a sleeping porch, she says. You know it’s hell on my legs, climbing those stairs every night. Makes them ache to a fare-thee-well. My veins are getting like goddamn garden hoses.

We’ll need to install an elevator, I say.

Your dad’s insurance won’t stretch
that
far.

(It’s getting less stretchy all the time.)

You might have to get a job again, sour ball.

I say, Choose or forfeit.

I choose none.

None?

I think they’re
all
fake. You’ve done a trick this time. Whatever I choose will be wrong.

Just choose goddamnit.

I won’t, because I don’t think it’s a real word. I think you made it up—

I ask, Is that your final decision?

She nods. I shut the dictionary. She leans her spoon on the rim of the tapioca bowl, sniffs, tucks her chin. Folds of skin accordion at her neck. James Agee could have described her much better—would have done justice to the weirdness of my mother, her loggishness, her ghouliness, her secret gentleness. He could’ve spent pages, maybe a whole chapter, doing her justice.

About me, there’d be little to write.
She sits at home of an evening. With mother, with dictionary.
He might have wrung a sentence or two out of my eyes, which are a not-bad shade of blue. He’d have piled adjectives upon this blue, lavished it with taut slippery words until it was unrecognizable as a color and had become—a feeling.

I wonder where the funerals will be, she says.

In the astronauts’ hometowns?

Too ordinary.

At the launch pad in Florida?

Too tacky. I’m thinking Arlington Cemetery.

That’s for veterans, I say.

And what are they, if not veterans? Soldiers in the space race? Battlers of the galactic elements?

Vomit, I say.

There’s that sunshine. There’s that charm. Hark!—she cups a hand at the back of her ear—I think I hear the suitors lining up now! Do you hear them? Outside the door? The line is forming
around the block.
Nobody loves a sour ball, sour ball.

James Agee wouldn’t have minded; he was sour too. He’d have whispered, We better clean out this mouth of yours! before he kissed it.

Next time I go shopping, I’ll be leaving her tapioca off the list. She wants pudding, she can goddamn well figure out how to get it delivered. Or she can put some shoes on for once and hop in the car.

James Agee, please write her into the ground. Tell about the wet earth clumping down onto her coffin. Describe her bone-box with your best, your most precise exaggerations.

In the yellow kitchen, her face is a lump of smile. She has seen the postman getting out of Mr. Brim’s car. Dirty deeds, she hoots. Oh, very dirty. She swallows coffee in triumph and I want her to stop smiling, stop watching out the window, stop thinking she
knows
.

Mother, I say.

Daughter?

In case you weren’t aware, that rocket ship didn’t crash yesterday.

Of course it did, beechnut. I saw it with my own peekers. No survivors.

It crashed in nineteen-
eighty
-something! The teacher has been dead for decades. How can you be so fucking—

Language, she reminds me, and gets up from the table.

Your word tonight is
thole.

Soul, you say?

Tee-aitch. Here are your choices. To murder someone using brainwaves only; to throw a body into a hole; to sew up a person’s face so she can’t smile; or to suffer long, to bear, to endure.

What a jolly lineup, my mother says.

I wait. She sips a bite of pudding off the spoon.

I guess I’ll pick the most horrible one, then.

Which is?

The long suffer, silly. The endure.

I was a dot in a teenager’s egg sac while James Agee was wrecking his looks with smoke and drink and screenwriting. The moment he fell, crumpling on the plastic-taped leather of a taxi seat, I was swinging around in a belly, as yet unfertilized, to sock hop music. He was the man for me and never knew it. He left the planet without being told I was on my way.

My mother has found a new delight to replace her rockets. It is a show about dragons. There is a lot, evidently, to learn about them. They are usually deaf but have excellent eyesight, and it takes a thousand years for a dragon egg to hatch.

She says: I know they aren’t real, but maybe they are.

Maybe they are, I agree.

Who can tell for certain?

Not us.

Maybe, she says, they only live beneath the remotest mountains. Or in the deepest pockets of the ocean.

From the porch I watch firstlings of heartsease climb the fence. Tiny green shoots fill the pavement cracks and sunned dirt sends its hot smell into my mouth. It’s an hour past mail time. Maybe we have gotten none, or my mother was accidentally right and he’s been visiting Mrs. Poole on her carpet.

Then he comes whistling round the corner in his gray-blue shorts. He grins at me with a mustached lip. I want to smile back, but I look down instead.

Beautiful day! is his observation.

I want to answer, but my mouth refuses. It makes a little fist on my face.

I bring you treasure, he continues, our jaunty postman, and holds up an envelope from Eternal Meadow Insurance Company. I start to say Thank you, but he is gone before it can come out.

The money won’t last forever. I’ll have to get a job again. I will work, and my mother will die, and James Agee will live in the pages under my pillow. I carry the check indoors to my mother, who likes to touch money with both hands before it gets deposited. She lifts her eyes from the blue screen, face sweaty and pleased. She has been waiting.