Carole Maso - Ghost Dance

“Don’t ask me why he chose to study philosophy, of all things, in college! Imagine! Philosophy! But by that time there was no talking to him.” To his parents my father was a walking mystery.

And indeed, had my mother not been so beautiful, my father might have had a very different sort of life, but the minute he saw her across the hall at a college dance, he had already dedicated the rest of his life to her. Good-bye, Kierkegaard; good-bye, Nietzsche. The problem was solved. He would love her even if she would not love him back. He would love her despite everything — before she said one word, before he knew one thing about her and her tremendous talent and the sadness that wore everyone out. In his mind he saw himself closing the Investigations of Wittgenstein, Heidegger’s Being and Time , Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason . Au revoir, Jean-Paul Sartre; farewell, Aristotle. Good-bye — no need for philosophy anymore, no need for any of it. As he glided across the college hall he pictured himself beside the girl in the organdy dress forever.

“That dress was quite simply hideous,” my mother once told me. On another occasion she said, “If only my mother had lived, I would have known how to act, what to wear.”

“It was a beautiful dress,” my father said. “You could never see a dress like that today. Its sleeves were like wings and blew in the breeze, and it was the color of the sky at certain dusks.”

“He could have been a nuclear physicist,” my grandmother said. To her, my mother was the worst sort of person you could be, a selfish one, for, as far as my father was concerned, she kept what could have been from being.

“He said he was happy,” my grandmother said, “but I never saw it. It was as if your mother was dragging him further and further into her own private world.

“I don’t think your father was ever really happy until you and Fletcher were born.” Then, for a minute, my grandmother told me, things changed for him. Our small lives asked to be loved and he loved them. He left his job to care for us. He fed us, he changed our diapers, he sang to us, he made us toys, he played Vivaldi and Mozart for us.

“Your mother, it seemed, never had any time for you,” my grandmother said, as if I was hard of hearing. “She was always too busy, though she never seemed to be doing anything.” My grandmother kept talking and talking, but I couldn’t exactly hear her.

“Yes,” I finally said, wiping my brow and clenching the weeds in my fist, and responding in the best adult voice and language I could manage, “I already know that. For your information, Grandma, I’m already aware of that fact so you don’t have to tell me anymore,” I said, tears in my voice. “Just stop telling me that.”

The pea plants looked like veins that led to some invisible heart in the ground. “Daddy,” I whispered into the porous earth, “help me.”

“Don’t make a scene,” I thought I heard my grandmother say, but when I looked up she was far down the path, her back turned away from me, guiding some plants up a fence. I was glad she had not seen me. Excess emotion always embarrassed her. She didn’t know what to do with it.

At night my grandmother stands over my bed and repeats things she thinks I should know — useful things like when to sow vegetables. “Sow hardy vegetables when apple blossoms show pink, tender vegetables with the first color in lilacs. Some cucumbers retard the growth of weeds.” Life is understandable was what my grandmother was trying to say. You can understand your life.

“What good are your dreams?” she asked, pushing the hair from my face. “You dream you are the water and then cry when you cannot do what the waves do, when you cannot fill any container. I don’t want to see you hurt, Vanessa. It’s the last thing in the world I’d want to see.” She paused. “You and Fletcher — you kids are everything to me — everything. I love you kids. I do.”

I nodded. “I know, Grandma.” I looked into her pale eyes. Her hands were shaking. In one way or another we would both disappoint her.

Life is comprehensible: it is the clothes flapping in the wind on the line; it is how the cat bristles when frightened, how steam rises from the kettle. That was the only truth to my grandmother — the observed life. She gathered her strength from the sunlight reflected on the bread pans, the cheese grater, the butcher block, the beehive. She collected her observations like rain in a barrel and used them when she needed.

“It’s so hot, Grandma.”

Tiny beads of sweat form on my grandmother’s forehead. Her hair is damp and sticks to her head. It’s so hot.

“Grandma, imagine the snow.” She is fanning herself with an important issue of Time or Meusweek that my grandfather insisted she save. John F. Kennedy is on the cover. His eyes seem to roll into his head and back out again as she waves him in the air. Her thumb rests on the base of his skull.

“Grandma, the snow is so high we can barely stand in it.” I take her hand and we tumble down the hill for what seems forever. My brother Fletcher glides by. His feet are like the red runners on sleds. Snow in slow motion falls on our shoulders. Snow settles on our knees. I can see my grandmother’s breath. Our hair goes white, silver white, our faces so bright. Grandma, come back. She disappears in white. Something cracks like ice. Snow piles in my throat. We fall to the ground. We sink in the snow. We move our arms and legs and make angels like the old days. Fletcher flaps wildly. I prefer a slower, more graceful technique. Our arms make the wings, our legs make the dress. And there’s mother, too, from out of nowhere, right next to us now. It’s snowing so hard that our angels seem to fill up even as we stand, turning to look at them. Mother shivers in the cold. The snow has soaked through her coat. “Oh! You make the best angel of all, Mom,” Fletcher sighs, looking at hers, which the snow does not seem to cover over. And he, too, begins to shake. The hills swerve into us.

“Such utter nonsense.” My grandmother’s voice chills the air. “Where do you get such ideas?” But she doesn’t wait for an answer. She’s blaming my mother, I know. My mother disappears for weeks and weeks. My mother hears voices in the trees.

“That is no way to live, Vanessa.”

My grandmother wished that I might take some sort of control over my life, that I not float along recklessly until death, but that I consciously choose a life and then live it. I know if she had lived to see me choose an enormous gray city to live in she would have helped me as much as she could have. First we would have memorized the thin pages of the encyclopedia under New York, learned its population and the shape of the city. She would have shown me where each borough was. We would have learned the grid system of the streets — east from west, downtown from up. She would have mastered the subway system, known that the E train crosses to Queens and the RR goes west. We would have written to the mayor and the chamber of commerce. We would have knocked on the walls to test their thickness and checked the positions of the windows and the ways of escape. We would have inspected the size of the closets, the condition of the appliances, learned something about the neighbors and the superintendent. We would have known the rights of tenants. We would have studied the lease until our heads hurt. She would have made sure that I made the most intelligent, the best choice. “Zabar’s,” she would have printed across a postcard or “King Tut” in a red pen. “Flower show at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, May fifth.”

Then, after I was settled, she would have found me the right job. It would have been in an office with a big view somewhere on the twenty-ninth floor of a building downtown in a large firm, taking up four floors with its hundreds and hundreds of offices, its dull carpets, and Xerox machines glowing in every corner. She would have seated me next to some computer, so cold, so terrible to the touch that my arm would jerk back into my body for protection. She would have wanted me among businessmen, among stockbrokers, in halls of finance, among corporate lawyers and their secretaries and cigarettes and air-conditioning, earning an honest living, saving my money, enduring this life, even though it is the only one I have.