I sat between them and when the down feathers went in my nose I snorted to get them out and Mama said to use a Kleenex.
I remember the dogs at Spring Hope, gun dogs mainly, English setters and springer spaniels for the most part.
I can recall the names of most and maybe even all of the dogs we owned over the years but the names of only three of my classmates.
Dana, Alex, Joseph, Henry, Big Boy, Bosco, Lucy, Beau, Venus, Rusty, Laddie, Cluny, Kirk, and so forth, were dogs.
The time Venus bit Jimmy Watts. No one liked Jimmy Watts, and we were all glad when Venus bit him, except Mama, who had to drive Jimmy home and apologize.
The fact that Mama’s little dog Margaret ate sugar lumps, was given scraps at the table, and became almost too fat to walk.
The fact that Margaret was afraid of Papa and sat between Mama’s feet when he was in the room.
I remember crying when Mr. Tully, who brought us firewood, ran over Lucy with his truck. Thornton said you could see her insides.
How Margaret just vanished, killed by a coon or an alligator probably, Papa said, nodding in the direction of the river.
I told people at school that an alligator ate my dog. I remember the stray dogs that crept in from the highway, mangy, cowering, half-starved curs that Papa called coloreds’ dogs, that slunk under the kitchen porch, where we would find them curled up in the dirt and lure them out with food.
That disappeared after a day or two, Mama saying they had run off, when actually Papa or Verdell took them out to the woods and shot them, I found out later.
At the desk writing, and becoming aware that I am talking to myself, reciting the names of dogs.
At my bedroom window last night, preparing to pull the shade, I looked out at the rain and saw Thornton standing in a doorway on the other side of the passage—Thornton the way he was then, I mean, not Thornton the man of today—but it was another little boy, obviously.
I have an image of Thornton stretched out on his back on the rug in my room, hands clasped behind his head, eyes wide open, fixed on the ceiling, and of me in the bed next to Mama, while she read to us from Peter Pan.
The many times, later, that we played Peter Pan and Wendy.
Peter Pan and Wendy consisting mostly of walking around in the yard while Thornton made up adventures and told them to me.
We were brother and sister in the stories.
Edward wouldn’t play.
Afterwards, while Thornton was in school, I wrote the adventures down in a book Mama made by sewing sheets of stationery together with shoelaces. We made drawings for the book and drew colored maps of all the places we had been in the stories.
I remember holding Thornton’s hand and flying over the roof of the chicken house.
I remember “That’s mine,” and Edward balling the tarp up in his arms. Without the tarp we were left sitting in bright sunlight with our plates and spoons.
The book was called Peter Pan and Wendy at Spring Hope.
It was a book about orphans.
Thornton scribbled all over some of the pages of the book after Mama said facetious was a word.
I went on writing adventures in the book even after he stopped playing.
Babies were birds before they were humans, and small children can still remember the bird-stage if they try hard, in Peter Pan.
The time Thornton took me up in an actual airplane and we flew down the coast. We flew low over the beach, and people in bathing suits looked up and waved.
We were not pretending to fly then. We were actually flying while pretending to be ordinary people.
Chagall was my favorite painter. He painted pictures of people flying through the air.
Even as a child I was crazy about Thornton.
The time my mother, rising abruptly from the table, said to my father, “We are not ordinary people.”
The many times I sat with Thornton on the black leather sofa in the library while Mama read poetry out loud.
The sofa cushions were split and oozed cotton stuffing. The time I tried to push it back in and Mama said I was just making it worse.
In my memories of Mama reading it is always raining outside.
Droplets trickled down the windowpanes, and she switched on the lamp behind her chair.
She read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Childe Harold,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “Dover Beach,” “The Lady of Shalott,” “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” “Annabel Lee,” and so forth, when we were still quite small.
My mother was fond of Poe.
Sometimes, reading, she was overcome by beauty and cried.
She couldn’t read Edna St. Vincent Millay or Keats without crying.
Sometimes I think she was driven crazy by beauty.
Mama, moved by a book or poem, would say that it was devastating. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was completely devastating, I remember.
Looking for Mama is in some ways like being lost in a dense forest, as I said earlier, and in some other ways it is like being lost in a thick fog or in a desert, as I also said.
Though I have never actually been lost in any of those places, I do have a precise image of being lost in a forest, one that I invented as a child while Mama was reading me the story of Hansel and Gretel.
I remember, from my mother then, stories drawn from the lives of artists. She told us about Robert Browning eloping to Italy with Elizabeth Barrett, that Shelley went sailing in a storm in a boat named Ariel and drowned, that Poe had a cat called Catarina, and so forth.
I don’t actually remember her recounting any of those stories, don’t possess, I mean, a little internal movie that shows her telling them to me. But in the case of certain facts, so to call them, like the ones mentioned above, it seems to me there was never a moment that I didn’t know them.
Unlike the story of Gérard de Nerval and the pet lobster he leashed with a blue ribbon and took for strolls in the garden of the Palais Royal, supposedly, which I do remember my mother recounting brightly at the supper table one night, having just read it somewhere, I imagine.
I remember my father saying that Gérard de Nerval sounded like an idiot.
Artists, according to Mama, were frequently eccentric, odd behavior being a natural consequence of genius.
She would have liked to be eccentric herself, I understood later, but didn’t dare because of Papa and the children and her position in the town and because in fact she hated being the subject of gossip.
More eccentric than she actually was, I mean, beyond the lavender dresses.
I inherited from her the idea that an artist has to be extravagant, even though she was never able to become truly extravagant herself.
Even though I am not myself an artist.
I almost wrote the fatal idea that an artist, etc., which is what it was for her in a sense.
I don’t remember Mama saying, “Modigliani was a debauched lunatic,” but I am convinced she did say that.
Lunatic was one of the words she applied to extravagant artists she admired. She used the term, I want to say, fondly.
She also used the word immortal without irony. I have never met anyone else who could do that.
A provincial woman who never learned to be cynical.
“Your mother’s a funny bird,” my father said.
The time she said to my father, “I won’t have illiterate children.”
The time she took Thornton and me to Columbia to view an exhibit of Blake’s drawings, and Thornton was bored. He sat in back on the way home and kicked the front seat even after Mama told him he had better stop. She said, “Just keep that up and I’ll tell your father.”
I was aware that superior people must not be bored by art.
I remember always knowing that Edward was not artistic.
The time, much later, that I tried to visit an art museum in order to see real paintings, the time I was in Connecticut with Thornton.
I remember walking there with him, crossin
g the campus when the carillon in the tower started ringing and students in coats and ties were suddenly all around us on the sidewalk. I was the only girl and Thornton wouldn’t let me take his arm. He said to everyone we met, “This is my kid sister.”
I remember that I cried when we found out the museum was closed to the public, sensing, I suppose, even then, that I was never going to see an actual painting by anyone famous.
Standing out front to watch the people who had invitations climb out of taxis and go in through the door, some in evening wear, though it was the middle of the afternoon, and thinking that these flat, bland, ordinary-looking men and women were the very ones Mama meant when she talked about cultured people and people of sophisticated taste, and Thornton remarking that they were swank.
Realizing later that she had invented a whole society of people that didn’t exist anywhere, one composed exclusively of people like the Brownings and Keats and Whistler and so forth, who in addition to being geniuses were kind and generous and helpful to each other, though she would never have admitted that even to herself.
An image of my mother kneeling in the upstairs hall, putting a notebook away in a tall mahogany secretary that stood just outside the door to her bedroom, pressing down on the stack of notebooks with the palm of one hand while pushing the drawer shut with the other, frozen in that posture, in that image.
I remember always knowing that the notebooks were important.
Other drawers of the secretary held linen from my grandmother that we never used and that fell apart in our hands when we took it out later, like the past, it occurs to me now, locked away in all the little drawers, opening them now and finding it has crumbled away.
She wrote in ordinary composition books, the kind with marbled black-and-white covers that one sees everywhere still, with a white rectangle in the center of the front cover and lines for name and subject. On the line for name she put a number. I don’t remember any of the numbers. I don’t know how many notebooks there were.
I remember “Please don’t lean on me like that,” the times I stood next to her while she was writing in a notebook.
If I shut my eyes, I can turn my head in the image, so to speak, and look at a page covered with her script. Despite being able to do that, or imagine that I am doing that, I can’t make out any of the words that are on it. The image of the page within the larger image of my mother seated at her desk is blurred like a photograph that is too small or too out of focus. If I stare at it, so to speak, it wavers as if glimpsed through water.
I want to say that the page has drowned in the river of time.
I sometimes imagine, absurdly, that if I could recollect some moment in the past with sufficient intensity, I would be able to live it again exactly as before.
Peter Pan wasn’t able to remember anything for very long because he was never going to die.
Not that he wasn’t able to remember exactly, it was just that he needn’t bother, I think, needn’t grasp at such meager immortality when an eternity of new experiences lay before him.
Ahead of me, I want to say now, I have only the past.
A truly crazy attempt to make time flow backwards.
I remember Mama reading her poems to Thornton and me, and later just to me, reading from a notebook that she held at eye level in front of her, like a schoolgirl, I thought even then.
Reciting above the hiss of rain that, it seems now, always accompanied her readings, as I mentioned earlier.
Not caring that we grasped almost nothing, apparently.
Is the reason, I suppose, that I can’t remember any words.
The fact that with my eyes closed I can see her reading, on the sofa in the library, usually, or at her desk or on the bed in her room, but all I hear is rain.
The fact that she mailed her poems and stories to magazines and reviews that always mailed them back, until she finally found a few small enough and obscure enough to print them. A newspaper in Charleston sometimes printed one of her poems.
I was fifteen when I finally understood that my mother’s poems were not literature.
I felt like a murderer.
If I had learned that my father was a molester of children, that would have been easier to accept than that my mother’s poems were not literature.
I understood that regardless of what had happened and might still happen to her externally, her life within had come to nothing.
The many times I looked out the window at my mother on the rope swing in the yard, scarcely moving the swing, staring at the ground in front of her.
“Is she going to spend the rest of her life on that swing?” my father said.
The time she saw Rimbaud standing in the cotton.
The time she fell to her knees in the church aisle and my father and my aunt Alice took her out, and after that she wouldn’t go to church anymore.
The hours and days she lay on the library sofa with her eyes closed.
I remember “I don’t want God to see me.”
Behind the locked door of the library, writing and balling up pages, starting a new sheet in an attempt to record her failure on the previous sheet, and giving up and stopping, forever she would say, and then starting again, hopeful once more, Thornton driving to town to buy her more paper when my father wouldn’t.
I remember “I have become dust.”
Wandering the house, agitated, her hair every which way, wringing her hands, wild-eyed, like a crazy person, binoculars dangling from her neck.
My mother was the only person I have ever known who actually wrung her hands, grasping the fingers of one hand in the fist of the other and twisting and squeezing, exactly as one would twist and squeeze a washcloth.
The time my father told us she was just pretending.
Thinking even then that she was just half-pretending.
Wanting to get my attention, Maria opens the door softly, stands in the doorway behind me, and shuffles her feet.
The time I was standing in my room playing Tristan and Isolde as loud as I could make the little record player go, when my father came up behind me and touched me on the shoulder and I was so startled I fell down.
The fact that Mama hated people coming up behind her while she was at her desk, locked the door to the library so people couldn’t startle her by coming up and touching her while she was writing.
The year I let my hair tangle and wouldn’t bathe or change my clothes, when I was always listening to Tristan and Isolde, when I was fourteen or fifteen, was the time my mother was locked in the library.
My most vivid memory from that time is of the voice of Kirsten Flagstad.
It was a portable record player in a hard case that would close up and lock. It had a handle on top and when shut looked like a piece of Samsonite luggage.
I used Mama’s Samsonite suitcase to travel to Connecticut later, the time I rode the train with Thornton and my father.
Ordinary things—luggage, radios, toasters, and so forth—looked just the way things were then. Similar items today look just the way things are now. I can’t explain this.
Memories also. It is impossible, I think, for anyone to have memories like mine now.
She dwelled in the wreckage of her poems, sat in the house in one or another of her lavender dresses and fantasized about a life that fate, my father, and the South had denied her but that she could not let go of, that she mourned the loss of, while the only real life she possessed slipped past her almost unobserved, her husband and children grew away from her, became actually frightened of her.
As if a foreign body had invaded the family. It could not be expelled, so we isolated it within the system, gave her wide berth when we passed her in the kitchen or hall and avoided looking directly at her, into her eyes, as if the system had formed a protective cyst around her.
I want to say that the foreign body was my mother’s soul, dwelling among us like a spirit of the dead, not resting, not able to find any peace, wandering the house, distraught.
If only I knew what I meant by soul.
The world seems to me such a poor and barren place, I can’t imagine what a soul would find to live on here.
The times she came into a room and the conversation faded and then resumed as a pretend conversation, stiff or animated in a false way, sounding rehearsed and wooden.
We were puppets, my mother said. We were little wooden dolls. She said she could see the strings.
I remember “Why don’t you shoot me, Stanley, the way you shoot dogs?” one night at supper, looking across the table at my father.
We acted as if she hadn’t spoken.
Birds flew to the feeders, and, finding no food there, flew away, and in time they forgot why they had ever come. We still saw them in the bushes and trees, and heard them all around us, but none came to the feeders.
The time Thornton tossed a handful of seed on one of the feeders just as we were getting in the car, so he could tell Mama that he was taking care of the birds.
I didn’t see my father take the notebooks, though I saw the splintered drawer where she had kept them.
I don’t remember when I learned that he had burned them. I have an image of him flinging the notebooks into the incinerator but it doesn’t feel like a real memory. It is perhaps only an imaginary picture that I invented to illustrate the remembered fact that he burned the notebooks, so it is not evidence that he burned them, standing there flinging them in one by one.