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History
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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38 History The first day of spring and the women who live next door have gotten back together again. The one who moved away unpacks the things she took with her six months ago. We watched her then. We watch her now, our hands at the window, the way that neighbors gauge and stare, the way we make our history. We log each item recovered, note each trivet, each sorry chair, all back where they started, their rightful place. We remember the endless row, the splay of rubbish bags she left back then like black plastic frogs at the end of the yard, and the ratty cartons, the water-stained boxes from the flood they had the year before leaning into each other, clumped and off-balance, filled with all they had rummaged through, their tattered history. That, and the sad-eared, reddish rubber plants, the yucca, ficus, spiders, dead for months, of blight, like scarecrows lost, the happenstance, the truck of our lives. Finally, oddest of all, the Barcalounger, orange, brown, white, left like an uncle, totally surprised, half in and half out of the road at the end, as if to invite anyone who wanted to sit for a while, take a load off, before the rubbish men came, taking each item, lifting them soundlessly, democratically, without bias or claim, tossing them into the curved and humpbacked maw of the truck, each one hurled like Jonah into beluga, baleen, the future, the past, the raw open mouth of the world. And she has brought back the boy they had made, three and a half now, towheaded, tall, and he stands at the center of his new and old lawn, sticks out his stomach and wails at the world. One word all he says, again and again, a Johnstown Flood, a Babylon, a word of such weight we can’t make it out, a lost friend’s name perhaps, history now, or the name for the home he has left and the one he’s come back to that he missed once before, his home like the moon he can see now, still there in the blue of this morning. He wails in the way one would cry for a doll left for good on a train, or a dog gone off that will never return. He’s got us all at the windows again, 39 our fingers held up to the lace as if we were saints bestowing a blessing, or women in history so lost in their curtained time, and ours, they are drawn to the light that comes like milk to the window, like the milky maids of Vermeer, or the way a young woman in prison at three a.m. wakes to the blue and vermilion ambulance lights flashing in the courtyard, the reflection circling, looping again and again on her ceiling and cell walls like a kaleidoscope, a prism, a skein made of silence and fear. And now he is crying louder than ever, like a little boy Buddha, fat-bellied, strong. He has lost everything, his mouth filling up with all of his sorrow, the song of his diphthongs and leftover vowels, crying Om, Om, or Home, Home, until his two mothers come out to take him inside, calming him, soothing him, saying There, There. And suddenly I know what my father was saying when I was a child, as he pointed so wildly to the treeline, the brake at the edge of the clearing, There, There, the albino deer and the fawn that came one night and stood, skitterish, thin, white as the clouds that skimmed the edge of the moon, their eyes in our flashlight haloes like the bright lost stars of our lives. How they stood there for a moment waiting for us to speak. How we wished that we knew some word full of grace, some word that would bring them closer to us. Night after night after that he went out to see if they would come back, and he searched for that word for the rest of his life, some word he could say for what he believed, what he thought might be true, some place he might find, some unsayable word for the nub of the future, which turns always and irremediably into the beautiful trash we call history, which Napoleon said wonderfully was the collection of lies we agree to believe in, the place my father could see and hold like a chalice and still...