V
64 V Late mornings I came downstairs, A at the door (is it that late? I always thought), my fatigue must have been visible. Those mornings, she knew me. Not the nights—I could be anyone when I’d gotten dressed, went out. But those mornings A walked in, always bringing something—wildflowers, fresh-baked bread, a book she’d finished—and kissed me on the cheek, Hello V, and put the kettle on. (Her kiss usually low on the cheekbone, far back—how are there no more precise words for this landscape, where one place differs so much from another?—the fullness of flesh over the molars below the ridge of bone. But sometimes when coming or going she was careless or I turned; instead the kiss caught my ear, the earring, and her lips pressed the metal to me, warmed.) You don’t have to take care of me, I told A. You must have better things to do. I should have said: I don’t want to be indulged. But I am not elegant in the mornings; I blurt out; I take whatever’s offered. 65 Someone making tea, making toast, making me a child. You don’t have to do that, I said to A, but it was just one of those sentences, a gesture. In the mornings when Z brought up anything—the news, what he and Ford had been planning, this or that article—I didn’t respond. I resisted. I said something about the near-empty milk carton, the smell of the radiator in fall. A knew better: she wanted to ask after my writing, but never did. How did you sleep? she asked. When I finally gave her a new manuscript, she ran her thumb along the edge of the pages. She thanked me. She told me small stories about her day. Should I feel guilty that I don’t remember what she said exactly ? I remember how she pressed a mug to her face. I remember her listening, though that is a strange form of memory—to what? to me, it must have been—her expression, aware of me, of my words. Even what was commonplace, routine. This was just one of her gifts to me. I did think of her as a writer; I thought of her as everything. Sister, daughter, caretaker, the one who answered the kettle, the one who endured—there aren’t words for all these roles. For those who enter one’s day only when it has fallen too silent. She fears I’ve always thought less of her. She tried to write whatever Ford wanted, whatever she described as (what did she say?) the most necessary, or was it urgent; she came to me, draft in hand, tearful or furious. But I didn’t doubt her. In my memory her features are drawn in newsprint, impermanent, she belongs to this time, the present and all its voices; I creep back into silence. The sentence, I would lecture her, should be a delicate arch—but I should have reminded her, how anachronistic are arches, of amphitheaters, cathedrals, garden trellises: no use in the present. Its mirrored skyscrapers, its labyrinths of offices and prisons and rubble. ...
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