“Maman used to carry a small metal box of coals and ashes to school to keep her warm,” Sabine says, running through the leaves in her boots. They laugh and laugh at the thought of Sabine’s mother and hug each other, fall into the leaves, get up and run back to the house for sweaters. “There were always wonderful winter roses on the Christmas table,” Sabine says, rosy cheeked, smiling, looking around the room. “Maman always saw to it.
“Come with me,” she whispers, taking Christine’s hand. Slowly they descend the dark steps to the apple cellar. The smell fills them. Thev lie on the cool dirt floor. My mother takes off her thick sweater. Their breathing grow s heavy. They move closer. They close their eyes.
After a long while Sabine opens one eye. From a small window she sees the face of a young goat looking in at them. “Look!” she cries, and they are doubled over in laughter. It seems that they have never seen anything funnier in their whole lives.
“Enough of this!” Sabine says, running up the apple cellar stairs. “A Paris,” she writes on blue paper and leaves it on the table of the w inter roses.
“Paris,” Sabine sighs, “finally!” They make a stop for cologne, a stop for blue paper, stamps, cherries, champagne.
“Oh, Paris!” my mother sighs. “Les fêtes, les soirées, les salons.” “ht beaucoup de femmes!” Sabine laughs. “Grand-mère told me that Mata-Hari danced her Javanese dances entirely in the nude once, for the women. Can you picture it?” She laughs and laughs.
My mother walks slowly, dropping her gloves, catching a falling scarf, stalling for time. Beautiful, vibrant Paris turns to watercolor sadness.
“Don’t worry,” Sabine pouts, “one day when we are old we’ll Join traveling circus and be together lower They mbrace, kiss good-bye lor the thousandth time.
“Au revoir, ma Pans. Au revoir, ma Sabine,” Christine say. She walks slow ly, turns once more.
“We’ll be tightrope walkers,” Sabine says.
My mother smiles and waxes good-bye.
She is dozing off now with the other little girl, her sister, in the cramped room. The tat man reads about New Orleans to them trom the newspaper’s travel section.
“New Orleans — that sounds, that sounds,” she murmurs, tailing asleep. What she means to say, what she would have said, was “that sounds so nice.”
In her dreams the notes of saxophone slide out of the windows &she is sure she has never heard anything like it before.
Creoles — was that those people were called? There are feathers and fans, men dressed as women, women dressed as lizards and birds, laughter, and a drink called bourbon. All of it follows her into her dreams.
And the fat man, too, leaving for work, dreams his wav into the dark mill.
“The rainbow-colored Painted Desert of Arizona sweeps in a great crescent from the Grand Canyon southeast along the Colorado River to the Petrified Forest.”
“The Petrified Forest!” Lucy cries.
“Go now,” my mother says. “There is no other way.”
The apartment is warm and dark. I turn in bed toward the wall and hug the cat. “But Mother,” I say.
“Go,” she urges me.
But I hesitate here. I would prefer to forget.
“There is no other way,” she says.
And so I go, in my mind, back to college where I will spend a little more than one semester. First to that strange, sad room, then to the beautiful library, and then beyond that, too.
“It‘s time,” she says. And I know she is right.
Part Three
I decided to forgo all the initiation rites of freshmen and went instead to the library. Eleanor Cove, the librarian, in response to my question, lifted her arm, pointed to the stacks on the second floor, and looked up. In her raised face I saw what I had seen so often in my mother. Here was a lover of books, a woman dizzied by them, transformed in some way. She smiled. Quietly she explained to me how things were arranged, where the periodicals were located and the reference room. I thanked her and climbed the stairs.
The library was empty. Classes had not yet begun and people were still stuck somewhere in summer, I assumed — on the wavy lake or the tennis court with its green hum.
It was cool and dark and I felt safe here. In the context of such coolness and sense and order it seemed that the events of the night before could not have happened; walking to the shelves I telt strangely free of them: that odd room on the top floor, Marta and her sad, sad story, and the needle I watched sink into my arm. I had changed into a long-sleeved shirt before going to the library, hoping to disown that arm somehow.
I loved the order of libraries. I felt at ease here among the old and new books, lined and numbered on the shelves. I found what I was looking for easily. When I was done I would put those books back in the same place, and on another day I would be able to find them again. Most people would think little of such a simple thing, but this afternoon the thought of every book having its place and no book being lost gave me an overwhelming sense of pleasure.
It was the pleasure of square dancing with my brother at the Blue Goose in Moose Point, Massachusetts. We loved the reliability of it, the certainty. We knew when we unlocked hands to allemande left or turned our backs on each other to honor our corners and do-si-do we were not losing each other; wewould reunite in the end — it was in the design of the call — and it made letting go possible. We always knew that for the final promenade we would be together.
I lined up the books on the table, starting with the earliest — the first book on the left and, six books later, the last one on the right. I turned them all over so that I could see the photographs of the writer, my mother. Watching my mother slowly age on the back of her books always had a calming effect on me. I wanted to linger this afternoon at each stage, tracing the shape of the years. I had studied these photos often, but now, missing her more than I ever had, I wondered what secret her face might give up. She had always left me—trips to France, summers in Maine, readings all over the country — but this time I was the one who had driven away, and it was she who stood at the edge of the driveway, stationary, growing smaller and smaller, and it made my longing more acute. Over the years I had stayed home from school often, not wanting to leave her. And when the young teachers came, as they inevitably did, I would run and hide.
“Vanessa?” my mother would say to those earnest women, “why, Vanessa could be anywhere. I can’t keep track of her.” And then she’d whisper, “She’s like the air, you know,” and motion out into the world and laugh her long lovely laugh.
The photo of my mother on the back of her first book remains the most constant in my mind. It is the one least altered by memory for I cannot ever remember my mother looking the way she does there. I love to look at her at twenty-three: the yellow-blonde hair, the smooth egg of a forehead, the softness of her face which, at this age, still seems to be forming. She looks like someone else almost, a young beauty, an actress perhaps, caught strangely off guard in the moment before she raises her hand to block her face from the camera or to put on sunglasses, shielding herself from a demanding public. She looks unfocused, nervous, as if she has already lost her way, though she has just barely begun. She seems to be moving slightly in the frame, but she does not know where she is going or why.
At times when I look at that photo of my mother on the back of Winter, her first book of poems, I think I can see Sabine, who took that picture, reflected in my mother’s eyes. “Smile,” Sabine is saying. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. This won’t hurt at all.” I imagine she lifts her polka-dotted dress to her thighs, bends her knees slightly, and does a little dance for my mother. Other times when I look at this photograph I think I can see a shadowy figure, quite small, standing behind my mother, caressing her shoulders, dark eyes lowered; and that, too, is Sabine.