Tell Me a Riddle (52 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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tion. Eva is a little gnome, ''all bones and swollen belly," with clawlike hands and a "yellow skull face"the portrait of starvation that stares at us daily from posters and television screens. Those closest to her see her as something edible. David, her husband, and Nancy, her daughter-in-law, try to persuade her to move from her familiar home to the Haven, a "cooperative for the aged" run by David's lodge. When she refuses, they leave her to "stew a while," as Nancy puts it. But perhaps more important, the language of food both expresses and shapes Eva's perception of herself and of the people and events surrounding her. When David complains to the children about her harsh tongue, she thinks, "(Vinegar he poured on me all his life; I am well marinated; how can I be honey now?)" Her quarrel with David over selling the house becomes a "bellyful of bitterness," her sickness she feels as a "ravening inside," and her children are "morsels" with "lovely mouths" that "devour."
Linda Yoder describes well one purpose of this "overwhelming concentration of [food] imagery." It underlines, she says, Eva's overidentification with her role as mother "against which Eva will wisely, though painfully, struggle."
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In other words, Eva's life has been so completely absorbed by nurturing others that these activities have taken over her ways of thinking and feeling and even her language. To borrow Olsen's imagery, they have eaten her up.
It was a brilliant stroke on Olsen's part to make Eva a grandmother living in the relatively affluent fifties rather than in the hungry twenties of
Yonnondio.
For Eva, the tasks of mothering that used up Anna's life are only memories, or have dwindled into unimportance. Instead of skimpy meals stretched to feed nine, now "a herring out of a jar is enough." While David worries about money, Eva shrugs, "In America, who starves?" The ironic answer to this question is that mothers starve even in America and even long after they have stopped being responsible for their children and no longer have to contend with physical hunger.
Against her family's urging, Eva refuses to nurture her grandchildren in the traditional mothers'/grandmothers' waysholding, comforting, feedingbecause she knows she dare not let herself be drawn again into the "long drunken-
 
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ness'' of needing and being needed, of devouring and being devoured by trusting children. Yet it is significant that she never abandons the language of food and hunger, and at the end of her life talks deliriously about "bread, day-old" and "one pound soup meat." Furthermore, Olsen's omniscient narrator continues to use this language to describe Eva, suggesting that motherhood as defined and structured in patriarchal society starves mothers by absorbing them body and spirit. Eva is hungry for all the nourishment that her life has refused her or that she has resolutely given away to be true to herself and her beliefs. She is hungry for both solitude and community, silence and language. (Eva even
tastes
and
chews
words and ideas.) Unaware that he is accurately describing her spirit as well as her body, David reminds Eva that she is "all bones and a swollen belly." All David sees are the symptoms of her illness; but here, as in
Yonnondio,
Olsen wants her readers to see mocking visual echoes of starvation and pregnancy which, mirroring each other and her illness, together form the shape of Eva's life.
In her fine essay "The Hungry Jewish Mother," Erika Duncan sets "Tell Me a Riddle" in the context of JewishAmerican literature by women. In this literature, writes Duncan, "mothers are the 'bread givers' who try to make feeding into a replenishing, ecstatic act. But the mothers are themselves starved in every way, sucked dry and withered from being asked almost from birth to give a nurturance they never receive. They are starved not only for the actual food they are forced to turn over to others, but for the stuff of self and soul, for love and song."
9
That is the blighted life mothers lead in patriarchal society. As Olsen would say, that is the life of most women, past and present, as they carry the full weight of gender, class, and sometimes racial bias. We also see clearly the ways in which the mothers' hungers are visited upon their children, especially their daughters, who, like Anna's Mazie and Eva's Clara and Hannah, are reduced to "hands to help."
But to stop with grief and anger is to stop far short of Olsen's destination. The second element of her structuring paradigm, the fruit borne by the blighted tree, is nowhere more evident than in her portraits of mothers. For Olsen's fic-
 
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tional mothers possess intelligence, courage, and a gritty determination to survive, no matter how insurmountable the obstacles they face. What is more, in every story, mothers reach beyond survival to make their children's lives richer and wider than theirs have been. Sometimes they succeed; more often they fail. But even in failure, Olsen says, the most nourishing bread they give future generations is the coarse grain of their courageous effort. An important part of the task Olsen has set for herself is to acknowledge this nurturance. She does so by setting remembered moments of beauty and exaltation in mothers' lives in their context of pain and struggle.
This combination of beauty and struggle is evident in a remarkable passage from
Yonnondio,
in which the rhythms of Olsen's prose transform work that might be seen only as absolute drudgery into grace. It is no accident, of course, that the work Olsen describes is that of preserving food. The scene occurs on an unbearably hot day in a long line of such days, and Anna is in her kitchen canning fruit, making jelly, and tending her children all at the same time. Here is a portion of that scene. Read aloud, its rhythms work their way into the body:
In the humid kitchen, Anna works on alone. ... The last batch of jelly is on the stove. Between stirring and skimming, and changing the wet packs on Ben, Anna peels and cuts the canning peachestwo more lugs to go. If only all will sleep awhile. She begins to sing softlyI
saw a ship a-sailing, a-sailing on the sea
itclears her head. The drone of fruit flies and Ben's rusty breathing are very loud in the unmoving, heavy air. Bess begins to fuss again.
There, there, Bessie, there, there,
stopping to sponge down the oozing sores on the tiny body.
There.
Skim, stir; sprinkle Bess; pit, peel, and cut; sponge; skim, stir. Any second the jelly will be right and must not wait. Shall she wake up Jimmie and ask him to blow a feather to keep Buss quiet? No, he'll wake cranky, he's just a baby hisself, let him sleep. Skim, stir; sprinkle; change the wet packs on Ben; pit, peel and cut; sponge. This time it does not sootheBess stiffens her body, flails her fists, begins to scream in misery, just as the jelly begins to boil. There is nothing for it but to take Bess up, jounce her on a hip
(there,
 
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there)
and with her free hand frantically skim and ladle.
There, there.
The batch is poured and capped and sealed, all one-handed, jiggling-hipped. There, there, it is done. (148-49)
In a recent talk, Olsen said that only when she read this scene aloud to an audience did she realize that Anna's movements had the economy and disciplined grace of dance. ''We gladly applaud for dancers on the stage," she said, "but do not recognize the similar grace and miracle of synchronization" of a mother, her baby on one hip, canning and tending her other children. Olsen added that she likes to imagine Anna's granddaughters as dancers, whose freer lives Anna had made possible with her hard work and loving determination.
10
There is danger in this kind of writing. Turning relentless work into a dance could lead to the kind of sentimentality that perpetuates the work by casting the softening glow of nostalgia over it and that encourages daughters to repeat the surface patterns of their mothers' lives. That Olsen is alert to this danger is clear from the scenes following this domestic dance, in which the same event is seen as a mother's daily deadly toil; her skilled and useful labor to feed her family; and a moment of beauty that is as necessary and nourishing as canned peaches and amber jelly.
The multiple tasks push Anna to trembling, and her tenderness with the children is mixed "with a compulsion of exhaustion to have done, to put Bess outside in the yard where she can scream and scream outside of hearing and Anna can be free to splash herself with running water, forget the canning and the kids and sink into a chair, lay her forehead on the table and do nothing" (149-50). But Anna does not stop; she keeps working through the afternoon, surrounded by her heat-sickened children. Late in the day, as Anna still works, the sunshining through a prism salvaged from the dump sheds rainbows on the room. Mazie watches as the rainbow falls on Anna: "Not knowing an every-hued radiance floats on her hair, her mother stands at the sink; her knife seems flying. Fruit flies rise and settle and rise." Mazie, with her quick appreciation for beauty of any kind, says lovingly, "Momma" (152).
 
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Light and shadow chase each other across these few pages, as Olsen's style turns drudgery into dance and back into drudgery, and then, for a fleeting moment casts ''the stammering light" of beauty and promise over the whole scene. The cycles of poverty and sexism that rule
Yonnondio
will end this moment and perhaps steal it from Mazie's memory. (In "Tell Me a Riddle," Eva's delirious, deathbed singing reminds her oldest daughter, Clara, of a sound she has not heard or remembered since childhood. Clara cries in silent anguish,
"Where did we lose each other, first mother, singing mother?"
Even knowing well that moments like this one are often lost to daughters, Olsen has chosen to preserve it as precious and nourishing without in any way exalting the toil or urging future generations of daughters to repeat it.
To return to Duncan's phrase, Olsen's fictional mothers are "bread givers" dedicated to feeding their children's bodies, minds, and hearts. But Olsen shows another, equally important yield of "circumstanced motherhood." Because the experience of mothering, coupled with the other crucial experiences I described earlier, gives them what Olsen calls "a profound feeling about the preciousness of life on earth,"
11
the other fruit their lives sometimes bear is an awareness of justice and injustice that reaches beyond the walls of home and family. Olsen dramatizes this sense of justice most powerfully in Eva, who like the Seevya and Genya of Olsen's dedication, had been a revolutionary during her girlhood in Russia, has memorized her few books, and knows both past history and the United States of the 1950s. To understand what Olsen is saying about Eva's wide-ranging consciousness we need to return to the image of bread, this time superimposed on the recurring image of stone.
Bread and stone run parallel to each other through most of "Tell Me a Riddle." In the scene just before Eva's death, they leave their parallel tracks, meet, and undergo that transmutation of shape and meaning that Olsen uses so powerfully. In Eva's last delirious words, these two images reveal that her embattled love for her family and her desire to create a more just world for everyone are somehow the same passion, felt with the same intensity and fed by the same springs. David keeps watch by her deathbed and listens as she repeats

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