I let her keep going, swearing into the ravaged earth, laughing hysterically as she excavated marbles and the arms of dolls from the ground. She began lining up all the things she had found on the slate path. “My treasures,” she said, smiling. I let her keep going, bather came home from work. He looked at me. I was old enough to know better.
He spoke very quietly into the ditch where we stood. We were waist high in dirt.
“Please don’t read tonight,” he said to her. “I’ll call and tell them that you won’t be able to come.”
“Oh, but I must, Michael. It’s our only hope,” she said in her high voice. “It’s the only thing that might work. Bring me my clothes, Vanessa. My black dress, my rings, my textured stockings, my new black shoes, and my manuscript, the one that is open on my desk. I will change next door. Call Sonia. Tell her that I am coming.”
My mother spoke calmly now, crouching in the dirt, fingering the marbles she had lined up.
As many times as my father saw her this way, he never got used to it.
“I’ve made dinner reservations,” he said softly, “for six o’clock, near the Guggenheim. We should probably leave soon.”
My mother laughed out loud. “I’m reading at the Guggenheim Museum,” she said. “How odd. Vanessa, my dress. But be careful in the house. Hurry through it, do you understand? And stay out of the shadows, my darling.”
I carried her voice carefully, lovingly, as if it were a child, into the house. “Mv darling,” I said, wanting to make her unafraid somehow. “It’s OK, darling,” I said to her, going through her closet to get her clothes, climbing the stairs to her attic room to get her poems. “Darling,” I whispered. “Darling.”
My father lifts his hand finally from my mother’s. The drinks arrive. She gulps down her martini, interrupts my father as he orders dinner, and says, “Another martini, please, Michael.” Then she looks to me. “Vanessa, do you want one? Fletcher, you’re still too young to drink.” Fletcher was thirteen. I was fourteen.
She finishes her second drink. “I’d like another, please,” she smiles, as dinner comes.
“Not wine with your dinner? I’ve ordered a nice Beaujolais-Villages,” Father says.
“Another drink,” she savs to the waiter. She stares at the food before her.
“You’d better start eating, Mom,” Fletcher says. “Remember the reading.” She touches his cheek and smiles vacantly.
“My little big man,” she says. “My love, my love.”
“I think that Fletcher is probably right about your dinner,” my father says.
“Don’t condescend to me, Michael,” she snaps. “Just don’t do it.”
Nothing can stop us from moving in the direction we must move. I want to stop this dinner scene now or alter it. If there must be this restaurant, then I want her to sit with us peacefully, to eat her dinner anil tell us a story, to be sweet and happy.
And if there must be this garden and there must, if there must be this ditch, then let us lie down together holding each other’s hands. May we be covered over with dirt. May it all stop. Stop. I would like to stay there with her and her collection of smooth stones and marbles, ladybugs and worms, exotic caterpillars. Let us then be covered over, smothered with earth. Let it all stop here.
“Stop it, Michael,” she says, pulling herself up from the ditch, the table, martini in hand, her manuscript under her arm. She walks across the floor away from the tables and into the dark bar. She opens her manuscript. She rubs against a man’s gray shoulder. She’s so beautiful. I all turns toward her and runs his hand up her textured leg. I can see all this, Fletcher; I suppose Father sees it, too.
“Eat your dinner now,” he says to Fletcher and me. “It’s going to get cold.” We cut our meat for Father. We put vegetables in our mouths. Dessert comes. We spoon soft puddings into our mouths though we think we w ill be sick. My mother’s hand rests between her legs. She is shifting on the bar stool, but the bar is dark and I hope I am the only one who notices this movement. She rubs the neck of another man. My father buries his face in his hands. “Leave me alone,” my mother says to the man. “Just keep your fucking hands off me,” and she walks back to us.
She bends down and gently kisses my father on the cheek. “Oh, Michael,” she whispers. She hurries her tongue into his ear. She wraps her arms around his shoulders. “Christine, stop it,” he says. She turns from him abruptly, rubs my back and plays with my hair, pushing it to the top of my head.
“Fletcher,” she says, sliding next to him, “would you do something for Mommy? Would you please, please?” She tilts her head.
“OK, Mom,” he says. “OK.”
“Pick out the prettiest woman in this restaurant for me.”
He is afraid not to do what my mother asks. “I don’t know, Mom,” he says, and he looks at his shoes. “I can’t pick.”
She sighs and he looks up finally and says, “I guess she’s pretty, Mom.” He points to a tall, thin, dark-haired woman who sits with her boyfriend. She must be about twenty.
“Ah, you’ve got very good taste,” she says, smiling at him. “What’s the matter, Michael? Do you think I won’t? Do you really think I won’t do it?
“Fletcher, get up,” she says, staring the whole time at my father. She takes my brother with her and introduces herself to the young couple, and because she is so commanding and confident, so powerful now, at the height, in fact, of some strange power, they are seated in seconds next to the young woman and her boyfriend. My mother smiles. Fletcher looks over at us. My mother takes a cigarette from the woman’s pack, lights it, and hands it to her. She lights one for herself. My father’s eyes swell as my mother, two tables from us, admires the woman’s dress.
“Mommy,” I say, “don’t do this. Please come back.” My father looks at me. There is no stopping her, his eyes say.
“They say I am one of the greatest liv ing American poets,” my mother says suddenly in a loud, agitated voice. “Come to my reading,” she laughs, leaning into the woman, “and make up your own mind. There will be a party afterwards,” she says, moving her hand toward the woman’s. “There are always parties.” The young man is entranced with her, too. The woman blushes. My mother is irresistible.
We walk down the street to the Guggenheim. “God damn it,” she yells. “Fuck. Oh, fuck,” she calls into the posh evening air. “Oh, Christ.” She is crying. She is wrestling with something right before our eyes. She focuses suddenly on me. I reach for her hand and she slaps mine.
“You don’t love me at all,” she screams. “You don’t care if I live or die. None of you! No, neither do you, Vanessa,” she cries, pushing me away from her. “Don’t pretend you’re any different from the rest of them. Go to hell. Go to hell,” she shrieks, running way ahead of us. “And don’t come in with me. Don’t you dare.”
We wait out on the sidewalk for what seems a long time. “OK,” my father says in a voice which is hardly a voice at all, and we step into the outer room of the museum where others who could not get tickets into the auditorium stand. There are loudspeakers set up. The young woman and her boyfriend are there. They wave to us. Fletcher waves back weakly, then stares down at the ground. There is silence over the public address system, then a buzzing, then footsteps, my mother’s shoes, an adjustment of the microphone, a few coughs from the audience, a bit of rustling, then silence. I imagine my mother just stands there in front of the microphone and stares out into the audience. It seems like forever. My father closes his eyes. We hear the rustling of pages, silence, then her voice, finally her voice. She begins without introduction, and as she reads the first line her voice grows — grows and grows with each word — loud, secure, catching fire, furious and pure.