As Joey and I race each other up the stairway, I smell cardamom and turmeric, schmaltz and wet plaster, urine and yesterday’s fish.
Three floors up, and I’m panting. “Wait—”
Joey stops halfway up the next flight. More than four decades between us. If I were a young father, I’d be able to give him more energy. More playfulness. Less of the caution he already rebels against. He waits till I’m next to him. Side by side, we walk up to the sixth floor, where it’s silent in the hallway. No loud music. That’s how I know my mother is home. I knock.
When she opens her door, James Hudak is sitting on her sofa in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt, working on one of her crossword puzzles with the retractable pencil I gave her. Though his age is somewhere between my mother’s and mine, James looks younger than I, fitter. As usual, he doesn’t stay. Mumbles something about coming back later to fix the window latch. Last time it was the sink. When I was a boy, I used to see him often—too often, really—because whenever he visited his grandmother she ignored me. James and I passed a sharp and swift dislike back and forth between us until he went into the Navy, and then I was away at cooking school, and we didn’t come across each other for years.
He grabs his denim shirt from the couch, gives me a brief nod. “Anthony.”
I nod. “James.”
“I’ll call you in a while,” my mother tells him.
“You need anything from the store?”
“A couple of onions for the roast tomorrow.”
He whispers something, and she whispers back.
She gets out plates and silverware with the Festa Liguria logo. While she feeds Joey and me, I try not to think of the rat; yet the effort of not thinking about the rat brings the rat into my mother’s kitchen, makes the man’s foot come down to crush it again and again, fills my head with the smell of wet feathers and sawdust, and I’m standing with Riptide in the poultry market, where the turkey with the shy eyes hangs by his feet from the scale.
“Look at that turkey looking at that little boy.”
“That turkey is looking at you, Antonio.”
“Gobobobob…”
“Nice turkey. Nice—”
“Antonio has decided. Questo.”
“No—”
And already I’m thinking of the rat again, and the man’s shoe is coming down, blood and violence, stimulating other violence, and what you see inside your head, you have to say. It’s like confession, where what you did or thought or said will push at you till you say it to the priest, and then you’ll feel better. And so I murmur “rat” to myself without moving my lips. “Rat. Rat.” Thinking this is stupid. And I don’t feel better. My mother is watching me. She seems small. Alone.
“Alone,” I whisper.
“What did you say?”
“That you spend too much time alone.”
“But Grandma’s got James,” my son says.
“I’m talking about a different kind of relationship.”
Joey is looking at me as if he were the father and I the child. He’s standing by her boombox, checking her CDs. “You got the new Busta,” he says excitedly.
“Go ahead and borrow it.”
“Thanks.” He and my mother trade CDs: Busta and Mystical and The Neptunes and Lil’ Kim.
“What if you started dating again?” I ask my mother.
She glances at Joey. They both shrug.
“Dad—” Joey pulls his hands through his short hair. Makes the ends stick up. “Grandma’s got James.”
“I want what’s already familiar,” my mother says.
“He’ll become familiar.”
“Who?”
“Someone new.”
“I don’t want someone new.”
“Once you get to know him, he’ll become familiar.”
“I would feel like a fifteen-year-old inside an eighty-year-old body.”
“There are men with eighty-year-old bodies…with ninety-year-old bodies…who’re alone and looking for a woman to—”
“Old men…” She waves my idea aside. “Whatever would I do with an old man?”
“Maybe one of your friends could introduce you to someone.”
Joey groans. “Dad—”
My mother winks at him. “A blind date…How romantic. I can picture it already…. I’m getting dressed for our date, and before I even meet him, I’m ready to have him be the one who is meant for me. But then I open my door and there he stands, barely my height, balding or with his hair parted above one ear, smelling of some manly cologne—”
“Anything but manly cologne.” I have to laugh.
“—and I want to change him already into the man I ought to be dreaming about.”
“Warts,” Joey says, “your blind date has warts.”
“Definitely warts,” she agrees.
I’m feeling lighthearted. “Why is it that the two of you need to gang up on me?”
Two weekends later, my mother arrives on the train with raisin scones and wants to rehearse for multiple attackers. After dinner, she instructs Joey to hold on to her arms while I’m supposed to approach her from the front.
“Wait a second, please—” she says, when she has us in position. “I have to think what to do first.” She lifts her right heel. Flexes her foot. “There are six parts to this.”
I’m stunned. “Is that what you’ll say if you get into that kind of situation? ‘There are six parts to this. Excuse me, please, while I think of the sequence.’”
“That is exactly why I have to rehearse with you.” Her voice is patient and slow, as if I were a four-year-old, a particularly dense four-year-old. “I have to rehearse with you, Anthony, so that it all becomes reflex.”
Swinging her right leg toward me, she stops before it touches my thigh. “I’ll do this a lot harder with real attackers,” she promises, and pivots herself to the side, using her right leg—still raised—to cock back, tap Joey’s knee, and from there shoot forward to graze my leg.
“Cool kick, Grandma.”
“Don’t you encourage her,” I snap.
But my mother is beaming at him. Her face is flushed. “Once I remember the sequence, I’ll be much faster.”
“All you’d do with any of these antics is annoy a mugger.” I hate the disapproving tone in my voice.
“No one wants to fight a wild, screaming woman. Look at Sa-lome…. And if Lot’s wife had fought, she wouldn’t have become a pillar of salt…. You see, that’s what we’re supposed to turn ourselves into when we’re in danger—pillars of salt. That’s how they get us. Now, if Lot’s wife—”
“Don’t tell me the instructor is a preacher, too?”
“It’s something I’ve thought out.”
“Now she wants to be Mrs. Lot.”
“Don’t talk about me in the third person, damnit.”
“I was just quoting what Dad would say: ‘Now she wants to be Mrs. Lot.’”
“And I would tell your father what I told you: ‘Don’t talk about me in the third person.’”
“But he’d remind you that you only quote the Bible to win an argument.”
For a moment, we’re both smiling. And I see my father arch his throat while she strokes his neck, see them lean close to each other, whispering, laughing. And I see him across the table from me at Hung Min’s, playing backgammon, his eyes on the board and on the lined face of his opponent, while I pour tea for all of us into tiny cups, stirring three spoonfuls of sugar into each.
“The instructor says ninety percent of self-defense is attitude…how I carry myself.”
“Attitude? I thought it was BLT or whatever.”
“Not BLT, Daddy. TSC. Timing, surprise, and calm.”
“Right,” my mother says. “And attitude is what leads you to TSC.”
“Then why isn’t it ATSC?”
“You’re looking for disagreement.”
“I’m looking for security. Security for you. Can’t you take some other kind of class that would make you feel str
onger? Something like…aerobics? Just make sure it’s low-impact. Yoga would be even better.”
“Yoga doesn’t kick ass, Daddy. Grandma does.”
I ignore Joey. “One of Ida’s customers—she’s in her mid-eighties—took up low-impact aerobics a few years ago. She bought several books on aerobics, and she’s walking better now than she did back then.”
“I’m walking just fine.” My mother looks at me, steadily. “Please, listen. Remember the example I gave you about a parent hurting a child, making the child afraid?”
“I remember.”
“I’m that child.”
I am still, cold. The sky is motionless. And I stand in front of her, defenseless, while my shadow lies on her face.
“I have been beaten. Many times. Brutally.”
My son is still holding my mother’s arms. While I’m afraid of knowing…afraid of not knowing.
“It happened over the span of four years…before my father com—Before he died.”
Joey moves one hand up her arm. Strokes her shoulder.
“Working as a prison guard changed him…made him brutal.”
“God—I’m sorry….” I want to hold my mother, but my shadow still lies on her face. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not the kind of thing you tell your son.” She keeps herself so straight and brittle that I don’t dare touch her.
But Joey dares. Joey keeps stroking her shoulder.
“I’m so sorry.”
Joey curves one arm around my mother’s shoulders. And now the two of them are facing me. I feel separate from them. Linked only to this grandfather—both of us causing harm—and as I wonder what malice I’ve inherited from him, I feel dizzy. I’ve only seen one photo of him, in a uniform, angular and somber, as if getting ready for his appendix to burst. My mother rarely talked about him. But now, in telling me about the beatings, she’s ripping me far open. How can I possibly hold on to my secrets any longer? I try to hear what they’re saying, my son and my mother.
“I wish I had known self-defense when I was a girl.”
“Would you have used it, Grandma?”
“Oh yes,” she says without hesitation.
“On your own father?” Joey asks her, but he’s staring at me with his new defiance.
“He shot himself,” she says. “He stuck his gun into his mouth instead of going into the prison for one more day of guard duty. I didn’t find out till I was twenty.”
And suddenly I have my arms around her, and we’re both rocking, back and forth.
“My mother said he wasn’t like that when she married him….”
Rocking, back and forth and back and forth, crying now.
“As a girl, I believed what had really burst inside my father was not his appendix but his rage. Because that’s what I wished on him whenever I was beneath his fists, that his rage would explode inside his body and kill him. Then it happened…and I felt powerful and guilty and grateful that the rage had killed him. And not me. Because it could have.”
I tighten my arms around her.
“Sometimes I tell myself that my father was just a poor schmuck inside his private hell, who struck at me, was afraid of being found out, and threatened. Compliance by fear. It works.”
“But you don’t have to defend yourself against him ever again. All that is over.”
“It is never over.” She steps away. “It is never over, Anthony. Because any new terror will attach itself to your earliest fear, and once you walk with fear—”
“But I want you safe.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” my mother says softly. She takes me by the wrist. Leads me outside. “Put both hands around my neck.”
“Mother—”
She grasps my hands, studies my palms as if estimating my life-line, and places my fingers around her neck.
Beneath my hands, her bones feel fragile.
Her skin is papery.
It might tear.
Slip off.
Her lips move. “Tighter,” she says.
I feel huge.
And as dangerous as the evening I lured Bianca into flying.
My mother—my tiny, old mother—lifts her right arm. She points toward the cloudless sky and pivots to the left, breaking my hold. Her elbow swings toward me. But this time she does not stop. In her swing, I feel her rage at having lost me to the silence, and as she lets her elbow crash into my sternum and jab up beneath my rib cage, it comes to me that she knows about Bianca, that she’s known forever how I pushed at Bianca with my words to fly, and that nothing since has been as thrilling and horrifying for me as that moment I knew Bianca was about to fly.
And now I fall.
Fall toward the smell of cut grass. Fall toward a startling release at both of us knowing, toward the possibility of going with my mother to that first fear of mine, toward the possibility of redemption, desire even. Fall into wanting.
Fall so hard that it rushes back at me, slams into me, the wanting. And I dare to want Ida. Dare to want our lost stories coming back into my family. Dare to stand in front of our old apartment building and stare up at our kitchen windows, one open, one smeared with glass wax, while Bianca spins toward me—languid and beyond all time—spins and pivots, slow-moving like a dazed star, her cape flitting around her. While I pray. Pray for that pulse-beat of mercy when both windows remain closed while Bianca applies television-perfect glass-wax decorations. Pray that—beyond Bianca in our kitchen—my mother and Aunt Floria dance, their faces close as if they spent all their waking hours practicing together. Pray that Riptide Grandma and Great-Aunt Camilla join them, that my father and grandfather and Uncle Malcolm clap their hands and chant, “The tango…Do the tango,” while Aunt Floria dips my mother so far back that her black hair sweeps the floor. Snow spins around my ankles while I pray for my mother and Aunt Floria to keep dancing, the glass-wax ornaments a pale flicker across their dark dresses as they reach for me and pull me into their circle, but when I look up, it’s the sun that’s spinning, not snow, spinning around my mother, who stands above me, fists raised, feet planted in her fighting stance, staging her fullest and all-out fight for my soul.
About the Author
Ursula Hegi is the author of nine critically acclaimed books, including Intrusions, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, Stones from the River, Tearing the Silence, The Vision of Emma Blau, and Hotel of the Saints. She lives in New York State.
Ursula Hegi, Sacred Time
(Series: # )
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