On a bare branch the mother saw a single bird’s silhouette.
Do not touch me, He says, for I am not of this world—or the other. Everyone gasped! The child’s arm remained extended. They were being battered by beauty.
At once, unaccountably, there were a thousand stars pouring from the sky like diamonds. The moon had been full and the sky dark when they arrived and a bonfire burned, but as the sun slowly rose, the moon sunk, and the sky, a dome above them, seemed divided for an instant, one half of the dome dark, one half light, until light began to spill and bleed into the darkness, and all at last was brightness, a translucent blue, and the full moon falling behind the child’s head — a perfect halo. They broke the bread and took the cup, and the mother thought of the Burning Man she had seen in the fall and the quiet ashes in the ground.
Austere as it was, and as unnerving, the boy with no legs felt there had never been a better Easter service — and the mother had to agree.
ON GOOD FRIDAY the child’s fish, Miss Tippy, had died and was outside in a plastic bag awaiting burial in the Children’s Garden. What could be better, the child thought, than Miss Tippy on the third day, floating and gold above their heads?
THE MOTHER REMEMBERED when the child was small and her head was as round as a planet and she would fit perfectly in the mother’s lap. The child’s feet came to the mother’s knees and it seemed to her the most miraculous of designs.
The Slung Hip Configuration, too, seemed a perfect fit even though in the time that the child and mother made that perfect Slung Hip Configuration, the mother seemed to be always lying prone and crying. The mother could not be saved by the beauty of design, but her tears kept the child alive. They were flammable, and so protected them from the evil that everywhere surrounded them.
Inside a circle of flame she kept the little baby safe, but to this day when the mother sees a baby, she runs in the opposite direction because she does not want to ever feel that way again.
WHEN THE MOTHER looked back, the bird was gone. She longed suddenly for the day of Phish and Phosh and the Ovenbird. The covered nest. The beauty of the Father. The Easter story had moved her as if she had never heard it before. She thought despite its grievous shortcomings, any religion that could conjure such a beautiful story was certainly worth something. When Christ rode into Jerusalem, he rode on a donkey, which meant he came in peace. If you rode on a horse you would have come to conquer and in war.
The mother was filled with sorrows. Four thousand soldiers this March were dead — and five years had passed.
WHEN THE BABY sat on her lap with her little legs reaching the mother’s knees, the mother’s mouth would fit perfectly at the back of her skull and the mother would take the opportunity to cushion the baby’s round head with kisses.
The baby’s head, cushioned with kisses, became impervious to the cruel and petty ways of some of the children who seemed to roam the earth, belligerent as if already in training for war.
Even now the child felt her head to be kiss encrusted, and wherever she walked in the unkissed world, she was protected.
30. time
THE MOTHER IS leaving behind a gesture of her time here. The way she moved through space. A gesture of utmost care and protection, a repetitive one, her hand moving through the child’s hair (that streaming and gleam) and what comes from it, this engagement with time and this one human life. The mother’s hand running through the smooth of the daughter’s dark hair. Is it not like silk as the darkness pours down, pours and pours, and the mother’s gesture reverberates through time and space, leaving no visible trace, but leaving a trace nonetheless. These were the records left beneath the official records. Undocumented, incapable of being caught by a camera or any other means. Beneath the story of the mother on a tablet, or a book, or a grave, is the gesture. The fingers starting at the forehead move through her hair, gently raking it back, and then in a circular motion, curling it around the right ear.
How mesmerizing is this single, simple act of love and concern and protection. There’s a feeling that no harm can come, though harm is everywhere around them. How mysterious they are, and how light, as if they were made only of wind and of dust. How buoyant. The way this singular but not uncommon gesture, left to the child, will live on. As the child runs her own hand through her own child’s hair one day, a shadow mother accompanies her. The smaller gesture asleep in the memory of the child, dormant, but waiting. The child’s hair, that gorgeous cascade of darkness, shrouding her face, and then the hand coming seemingly out of nowhere to comfort, to help, to arrange — and the tenderness of the mother, which is more, some days, than the child can bear. And that is what the child recoils from, when she recoils — from the tenderness. Sloughing off the mother, for how otherwise is a child supposed to grow and live?
Long after, the child will regret that shielding — what did she think she was protecting herself from? Long after, sitting by the river, the child will still wonder whether the mother died with the recoiling that day in her mind’s eye, as she tried to push the hair gently away from the child’s face, and the child veering slightly away — No, she had pulled away, as if from a demon. This makes the dead mother smile. Children always believed themselves to be the center of each and every instant of their particular adult’s life. The mother closes her eyes. A velvet curtain closes before her.
And even now, the mother cannot be sentimental. She had watched the child vanish over and over into another phase of being, and it had hardened her, and it taught her never to get too attached to any person, especially a child. Attachments were not what the world suggested. The world tended toward change and suggested it was the changing, the metamorphosis, that was important. It was one of the most useful and most difficult things she had ever learned while on earth. From here she floated and watched the child grow and grow and change, and change again, vanishing so many times until she, the child herself, had become an old woman like the Grandmother from the North Pole, who is eternal.
SHE CONCENTRATED ON the moth — its pale green wings against the screen. She put her hand to it. In winter, she would remember that simple gesture — her desire, the silence.
THE MOTHER THINKS it is sad that after she is dead, the child, who will be a grown woman, will have no way of knowing that this day ever occurred. No one will remember this afternoon — the child so young, the moment so ordinary, so easily forgotten. She will have no recollection of it whatsoever. That they made a collage, that they made paste from flour and water and sometimes they spread it with a paintbrush. They buried little figures inside their Playdough cakes. Grumpy or Sleepy. We make our appearance here. Forgetfulness closes up over us from both ends of the life cycle. In a hundred years the mother and child will be forgotten. The mother called in her orders to the Rose Bakery, and the child filled them. I would like a wedding cake with blue roses, and five loaves of heart-shaped breads, and three dozen hot cross buns.
No one will remember this afternoon — the child so young, the moment so ordinary, so easily forgotten.
AND ON ANOTHER afternoon: when the mother and child played Vet, there was often a problem with Bunny Boy’s purr box, and they had to wrap him in scarves. Bunny Boy, a reluctant patient, wriggling out of his clothes, remained unamused. There is nothing wrong with my purr box, he said.