I didn’t study. I didn’t even read. Eva danced only one desultory hour a day. In the morning we gave the hens their increasingly meager ration of cracked corn, checked their nest boxes for their increasingly infrequent eggs, and let them out into the yard to scratch. We played endless games of Backgammon on a board that opened like a suitcase. Round and round we circled with our markers, traveling, getting safely nowhere, while we waited for the phone to ring or the power to come back on, waited for night to fall so we could cross another blank day off the calendar in the kitchen, waited to be rescued from the mistaken detour our lives had taken.
The weather grew colder, and we moved from the deck to the dim front room, abandoned Backgammon for the thousand-piece puzzles our father had once loved. The rains came, and we lit the woodstove and pieced puzzles while in the pantry the sacks of beans and rice and flour began to slump, the rows of home-canned vegetables and fruits grew shorter. But hour after hour, we thought only of the bits of colored cardboard spread out on the table between us. As long as there was yet another convoluted scrap to fit into place, as long as the whole puzzle could be dismantled and begun again, we could remain suspended, waiting, safe.
But one morning we woke up and the fire was out. Our breaths plumed into the chill air, and when we went outdoors for armloads of stovewood, the world was etched with a rare frost. We chattered back inside, dropped our wood beside the cold stove. I filled the teakettle with the water that had collected in the sink overnight, replaced it on top of the stove, and bent again over the tidy sea of puzzle pieces while Eva knelt to start the fire. She chopped a batch of kindling, crumpled a quarter of a page from an old catalog, reached for the box of kitchen matches, and gasped.
I thought she had been stung, so sudden and shocked was the sound she made, and before I could even ask, “What’s wrong?” I imagined a scorpion arching out of the opened matchbox, and everything I feared about scorpion stings dashed through my mind. But rather than flinging the matchbox from her, Eva clasped it to her chest, and in answer to my question, she held it out to me, too stunned to speak.
I took the box gingerly, but instead of the ugly, naked brown of a scorpion, I saw only four red-tipped matches—in a box that had once held hundreds.
“What happened?” I asked.
Eva answered, “We must have used them.”
No one else could have, so it must have been us. But we had used them so slowly—a match every few mornings to start the fire if the banked coals didn’t keep until we woke—that Eva had never noticed when we were down to half a box, a third of a box, a handful.
“Aren’t there any more?” I whispered.
“I don’t know.”
We looked at each other. Eva stood up, straight as a dancer once again. “We’ll have to look,” she said.
And so our search began. At first it was a frantic rush through the house, fumbling under sofa cushions and mattresses, tearing through closets and pockets and drawers. By the time we had assembled an old lighter still sloshing with butane, a half-dozen ragged books of matches, and the magnifying glass from Father’s Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, our immediate concern was relieved, but our real fears were intensified. Suddenly we had seen—and could no longer ignore—that not only were our matches numbered, but also that the supplies in the pantry weren’t limitless, there were only a few aspirin at the bottom of the bottle, a handful of tampons in the blue box in the bathroom, that even our clothes and shoes might wear out before all this is over.
We became systematic then, going through the house room by room, first the kitchen, pantry, utility room, and bathroom, and now our parents’ bedroom—sorting, organizing, evaluating our legacy—planning how we might use or barter every old bottle of cough medicine, each roll of duct tape, every torn sheet and screwdriver and pair of sneakers, every bit of the stuff that fills our house.
The other day while I was studying bats I skipped ahead to the F’s so I could learn about frosted bats, and there the entry above caught my eye: Frostbite, an injury that occurs when heat loss allows ice crystals to form in living tissue. Frostbitten tissue becomes bloodless, hard, and numb. In order to prevent complications, such as infection and tissue death, it is important to warm the affected areas as quickly and gently as possible; however, the pain during thawing may be severe.
That’s what it felt like, as we began to work our way through those rooms, examining the artifacts of our childhood, the possessions of the parents who were lost to us. Slowly the tissue softened, warmed, slowly the blood returned, but at times the pain of that thawing was so intense I longed to remain ice. Still, a kind of life burnt its way—cell by screaming cell—back through my frozen self.
At first it seemed as though the whole house were filled with what we no longer had. Each drawer was a Pandora’s box of loss and despair. Here were our father’s worn bookbag, his splayed toothbrush, his battered coffee mug. Here was our mother’s loom, on which her final tapestry waits, the warp shed open for the next pass of the abandoned weft. Here were her canning jars and crystal glasses, and—since our father could get rid of nothing that had been hers—her perfume bottles and slips.
Even something simple as a mixing bowl seemed to fill with a childhood’s worth of cake batters when we lifted it off the shelf, examined it, trying to imagine its current and future uses, to assess its value, trying not to dwell on the last sweet lick we had tasted from its depths.
Each time we opened a new closet or another drawer I braced myself, ready to flinch and run as memory struck, rattles buzzing, fangs bared and sinking into my flesh. But in a funny way, even when they bit, those memories weren’t venomous enough. This afternoon what saddened me was how little remains after a person’s gone. A few photographs, a silk scarf, a checkbook—and where are they, the people who once owned those things? In which barrette or workshirt do our mother and father reside?
I kept thinking we would run across something that would reveal them to us. I steeled myself for the discovery of a packet of letters or a book of pornography or a newspaper clipping that would give us some new understanding of our parents. But there were no surprises. Everything we found seems almost anonymous in its familiarity. Here are our mother’s bras, worn to the shape of her vanished breasts. Here are our father’s socks with their candid, threadbare heels.
Trying to understand my parents is like trying to see my own eyeballs or taste my own tongue. It’s like trying to step outside the air. I know they were eccentric. But even when I wished they would move to town, drive new cars, and wear crisp slacks and sweaters, I could never really imagine any other parents for my own.
My mother was beautiful, there’s no doubt of that. She always looked like the dancer she had been, straight and slender, with startling grey eyes and a halo of pale gold hair that sprang from her head like an aura, surrounding her face with its own source of light. She moved like a ballerina until the very end. She never lost her turnout, and her gestures were both larger and more precise than they needed to be, as if each movement, each moment, meant something. Even when she was just doing chores—sorting laundry or turning the compost pile—she moved with a full, efficient grace, as though there were an art or a secret pleasure to folding sheets or forking yard clippings.
But for all her ethereal beauty, my mother had an earthy side. She had a dancer’s earthy feet, with twisted toes and bunions that ached when the weather changed, and she was always unswervingly frank with us about what Father called “The Interesting Stinks”: elimination, menstruation, sex, and—until it was she who was dying—death.
She had joined the San Francisco Ballet Company when she was eighteen, and she danced for three seasons before she shattered her ankle during a dress rehearsal for The Sleeping Beauty, a production in which she was to have her first solo role, as Little Red Riding Hood. She met our father in the emergency room, where he was waiting with a second-grader who had shown up at school that morning with a black eye and a broken arm.
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It was Father’s first year of teaching, and he had chosen the toughest school San Francisco could offer. But by the time he saw my mother limp into the ER waiting room in her Red Riding Hood costume, white-faced and clinging to the properties manager, he was more than ready to spend his evenings contemplating something other than the demise of the school’s hot breakfast program and the increase of preteen pregnancies.
Later, after a year of grueling physical therapy, when my mother was told she would have to stay off her ankle for at least another season, and even then might never be able to dance professionally again, she abandoned ballet entirely, married Father, and moved with him to the property he had found outside of Redwood, eighty acres of second-growth forest whose isolation he felt was guaranteed by the fact that it was tucked up against an expanse of state-owned forest. That summer she helped him add indoor plumbing and a utility room to the loose-jointed, two-story summer cabin that sat at the center of their land, and by the next spring she was pregnant.
Before she defected to my father, Mother had been considered one of the most promising young ballerinas in the company, and no one—from her friends in the corps to her own parents—could understand why she had forsaken that life so completely. She claimed she didn’t regret her choice, but twice a year, every spring and fall, the four of us dressed in our best clothes, piled into whatever old car our father had running at the time, and drove the three hours to San Francisco to see the ballet.
After the performance we would go backstage, where we stood, clumsy and heavy in our street clothes, while women in tutus and tights swirled around our mother, stretching their long necks towards her to kiss the air beside her cheeks. It seemed like only yesterday, they said, when she was dancing with them, and now look—they were nearing the end of their careers and Mother had two lovely daughters. They made dramatic and very general comments about how wonderful families were, how much they envied our mother, how they wished they, too, would get married and have babies.
The drives home were always quiet. Eva and I would fall asleep in the backseat and wake to feel our father lifting us from the car. “The Buick stops here,” he would say, even more heartily than usual. “All ashore that’s going ashore,” and as he carried us across the deck and into the house, we could glimpse over his shoulder our mother standing in the black yard, her shoulders square, her head held high, facing away from the house, facing the darkness, facing the stars.
For a day or two after those trips, she was even more silent than usual. The laundry piled up, and our dinners came from boxes and cans. But inevitably we would wake one morning to Bach or Handel or Vivaldi pouring from the radio in her workroom, and when we came downstairs, there would be pans of cinnamon rolls rising on the freshly scrubbed kitchen counter and a cup of tea cooling on the table beside her as she designed the cartoons or wound the silk for her next tapestry.
I don’t suppose Mother was ever meant to be a country woman. She loved the isolation of our house and the view of the trees from the picture window she insisted our father install in the front room. But she never really cared about country life or the forest. She didn’t like the work of gardening, and she was allergic to all the pets Eva and I proposed. She never lost her fear of rattlesnakes, ticks, and wild pigs, and whenever she ventured beyond the clearing she managed to come home with a poison oak rash. Even so she seemed content enough with the work and silence and family that filled her life.
Since she’d quit dancing, she’d pursued several other arts or occupations with what seemed like equal passion. When we were little, she had a potter’s wheel and kiln in her workroom, and I can remember making pinch pots and lumpy animals on the floor beside her while her wheel spun to the rhythmic kick of her foot.
But at some point her injured ankle started to bother her, and rather than get an electric wheel or learn to keep the kick-wheel turning with her other foot, she traded her potter’s wheel and kiln for a loom, a warping board, and a bobbin winder, and she learned to weave. Her allergies kept her from working with wool, so she used silk yarns and wove tapestries of intricate flowers that she modeled after the millefleurs designs of Gothic Europe and sold through one of the most exclusive galleries in the city.
She dyed the silks herself, and it used to be a magic no chemical formula could ever explain away, how the dull-colored and bitter-smelling powders she added to her kettles could produce the indigos and amethysts, emeralds and crimsons, carnelians and ochers and umbers with which she filled her tapestries.
In the kitchen were a whole set of pots and bowls and spoons we knew not to use for food because of the toxic dyes and mordants they held or stirred. But after her cancer was diagnosed, Mother became interested in using natural dyes, in using benign alum and gentle vinegar as mordants, and before she grew too sick to think of working, she was talking of learning how to get her colors from the plants in the forest.
I know she loved us, though she left us mainly alone. She wasn’t a talker like my father, and her love came in the form of quick hugs and cookies and a sort of distant interest, an indulgent neglect. She lived deeply in the center of her life, and she expected Eva and me to do the same. I think she saw little need to act as companion or playmate to us. You’re your own person, she would say whenever either of us came to her lonely or bored in the middle of the day, You?? figure it out. And she would give us a warm, firm smile and turn back to her loom.
You’re your own person. When one of us came running to her with a complaint about the other—Eva won’t be the prince, Nell is cutting her doll’s hair, Eva won’t clean her room—she would answer half-sternly, half-proudly, Your sister is her own person. And so are you. You’ll figure it out. Then she’d ruffle our hair, her long fingers massaging our scalps for a brief, sweet instant before she took up her shuttle again.
We spent the morning in our father’s workshop, in an attempt to organize and inventory the chaos there. I used to hate his shop with its untamed clutter and dank smell of molds and chemicals, but now every wire and hose and bolt, each tool and gadget and machine may have a use, and it seems both a solace and a reproach to sit among his things, attending to them, sorting and cleaning, giving them the care he never had time to devote to them.
Father kept everything and sorted nothing. Our mother used to complain he was like those housewives approaching senility who hoard grocery bags, margarine tubs, and Styrofoam meat trays. He saved it all—broken appliances, used toilet seats, rusted chicken wire. I have to admit he did make use of some of it. He always had a board or a screw that would work, although—as our mother liked to point out—it might take him half an afternoon to find the right one.
It’s ironic to think that all his junk may now be our greatest treasure. Beyond our clearing there is nothing but forest, a useless waste of trees and weeds, wild pigs and worms. But our father’s workshop is crammed with things that may finally have some value.
There was nothing much unusual about my father’s background, although he always seemed an even greater eccentric than my mother. He grew up the middle son in a midwestern farm family. “I’m a middle man,” he used to claim, “middle income, middle class, middle aged, but I’ve still got my middle finger, and by god, I still know how to use it.”
It occurs to me now that it must have been a bitter childhood, although for all his talk he never mentioned it. It seemed his father’s farm was under constant threat of foreclosure. His older brother drowned in a swimming accident the summer he was seven and his mother never recovered from that loss. But the only thing my father seemed to retain from all those hardships was a dislike of powdered milk and a genius for maintaining old trucks and cars.
He even remembered midwestern weather fondly. He had grown up where winter meant a long siege of snow and sub-zero weather, and he always showed his disdain for what Californians called winter by refusing to even own a coat. “Out here, there’s summer and there’s sweater weather,” he would scoff. “Winter—ha! No season deserves th
e name unless you can count on being snowed in for at least a week. Here you can’t even assume there’ll be frost.”
My father wasn’t a big man. He was only inches taller than my mother—scrawny, almost, but strong—with hair that was always a little too long, unless it had just been cut, in which case it exposed a rim of untanned skin across his forehead and behind his ears and along the back of his neck. My father had the world’s bluest eyes and the crow’s-feet at their corners only made them sweeter. He had nimble hands, a smile like a gift, and a quick, almost manic energy. He was always bristling with jokes and projects and ideas. He was always doing something, always tinkering or fiddling or fixing, adding another room to the ramble of our house, rebuilding an engine, digging a new leach line for the septic field, cleaning out the spring.
He was always working and he always called it play.
“Think I’ll go play on the roof for a while,” he would call to Mother as he went out to patch the most recent leak. “Time to play in the garden,” he would say on a Saturday afternoon, or “I’m going to play around with that carburetor today.” And on Monday morning he would stuff his great, sloppy notebooks into his canvas book-bag, toss a rumpled corduroy sports jacket over his shoulder, and announce, “I’m off to play principal.”
Our mother used to say that Father had an infinite capacity for entertainment, though now I wonder if it weren’t just an infinite capacity for loving her, because after she was gone that all changed. When she died, his life seemed to collapse like a black hole, creating the density the encyclopedia calls singularity, a force from which nothing can escape, a negativity that devours even light.