What waited for her in France she was too tired even to conceive. She took from her large leather bag an Italian Vogue, a French dictionary, and some light-blue writing paper, which she quickly put away. She would not look back again. Gray Poughkeepsie was gone. She had made it disappear. She could do anything. Marta, too, was gone. Her French, of course, would need brushing up, she thought. Marta ‘s had always been so pathetic, so horribly Spanish. Natalie loathed imperfection, weakness of any kind. She hated the way Marta groveled. Natalie practiced her cold, hard look on the man across the aisle. He fidgeted in his seat. Marta had become so weak. At the end Natalie could not stand the sight of her. She smiled. She had made her disappear.
I stumbled into the white room. The weather was getting colder and colder now, the mercury falling way below freezing. I hugged my black coat to me. White envelopes fell from my pockets and the package of needles. Jack looked into my eyes, rolled up my sleeves.
“Goddamn it,” he said. “Goddamn it, Vanessa.” He kissed me everywhere as if he might suck the drug from my system. “Goddamn it,” he whispered.
“Don’t do this,” he said. “Save yourself.”
White, too, is the color of snow.
“Crazy Horse was dead. Sitting Bull was soon to die. What Drinks Water dreamt in advance was coming true: ‘they will come and they will build small gray boxes on the land and beside those boxes we shall die.’”
We walked on the farm with Grandfather. He was getting old as he spoke the story. “Let’s sit here,” he said, and we sat in the center of a field of wheat.
“They were being crowded into camps,” Grandpa said. “Their food was being cut off and they were slowly starving to death. The land they loved was being taken away. The white men wanted to buy it. They did not understand that it was not for sale.
“It was the end. The earth was being pulled apart for coal and gold. Every promise was broken. Many, many were killed. There was no hope on earth.”
“It was the end,” Eletcher said. “They could not roam on the land. They were put into camps.”
“But then from the west,” my grandfather said, “came a dream over the plains.” He made a large gesture with his arm. “And the dream was this: Christ had come back to earth as an Indian. Indians from all over went to Nevada to hear the dreamer’s story. ‘The dead will all be alive again,’ Wovoka said. ‘The earth will be green with high grass. The buffalo and elk will return. There will be plenty of food. It will be like old times.’
“They were starving. There was no hope on earth. Crazy Horse was dead,” my grandfather said.
White Feather thought of her son and her heart swelled.
“‘We will walk and talk with our lost ones,’ Wovoka said, ‘if you do the Ghost Dance,’ and he taught them how to do it. ‘Everyone,’ he said, ‘must dance. There will be food and sweet grass. And the white man will become small fish in the rivers. Spread the word.’”
The Indians brought Wovoka’s message back to their tribes, Grandpa told us, and everywhere men and women began dancing the Ghost Dance. They wore the magic Ghost Shirts that were painted with sacred symbols and impenetrable to the bullets of the white man.
There was no hope on earth.
“After doing the dance for a long time, men and women fell into trances. Many saw what had been promised. There was happiness and peace. When they came back from the trances they told their dreams to others. They had seen the dead. In the next spring it was promised there would be no more misery. They danced on and on. The white men ordered the Ghost Dancing to be stopped. Sitting Bull was taken away. But the Indians continued. ‘We shall live again,’ they chanted.”
It was 1890 and winter was coming on.
Anne Stafford held her five-year-old son Joshua tightly in her arms as if she might squeeze the life back into him. Her heart ached so that she wished she might die with him. Cholera had broken out all along the Platte River. All day as they traveled westward in their covered wagons, they could see people burying their dead, using the side boards of the wagons to construct coffins.
“You cannot trade the lives of children for handfuls of gold,” Anne cried. “One does not make up for the other.”
After three days Anne’s husband finally pried Joshua away from his wife, took some boards and made the second small coffin of their short voyage. Her arms were now empty of both children. One could hear her piercing cry, like that of the coyote, through the dark nights. In grief she gathered her children’s toys together, glued them to a pail, and painted them blue.
Eva Hauser, sitting up in bed, moved the blue stamp from Germany from the top corner of the canvas down to the bottom. A series of pink stamps from France, cut in half, ran down the left side like a border. She sprinkled a bit of chamomile through the center. Looking at the various scraps of fabrics the women of the sewing circle had left her, she picked one and held it in her hands. She cut out a triangle from a family photograph and placed it carefully to the right. A broken teacup that her grandmother once lovingly put her lips to every day completes the piece.
“I can’t live here anymore,” she sighs over the phone, exhaling cigarette smoke as she tells her parents of her plans. “I can’t even drive.”
“Drive? What do you need to drive for?” her mother, always chauffeured, asks.
“You’ve obviously never come to visit me in Poughkeepsie,” Natalie says. “You obviously don’t know what I’m up against!”
“Your father will get you a car,” her mother says.
“Yes, but I don’t want a car. I want to go back to Europe.”
Marta began to eat only things that crunched: carrots, celery, crackers, popcorn, apples. She did not move. I brought these things to her bed, closed my eyes, and listened to the sound of her jaw coming down on a stalk or a core. She did not speak. She was making sounds the only way she could. No more talk about Natalie’s death — no more talk at all, the crunching went on all day and long into the night.
As I lie alone in my bed in New York now, I hear her crunching again, though I have not seen Marta in such a long time. Now in the middle of this lonely December she hands me a perfect, red apple. “Eat this,” she tells me. “Eat this.” She passes me a carrot next, a cracker, not much, but all she has.
“I miss you, Marta,” I call out in the darkness where only the cat moves.
“I loved her so much,” I hear her say. “It was so hard to try to live without her, to try to live after her.”
She tries to help me now as a light snow begins to fall, and I realize that she has been helping me all along. The room, the candles, the photos, the — it was all part of the rehearsal. She gives me my marks on the stage now, telling me where to stand, my line cues. She hands me a ripe, red apple. “Eat this,” she says, “eat this.”
Before her eyes the highway opened up like a field and slowly filled with snow. She looked up at the white sky; it seemed the snow might never stop. As they neared home in the little red car, the snow fell harder, transforming the landscape.
It was one of those bright, impossibly clear spring days that had become less and less common in New York. Rain had become its weather, gray its color. Ahaze that would not entirely burn off seemed always to envelop the city. We had grown accustomed to it; it was how we lived. So on this day in Central Park the heightened clarity seemed strange, giving us all a sense of unreality-Things this clear did not seem true anymore.