Great Things
Hi,
It’s been a doozy of a week! Everything has been leading up to Friday with increasing momentum. Friday six young people graduated Place Corps (my every day proud-mom job) after spending ten unforgettable months learning everything under the sun together. Wowzer, the graduation was everything and more including: boat rides, trolley rides, tearful presentations, rain showers, an unexpected teen tornado, and launching the hand built boat the teens made over the course of the year initially named “purple people eater” which by end of day was renamed “purple rain”. It was amazing! So amazing that I forgot to write and then Saturday felt like purple haze and suddenly I remembered tomorrow is today (Sunday!).
So, it’s the perfect day to invite you to read an essay I wrote, Great Things. I started writing this last summer at this exact time. It may still be a wip but ready to be read by you.
Great Things
The baby's floppy pink body drapes over the woman's deflated belly. The woman lies on the bed with open legs. The infant's rosy arm hangs between her legs while the other cradles its sleeping bobblehead. She delicately touches the back of the head with her middle finger. Her other fingers stretch out of the way as if dancing away. She props herself up on her arm, on a pile of white pillows, her breasts laden with milk fall out from her black bra, with straps digging into her skin pulled tightly over her shoulders. She props her head up with her other hand, a heavy weight to handle.
Unbeknownst, she births a great terror. A small, soft creature broke her open. It drinks her milk like a vampire. She wants to tell someone the truth. "I'm terrified," a voice inside her says to no one. She doesn't know what's happening. She doesn't want it. She thought she wanted it. It is a a placeholder for other words such as motherhood. Her mother says motherhood is the greatest thing that will ever happen to her. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to her. She says it repeatedly. "It is the greatest thing that happened to me."
It was June, 2008. It was hot. It was the month she had her first child. It was the month her sister, Summer, celebrated her birthday. It was two months from when Summer would die. This time would later be known as the Great Recession, different but similar to the Great Depression. The streets smelled rancid. Smoldering Chinese cooking in dumpsters. Rotten ribs. Real estate crashed the month before. The wealthy lost sky castles. People like her couldn't say they lost a lot of anything they hadn't imagined before. But she felt the burn. The house she had closed on earlier that month—the home for her and her new baby, had just been gutted. Ready for a renovation. She mailed a check to the demolition company earlier that week, the week she received a letter from the bank announcing her home equity line of credit had suddenly been closed. Falling housing market. They didn't offer advice when she asked what to do with a new and broken home and a baby on the way. The line of credit was a future she had banked on to support her building her dream house. It tanked without warning.
Behind her are plush peonies wilting. Pink petals litter the bedside table. Gifts from friends and family celebrating the birth of her firstborn. The woman lies in her bed, pushed against the wall. The bed is covered in moss-green sheets. She lies under a fresco painted on the wall. The fresco is a fragment. A Pompeian replica of Flora. Flora–the Roman goddess of spring, fertility, and fecundity. The room is fragrant. It smells like flowers, honey, and milk. Flora has her back to the viewer as she delicately plucks a white flower between her fingers. She is depicted against an emerald background. The woman had been wishing to have a baby for what had felt like forever. She didn't know that she had been sleeping under the feet of an ancient enchantress who may or may not have had her own ideas for the great timing of her baby's conception. But she had been to Pompeii with her husband before he became her husband. They had a great time together before he became the father of her baby. In Pompeii, they marveled at burnt bodies frozen in time. Her husband fell in love with the fresco of Flora. Years later, he brought the image to life in their bedroom. He painstakingly painted it by hand on the wall.
The woman doesn't know how she will survive it. Her husband appears at the door to the bedroom, asking if she needs anything. "Save me from this monster" or "I'm dying," she wants to say, but instead, she just asks for water. When she lost her contractions and stood bewildered with the baby crowning between her legs but still in her belly, her husband said, "I'm worried for you. We can't have another you, but we can have another baby". The woman had only seen him cry three times. Once, when she told him she kissed another man. Once, when his father died. And then this. It was the most touching thing.
That summer, there were two deaths and a birth. The woman's sister, Summer, died two months after her son was born, and the woman felt she died when her son was born. Her son's due date was Summer's birthday, but he came a week early that June. They ate carrot cake for her birthday. It wasn't the honey-no-sugar version their mother would make them that they grew up to love. It was a store-bought carrot cake. They didn't have a party. The woman had planned a party for the end of summer, Labor Day weekend, to welcome friends and family into her new home and to meet her son. Friends and family gathered for Labor Day weekend at her new house as planned. They ate roasted ribs around the fire. It was hot and sticky. Everyone was crying. Crying because Summer had unexpectedly died that weekend. Taken her life into her hands. It was funny, as in awkward, when unknowing guests showed up with a six-pack and found the woman and her family hysterical.
The woman can't smile, sleep, or shit. She takes the baby for a first walk, and an old scraggly woman with missing teeth and two steps from death stops her, puts her gnarled hand into the cradle, and touches her son. She tells the woman, "Your baby is crying because it is cold." The woman tells her to go to hell in her mind and wants to murder her. She smiles and carries on. The woman feels really bad. She thinks they call this postpartum depression. One more thing to feel bad about. People won't let people be sad. Mothers are supposed to be happy martyrs. The woman refuses the definition of postpartum depression for what she is sure is something else, something much greater. She feels buried inside. Later, when her sister dies she will know this feeling was grief, but then she had no reference for that feeling of not feeling. Mothers don't get grief support. Mothering is supposed to be the greatest thing that ever happens to them, and of course it is.
The woman's bedroom is full of dark, omnipresent antique Italian furniture. A towering walnut armoire casts its shadow over her bed. There are two nightstands with names that end in "period." It wasn't furniture they had bought for themselves. It was meant to be sold. It was an attempt at a business and a life that didn't flourish. They had inherited the unwanted, formidable, and beautiful pieces from the dead-end business they had started. With time, the woman and her husband slowly began to love the forsaken furniture. They were becoming more comfortable with the idea that they were theirs to keep now. They could grow into people who had 'adult' belongings.
Antique furniture survives many lives. Sometimes, it needs restoration. Restoration was her husband's craft, which had gotten them into this mess to begin with, becoming the owners of the armoires, that is. The husband and wife had met long before they were in this room when he was completing his Masters in Art Restoration in Florence. She was visiting Italy with cash from a drunk-driving car crash. They became a silhouette of love. Two young people dressed in black, up past the moon rising, pushing their bodies and lips into one another against the columns of the Uffizi. It was there that the woman first saw ‘The Birth of Venus.’
The woman didn't know how to care for something so precious and would have never bought the antique furniture given a choice. If it was up to her, she'd have stuck to what she knew best: clunky furniture with character and too many broken bits to be stable. It was a love she had inherited from her mother. Her mother collected broken chairs and extra arms with the idea that someday she'd fix them. Her mother never learned the craft of fixing broken things the way her husband did. The art of restoring splendor to something lifeless is to maintain visible demarcations of the original, the broken, and the new. This is something every restorer is taught and something her husband showed the woman the value of.
The woman lies there in the bed with the baby on her swollen breast and watches her thoughts pass as fast-moving clouds as the sky out the window changes from baby blue to gray, and her body lays frozen. She's thinking about how she will get up to pee with a sleeping baby on her belly. If she moves, it will cry. If she moves, she will cry. She wants to cry, "Help Me!". Her sister, Summer, is still living with her in the guest room, but next month, she's moving across the street to an apartment the woman can see from the window of the bed she's lying in. The sister will be close by to help. The woman has been helping her sister get her feet on the ground. Her sister is in a recovery period. She calls her sister and asks her to please come and take the baby off her frigid body. She calls it a tree frog, the baby. She doesn't know why but maybe because it sticks to her trunk.
That summer, the summer her sister died, the woman's husband worked with her sister's boyfriend, Chris. Chris and her husband spent their days fixing the new, broken house for the woman to move into. They busied themselves leveling floors and hammering nails. The woman spent the summer sweating, breastfeeding, and not sleeping. Somedays, Summer, her sister would visit, and she'd beg her to hold the tree frog so she could rest in peace. Summer would carefully pile the soft sleeping creature into her arms and gently nestle it over her shoulder, supported by her strong arms. She would sit calmly like a statue for hours, reading a book on the couch while the woman crept to her bed and wept until she heard the baby cry. When the baby cried, which seemed like always, the woman's breasts wept warm milk, and blood rushed to her head. Terror ran through her veins as she ran to the tree frog, grabbing it as if the world would end, and smashed her nipple into its mouth. As the milk released with a vicious tug of the tiny tongue, the woman's body would collapse. Daily terror drills.
The day Summer died, the woman had plans to meet her. Her husband drove to pick up Chris to help put the finishing touches on their house, now a less broken house and one they were now sleeping in. Chris told the woman: "Summer is looking forward to spending time with you and the baby today." The woman said she was excited to be together again. The move had felt so distancing. The woman called Summer in the morning, but she didn't answer. The woman knew she sometimes slept late, so she went to her old house across the street from her sister's new apartment and waited for her to wake up. The woman decided to take a nap in her old bed, with her baby, under Flora's feet. When she woke, she looked at her phone, noting her sister hadn't returned her call. She looked out the window, wondering if she could see her somehow. That afternoon, she drove back to her new house, and her husband drove Chris back to his and Summer's apartment. Before her husband had returned to their new home, Chris called. The woman recalls all he said was, "Summer." She knew. How she already knew she didn't know. She fell on the stairs, dropping the phone, screaming, and holding the tree frog. Then, she crawled like a crab up the stairs and placed the frog in the center of her bed before running down the stairs howling, throwing herself on the ground outside in the backyard she had dreamed of, grabbing the grass while she called her mother. She recalls screaming her sister's name, "SUMMER!"
The baby is crying. The woman is crying. Everyone is crying. Her husband is not crying. Her husband hands her the hungry baby. Her breasts begin to weep. He cries, "STOP!" and takes his fingers and squeezes her nipples hard, expressing small white drops of milk. He says, "You can't let the baby drink sad milk." His Sicilian superstition has taken hold of his senses. Now, saving the baby from sadness seems like the only thing to be saved. She has no thoughts but knows she only produces sad milk. She wants to kill him at that moment. A casualty. First, she passes the baby back to him. The baby just sucked her breasts raw outside the room where her sister lies dead. A casualty. She's lying dead on a giant brown bean bag, casually slumped over. Her fingers delicately hold a burnt-down cigarette. Casually burnt down between her then unfeeling fingers. The woman notes the amount of time that passed from her sister living and lighting a cigarette to dying with it burning between her fingers. Her sister's long blonde hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Her eyes are closed. Her skin is different. It looks like the woman's boobs, meaning her dead face is swollen and mapped with tributaries of blue life paths. The woman wraps her arms around her sister's cool body, not cold yet, just cool, and whispers in her ear, "I don't want this." Later, when the paramedics arrive, the woman asks, "Are you sure she can't come back?" Later, she wishes she had cut off her sister's blonde ponytail and put it in her pocket before they put her in the large black plastic bag and carried her away so she could hold some part of her forever.
It is hot, burning hot. The woman stands in a loose-fit sack like black linen dress, holding her husband's hand, also dressed in black. Outfits that continue to suit them. Black a classic color. It is June. They are in Pompeii. They stand again in front of the fresco of Flora. The woman's dripping dress clings to her damp body wet with perspiration. She is wearing a new floral scent, gardenia, like the flower held delicately between Flora's fingers, something timeless her husband presented her. He knows what she loves. They recently celebrated their son's fifteenth birthday and have taken a family summer trip to Italy. It is their son's first time in Pompeii. The woman turns her gaze from Flora towards her tall and slender son standing amidst the charred ruins. She's been told he shares her eyes. She knows he shares her heart. Tenderly she watches him wander in wonder of the great tragedy.
THIS WEEK! I will be sharing my most recent ceramic collection at Alder & Co in Hudson, NY, on June 15th from 5 to 7 p.m. The collection will be in store (442 Warren st) through the summer.
This is so gorgeous and heart wrenching and true. Thank you for sharing it, Dawn.