Кейт Браверман - A Good Day for Seppuku

In truth, few of her students want to read, not even the brightest and the most verbal. They’ve been inundated by more images in their fourteen years than entire libraries contain. Sentences and paragraphs are tedious, irrelevant like fortress walls. They don’t believe books provide revelation. Words are a version of stone.

Her students spend afternoons in computer chat rooms, employing aliases, and inventing constantly evolving identities. They exchange texts they mistake for accurate approximations of their values and psychology. They don’t recognize they’re engaged in acts of fiction.

Once she mourned the passing of the poets. She recognized that, when they became obsolete, something of what was intrinsically human would be extinct. So it was for the bards with lyres and the carvers of canoes who navigated Pacific islands by the sound and scent of currents. The Gutenberg Printing Press lasted five hundred years, certainly longer than airplanes or cinema will. The technological revolution is an abrupt compression, a swing toward an incremental and collective synthesis. Who is to say half a millennia of books are not enough? She keeps these thoughts to herself.

On Maple Ridge Road, her neighbors perceive her as neutered and eccentric. She’s beyond fertile and therefore harmless. She’s a middle-aged woman, predictable in navy and cranberry, who does her own gardening and house repairs. In late summer she sells eggs and blueberries from her yard. She looks like she’d defend Emily Dickinson’s honor with her own life if it came to it. Barbara Stein is viewed as a distillation of English literature and the teaching profession itself.

If there’s a sense of tragedy in her eyes, it’s an ancient wound — or the result of childhood abandonment. There are rumors of an unfortunate early marriage and a problem with a daughter. But it’s nothing anyone can verify. Invisible women do not invite serious investigation.

Mrs. Stein is aware of the multiplicity of rumors surrounding her. Some are perennials, flaring like banks of May Daffodils, Tulips and Lavender Crocuses. They have a short season. Then the anomaly of annuals that stun but don’t return. In point of fact, she has more than a passing interest in the powers of intuition. Mrs. Stein suspects she might be an adept. When she’s luminous with clarity, she can, in fact, see. She penetrates the ordinary to an enormous brilliant core like an inland sea. It’s a region of pure marrow, detailed and unspoiled. She could trace it with her fingertips.

The inland sea is a body she can open. She’s learned its subtle anatomy and how to subdue and characterize it. Ridges of bone are maple leaf green, the surrounding tissues are chartreuse, and the fluids are a jade she can split with her lips.

Mrs. Stein has a natural affinity for landscape and its seductive promise. All women in gardens sense there is a further purpose. Women on their knees in dirt are engaged in conspiracies of disguised eroticism. The shears, gloves and baskets are blatant props. Any woman gardening is prepared for acts of love.

“Menopause is turning me into a witch,” she told Elizabeth.

That was the last time they spoke. Elizabeth is her only child, the daughter she is going to Los Angeles to find. That’s what Barbara Stein does, secretly, during the two weeks of her summer when she has the budget to leave Maple Ridge and search for her daughter. She’s been doing this for twelve years.

“You were always unusual,” Elizabeth said, her voice raked raw and hollowed out. That was three months ago when she still had Elizabeth’s latest phone number. Barbara Stein inscribed it in her leather directory, in a section filled with discarded Elizabeth phone numbers and addresses. These are kept under D for daughter.

Sometimes she just layers blank papers with the ten phone numbers the way her infatuated students reproduce the name of the object of their desire. They’re engaged in acts of magic — a kinetic incantation, the pencil and paper are flints and there’s an angle that can produce fire. Her students wonder if this is the meaning of geometry and why mathematics is required. It’s an attempt to stem delirium.

For decades, notebook pages of —

Brian

Brian

Brian

Brian

Justin

Justin

Justin

Justin

— fall from folders onto her classroom floors. The repetition of the printed patterns, the crude calligraphy spilling beyond the margins, the curves and etchings suggest the deliberation of engineering and construction. Who is to say these are not novels about love?

She last spoke to Elizabeth three months ago. Barbara Stein was surprised when her daughter answered the phone. She told Elizabeth that her life was a simple arithmetic of addition and subtraction. She had lost her hormones, her interest in men and sex. She had insomnia, needs eyeglasses and a prescription for sleeping pills. Her hair fell out in clumps. The veins in her legs rose like so many summer flowers, lilies and peonies pushed from below.

These manifestations were not the ordinary residues of age, Barbara Stein intimated, not mere spider veins embossing her thighs and calves. Her legs were like dusk avenues where ritual processions passed and stalls on riverbanks offered Carnations and Chrysanthemums for altars and cremations.

“I’m being tattooed while I sleep,” she told her daughter.

“You always wanted a tattoo,” Elizabeth said, voice husky from cigarettes, whiskey, sequences of strangers mouths, and some unspeakable vast fatigue.

“We were going to get them together. Remember?” Mrs. Stein remind her.

Elizabeth was increasingly breathless, as if calling from a public phone on a rush hour boulevard above a subway. There’s too much noise and static on the line. But it’s better than a beeper.

“You sound exhausted,” Barbara Stein realized. “You’re not taking your medicines.”

“You’re clairvoyant,” Elizabeth managed. “It’s too hard. They disrespect me at the clinic. Nurses won’t touch me. They give me the same forms to fill out. They won’t let me use their pencil. And you always wanted a tattoo, Mommy.”

During college, her roommates returned from weekends in Boston or New York with moons carved on their shoulders and bracelets of flowers engraved around their ankles. Barbara Stein craved this ink and envied them. She couldn’t have a tattoo, of course — her parents denounced it as unacceptably vulgar.

Her father was a rabbi. Her parents were, in their way, sophisticated for their historical moment. It wasn’t about the Torah, her father was quick to point out. It was about commerce. God was the family trade and a tattoo would be bad for business. It was that simple.

But her parents are dead and she’s being etched from beneath as she sleeps. Why not choose the actual design? When she gets to Los Angeles and finds Elizabeth, she will get a tattoo. Perhaps they’ll do this together — select a symbol, an emblem, a celestial configuration.

On her final morning, Barbara Stein thinks about tattoos, constellations and the history of carving images into flesh. All cultures practice this and interpret the positioning of moon and stars as recognizable objects. It’s a perpetual night of cause and effect.

Barbara Stein slides her suitcase into her gray Volvo. She assembles stacks of AAA maps and state pamphlets listing motels and local attractions. She realizes, with sudden urgency and discomfort, she wants a summer vacation distilled to three pages.

Eric, the teenage son of her closest neighbor, arrives. She gives him the last of her instructions. He’ll feed her cat Grace for the next two weeks and pet her for ten minutes every day. He’ll pick what’s ripe in the garden.