When Women Were Dragons(24)
I let my fingers drift along the surface of the letters, my skin whispering along the paper. I stopped at Marla’s letter to me, and my breath caught. I picked it up and held it for a moment, pressing my thumb against my name written in her hand. Alex. She never once called me Alexandra, not in my memory. I never thought to thank her for it. The letter was still sealed. The image of her suddenly filled the entire space inside my head. Her pinned curls, her red mouth, her well-worn dungarees and heavy boots, her booming laugh. My aunt with a baby on her left hip and a bucket of tools in her right hand. I imagined her pulling out the paper, with Beatrice asleep on her lap, and writing to me to say goodbye. No, I decided. I wasn’t ready to open it, much less read it. I needed my aunt to help me, but I certainly didn’t need her leaving me all over again. Instead I picked up the letter nearest to my hand. The paper was fragile, and the handwriting had the careful strokes of a person who wanted every word to be perfect.
“Marla, my love,” the letter said.
It almost happened again, this time while I was in flight. And oh, what a flight it was! The sea below was an aching blue, as was the sky above, with its center of heat and flame. There is a heat and the flame inside me that grows by the day—sometimes by the hour. What part of me is not on fire? My mind, my heart, my body at the thought of you. I had an aunt, you know, who changed like this. No one in my family speaks of it, but we all know. You would have liked her. She raised finches, and sold them out of her house. Bright feathers in all colors, and beautiful songs. She made a good business selling mostly to bored housewives in the nicest part of town—ladies who just wanted something lovely that was wholly their own. My aunt then had her own money, and her own spending power, and her husband couldn’t abide it. One day she came home to a den of horrors. Her husband had reached into each cage and wrung each tiny neck, and left their beautiful corpses on the floor. He tossed dead birds onto their marital bed. Terrible thing. Terrible man. She went weeping to her sisters, who were sympathetic, but unhelpful. They told her that a husband is the head of the family. If he doesn’t like her work, then what was the point of arguing? My mother uses the same logic to justify all manner of my own father’s sins. Why do women do this to themselves? What kind of sister turns her back on her own? I have never understood this. I don’t think my aunt did either.
In any case, two days later their house ignited. The authorities said that a gas explosion ripped off the roof and left my uncle on the floor with a broken neck. I know better. I always believed that it was rage that made her change, and perhaps this is so. But I, myself, feel no rage. And yet, I feel this change is inevitable all the same. Ever since that first moment when my hand touched your hand and my lips touched your lips there is only joy, joy, joy forever and ever. It is joy that burns me now, and joy that makes my back ache for wings, and it is joy that makes me long to be more than myself. But it is love that makes me pause, that tethers me to this body and this life, that I may always fly home to you. My darling Marla, there is a longing now that splits me in half. I don’t know how much longer I can last. No matter what happens, Marla, please. Always wait for me. Or follow me. Edith.
I stared at the letter for a long time. I was only eleven years old. I had no frame of reference. I had no way to understand what it was that I was reading. And I certainly couldn’t ask my mother. I didn’t think I was ready to read anything else. Feeling more alone than when I had started, I bundled the letters back together, tucked them into their hidey-hole, and slid the panel back in place, and went to the washroom to have my bath.
13.
I’m not exactly sure when my mother decided to take up gardening. I don’t have any clear memories of when it began—only that the garden seemed to suddenly exist. There were raised beds, climbing vines, hand-built structures, and a thicket of herbs that kicked out a complex and heady scent that lingered on our clothes and extended almost to the end of the block. My father didn’t approve. There was too much dirt, he said. And bees. The garden lacked symmetry, and order. Grass was neater, and what about the lawnmower that cost a pretty penny and why wasn’t she more grateful for it? And anyway, why have the distraction? Wasn’t the house and family enough? But my mother never asked for permission, so he couldn’t exactly forbid it. By the time anyone realized what she was doing, there were already six rows of corn unfurling themselves to the sky, mounds of potatoes, garlic scapes, tomato vines, a growing tangle of squash flowers. The garden shed looked like it had always been there (did she build it herself? She must have), as did the clumps of asparagus and the rhubarb in the side yard.
“When did you even start with this?” my father asked one Saturday afternoon, when he headed outside with a whiskey and a cigar and a newspaper, and my mother handed him a hoe and asked him to tend to the edges. He stared at the hoe for a long time, as though wondering how it worked. Eventually my mother lost patience and did it herself.
“You’ve been eating out of this garden for quite some time now,” she said without looking at him. “But I’m not surprised that you didn’t notice.”
There was a lot my father didn’t notice. His hours at work grew longer and longer. The older I got, the less he was around. Each day, my father paused at the open front door and kissed us all on the cheeks before he went to work. It was the only time he ever kissed us. When people might see. He whistled as he strolled down the block, the tune echoing as it bounced off the sidewalk and houses and lingered in the air, and fell silent the moment he turned the corner. Every day, my mother scrubbed our house within an inch of its life, and dinner was always served at 6:15 sharp, with a whiskey and rye poured for my father, whether or not he actually arrived.