Kathryn Nuernberger

You are afraid of the dark, for which you blame the raccoons, or more to the point, your father, who took you and your mother into the night with a flashlight and shotgun, then left with both, while you held her shaking hand. You would follow your father to the end of the world, those distant birch woods where raccoons rustle and flash their green eyes. His gun was firing into the persimmon trees and the rain of leaves and ripe fruit fell farther and farther, until only the crackle of his shots and the distant baying of the hounds could be heard. The raccoons came then to hiss all around: he left you, he left you, and now you are ours.

I want to believe we can’t see anything we don’t have a word for. When I look out the window and say green, I mean sea green, I mean moss green, I mean gray, I mean pale and also electrically flecked with white and I mean green in its damp way of glowing off a leaf. Scheele’s green, the green of Renaissance painters, is a sodium carbonate solution heated to ninety degrees as arsenious oxide is stirred in. Sodium displaces copper, resulting in a green precipitate that is sometimes used as insecticide. When I say green I mean a shiny green bug eating a yellow leaf. Before synthetics, not every painter could afford a swathe of blue. Shocking pink, aka neon, aka kinky pink, wasn’t even on the market. I want to believe Andy Warhol invented it in 1967 and ever since no one’s eyes have been the same. There were sunsets before, but without that hot shocking neon Marilyn, a desert sky was just cataract smears. I want to believe this. The pale green of lichen and half-finished leaves filling my window is a palette very far from carnation or bougainvillea, but to look out is to understand it is not, is to understand what it is not. I stare out the window a lot. Between the beginning and the end the leaves unfolded. I looked out one morning and everything was unfamiliar as if I was looking at the green you could only see if you’d never known synthetic colors existed. I’ve drawn into myself people say. We understand, they say. There are people who only have words for red and black and white, and I wonder if they even see the trees at the edge of the grass or the green storms coming out of the west. There are people who use the same word for green and red and brown, and I wonder if red seems so urgently bright pouring from the body when there is no green for it to fall against. In his treatise on color Wittgenstein asked, “Can’t we imagine certain people having a different geometry of colour than we do?” I want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name, because I don’t want anything to look the way it did before. Van Gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded and curators labeled the work “White Roses” by mistake. The world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol. When I learned the word I was newly pregnant and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches. The pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable words. The vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger dipped in sugar pleased me then. I said the word aloud for the baby to hear. Chlorol. I imagined the baby could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe, but if you can see what I’m seeing, the word for it is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here. Nineteenth century critics mocked painters who cast shadows in unexpected colors. After noticing green cypresses do drop red shadows, Goethe chastised them. “The eye demands completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.” He tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies to see the flaming petals again and figure out why. Over and over again Wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence. Why is there no clear white? He wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses, but all he finds is mist. At first I felt as if the baby had fallen away like a blue shadow on the snow. Then I felt like I killed the baby in the way you can be thinking about something else and drop a heavy platter by mistake. Sometimes I feel like I was stupid to have thought I was pregnant at all. Color is an illusion, a response to the vibrating universe of electrons. Light strikes a leaf and there’s an explosion where it lands. When colors change, electromagnetic fields are colliding. The wind is not the only thing moving the trees. Once when I went into those woods I saw a single hot pink orchid on the hillside and I had to keep reminding myself not to tell the baby about the beautiful small things I was seeing. So, hot pink has been here forever and I don’t even care about that color or how Andy Warhol showed me an orchid. I hate pink. It makes my eyes burn.

My child is sitting cross-legged on the floor reading to herself. Sometimes she is so full of need I push her to the floor. Only once I did that and I don’t even remember the moment right, but I was trying to wipe urine off my leg and she was naughty like a squirrel and jumping and singing and her head slammed into my chin, which hurt and even more than that, it pissed me off, because she’s my beautiful child, but in that button snap of a moment she was suddenly just one more person and I pushed her away in a way that felt to me like setting her down, but awkwardly, because of how she was also balancing her feet on my feet as I tried to pour out a bowl of pee from her little potty as a toothbrush dangled foaming from my mouth. Somewhere in the mess of that morning she’d become person enough to, in the space between us, create force of momentum, and then I did not set her down, but pushed her and she fell away from it against the wall and was crying because I, her mommy, pushed her. And I know this should be the poem about how I’m horrified at myself, the poem about what in ourselves we have to live with, but in that moment which followed two years of breastfeeding and baby-wearing and sixty-nine hours of natural childbirth and the hemorrhaging and the uncertain operation, after which I pumped every two hours, careful not to let the cord tangle in the IV. Even then when she cried and no matter what and no matter and no matter and no matter and no matter what, I held her all night if she cried so she would not ever know someday you’ll cry alone, but I held her and ached and leaked and bled too as long as it took. Of course there’ve been nights since but sometimes it feels as if I’ve never been asleep again, so when I say I pushed my two-year-old against a wall and I don’t remember it happening that way but it happened and I did and I’ve been wondering a long time now what the limit is and when I would find the end of myself, and that day, which was yesterday, was the end. And this day, when we played hide-and-seek with Daddy, and touched bugs, and read Frog and Toad Are Friends twice together before she read it to herself as I wrote this, this is the day that comes after.

When the strange girl skips rope her hair flies like a porpoise. She collects things that melt and things that tick, circles and cubes and checkerboards in a drawer she can pull out from her navel. Other children, alerted by the rumble of marbles in her chest, chase her across the field. She insists she is only hungry, but they pin her down and open her up. Cockroaches rush out and bullies run and squeal, crushing carapaces underfoot. She gathers as many as she can, tells them she’s sorry there is no lock. She’s sorry, but good children shouldn’t have secrets.

When I tell you I love the song “Edelweiss” you have to understand that even though I too am a sophisticate who scorns musicals, I was once a little girl who stood in my grand- father’s living room singing,Cuckoo! Cuckoo! while he sipped his scotch and laughed at my preciosity. And when I sing the lyrics in your ear—Small and bright, clean and white, you look happy to meet me — you have to understand my grandfather only ever had one friend, a jeweler who also drank scotch, and left his $10,000 Rolex to my grandfather, who wore it even though it turned his wrist green, wore it to the funeral, where the daughter sang in her ethereal voice.Blossom of snow may you bloom and grow, bloom and grow forever. She couldn’t take her eyes off the casket. You have to understand that my grandfather kept spinning that heavy gold around his wrist, and when he raised his voice to join in, he cried to sing it.Edelweiss, edelweiss, bless my homeland forever.

Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation, before me appeared Benjamin Franklin, who magnetized his French paramours at dinner parties as an amusing diversion from his most serious studies of electricity and the ethereal fire. I like thinking about how he would have stood on tiptoe to kiss their buzzing lips and everyone would gasp and clap for the blue spark between them. I believe in an honest and forthright manner, a democracy of plain speech, so I have to find a way to explain I don’t care to have sex anymore. Once I was a high school teacher and there was a boy who everyday came in late, who only came to school at all to sell drugs out of his backpack, upon which he laid his head like a pillow and closed his eyes while I pointed at a chart diagramming the anatomy of a sparrow. The vice principal was watching and taking notes as I taught this class, so I slid the bag from under his cheek, as if not to wake him, wrapped his fingers around a pen. I was trying to be a gentle mother and also trying to show I was in control of an unstable situation. The boy, also trying to be in control of himself, walked so slow to my desk and we stood to watch him push everything—binders, piles of ungraded papers, a beaker of red pens to the floor. He was so calm.How do you like it when I touch your things. I do not like it. I live in a house with many blue mason jars, each containing a feather collection or starfish collection or vertebrae collection, and also there is a fully articulated fetal alligator skeleton. Each window is pressed by the design of a sweet-gum branch, all the little orange and red stars of its leaves, you can’t see the perfect geometry this close, just haphazard parabolas, but beneath the foundation the roots mirror the branching. I have a chart of this to pull down. The view is flat and so quiet on the inside. Have I been forthright yet? What I want to know is what happens if I decide to never have sex again? Or more precisely, can I decide to not have sex again and still be kind? And be a joy to others? I should mention I am a wife. I should mention I was told my sole purpose is to be joy to others. The sidewalks outside are very full of people and when I look at them I feel hopeless. Benjamin Franklin was so jolly with his kite and his key and his scandalous electricity. He was so in love with women and drink and democracy. Before I was this way, I was not a house, I was just a jar and what I wanted was to be broken. A cool trick you can do that I once showed a class is crank a wheel covered in felt against another felt wheel. Static bristles and sparks and makes your hair stand on end . But hook it to a Leyden jar and the electricity fills up in there, invisible as air. Becomes a glass battery, until you too much the thing, then wow! broken glass everywhere. I remember wanting that. Do I have to always want that? My house is blue and quiet. I can hardly hear the squirrel in my sweet-gum tree dancing like a sunbeam to sing his riddles: “A house full, a hole full, but you cannot gather a bowl full.” The air of everywhere is wet with electric fluid, you can’t even tell, but pop, whiz, everywhere. “In this field,” Ben says, “the soul has room enough to expand, to display all of her extravagances.” The sweet gum has 10,000 sticky, spiky seed balls. They start green but grow black and fall for want of a barren season. They look like sea urchins. I call them tree urchins and think it’s a funny joke. I don’t tell it to anyone, as I am tired of being told what is not. Such a secret, I know, is an extravagance, and I like best how it’s an extravagance so small you must keep it in a jar with others of its kind for it to ever mean anything at all.

The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is in her eighties and she underestimates the value of everything, for which I am grateful. Lightly used snow suits, size 2T, are $6 and snow boots are $3. There is a little girl, maybe seven, fiddling with a tea set. Her mother inspects drapes for stains. Sometimes the very old and lonely are looking for an opening. She glances up from her pricing and says something about the tea set and a baby doll long ago. I am careful not to make eye contact, but the mother with drapes has such softness in her shoulders and her face and she knows how to say the perfect kind thing—“What a wonderful mother you had.” “Yes, she was.” Why do children sometimes notice us and sometimes not? From the bin of dolls: “What happened to your mother?” “She died.” The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is crying a little. She seems surprised to be crying. “It’s been eighty years and I still miss her.” When my daughter was born I couldn’t stop thinking about how we were going to die. If we were drowning, would it be better to hold her to me even as she fought away or should I let her float off to wonder why her mother didn’t help her? What if it’s fire and I have one bullet left? I made sure my husband knew if there were death squads and he had to choose, I’d never love him again if he didn’t choose her. If I’m lucky, her crying face is the last thing I’ll see. The mother with drapes is squeezing her daughter’s shoulder, trying to send a silent message, but children are children. “Why did she die?” “She was going to have a baby and—And she died.” “But she was a wonderful mother.” I’m holding a stack of four wooden jigsaw puzzles of farm animals, dinosaurs, jungle animals, and pets. Each for a quarter. “It’s silly how much I still miss her.” She takes out a tissue and wipes her eyes and then her nose. When my grandmother threw her sister, Susie, a 90 th birthday party, one hundred people came, including 5 of the 6 brothers and sisters. At dusk only a few of us were left, nursing beers with our feet kicked up on the bottom rungs of various walkers. Susie said then to my grandmother, “Can you think of all the people watching us in heaven now? And our mother must be in the front row.” Grandma took her sister’s hand. “Our mother—Estelle.” “Yes—her name was Estelle. I forgot that.” They looked so happy then, saying her name back and forth to each other. Estelle. Estelle.