Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman, he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don’t do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

I could not tell I had jumped off that bus, that bus in motion, with my child in my arms, because I did not know it. I believed my own story: I had fallen, or the bus had started up when I had one foot in the air. I would not remember the tightening of my jaw, the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out into the air, the clear child gazing about her in the air as I plunged to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it, the bus skidding to a stop, the driver jumping out, my daughter laughing Do it again. I have never done it again, I have been very careful. I have kept an eye on that nice young mother who lightly leapt off the moving vehicle onto the stopped street, her life in her hands, her life’s life in her hands.

Even if I still had the clothes I wore, those first twelve years, even if I had the clothes I would take off before my mother climbed the stairs toward me: the glassy Orlon sweater; the cotton dress, under its smocking my breasts-to-be accordion-folded under the skin of my chest; even if I had all the sashes, even if I had all the cotton underwear, like a secret friend, I think I could not get back to how it felt. I study the stability of the spirit — was it almost I who came back out of each punishment, back to a self which had been waiting, for me, in the cooled-off pile of my clothes? As for the condition of being beaten, what was it like: going into a barn, the animals not in stalls, but biting, and shitting, and parts of them on fire? And when my body came out the other side, and I checked myself, 10 fingers, 10 toes, and I checked whatever I had where we were supposed to have a soul, I hardly dared to know what I knew, that though I had been taken down, again, hammer and tongs, valley and range, down to the ground of my being and under that ground, it was possible that in my essence, at the center of my essence, in some tiny chamber my mother could not enter — or did not enter — I had not been changed.

The doctor said to my father, “You asked me to tell you when nothing more could be done. That’s what I’m telling you now.” My father sat quite still, as he always did, especially not moving his eyes. I had thought he would rave if he understood he would die, wave his arms and cry out. He sat up, thin, and clean, in his clean gown, like a holy man. The doctor said, “There are things we can do which might give you time, but we cannot cure you.” My father said, “Thank you.” And he sat, motionless, alone, with the dignity of a foreign leader. I sat beside him. This was my father. He had known he was mortal. I had feared they would have to tie him down. I had not remembered he had always held still and kept quiet to bear things, the liquor a way to keep still. I had not known him. My father had dignity. At the end of his life his life began to wake in me.

When we talk about when to tell the kids, we are so together, so concentrated. I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m the killer”—taking my wrist—he says, holding it. He is sitting on the couch, the old indigo chintz around him, rich as a night sea with jellies, I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him, as if within some chamber of matedness, some dust I carry around me. Tonight, to breathe its Magellanic field is less painful, maybe because he is drinking a wine grown where I was born—fog, eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that, I tell him I will try to fall out of love with him, but I feel I will love him all my life. He says he loves me as the mother of our children, and new troupes of tears mount to the acrobat platforms of my ducts and do their burning leaps. Some of them jump straight sideways, and, for a moment, I imagine a flurry of tears like a whirra of knives thrown at a figure, to outline it—a heart’s spurt of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod to it, it is my hope.

When she comes back, from college, I will see the skin of her upper arms, cool, matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old soupy chest against her breasts, I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment, her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a soul in a body. She came into my life the second great arrival, after him, fresh from the other world—which lay, from within him, within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep, week after week, the moon rising, and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months, in a slow blur, around our planet. Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk, and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult to have her in that room again, behind that door! As a child, I caught bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds, looked into their wild faces, listened to them sing, then tossed them back into the air—I remember the moment the arc of my toss swerved, and they entered the corrected curve of their departure.

As we sat at the feet of the string quartet, in their living room, on a winter night, through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent air was thick-alive with pearwood, ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse howled, and cat skreeled, and then, when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us, over us, in us, I felt I was hearing the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening and grieving and scathing, along each other, scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that woods of hating longing, and I knew and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents, there—and then, at a distance, I sensed, as if it were thirty years ago, a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching, straying toward, and then not toward, and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted to warn him away, to call out to him to go back whence he came, into some calmer life, but his beauty was too moving to me, and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the covert, any more, and so I prayed him come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome.