“Things of This Life”

By Judith Kitchen

The present rips apart and
Joins together again' it begins'
It is beginning itself. IT has a past,
But in the form of remembrance.
It has a history, but it is not history.

--Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other

Consider the child idly browsing in the curio shop. She's been on vacation in the Adirondacks, and her family has (over the past week) canoed the width of the lake and up a small, meandering river to where the beaver dams have made passage impossible; found a stable and spent an afternoon on horseback; cooked pancakes and hot dogs and beef stew over a campfire; and spent each evening lying stretched on their backs on a canvas tarp, hoping to catch sight of the meteor showers as the darkness deepens. So why, as she sifts through boxes of fake arrowheads made into key chains, passes down the long rows of rubber tomahawks, dyed rabbits' feet, salt shakers with the words "Indian Lake" painted in gold, beaded moccasins made of what could only in the imagination be called leather, is she happier than any time during the past week?

The child could spend hours like this, touching and putting back, lifting, holding, choosing. Her father cannot understand it. Her brother has chosen quickly, paid, and left to wrestle with his friend in the gravel parking lot. She can hear their syncopated scuffling. Her mother shares a bit of her desire, but is a practical woman and can already see that nothing here will last. So the child feels guilty as well as drawn, and she can't make up her mind. "Ten more minutes," says her father, "that's all." And so she chooses, reluctantly letting go of the alternate dreams. She picks a round box made of bark, she thinks, decorated with porcupine quills. It smells like sweet grass, like countryside. She counts out her quarters and nickels and emerges, squinting, with her purchase. "What are you going to do with that?" her brother asks, and she realizes that she doesn't know. "It feels nice," she says.

Now consider the woman who was that child. Today she wakes up in her untidy bedroom with sunlight slanting through the panes where she has recently adjusted the blinds. Outside, there is snow and for some reason that makes the sunlight brighter, sadder. There has been too much snow this winter and she is tired of it, tired of stepping out of the passenger seat of the car into a wall of snow that filters into her shoes, tired of keeping the porch steps swept for the mailman, tired of the way everyone talks about nothing but weather. She's tired of driving home on Tuesday nights with the wind in her face and the thin snakes of snow rippling fastforward out in front on the asphalt. She's tired of how the flakes flare briefly in the headlights, and how she can't somehow see beyond them into the receding dark. She's almost tired of wondering why the tracks -- footprints in the yard, snowmobile in the field -- are whiter than the surrounding expanse of snow so that you see them as a trail of pure light. Or why the blue evening, cold at the edges, makes the houselights seem so lonely. So this morning she stirs and then closes her eyes to the glare, turns toward the wall.

Consider what she sees there, against the grey wall other bedroom, between the closet and the doorway into the study. For a moment, she's a child again, everything familiar. The dresser is squat, waist-high, with three drawers. Dark walnut, with carved handles. When she was little, this dresser was in the dining room, filled with carefully ironed linen tablecloths, napkins, the flowered glass place tags that her mother never used because they were too nice. In its new location, there is a drawer for sweaters, one for scarves, and the top drawer holds gifts she's saving for some occasion or another. At the moment it has a blue ceramic soap dish, a writing pad, three books, a set of woven coasters, two tea towels, a pot holder, a tape of southern fiddle music. She has no one in mind for any of these items.

On top of the dresser -- it seems (to her eye) pleasantly crowded -- there is a handcrafted jack-in-the-box whose insides, which have "popped," reveal themselves as a green felt frog with a black velvet cape lined in red satin. He has a gold monocle on one eye. There is also a vase with flowers, just beginning to wilt. (She'd been sick and he'd brought them.) That's the only thing that isn't usually there. The other items include a shallow bowl with fluted edges which might, anywhere else, be called gaudy. The interior is pink, and the outside is covered with painted flowers in deep blue, yellow, white, with orange centers. She keeps necklaces in it -- including the string of wooden beads her son made for her when he was nine. There are two painted baskets, one for bracelets and one for pins. And a ceramic mug (whose handle fell off so neatly it looks like a vase) where she keeps loose quarters and dimes. Two painted wooden tops seem never to have found another place to call their own, and there's a lacquered box -- what we now call Chinese red -- which is really a deep-throated rust, with a gold tree spreading across its cover. And -- again from her childhood -- a tiny porcelain piano. When she lifts its lid, inside is curled a pair of earrings she could not bear not to own, waiting for the day she might have the courage to pierce her ears.

Sometimes, in the mirror, she holds them up to her face. She becomes someone she does not quite recognize. She wants to drive quickly to the mall and ask to have it done before she can change her mind. It can't be all that painful. But, she wonders, would a woman in those earrings ever throw back her head and laugh long and loud? Would she cry, huge gulping sobs? She tosses her head to watch the effect. Who would she be with those elegant earrings elongating her face, holding her to their standards of decorum?

Sometimes she does not want to get out of bed. Beyond this room there are others, each of them holding the things with which she has surrounded herself, the tiny objects her hands have sampled and selected. If she listed them to herself, it would take hours. If she were to move, how would she choose among them? What is the relative value of the glass paperweight, the paper fan, the cracked blue tile from Belgium? Besides, don't these things belong together, especially now that they have grown used to each other, used to being her objects of desire? Don't they welcome the next item as she finds it? Don't they all move over, make room, accommodate? Don't they take on new lustre in its presence? Don't they preen and shine?

So, as she stirs, turns, opens her left eye, lets it rest on the green frog, run itself over the soft body, burrowing for texture and light, she feels safe for a moment, lost once more in the long dusty rows of the shop, fingering and fingering her way toward the things of this life. Because this life, as she knows it, is alien still. Even after five years, it doesn't quite feel like her life -- the one she knew how to live. She has surrounded herself with her things to remind her that she is really here, in this house, with this man. "This is your life now," they tell her, since her dreams still haven't caught up and (as often as not) she inhabits other spaces in the depth of the night. Her old life closes in with its shapeless certainties as she crosses its threshhold.

In the clean, uncritical light of morning, the room leaps to life and she rises famished. She wants bacon and eggs on a green Fiestaware plate -- and whole wheat toast with Scottish marmalade. If there were tomatoes in the refrigerator, she'd want a grilled tomato, carefully cut into two halves, each with a serrated edge, like her fluted bowl. But she'll settle for mushrooms, sauteed with butter and garlic. Or an orange, peeled and quartered, the way they serve dessert in the Japanese restaurant. With a little toothpick.

Here's what she'd tell you: her hands know beauty when they feel it. Oh, there are drawings on the walls -- a hunting print from Wales, old maps -- but those are merely decoration. She wants to lift and savor, to settle something into place. She wishes every day were Christmas and she could bring out her wooden angel, the rope horse from Brazil, the origami swan, making this life dance like her tree, a tangle of old and new, a confusion of time and place all held together by one hand -- hers.

Think of it: she doesn't know who she is or where she belongs. She buys the Mexican salad bowl and the two wooden spoons and places them in the middle of the table so she'll know she should be here. Look around. No one else would put her grandmother's little trunk next to the wicker picnic basket. If she closes her eyes, she can see her grandmother's proper handwriting, purled on the edges of envelopes, careful and precise. Mayme, who never finished eighth grade after her mother died and she had to take care of her brothers and sisters, who had to work hard on the farm but who knew how to spell and who kept every letter she ever received. Even the ones with the wobbly scrawl that said Dear Grandma Pendell, Thank you for the present. I wish we could see you soon. I am already seven. Love. Here's the way it happened: the train's shrill whistle, crescendo, then a bright hole in the dark and the thunder of steam. Mayme would step onto the platform wearing a dark purple coat, her black braids wound tightly around her head. Her skin was too soft and wrinkly. When you kissed her cheek, it wobbled, and you wished you didn't have to do that. What you really wished was that you could go to her place in Michigan to visit your cousins' farm and ride in the back of the wagon and see the baby pigs. And you wished you could run off by yourself in the meadow and lie back in the grass and see, up close (so close your own eye might be a telescope), the buttercups on their spindly stems above you. Shards of sunlight. And the sky behind them blue forever. The only sound would be wind and you'd know it was wind even though it was only a tickle. It was the kind of quiet that seemed as if something had been taken away. Today, she'd call it a hush. Meaning that sound had receded. Meaning an absence that fills itself up with a word.

Think of her now, beginning her day. She was that child. How can she go on, wanting like this, for the rest other life? How can she bear to think of next week, next month when she will meet friends she hasn't seen for too long? It's too late to lose twenty pounds or to grow her fingernails. Who will she be? There's not even time to pierce her ears and enter the room as a new and different woman. She will have to attend the ball as herself. She will need to find herself quickly. She will need to sort through so many boxes, untie so many ribbons. At the very least, she will need to buy a new blouse in a fabric that begs to be fondled. She wants to be touched. She wants to become the very thing they cannot do without.