|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
You Watch People Turn Into Ashes and Fall
You have to imagine how it rained that day and the hundred or so people who came over left shoeprints all over the kitchen linoleum. This was the same house my great grandfather built when he and his wife moved here from Pittsburgh, the same rooms where my great grandmother read palms and channeled spirits for widows during the depression. They were my mother’s grandparents and they believed in heaven and earth as inevitable steps along a much longer journey in a much bigger plan. My mother told us stories about her grandparents and made them seem honest. She said her grandmother knew things before they happened, recounted memory after memory of truths that were delivered flawlessly, like dictation from God. You have to imagine my father and brother and I standing in the kitchen with the door open after dusk, every light burning in the house, the kitchen porch crowded with moths and mosquitoes. We are all smoking cigarettes. I am seventeen. I smoke in secret: in my room with my head out the window; on the walk home from school; after my parents are in bed. You have to picture me as an outline that day. I was just more smoke. I was dripping. We were all dripping like we’d been dipped in hot syrup. Listen to this: when my great grandmother met my father for the first time, before he even married my mother, she shook his hand and said, “Welcome back to the family.” My father, brother and I are standing in the kitchen smoking cigarettes and by now it has stopped raining and everyone has gone home and we are staring at the footprints they have left on the kitchen floor. We see muddy histories, like magnified palms whose lifelines have overlapped and spread throughout the house to dry and eventually be mopped away by the maid. We see in each of the prints my mother’s face; we see her lips, her skinny knees, her bones; we see her voice transcribed into a thunderstorm and caked onto the floor. Here on the kitchen linoleum is a tactile map of limbo: threads of affirmation wound in breath throughout the house and now rising away while we stand smoking and dripping. My father says: “We’ll leave,” and then he closes his eyes as if imagining what to pack, and we all stand there breathing so quietly that with the door open we can hear the gas meter outside, each tick echoing like a lock turning in an empty house.
|
