BORN MELINDA PRADA IN THE WARM AUGUST, SHE GREW up on a young sandspit of land that pushed into the Atlantic like the fragile arm of a young boy. The arm might have been diseased, at least a mutation or birth defect; it lacked fingers, a positive hinged and mobile elbow; it seemed eaten away in some places, one of them an inlet where Melinda lived. The name was pronounced pray-da, the slight pathetic anglicizing of the Portuguese that the women had accepted and the men had forced, historically. For the women had changed their names anyway, but the men had work to do among Yankee fishermen and thought to become Americans, against their skin color and language. It could not have been a young girl’s arm, with its welcoming or slight defiance, because it was a public gesture in the sea, and there was no public act for women to perform. And yet the calm and yielding, but resilient nature of the spit was surely feminine and not to be controlled, and this was the geological irony, confronted and not solved: there was no manipulation of the spit possible to good ends. There was, as with the women, a fragile working relationship.
She was an only child, to her father’s chagrin (her mother’s pleasure), and she came to his dragger and to the sea when she was twelve years old, at the same time as boys came to her. Her father knew his sources were circuitous. They shamed him, and he made no mention of the following passage when he found it, even put the book away out of eyeshot. Every returning New Bedford whaler brought home a few bravas, or black Portuguese, among its crew. These Cape Verde savages — a cross between exiled Portuguese criminals and the aborigines of the Islands — began to drift into Mashpee and marry into the hybrid of Indian and African Negro that they found there. This vicious mixture caused what Mr. Pocknet called “a drift of disgust against Mashpee”. When the other boats came zigzag in to see, at first her father hid her (as he had hid the book) below decks, but this was futile, since news traveled among the fishermen, who were like old folks with nothing to do when it came to rumor. She was revealed, and she was good enough at the nets to become quickly integrated. And, though not approved of, she was his daughter and was accepted as an oddity.
On the way in from the Georges Bank she used watercolors sometimes, oils occasionally, and pastels, and she wrote stories. The boys saw she could do all this well and the dragging too, and they could see their own dim, secret wishes for the joining of tenderness, sensitivity and strength in it, and they feared and shunned her. Her stories were sea stories and like her painting, very clear and comprehensive and tough. She saw the way the water came in against the boat, the way it looked at a distance, the colors in the various cloud covers and the light in them. She had insight into the lives around her, and what she wrote affected those who read it. She took up with girls then, who knew their places and were full grown and integrated. And when she was sixteen and her parents drowned, ironically, on a pleasure cruise to Boston, she took up with an older woman, an artist in the town at the Cape’s end, who taught her things about technique and taught her to mourn her parents properly, and loved her and let her go with grace when she was eighteen, and she went to art school in Boston.
There had been some women there, but the times were not right for it, and she was thwarted, and when this happened she turned more intensely to her studies and her art. She wrote stories and sold them to magazines, and her water colors were a success in small galleries, and she knew she was on to things important.
She quit the writing after a while, making a choice for the visual. There had been men there too, usually older ones whom she had come out to a bit, but they had learned to fear her intelligence and skill, though more slowly than the younger ones, and things hadn’t worked out. She finished school and went to work, teaching young children art. She kept the circle around her own art very tight, knowing what she was doing, and then she found that she was twenty-three years old.
That year she met Allen and went out with him. She slept with him, cooked for him on occasion; they had long talks, and she discovered no shocks to her expectations. She was smarter than he was, and he balked at this like the rest, conventionally, but she was older now, and he was younger than he was, and before too long, in away that she did not understand (and she liked that she did not understand it), she found out a familiar quality in him. Her way of loving him became unintimidating to him when she found it out, and they had married and lived good and reasonable years together. Then she had been introduced to the cancer.
This was the past Allen had put together from what she had told him and from his own romance of it. He felt she had no secrets in the way he did, but she did have a few. There was the closed circle in which her art stood; he was shown the product openly, and he thought he understood intention and process through it, but he had no sense of her strength manifest there. He took the clarity he saw as a kind of openness and transparency, but that was not it. And when the cancer started, and he saw some depths in her revealed, he saw them as feminine depths, that is, to him, depths of gentle sensitivity and attunement. He did not see that what they were were instances of clarity, certainty, and a steel-hardness of character. They joined anew in the occasion of the cancer. She found his weakness and childishness, and it endeared him to her. He saw what he thought was the bud in her unfold into certain womanhood, not realizing that it was a purer power, and neuter.
“IT’S LIKE A WEB,” SHE SAID, “OR A NET. BUT IT’S A CIRCLE. There is no up and down to it; it’s in and out. Think of all of those sticks making it up as being people. If you were a disconnected stick lying on the table beside it, you’d feel, possibly, lonely. No. There’d be no place for loneliness then; you’d just be disconnected. You’d be very still. If you push one of those sticks, one on the other side will move. They’ll all move a little, like people, each in its own way, but because you pushed one of them. The one on the other side could be a person out of your past, or somebody that you don’t know very well, or somebody you do know well, but he’s far away right now. I don’t mean mind control or telepathy. When you push that stick the other one doesn’t move the moment you push it; it takes a while. I mean that things you do always change the fabric or net or web you are in.
It comes around to affect the other sticks in time. The small wires between the sticks are the processes that cause behavior. One end is head process, the other end is, well, you know, the other end, another kind of consciousness — D. H. Lawrence, et cetera.
And it could be something as small as a symbol or a photograph you look at, after many years, that starts the chain, the net, reaction. The focus of the thing, its integrity, is the matrix; this is what we call ‘meaning.’ Out here we analyze it. But in there, when we are one of the sticks, we can’t do that. A breeze pushes against one stick or wire, and we, on the other side, or in the middle, or very close to the one that the breeze pushed, are moved a little. There is no help for it, and we’re moved before we know it. So that knowing is always after the fact of definition. But look how the sticks seem to ache when they are still. They want moving; that’s about all they really have. That is the story I wanted to tell you,” she said, glancing up at Bob White. “I call this story The Integrity Sphere.”
She was out of breath from talking, so she stood quietly beside them, looking into the window. They both seemed able to see the sphere as she saw it; at least, they attended to it. They were in front of an architect’s window in Aspen, Colorado. It was after he had gone to the river where he had let out the cocaine from the plastic bag that had been in the Kansas City Diamond matchbox, let it mix its rush with that of the swift stream. It was after noon. The Buckminster Fuller Tensegrity Sphere was on a piece of dark felt covering a table. It stood there, airy and both powerful and fragile. It was made of quarterinch pieces of pine doweling five inches long, screw eyes, and thin wire. None of the sticks touched each other, and the wires in the screw eyes did not touch the sticks. Gravity seemed to play no part in its structure. It was the structure that was powerful, the materials that were weak. He held her shoulder. Bob White stood on the other side of her. There seemed no room in the sphere for free movement. Open as it was, an open matrix, it seemed claustrophobic to him. He wondered if he could push on it hard enough to break it.