I
Do you hear the strange
music? Ringing in a story my mother
told me once. Not much of a story, I guess—just a
few short sentences: factual, bare-boned.
“My mother killed herself when I was twelve years old.”
She goes on—my mind fills in facts with
images, voices:
My mother’s mother lies in her bedroom—the lights are off;
the room is a deep black throat, threatening to swallow her
sallow face peering
from its pillow. Her eyes catch
the pale, thin girl drifting past the
door— “Amy,” she calls to my mother (and her voice sounds like
my mother's voice, and my mother’s voice sounds like
my voice).
Mother enters the death den: “Yes?”
“Bring me my pill bottle. It’s on the bathroom counter.”
My mother is
obedient; she leaves, returns with the bottle, leaves again.
She sees her mother next in the
Hospital—still, unresponsive—
and next in a casket—still, unresponsive ad infinitum.
Her used-to-be mother is lowered down into the deep
black throat of the earth and
swallowed.
II
This is what I know about my grandmother:
before she killed herself, she was a painter.
A Jew. She had a green thumb, though she was sensitive
to the sun’s rays. From her, I inherited the same sensitivity:
polymorphic light eruption. What else, I sometimes wonder,
did she pass on to me besides the bubbling of skin in the springtime?
Besides this spattering of facts, I have
her painting. When I was a kid, it hung in my
grandpa's office, and it drew me in like a
current during every visit to his house. It became
a ritual: step away from
the family, step into his office, stand there, stare
up at it as the minutes tick by. I felt, even then,
its movements inside me, although its precise
meaning, I could not pinpoint.
The painting reveals an ancient scene—
prehistoric, perhaps—done in the sharp black and
accompanying white of charcoal. There is
a woman, bare-chested: she holds a limp body in
her arms, held out like
an offering. The woman’s hair hangs
limp and lifeless upon her shoulders like a
blackened mop. Her neck cranes back; her
face, slack and broad, stares into inky
heavens. Perched on a nearby tree, a disproportionately
large raven looms out of (and is partially obscured by) the surrounding darkness—
its talons curl, its face melts into black sky.
In the corner, the painting’s title is written in my grandmother’s hand:
“The Quality of Loneliness.”
III
My grandpa followed his wife into the dirt during
my freshman year of high school. We gathered at
his house for the funeral. In the basement, I found
an old photo album. I sat on the floor and turned its
pages. There was
my grandpa but his beard was black, and
there was my mother and my aunt, but they
were dolls—miniature versions of the women they would
become. Then there was me—
laughing in my late twenties, standing in my garden.
Me: cradling my babies or my husband’s hand. This was
my first time seeing my grandmother, my
doppelganger—besides in the family portrait hanging in
my grandpa’s basement. That picture had been taken near
her death, and I had looked upon it for years without
glimpsing a sliver of myself in that stony, unsmiling face
with its cropped dark hair.
But here we were—decades ago, tucked in a photo album:
in her garden, the sunshine kisses her ivory
skin; she throws back a bright moon glow, just
like I do, and sunrays catch her flowing brown hair, blazing red
the locks that now lie buried in a box below. But the sun found
a new plaything in me, dressing my head
every springtime in twin flames.
A smile touches her lips; she laughs; I never
imagined her to smile or laugh before. Her long,
thin limbs arch beautifully—they mirror mine.
In the glossy old photo, they are invincible, carved
in marble. I gazed at them, then—I, too,
a young woman who felt invincible.
IV
I wish I could say now
that, in a way, I know my grandmother like never
before—that my soul transcended
decades, even death, to link with hers, and
that seeing her like in a
mirror filled all the gaps between facts.
But that’s not true, and I am,
most of the time, a poet rather than a liar. To me,
my grandmother remains a vague abstraction:
a concept, a mystery.
After all, pictures can never replace
the touch of a hand in yours or the mingling
of voices, the sharing of secrets, the taste of love
settled deep in your gut. Yet something
speaks to me, moves inside me, when I look upon
that painting my grandmother made. Yes,
I took it after my grandpa died—the one thing
I brought back—hanging now
on a wall in my house. Sometimes I still
stare up at it, and I hear a strange music like
the braying of a raven over my shoulder.
Do you hear it? Listen—it’s ringing
in a story that continues still.
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