Then she burrowed into him, tried to fit her whole head into the hollows of his torso. Oh, she wanted to weep, but not from sorrow, from confusion. She felt as if all her life she’d been carrying this black sack filled with cobras, and the redheaded boy had swept it from her hands and given her a different one, filled with something soft, and said, Listen, this, too, is yours, and you can have it, and didn’t you know there are millions of different things to carry in the world, darling? And she thought of her father, of Joe Helmuth and all the other hard, dark men in her childhood, and had to blink to see the redheaded boy with his big nose and his sleepy, mole-like eyes as the same genre of human as them. Later, she let the sheets fall off her legs, let the boy exclaim and hold her calves in his hands, and she explained the burns, told the story for the first time of her own small revolution. As she watched him sleep that night, she thought a very definite Yes.
THIS IS HOW A LIFE FALLS INTO PLACE. A graduation, a wedding with her pale, redheaded groom sneaking into her room before the ceremony for a prewedding snuggle, the reception with Joe Helmuth in a fine blue tuxedo, spinning her around the dance floor, his white moustache twitching with pride as she smiled up at him in her lace dress. A hot day outside, the chocolate factory perfuming the wedding, like a blessing bestowed by her hometown. Her parents looked small and nervous at their table, her father becoming so drunk he wept openly, smacking his forehead with his palm, smacking, smacking, until her mother stubbed out her cigarette, and took his hands in her own jaundiced ones, and held them to her lips and kissed them until he leaned his forehead against hers. They sat there, calm, eyebrow to eyebrow. Her monkey-faced sister, who turned out to be quite pretty in an overbitten Betty Boop way, swept her retarded brother around the floor, both laughing like fools, and the bride’s younger brother pressed her to him for one brief moment after the dance, unable to speak, his eyes full of tears. He smelled the same as ever: celery, sweat.
Then she was the breadwinner, putting her husband through medical school, drawing blood samples from small Amish boys who never so much as whimpered at the needle. Her father, resenting this — It’s not natural, he said, it’s not right; a man should provide for his wife — began to only grunt in her husband’s presence, always seeming to have a tool in his hand. Joe Helmuth tried hard to provoke her husband to bickering and when her redheaded husband only laughed, refused to bicker, he at last relented, giving them a basset puppy that grew up fat and gentle. With the residency came the years of joyous scrimping, years of making baskets for gifts and canning her own vegetables, and hovering over her first child, a beloved son, whose birth was the best day of her life, at least until the birth of her daughter, an even brighter day that seemed to engulf her, drown her in its fearsome miracles.
When she unwrapped her daughter for the first time, she touched the tender folds of the baby’s body, the warm little tires of her neck and lips and eyelids and kneepits. And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms. If her daughter cried at night, she stood and slipped into her room and kissed her to sleep. She nursed her and felt herself grow softer, her hard edges sanded off, as the satiated mouth grew slack.
And she watched this daughter grow, grasp at words as if they were bright things, shove everything the world offered into her mouth, as if to taste it all. She watched those little legs in their corduroy pants pump like pistons down the lawn after her older brother, she watched her build forts of sticks and stones and tree stumps, make soft beds for herself of thick moss. The delicate things her daughter crafted with her hands she held in her own and wondered over, as she wondered over the fierceness of the girl’s bright force as she shouted and pulled at a stranger’s mean dog that had attacked their family’s golden retriever, at how, so young, the power of her fury drove the mean dog off. The years of dancing to suburban hip-hop in the kitchen as they did dishes, of bent flowers ripped from the ground in a pitcher for Mother’s Day, of the hurling of words more painful than any thwack of her own daddy’s belt, her daughter screaming words at her, spiny with superiority: You’re so fucking superficial; It’s the nineties; Make Dad make his own sandwich, for God’s sake. And then the swallowed sorries and bittersweet repentance: Mom, you know I love you. Her daughter grew tall and muscled, fierce and laughing, so terrible that the girl scared her mother, her brother, her small and suspicious grandparents. Joe Helmuth laughed and laughed at her. My girlfriend, he said with admiration, Such a spicy jalapeño. Her mother watched her, awed, this mountain of a girl; she saw how the hunger in her was different from her own, greedy, not empty.
Should a life be lived with such intensity? the mother asked her husband as he read a magazine before bed. Should life be lived with the intensity our daughter lives it? He put the magazine down, smiled, the skin behind his glasses crinkling. He was bald now, plump. What do you think? he said. She did not answer him at first, spent a few minutes looking through the dark panes and into the city where they lived, far from Hershey, far from her childhood. She thought of her mother’s cigarette smoke as it spun a blue web on the ceiling. Yes, I think it should, she said, and then put out the light and folded herself under the covers, rested herself against him. Her old body against his old body, unbeautiful in aging. But together, they were still beautiful, somehow.
In the end, it was volleyball that was her daughter’s steady passion, the sport for leaping Amazons. The mother sat in the honeyed high school gymnasiums, the college gyms, and watched the stony look come over her daughter’s face with every stuff, dig, kill. In the stands, the mother touched her ravaged calves. She was still so lovely in her increasing years, her hair dark now and straight, her lips glossed, eyebrows grown out to a normal thickness. When the ball shot toward her girl, the mother leaned forward and waited.
She saw her daughter’s thigh muscles bunch as she readied herself for the jump; she saw one beautiful summer night at her parents’ years ago. Her children had been tiny then, running around with glass jars to collect the fireflies, her retarded brother was singing a song under his breath. Tang of daiquiri in her mouth; lick of cigarette smoke curling into the night; scent of the middle-aged chokecherry pricking her eyes. She ran inside and dug in the basement for her fire batons and came out onto the lawn, setting her mother’s lighter to the ancient ends, flinging them one, two, three, four, into the air so they spun into the starred sky, one after another, outglowing the stars. She saw herself reflected in the faces of her family, twirling, the children spellbound; she saw how they looked at her with surprise.
In the warm glow of the gym she closed her eyes to imprint her daughter upon her eyelids, stilled her in midmotion. As the game went on, she held her daughter leaping. A wonder, this girl, who knew already how to catch herself.
Blythe
THE YEARS BEFORE BLYTHE WERE A KIND OF beautiful limbo, sticky with juice boxes, scented with leaf mold at Wissahickon Park where I walked the babies, book-ended by the hordes of Catholic schoolchildren in their uniforms who flitted down the hill in the mornings, drawn by the ponderous bells, and dispersed in the afternoons like handfuls of moths. Sue and Mackenzie would press their faces to the window and watch the children pass with toddlers’ fixed awe, and I would watch my girls and think with a fierceness I still sometimes feel, Not yet. When I’d remember the law firm where I was supposed to return to work, panic like a cold finger would press my heart, and I’d think the same thing: Not yet, not yet, not yet.