Though I was still there, sitting near her, I knew some part of me was already asleep dreaming of that wonderful light brown hair, that mane of a lion, following her wherever she asked me to go. To see Jennifer was to raise a hand and pledge allegiance to what she wanted.
I walked up to her after the meeting, my hand already raised. Whatever she wanted I had already agreed to it. I said nothing.
“You must be Christine Wing’s daughter,” she said, staring at me as she put papers into a folder.
I nodded, taking a step back. Hearing her speak directly to me and say my mother’s name made me shudder with cold suddenly.
“I’d like to talk with you sometime.”
Yes, I nodded.
“I’ve got her old room, you know,” she said. “I’m a great admirer of hers.”
I stared at her, wondering what she wanted of me.
“That’s all,” she said, motioning with her head as if to dismiss me. “Thank you.”
With her voice alone she forced the season prematurely into winter.
I could not have known that my first meeting with Jennifer would be the only time we would ever speak. As simply and as strangely as she had entered my life, she would exit from it. And the place that seemed to promise so much would become off-limits to me as she grew more and more solitary, lost in the lives of the Stafford women in the room that had been my mother’s.
So it was my mother who had brought me here, I thought. Because I was her daughter I was privy to a sad underworld that otherwise I would probably have never come across. It had been the reason for the small note, the reason for everything. My mother through Jennifer had brought me here — to Marta, to this sorrow. She had united us at this wailing wall, this place of the lacerated skin, the shorn hair. She had brought me here, as if she herself had taken me by the hand. She had brought me here to this universe of grief, though I did not know why yet.
It had not occurred to her while they were together that the lovely, branching line that looked like a delicate sprig of wheat was actually the life line and that it separated early, somewhere near the base of the thumb.
But Natalie had already stepped onto another continent, her arms outstretched, her doomed hands open, before Marta realized the truth etched in her palm, and by that time it was too late.
Pamela Stafford, second aunt of Jennifer Stafford, but only a wisp of a child at the time, stepped tentatively in front of the camera for her screen test at the MGM studios. She looked back at her new friend for luck and smiled. Her straight hair, which had been set on hard rollers all night, had already lost its curl. Her pink dress puffed out from the waist made her look like the most fragile of flowers.
“Go on,” the smiling man coaxed. “Go on, sweetheart.”
“Moon River,” she sang softly off key,
“Wider than the Nile,
“I’m crossing you in style
“Someday.”
She cleared her throat.
“Oh, dream maker, you heartbreaker,
“Wherever you’re going,
“I’m going your way.”
“What are we going to see, Dad?” we screamed.
“It’s called It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” he said dreamily. “It’s in Cinerama, with the screen so big that it wraps around you.” He paused for a long time. “Cinerama,” he murmured. “You’ve never seen anything like it.”
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. I would have stopped her in my mind in this position forever if I could have, but that is the photographer’s art, not the daughter’s. My mother cannot stay still in my mind. A lovely profile turns full face, slowly the smile dissolves, and the vision breaks. Her hair grays, then changes back. She grows young, wanders through the quiet house of her childhood in Paterson, New Jersey, a little girl on tiptoe, looking in on her own sleeping mother or sitting in the dark listening to the Sunday stories of her father. I look again at her smiling profile on the back of To Vanessa, my book. She will not hold still for me.
“Disney land!” Grandpa Sarkis said. “Would you look at that?”
“The Magic Kingdom!”
“Look at that castle!” my mother cried.
“A castle for my little princesses in California!” their father said, patting their heads.
“Here’s Niagara Palls!” Lucy said.
“Where lovers go!” my mother sighed.
“Listen to this,” Lucy said. “About four million gallons of water per minute thunder over the lip of the falls into the Maid-of-Mist Pool!”
“Four million gallons!” my mother said.
“Per minute!” Lucy added.
My father sings loudly over the rushing water along with Louis Armstrong:
“Two drifters, off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see.
We’re after the same
Rainbow’s end
Waiting round the bend,
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.”
He raises a shiny trumpet to his lips, bends his knees, and blows. Beads of sweat fall down his face. He wipes his brow with an imaginary rag.
Part Four
I expect there’ll be rain today,” she says, flexing her arthritic fingers as we look out the back window onto the smoldering landscape.
“Oh, I don’t know, Grandma.” I smile at her. To me the farm sky looks like it’s going to hold back, going to deny the open-throated hens, the crippled corn, the old women.
“We’ll see,” she says, her eyes closed. It looks as if she’s trying to gather the strength to go on. In the darkness she pictures three white pillars. She opens her eyes, forcing herself back to the scene, back to the breeze and its empty promise, back to the weeping willows sucking stones from dirt, the panting dogs, the neighbor’s slow gaze, the memory of water lulling everything to sleep. She clears her throat, opens and shuts her hands. It’s as if those bony fingers extend out past the glass onto the earth as row s of crops. If she could only do something — she draws her fingers in, folds her hands, and puts them in her lap. The tomatoes bleed into the ground. The basil dries on its stalk. Peas shrivel. Trees shrink to shrubs. The scorpion moves in, the tortoise, the lizard glitters in the sun. Humps grow on the backs of dogs until they are camels. When I turn around, the soil has turned to sand. When I turn again, the rosebush is a cactus.
“It’s so hot, Grandma. If I was a snake I’d leave my skin.”
“Be sensible,” she says. Her voice is as old as the sand. Her throat is the bark of oaks.
“I think I’d like to take a long, cool bath”—water gushing up to the top of the tub, overflowing when I reach for the soap; water hitting my thighs, circling my knees.
“Grandma, it’s so hot. I think I’d like to go to the grocery store and stand next to the frozen foods for a while. I wish I was a TV dinner! I wish I was a fish stick!”
“Vanessa, be sensible,” she says. It sounds like a plea.
My grandmother was all good sense. A beautiful plant flowered at the base of her brain: broad-leaved, hardy, dark green. If she could have seen it, it would have pleased her, but of course she could not. She did not have the eyes for it. Only at the end was it replaced by something else — something more dense, rounded, almost luminous, something harder. I watched it happen: the flower fold into itself, the leaves curl back into the seed, the seed explode. Then my grandmother, strong willed, confident, grew backward into some tentative future and was frightened. But that was only much later.