Meditations. Listening to Music from Boys

Winter Dance, Brian Kershisnik

I'm an incurable audience watcher. Hard core addict. Performance blossoms in rays of sustained directed focus, the built-in difference between talking to yourself and soliloquizing. I love to watch the watchers, covert audience of one, hidden for they mustn't observe my observation and all unwilling find themselves thrust into the performance. So, while my youngest child spent the afternoon trying out for the middle school ballroom team (nervous!!), I give a little bit of my time to watching the dancers and a lot to watching the instructor. Watching him watching them. I have to wonder. I'd know so much about him if I knew what he was looking for in those huge children (or are they tiny teenagers) --polish? eagerness? innate rhythm? ease? I know so little about dance, ballroom in particular, I have no way of knowing who looks good but I know a ton about the horrible difficulty of auditioning children for a project that stretches over months. Being unable to predict how they will grow and alter just between now, the end of school, and the first day they come back in August. Middle school. Hurtling along at breathtaking speed. Easier with adults, we're so...stable. And so seldom delightfully unforeseeable. I hurt for him, and admire his crazy greatness. He looks calm and pleasant. He doesn't look like his stomach aches. I'm taking care of that for him, twisting up on his behalf. I watch him closely, wondering what he is watching closely. Look from him to the dancers. Back and forth. Looking for dancers I think would be interesting to work with because in my work I can be "interested." I don't have a team, don't have to compete so I needn't care about "winning."

And there was this boy.
I'm not going to describe him in any way because while I have no idea who he is or who his people are I'm willing to bet they are alive and can read. Suffice it to say he is already on the team, was there to help out and is older than my still-in-elementary-school daughter.
Like a hundred years older. I think I never want her to be that old.
I'm not sure she ever will be.

She's sort of ageless in a too-young-for-this-world way. There's an otherness to her; she always seems to be playing the dying swan. Even as she trips over swanlike feet that have grown too big too fast. It worries her. Her older sister has always been a dancer, always sure, even though she falls over stuff just as much as the next person. Maybe more. "Am I a klutz?" the youngest asks, "Look what I did to myself. I ran into a wall. A door. A boy." Not a klutz. A water bird on dry land. She looks right when she waltzes, swooping around, head high on a slender, long neck, graceful long arms, proud, sweet face.
She also looks like a swan when she gets funky.

That'd be white. She looks white.
Not that white people can't be funky, some can and they do but some can't and when they can't they look really white. White as the driven snow.
And I don't have to say at this point really all the kids are looking awkward, one way or another. Even the obviously advanced dancers (ballroom's a big thing in Provo) still inhabit bodies changing day to day (or not, let us pause a moment to send silent sympathy to those poor, shortest boys. you remember them). Of course some will hide that better in the waltz, like my girl, while some show to better advantage bopping about and shakin' it. But no one's going to look good all the time.

But there was this boy.
Awkward and gangly too, one more pimply face in a sea of them, hair too long in precisely the way everyone's is too long or just too short. But he understands using music for dancing with girls and when he dances, everything changes.
He never partners with my daughter. He doesn't see her. I have oddly outsized feelings of gratitude about that, and, and, just a small cutting sliver of sadness for her. She doesn't notice him. She's still little, still playing at this, but when he's dancing, he's a hundred years old. It's like watching a fate dance from inside some fey story where destiny rides on the smallest, thoughtless action, take my hand and smile, and part of the spell is that all the dancers look the same while one of them is not. Not the same. Can the dancers see it? Is this the good and golden prince revealing himself? Or is he the dark swan? Nothing for the watchers to do but watch.

Or is it that he just really gets the music.

I had a boyfriend once, once, who did understand music and dancing to it. That was a revelation.

I loved to dance all my life, took dance classes whenever they were available in my little community, but barely danced at all at school dances where the boys I wanted (so badly!) to ask me apparently felt zero desire in that direction; meanwhile, I generally felt compelled to hide from the boys brave enough (or weird enough) to desire and request my company on the dance floor. My middle child is just past her junior prom, the dress that cost me a solid day of my life in the hunting is still hanging on the back of her door in its protective bag (though that's probably less because she's keeping the memory fresh than because she simply can't put it away, which after all would require moving it all of six feet to hang on the clothing rod. Must...gather...strength). That was the first fun and happy high school formal I saw from close to the inside. Boys don't count the same way. They are too nervous, dances in high school seem more defined by what they forget. Polishing their shoes, the tickets, the corsage. "Mom, do you think she'll mind?" Yes, honey, you dork, I think she might. He's a good true boy, not a prince yet, but he's a tin soldier. Steadfast. Waiting for a beautiful dancer to fly into the furnace of the future with him so he can reveal his heart to her. Or some other event not so cheesy.
I only attended one formal in high school. Senior Ball, I was in charge, I had a boyfriend in college, it was just yucky. I was worn out, we made my dress and I really liked what my mom chose but it was just too different, once again, from the dresses I didn't like that the other girls were wearing. And I started truly disliking my boyfriend that night. He had too many rules, how I should act, look, talk to him. At one point I was looking around too much, I guess, wanting to see the decorations I had made from different angles, trying to discern whether people liked them, what they thought of the refreshments, the lighting, the million choices I had made for them. He took my wandering head and yanked it down onto his shoulder (not so comfortable, he wasn't quite (ha!) tall enough) where it was supposed to be snuggling happily. I was so angry I was blind for a minute. I thought about crying but instead I just went to sleep. I was tired. In about six months I would run away to college and break off all communication. Not break up, too frightened of him, of what he'd do to me. Just dissolve, disappear.

College was different for me. Suddenly and strangely. I went to every formal, borrowed dresses, stiff dinners, pictures, the whole bit. This was what I had spent myself longing for? For this? Better were the dance classes I took every semester, jazz, tap, folkdance, everything. And when my best friend and I bummed rides to discos (remember? how old are you?) and clubs, went to every casual Friday stag dance. Those were much more fun. Dance, dance, dance. Boys, boys, boys. Fun, fun, fun. Ho hum.
But. The first time I danced with that one, one boyfriend it was as if, holding his hand, strolling casually onto the dance floor, I turned and saw him standing unexpectedly on the other side of a threshold, through an open door, a door he was holding open and keeping open (true gentleman) for me and only for me, while all the others swirled about us, unaware. And he was powerful there; once through that door we were in his kingdom. I don't know how this story might have twisted had he been at heart a dark swan. At the time I wasn't at all real enough to know anything except how much I liked him. But he wasn't false, he was a golden prince; he felt that weight and took it seriously.

Because I only have eyes for you.

Rules for dancing with boys (these never varied much from seventh grade through college, unless you fell in with an Enforcer. then he would communicate his preferences). Bop around, try to talk or not, look wherever as long as you glance at each other occasionally and don't obviously flirt with anyone else till you are actually off the floor. Slow dances, don't grab too tight. Now here's a true secret. He never looked away from me, from my eyes, from the moment we stepped onto the dance floor till we walked off. I couldn't believe it or figure out how he did it. Like something only in a book, the ending of a certain sort of book, the sort of book you have to put down from time to time and just take a quick little walk around the drab, grumpy, real world to shake yourself out and to remind yourself of things. He never stumbled or stepped on anyone and it never felt forced. I don't know what you're talking about, he said. This was what he understood you were supposed to use that music for, dancing with a girl.

Do I want my daughter to be old enough for this?
And what is this, exactly?

Dance with me,
I want to be your partner...

Wanting.
Focus.
And safety.

The instructor's teaching all the dancers a jive dance now, watching how they learn. Watching them with his back turned because he's teaching while he's watching, he has to do the steps too. I KNOW that place, that watching over the shoulder, and while he still seems remarkably calm I am thinking not till December no auditions for me till December and doing silent internal backflips of joy.

Remembering music and boys.

Only two boys ever made composite tapes for me (cassette. uh-huh). It's such a quotidian, omnipresent action now, everyone gives those to everyone else. Playlists, Pandora. What, really, is an iPod but an enormous composite creation? It may have been common then, more than I knew, but it felt very special and exotic. And it was a heck of a lot of work.

One of the tapes was horrible.

Not the songs, the songs themselves were great, far better than these souped-up eighties songs I'm hearing at this audition, though his choices for me were from the eighties, of course, and before, really good stuff, and set me firmly on the folk rock path I would follow faithfully for years, which was what they had been intended to do. That was the horrible problem. It had been made as an instructional tape, and presented as such. I needed to brush up on my listening library, deepen and broaden my exposure in order to pass muster, to hang with his crowd. And, hey, too true, I was not well educated musically. He was his whole short life ahead of me in the cool music department. This is still a failing of mine. I'm not hip, I'm READING. Busy.

Let's suppose I had done that to him with books.
"Hey dude, here's the composite LIBRARY I put together for you. You get these two or three hundred books under your belt for starters so we can converse in a civilized fashion, 'k? I'll be over here, listening to this tape."
Brother.
But I loved him and never even noticed this particular rotten manifestation till later. When I broke not up but off with him (I have this tendency to dematerialize) it was for what I would have called entirely different reasons. He said, "Have you gained weight?" I said, "What? Um, I think, I think I've been happy." He folded his arms. Started talking about my hair.
Too much wanting.
Too much focus.
On me.
No air.
Such a golden boy. He had everyone duped.

A Good Man and a Bad Man, Brian Kershisnik

The other tape. Ahh. The other tape. Not a hipster, just a rocker, even sort of a metalhead. Which made the tape he gave me all the more shocking and lovely. Unforeseen. A door he opened, for me and only for me, to let me look a little way inside.
An amazing collection of songs about how he felt. About loving people, seeing to them.
I have no idea where he got the songs. Not from his own albums. You couldn't search the net in those dark ages. He must have had to borrow stuff.
It made him embarrassed. Embarrassed but defiant. Watching me narrowly, out of the corners of his eyes, waiting to see what I would think, maybe if I would laugh or tease him (no idea why he'd think that, not me, never). He wasn't my boyfriend, exactly. That would have been too tame, too domestic. He danced with lots of girls. But toward the end of the evening he danced close by, and the last few dances were his. He had an impressive car (I mean, I don't know anything about cars either, I was impressed. he wanted me to be) and he made sure he drove me home. Once to the emergency room. Wanna know what that tape was for, before I got to take it? For playing on his car stereo, for dancing in the garage. He was sort of a bad boy, life had made him kind of hard, he was hiding a hope to find someone to take care of, to watch over. He showed it, just a little.
Wanting.
Focus.
Safety.
And, oddly, freedom.

...dancing with me, cheek to cheek.
There's nobody here, it's just you and me.

Seventh grade. She will start dancing with boys and she's absolutely got to learn to tell dark swans from princes. She can't get it from a book or learn from her sister though all that helps (her brother, now, that's a thought). It's an experiment on real people who may bleed or forget about her. Hurt her. There's one out there right now who already understands about using music for dancing with girls. It'll be magical if he decides to become a golden prince. The instructor's walking around, watching, while they go through what they've learned so far, one last time. My daughter's dancing with a boy she knows, a friend, but he's an awkward dancer, has to concentrate on his feet to avoid disaster and she doesn't want to be there, she's letting her focus slide. I can see her watching another boy, pretty and fancy, but I've pegged him for a false swan. He dances for himself, he's wearing his partner like an apricot scarf. And he keeps looking over at--what?--not mirrors, there aren't any--what then?--oh. That must be his mother. Run, baby, don't look back. He's not interested in a little swanling, anyway, he's of the opinion that he can dance and he can jive and he's chosen himself an accomplished partner with a supercilious expression and super skinny long legs and a hot hot pink short dress. Different plumage altogether. Birds of a feather. They're all watching each other and I'm watching them and the instructor walks around and around.
This isn't dancing, of course, this is a performance.
Now my little girl is thinking about the steps. She wants to get them right, to be good at this, and her focus has shifted again. To just dancing.

She might as well be alone.
Good. Maybe when she's older.

Dance with me,
I want to be your partner.

Painting, Brian Kershisnik

Life. Inly Ruminate the Morning's Danger

It's the night before.
They're not ready. I'm not ready. We're never ready. Maybe, maybe you're not coming?
Then again, seeing as you were invited, maybe you are.

But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dar'd
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object.

I keep stepping on steps that aren't there.
I forgot to ask the janitors to set up the chairs.
I forgot to ask someone to make programs and then when someone offered I forgot to get them the info.
I forgot I've got a pair of boots to make black. And the commissions to make because I lost the other ones somewhere.
I forgot I've got to set up lights or go without them. In the other theater my boy set us up with lights years ago, lights, speakers. I don't know how to do this. I never wanted to learn. I miss the moms who used to already know how to help me, they stepped up to hold me in place quietly, I never had to ask, to say please, only thank you, thank you. I've been spoiled, and I've enjoyed it.
I hate asking.
Hate explaining, hate remaining inflexible while holding to an invisible standard of interior excellence, hate saying no let's not worry about that thing it won't matter in the end, while begging. Hate inconveniencing. But more than, worse than hating to ask, I just forget. Forget how much easier life is with help. (he today that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother) How much more friendly with friends.

Step--nothing--hard down--jarred and teeth on edge.

Step.

Nothing.

This is always the way. I only even get in bed every night before the opening night so I can be prone while I'm thinking how crazy, how misguided, how arrogant, how impossible, how prideful, all night, all night. All around me people whose play this is not, who carried costumes and boxes, made swords, shopped at thrift stores, put up posters, memorized lines, helped in any way I thought to ask, all those people get them to rest. People who are not in charge, not the director. The Corrector, my nephew calls me, you know, the one who bosses us around, tells us what to do. People whose idea this was not, on whom none of this is laid, to whom it matters not, really, if all stand as greyhounds in the slip or sinfully miscarry. They will enjoy the play. (As who wouldn't enjoy listening to a twelve year old inform us Besides, their writers say,/ King Pepin, which deposed Childeric,/Did, as heir general, being descended/Of Blithhild, which was daughter to King Clothair,/ Make claim and title to the crown of France, as if it matters this very moment in real time how those deceptive French worded their slippery dispatches and how chuffed we are at having caught them in duplicity by close examination of twisted bloodlines and their own convoluted history.) But little know what watch is kept to maintain it.

In her bedroom my youngest is going over her lines, dreadful note of preparation. My middle child, no longer young enough to be delicately forced to perform in the family troupe, has appropriated my workroom, sewing madly, making poodle skirts for a dress rehearsal tomorrow, dance concert over the top of Shakespeare. I'm teaching her to copy a skirt, to sew without a pattern, not purposely teaching her to do it the night before yet somehow bequeathing an inheritance of such busyness that doing each thing in its time means doing nothing till it stands shrieking that attention must at last be paid.
But not till the very last.

They're not ready. And they won't be. But they'll be more ready after a performance. Battle-hardened.
This industrial carpet shall be our stage, these unused but oddly full classrooms our tiring house and we will try to do it as we would do it before an audience tougher than this one composed of our parents and our friends.
I miss my funny little theater in Kanosh. Funny, but mine.


There's that lovely line just before the battle, just as Montjoy enters to steal the momentum, the forward way and steam, where Henry says, You know your places. God be with you all! And that's how I wish to feel the night before, how I want it to be. You know what to do, tiny shining actors, God be with you as you do this to the full stature of your spirits, to your full humanity, as I taught you, as you believe in your secret heart you can do this. We have worked all these months to make a shape, to find a story, to learn how best to share it. On, you noblest little soldiers, be strong and of a good courage. That's what I feel I ought to be thinking as I fall peacefully asleep the night before. This should be the reward for the director, true in spirit and intent, filled from the beginning with a parent's heartscoring and unspeakable love for at least one member of this cast.
If I were writing the script, that's how I'd want it to be for the character who is me.
But the writer who is also me wouldn't be allowed to let that happen.

No, thou proud dream,
That play'st so subtly with a king's repose.
I am a king that find thee; and I know

That's not how children's theater works out, at least, not in my productions. It's more like trying to shape the weather. I only know something is going to happen, all right. It always does.
I only know they can do this, not whether they will.

And so our scene must to the battle fly;
Where--O for pity--we shall much disgrace
with four or five most vile and ragged foils
(Right ill dispos'd, in brawl ridiculous)
The name of Agincourt.

There are actually not four or five ragged foils but 25 wooden ones. Pretty deadly and we try to be careful.
Five daggers.
Commissions.
Maps.
Treaty and genealogy.
Banners and standards.
Siege ladder and stretcher.
Bandages, bloody and clean.
Crowns.
Lanterns.
And the tennis balls.
He'll make your Paris Louvre shake for it


There's nothing more I can do, though all that I can do is nothing worth.
I can't show you how hard they worked, those that did. And truthfully, they didn't, all.
I can never show you how far they've come, those that traveled. Not all chose to stir, much, from where they began. But some, O, some have come far. I found out only tonight, in an electronic note from a mother, that two of the girls are terribly frightened but working through it. She's so proud of them, attributes this progress to me, wonders how I managed this.
I thought they weren't much interested, stand-offish and stiff. I treated them just like everyone else.
They made those steps alone, and me not knowing.
Brave soldiers, steely hearts.
They need to pluck comfort from my looks but my breath catches and hurts me; I'm stupid and tear up when I have to welcome their families and friends and say some empty little words about the enormity of what I have, all alone, witnessed; my heart breaks, over and over, every every time.


And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.

We learn some of the ways of the sword. How to stand to shoot with the bow. How to wear large sleeves without fidgeting with them. How to represent one person differently from another. How to pay enough attention to get that line in the battle scene.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
...For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

No adults backstage. Props masters, weapons masters, fight captains, all playing lords and foot soldiers. Hang up your own costume. Keep yourselves quiet. Don't miss your entrance or block the exit.

Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times,
Turning th' accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass;

We learn all those words, what they mean, why they were said. What a bow signifies. Cressy battle, the strategic importance of a port town, how armies are raised and the time that takes. Nobles are carried off on shoulders or stretchers. When you drag away the dead commoners, get them all the way off stage. Boys in the luggage, let your heads drop back, lie limp in death.

for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history

Will they change the sets? Sometimes they just don't remember for horrible long minutes of nothing. Will they smile through the tough bits in their swordplay? I keep warning them about that--

The best way first steps compare to marathons is in the miracle of this upright human, bringing all that soul to the forefront, moving and moving forward.

Who, Prologue-like, your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

O, God of battles, let it be all right.
I think --breathe-- it's going to be ok.
I hope.

Yet sit and see,
Minding true things by what their mock'ries be.

Life: Birth Days

I'm the oldest because the baby before me didn't make it all the way to birth.


I was born in the fall. But I don't remember.

* * * * *

The earliest memory I have is of being shown the sister one younger than myself. So, I would be two and a half years old. What I remember is opening my mom's bedroom door softly, knowing my mom wanted to see me. I suppose she had been gone, she must have returned, I must have been summoned. But I don't remember. The movie of my memory comes alive as I am pushing the door gently open and looking around it. My mom is sitting on her bed which is completely strewn, covered, with baby stuff. I did not recognize any individual and discrete items at the time and I can't reconstruct anything specific now. I bet there were diapers, but that's just an informed guess. Whatever was on the bed, there was a ton of it and it had been arranged as for public display. My mom did that, laid stuff out like it was going to be formally reviewed. Every year, after the frenzy of Christmas or Easter morning subsided and people had started eating their candy but before anyone could get too involved in a new book, she always made us gather everything up, take it to our rooms, make our beds and compose our gifts artistically so that guests arriving later could easily peruse our loot, not in a jumbled mass but in a pleasing collage. Books fanned out so each title showed, shirts folded and stacked like stair steps with each one visible, necklaces stretched out chains and all. It was the bed, loaded and groaning with my new sister's haul, that took my full attention when I came into the room. My mom was holding something out to me, saying "Come and see!" but I just stood at the foot of the bed staring at the stacks. "Who's is all of this?"
"It's for the new baby, come and see!"
"All of it? All of it is for the baby?" (OK, author's note here. Yes. I talked like this at two and a half. Probably at eighteen months. It's a thing in my family, the babies talk early and well.)
"Yes," my mom is saying, "don't you want to see your sister?"
I wrenched my eyes from material gain and looked.
First of all, my mom had been nursing her and that was the most awkward and unnatural thing I had ever seen. I delicately averted my eyes. Sorry everyone.
Second. I looked back, editing my field of vision, seeing only sister, nothing icky. And realized my parents had been had. Someone had pawned a terrible thing off on them and they were too crazy excited, inexperienced or just too unobservant to notice. This was nothing like any little sister I had been led to expect. You'll be able to play with her and talk to her and share your toys with her and she'll be your best friend, they had told me, laying the foundation for the coming addition to the family.
Of course I had believed them.
And formed expectations accordingly.


Two years old is not very far off the ground, but I had seen enough of life to know that the unfortunate creature lying practically naked in my mom's arms was not going to do any of those things. Ever. On the other hand, since I had not been particularly wanting a sister before this thing came, I felt no sadness or disappointment, only embarrassment for my parents. Whatever this was, it was obviously no threat to my happy little world, my serene and cushy security. I felt nothing for or about it.
I made polite conversation with my mom for a minute, agreed the thing she had was lovely and slipped away, saddened for parents who had been hoping for a sister.

* * * * *

I don't remember the next sister till she suddenly began to laugh one evening at my silly big sister antics which, up till that point, had never once been for the baby's benefit. Who would show off for a baby? It would be like performing for shoes. I remember my game had something to do with balloons, with throwing balloons up in the air and letting them bonk me in the face, over and over mindlessly and aimlessly and then she was bursting out in those bubbly, fat little chortles behind me and I remember spinning around to face a giggling baby, completely taken aback to hear her make so sensible and organized a sound as laughter, just as if she were a real person. I was even more shocked when my mom told me the baby was laughing at me, that she thought I was funny. The baby. Thinking. Unbelievable. I experimented, repeating my balloon act for this tiny new crowd. The baby shrieked. It was true. My biggest fan. I threw my balloons in earnest and the baby howled, leaning toward me and shaking, helpless with laughter, gently bonking my head with hers. I threw and threw and waxed achingly comedic. I'll never do the balloon dance again like I did it that night. The other little sister was getting in the way now, elbowing in on my successes, trying to out-balloon me but she was too young and kept getting it wrong and the baby got distracted and bored and looked away and sighed and my mom said, "Alright, now you're just silly," and it was over and everybody went to bed. But after that I knew the baby would turn into a person someday after she was done being a baby. And she got interesting to me.

I do remember, though, going to the hospital when she came, and playing outside with the other sister because children couldn't visit in the hospital. We had been taken to the hall outside the nursery, to the huge window where a nurse held up some wadded blanket and my grandma said, "See your new baby sister?" and I was wise from past experience so I was neither surprised nor saddened by the travesty. Nor interested. And then they put us outside to play while they visited my mom and that baby. The hospital had a wonderful big courtyard, wide shallow steps descending on four sides to a great sunken square in the center. At the top level in each of the corners were planters nearly as big as the central square with huge old aloes and cacti and trees and ornamental things and a broad cement boarder to run around and around. I could have stayed and played there for a hundred years. It was so fun I refused to get scared when the little sister started to wonder if Dad would ever come back because it was getting dark, streetlights coming on, the sun down behind one of the planters. I just told her he would and grabbed her hand and dragged her up and down the stairs for a while till she was happy again and not crying. Then Dad took us home and made something like food that was good and not what our mom made. We never saw one person go into or out of the hospital while we were running in the courtyard. We would have been three and five and a half, respectively.

* * * * *

The next sister I should remember from the get go, but I don't, even though I was ten when she was born. I do remember the miscarriage before her birth and the strange hopelessness of it, not that the kids wanted another sister so much, but that my mom was so sick for so long and then the baby was just dead and gone and there was nothing for all that. Nothing to hold, nothing to show. It was such a terrible emptiness and my mom was to desolate, so ripped up and there was no place for us girls to put our eyes, nothing for us to do but be good and quiet and clean the house while they were gone to the hospital. And that wasn't any use, either, because we seemed to mess it up again before they got back so my dad yelled at us softly, tired, because they really needed our help right now and couldn't we just have cleaned up? Just that? We were too sad and strange and he was too weary for us to defend ourselves because it was always the boys who died, just as they became boys, and he was too sad and lonely for them. And we were all girls. No way to get out of that, no matter how we tried, to be boys. He didn't complain, he liked us. We just didn't grow up to be sons. We never spoke to anyone or among ourselves of my mom's pregnancies till after the fourth month or so, or if we did we always appended the phrase "if it lives." I did that with my own pregnancies, because I was used to it, that's how we always did it at home. It hurt and upset my friends but it helped me with my own losses, when they came.


So I don't remember that sister being born. I remember a baby that sat on my left hip for a whole summer. I remember the next summer my mom said Take The Baby! no matter where I was going, to the cemetery, to the park, to the dam (sheesh! yikes! zowie!), to the store. The baby rode on my handlebars. She was there one time when a giant dog came after us, running along side, trying to nip her feet, so tall he only had to turn his head. I had to ram him hard with my front tire so he would go away and that made her fall off but I caught her. Mostly. But she was hurt so I had to scrub her owies on some one's lawn (grass cleans. you know.) then put her some place high up and go after the dog, riding hard to catch him, seriously ramming him a couple of times, climbing off my bike to throw rocks at him. Then I had to go back and get the baby and take her home to put on bandaids and feed her because my mom was at work. That was in the summer. In the winter that baby lived mostly with my grandma. My grandma still thinks she owns that sister.

* * * * *

The last birth day I missed because I was at college, traveling with the speech and debate team. I came home in the middle of the night and a roommate staggered out to tell me there had been a phone call, a baby had been born. So I called home, excited, thrilled, thinking they would be excited, thrilled, waiting to hear from me. They had not been waiting. They had been sleeping. Not thrilled, exactly. My dad was civil.
"But what is it? What is the baby?"
"What is it? It's a girl, of course. What else would it be?"
I didn't keep him on the phone.
There had been more miscarriages after the fourth sister. As my mom got older, it got harder and she had decided she was finished. Definitely.
Here's how she told me she was going to have another baby. I was home from college and we were washing dishes. No one else around. I was pouring out the engrossing, true, though artfully edited, history of Suzanne At College when my mother cut across one of my best sentences. "What do you think is the worst thing that could happen to me?"
A strange query, coming so abruptly in the middle of so fascinating a narrative, but engaging. I turned on it the full blaze of my recently sharpened focus and shiny new college freshman intellect. After a moment's intense mental effort I offered an elaborate scenario; house burns, total loss of worldly goods, family dies horribly, she is terribly injured but survives to endless painful procedures and a life of medical debt. I still think this is pretty good. She considered, rinsing out a glass. "No. It's worse. I'm pregnant. The baby's coming after the new year."
I would be eighteen.
"If it lives," I said.
"It'll live. Five months, now."
And it did live. It has two babies of its own.
Another baby I would only really know in the summers. Everyone thought she was mine, of course, if I happened to be the sister holding her. I was equally skewered by the humor and the horror. "She's my sister." No one believed me. It happened to whichever of the oldest three were holding her. "She's our sister." A littlest sister with nephews close enough to her in age that one of them played Petruchio to her Kate.

* * * * *

So, here's the thing. I remember happy cakes and candles and pretty gifts and pinatas and trips to the zoo but I don't remember a single birth day in my immediate, growing up family. I only remember the parties we had after. I remember cement stairs and mean dogs and piles of what weren't my presents. How can you tell, as you go, what should have been noticed, will be important to someone later? Tell me about the day I was born. Sorry, little sis, you'll have to ask your mother.

And good luck with that.



Noah's photos

Life. What We Can Do

When I was little my dad got himself a hunting dog. A papered Brittany Spaniel named The Lady Angeline. Angie. She was supposed to become this bird dog and my dad was supposed to become this bird hunter. I know he did take her out at least once because I went with them and got a tick, on the back of my neck, just at the hairline and to the left of my spine. In the soft hollow place below my skull. It was a hard little pointy bump I knew had not been a part of me when I got up that morning.

I showed my mom and she showed my dad and he diagnosed it because he had been to medical school and was a hunter. There was a lot of conferring and a call to the doctor to check on diseases. First they tried just nudging it to get out, sort of irritating it. Failing to achieve surrender, they tried coating it with oil to suffocate it. Ticks, my father informed me in response to my urgent queries, (you can suffocate if you get oil on your body?!?) breathe through their bodies, somewhere, not through their noses. Obvious, once I thought about it; its nose was buried in my scalp. Somebody, maybe the pediatrician or maybe a witch doctor my parents palled around with, told them to light a match, blow it out and put the very hot end of the match on the tick's behind. This treatment would make the tick want to back out of my head to determine what the heck was up and possibly, like Abraham, see that it was needful for it to obtain another place of residence. Apparently it was vital the tick come out of its own accord and under its own steam to insure that its head not remain with me though its body be removed, as might happen if some impetuous person tugged roughly on it with a tweezer, which some had threatened doing. Should the head be left behind (here's the part that makes me wonder if this were not advice given by a local shaman) it would continue to work away at me, sucking blood until, well. Until things got very bad. Basically, there'd be no stopping it, once it was free from the civilizing restraints of its body.

I wondered about this a great deal at the time.

If a tick could work so much more freely without its body than with it, why did it have a body in the first place? And if having your head separated from your body couldn't kill you, what on earth was going to do the job? Should my parents, with no prior tick handling skill of which I was aware, be successful in getting the thing to back willingly out of my head, was it going to be safe to release an insect unkillable into our bathroom and by extension, the rest of our house and my bedroom in particular? How was I ever going to feel safe playing outside or inside again knowing that the heads of ticks, unstoppable, could be roaming at will, seeking hairlines in which to thrive? (My mom had told me they favored the hairline.)

I was a child given more to brooding fearfully about matters of disease, monsters and the apocalypse than to just asking questions so I clamped my mouth shut and turned the whole thing over in my head, which was upside down resting on a towel folded up lots of times so that it would cushion my forehead where I was sort of standing on it leaning down on the toilet in the bathroom where the light was good.
I thought about parents and the mayhem they wrecked in the world.

Parents just did things, that was the trouble, they didn't think or stop to weigh the consequences, and look where it had gotten us.
They walked into a mess, say, throw up, and started cleaning like it was doable.
They packed up and drove all alone into the wilds following a map to a place no one had ever seen since the map got made and set up a tent, really just a house made out of clothes or sheets or something and made fire with newspaper and cooked food with just sticks and said don't put toothpaste in the tent because of bears. Goodnight, go to sleep.
They held you down and dug out your sliver. They scrubbed it with soap and rinsed it with alcohol.
They drove to Mexico even though you couldn't drink the water or eat the food, even though you might get lost or stolen and no one would ever see you again (this you knew because they told you), even though you drove past cars with all the doors open and the trunk and the seats out and the people's stuff strung out along the border crossing where the border cops had taken someone apart. "What happened to those people, Daddy? Why's their car like that?" "What? Oh, the border cops took them apart." Laughing.
They walked you across the street and put you into school where neither you nor any of your little sisters had ever been before and that was that. They expected you to stay there. And to tell them all the time how your day was and that you had learned stuff.
They bought a house; who knew how they were going to pay for it? "What if we can't pay for the house sometimes?" "What? What did you say? Oh, well then the bank takes it."

????????????

They bought a bird dog.
And they thought they could take a tick out of you with no prior medical or dangerous animal containment training whatsoever.
In the bathroom you were going to have to use in the night.
When the light would be bad.

Head down, for some time now, knees locked, legs starting to shake.
Dad says, let's try the matches. No, get the whole box.
And, even apart from everything else and the threat of wild tick heads lunging ferociously under my skin toward my brain, even aside from that, a whole box of matches, blazing, blown out and headed for my hairline is not a pleasant thought. I am so tired now, I am afraid I will just roll over my own head, perform an unintentional somersault across the toilet and slam onto the tile floor on the far side, probably snapping off the tick body and dooming myself to an eternity shared with the insatiable head. We're Mormons, we know about eternity.
Spine stiffened. Lips compressed.

You do what you have to do. When he dropped me off at the dentist to get my first tooth filled, when my dad got me out of kindergarten and dropped me at the dentist, careful to watch from the parking lot that I got into the office OK, assuring me he'd be back to pick me up when it was done, I checked myself in at the desk. What was I going to do? I had never been in a dentist's office before, but the only human in the room when I entered asked my name and I told her and she told me to wait. Till they called me. And they told me the shot wouldn't hurt much, and it didn't, much, and they told me to go back out to the waiting chairs. And after a while the lady at the desk asked if my dad was coming back and I said he said he would and after a while she told me she was sure he would be there soon and after a while he came.

When I took my youngest child to the doctor and he told me she had pneumonia he also told me that the people with this flu who had been admitted to the hospital with pneumonia were getting much, much sicker. He told me, unofficially, that he thought I should try to take care of her at home. He told me what to do, what to watch for. And I nursed her like he said, I took fierce care of my baby, only two. I did everything he had said and a whole lot more, everything I could think of or find out about and I prayed like crazy for about three days while she didn't get worse but she didn't get better but the people in the hospital got sicker and sicker. And on the fourth day she was getting better. And I had done it. And I fell right down and prayed and knew I had done just what I could do, no more, no less. So had everyone else.

What else can you do?

When I finally broke up with my charming, harming, talented smart funny abusive boyfriend and felt like I might be standing up and starting to live and finally allowed to die, both at the same time, I gathered up just enough strength to call my mom. And that was a good thing because it turned out there was something worse than the breakup. Hashing it out on the phone, being comforted, being defensive of myself, of him (!?), with my mom was worse and I got myself off the phone and that was the first step of the rest of my life.

Sometimes you're brave and sometimes you aren't smart enough to be scared. Sometimes you know what to do. Sometimes you just don't stop moving altogether and that's all you can do. Do something, my neighbor said. The amazing nurse who saved his brother's life, worked like crazy on this man, just this man in an ambulance, working all the way to Fillmore after jumping on the ambulance in Meadow, doing his job and working and working and never knowing who he was working on till he heard the name, till his brother was admitted in the emergency room. Do something, he said, telling us about working, throwing himself into saving his wife who died, anyway, young, of a heart attack after the birth of her third baby. It almost doesn't matter what you do. Do something.

I held perfectly still with my head upside down and gave my life into God's hands. I think for the first time. The dentist would be later.
It was all I could do.

Movement. Stuff. Talking. Smoke.

OK, my dad says. That's that. Do you want to see it?
I ask, is the head there? No one has mentioned it but this seems to me the obvious point, I mean, what are we talking about here? Huh? Like the baby's born and we have to inquire as to the sex?
What do you mean? my mom asks. I guess it's there, it'd be too small, really, to see. She's blind, my mom. No driving without glasses. Lucky, she says as they go off down the hall to return all the removal paraphernalia to all its rightful places, lucky it was the wrong season for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

Spotted???

Relief.

Now I know they're messing with me. This is a joke. Spotted Fever? For real. Come on, five years old is too old not to see through this flimsy pretense. At least if you're going to make stuff up to freak me out, do better with the names. Spotted Fever, indeed. So all that stuff about the rogue head was just my dad trying to give me nightmares again.

But I never forgot it. Never forgot the danger of a disembodied tick head, checked my children thoroughly after every encounter with the wild. Hairlines, folds of skin. Lyme's Disease, fevers with spots. We just don't see that here, my brilliant and beloved new pediatrician tells me, rubbing her thumb gently across the great raised red disk that is not Lyme's bull's eye but a bite made by something, something out in the wilds of our yard, on my daughter's forearm. We don't see that here.
OK, we stay in Utah. Forever.

Do you want to see it? It is a small black bug, sort of spidery looking but with short legs and, of course, too few of them. It must not have had much time to suck up my blood, because it never got big. My dad has told me, while I was upside down waiting for one of his tricks to bring the tick backing out into the daylight (blinking?) that ticks on dogs and deer get so big they are like grapes, like walnuts. They can get splatted with a soft and terrible burst and a splash, leading, I suppose, to the aforementioned problems of an unbound tick head, but I no longer believe in that. My dad certainly found leisure to convey a great deal of tick lore to me in the sensitive time while I was wrong way to the world and before we knew how the tick and I would part company. A suspiciously large amount of upsetting detail. We are alone in the bathroom, my tick and I. I am young and have elf eyes. I can clearly see that still stuck onto the body is its head which is bigger than the period at the end of a sentence and I can clearly see periods even though I can't read and don't understand what you use them for. The tick is lying on a piece of toilet paper and I have the abandoned tweezers to poke it. Abraded, oily and burned of bottom, my tick, and bits are coming off. (A shiver of fear, what can a leg do, really, on its own? Do I believe? Or not?) And unquestionably dead. Even I can see that. The light in the bathroom is good. The tick lost. I won. I won by coming through the ordeal unscathed. The tick lost by coming through the ordeal dead.

What else could we do?

My mom has come back to relieve me of the tweezers and remove the headrest towel. Good job, she says, putting stuff away up high. I am nonplussed. What? For standing on my head for forty hours? For not falling over when they were putting matches in my long hair? For not voicing questions about slow, grisly death? For figuring out that they were teasing me about spotted sickness and ticks roaming free without legs and stomachs? Good job to find that tick, to notice so quickly. I don't know how long it would have taken me to realize I had a tick on me. Good for you. And she is gone to make dinner out of some tuna fish.

I turn it over in my head. What kind of people? Who doesn't notice they have a tick on them? How lame is that? My poor, malfunctioning mom. Silly. If she is so inept as that, why at this very moment...

I am frozen with revelation and with horror. At this very moment...

But, wait, there's more. What if the whole world, or even only some of it, is as inept as my mom?

But that could mean...How will I ever go back to school? Church? Play inside? Or outside?
I walk cautiously into the breakfast nook where I can climb (quietly, this is not allowed) onto the table. I can see her well from here. She's cooking. She doesn't like to do that so she doesn't notice me. I start scanning her for pointy little bumps.

What else can I do?