Every year we each choose something of Cady’s to decorate the house with. Some things always get used. The dried wildflowers she collected the summer before eighth grade and ironed between sheets of wax paper, her tape deck and the cassettes with her name written in nail polish on the plastic shells. I found a copy of Pretty Hate Machine missing its cover. Cady and I were singing “Head Like a Hole” on the bus the day she died. She said it was “got money” and I said it was “god money” and she called me an idiot and went to sit with some friends up front. Then she ran back crying because Jeremy Sokolov called her fat and she had a big crush on him. So I ran up and whacked him with my knapsack. Then we went off the cliff. All three kids in the very back were killed. I remember Cady like a magical animal with sharp lines and multicolored fur. I knew she would call me a coward for even thinking about leaving.
Miro looked over at me and held up a clay dog.
“She made this at camp, right?”
“Yep. She used to tell me it came to life at night and that the only reason it hadn’t ripped my throat out was because she had asked it not too. Goddamned death hound.”
Miro smiled, “I think it’s exactly that.”
Credence unrolled a huge Bauhaus poster. We spread it out on the floor and put books on the corners to hold it flat. Cady’s face, soft with her baby fat, floated up before me. She had thick black eye make-up smeared just above her freckled cheeks.
Credence grabbed some of Cady’s black nail polish out of the crib and Grace took the plastic record player. I picked out a drawing Cady made as a kid. It had a row of burning apartment buildings and everyone standing over a little dead bird. On the bottom of the picture it says “Africa” but I know it was Philadelphia. Cady drew herself too, big as a skyscraper, right next to the little bird. I laid it next to the clay demon dog.
Jimmy came back in. She wasn’t saying much anymore. I didn’t blame her. What do you say at a funeral? Or wear to a hanging? Or a bus crash or a school bombing? Nikes? A flak jacket woven from pieces of the true cross?
“How bad is this going to get?” she whispered.
“Maybe not so bad.”
Grace put Rainbow Brite dolls on the shelves and tables. She tried to balance a couple over the door but the molding was too narrow and they fell off.
“Cady would kill you if she knew you were putting those dolls up,” I said.
“I know,” said Grace, “it helps me to see her face.”
I heard the sea shift in her voice.
Miro taped the Bauhaus poster to the door and put the little clay dog on my dinner plate. I threw a napkin over it. Credence painted his nails black in the doorway. I propped my drawing up between some glasses. We used the turntable on the plastic record player like a lazy Susan and put the salsa and sour cream on it. Annette put the Frito pie on the table and Miro poured the wine. Then we all sat down. Credence blew on his nails to dry the polish. Annette looked like she’d rather be chained to a fence. Jimmy shifted in her seat and bowed her head slightly. The windows were open and outside the woods were filled with small sounds, sparrows and quivering tree needles. We always start with silence. It’s my favorite part because it feels like Cady’s there, like she’s upstairs and lost track of time and might come down to dinner any minute. Grace rose from the table like a tsunami. With her breath she washed away the debris of the past until we were all floating in her massive sorrow and buoyed by her absolute conviction in life, vibrant and wild on the shores, she carried us forward and that’s how we landed, all of us on this strange beach.
“It is a wonderful thing,” Grace said with her glass high, “to raise a free child. To Cady!”
She drank then slammed the glass down. The wine splashed out on all sides and reddened the tablecloth.
“To Cady!” we yelled and drank and slammed our glasses down like Grace.
I stood.
“To my wild sister!” I shouted, “to Cady!” and slammed my glass down.
Jimmy jumped up to get some rags from the kitchen. I saw her minutes later in the doorway with her hands full of surgical gauze. Credence made his toast and she started laying down the dishtowels. Miro went and Jimmy scrambled to sop the wine that was pooling under the plastic record player. Then Grace went again and on and on until the tablecloth was a field of crimson flowers and Jimmy could find no more towels and we were all hoarse. Cady the bold. Cady the poet. Cady the fighter. Cady the argumentative. Cady the strident. Cady the gentle. Cady the unsure. Cady the secret crier. Cady the awkward. Cady the valiant. Cady the private. Finally no words, but there aren’t any really. Jimmy was crying. And even though it was silent, I knew my parents were talking because they never stop. Grace is a tsunami and Miro is radio signal and they speak in waves punctuated by dolphins and sea glass.
Miro brought out an orange guitar with hummingbirds and brushed the back of his hand down the strings. It came to me again as I watched him that Miro is a radio signal. He arpeggiated a chord with his leathered hands and I thought—these sounds have traveled across a galaxy to get to me. My last thought was—the singer’s been gone for years. He started to sing and Miro, the lost fish of the Morava, snapped his torn tail and bubbles filled with strains of Czech lullabies shot upwards, each for Cady.
We all have our mother’s mouth and our father’s cheekbones, sharp and high. I have my grandmother’s lighter hair. It turns blonde in the sun and when I was at Davis nobody believed it had ever been brown. Credence has dark hair and dusky skin just like Cady did. Even now, in the end of September, there’s rose on his cheeks. They both had blue eyes but Credence has a dark spot in his left iris. Someone told me that those are trauma scars and not genetic. I don’t know if that’s true. Eyes change over time though just like rivers and it would make sense if every place we’d been, everywhere that counted, we left behind a meander scar.
Mom cut the Frito pie.
“It’s nothing but meat and cheese,” I whispered to Jimmy.
“Shut up,” she hissed.
The skin under her eyes was swollen.
Grace came over and tucked a piece of Jimmy’s hair behind her ear.
“How are you doing with all this?”
“It’s pretty sad, Grace.”
“Yes. It is sad,” Grace put her hand lightly on the back of Jimmy’s head, “but it is important to remember that we have always had our political martyrs.”
Grace reached across and pulled two grapes off a dense cluster in the center of the table.
“What do you mean?” Jimmy asked.
A veil came down between Credence and the world, thin, shimmering and nearly invisible and Miro, like a man waving in the distance at a passing ship, smiled. He set a piece of buttered bread on the edge of Grace’s plate.
Grace squinted her eyes.
“It was a failure on my part, “ she said, “Cady never really did understand the role that gender played.”
She sat back down and took a bite out of the buttered bread.
“I don’t understand,” said Jimmy.
“You see, Cady understood class and race. She was very good on those points. She had a wonderful critical mind but she did not understand gender. Her grasp of feminism was tentative and that’s where I slipped. You see she didn’t have the tools to protect herself from gender-based criticism—she didn’t know how to let what that boy said, calling her fat, roll off her. If she had had those tools, she wouldn’t have run to the back of the bus.”
Annette looked down at her plate and shook her head. Jimmy put her fork down.
“We have to learn from our mistakes,” she continued. “I know you more than anyone at the table must understand the importance of gender. Della’s always been pretty clear on that too. But I underestimated it. We are nothing if we can’t face our own past with clear eyes, no matter how much it hurts. I take full responsibility for what happened to Cady.”
Then Grace picked up the empty bowl and walked into the kitchen to get more salsa, trailing behind her t
he harpoons and tangled rigging of a terrible storm.
16 Sea Goat
As I got into the truck to go home my hands were shaking. I felt like something was finally becoming clear but I wasn’t sure what. Something had failed, something big and now there was a vast plain before us on which I could build anything. Jimmy spun us around on the trail rock and out onto the road.
We drove under the night sky with the windows rolled down and the cold air rushing around us. The broken speedometer bounced frantically between numbers as we barreled down the mountain. Capricorn blinked through a lattice of radio towers in the distance.
It was like the world had broken open and nothing was hidden anymore, like we were crawling all over it like salamanders. I felt my own life, a minnow in a brook silvered and fleet. I was alive for no reason at all, finally unindentured. Miro told me that he swam the Morava when it was flooding. All the landmarks he had counted on were sunken beneath the water, which just kept rising. He dove into the current and when he came up he was surrounded by sticks and card tables, shoes and bottles. He said it was as if the river had swollen with debris of his country, like it had done it on purpose to keep him from leaving. I felt that way saying goodnight to Grace.
We were on the porch and the light was broken. She hooked my fingers with hers and I felt the dark woods, filled with birthday trees, shudder. The whites of her eyes flickered like stars on the sea when she moved.
“Della…” she said and took my head in her hands, “Della.”
Her breath wet my cheek. She leaned in and said something to me in a sharp whisper. It must have been important because it seemed like she said it twice but her palms were over my ears and I couldn’t understand what it was. All I could hear was the ocean. And I thought, it’s only going to get worse. Leave. Down below this mountain the borders are tightening, the nations are shifting and through all the dangling black branches I see Grace and Cady dancing in circles. If I look down for a second, I will never go. Grace, my Broken Shield, will hold me forever. And Cady? My Clay Dog Master, my Torturer? My Brave Indian Chief? She will certainly kick me if I move and shoot me if I talk.
Tapping Jimmy’s windshield, I pointed to the rim of the valley.
“See that? Capricorn? That’s the tail of the Sea Goat.”
She didn’t raise her eyes.
“Over there,” I pointed, “Capricorn. By the towers.”
“I don’t want to talk about constellations. I don’t want to talk about anything.”
“But it’s Babylonian.”
“Della, that was the most fucked-up, masochistic fucking thing I have ever fucking witnessed. I felt like I was being asked to watch your mom slice herself to ribbons.”
She had a point. If you look at Grace too long everything turns into scary little splinters but I didn’t want to get into it and lose my own momentum.
“I thought it was really sweet of you to eat the Frito pie.”
“Fuck the Frito pie!” she screamed. “Fuck the fucking Frito pie!”
The spinning cell phone whizzed by on my left and parking lots on my right.
Jimmy rolled her window up. I started to say something and she turned on the radio. There wasn’t a clear station and several different ones came in and out of the static. A blast of Christianity, the stammering Mexican brass then nothing but free bandwidth. We turned off the freeway and eventually came to a barricade. There were packs of crickets everywhere and a large chirper sidled over.
“Where are you girls going?” he asked.
“Home,” Jimmy said,
“Where have you been?”
“At a family gathering.”
“Oh yeah, what kind?”
The kind where you celebrate the day a bus crash killed your thirteen-year-old sister because your mom believes that it is important to re-experience pain as a political construct. An anniversary?
“An anniversary,” I said.
“I’m not talking to you,” snapped the officer.
“At an anniversary,” Jimmy said.
“Look,” said Jimmy when we were through, “I need a few days.”
“Sure.”
I asked her to drop me off at an all-night Safeway. She pulled up to the curb by the sliding doors. I got out and started to say goodnight but she was already driving away. I didn’t really blame her. It just wasn’t what she thought it was going to be, being out there with them. I could have said, charisma is violence, but she wouldn’t have understood. I could have told her, there is no haven, but it’s hard to look those things in the eye. It’s hard to see Grace as she really is. She’s just too close to what you need her to be. Up until that moment I think Jimmy really believed that there was sanctuary somewhere. And not just driftwood shacks filled with sorrow, lit with oil lamps.
I stood in front of the Safeway for a few moments then went in. I have my own traditions. They have nothing to do with anyone else.
The store was empty. The meat glowed and a steel drum version of “Eleanor Rigby” echoed on the Congoleum. I went over to the customer service desk. A checker with fine brown hair, hoop earrings and tracheotomy scar walked up to me. She had a button pinned to her chest, big as a can lid, with a photo of a German shepherd puppy on it.
“Can I help you?”
“I want have my sister paged. We came in together and I can’t find her.”
“Have you looked around?”
“Yes, I’ve looked everywhere.”
I went back to the table and waited.
“Cady Elizabeth…”
The checker’s voice cracked shrill through the overhead PA.
A teenage boy unpacking a palette of potato chips looked up. That’s right, I thought, you should be looking for her, my scary Indian sister, it’s only smart. She’d slit your throat in your sleep you big sell-out. You’re lucky it’s just me here.
I waited a few minutes and walked back over and asked her to page Cady again.
“I don’t think your sister is here,” she said.
“Maybe she was in the bathroom,” I said.
“Maybe she went outside to use the phone,” she said, “there’s a pay phone on the corner.”
Maybe she’s turned into minerals that got ground into soil and line the tanks of goldfish.
“Maybe your sister will come back later…”
As a gila monster or a grass spider.
Raina believes in reincarnation.
“What about birds?” I’d asked her. “Will they all be birds again? Do sparrows become starlings, or does it go the other way? What happens after you’re a blackberry bush?”
“Well,” she said, “I think we’re here for a reason and that whatever we haven’t learned before we get to learn now. Some of us won’t have to come back.”
I’m learning how to bury rats in the back of a restaurant without tipping off the health department. Do I have to come back?
“The point is to not to get too attached,” she said.
Mirror believes in reincarnation too.
“Dude, I am totally coming back as a black chick.”
“Why?”
“Cause they’re hot.”
“You don’t get to pick. That’s the whole idea.”
“Right, you earn it. And I totally deserve to be a hot black chick.”
“What about the black chicks? What do they become?”
“Nothing. That’s it. They’re done. They’re the head of the line. Unless they shoot someone or run over a kid or something like that.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I’m going to be as black as a Nigerian with a huge fucking pink Afro. It’ll be totally hot.”
I think I should be a coral reef and Credence should be a dog salmon. All those kids they blew up in that school last year should get to be silk moths or new planets.
Thinking that, I left the commercial lighting of the Safeway behind and wandered through darker and darker streets until I came again to the edge of New Honduras. Ten blocks up an emergency lamp redden
ed the blackness.
17 Manifestation
It was just after 2 AM when I got in and I turned on the kitchen light. I was restless. On the counter was a letter from the Department of Geology at UC Davis propped up against a Rice Krispies box. I didn’t need to open it to see what was inside. It was a copy of my article, soon to appear the Journal of Paleobiology. I flipped it over. My work. Years of academic torque folded in three and stuffed into an envelope. As pointless as anything under the sun. What to make of it? Origami swans? A fleet of paper airplanes?
Upstairs, the mail tub I’d named “the head of John the Baptist” overflowed, my own personal Lagerstätte, my quiet lake, silt-bottomed and still, to catch all the falling things and press them like wildflowers into the earth. I put down the letter. I didn’t want to talk about geology with anyone ever again. I dumped the mail on the bed.
I hadn’t done papier-mâché since sixth grade but that night I made wheat paste and tore my mail to shreds. All the scraps of my education went in, all for the greater glory of the head of John the Baptist. I formed the skull out of academic accolades and the ears from peer review. The hair was shredded junk mail. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the Paleobiology article but everything else got used. Paste and bits of paper stuck to my hands like barnacles. I want the head of John the Baptist to be as big as the head of a Minotaur, I thought. That’s the problem with symbolic gestures. People never take them far enough. They don’t see them as a system. They blow up something right in front of them, like the bathroom of the New Land Trust building, and then caper around like monkeys. They might as well throw bananas at it. When I was little Grace used to say we were a ship with a broken mast. She said we needed to be careful or we’d sink. And now I think she was right. But there’s something new, I know because I stay up and listen to the world at night. We are on a ship, only we’re not sinking. We’re moving again, cutting fast through the sea with a crucifix mast, plastic bag sails and a hull made of disposable razors and straw.
I spread my field notes on the floor of my room. All the sketches and lists, the formations and fossils and indexing of trends, I laid them out.