Whirlwind

II. Playing my Part

II. Playing my Part 33 What I Knew He figured I knew. It suited him to figure I knew. But I didn’t know. Or I didn’t know I knew. When I asked him a leading question. Until he alluded to it. When he could not really deny it. As though we were both in on it. As though the conversation had been ongoing and not new. He wanted me to know yet hid it. He assumed I did know because he wanted it and he didn’t want it. Because he wanted not to have to say it. Not to have to face the part of him that knew I didn’t know. That knew I couldn’t have known. Or couldn’t have known I knew and continued. I didn’t know I didn’t want to know until I knew. When I first knew I wanted to know more. That was one of the many things he refused to let me know. Now that I already knew. Now that I already knew that I knew. These being the things I will never know. Because in the end he didn’t want me to know. He didn’t want part of himself to know. 34 For the Alabaster Figure from the Cyclades Something in her pose her arms crossed over or slightly beneath her breasts is she holding herself together from some great blow? Or merely standing self-possessed? Or is she ashamed to be so exposed to the centuries’ raw gaze? She crouches yet stands on her toes— a stance it’s hard to imagine a real woman maintaining her balance her head— a flattened-out mask no mouth only a nose carved out so the eye sockets are hinted at. As generic as they come. Or is she? I saw the genuine ones in Naxos—thousands of years old—bought this reproduction in Athens in the Plaka the night before we flew home (there were hundreds like her). When my fate (I knew but didn’t know) was sealed. Something impervious about her. Something solid 35 and enduring. She holds herself despite everything that has happened. As I would have to hold myself through the long summer and fall. I wanted her in my life. Her singular pose. (What color, what consistency the walls of a fractured heart?) The folds above her sex say the sculptor understood she might have given birth. I carried her in my flight bag sobbed in my seat next to a self-clefted stone. I sensed she would protect me. That I would have to clasp hold of myself. Her body the color of this winter’s absent snow. Her bent knees enduring some as yet unforeseen burden. Her head lifted above suffering. Or else calling to her god, knowing that the men of the earth would not come to her aid, nor redress her wrongs. 36 The Shell I lived inside with him— at least I thought I did. Call it the nacre of marriage. I whirled inside its whorls with my son. Chambers within chambers. I often lost sight of him—my husband. Increasingly so. He moved to an outer chamber even as we limped along the beach his hands pocketed in their tombs— was I inside or outside? For years it sat on my shelf— a mollusk with radiating points. I never thought to pick it up. Examine too closely whether the creature still lay within. Until now, or back then, last summer when I asked him where he’d been and he refused to answer. I turned the shell over—the one I’d been living in and it was empty. Why did I still want to live within its ghostly chambers? Why do I still live 37 within them? Now my heart echoes with the no footfalls of him. I am in a darker vault scratching to get out. Winding through so many rooms— the dead-end corridors of years of his being body-shed. Why did it take so long to see he’d vanished—a hermit crab gone to a new-old shell to armor himself within. I’m staying inside this old whelk. Unwelcomed. Put the shell of self up to my ear. The rushing sound of his tide tearing himself away. My whooshing heart. My hard to...