She dragged the heavy ladder herself, set it down next to the doorway to the attic, a little to the right, so that it would be possible to close the wooden door again with the crooked nail stuck in the frame. The upholstered and reupholstered armchair that had wandered from place to place until it was banished from the shack was now waiting below.
I climbed six rungs of the ladder and stopped, peering down over my shoulder, at the prints left in the rose bed by my shoes: the colors began to blur, the green merging with the brown. “Climb!” She smacked my calf, climbed one or two rungs herself, hoisting the armchair over her head. I took hold of the legs of the armchair and climbed with my back to the ladder. I saw a quarter of her face, distorted by effort and willpower, looking out from behind the back of the chair, below me. If I loosened my grip for a moment the armchair would slip and fall straight onto her head. “Climb!” She roared, but not at me, from pain: her knuckles were blue. We climbed heel to toe, the armchair between us, to the last rung, next to the opening. The armchair stuck in the doorway, its legs in the air. “It won’t go in,” I said in despair. “Yes it will,” she fumed from below. “There’s no such thing as won’t. Use your brains and it will go in.” I pulled the arms as hard as I could, swaying on the ladder, and freed the chair. We began again from the beginning, this time with the chair slightly at a slant, pushing one leg after the other, with little twists and turns, until the whole chair went in, lying on its side. I went in, too, closing the little wooden door behind me. I heard her muffled shouts, her instructions regarding the arrangement of the furniture, and I lay down on the plywood floor, crisscrossed by the heavy supporting beams of the shack.
Till evening fell I sat “up there,” curled up in a corner on a pile of cushions that had once decorated the chairs in the dining nook. There was a magical silence, amplified by the darkness, a silence stretching from the low tiled roof above my head, from the long hall that was for the most part empty, left to its own devices, freed from the piles of objects assembled next to the opening, not policed, obedient to a secret inner order, to the logical disorder of a dream, but not my dream — I was a visitor in the dreams of my mother.
PLANTING ROSES
THE ROSE SEEDLING is usually planted in the winter, when the temperatures are low and the growth of the rosebush is slowed down. This is the most suitable time for removing seedlings with exposed roots from the ground of the nursery and planting them in the garden. The physiological state of the seedling is then suitable for transference. Without causing physiological damage, it is important to plant roses with exposed roots, since this gives us the possibility of examining the root system and its shape, the degree of its branching, its health and relative size. This is also the time when there is a large selection of species in the nurseries, enabling you to select the popular species without compromising on the seedlings remaining in the nurseries or other distribution outlets. In the winter there is also no need for frequent watering of the young plant.
Of course, it is possible to plant roses in the late spring and summer, too, if the conditions of the terrain demand it. But in this case they must be planted with the earth around their roots. It is possible to plant selected seedlings in pots in the winter, in order to transfer them with their earth to the garden in summer. Planting in hot seasons must be carried out with great care, and be accompanied by frequent watering until they take root.
At the end of the planting the seedling should be held at the point of the grafting and lightly pulled to ensure that the “bud” of the graft is at the correct height. To straighten the roots after packing the earth, a wide basin should be dug around the plant. Watering is by a gentle stream at the side of the basin (in order not to disrupt the earth clinging to the roots). The day after planting, the basin is filled in again. Some people make a mound to cover the place of the graft and the base of the branches in order to guard the seedling and the exposed arms from wind and dryness. The mound will be flattened by water from the hose after the plant has taken root.
EXPOSED ARMS
AT THE AGE of seventeen Corinne got up and got married, left the shack only to return to it time and again, but with the halo of “the married woman with problems,” which radiated even more powerfully than simply “the married woman.” “Got up and got married” is exact, because most of the time, when she wasn’t working or wandering, she spent lounging in the corner she claimed for her own, steeped in the still, silent waters of her visions, in the realms of infinite, stylish solitude where stylish faceless figures ignored each other or bowed stylishly to each other — all of them reflections of Corinne herself. Once in a while, when someone addressed her or when she thought someone addressed her, she shuddered and woke up: “What?” she demanded. “What?”
She married Mermel. His name was actually Sammy Mermelstein, but, in order not to confuse him with Sammy, everyone called him Mermel, a name invented by Nona, maliciously or innocently, because she couldn’t pronounce his surname. She, Nona, objected violently to the idea of the marriage: “She’s getting married to run away from home, poor girl. That’s why she’s getting married,” she pronounced. The mother started jiggling her thighs, cascades of flesh shaking under her dress: “What do you mean ‘run away’?” she fumed. “What has she got to run away from? Did anybody do anything to her?” She herself thought and also said that Corinne was getting married because of the dress. “It’s that msahwara of a dress that she wants to wear. She’s driven herself crazy with that dress,” she said.
And the truth is that Mermel crossed the path of the dress and not the opposite: for months before she met him, maybe half a year, Corinne had strewn the rooms of the shack with pages torn out of drawing pads, full of sketches of that figure with the dress, which succeeded in living only up to its knees, where the hem of the dress dissolved into the whiteness of the fine paper. Corinne lacked any talent for drawing or sketching — or perhaps she actually had a great talent, because she took no notice at all of any rules of proportion or perspective, subjugating the body of the replicated woman completely to what she saw in her mind’s eye, which seemed to see the world of things and creatures from upside down, like a child bending down and looking out with his head between his knees. Again and again she drew her, not obsessively but automatically and absentmindedly, gliding from unchanging sketch to sketch in the endless repetition of what was already fixed in her mind and wanted to fix itself as a fact in the world by means of one drawing after the other. The figure had no features, only the oval contours of a face, filled with cross-hatching pencil lines that reached the edge of her forehead and stopped, in honor of the hair combed back severely to the top of her head, where it was gathered up and shot out like a fountain in tongues of streaming, cascading curls. At the sides of the head, on a line with the chin, a pair of long earrings dangled, the shape of the spirals of her hair, which were not connected to anything since she had no ears or earlobes. The front of her body covered with what was the main thing — the dress — was flat as a board, and the slender, string-like straps of the dress hung on the round shoulders, dropping slightly downward and always at the same angle — two lines cutting across the exposed arms like scars.