Small Wonder (17 page)

Then all at once, after innumerable tussles, according to some scoring system invisible to human eyes but unmistakable to the contestants, one guy won. The other slunk quickly away, and Sheba came sliding out into the open, with no eyelashes to bat but with love clearly on her mind, for off she slithered with her he-snake into the sunset. The greatest show on earth.

 

When you, my dear, were about two and a half, I carefully and honestly answered all the questions you'd started asking about reproductive organs. For several months thereafter, every time we met someone new, the unsuspecting adult would tousle your adorable blond head, and you'd look up earnestly and ask, “Do you have a penis or a vagina?”

If you are
ever
tempted to think my presence is an embarrassment to you, please recall that I stood by you during the “penis or vagina” months, July to September 1989. I wasn't sure I'd live through them or have any social life left afterward. I gave you a crash course in what we call “polite company” and harbored some doubts about whether honesty had really been the best policy.

What I see now, though, is that honesty
was
. Manners arrive in time; most girls are gifted enough at social savvy to learn the degree of polite evasion that will protect their safety and other people's dignity. But before anything else, you've got to be able to get the facts. Penis or vagina? I couldn't possibly tell you it wasn't
to be discussed, or didn't matter. It matters, boy howdy, does it ever. Barbie or Ken, Adam or Eve, pilot or stewardess, knuckle sandwich or mea culpa, scissors, paper, rock, War and Peace. It's a very reasonable starting point. So begins the longest, scariest, sexiest, funniest, smartest, most extraordinary conversation we know. Cross your fingers, ready, set. Go.

I
imagine you putting on your glasses to read this letter.
Oh, Lord, what now?
You tilt your head back and hold the page away from you, your left hand flat on your chest, protecting your heart. “Dear Mom” at the top of a long, typed letter from me has so often meant trouble. Happy, uncomplicated things—these I could always toss you easily over the phone: I love you, where in the world is my birth certificate, what's in your zucchini casserole, happy birthday, this is our new phone number, we're having a baby in March, my plane comes in at seven, see you then, I love you.

The hard things went into letters. I started sending them from college, the kind of self-
absorbed epistles that usually began as diary entries and should have stayed there. During those years I wore black boots from an army surplus store and a five-dollar haircut from a barbershop and went to some trouble to fill you in on the great freedom women could experience if only they would throw off the bondage of housewifely servitude. I made sideways remarks about how I couldn't imagine being anybody's wife. In my heart I believed that these letters—in which I tried to tell you how I'd become someone entirely different from the child you'd known—would somehow make us friends. But instead they only bought me a few quick gulps of air while I paced out the distance between us.

I lived past college, and so did my hair, and slowly I learned the womanly art of turning down the volume. But I still missed you, and from my torment those awful letters bloomed now and then. I kept trying; I'm trying still. But this time I want to say before anything else: Don't worry. Let your breath out. I won't hurt you anymore. We measure the distance in miles now, and I don't have to show you I'm far from where I started. Increasingly, that distance seems irrelevant. I want to tell you what I remember.

 

I'm three years old. You've left me for the first time with your mother while you and Daddy took a trip. Grandmama fed me cherries and showed me the secret of her hair: Five metal hairpins come out, and the everyday white coil drops in a silvery waterfall to the back of her knees. Her house smells like polished wooden stairs and soap and Granddad's onions and ice cream, and I would love to stay there always but I miss you bitterly without end. On the day of your return I'm standing in the driveway waiting when the station wagon pulls up. You jump out your side, my mother in happy red lipstick and red earrings, pushing back your
dark hair from the shoulder of your white sleeveless blouse, turning so your red skirt swirls like a rose with the perfect promise of
you
emerging from the center. So beautiful. You raise one hand in a tranquil wave and move so slowly up the driveway that your body seems to be underwater. I understand with a shock that you are extremely happy. I have been miserable and alone waiting in the driveway, and you were at the beach with Daddy and
happy
. Happy without me.

 

I am sitting on your lap, and you are crying.
Thank you, honey, thank you,
you keep saying, rocking back and forth as you hold me in the kitchen chair. I've brought you flowers: the sweet peas you must have spent all spring trying to grow, training them up the trellis in the yard. You had nothing to work with but abundant gray rains and the patience of a young wife at home with pots and pans and small children, trying to create just one beautiful thing, something to take you outside our tiny white clapboard house on East Main. I never noticed until all at once they burst through the trellis in a pink red purple dazzle. A finger-painting of colors humming against the blue air: I could think of nothing but to bring it to you. I climbed up the wooden trellis and picked the flowers. Every one. They are gone already, wilting in my hand as you hold me close in the potato-smelling kitchen, and your tears are damp in my hair but you never say a single thing but
Thank you
.

 

Your mother is dead. She was alive, so thin that Granddad bought her a tiny dark-blue dress and called her his fashion model and then they all went to the hospital and came home without her. Where is the dark-blue dress now? I find myself wondering, until
it comes to me that they probably buried her in it. It's under the ground with her. There are so many things I don't want to think about that I can't bear going to bed at night.

It's too hot to sleep. My long hair wraps around me, grasping like tentacles. My brother and sister and I have made up our beds on cots on the porch, where it's supposed to be cooler. They are breathing in careless sleep on either side of me, and I am under the dark cemetery ground with Grandmama. I am in the stars, desolate, searching out the end of the universe and time. I am trying to imagine how long forever is, because that is how long I will be dead for someday. I won't be able to stand so much time being nothing, thinking of nothing. I've spent many nights like this, fearing sleep. Hating being awake.

I get up, barefoot and almost nothing in my nightgown, and creep to your room. The door is open, and I see that you're awake, too, sitting up on the edge of your bed. I can make out only the white outline of your nightgown and your eyes. You're like a ghost.

Mama, I don't want to die
.

You don't have to worry about that for a long, long time
.

I know. But I'm thinking about it now.

I step toward you from the doorway, and you fold me into your arms. You are real, my mother in scent and substance, and I still fit perfectly in your lap.

You don't know what Heaven is like. It might be full of beautiful flowers.

When I close my eyes I discover it's there, an endless field of flowers. Columbines, blue asters, daisies, sweet peas, zinnias: one single flower bed stretching out for miles in every direction. I am small enough to watch the butterflies come. I know them from the pasture behind our house, the butterflies you taught me to love and name: monarchs, Dianas, tiger swallowtails. I follow their lazy zigzag as they visit every flower, as many flowers as there are stars
in the universe. We stay there in the dark for a long time, you and I, both of us with our eyes closed, watching the butterflies drift so slowly, filling as much time as forever.

I will keep that field of flowers. It doesn't matter that I won't always believe in Heaven. I will suffer losses of faith, of love and confidence, I will have some bitter years, and always when I hurt and can't sleep I will close my eyes and wait for your butterflies to arrive.

 

Just one thing,
I'm demanding of you. It's the middle of summer, humid beyond all reason, and I am thirteen: a tempest of skinned knees and menarche. You are trying to teach me how to do laundry, showing me how to put the bluing in with the sheets. The swampy Monday-afternoon smell of sheets drowning under the filmy, shifting water fills me with pure despair. I want no part of that smell. No future in white sheets and bluing.
Name one good thing about being a woman,
I say to you.

There are lots of good things.
…Your voice trails off with the thin blue stream that trickles into the washer's indifferent maw.

In a rare flush of adrenaline or confidence, I hold on, daring you:
OK, then. If that's true, just name me one.

You hesitated. I remember that. I saw a hairline crack in your claim of a homemaker's perfect contentment. Finally you said,
The love of a man. That's one thing. Being taken care of and loved by a man.

And because you'd hesitated I knew I didn't have to believe it.

 

At fifteen I am raging at you in my diary, without courage or any real intention, yet, of actually revealing myself to you.
Why do you
want to ruin my life? Why can't you believe I know how to make my own decisions? Why do you treat me like a child? No makeup or nail polish allowed in this house—you must think I am a baby or a nun. You tell me if I forget to close the curtains when I get undressed the neighbor boy will rape me. You think all boys are evil. You think if I go out with my girlfriends I'll get kidnaped. You think if I'm in the same room with a boy and a can of beer, I'll instantly become a pregnant alcoholic.

Halfway through the page I crumble suddenly and write in a meeker hand,
I have to learn to keep my big mouth shut and not fight with Mom. I love her so much.

I am a young woman sliced in two, half of me claiming to know everything and the other half just as sure I will never know anything at all. I am too awkward and quiet behind my curtain of waist-length hair, a girl unnoticed, a straight-A schoolmouse who can't pass for dumb and cute in a small-town, marry-young market that values—as far as I can see—no other type.

I understand this to be all your fault. You made me, and I was born a girl. You trained me to be a woman, and regarding that condition I fail to see one good thing.

 

The woodsmoke scent in the air puts me in mind of raked leaves, corduroy jumpers and new saddle shoes, our family's annual trip to Browning's orchard for apples and cider: a back-to-school nostalgia altogether too childish for me now, and yet here I am, thrilled to the edge of all my senses to be starting college. You and Dad have driven three hundred miles in our VW bus, which is packed like a tackle box with my important, ridiculous stuff, and now you have patiently unloaded it without questioning my judgment on a single cherished object—the plants, the turtle-shell collection, the glass demijohn, the huge striped pillow, the hundred
books. You're sitting on my new bed while Dad carries in the last box. To you this bed must look sadly institutional compared with the furniture lovingly lathed for us from red cherrywood by your father before he died. To me the new metal bed frame looks just fine. Nothing fussy; it will do. I am arranging my plants in the windowsill while you tell me you're proud of the scholarship I won, you know I'll do well here and be happy, I should call if I need anything, call even if I don't.

I won't need anything,
I tell you.

I am visited suddenly by a peculiar photographic awareness of the room, as if I were not really in it but instead watching us both from the doorway. I understand we are using up the very last minutes of something neither of us can call, outright, my childhood. I can't wait for you to leave, and then you do. I close the door and stand watching through my yellow-curtained window and the rust-orange boughs of a maple outside as you and Dad climb into the VW and drive away without looking back. And because no one can see me I wipe my slippery face with the back of my hand. My nose runs and I choke on tears, so many I'm afraid I will drown. I can't smell the leaves or apples or woodsmoke at all. I feel more alone than I've ever felt in my life.

 

At the Greencastle Drive-In on a double date, I am half of the couple in the backseat. We have the window open just a crack to accommodate the hissing metal speaker, and the heater is on full blast. Outside our happy island of steamy heat, frost is climbing the metal poles and whitening the upright bones of the surrounding cornfields; it's nearly Thanksgiving, surely the end of drive-in season as we know it. Tomorrow I have a midterm exam. Surprisingly, I don't even care. I feel heady and reckless. Truth be told, I will probably ace the exam, but even if I don't, so what? I'll live.
Finally I have a genuine social life and the privilege of giving in to peer pressure: I threw
Heart of Darkness
over my shoulder at the first bark of temptation and went out on a date.

The movie is
Cabaret.
Sally Bowles, with her weird haircut and huge, sad eyes, is singing her heart out about being abandoned by her mother.

With a physical shock I wake up to what's been tugging at my ear all day: November 20—it's your birthday! I've never forgotten your birthday, not since I was old enough to push a crayon around in the shape of a heart on a folded piece of construction paper. How can it be that this year I didn't even think to send a card? I sit bolt upright and open my mouth, preparing to announce that I have to go home immediately and call my mother. My friend and her boyfriend in the front seat are deeply involved in each other. I imagine them staring at me, hostile under rumpled hair, and feel myself shrinking into my former skin, the vessel of high school misery. I despise that schoolmouse. The happiness of my new adulthood is so precarious that I have to be careful not to wreck it like a ship. I sigh, settle back, shut my mouth, and watch Sally Bowles ruin her life.

 

I am nineteen, a grown woman curled like a fetus on my bed. Curled in a knot so small I hope I may disappear. I do not want to be alive.

I've been raped.

I know his name, his address—in fact I will probably have to see him again on campus. But I have nothing to report. Not to the police, not to you. The telephone rings and rings and I can't pick it up because it may be you. My mother. Everything you ever told me from the beginning has come home to this knot of nothingness on my bed, this thing I used to call me. I was supposed to prevent
what happened. Two nights ago I talked to him at a bar. He bought me a drink and told my friends he thought I was cute.
That girl with the long hair,
he said.
What's her name?
Tonight when he came to my door I was happy, for ten full seconds. Then. My head against a wall, suffocation, hard pushing and flat on my back and screaming for air. Fighting an animal twice my size. My job was to stop him, and I failed. How can I tell you that?
You met him in a bar. You see?