“The ballroom is gigantic!” I say.
“I have never in my life seen a chandelier like this one before,” she gasps, pointing to the sun. “Oh, have you ever in your life seen anything like it?”
“Never,” I say. “Where are we?” I ask. “Where are we, Mom?”
On the book jacket of To Vanessa is my favorite picture of my mother. She is in profile and she looks as serene as I have ever seen her — content, happy. The light is beautiful and she is smiling.
“You’ll miss your train. Don’t miss it,” she urges. “Go now. Go.”
I try to enter the sky, to force myself to become that bird. But there is no forcing it, I know.
“Do not be afraid,” she whispers to me.
I watch that bobbing branch where the Topaz Bird once was. But it’s so tiny, so hard to see.
“Continue the story,” she prods me. “Go on.”
The note asked that I come to Main Building, Room ç2ç, as soon as possible. It was written on an index card in an impossibly small handwriting and signed by someone named Jennifer Stafford. There was nothing unusual about this note, it was just one among many instructions I found in my mailbox upon arrival at college, and yet I kept going back to it, going over the same few words, even as I read other papers, other notes, I visualized that handwriting and that name. There was something familiar there, something that called me to it; the other papers fell to the floor.
Slowly I unpacked my clothes, savoring the mystery of the message, prolonging it. What could this Jennifer Stafford want from me? It began to sound like a command. “Stop by. Soon.” Hundreds of things occurred to me as I fumbled with hangers and put away books, but none of them anticipated that room on the top floor of Main Building under the catwalk. “Come as soon as you can,” I said to myself. “Jennifer Stafford.” Parents still lingered in the halls. There seemed a sea of students all folding into one another, crashing on an unfamiliar shore. There were waves of color and sound all around me, but the note that I held in my hand was silent and a certain darkness seemed to collect around it. I read it once more, then again, and, using the heads of parents and the shiny black trunks of students for stones, I crossed this glittering, shouting body of water and stepped safely onto the ascending elevator.
“Come in,” she said.
Walking into that room was like moving from one life into another, light into dark, air into water. With my first look inside I could already feel myself adapting, always the survivor. My body grew sleeker, my hands broader, best for swimming. My lungs expanded. I felt as if my eyes were becoming bluer so as to fathom the depths, my heart stronger because I sensed it needed to be.
The demands of this dark, vaguely sweet-smelling room were great. It asked even of its most casual visitors what no room, no place should have been able to ask of anyone. To enter the room was to surrender something, to give something up.
She seemed to be crying.
“Jennifer,” I said quickly. “Maybe it’s a mistake. I got this in my mailbox today. I don’t know if—”
“Please,” she said, as if she could not keep up with my speech. “Please, I’m not Jennifer, I don’t live here, and I don’t want to hear about it. Really.” She read Jennifer’s note, holding it up close to her eyes as if she found the size of the handwriting ridiculous. “But you’ve got a little note here,” she smiled sarcastically, “so please come in.
“As you can see,” she said, motioning around the bare room, “Jennifer has a rather modest conception of her own needs.” On the floor was a mattress, a desk lamp, and a record player. In the hallway the dresser, the desk, and the bedframe stood with a note like mine on an index card to the maintenance people, asking that these items be put in storage for the year.
“She’s doing her thesis now on the history of the women of her family, starting with her long-lost relative Sarah Stafford, who came over on the Godspeed or one of those. I think she’s trying to get a little bit of the Pilgrim ship ambiance in here.” She laughed and her laugh echoed in the empty, angular room.
“She doesn’t ask much anymore,” this strange woman said, looking directly at me, “just to be left alone.”
“Perhaps I should leave,” I said.
She shrugged, lighting a joint. “Regardless of its rather austere appearance, this is a room you will soon find you cannot leave,” she exhaled, “ever.”
I accepted the joint, but it felt like I was accepting much more. She smiled at me, knowing that already I was becoming a part of this thing.
“I think you’ll probably like it here,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I answered, but already I felt as though I was a bowl or an urn in this dark still life.
“Who are you, then?” I asked shyly.
“Oh, where are my manners?” she asked, again with great sarcasm. “Forgive me. My name is Marta Arenelle and today I commence my fourth and presumably final year at this hallowed institution where I am,” she paused, “of course,” she paused again, “a drama major.” She smiled at her own good sense of timing. “Let me redeem myself. Here, have a drink,” she said, getting me a glass from the closet and filling it with Scotch.
“Yes, but still, you say, who is this Jennifer Stafford and where is she anyway? And above all what does she want from me?” “Well, let’s see. She’s our resident feminist, Women’s Center, Women’s Studies student par excellence, and I don’t know what she wants from you but I can certainly guess. She’s in the bathtub right now.” Marta laughed and shook her head. “If you want to be near Jennifer, you must be resigned to the fact that half the time you will spend submerged underwater.” She laughed but the laughter went nowhere. It was a dense laugh, heavy with gloom. Like certain fogs, it felt as if it might never lift.
Billie Holiday’s voice slurred through the empty room — the sad, eerie, off-key voice I would come to associate forever with this day and with Marta, w ho retreated into the song with her bottle of Scotch. The voice deepened the darkness, intensified it. It was difficult to breathe such mournful air.
“Dreaming, I was only dreaming,” Billie Holiday sang, agonizing toward her final death. “I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart, dear.”
She was singing to someone Marta could see standing in front of her. Marta had made the song hers, personalized it so that it was almost unbearable to listen to.
“Darling, I hope that my dream never haunted you. My heart is telling you how much I wanted you.” The song articulated her sorrow, validated it. She sank into its lowest registers. Tears filled her eyes; they would not fall.
“Please pardon my sentimentality,” she said, reaching for a small bag of hashish and covering my hand with hers.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” she whispered. “We’ve been waiting a long time for you.” Her hand was large and strong. I did not dare look at her.
I knew some further definition of myself lay here in this room, something I had previously only glimpsed, a suggestion lost before in a change of light or a conversation that took a different direction — lost at the last minute because I had turned away in a failure of nerve or a change of heart. What was here that promised to change everything now? I wondered.
I suppose it would be easy to be carried away by the voluptuousness of the scene — the velvety darkness, the ruined voice, the sweet smell of hashish, Jennifer’s conspicuous absence, and the lost person breathing shapes into Mar-ta’s full mouth. She looked at me through her tears, forcing my chin up so she could study my face.