Carole Maso - Mother and Child - A Novel

She was unequivocal about it. There were days like that where the mother possessed such a terrible incandescence that the child had to look away from her or be burned up.

Under no circumstances may you go into that barn’s loft, the mother had said, and the child thought to herself: bat face, fish emulsion, vapor — for vapor is what the mother was, everyone could see, and what the mother fought so hard against being.

Why must she be so unfair? the child wondered. Shouldn’t she be allowed to do what other children did? Shouldn’t — but before she could complete her thought, the boy, twelve, began to fall, and continued to fall in what seemed slow motion, through the barn, having stepped on a rotted floorboard.

Next a helicopter came and took the boy away creating its own weather: heat, wind. After that, back at home, every box started to look like a receptacle to hold a falling thing: the dollhouse with the roof that could be taken off, and the piano bench that opened, and the rain barrel.

Certain things, once seen, cannot be unseen. She felt the world had changed and it would not change back.

Now she cannot stop seeing boys falling from the rafters. She lines the floors with shoeboxes. Children are falling from the sky all the time. She lines the earth with anything soft. She looks out the window and sees the mother is in the garden. Cut flowers were the most beautiful, the mother said, because they live such a brief time.

THE MOTHER’S GARDEN unnerved some who saw it because it seemed to exist always on the edge of disarray, barely contained, at the place where any moment, it might be reclaimed. There was something exciting about this cusp to the mother, that place in the day where at any moment the garden might return to chaos, but did not. It held its own. Looking down from the second-floor window, she could see its architecture clearly: the boxwood, the dwarf spruce, the pergola, the birdbath, the circle of stones.

She loved what people thought to do with the small plots of earth allotted them. She was making a pattern, a design, a dwelling, a haven for their small time on earth — that much was clear from her perch.

Even though the child was holding a stone, she easily rose up two flights to the window where the mother looked out. The mother waved, and on the Aging Stage, she cast herself centuries into the future where she could see that a few rocks they had arranged in a circle remained. Another mother and child had unearthed them, and for a moment, they had intimations of a garden perhaps that once existed, and they reached back toward something ineffable but real, holding the rock the mother and child had once chosen for the circle and caressed.

Further even into the future, when the circle is taken apart and the rocks have scattered and gone back to the forest, something still of the mother and child has been left behind. For a moment it stayed in her, the full weight of the feeling, of what survives, a momentous feeling, a rock in the forest that someone had once held; it was a prolonged moment, momentous really, and then it was gone, and the mother resumed her day. Only figments of the feeling remained in her after that — flight, design.

Something about this comforted the mother. All effort passes, everything of us and who we were disappears as though we never existed, falling back into obscurity. What remained was perhaps an intimation.

The universe is drifting away from, not toward, the center of gravity, though no one knows why. It was all right. We will not understand it, not in a thousand human lifetimes.

THE CLOCK ARRIVED from the North Pole and the next day the mother swooned in the Children’s Garden, and for minutes in a row she could not be revived. This terrified the child who stared at her mother even after she had gotten up and was talking again. She had left an indent of her body in the Lamb’s Ear. Though the wooden box the clock had come in was shaped like a coffin, it was too narrow and too long to hold the mother comfortably. Still, it might have worked in a pinch. It lay now in the clover with her name and address on it.

THE BOYS WERE up at the top of the hill throwing Frisbees in the last moments before they were called back to the skirmish. When summoned, the boys rolled down the hill like little rag dolls. They tumbled into the vale where the mother and child tried to help them up. They had little smiles on their faces and they said they were just having a Tumble Down, and that they would get up soon, but not yet.

THE CAT LAY in the catmint and the bee was in the beehive and all seemed right with the world. The schoolchildren were in school, the painter was painting, the farmer was farming, and the drinker was pouring a drink. Only the lover, returned from the war, and renowned in the Valley for his love, was trying to find his way beyond it, because as his beloved had told him it was necessary for her to leave, and she would not be coming back.

The lover went out to the garden. He knelt down and it looked as if he might be praying or staking the tomatoes. There was a secret sadness in all things that he would never understand.

The mother walked in the Sterling Forest, recalling the story. It was a long walk, and ephemerals covered the forest floor. The next September, the beloved would be trapped in the burning tower, and she would not make it out.

A fox crossed the mother’s path. The bee burrowed deeply into the heart of the rose.

SLEEP WAS A biological imperative for every creature on earth. It was essential because it did something the awake brain could not do. The mother knew as she watched the sleeping child that the brain was taking what it learned during the day and placing it into more efficient storage regions. To consolidate all the memories, certain genes up-regulated during sleep and got activated. Memory tracks were laid out, categorized, distilled. The brain synthesized some memories during the day, but these memories were enclosed and concretized in the night. Synaptic plasticity strengthened connections, and it was a beautiful thing. In the night, new inferences were drawn leading to insights the next day.

The limbic system, she knew, amps up during REM sleep, and the brain’s emotion streams fear while rational thought is dormant. The secondary Visual Cortex, striving to decipher, ricochets through it. In REM sleep, a small region in the brain that paralyzes the body is alive. Immobile, the streaming video of one’s life passes by.

The mother loved the drama of the night. Had she not had the child, she might have been a Scholar of Sleep, she thinks, a Professor of Sleep, or at the least, a Sleep Advocate, tirelessly working for the Rights of Sleepers in the hospital’s deepest recesses.

In the night, the sleepers might be closely monitored and observed, and experiments might be conducted. The object would be to scramble, detoxify, and discard old fears, so that there was room for new ones. Circadian rhythms could be measured by testing saliva. Open your mouth; sleep researchers might serenely take a swab.

Dreams take the day and cannibalize it, using real life, such as it is, for props and spare parts, defanging fear — making it stupid, useless, harmless. Close your eyes, says the mother to the child. Everything was changing. Sleep was the ingredient for change.

Melatonin, as a child grows, makes it harder and harder to go to sleep early — teenagers need as much sleep as toddlers but cannot begin their descent until midnight. It’s science, the mother says.

The child loves the idea of it — that she one day might be the one to keep the night vigil, while her mother sleeps.