“I
don’t know much
about this,” my mother’s doctor
admitt
. “It’s just
frea
of nature, something goe
wrong.
Two sperm, one
egg, but inste Fuck d of twins, you ge Panties an abnormal placenta
and a fetus with too many chromosomes. Your bab F
k never had a a chance.”
I could not read the pages he gave me.y I folded them neatly, carried
them away with me, and hid them far
o vwn in the back pocket of my empty
suitcase. Perhaps Steven will want them when I go
ack.
~~~~~
“Help me with my garden,” myk motheraid at the end of May. She handed me a trowel and a pair of garden gloves. I went with her to
the back yard and knelt in the dirt while she broke up clods of soil and
weeded the lettuce and tried to charm me wh poetry:
“She digs in her garden
With a shovel and a spoon,”
Out of habit, I finished the stanza for her, and while I spoke she smiled
as if a miracle were taking place.
“She weeds her lazy lettuce
By the light of the moon.”
Then we heard the music. My mother rose eagerly, brushing dirt from
her knees. “Suze, remember how you used to love parades?” and
again I trailed behind her, this time to the front yard.
It is Memorial Day, and nothing has changed since I was a child: the
high school band; the firemen riding invincible on the new fire truck;
the veterans with guns on their shoulders and triangles of extra cloth
stitched into the backs of their pants, a record of how time has thickened
them. “Go ahead,” my mother says. “A walk will do you good,”
so I follow the music, thinking I will walk just a little way.
Except, suddenly, deep purple lilacs bend toward me over a white fence.
I pause, break off a few small branches, and carry them, still trailing
the parade, through the open cemetery gates. Ahead of me, the marchers
turn to the right, raggedly in step, moving toward the flag pole in the
center of the graveyard. I remember everything from years before: two
Girl Scouts will lay a wreath; a Boy Scout will play taps falteringly
and more sweetly than you can possibly imagine; I will brush tears from
my eyes without knowing why they are there.
~~~~~
This year, instead of following, I veered off across the grass, looking
for my grandmother’s grave, a place to leave my lilacs. Grandmama
is in the oldest part of this cemetery, the part where narrow roads, designed
for horse-drawn carriages and paved unevenly in cobblestones, lead past
rows of broken gravestones. No one visits these graves. Because my mother
lives nearby, I have daily walked or driven past this cemetery, and since
Memorial Day, I have come here every night, but I seldom see another person
except for the cemetery crew or R.
The crew consists of two men, old men who cannot match the pace of time.
In slow motion they mow the grass, trim the edges, rescue the broken gravestones
and stand them upright against their bases. Virginia creeper, bittersweet
and poison ivy edge over the fallen markers, and grass pushes up between
the cobblestones like Sandburg’s grass at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
“Shovel them under and let me work --
I am the grass; I cover all.”
Late at night and in defiance of locked gates, vandals tip and smash
the stones. I believe the vandals are boys from the high school down the
hill, showing off, challenging each other to topple the tallest stones,
and I am angry at their stupidity. My mother blames the city housing project
and votes Republican because of it. R. insists that ghosts upend the stones.
I tell him there’s no such thing as ghosts. “Oh yes,” R.
says, “long-forgotten ghosts. I hear them calling out for plastic
flowers, miniature American flags, visitors respectful in dark clothing.”
~~~~~~
That day in May when I found my grandmother’s grave, her stone
was broken, split horizontally between the dates of her birth and death.
Someone had leaned the top half crookedly upright in front of the bottom
half. Only her name and birth date showed:“Sarah Grinnell, January
17, 1887.” I tried to straighten the stone, but it was too heavy,
rough and cold against my fingers, and I abandoned it, arranging my lilacs
fragrant on the grass, wishing for a prayer that I could say, then turning
toward the sound of guns--the veterans’ annual salute to the dead.
While I stood startled by the guns, I saw a man watching from the shadow
of a tree--middle aged, an old brown dog beside him on a leash. The man
was nondescript except for how he stared at me, and so I looked directly
at him--never, ever act afraid--and saw then that he was not a stranger,
but R. Years ago--ten, twelve, fifteen?--R. was my high school English
teacher, the favorite of us all because so young, barely a dozen years
older than we. The man walked closer and spoke to me with a question mark
at the end, “Suzanne?” and I said, “Yes.”
Just as R. can hear the dead demanding flowers for their graves, he saw my hollowness. He saw it at once, I knew. I felt his eyes on me, electric like the touch of a lover. I stooped to pat his dog.
“You’re back in town?” R. asked.
“Visiting my mother,” I said, “and you? Do you still teach?”
“No, alas, and how I miss it.”
“What part?” I am curious for the details of regret.
“So many things. Last night--and this is strange, I know--I dreamed
the smell of chalk dust.”
“So why have you quit?” I asked.
“My wife,” R. said. “She has Parkinson’s Disease.
I oversee her slow and daily disintegration.”
“How terrible. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t like to leave her alone. This weekend, her sister’s
here. At night, home health comes for an hour or two. Otherwise, it is
just her and me.”
~~~~~
Next to my grandmother, another family, the Bartletts, rests inside
a scrolled, Victorian fence. The fence is iron and shaped to recall ocean
waves. Even within the protecting fence, the stones have been broken and
pushed to the ground, and someone has chiseled the rosebuds off the top
of Nellie Bartlett's marker.
That afternoon, the afternoon we met, R. and I went into the Bartletts'
plot and sat facing each other, his dog flopped between us, on the grass.
R. imagined a patriarch, Lemuel, lying here with his mother--the roseless
Nellie--his father, his sister, two wives, and the children, some stillborn,
others “died young.” Thirteen graves in all, a pair of Japanese
dogwoods leaning above them.
The dogwoods were blooming the first time R. and I kissed here--it must
have been mid-June--white petals spiraled down on us. This has become
our place, this small and private garden next to Grandmama. It seems right
to comfort each other among the dead.
~~~~~
Tonight is warm, late August. There’s a soft small breeze and the
moon is rising already, hot orange behind the copper beech trees whose
roots go down among the bones. I enter the Bartletts' plot and unpack
what I have brought in my picnic basket. I spread a soft blue table cloth
on top of the only stone still upright, Lemuel Bartlett’s square
monument. I let the edges of the cloth hang down to cover the name. I
arrange silverware, two linen napkins, two candles in glass cones. R.
will bring our food and, tonight, our wine.