Dawn Raffel: Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

I stood and watched the fireworks along with the others on top of the building. We saw them from the distance, miles to the east.

We couldn’t hear a thing.

There were colorful fingers pointed at us, coming down from the sky.

I ate a carton of food with a wooden utensil, and dialed up the hospital.

“What was your fortune?” my husband said.

My dress was stained.

I said, “Wouldn’t you like to hear what I saw?”

My grandfather told me a story once, pertaining to a faraway country and king. My grandfather’s friend had a valued position tidying the palace — the alternate palace, the residence for summer.

This friend let my grandfather enter in winter, and left him alone for a minute in the study. My grandfather sat at the desk of the king. He filched a pen. The pen had a feather and also a crest, my grandfather said. He had planned his escape. But the walls of the study, my grandfather said, were covered with various animal heads. Hunted down. The eyes, he said, were watching him.

He put back the pen.

The king was killed.

The friend was killed.

The people who lived in the village were killed.

My grandfather lived out his life in Chicago, selling cloth. His hands were red. Dry goods were his industry.

He sang with delight for us in another language.

“Listen,” he said. “Vot I have is a story.”

Still, I believe he wished he’d had the pen.

All of our sons have been named for someone else — in memory, or honor, or something akin.

I sat on the river, on the ferry one day, and watched the city burn. I was leaving, of course.

I am terrible at names and at faces — both. I cannot always recognize the people I know. But this I insist: I have never, I swear it, forgotten a voice.

After the food was consumed at night, I’d put the tray in the hall, and I would hear the woman raging.

Someone would come, sooner or later, my husband said, and take the remainders away.

My grandfather wanted to tell me the story of the horse that died of heartache.

“What are you thinking?” my grandmother said.

The horse’s name was Sully, my grandfather said. (Which must have meant something quite different in another language. I did not ask.)

“A beauty,” he said.

He said it was true, the story he told: “Ven I vas a boy”—before the wars, before the influenza. He said Sully was owned by a neighbor he’d had. “A beautiful mare,” he said to me. “Magnificent. The apple of the village. The neighbor vas poor, of course.” At last and in time and at very great length, he was persuaded, this neighbor, with a marvelous regret, my grandfather said, to part with her, to sell her to a traveling show.

He missed this horse.

One day in the spring of the following year, the traveling show traveled back to the village. Everyone went, my grandfather said. Every last soul who could scrape the amount to pay for a ticket. “And vot do you think?” He raised his hands, reddened from labor. “Sully broke rank the minute she saw her old master again. A plume, she had. A feather. She ran to him, ran out of the ring.” He saw through the fence posts, my grandfather did. “He threw his arms around her neck! But he could not afford to buy her back.”

“And?” I said, though I had heard it before, and more than once, and asked again.

“The horse collapsed that very night.”

He was old, my grandfather. “A plume this high.”

“Why are you telling a story like this to a child?” said my grandmother, when all was done, as was her way.

She served us cake, golden.

I had a new question.

My grandfather chewed. “Vell,” he said. There was no one alive in the village, he said, not anymore, at least not that he knew. The man did not get out, he said. “So far as I know.”

“You know, there are people,” my grandmother said, as she captured a crumb, “who eat to live.”

“Ve live to eat,” he said.

She gave him a napkin.

He died when he was very old. He’d stopped speaking English.

“What is this?” the night nurse said. “This language of his?”

They are both of them, mother and daughter, inflamed by something minuscule, sneezing in tissues, covert sleeves, a hand.

The mother says, “Bless.”

The daughter says, “God.”

The mother says, “Look.” She says, “Look at yourself.”

The daughter is young. She is darling to look at, the mother says. “If only,” the mother says.

“Stop it,” the daughter says, the timbre dropped, as if some sort of gauntlet. “Mother,” she says.

“All I am saying,” the mother says.

The windows in this hotel will not budge. The daughter thinks mites must live in the air, or maybe the carpet, or else in the bedding — dust or other allergens. “Please,” she says. “Pass me…”

The mother gives the daughter the thing that she asks for. “Whose idea, anyway,” the daughter says, “is this?”

Neither she nor the mother lives in this country. “Neither here nor there,” was how the mother had put it. “We’ll meet in the middle, north of the middle.”

“Here is a thought,” the mother says.

“Just a thought,” the mother says. “Listen to me, we could both use some color.”

The daughter has something crumpled in her hand. She says, “Where?” She says, “Where is the trash?”

The store smells of lotion, the daughter thinks, or of salve, or of sugar, or something artificial.

The mother says, “There.”

The signs are in English.

In between floors, riding a step, they are poorly reflected. “I can’t see,” the daughter says, “enough to tell, to really tell.”

“Let’s just look,” the mother says.

“Look at this,” the mother says. She is judging a garment, holding it up.

“For me or for you?”

“You,” the mother says.

“Me,” the daughter says, “I am hungry, is what.”

“Here is the mirror,” the mother says.

The mother looks tired, the daughter thinks. The lipstick the woman, the certified expert, applied to her lips is bleeding into lines about her mouth.

The girl is smudged beneath the eyes from what the woman wanded in.

The mother takes tissue to work on the daughter, licking it.

“This is not us,” the girl says.

The mother and the daughter are sitting at a table. “Watch the rotation,” the mother says.

The scene beneath them seems to turn.

“Careful,” the maitre d’had said. “Watch your step.”

The daughter sips.

“When I am married,” the mother says.

“I said, when I am married,” the mother says.

“All right,” the daughter says. “We had this discussion, didn’t we?” She is viewing her choices, sniffing in a napkin. “What is a tourtiere?” she says.

“After the wedding,” the mother says.

“Yes,” the daughter says. “I said alright.”

“What was the question?” the mother says.

The daughter feels bad that the napkin is cloth. She should use something else.