The furrows, p.9
The Furrows, page 9
I stumbled forward, my back arcing like a wave had knocked me from behind. I stepped out of the line to look closer. Not Wayne. Another boy—and not made of sand. It must have been a trick of the light, which was filtering through the pines, making slow sunset strobes over the grass. Little Elaine—dirty-blond, splotchy-pink—was now squirming in her father’s arms. I went back to scanning the undercrowd for Wayne.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“D’you just curse?” Wayne was at my side, grinning and sandy. “I’m gonna tell Mom.”
“Where’d you go?” I squatted in front of him to line up our eyes. “Where were you?”
“Right here. Jeez, look around much?” He shook his head as if with disbelief.
I grabbed his wrist to pull him toward me. We resumed my place in line. After a while, my grasp loosened and slipped from his wrist to his hand as we inched forward in unison. As we got closer, we saw that the carousel was elevated on a wooden platform that backed onto the grove at the edge of the park. Metal barriers had been set up to form a U-shaped fence around it. Inside it, the parents of the kids on the ride hovered in a loose circumference, gazing up at the carousel with slack smiles. It was pretty fast. The brightly colored horses lifted and fell with a smooth piston motion. They looked edible, candycoated with elaborate braids and stirrups. The younger kids gripped the thick poles lanced through the horses’ backs; the older kids were more cavalier—no hands, or just one.
When we reached the front of the line, we saw the man running the show. He was inside the enclosure, bent over to adjust levers sticking out of a black box bound by its own cords. The back of his orange shirt was a map of sweat. The carousel slowed, then came to a stop. The parents inside the fence climbed onto the platform to claim their kids, then filed out through a gap in the fence. The man moved a barrier to open another gap beside this exit and I saw that the front of his shirt read B A R K E R. His face was more tired than his shout.
“Come one, come all! World’s best carousel! Taller than the monkey, shorter than the giraffe! Next in line, step up to the sign! Between the monkey and the giraffe, folks!”
Wayne held my hand as he stood before the goofy, faded sign. The barker nodded and let us into the fenced enclosure. We climbed onto the wooden platform and moved to the inner ring of horses. I lifted Wayne awkwardly—“You’re so heavy now,” I groaned—until he was high up enough to straddle a purple horse with a mane of gold. Wayne giggled, giddy, sliding his butt from side to side to feel out the traction of the saddle. I got down from the platform and stood with the parents inside the fence, shaking my head at his anticipatory glee. His head hung back as he laughed, his hands glued to the pole.
The carousel began to turn. The horses rose and fell, rose and fell, in alternation. The carousel turned faster and soon my eyes were whirring madly as I tried to keep up with its spin. I forced my vision to go out of focus to see if its motion came anywhere near the true gallop of horses. It didn’t. I felt happy and bored. There was no reason to count how many times Wayne’s purple horse plunged up into view, how many times he waved his small hand at me, how many times I waved back with a smile. The sun was sending up its last rays, but the air was still soft and curved with warmth. Some of the bulbs strung over the carousel gave off more light than others: brighter and lesser moons. The French-ish song went up and down and round and round. Wayne whisked past, his neon-green shirt a flash, his waving hand a blur. I needed to pee. I crossed my legs at the thigh and hit my wrist against my hipbone to distract my bladder. I saw the wind stir the tops of the trees.
“Stand clear! Riders, rein in your horses! Whoa, whoa!” The barker reached under the platform and manipulated the levers in the black box. The carousel began to slow.
“Cee!” Wayne was waving, shouting for my attention as he passed. I waved back as he came around. The shape of him grew starker with each slower spin, as if my vision were holding him tighter. Once, twice, he came clear, then clearer. And then he was gone. Just gone, like a light switched off.
I stared intently as his high-stepping horse came past again, blank, riderless. I stepped toward the platform, still tracking it. “Oh god oh god oh god,” I was saying but incredulity tweaked the corners of my lips.
* * *
Dear Wayne. I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt. You were safe in your circle, that lofting, sliding canter carrying you round. You couldn’t have seen what was coming. The trees at the edge of the park shadowed your progress. The sun was chastened by the coming night, the moon beckoned by the bulbs above. Regal on your bridled beast, you couldn’t have known that your joyful circle would spin fast and wide, that you’d be flung, sent out of life, as if hooks had caught you under the arms and snatched you.
* * *
The carousel stopped with Wayne’s empty horse on the far side. Parents climbed onto the platform to help their kids disembark, safe and sound. I joined them and strung my way through the tangle of creatures, human and horse, on the platform. I couldn’t see Wayne anywhere. I hopped down off the platform and began tracking the inside perimeter of the fence to where the carousel backed onto the woods.
“Miss! You can’t go back there!” the barker called out, his voice nasal and highpitched, no circusy boom now.
I walked quickly over to him, panic ricocheting through me. “My brother’s gone. He’s not on his horse.”
The barker grinned. “Oh, I’m sure he just got down on his own. They do that sometimes. What’s he look like?”
“He’s got a green shirt on.”
The barker stared at me blankly, then said, “Okay, gimme a minute. Stay right here.”
He moved the barriers to close the gaps in the fence and announced that the carousel was closed for the evening. The music stopped; the lights went out. The people in line aw-ed and boo-ed and drifted in listless clumps, then gave up and dispersed. The barker bustled about, shutting things down and packing them up.
* * *
—
Then night had fallen and I was alone beside the carousel. A hot vibration filled my ears. How much time had passed? When had it gotten so dark? Where was Wayne? Where was the barker? He seemed to have forgotten about me. I climbed up onto the platform again. In the dark, the carousel was like a beached spaceship, shadowy and buzzing and ticking. My eyes were burning dry—I willed myself not to blink lest I miss something—as I peered into that jumble of poles and limbs, my hand moving from horse to horse. They were slippery to the touch, still warm as if from the recently departed riders. I pushed past their flanks, their striding, rearing legs, their long heads, their round eyes, their black nostrils. They snickered—no, whimpered. I turned my head toward the sound and saw a glimpse of green.
Most of his body was under the carousel but his shoulder was visible, wedged between a tree and the platform. I couldn’t fathom how he could have fallen and gotten stuck there. “I’m coming!” I cried as I scrambled off the platform and crouched to peer into the gap beneath it. It was so dark but I could make out the dull glow of his green shirt. I flung myself to the ground—so hard I bruised myself—but I couldn’t squeeze under the platform. I lay out on my belly and reached forward until my fingertips brushed something hard and wet—his arm or leg, broken. I flinched reflexively. The whimpering stopped.
Knowledge rushed up in me then, ssth-ing into me, and I felt a flurry at the base of my throat. I stretched my arm deeper under the platform, straining it at the shoulder until I could wrap my fingers around the hard wet thing—it was his forearm—and pull. Wayne shifted, in a bad way, a dead-weight way, and suddenly, the barker was next to me, wriggling his arms under the platform, shouting commands at me as we tugged Wayne out together until he was between our kneeling bodies.
It was dark there in the shadow of the woods, but I could smell my brother—his blood and his cotton-candy sweetness and the soil we had overturned when we dragged him—and I could see his green shirt, wrenched above his belly, and I could see, too, that he was all wrong, the angles of him. I felt my bladder give way, droplets of urine seeping into my underwear. The barker put a hand on Wayne’s chest, then hovered it over his mouth. He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “You’d better go and fetch the barker.”
I stood up dizzily, blinking at the man I had thought was the barker, seeing now that he was shorter, and wearing not that sweaty orange shirt with its helpful label but a skyblue windbreaker. I turned and ran, the pumping of my muscles a relief after the cramp of crouching to pull Wayne free. It took me a minute—or longer, even a minute was too long—to find the real barker. “Mister!” I shouted. “My brother!” He was a few yards past the carousel, coming out of a port-a-potty—the sight of it made my bladder swell again—sucking on a cigarette. He saw my face and broke into a heavy jog, his label jiggling on his chest. He followed me as I turned and ran back to the windbreaker man and my dead brother.
But they weren’t there. There was just the shallowest trench in the ground, the groove we’d made when we’d pulled Wayne’s body through the dirt. I felt feverish as I crept in a hunched circle around it in disbelief. Just as the barker reached me, I saw something just inside the woods: blue or gray, rippling with sharp folds—the stranger’s windbreaker. It looked grimy but newly so—recently dropped. I ignored the barker panting with questions beside me, and used a branch to lift it up. Under it was our Spider-Man cotton-candy cone, rimmed with something dark. I dropped the branch and raced into the woods, calling my brother’s name.
10
My father told me much later how he hunted that man down, the man with the skyblue windbreaker. It was the summer before I went to college. My mother and I had a horrendous fight and she forced me to go visit my father and his new family in Georgia. Horrendous, forced—these are exaggerations. My generalized fury as a teenager often stretched reality, and then that’s how I remembered it, so it stayed stuck in its distorted, hyperbolic form. The fight with my mother had been trivial in fact, banal. I had gotten my nose pierced—a small silver ring in one nostril—without asking her permission.
I had gone alone to the mall, no one to help choose the ring, no one to hold my hand through it. Only me for the cool of the alcohol, the clamp of the piercing, the cluttered store glowing from the euphoric excruciation, the pain swimming in adrenaline. I had the shakes afterward, my pulse visible. The guy who worked at the store made me stay until the blood had stopped bubbling from the hole and swallowing the ring. I remember that his eyes were silver and that, as he watched me bleed, they held a mixture of something less than patience and more than curiosity.
Waiting for the blood to coagulate made me late to the Vigil session that day. My mother’s foundation had been around for a few years but it was still a janky affair. This was before she received the inheritance from Grandma Rose that would change her tax bracket. Back then, the group met weekly at the neighborhood rec center across from the mall. During my summers, I helped host the bereft mothers. They were mostly white, all middle-class enough to afford to keep looking for their kids. My job was to give out doughnuts and coffee, cookies and lemonade, greetings and pity. I can still remember the roll call of loss, the litany: Jeanie (Jake, nine years old, three years ago); Zee (Jane, eight years old, six months ago); Toni (Billie, seventeen years old, seven years ago); Jen (Rob, fifteen years old, five years ago). The Vigil Aunties, I called them.
The day of my piercing, I burst out of the placid light of the mall into cloudy weather, and ran across the parking lot to the rec center, mumbling an apology and tugging at the hem of my miniskirt as I entered the dull drear of that room. Voices lowered; eyebrows lifted. The skirt had seemed adorable in front of the mirror that morning—just the thing for a day of solitary ritual adornment—but it felt obscene in front of these women. It wasn’t explicit, their judgment, but it wasn’t unfounded, either.
I had gotten over my insular adolescent crushes and now relished being noticed, having realized that my legs made up for my chest, that the inward incline of my knees was fashionable, that my ambiguous shade of brown was desirable. And now I’d pierced my nose, moving further into the aura of being seen. The eyes of older men like the jewelry store guy still intimidated me but I was starting to enjoy even that edge, to flirt with it.
I don’t know if it was because I was late or because my mother was wrecked as ever from her endless seas of insomnia and grief. I’m sure the nose ring tipped her over. (Her permissiveness had the arbitrary rules of the white middle class: tattoos were cool, piercings trashy; bras were oppressive, miniskirts slutty.) She and I turned on each other in front of the shocked Vigil Aunties. I don’t remember all that we said, or how we got from fashion to Wayne and whether or not he was dead. I remember only the echoing hiss of the word disrespect and her final pronouncement:
“Don’t you see?” she shouted. “If he’s still alive, it means you didn’t kill him!”
The room fell silent, as if this electric sparring had shorted everything. I stared at the carpet. My nose was throbbing on the outside, buzzing on the inside. I had always believed I was the one taking care of my mother, placating her by muting the inevitable question: “Where were you that day, Mom?” But on that stormy summer day that smelled of metal—the blood, the ring, the lightning in the air—I wondered if, all this time, my mother had thought that she was the one saving me, not from guilt, but from the blame that she secretly held under her tongue, and that, if uttered, would cast me out completely, put me in a place where she could no longer love me. The world is never what you think it is. It can turn over and expose itself to be the exact opposite.
My mother and I didn’t fight in the car on the way home, nor once we arrived. But after a few days, she told me she had bought me a plane ticket to visit my father. This was a first. My father had quietly married a Vietnamese-American lawyer, Linda, whom he had met while applying for a waste-absorption patent. Her daughter from her previous marriage, Josephina, was a couple of years younger than me and lived with them in Georgia. I’d seen pictures of them—the courthouse wedding, tacky holiday cards—but we hadn’t met in person. We were all in unspoken agreement that there was no need to, that it would breach some etiquette, some sacred line between old and new.
Or so I’d thought. Did my mother send me to Savannah as a punishment? Maybe she knew what my father was going to tell me. Maybe in the clang and bash of that fight at the rec center, she’d remembered that my father had always claimed that he believed me. Maybe she wanted me to know that he hadn’t, not completely.
* * *
I slept uneasily on the flight. Plane sleep always feels to me like a form of restless thinking. The thoughts are like links in a chain, then the chains start pulling you by the wrists as you stagger along, picking up speed until you start to jog, race, careen and this is how turbulence becomes the bumpiness of a road that I’m rattling along in a giant vehicle, massive firs on either side casting occasional shadows within (my dream making sense of people passing down the aisle), my mind skimming the surface of sleep like a wake in water, lightly enough that it churns up real events into surreal dreams.
In this one, you’re sitting across the aisle, smirking, seven years old, and the shadows become tendrils that swarm up our legs, biting us, itching us, they’re glass noodles, they’re the worms you use for bait (my dream accounting for my father’s Vietnamese-born wife and his offer to take us fishing), the tendrils are gray and translucent and they range in size from the tiny smeared line of a bug you’ve slapped dead to as thick and as long as an arm, and I don’t know how to stop the shadows from swarming you, though you don’t seem too bothered by them, you let them curlicue around your fingers, your arms, your legs like living-dead vines, so I decide to trick them, I take a tiny chunk of flesh from my nose piercing and place it in a bowl, Grandma Lu’s silver mixing one, and the shadow worms promptly gather inside it and form a tangled lump, like when you turn a pot of old spaghetti upside down, and the lump licks slickly with movement, the shadow worms weaving and unweaving and growing even longer and thicker, and I realize the chunk of flesh has been seeded, the worms are hatching from it, my flesh is their origin point and I’m
* * *
—
sick to my stomach, breathing fast, the smell of the plane air like rotting lilies, my piercing gripped with scab from the dryness. Time to slow down, interpret my dream leisurely, shape it like a story. I’d had plenty of practice with this by that point in my life of the mind, so to speak. My latest therapist, Dr. Weil, had recently introduced me to a theory called “life span integration.” The premise is that you make a story out of your life. You plot it to give yourself a sense of continuity. In the therapy, you zoom in on moments of trauma—where the line broke or knotted or looped—and undo them, give yourself a before and an after. You try to convince yourself that you did in fact survive, that life kept on keeping on even after everything seemed to fall apart.
The funny thing about it, though, is that you don’t reconstruct your life as it actually happened; that would take too long. Instead, you design a fiction. First, Dr. Weil made me write a list: a single memory for each year of my life. Then, in session, I would close my eyes and conjure a vision of my deepest trauma: the moment I lost Wayne. I’d paint the scene in all its detail, immerse myself in all the feelings. Then I’d pause that scene, enter it as my current self, at eighteen, and rescue my twelve-year-old self from the situation. C and Cee would go off somewhere together, a safe place. And as Dr. Weil read out my list of memories to me, I’d convey to young me all of the events that had happened to us before and after the trauma so as to stitch our timeline back together. I chose to project them up on an imaginary screen in an outdoor movie theater, though I’d never been to one.
