“Fletcher, get up,” I try to say. “That lump, over there,” but I cannot get the words out fast enough, “is a grenade.” If a telegram comes I w ill not accept it. If a telegram comes I will tell them to send it elsewhere.
Preferring no thoughts to these, I close my eves, but the fear follows me.
“Fletcher,” my mother calls, wandering into the lining room of our enormous house in Connecticut one July afternoon years ago. She seats herself in the center of the floor. In the silence she feels the room betraying her.
“I think we’d better get rid of all this,” she says miserably and motions to the objects that surround her. It’s so crowded, and everything is always moving. She shows him the melting legs of the coffee table, the heavy curtains rustling in the windless air, the stereo that seems to slip from one radio station to the next without anyone touching it. The lamp and the piano chatter. There’s whispering among the Waterford. Fletcher’s eyes are wide. My mother’s perceptions are so real that my brother actually sees the furniture huddling in collusion. The pillows seem to be breathing, in the shrinking room, before his eyes.
“And this rug, too,” she sighs, “and these vases — I never wanted them.” Now the room seems impossibly cluttered. Fletcher can’t believe we ever lived in it.
“And these paintings,” he shouts, looking at my mother, then back at the heavy brushstrokes.
“And this couch.”
“And the candles,” Fletcher says.
“And all these plants,” my mother says, gasping for air, and my brother, too, begins to cry.
The enemy is everywhere. It is the chaise longue, it is the love seat.
“Help me, someone,” I whisper, closing my eyes in an attempt to dissolve the images with darkness, with words. “Help.”
“Who are you?” I ask, squinting, my head tilted to the side. “Who are you really?”
“Why? What does it matter? How could it help?”
“Because I love you.”
“You love me? Love yourself first.”
“Please, Jack.”
“Don’t cry,” he says. “Keep going. There’s no turning back now.”
She reaches her arm into the present, into my apartment here in New York. “I always knew you were strong, Marta, but this—”
She hands me an apple.
“bat this,” she says. “Eat this.”
“Fool Dog. Three Fingers. Wolf Necklace. Dead Eyes,” my brother writes across the last postcard, which pictures Bear Butte in South Dakota.
“Eight miles from Fort Meade,” the postcard states in fine print, “is Bear Butte. It can be seen from a hundred miles away. The Teton used to camp on this flat-topped mountain to pray. Here they would wail for the dead of whom the stones are tokens.”
The day my mother turned eighteen and was awarded a full scholarship to Vassar College and my Aunt Lucy was more or less settled, having become engaged to the life-insurance salesman and on her way to a career in nursing, was the day that Grandpa Sarkis announced in the gray kitchen that he was going home.
The sisters looked at one another puzzled, pretending they did not know what he was talking about, although they both knew precisely what he meant.
“But you are home, Daddy,” Lucy said, patting him gently on the back and looking around the room with him.
Already he had changed his name back to the real one, the Armenian one, Wingarian — not Frank Wing, the name he used in the mill.
“I’m going home,” Sarkis Wingarian repeated.
But home, the girls knew, was something only in their father’s head. You could not even find it on the map. He was going back to the old country, now many countries strewn across the continent. He was going to a place where, he imagined, his own life and thoughts of his wife might be erased by some greater suffering.
“In this country there is only work. You work your whole life and for what?” he muttered. “For nothing.” He looked at the seat at the kitchen table where his wife used to sit when she was well enough.
My mother would never see her father again. Only once that I know of did she ask him to come back, and that was right after my birth. I cannot really imagine it — how she found him or what she said or what he said back.
But he might very well have said, “In America they will laugh at me, they will call me a fat man, but here my weight is cause for respect. Here I am worth my weight in gold. In America I would look like an old man, but here old men are respected. Old age means wisdom.”
“But, Father, she is beautiful,” my mother would have said back. “I want you to see her.” Then she would hesitate. “Father,” she’d say in a whisper, “she looks just like Mother to me.”
This was one thing my grandfather, running across Russia, Turkey, Svria, Lebanon, could not bear to hear. He pretended he did not.
“What good are girls?” he said back to her. “All we get are girls. Always girls! Let me know if you have a son.”
“No, Father,” she said, and she did not call him when Fletcher was born the next year.
Yet despite everything, despite even his indifference toward me, I cannot help liking Grandpa Sarkis — stubborn as a bull, thick as an ox, fat as the world.
In the old country you can grow silk on trees. In the old country you are worth your weight in gold. In the old country his people were slaughtered like sheep. I miss him, this enormous Grandpa Sarkis. When I get older and begin to gain weight myself, I know I will think of him. I will watch my hips turn to gold. And in the silk dress I someday buy I w ill see him in Paterson, setting the weave all day and all night for love. As I slip into that smooth dress, I’ll think of him, wherever he is, coaxing the silkworms into productivity for me.
“Turks,” my mother hisses to the children passing under her window on bicycles, when she does not feel well. “Turks,” she screams.
I have imagined the Topaz Bird with talons, curve-beaked, its brutal feathers sharpening into points. It devours mice in front of me. It lands on my mother’s head and draws blood.
“Turks,” she screams as the grass turns to worms, as her hair catches fire.
When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone…. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.
Chief Seattle
Keep going, I think to myself. There is no substitute for pain.
We were sitting on her bed next to her, but she was in the Sung Dynasty. She was in a German forest. She was blossoming under her dress for a man we could not see. She was next to us again, then far away. She was escaping from the Turks. She was in the center of the waterfall. Her hands fluttered in front of her face. She closed the book from which she was reading our bedtime story. I don’t know where she was.
“But what’s the ending, Mom?” we said and tugged at her golden robe.
“And then the children plucked the chocolate bonbons from the tree and put them in their pockets.”
“What tree?” we asked, thrilled, confused.
“What bonbons?”
The story she had been reading to us had been of a flock of migrating birds.
She smiled. “And the stormy sky turned blue, and the ocean became still. Swim off to bed now,” she whispered, “my minnows. Press your bellies into the sand and sleep.”
“Good night, Mom,” we said, our arms undulating by our sides.