Jill Bialosky

We take our last walk. Walls stripped of portraits, warped mirrors, dressing tables, and the grandfather clock with its stoic face and elaborate gentle fingers. For years we struggled to break free of the closeness of rooms, the obligation of birth order, the metaphysics that bind one element to the other, as if we were still wild girls playing wild rover in the garden, breaking through a chain of linked hands.

On the side of the road a deer, frozen, frigid. Go back to your life, the voice said. What is my life? she wondered. For months she lost herself in work—Freud said work is as important as love to the soul—and at night she sat with a boy, forcing him to practice his violin, helping him recite his notes. Then the ice thawed and the deer came to life. She saw her jump over the fence, she saw her in the twilight, how free she looked. She saw her eyes shiny as marbles, as much a part of this world as the fence a worker pounds into the earth. At night she still sat with the boy. He’s learning “Au Claire de la Lune.” Do you know it? He has established a relationship with his violin. He knows that it takes practice to master it: the accuracy of each note, to wrestle his feelings to the listener. But he’s impatient. Sometimes what he hears and feels are not always the same.Again, the poet says. She knows if he tries to silence his fervor, he might not ever know who he is. The poet contemplates whether a deer can dream. Rich blood-red berries on a branch, pachysandra in the garden. A soft warm bed in the leaves.

Music is time, said the violin master. You can’t miss the stop or you’ll miss the train. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.

Our labor realized in the crowns of marigolds, blue eyes of the hydrangeas, smell of lavender and late bloom of the hosta’s erect purple flower with its marvel of thick green leaves. In our twilight every year we trimmed back and the garden grew more lustrous and untamable as if the eternal woods and animals asleep at night in its beds were claiming it back. The water in the pool shimmered an icy Tuscan blue. When we arrived we swam until the stress from the grueling life in the city released our bodies. Later we sat under the umbrella and watched a garter snake slip into the water, careful not to startle its flight-or-fight response. Its barbed-wire coil. Comet of danger, serpent of the water, how long we had thwarted the venom of its secret lures and seductions. It swam by arching then releasing its slithery mercurial form. Through the lanky trees we heard the excited cries of the neighbor’s children—ours, the boy in our late youth, of our happiness and our struggles, the boy who made us whole and broken, was in his room perhaps dreaming of a girl and sleeping the long, tangled sleep of a teenager. It was a miracle, our ignorance. It was grace incarnate, how we never knew.

“A fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants, and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell their acquaintance what a charming day it is.” — northanger abbey I awoke from the tunnel to the fields of yellow rape, seventeenth-century buildings, and cobbled streets as she would have seen them. It was rainy; the rain came and went, came and went so that you could not escape its dampness. I understood the need for tea and the luxury of cremes and pastries and why the ladies longed for a strong shoulder to see them through the winter. The seagulls cried overhead, though there was no sea, only a muddy river from Bath to Bristol. The scavengers lived on the rooftops and if desperate enough would swoop down and take a sandwich from your hand. I secured my room at the Royal Bath Hotel. It was a hovel, really, with a carpet as old as the early century. Walking through the hotel, I sensed something lurid in the air, every eye upon me as if they knew I was a foreigner in a strange land. Over the bed, a burgundy bedspread dusty and faded as vintage wine, made me long for the bright color of red. In the next room, sleepless, I heard through thin walls the sounds of an un-tender coupling. I looked in the warped mirror and found myself ugly and when I turned from it, could not escape the vision. It lingered. The rain came and went, came and went. I took an umbrella and began my walk, hoping to come upon her quarters. I passed the Roman Baths, the statues not beautiful, but puckered and fossilled and the Pump Room where her protagonist, other self, doppelgänger, good, strong, loyal Catherine, longing for companionship, fell under the seduction of Isabella and her reprehensible brother. Even then her coming out seemed less magisterial, and Bath a representation of the emptiness and evils of society where a woman’s dowry might confine her forever, than a reprieve from country life. I gave up my search. Images were everywhere. And my mind had been made up. I perceived no romance in the wind, no comfort in the hard glances of strangers, girls with chipped nail polish, lads unkempt as if there were no hope of glory. The next morning I boarded the train to the modern world and it wasn’t until a sheet of blue slipped out like a love letter from its envelope of dark gray sky that I knew the journey had ended and, like Catherine, I was finally safe.

All day we packed boxes. We read birth and death certificates. The yellowed telegrams that announced our births, the cards of congratulations and condolences, the deeds and debts, love letters, valentines with a heart ripped out, the obituaries. We opened the divorce decree, a terrible document of division and subtraction. We leafed through scrapbooks: corsages, matchbooks, programs to the ballet, racetrack, theatre—joy and frivolity parceled in one volume— painstakingly arranged, preserved and pasted with crusted glue. We sat in the room in which the beloved had departed. We remembered her yellow hair and her mind free of paradox. We sat together side by side on the empty floor and did not speak. There were no words between us other than the essence of the words from the correspondences, our inheritance—plain speak, bereft of poetry.

We loved them. We got up early to toast their bagels. Wrapped them in foil. We filled their water bottles and canteens. We washed and bleached their uniforms, the mud and dirt and blood washed clean of brutality. We marveled at their bodies, thighs thick as the trunk of a spindle pine, shoulders broad and able, the way their arms filled out. The milk they drank. At the plate we could make out their particular stance, though each wore the same uniform as if they were cadets training for war. If by chance one looked up at us and gave us a rise with his chin, or lifted a hand, we beamed. We had grown used to their grunts, mumbles, and refusal to form a full sentence. We made their beds and rifled through their pockets and smelled their shirts to see if they were clean. How else would we know them? We tried to not ask too many questions and not to overpraise. Sometimes they were ashamed of us; if we laughed too loud, if one of us talked too long to their friend, of our faces that had grown coarser. Can’t you put on lipstick? We let them roll their eyes, curse, and grumble at us after a game if they’d missed a play or lost. We knew to keep quiet; the car silent the entire ride home. What they were to us was inexplicable. Late at night, after they were home in their beds, we sat by the window and wondered when they would leave us and who they would become when they left the cocoon of our instruction. What kind of girl they liked. We sat in a group and drank our coffee and prayed that they’d get a hit. If they fumbled a ball or struck out we felt sour in the pit of our stomach. We paced. We couldn’t sit still or talk. Throughout summer we watched the trees behind the field grow fuller and more vibrant and each fall slowly lose their foliage— it was as if we wanted to hold on to every and each leaf.