Carole Maso - Ghost Dance

“This ship is so beautiful, Michael,” she sighed. “It’s huge and it’s white. And the land is disappearing and it’s getting cooler and cooler but it feels so good.”

“Yes,” my father said. He looked so sad. He did not move or speak again.

“Listen, oh, just listen.” She heard a muffled foghorn in the distance, but he heard nothing and sat in silence.

After a long while she took out her compass and showed it to me. It caught the light of the moon. She smiled and closed her eyes finally.

“They can’t hurt us now,” she said. “They can’t hurt us now,” she whispered in my ear as we moved through dark water, all night, the four of us, on our sad, lonely voyage — north — somewhere.

Sibelius. Nielsen. Grieg.

She slides into her seat and rubs her back against the back of the chair as the maître d’ pulls it out and then pushes it to the table for her.

“Thank you,” she says. Her eyes are violet in this light. She taps her finger lightly on the table, brings a finger to her mouth, rubs her head against her shoulder, and smiles.

“Michael, a martini,” she whispers and edges her hand across the table to his. He puts his large hand over hers in protection. I would save you if I could, his immense hand says. His wedding ring catches the chandelier’s light. Fletcher and I stare at the ceiling, then at our parents, not knowing where else to look. My brother and I are not brave enough yet to see clearly what is obvious: neither of us matters at all to them at this moment as my father puts his forefinger and thumb around her wrist and gently massages it.

I notice there is still a trace of dirt under her fingernails from her long day of suffering. In the morning we had been banished to the garden and spent the whole day weeding and watering, mulching, digging, and transplanting. The house was turning against her, she said, waking me at ç:oo A.M. and, taking my hand, we had fled. “There’s evil in there,” she said, pointing to the house she loved. “I don’t know why, but it’s there today,” she said, kneeling on the ground. “Don’t go near it, Vanessa,” she said in agony. “Believe me,” she said and sunk her nails into my arm. “Believe me.”

I believed her. I knelt next to her. Side by side we pulled weed after weed together, hour after hour, our backs turned away from the dark house. “I can’t decide where to put these lilies,” she said, and we uprooted them and moved them from one section of the garden to another. “What about this lilac bush?” she asked, and we dug it up. “And the daffodils,” she said, “let’s try them over there. I can’t decide where to put the lilies,” she sighed, and she moved them to yet another section of the garden. She was searching for the secret design of flowers that might dispel darkness, evil, fear.

“These need more light,” she said, pulling up the poppies and replanting them over and over as she followed the sun across the sky, every few minutes changing the pattern of the great garden. “The work in a garden is never done,” she told me. “There’s always something to do in a garden,” she said, holding the strangled flowers in her hand, burying them in the ground finally, only a wilted petal visible here or there.

“Shit,” she cried. “I’ve killed everything,” and she turned and looked accusingly at the house. “Let’s clear out the roots, honey. Let’s start over.” She began digging, and slowly I could see her garden turning in on itself, the earth giving wav. “We’ll get rid of the roots, it’s the only way.” “It’s the only wav,” she kept saying. “We’ll get rid of the roots.”

I let her keep going, swearing into the ravaged earth, laughing hysterically as she excavated marbles and the arms of dolls from the ground. She began lining up all the things she had found on the slate path. “My treasures,” she said, smiling. I let her keep going, bather came home from work. He looked at me. I was old enough to know better.

He spoke very quietly into the ditch where we stood. We were waist high in dirt.

“Please don’t read tonight,” he said to her. “I’ll call and tell them that you won’t be able to come.”

“Oh, but I must, Michael. It’s our only hope,” she said in her high voice. “It’s the only thing that might work. Bring me my clothes, Vanessa. My black dress, my rings, my textured stockings, my new black shoes, and my manuscript, the one that is open on my desk. I will change next door. Call Sonia. Tell her that I am coming.”

My mother spoke calmly now, crouching in the dirt, fingering the marbles she had lined up.

As many times as my father saw her this way, he never got used to it.

“I’ve made dinner reservations,” he said softly, “for six o’clock, near the Guggenheim. We should probably leave soon.”

My mother laughed out loud. “I’m reading at the Guggenheim Museum,” she said. “How odd. Vanessa, my dress. But be careful in the house. Hurry through it, do you understand? And stay out of the shadows, my darling.”

I carried her voice carefully, lovingly, as if it were a child, into the house. “Mv darling,” I said, wanting to make her unafraid somehow. “It’s OK, darling,” I said to her, going through her closet to get her clothes, climbing the stairs to her attic room to get her poems. “Darling,” I whispered. “Darling.”

My father lifts his hand finally from my mother’s. The drinks arrive. She gulps down her martini, interrupts my father as he orders dinner, and says, “Another martini, please, Michael.” Then she looks to me. “Vanessa, do you want one? Fletcher, you’re still too young to drink.” Fletcher was thirteen. I was fourteen.

She finishes her second drink. “I’d like another, please,” she smiles, as dinner comes.

“Not wine with your dinner? I’ve ordered a nice Beaujolais-Villages,” Father says.

“Another drink,” she savs to the waiter. She stares at the food before her.

“You’d better start eating, Mom,” Fletcher says. “Remember the reading.” She touches his cheek and smiles vacantly.

“My little big man,” she says. “My love, my love.”

“I think that Fletcher is probably right about your dinner,” my father says.

“Don’t condescend to me, Michael,” she snaps. “Just don’t do it.”

Nothing can stop us from moving in the direction we must move. I want to stop this dinner scene now or alter it. If there must be this restaurant, then I want her to sit with us peacefully, to eat her dinner anil tell us a story, to be sweet and happy.

And if there must be this garden and there must, if there must be this ditch, then let us lie down together holding each other’s hands. May we be covered over with dirt. May it all stop. Stop. I would like to stay there with her and her collection of smooth stones and marbles, ladybugs and worms, exotic caterpillars. Let us then be covered over, smothered with earth. Let it all stop here.

“Stop it, Michael,” she says, pulling herself up from the ditch, the table, martini in hand, her manuscript under her arm. She walks across the floor away from the tables and into the dark bar. She opens her manuscript. She rubs against a man’s gray shoulder. She’s so beautiful. I all turns toward her and runs his hand up her textured leg. I can see all this, Fletcher; I suppose Father sees it, too.

“Eat your dinner now,” he says to Fletcher and me. “It’s going to get cold.” We cut our meat for Father. We put vegetables in our mouths. Dessert comes. We spoon soft puddings into our mouths though we think we w ill be sick. My mother’s hand rests between her legs. She is shifting on the bar stool, but the bar is dark and I hope I am the only one who notices this movement. She rubs the neck of another man. My father buries his face in his hands. “Leave me alone,” my mother says to the man. “Just keep your fucking hands off me,” and she walks back to us.