Lynn Emanuel

Tonight I will remember the model With the wide, sad mouth Who used to pose for father Because I love the dangers of memory, The boarded window and door, Rooms where one bare bulb Makes shadows swell up the wall. And yet I recall only vaguely The way her hem rustled on the floor Like sand against tin Laisse-moi tranquille, epicier, It said because I want it to Say something memorable. I want her back That brilliant, farfetched woman Who drank coffee in our garden And the days father fed me Absinthe through a sugar cube So I would be asleep by noon And wake to find Ramona posing Naked with a tambourine. Tonight the whole world is a garden In which the immortal whispers Something about art And its opportunities: Memory like a bolt of silk In a tailor’s arms Can be made into anything Especially misfortune, Especially the year Ramona spent In a wrath almost Biblical And so far from the world Not even the moon could find Her study in Paris Where the doors opened to the river.

That was not the summer of aspic and cold veal. It was so hot the car seat stung my thighs and the rearview mirror swam with mirage. In the back seat the leather grip was noosed by twine. We were not poor but we had the troubles of the poor. She who had been that soft snore beside the Nytol, open-mouthed, was gone, somewhere, somewhere there was a bay, there was a boat, there was a scold in mother’s mouth. What I remember best is the way everything came and went in the window of my brief attention. At the wake I was beguiled by the chromium yellow lemon pies. The grandfather clock’s pendant of unaffordable gold told the quarter hour. The hearse rolled forward over the O’s of its own surprise.

In Tunis we try to discuss divorce And dying but give up to lounge With rug merchants under a plum tree. From its corner the lamb’s severed head Watches the flies drink from its eyes And its fat disappear into the fire. The light rinses the edge of your sandal, The two wasps that ornament the blur Of screened window. My grandmother Would have loved a night like this. In the wind chimes I can hear her tea cart With its china rolling through Cook Street’s Stony yard one summer when I was always Thirsty, and she moved like a figure On a clock from my lawn chair to the cart, Or swabbed me with alcohol, or cut My hair with the straight razor. I was a week out of the hospital. Beneath my breasts an incision was crossed With stitches of surgical thread. The scalpel came so close it gave My heart a quick kiss. I nearly died. Years later I can still see the skin Flutter on the inside of my left breast And my heart limps like a great uncle Who, because he was a Jew and lame, Was dragged by cossacks across the steppes. He became a friend asking a favor Of a horse who ran so hard, so perfectly Hard, that the green grass rose to meet him.

This was the winter mother told time by my heart ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest. This was the fifties & we were living on nothing & what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse, what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists & each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass, what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed with rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman, into our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming & brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,” & hissed my little princess& hushed the Jordan & set the chariots on the golden streets &Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light.

Outside the window the McGill smelter sent a red dust down on the smoking yards of copper, on the railroad tracks’ frayed ends disappeared into the congestion of the afternoon. Ely lay dull and scuffed: a miner’s boot toe worn away and dim, while my mother knelt before the Philco to coax the detonation from the static. From the Las Vegas Tonapah Artillery and Gunnery Range the sound of the atom bomb came biting like a swarm of bees. We sat in the hot Nevada dark, delighted, when the switch was tripped and the bomb hoisted up its silky, hooded, glittering, uncoiling length; it hissed and spit, it sizzled like a poker in a toddy. The bomb was no mind and all body; it sent a fire of static down the spine. In the dark it glowed like the coils of an electric stove. It stripped every leaf from every branch until a willow by a creek was a bouquet of switches resinous, naked, flexible, and fine. Bathed in the light of KDWN, Las Vegas, my crouched mother looked radioactive, swampy, glaucous, like something from the Planet Krypton. In the suave, brilliant wattage of the bomb, we were not poor. In the atom’s fizz and pop we heard possibility uncorked. Taffeta wraps whispered on davenports. A new planet bloomed above us; in its light the stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates. The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot; we could have anything we wanted.

We’re headed for empty-headedness, the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration. We’re taking the train so we can see into the heart of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds; we want the golden broth of sunlight ladled over ponds and meadows. We’ve never seen a meadow. Now, we want to wade into one—up to our chins in the grassy welter—the long reach of our vision grabbing up great handfuls and armloads of scenery at the clouds’ white sale, at the bargain basement giveaway of clods and scat and cow pies. We want to feel half of America to the left of us and half to the right, ourselves like a spine dividing the book in two, ourselves holding the whole great story together. Then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station, and the scenery begins to creep forward—the ramshackle shapes of Main Street, a Chevy dozing at a ribbon of curb, and here is a hound and a trolley, the street lights on their long stems, here is the little park and the park stuff: bum on a bench, deciduous trees, a woman upholstered in a red dress, the bus out of town sunk to its chromium bumper in shadows. The noise of a train gathers momentum and disappears into the distance, and there is a name strolling across the landscape in the crisply voluminous script of the title page, as though it were a signature on the contract, as though it were the author of this story.

Scrape the sun from the wall of  the sky. Cast the great nets of  autumn over the houses. Even the throat of  the lily is a dangerous inlet. Let the world stand wearily on the stoop of  the jail of  the world and the light of  the mind, that small lamp, pearl of  shine, let the night come to it, as iron filings to a magnet, mother.

Mother is drinking to forget a man who could fill the woods with invitations: come with me he whispered and she went in his Nash Rambler, its dash where her knees turned green in the radium dials of the 50's. When I drink it is always 1953, bacon wilting in the pan on Cook Street and mother, wrist deep in red water, laying a trail from the sink to a glass of gin and back. She is a beautiful, unlucky woman in love with a man of lechery so solid you could build a table on it and when you did the blues would come to visit. I remember all of us awkwardly at dinner, the dark slung across the porch, and then mother’s dress falling to the floor, buttons ticking like seeds spit on a plate. When I drink I am too much like her— the knife in one hand and the trout with a belly white as my wrist. I have loved you all my life she told him and it was true in the same way that all her life she drank, dedicated to the act itself, she stood at this stove and with the care of the very drunk handed him the plate.

Down in the basement, jacked on Kimbo, I’m screwdriving chunks of OxiClean into the washer. Jane:Collage is tattered backdrop, not worth the Time nor Money.

My mother in her dress of red Viyella, teetering like a tiny idol on three-inch lacquered spikes, chignon dressed with little gold- throated bells that chirped more sweetly than the cricket, held her small, perfect hands to the torrent pouring from the slots. Money went like water through our fingers: was dammed by budgets, released, then abruptly gone at the China Starr, that grotto, festooned with red and vivid lanterns. Dark as the inside of a limousine, that saloon was where our lives, dulled by the copper barons, were cleansed, where we bade good-bye to the limp and stutter of bad goods, to the wince of the creaky rocker, to the vast grandmother dying in its clutch, to the dirty, wrinkled ones and tens pieced together to cover the week. Hello, we said, to the beautiful dark starlit bar and the luxury therein: the runcible spoons with their slippery cargo: the snarled silk of tinned bean sprout, the wrinkled flame of the dried lily. Hunched over our beakers of jasmine tea, we let the exotic rinse over us—impractical and non-negotiable.