She stumbles down the hill in the dusk. Her eyes are as heavy and generous as apple trees. Her apron is filled with the fruits she’ll use for cider, for applesauce. Her rounded arms reach out to her husband for help. Apples dangle from his beard. Apples color the sound of his speech, his concerns. When will the trucks show up for a pickup? How many hundreds of bushels have been left behind?
I want to follow her into her kitchen, settle in next to the wood-burning stove, drink Gertrude Ford tea with her, separate the pumpkin from its seeds, read the Poughkeepsie Journal, its early snow reports, and drift into winter.
White light, bluejav, bear-sleep, split wood, apple wine, baked apple: bruised, I want to be with her now, to pass the days in her warmth, to sleep soundly through the bitter nights and dream of no one and nothing but apples.
“I can hardly find your vein,” Marta said. “You’ve gotten so skinny.”
“Please don’t,” I said. But I gave her my arms and, after those veins collapsed, I took off my socks and we examined the places between my toes. “Please don’t,” I whispered, offering her the back of my leg.
I missed her terribly even before she had gone away. I missed her as I watched her writing. I could tell she was so far away that nothing could bring her back. Watching her some nights, stretched out on the couch reading or dozing off, I missed her even then.
“Help yourself,” Jack said, wiping my brow, stroking my hair.
“I’m trying,” I said. “But I can’t seem to get myself any further.”
“Come on,” Jack said. “Try harder.”
I shivered. The weather turned colder.
I reach for her arm and she is strong, stronger than I could have imagined.
“Vanessa,” she says.
“You’ve remembered my name!” I smile.
“Of course I have,” Grandma Alice says. She lifts me up. “Everything’s going to be all right. I promise.”
“Anza-Borrego State Park in California,” he reads, “claims two unusual features: a limitless carpet of wildflowers and elusive bands of bighorn sheep.
“California,” he muses. “Disneyland,” he says dreamily. “A castle for my princesses.”
Grandpa Sarkis, born in the year of the ox, had big plans for my mother. Prom the first moment he saw her behind glass in the infant nursery, he knew there was something different, something special about his daughter. Girl babies in the old country were nothing to dance about, but he danced at the birth of my mother. Through drifts of cigar smoke in the maternity wing of St. Joseph’s Hospital, he danced, he sang. She was beautiful; she was special. He was sure of it. Without knowing anything about the Topaz Bird, he knew. She w as the most perfect creature he had ever laid his eyes on or ever would. And best of all she was his.
She would bring him luck. “My tamarind seed, my goat’s tooth,” he said to her and smiled. He was proud of her light hair that waved. He had made an American girl, with her blue eyes like the Pacific, her long graceful body — California. He had made a real American beauty. As unhkelv as it seemed, he had had a part in this. His brooding dark good looks had combined w ith those of his frail American wife and from this hard-fought union Christine had been born.
Everyone had disapproved of the marriage, it had seemed, but especially his in-laws, William and Anne I lauser, Germans from Germany, w ho could not bear the thought of their onlv daughter marrying an Armenian, from Armenia, no less, of all places. But even they, after seeing Christine, were appeased somewhat. She was lovely, all agreed on that.
Grandpa Sarkis accepted the compliments and took all the credit he could get, but still he could not help feeling that she was the product of something else, he did not know what — something out of his reach. She felt invented to him, a product of this new country Like the morning mist itself, rising over the land, at birth she had seemed to lift up gently from her mother’s lap and float into the air — something to admire and love but belonging to no one.
Yet Grandpa Sarkis tried. “My American daughter,” he said, showing her baby pictures to the men he worked with in the mill, showing them to the women in the grocery store, the family who owned the candy and newspaper store, the bakers where he bought his Armenian bread. “Isn’t she beautiful?” Yes, everyone agreed. Even at two weeks old she impressed them, even at two months old; even those who did not appreciate babies appreciated Christine. And this got Sarkis to thinking. In America it was true, anything was possible. In America even he could have a beautiful baby. In America, and the thought came out whole as he drove home from work one late night, you can make movie stars.
My grandfather, a weaver in a silk mill in Paterson, New Jersey, could not afford his wife’s hospital bills. He must have lived in terror of them. He worked night and day, two and sometimes three shifts, and still it was not enough. I would like to think that it was this specific terror that made my grandfather’s dark eyes, darting around the house for something to sell for money, rest on my mother asleep in her crib. In America you can make movie stars, he thought, and at six months a baby can make diaper commercials. Beautiful babies could make money just for being beautiful. This is a good country, he thought, as his sick wife called him from the other room.
“A good country,” he said to his wife, Alice, and in desperation one wintry day he took the baby from her crib without Alice knowing and brought her to the commercial studios in New York City w here photographers posed her in diapers, in other mothers’ arms — posed her in front of fields of flowers, backdrops of spring. “My sweet little silkworm,” he purred.
I hope my mother found comfort in the notion that perhaps she had prolonged her own mother’s life a little, that she provided her with a nurse when she needed one, that the medicine was always there, the tank of oxygen, the way to the hospital. I hope she believed this and not the darker things which it undeniably suggested about her father. Diapers turned to pinafores. She did it for years.
As my mother grew more and more lovely, more radiant with each day, my grandfather’s plans for her grew, too. He dreamed she might be a beauty queen one day and took her every year as a little girl to the Convention Hall in Atlantic City, that cake of a building, to watch those hopeful women strut down the lighted runways: laurels and crowns; banners and bounce; red, white, and blue; Miss America.
“Look at Miss Mississippi,” my grandfather would say, nudging her. “Oh, Miss Horida, you’re breaking my heart,” he shouted. “They’re like racehorses,” he sighed, “thoroughbreds.”
But my mother, grown out of pinafores, stepped back, aw ay from the toothy grin, the larger than life. My grandfather did not understand. Watching her walk onto the beach off the boardwalk, he shouted for her to come back, but it made my mother, only seven years old, walk faster and faster. As she ran in the sand, my grandfather dreamed her into a Rockette. He pictured the long line of women she would be a part of, lifting their legs in beautiful unison.
“That is my daughter,” he said, pointing to Christine who stood where the ocean met the beach. “One day you will see her in the Rockettes.” My mother turned to see him pointing at her and ran faster along the edge of the sea, kicking as she went — a different sort of dancer.
What was wrong with Christine? Silently, Sarkis blamed his wife. “You did not talk to her enough when she was in the womb,” he thought. “That’s why all this fuss about books, the need for so many stories. You were too weak, and it sapped the joy from her heart. You were too sick and it brought her inconsolable sadness.” Nearly immediately Sarkis regretted even thinking this, but it was too late; he could not call the thought back.