Lithium for Medea

23

I stood near the bridge over Eastern Canal. I was thinking if I stood there long enough, my entire life would drift by. The toys from childhood would pop up, pulled by a slow tugging current. Miniature pie tins and starched pink smocks with the ribbons at the collar Mommy always ironed. Roller skates and sled. And peaches eaten at seven in a Philadelphia August, wet and hot and Daddy upstairs in bed coughing red stuff and shivering under woolen blankets. Brass lamps and new china plates strangers took away from Mommy. And what’s that sodden mass of cotton? My rag doll, the one Mommy sewed red spots on when I had measles. And look, there they are. Near the light green, lime green algae, there near the shadowy bridge spokes brushing beer cans and big black and brown ducks. All is returned, returned.

I looked across the canal. Spring was an undeniable eruption. I felt a sudden clarity. A light wind nipped at new branches, tasted buds, pronounced them in order and moved on, moved on. Yards exploded with pink lilies, stalks of lust and perfect tongues repeated in the water. And clusters of agapanthus, bushy-faced carnations, crepe-thin poppies, new strawberries crawling slow and pink on threadlike vines. A hummingbird churning in place, treading the air forever. Sunflowers nodded swollen balloon heads. And I wanted to shout, hey, sunflowers, your intensity has driven you mad. Your greed for sun, sun has poisoned you, gutted your brain, and you are insane now. Your unborn generations will be insane. And you will recede back into the earth. You will end as tubers, in hell, the sky sealed.

I could watch my childhood drift by in the dreamy yellow water. I could talk to sunflowers. But what could I say to Jason?

Listen.

There are possibilities. You say it’s all a matter of shape and color. You could paint anywhere. Come with me. Be airborne, windsong, starwarmed. Let’s get out of here. Venice, the canals, this city, boulevards, billboards, noise, dead ends, temptation, isolation and ruin intense and abominable. The madmen in their stucco burrows. The madmen on the boardwalk under the lame sun, that deranged turkey falling plop into the goddamned dying ocean. Can you remember when the bay still breathed fish? Before they tacked the Contaminated signs to the pier? Before they embroidered the Contaminated signs across our flesh? Once we had arms that moved surely and without blood grooves, without snakeskin imprints across our skin. And, Jason, can’t you hear that strange hissing? Listen. It is the sound of an interminable sinking in. It is the long white siesta of a race. And this whole place is a terminal ward.

Listen.

I’m tired of being Scheherazade at five A.M. This is my last story. Once upon a time there was a woman. Not a woman, really. A suggestion of woman, an approximation. I lived as a tree in winter, branches whittled and half asleep, willing to merely endure. My life was a perpetual four P.M. in a cold February. I was not yet blessed with coral orchid eyes and sea bells. I knew nothing of sailing past reefs on the sea’s ribs, the sea’s steel-girded spine, though I longed for this.

I was by madness wooed. I pretended there was a mystery. I called myself an explorer. It gave me the illusion of purpose and movement. I lived on the banks of a swollen river. I could watch the restless water inch closer. I piled sandbags in neat little rows. It gave me something to do. It even seemed important.

You took my girlhood as simply as one lifts back a sheet, revealing the naked longing and inadequacy. There wasn’t much to take. But you took it. I accepted this. I thought birth is historically a scream, a curse, a burst of blood and the long torture of sun and solitude. And you taught me. I tunneled parched ground while winds howled and stars scratched my face before the first intimation of jade banks erupting with shade trees. In a way you made me strong. The clay began to breathe. I didn’t mind being a prop. I lacked all reference points. You were a kind of compass. I learned which way led down. I learned which way broke. Understand. It is not without a certain gratitude I wish you slowly drawn and quartered.

Listen.

I understand your compulsive whittling of our life, your secret dog teeth, fear of your unknown wolf blood and your love of taking night alone like a test of strength, grace between the demonic black waves. But you will regret this. My eyes are crystal shells now and I see you as you will be, mistakes repeated. The dream part, that underbelly of invention, will dry without residue. You will be left with remnants to sift, details, objects. The hard evidence without context will prove inadequate. You will suffer. You will remember when we were black-winged through blazing dark concrete concentric whirlpools, ecstasies of spring night excesses and dancing spontaneous and naked. It will be rubble.

I stood on the bridge over Eastern Canal for a long time. Then I walked to Jason’s studio.

Jason was sitting at the table my father gave me. His small boy’s body was pale. It glistened like a certain kind of enamel. It occurred to me that the entire world was beginning to look like the underbelly of an abalone shell, a glazed white and turquoise. Blue and white. The sky with clouds. The waves with whitecaps now permanently embossed across their backs.

Jason was tying up his arm. And you know right away if you’ve hit it. Blood jumps in the needle. You let the tie drop. Halfway in and you know. You smell sweet Martian wind dancing in your ribs, behind your new plum-colored eyes. You sigh and it is moss smooth, glacier cooled. You walk on the moon as she once was young, green right to the feet of her slow lapping amber oceans. Her yellow tongues. Her just pushed up cliffs are soft under your feet. A wind unfurls. The air steams with jasmine, bewitched. The ground is moss and ferns. And you are the grand ecologist. Planet builder, what will you have? Thunder and volcanoes? A flock of singing sea birds? And icebergs, a blue-white? And always day? Or always night? Here. Take a canopy of lights, the night scalped, a kind of gauze.

Then you are memorizing the linoleum tiles. The rest is mechanical, is merely survival. Watch for air bubbles, take out the needle. You are beyond standard divisions. You wear a cosmic surgery, cloud skin. You whirl the black gulfs, the black grooves where planets come to feed.

Jason offered the needle to me.

I turned my head away. “I’ve quit.”

“How long?” Jason asked. He was running alcohol through his needle.

“A couple of days.” Was it? I stood in the deserted morphine room. Nurses scurried with their lunch trays. I held the bottles in my hand. Then I put the bottles back.

“You shake and sweat? Do you have to fight the temptation constantly?” Jason asked. He might have been taking a census.

“It’s not as hard as it was,” I said. Not hard compared to this kite season of private burials. My girlhood fossils stripped and packed into boxes. My father. My rooms breathless, sensing death. My plants in the backyard dropping leaves like severed fists. The trail of my sins.

“You take a bath yet today?” Jason asked.

I shook my head no. Outside it was late afternoon. Branches were waving, swaying sunlocked and enchanted.

“Good,” Jason said. “Come sit on my face.”

I followed him into the bedroom. I touched his shoulder lightly, the way one might touch a statue in a museum, guards watching. Jason, my rare one, skin white as porcelain. You must be kept absolutely protected, encased in a kind of glass. You are yourself the work of art. Rare as a robin building a nest in rain. Something I saw only once, will probably never see again. You are beautiful. But so expensive. And it’s survival time now. I can’t afford you anymore. I’m going the distance. I’ve got to carry less weight.

“Jason, I’m bored by my contempt for you. My rage has scraped itself thin.” Thin as a gutted throat, my friend. Thin as my father’s sculpted hands, gray scab of the IV and bones poking through. “I want something else.”

“You always want something else. That’s your theme.” Jason looked at the ceiling.

I memorized the bones in his ribs, the curly reddish hairs on his thighs that seemed to be reaching out for something. Fragile man, emotional hemophiliac, too rare and delicate for this world. You must remain as you are, encased and oddly protected and exaggerated, exaggerated.

“I’m leaving.”

Jason leaned on one elbow. Skin pale as porcelain. A kind of statue. The last piece of hard evidence. He lit a cigarette. “I thought those boxes were significant. You folded things. It wasn’t like you.” Jason stared at me. “Isn’t this sudden?”

“I’ve been packed for weeks. My father has cancer. But he’s going to make it. By the way, I killed Picasso. I strangled him on the boardwalk. The waves buried him. It was a rite of propitiation. If you had come back that night, I might have killed you.”

“You better slow down,” Jason said. He sat up.

“I’m just beginning.” I walked to the door feeling absolutely sober and thinking, it’s possible to start over. A few equipment changes, no blinders, no bandages, a lot less weight. It’s possible. And madness is a storm like any other. It passes.

“You’re strung out,” Jason observed, somewhere behind me.

I was standing in his front room. His new paintings were hung on the walls. Floors disappeared into a tapestry of purple and yellow threads. Patches of skin were swallowed by patterns within shadows, their own dimension. The shadows looked as if they were moving, a kind of moth feeding, eating something at the edges. I heard the water in the fountain falling lazy, drunkenly, while goldfish flashed their fins, a series of swift orange fans, behind me.

“You’ll never make it,” Jason shouted.

I stood on his porch thinking, I have been loved by a madman. I am twenty-seven years old and know the best has already been. Then I closed the door behind me.

I zigzagged a path to my house. The Woman’s House. A duck swam below me, slow but purposeful. A gull shrieked and rushed back to the sea. Soon the peninsula would be a slow floating seal, enormous and dark. Soon the sky would lay a pink claw across the land, the corally gray sand. And madness is a storm like any other. It passes.

The sea breeze grew stronger. And wasn’t it talking? Wasn’t it saying, go, go. We are with you. We are your arms, your fuel. Go. Go. We are your sails, your current. If you decide to swim, we will be your gills.

I sensed the breeze tearing at the house like a chorus of voices, women’s voices. Women with kerchiefs chattering at a stream while they pounded clothing clean against rocks. A chorus in Polish and Yiddish. A stream of klulles, of dark winding curses. But no. They are smiling. They are saying, go, go. Do what we would have done had we known the world was round, had we known it possible, had we maps, the power of navigation, a few equipment changes, hope and the key to the ball and chain.

It was night. I turned on the kitchen light. I found a pad of paper and a pen.

Early Spring

Dear Rachel,

There is much to say and time is a cymbal crashing. And time is a disk of brass banged periodically and forgotten. When we realize it’s getting late, it’s almost over.

I must tell you about our grandmother’s apartment. It bears the ruin of unrepaired living, of paint that peels, of streaked windows, stains from faulty plumbing. All of this, yes. But within her limits she keeps her two small rooms spotless, immaculate. Everything is polished. Her imitation cut crystal ashtrays perch on her always waxed secondhand tables. Her bright bouquets of plastic flowers are dusted. Her threadbare rugs are vacuumed. From the front door I smelled a faint trace of ammonia.

One entire wall of her living room is covered with memorabilia concerning us. She has tacked to the plaster the announcements our mothers sent of their marriages. She has tacked newspaper clippings she chanced to find about our mothers, yellowing slices of their careers. All the bits and pieces that have somehow drifted toward her across the decades. One Mother’s Day card, a bright red heart such as a child might make, hangs in the center of the wall surrounded by the announcements of my birth and yours.

A calendar with the dates of importance in our lives marked with black crayon is taped to her front door. A black X.

She explained that when she sees the day of a birth or an anniversary approaching, she takes the bus to a department store. She shoplifts a gift for us. It is the only time she ever steals.

And time is a cymbal crashing, crashing. When we realize we are mortal, we are already old. When we realize it is getting late, it’s nearly over.

The first thing Grandmother Rose did was give me my gifts. I noticed the piles of oddly wrapped objects stacked along the wall beneath the child’s red heart. The paper heart was a kind of eye in the wall and the wrapped stack of gifts a kind of altar. There were four such stacks.

I cannot really call the gifts wrapped. You must understand that she stole these things. Often she simply tucked them away in strips of old newspaper with string tied in a bow around them. I sat at her tiny kitchen table and began unwrapping my gifts. They were stacked in order. I began with my baby gifts, a silk hat lined with lace ruffles, a pair of infant’s sky-blue mittens, a pink starched-looking cotton pinafore.

I was sitting at the table in her tiny kitchen, in the same kitchen where our mothers sat when they came on subways from the orphanage on Sundays and showed her geography in books of maps they stole from libraries for her. I opened each gift slowly. A little girl’s change purse, a compact with my initials carved on the glittery surface, a scarf with bluish flowers stamped onto the cheap cotton and an apron imprinted with strawberries and daisies that looked somehow fresh, impossibly sunny.

My fingers began to feel haunted. Everything I touched smelled of her, smelled somehow pink and perfumed and broken. And I know even now, completely crippled, when she notices the approach of a birthday she will manage to climb down her six steep flights of stairs and make her painful way to a department store to grab a scarf or compact. And if it is a good day, without ice or rain or wind, she will stop in a dime store and buy a sheet of birthday wrapping paper. Then the new object will join the others in one of the four waiting stacks.

I saw twenty years of birthdays on the table in front of me. A progression, a chronology, a complete history from infancy through girlhood, womanhood. The later gifts were tokens for a house. Place mats with dancing yellow flowers and matching napkins, potholders, a ladle with a long wooden handle. “For your house,” Grandmother Rose said. “For your husband?”

We sat in silence after the opening of the gifts. She explained that the other gifts were for her daughters and you. And I breathed in her smell, something pink and somehow broken and tinged with ammonia.

“I have more things for you,” Grandmother Rose said.

Night fell like a black fist. Even the sky seemed to be holding its breath. She sat near me, hunched up, yes, and almost blind, with a cane. I had a sense of something black dancing in her eyes. And I was afraid.

I started to speak. “Not yet,” she cautioned. And I sat in my assigned seat in her tiny kitchen watching the darkness thickening in the room and waiting, my pile of gifts on the table in front of me and an aroma of grief radiating from the cotton threads of apron and potholders and kerchiefs.

But I was impatient. I wanted to ask her about the farm, the village in Poland, the Cossacks, her sea journey to America. I wanted to ask her about our mothers and the orphanage, the foster homes. I wanted my history all nice and complete, a series of answers filled in like the openings left in certain questionnaires, dates and places clearly designated, a matter of checking the appropriate boxes. I wanted the map colored in. Did I tell you I wanted warm-from-the-oven butter cookies in round printed tins?

The darkness spread like a wound in soft flesh. After a while she let me babble, let me ramble about what grew on the farm in Poland and did she pull water from a well and how did that city New York first seem to her startled eyes fifty years ago?

Suddenly she flicked on the light switch. For an old bent woman she moved with astonishing speed. She reached easily across the table to the wall and flicked on the light to cockroaches. Everywhere. Cockroaches crawling across her kitchen walls, hopping across the bread and sugar in their shined and polished tin containers.

I screamed. I tried to leave the room, the walls of curling black roach legs, curling red roach legs, waves of roaches, a sea of sickening insects making their tiny insect sounds, sounds like distant stars slowly sizzling and sinking in their own terrible bloated heat.

Grandmother Rose gripped my wrist. “Look,” she commanded. Her voice was powerful and full as the imperatives shouted by the dead. “See them dance?” She smiled at the black walls. “All these years,” she sighed. “My only friends. All these years when no one comes to see me. No one.” She stared at me. “You wanted to know,” she said softly. There was something sharp and cunning in her voice. “They say I’m crazy. They’re afraid of me. But you came. You knew I had secrets. But you wanted to know about the farm. The times I carried the trays. The afternoons when the little girls came and sat here with me.”

“Please let me go,” I screamed.

My grandmother looked at me. She shook her head from side to side, sadly. “So afraid,” she observed. “You’re so afraid.”

A cockroach crawled across my arm, the arm my grandmother was holding. She studied me. “See them dancing?” She was staring at the walls, measuring something. “The stragglers,” she sighed. “The frightened black ones? The babies? See how they play, my little friends?”

I was still screaming. “You wanted to know about my life,” she said again. She threw back her head and laughed. Then she let go of my arm.

I ran out through the living room, past the three stacks of wrapped gifts, past the calendar, the red paper heart and the altar. I ran into the dark tiled corridor where drums were beating behind closed doors and radios were blaring and her voice was ricocheting somewhere behind me like a bullet. “They dance,” she was screaming. “Remember this.”

Her voice followed me as I ran down the steep stairs. Her voice bounced and echoed across the tiles in some horrible and final benediction.

Rachel, I’m telling you this because I left my gifts there on the table in her kitchen. The same kitchen where our mothers came on the subway from the orphanage on Sundays and helped her trace the exact route from Krakow to New York while she studied the map and cursed half the world. I left my gifts there and I have always regretted it.

Time is a cymbal crashing, crashing. I’m sorry but I won’t be able to write to you for a while. In part I am afraid you will one day tell me of becoming a college student, of discotheques and boys with beer and grass. I’m afraid you might develop a fascination for the succession of European kings, border disputes in the fifteenth century, Middle English or Mayan art. They all mean something. It just isn’t enough. Not nearly.

There are crevices in the mural that is the world. There are moments when the individual times/time/cells open suddenly. Those are the moments that matter. When I sat with our grandmother in her kitchen and she suddenly flicked on the light switch, that was such a moment. If I could do it again, I would do it differently.

I am enclosing our grandmother’s address.

May we both find fair winds and safe harbors.

I folded the letter into an envelope. What was left? Sofas and chairs? They were simply shells, substance removed, anonymous. Jason could keep them. After all, I hadn’t even given him two weeks notice.