Carole Maso - Ghost Dance

Eagle Wing

We were restless. We walked deliriously through the landscape of passion, always at the edge of breath. Our desire alone exhausted us. We sleepwalked through our days with uneven breath, hooded eyelids, lusting not only after the absent lover, the lover out of our reach, but after what we sensed was the unavailable in ourselves: the thing we could never call up no matter how diligent or attentive we were, the places we could never reach, the people we could never be.

Jack wiped his face on his sleeve as he came in the door. He was sweating heavily, his shirt was soaked through. I knew not to ask about it. He looked tired. I did not push him. He looked enormous, too large for my apartment; the ceilings were too low, the walls too close. He had to bend over to get in the doorway “You’ve grown,” I said. He laughed and shook his head. The half-refrigerator which he opened looked like a tiny white box next to him. I had accepted it: with Jack I knew that everything would always be out of proportion.

He took the skin off an orange, tore a piece and sucked the juice from it, then ate the pulp, doing this until he finished. I watched him cautiously from the other side of the room. I felt frightened of him, but I did not know why.

“Come to me, Vanessa,” he said quietly, gently, coaxing me as if I were an antelope or a deer and in his hand were food, or kindness, some human security. I moved toward him tentatively, testing the air. It was warm, strange, but the smells reassured me, orange and tea and the salt of his sweat. I could not hear anything but his gentle voice.

“Come now,” he said, “come to me.” And I did after a while, though still I did not trust him entirely.

He laid his hand on my thigh, lifted it slightly, felt its weight. His hand looked swollen, his lips too looked swollen, and his words, though gentle, had a thickness to them not unlike the air. His tongue was heavy, his thoughts slowed, his pulse. He stroked my hair, massaged my neck. I blinked my eyes, stretched my back, pawed the ground with my foot. He moved his hand slowly down my chest, down my belly, then to my leg where he studied its muscles. “My beautiful animal,” he whispered. He caressed my foot, outlining with his lips each toe; he held my ankle between his thumb and forefinger, a giant’s hand. He applied some pressure. I sighed. I felt an aching deep within me. He reached between my legs, they opened with his first movement forward, and slowly he began revolving his hand. The room began to revolve with his slow steady motion. He had led the shy beast into a clearing. I fed from his hand. He watched my breathing change shape. Squares became circles. He moved his mouth up to meet his hand and circled his sweaty head in the same round motion. His hand slipped under my shirt. He circled my full breasts and pressed my nipples between his thick, soft fingers.

But suddenly the air changed. I sensed danger, flood or fire.

“What is it?” I said. “What?”

He looked at me like an ancient man, wild, needing food. With an enormous strength he ripped apart the zipper of my pants as if he did not know what a zipper was or how it worked. He was going back in time. He had forgotten all this. I squirmed under him. Having gotten my pants off, he pinned my shoulders down to stop my movement, bracing me, holding me tight, not knowing where we were going though we had gone there so many times before together. He was hard and large on top of me. He was something primitive, made of stone or bone, something blunt like a club. He put his hand in my mouth. I felt I might choke on it. He forced his salty fingers down my throat and pressed his way into me. I pushed my head away and sat up, feeling him in this position deep inside me where another more mysterious mouth opened and opened and howled, and he, too, began to howl, and his howls grew louder and louder, changing from the sounds we recognize as human into other sounds — sounds that had been lost at the beginning of language. I followed him backwards to the time before words, before memory, where I let go of everything, and we lay there at the start for a moment, two bodies of water, of air, breathing in the dark — for a moment.

Slowly the darkness began to give wav and the land bathed in the light of dawn. He let his eve linger for a long time over the mesa, the sunlit cliffs, the loping hills. He stood facing east, watching that great red disk on the horizon flare, rise up, and slowly climb the enormous sky.

“It’s even more beautiful than a swan,” my mother whispers.

“That precious, precious bird,” I say. She nods her head.

“You must not be afraid.”

They must have looked lovely together as they swirled around the center of the dance floor for all to see.

My father was becoming even more lost as they hugged and listened to the silence outside, alone during the band’s break, standing precariously on the verge of their adult lives.

The band returned — one final song. And, yes, my parents indeed looked lovely together — like figures of marzipan poised on the top of a wedding cake…

Sabine opens the large window s of the house in Maine. Strangely, at the same time the air of the sea seems warm and cool. She looks out at the breast of the beach, the lovely white belly of the beach. She watches the fishermen lift their nets, come in with their catch. The air of the room is heavy, drenched with the sea, a persistent humidity. My mother’s empty pages stacked in a white pile are filled up already with so much water. She, too, is filled up. She bends down. Her eyes slip slowly to Sabine’s ankles. She helps Sabine pull back the heavy sheets in the languid air.

She is not so far away on that day I fall off my bicycle, my knee shredded, bits of the driveway embedded in the wound. She appears from around the corner when she hears me crying. She is wearing her gardening clothes.

She helps me up, looks at my knee, kisses me on the ear, and whispers, “Your dress is magnificent.”

“The ballroom is gigantic!” I say.

“I have never in my life seen a chandelier like this one before,” she gasps, pointing to the sun. “Oh, have you ever in your life seen anything like it?”

“Never,” I say. “Where are we?” I ask. “Where are we, Mom?”

On the book jacket of To Vanessa is my favorite picture of my mother. She is in profile and she looks as serene as I have ever seen her — content, happy. The light is beautiful and she is smiling.

“You’ll miss your train. Don’t miss it,” she urges. “Go now. Go.”

I try to enter the sky, to force myself to become that bird. But there is no forcing it, I know.

“Do not be afraid,” she whispers to me.

I watch that bobbing branch where the Topaz Bird once was. But it’s so tiny, so hard to see.

“Continue the story,” she prods me. “Go on.”

The note asked that I come to Main Building, Room ç2ç , as soon as possible. It was written on an index card in an impossibly small handwriting and signed by someone named Jennifer Stafford. There was nothing unusual about this note, it was just one among many instructions I found in my mailbox upon arrival at college, and yet I kept going back to it, going over the same few words, even as I read other papers, other notes, I visualized that handwriting and that name. There was something familiar there, something that called me to it; the other papers fell to the floor.

Slowly I unpacked my clothes, savoring the mystery of the message, prolonging it. What could this Jennifer Stafford want from me? It began to sound like a command. “Stop by. Soon.” Hundreds of things occurred to me as I fumbled with hangers and put away books, but none of them anticipated that room on the top floor of Main Building under the catwalk. “Come as soon as you can,” I said to myself. “Jennifer Stafford.” Parents still lingered in the halls. There seemed a sea of students all folding into one another, crashing on an unfamiliar shore. There were waves of color and sound all around me, but the note that I held in my hand was silent and a certain darkness seemed to collect around it. I read it once more, then again, and, using the heads of parents and the shiny black trunks of students for stones, I crossed this glittering, shouting body of water and stepped safely onto the ascending elevator.