Still, I continued to watch. I watched them so often and so intentiy that soon my body assumed a position which it always took thereafter to accommodate deep concentration. One eye is squinted, my head is tilted to the side, my arms are folded across my chest. Candid photos of me at numerous occasions reveal this pose — at parties, at the zoo, at picnics, at poetry readings. Whether I am eight or ten or sixteen I always look the same: my right eye squints, my head tilts to the side, fixed in concentration, as if sheer w ill might expose to me the secrets of the universe. But, of course, this posture, a child’s invention, never helped to unravel the intricate workings of my parents’ hearts.
“You think about the strangest things sometimes, Vanessa,” Hetcher said, putting his arms around me. He was worried. He couldn’t understand what I needed to know so badly. For a second, I knew, he thought he was losing me to the incomprehensible world of our parents, but he should not have worried so; I would never even get close.
I will never get close. Still I have not entirely given up, even now.
I remember watching Father one night as he listened to Fletcher talk about the Civil War. I remember especially how carefully he listened to Fletcher, occasionally interjecting a comment of his own. I could tell that it brought my father pleasure to see Fletcher consider what he had said.
“It’s more complicated than you make it,” my father told him. “You have to let yourself really live in the South to understand the Confederacy,” and Fletcher nodded. Then, looking down at his plate, my father would say in that voice that was half here, half somewhere else, “What fine tomatoes and fine corn this season has produced. It’s been an exceptional season, I think.” At this point he smiled and closed his eyes, thankful for the good food and for Fletcher’s intelligence and curiosity and for his wife and daughter who on this rare occasion were all together at the same time for dinner. He looked so happy, so calm, that you would think that feeling of well-being would have stayed with him after we had all left the table.
“I’ll do the dishes,” Fletcher volunteered as he wandered through the Appomattox courthouse. “I’ll help,” my mother said.
How, then, was it that, when I followed my father out into the garden, this same man who minutes before was so content now seemed to be trembling as he turned the same black eggplant over and over in the evening light? It was a mystery to me what in the composition of this scene might turn my father into a sadder man, a smaller one. The mosquitoes at his neck? The whisper of fall in the air? The earth cooling drastically with the sunset?
“Daddy,” I asked, this year’s tomatoes turning in my stomach, “is anything wrong?”
“No, nothing, sweetheart,” he murmured and kissed the top of my head. “Come on, it’s getting chilly. Let’s go inside.”
And consider Mother, as we entered the house, sitting in a chair, a pencil poised in her hand, her eyes closed. What could I learn from the way she lived?
“Tell your brother that I would like to see him,” she said to me one day. But when I returned with Fletcher she had disappeared, nowhere to be found, not in the house or in the garden or near the lake.
“Mother,” we cried into the arms of trees. “Mother,” we said, kicking up rocks as if with some small adjustment the whole world would fall into place. When I eventually learned of Virginia Woolf ‘s death by water, I began to fear for my mother and that magnetic lake. I am grateful now that no such idea ever crossed my mind independently on those days when we searched everywhere for her to no avail.
And what was I to make of the way she would braid my hair into a thousand braids or make dandelion makeup with me or mudpacks, only to leave before she could explain, for example, what to do with the concoction she’d plastered on my face?
“Please go now, Vanessa, all right, honey?” she’d say in a voice that swam, and I walked around alone, muddy and frightened, dirt hardening, then cracking on my face.
“What on earth—?” Sonia laughed, seeing me on the way to the house. “What are you doing?” she asked, her voice excited and high with the incongruity of the idea. Dirt was to be washed off the face, not put on in thick layers. Sonia was part Russian and she felt more rational than I.
“I don’t know, Sonia,” I said. “It was something my mother and I—”
“It sure looks strange,” she said. “How did you do it?”
“I’ll show you. It’s mud and clay,” and I, too, felt my voice rising in excitement.
Just moments before, to get the clay my mother and I had gone down to the tennis court where we had taken all we needed. It was before tennis became obsessive in Connecticut and no one yet cared that we were making deep gouges in the vulnerable baseline. When Sonia and I returned and I saw the pits my mother and I had made a few moments before, they seemed like the saddest marks in the world. I had been so happy when she was next to me, showing me how easy it was to get the clay up, but now with her gone and only the pockmarked court to testify that she was ever there I felt like crying.
“Don’t cry,” said Sonia. “Your face will run.”
Sonia thought my mother was wonderful. She loved coming to my house; particularly, she loved the lack of rules and regulations because her own mother had such a strange set of them.
Sonia was not allowed to leave the dinner table until she finished everything on her plate — not such an unusual rule in itself until you considered what had to be eaten. Barely disguised, it often turned out to be the brains of calves or the kidneys of sheep or some other unidentified hearts or lungs. Sweetbreads, tripe, tongue; venison, rabbits, oxtails, pigeons every night another surprise.
Another rule was that on weekends, no matter what the weather, Sonia would be sent outside to play and could not come in until it was time for the dubious dinner to be served. We wondered what it was that Sonia’s mother was doing during that time that she did not want Sonia to see. Frequently we would spy on her but never found her doing anything too unusual. We hoped she might be burning letters in the kitchen or whispering American secrets on the telephone in Russian or inviting lovers with fur hats in, but she’d always be doing something fairly routine like polishing the figurines or scrubbing the floor to classical music or sautéing some mystery meat. While we had the Osbournes and hmily Tilset and the rest, I was relieved not to have the kinds of ghosts Sonia must have had. Though she never spoke of them, there must have been silent herds of sheep and deer, heartless and vacant eyed, roaming through her house; huge empty-headed cows must have nudged her in her sleep, breathing their terrible breaths, looking for their brains, their lost lungs.
As we blended the mud and clay and applied it to Sonia’s wide forehead and high cheekbones, her pretty ears and long neck, I felt better, as if my mother were sending me a message through the earth.
We walked through town proudly in our masks and did not cower when the local boys laughed or bow our heads when the women whispered and clicked their tongues. The undercurrent of ill-willed gossip that flowed through the center of our small town would easily have been enough to drown people less preoccupied than Sonia and I. Unlike my parents, w e did care w hat other people thought about us, but we could not hear what they whispered, so absorbed were we in our own complicated lives. Perhaps we shut them out on purpose; too fragile to hear what they really said, perhaps we magnified the sounds of the wind in the trees and the birds and the lake and the cars. If we did in fact do that, it was a good idea, and Sonia and I were far smarter than I ever thought. I have seen so many people hurt by the closed-mindedness of others that I know now it is best not to take too seriously the opinions of those you do not love or cannot ever imagine loving — finally, a point of view of my own.