Various Miracles
Louise. Gold hair set off by a blue cotton square. Louise was leaving. Instinctively, he felt she didn’t really want to go. All her friends were here. This was a beautiful city. She had a decent job, a pleasant apartment full of thick-leaved plants and bamboo furniture; she had a modest view of the mountains and a membership in a health club, but nevertheless she was leaving. SO LONG, LOUISE the pink icing on her farewell cake spelled out.
Something had forced the move on her—a problem that might be professional or personal, and now she would have to deal—alone, for how could he help her?—with storing her furniture, canceling her subscriptions, and giving away to friends the books and oddments she loved. Her medical insurance would have to be transferred, and there would be the last heartbreaking task of going down to the post office to arrange to have her mail forwarded. It seemed unpardonable to ask so much of a young woman who barely had had time to savor her independence and to study love’s ingenious rarefaction. She would have to face the horror of apartment-hunting elsewhere; a whole new life to establish, in fact. If only he could put his arms around her, his poor Louise, whom he suddenly realized he cared deeply, deeply, deeply about.
His lost Louise. That is how he thinks of her, a woman standing in the airport—no, the bus station—in her dark cloth coat of good quality and her two pieces of soft-sided luggage in which lay folded a number of pale wool skirts and sweaters, and her little zippered bag of cosmetics, toiletries, talcum powder and emery boards which would be traveling, ineluctably, with her out to the edges of the city and over the mountain ranges and away from his yet-to-be declared love.
Still, he won’t forget her, just as he has never forgotten his young and lovely Sherri, whom he first encountered thirty miles north of Kingston—where his first transfer took him. There he had seen, spray-painted in red on a broad exposed rock face, the message HANK LOVES SHERRI in letters that were at least three feet high.
He knows, of course, what the Hanks of the world are like: loud-mouthed and jealous, with the beginnings of a beer belly, the kind of lout who believes the act of love was invented to cancel out the attachment of the spirit, the sort of person who might dare to fling a muscled, possessive arm across Sherri’s shoulders while coming out of a coffee shop on Princess Street and later swear to her that she was different from the other girls he’d known. His Sherri, who, with her hyacinth cologne and bitten nails, was easily, fatally, impressed by male joviality and dark sprinklings of chest hairs. She would never stand a chance. For a while, a few months, she might be persuaded that Hank really did love her in his way, and that she, in return, loved him. But familiarity, intimacy—those enemies of love—would intervene, and one day she would wake up and find that something inside her had withered, that core of sweet vulnerability that was what he had loved in her from the first day when HANK LOVES SHERRI had stopped him cold on the highway.
And now it’s Wendy who sets off wavelets of heat in his chest. WENDY IS BACK! He walks by the orthopedic footwear store again the next day—but this time more slowly. The loose leather wrappings on his feet scrape the pavement absurdly. His breath comes with pleasure and difficulty as though the air has been unbearably sweetened by her name—Wendy, Wendy, Wendy. Of course, he is tempted to peer closely through the dark plate glass, but finds it to be full of reflections—his own mainly, his hungry face. He might go in—not today, but tomorrow—on the pretext of asking the time or begging change for the parking meter or telephone. He’ll think of something. Love invents potent strategies, and people in love are resourceful as well as devious. Wendy, Wendy is back. But for how long?
The end of his love affairs always brings a mixed nightmare of poignancy and the skirmishings of pain. He feels stranded, beached, with salt in his ears. What is over, is over; he is realist enough to recognize that. But his loves, Sherri, Louise, Wendy—and the others—never desert him entirely. He has committed to memory the minor physics of veneration and, on dark nights, after his wife has fallen asleep and lies snoring quietly beside him, he likes to hang on to consciousness for an extra minute or two and listen to the sound of the wind rocking the treetops and brushing silkily against the window. It’s then he finds himself attended by a false flicker on the retina—some would say vision—in which long, brightly colored ribbons dance and sway before him. Their suppleness, their undulations, cut deeply into his heart and widen for an instant the eye of the comprehended world. Often he can hear, as well, the muted sound of female voices and someone calling out to him by name.
Dolls, Dolls, Dolls, Dolls
DOLLS. Roberta has written me a long letter about dolls, or more specifically about a doll factory she visited when she and Tom were in Japan.
“Ha,” my husband says, reading her letter and pulling a face, “another pilgrimage to the heart’s interior.” He can hardly bring himself to read Roberta’s letters anymore, though they come addressed to the two of us; there is a breathlessness about them that makes him squirm, a seeking, suffering openness which I suspect he finds grotesque in a woman of Roberta’s age. Forty-eight, an uneasy age. And Roberta has never been what the world calls an easy woman. She is one of my oldest friends, and the heart of her problem, as I see it, is that she is incredulous, still, that the color and imagination of our childhood should have come to rest in nothing at all but these lengthy monochrome business trips with her husband, a man called Tom O’Brien; but that is neither here nor there.
In this letter from Japan, she describes a curious mystical experience that caused her not exactly panic and not precisely pleasure, but that connected her for an instant with an area of original sensation, a rare enough event at our age. She also unwittingly stepped into one of my previously undeclared beliefs. Which is that dolls, dolls of all kinds—those strung-together parcels of wood or plastic or cloth or whatever—possess a measure of energy beyond their simple substance, something half-willed and half-alive.
Roberta writes that Tokyo was packed with tourists; the weather was hot and humid, and she decided to join a touring party on a day’s outing in the countryside—Tom was tied up in meetings, as per usual.
They were taken by air-conditioned bus to a village where ninety percent—the guide vigorously repeated this statistic—where ninety percent of all the dolls in Japan were made. “It’s a major industry here,” Roberta writes, and some of the dolls still were manufactured almost entirely by hand in a kind of cottage-industry system. One house in the village, for example, made nothing but arms and legs, another the bodies; another dressed the naked doll bodies in stiff kimonos of real silk and attached such objects as fans and birds to the tiny lacquered female fingers.
Roberta’s party was brought to a small house in the middle of the village where the heads of geisha dolls were made. Just the heads and nothing else. After leaving their shoes in a small darkened foyer, they were led into a surprisingly wide, matted workroom which was cooled by slow-moving overhead fans. The air was musty from the mingled straw and dust, but the light from a row of latticed windows was softly opalescent, a distinctly mild, non-industry quality of light, clean-focused and just touched with the egg-yellow of sunlight.
Here in the workroom nine or ten Japanese women knelt in a circle on the floor. They nodded quickly and repeatedly in the direction of the tourists, and smiled in a half-shy, half-neighborly manner; they never stopped working for a second.
The head-making operation was explained by the guide, who was a short and peppy Japanese with soft cheeks and a sharp “arfing” way of speaking English. First, he informed them, the very finest sawdust of a rare Japanese tree was taken and mixed with an equal solution of the purest rice paste. (Roberta writes that he rose up on his toes when he reached the words finest and purest as though paying tribute to the god of superlatives.) This dough-like material then was pressed into wooden molds of great antiquity (another toe-rising here) and allowed to dry very slowly over a period of days. Then it was removed and painted; ten separate and exquisitely thin coats of enamel were
applied, so that the resulting form, with only an elegant nose breaking the white egg surface, arrived at the weight and feel and coolness of porcelain.
The tourists—hulking, Western, flat-footed in their bare feet—watched as the tiny white doll heads were passed around the circle of workers. The first woman, working with tweezers and glue, applied the eyes, pressing them into place with a small wooden stick. A second woman painted in the fine red shape of a mouth, and handed on the head to a woman who applied to the center of the mouth a set of chaste and tiny teeth. Other women touched the eyes with shadow, the cheeks with bloom, the bones with high-light, so that the flattened oval took on the relief and contours of sculptured form. “Lovely,” Roberta writes in her letter, “a miracle of delicacy.”
And finally, the hair. Before the war, the guide told them, real hair had been used, human hair. Nowadays a very fine quality of blue-black nylon was employed. The doll’s skull was cunningly separated into two sections so that the hair could be firmly, permanently rooted from the inside. Then the head was sealed again, and the hair arranging began. The two women who performed this final step used real combs and brushes, pulling the hair smoothly over their hands so that every strand was in alignment, and then they shaped it, tenderly, deftly, with quick little strokes, into the intricate knots and coils of traditional geisha hair dressing.
Finally, at the end of this circular production line, the guide held up a finished head and briefly propagandized in his sharp, gingery, lordly little voice about the amount of time that went into making a head, the degree of skill, the years of apprenticeship. Notice the perfection of the finished product, he instructed. Observe the delicacy, mark the detailing. And then, because Roberta was standing closest to him, he placed the head in her hands for a final inspection.
And that was the moment Roberta was really writing me about. The finished head in her hands, with its staring eyes and its painted veil of composure and its feminine, almost erotic crown of hair, had more than the weight of artifact about it. Instinctively Roberta’s hands had cupped the head into a laced cradle, protective and cherishing. There was something alive about the head.
An instant later she knew she had overreacted. “Tom always says I make too much of nothing,” she apologizes. The head hadn’t moved in her hands; there had been no sensation of pulse or breath, no shimmer of aura, no electrical charge, nothing. Her eyes went to the women who had created this little head. They smiled, bowed, whispered, miming a busy humility, but their cool waiting eyes informed her that they knew exactly what she was feeling.
What she had felt was a stirring apprehension of possibility. It was more than mere animism; the life, or whatever it was that had been brought into being by those industriously toiling women, seemed to Roberta to be deliberate and to fulfill some unstated law of necessity.
She ends her letter more or less the way she ends all her letters these days: with a statement that is really a question. “I don’t suppose,” she says, “that you’ll understand any of this.”
Dolls, dolls, dolls, dolls. Once—I forget why—I wrote those words on a piece of paper, and instantly they swam into incomprehension, becoming meaningless ruffles of ink, squiggles from a comic strip. Was it a Christmas wish list I was making? I doubt it. As a child I would have been shocked had I received more than one doll in a single year; the idea was unworthy, it was unnatural. I could not even imagine it.
Every year from the time I was born until the year I was ten I was given a doll. It was one of the certainties of life, a portion of a large, enclosing certainty in which all the jumble of childhood lay. It now seems a long way back to those particular inalterable surfaces: the vast and incomprehensible war; Miss Newbury, with her ivory-colored teeth, who was principal of Lord Durham Public School; Euclid Avenue where we lived in a brown house with a glassed-in front porch; the seasons with their splendors and terrors curving endlessly around the middle eye of the world which I shared with my sister and my mother and father.
Almost Christmas: there they would be, my mother and father at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning in early December, drinking drip coffee and making lists. There would come a succession of dark, chilly pre-Christmas afternoons in which the air would grow rich with frost and longing, and on one of those afternoons our mother would take the bus downtown to buy the Christmas dolls for my sister and me.
She loved buying the Christmas dolls, the annual rite of choosing. It’s the faces, she used to say, that matter, those dear molded faces. She would be swept away by a pitch of sweetness in the pouting lips, liveliness and color in the lashed eyes, or a line of tenderness in the tinted cheeks—”The minute I laid eyes on that face,” she would say, helplessly shaking her head in a way she had, “I just went and fell head over heels.”
We never, of course, went with her on these shopping trips, but I can see how it must have been: Mother, in her claret-wine coat with the black squirrel collar, bending over, peering into glass cases in the red-carpeted toy department and searching in the hundreds of stiff smiling faces for a flicker of response, an indication of some kind that this doll, this particular doll, was destined for us. Then the pondering over price and value—she always spent more than she intended—having just one last look around, and finally, yes, she would make up her mind.
She also must have bought on these late afternoon shopping excursions Monopoly sets and dominoes and sewing cards, but these things would have been carried home in a different spirit, for it seems inconceivable for the dolls, our Christmas dolls to be boxed and jammed into shopping bags with ordinary toys; they must have been carefully wrapped—she would have insisted on double layers of tissue paper—and she would have held them in her arms, crackling in their wrappings, all the way home, persuaded already, as we would later be persuaded, in the reality of their small beating hearts. What kind of mother was this with her easy belief, her adherence to seasonal ritual? (She also canned peaches the last week in August, fifty quarts, each peach half turned with a fork so that the curve, round as a baby’s cheek, gleamed lustrous through the blue glass. Why did she do that—go to all that trouble? I have no idea, not even the seed of an idea.)
The people in our neighbourhood on Euclid Avenue, the real and continuing people, the Browns, the McArthurs, the Sheas, the Callahans, lived as we did, in houses, but at the end of our block was a large yellow brick building, always referred to by us as The Apartments. The Apartments, frilled at the back with iron fire escapes, and the front of the building solid with its waxed brown foyer, its brass mailboxes and nameplates, its important but temporary air. (These people only rent, our father had told us.) The children who lived in the apartments were always a little alien; it was hard for us to believe in the real existence of children who lacked backyards of their own, children who had no fruit cellars filled with pickles and peaches. Furthermore, these families always seemed to be moving on after a year or so, so that we never got to know them well. But on at least one occasion I remember we were invited there to a birthday party given by a little round-faced girl, an only child named Nanette.
It was a party flowing with new pleasures. Frilled nutcups at each place. A square bakery cake with shells chasing each other around the edges. But the prizes for the games we played—Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Musical Chairs—were manipulated so that every child received one—was that fair?—and these prizes were too expensive, over-whelming completely the boxed handkerchiefs and hair ribbons we’d brought along as gifts. But most shocking of all was the present that Nanette received from her beaming parents.
We sat in the apartment under the light of a bridge lamp, a circle of little girls on the living-room rug, watching while the enormous box was untied. Inside was a doll.
What kind of doll it was I don’t recall except that her bronzed hair gleamed with a richness that was more than visual; what I do remember was the affection with which she was lifted from her wrappings of paper and pressed to Nanette’s smocked bodice, how she was tipped reveren
tly backward so that her eyes clicked shut, how she was rocked to and fro, murmured over, greeted, kissed, christened. It was as though Nanette had no idea of the inappropriateness of this gift. A doll could only begin her life at Christmas. Was it the rigidities of my family that dictated this belief, or some obscure and unconscious approximation to the facts of gestation? A birthday doll, it seemed to me then, constituted a violation of the order of things, and it went without saying that the worth of all dolls was diminished as a result.
Still, there sat Nanette, rocking back and forth in her spun rayon dress, stroking the doll’s stiff wartime curls and never dreaming that she had been swindled. Poor Nanette, there could be no heartbeat in that doll’s misplaced body; it was not possible. I felt a twist of pity, probably my first, a novel emotion, a bony hand yanking at my heart, an emotion oddly akin—I see it clearly enough now—to envy.
In the suburbs of Paris in one of the finest archeological museums in Europe—my husband had talked, ever since I’d known him, about going there. The French, a frugal people, like to make use of their ancient structures, and this particular museum is housed inside a thirteenth-century castle. The castle, if you block out the hundreds of surrounding villas and acacia-lined streets, looks much as it always must have looked, a bulky structure of golden stone with blank, primitive, upswept walls and three round brutish towers whose massiveness might be a metaphor for that rough age which equated masonry with power.
The interior of this crude stone shell has been transformed by the Ministry of Culture into a purring, beige-toned shrine to modernism, hived with climate controlled rooms and corridors, costly showcases and thousands of artifacts, subtly lit, lovingly identified. The pièce de résistance is the ancient banqueting hall where today can be seen a wax reconstruction of pre-Frankish family life. Here in this room a number of small, dark, hairy manikins squat naked around a cleverly simulated fire. The juxtaposition of time—ancient, medieval and modern—affected us powerfully; my husband and young daughter and I stared for some time at this strange tableau, trying to reconcile these ragged eaters of roots with the sleek, meaty, well-clothed Parisians we’d seen earlier that day shopping on the rue Victor Hugo.