Gwyneth Merner
Ziggurat
What frightened me about your mother—I remember this—was the way she appeared more mesh silhouette than person, her head tilted, unmoving inside your screened-in porch. That was the first time you invited me indoors, the first time we left the garden, the flowering cacti and the Dopplered bees. You did not ask your mother for permission. Later you would show me your piano, the span of your fingers on its butter slab keys. Within the first moments in your house, you gave me a tour of your mother’s closet. This is silk, you said, it’s an underthing; this is houndstooth, you said, and I touched it, called it itchy; this is for special occasions, a visit to the city, and I rolled the lines of black beads under my fingers; this is velvet, it was my great, great grandmother’s, you said. The light chain twitched beneath the fixture. You said the velvet coat repelled water, that you would wait until your mother was away and you would test it in the rain. I shook my head. You would never ruin your mother’s coat, I said. I touched the coat, and in parts it felt softer than a cat, softer than a rabbit, a school mouse, a dog’s snout. In parts it was rough, the silver parts and the blue parts—a pattern of flowers. My mother said that water just falls off the coat. The water beads and she shakes it and it’s dry, you said.
Then I became fearful of your mother, pictured her in the velvet coat, shaking so fast that the rain parted in the air around her. Where we lived it hardly rained.
Last night I ate pistachios in bed, left a heap of shells in a small brown bowl on the bed stand and this morning I find them shamefully scattered, the bowl split, the purplish crêpe of the inner skin tucked inside the shells or collecting in flakes on the floor. Perhaps in my sleep I cuffed the bowl, although I remember my turbid dream, how the fingers of my right hand were concentrated at your sex, not clumsily but urged by a kind of paper shuffling query—where did I leave that sheet? It’s an important curvature— my nose at your neck, your hair tangled and clean. Your breath was inaudible and so I struggled, could not interpret my reception, until I found within your sex a fine grit. I thought that I could smooth the grit away, unobtrusively clean the folds of your labia, but I was afraid to offend you, afraid that your arousal was hardening, or that my fingers introduced the debris in the first place. And so I shifted the grit until I woke.
This early morning already carrying grit, I toss the pistachio shells and the broken bowl into the trash bin. A dream of perplexing desire is not a bad dream; yet it scums the morning, obliges me to recall the faces, bodies, inexactly, of those who have aroused me. You are too conspicuous to belong to the throng of male limbs. In sleep, the two of us are the film of an inexact self, a loss of fidelity. I think of calling you at your mother’s house. I write: “Call Jenny” on a pad of paper. My note is ringed by a brown cup stain. I consider the word fidelity, loyalty, a troubling roughness, and concentrate on the exactitude of reproduction. Which is more truthfully joined to the warm glass pane: the slanted box of light on the oval rug or the rippled light on the closed curtain? Are you more similar to your mother or to the Jenny in my dream? I’m not sure. I think of your mother as a thick line, and you—distant, unfamiliar—a more slender parallel line. I add a perpendicular line for each thought, each dream that bears a distant fidelity to you, to your mother, and then you appear; a discrete motherly mesh. I use this mesh to sift grit, substantial and unsubstantial, collect what can’t pass. The residual part of you frightens me.
I move on with my day. At the gym, I wear green shorts. A prick of red light inside of a flattened ring—my body from above, my body on a track that does not exist—sluggishly advances, the belt of the treadmill spooling away from the windows where the waters of the bay are dark and a cargo ship passes under the bridge, stacked shipping containers tawny, burgundy, and Jordan almond blue. A man at the mirrors grunts and his dumbbells chime on the rack.
I have a lethargic constitution—your mother’s appraisal, long ago, after I took a spill on the concrete steps leading up to your porch, after she squeezed my fractured wrist, enfolded it in two bags of frozen spinach and drove me to the emergency room, not bothering to involve my parents while they worked. I admit to thoughts of your mother whenever I try to correct my natural inertia, refine myself in enclosed spaces. I have not seen your mother in five years, and still I petition her approval. I wonder if you still expect to earn it, too.
Above my elbows, above my knees, mid-sternum and below, my lethargic constitution marls my body, and so in the locker room I wrap my towel torso-tight and take small steps between the shower stall and the double sinks. I feel meekness toward the woman washing her thick, black hair in the basin. Her back is arched, narrow legs planted wide, knees slightly bent. Her buttocks are so halfhearted; I see limp tips of mons hair. Communal spaces reveal anarchic habits, broadcast intimate departures in hygiene, but the woman is also breaking etiquette: don’t dominate space; don’t imperil the elderly swimmers with splashed water.
She prevents me from washing my hands, from rinsing grit from the contact lenses I should have replaced weeks ago. I hesitate as her elbows skull the space around the sink and the soap dispenser. Thumbs pluck matted strands. Excuse me, I say.
Her hair turns over her shoulder and I see fractions of her features: the tops of her small ears, a prominent upper lip, chin sharply cleft, meditative tip of nose. Inconclusive shapes, fungal. Her hair swings and her breasts do not; they are small and don’t quite match the age of her veined, wet hands.
She lunges low. Sounds a guttural syllable. My tailbone hits the rubber mat.
Our contact is anomalous and slow. She is lethargy—I am certain of it. To her I am a devil, an unannounced hostility. She pulls one ankle while I try to grip the counter and kick with the other foot. My towel rolls at the base of my spine. I drag. At once she is close and dripping, pushes the space above my ear hard against the counter edge. The sharpness of the pain makes me fearsome; my hands barb her knees and she crumples backward. Her head hits the hand dryer activator and it whirs.
Prone, she rubs her hands over her mouth, snaring an awful and thick sound. Hair sweeps octagon tile, a pose so like a sideswimmer. In retreat, I pull a rustic handle and dislodge the sauna thermometer when my back hits hard against the hot planks of the door. The gas furnace ticks in its cage; sweat collects on my eyelashes and it’s difficult to see the tiers of empty benches. My septum burns with cedar scent. I pant and watch the yellowed schoolroom clock, clutch my breasts. Shame makes odd kin of fear. Harsh exhale: a spray of spittle or lip blood, the surface of the furnace sizzles.
Yes, fine, I say. I am triumphant. I am solid. My thighs and forearms are flushed. Circular marks from the floor mat have begun to fade.
Did you hit your head? the EMT asks.
I think you would like him, appreciate the gentle way he applies iodine to the scrapes that I can’t tie to the woman at the sink, how he blots the gauze orange and red. I make a duck and cover shape over my head, one side of the bandage at my elbow flaps open; a wound like a stocking run. I protected myself, I say.
Good girl, he says.
This is how I know he finds me pitiful. He does not think I know the value of a skull and the delicacy of the matter it protects. Brilliant flecks of personhood. Without this shared compact, I am left with stained mesh—only mesh to bind my coarse thoughts.
An officer takes a statement, asks me if I did anything to agitate the woman, said anything offhand. I supply the two offensive words and take his card. On my way out of the building, the account manager at the YMCA stops me by the front desk, offers me a free year of membership, holds both my hands while she tells me how sorry she is. My membership is subsidized, but I don’t have the heart to refuse her good intentions.
Capricious violence is one language the world speaks. In communication with it, I decide to take the long walk back to my apartment, avoid the bus and the ride shares. I hold my arms tight to my body but take quick steps. This kind of fear, one you must understand, is separated by degree, by volume. Mine is as small and unconscious as a sound made in the throat while exhaling.
I rest on a bench in front of a dog park with my back to the barking and the rattling collars. If I take time off from work, I allow my conversation with the woman at the sink to continue. It’s fearful to me; the idea that there is more to anatomize in private. I call Richard and tell him there’s been an emergency, that I can’t come in until two.
What’s happened? he says. Richard is large. In his furniture shop, he’s forced sideways when walking either aisle. His voice carries that significant weight, but he never uses it clumsily.
An accident on the streetcar, I say. Someone was dragged. Again? Richard says. A woman or a man?
I switch my phone to the other ear and sigh. A woman, I say. It was the back car, so no one knew until someone started honking.
Richard whistles. Awful, he says. It must be something in the air.
He’s more sensitive than most, even if he can’t tell that I’m lying. Richard is how I stay in this city, delaying the likelihood that I will have to move home. His business is too small for an employee. You might be suspicious, and that’s your right. A tactical dependency is a type friendship, comparable to the small-town friendship. In the shop, I’m the guardian of small objects—clip lamps, paperweights, bookends, alarm clocks, lidded stoneware, milk glass jars, coffee table books on Scandinavian design, anything on top of the marble coffee table or the Danish credenza. I make displays. I dust. I shield him from technology, pretend that managing his online auctions is time consuming; he pretends that I have an eye for nostalgic beauty, have earned the questionable low rent of his apartment. He shared it with his mother for forty years.
At home, I take two painkillers for my tender back, the thrum of my bruises moving obliquely as far down as my hips. There is a red flannel sheet tucked into the couch—a protective cover in case Richard plans to sell it—and I shroud myself with it. When I don’t feel well, I treat Richard’s things, his mother’s things, like they’re mine. I can’t live there anymore, Richard told me when he offered me the apartment. But, it’s a comfort knowing you’re there.
Under the sheet, the air is rarefied. Musty upholstery and the warm recirculation of my breath. Nothing foreign or malignant.
You—as version, as memory—you would call the woman at the sink a devil, but I do not believe in devils; I believe in flawed communion. She was just a woman—a variant of a typical woman— the recipient of an imprecise transmission. It emanated from my body the way a bird’s call thickens from the friction of its feathers. Her transmission: when I think of it now, it radiates gentle dullness, a slow black beetle. The violence between us was not random. We signaled, paired, uncoupled, and now I am subsumed, more devilish for being less wholly myself.
Jenny and Nina Carmody. When you rely on your mother do you feel less than yourself?
Yes, you say.
Like airborne grit in motherly mesh?
Yes.
A frayed sieve. Do you understand?
Yes.
Your voice doesn’t sound the same.
Injuries and intubation, you say.
It’s monotonous; your voice leaves a metallic taste in the mouth. There’s rehab, you say. No, occupational therapy. A correction. Your injuries have made you a child again.
Yes.
A good girl?
It’s difficult.
A part of you vanishes and the remainder signals.
Not flawlessly.
Not flawlessly at all. I’m certain it’s the grit.
The deadbolt catches on the door to Richard’s shop. Through the scummed window I can tell he’s not reading a magazine at the long walnut table with the broken cash register. I unlock the door and call for Richard, tell him I am here, that I am sorry I missed half my shift. In back, in Richard’s apartment, a solemn radio announcer states the time and station call numbers to music.
His favorite chair is an Eames lounger under a white sheet. He will never sell it, except sometimes he threatens to, a repercussion of a cash-slow month. Richard sleeps tilted back on the lounger, legs propped on the footstool, one arm dangling off the armrest. I call his name. I clap and change the radio station, tuba and accordion rattling the cups in his dish strainer. I hit the lid of the pressure cooker with a wooden spoon. I take his hand. It is discolored and warm.
Then I become fearful of Richard, his body unmoving, his refrigerator shuddering out of quiet, his lounger creaking weakly when I press my fingers to his neck. The notion overcomes me that stillness is not as unnerving as the unseen form of the lounger beneath Richard, beneath the white sheet. I lift the edges of the sheet and drape them over his body. I can picture these graceful folds cut in marble. The stain of the exposed leather—I’ve never dared to look—it is dark chocolate brown.
I can see the top of Richard’s head tipped back to me, his white eyebrows loose and high. Peaceful is an unacceptable description. You and Richard, conversant with cataclysm, recall for me the moments that come before: you thrash with fortitude, with immense will—it could be painful or rapturous—until you reach an indeterminate shock. Emptied, your body is found peaceful, the model of repose. Richard’s expression is not peaceful—it is a raw pervious surface.
I search his apartment for evidence of relationships—not competitors, not other scavengers and bidders—a lover, a sibling, a friend, someone to inform of an absence. I rummage through kitchen drawers, displacing utensils, knotted plastic bags, dishrags, and a jar of pennies. Closing a drawer too vigorously, I topple a cylinder of scouring powder into the sink. I open the green metal file cabinet and scatter six years of handwritten receipts onto the carpet. Inside one of his paperbacks, a detective novel, I find a grocery list: cannellini beans, batteries, two lemons, decaf coffee. He wrote it in blue ink. I open a closet with an accordion door and find the space plump with trash bags. Tearing one open, I pull out a silk negligee, a houndstooth blazer, a beaded dress, and a black velvet coat—each rent and moldering—unsalvageable merchandise he couldn’t discard.
What frightened me about your father—I remember this—is how dispassionately he worked in the prefabricated office at the rim of the open-pit borate mine, at the start of a terraced spiral, each circuit progressively smaller and deeper in the ochre dust. He carried curled survey maps and a transit on a metal tripod, but most days he typed reports and made long distance calls, the phone cord taut as he paced from his desk to the drafting table where we drew on thin paper.
We were happy indoors, safe from the land movers and trucks speeding in clouds of dust. On high stools, we could see down into the pit, watch the miniscule men on the lower tiers—orange blots in hardhats, one of them my own father—move in unpredictable directions. We peeled the perforated edges off the ream of printer paper and folded the strips into box chains—this enraged your father, made the bald spot at the back of his head redden. It frightened me, the time he kicked the oscillating fan; the cage was so dented the blades could no longer turn without scraping, the air scarcely agitating.
I hear you have a temper now. And what a temper; my mother reports such screeching, plates cracking on the walls. When my mother hands him the phone, my father metes out news of health, heat, drought, and politics. My mother reconfirms what I already know about you, dresses the mannequin. Jenny’s doing much better, she says. Two velvet buttons fastened, the rest left open. On Tuesdays she packs tea for the Mars Hill Inn, she says. A light cashmere sweater under black dolman sleeves. And then, on Saturdays, she paints at the community center.” A layer of repellence.
Nina Carmody, too cultured for our town, is a mother again. I remember how she used to make you sing scales at the piano for an hour each day—how she wished you would be the soprano she never was. Nina Carmody, now too old to still be mothering. It does not escape me that my mother, speaking of Nina, says saint with a burr on her tongue. Through a motherly conduit you say, Hello. You ask: When will you visit?
I admit I have lacked a degree of courage to exhume a childhood friendship, to separate the grit from a fine and choking dust. I fear your body for its unforgiving mechanics, your labor against immobility and insensate signals. I am curious if you will resent me.
The maps we drew as children on the drafting table were routes taken by the dead: a tunnel to a tomb. You taught me to hum arias and then told me I should never sing. You gave us both strange names: Euridice and Orfeo. The king of the underworld has taken me and you have to save me, you said. I begged you to reverse our roles and let me play Euridice for once. You told me that I shouldn’t let my mother cut my hair so short. Though your father told you never to touch his things, you took a thorny white geode of colemanite from his bookshelf, passed it into my palms, called it my lamp. Sometimes, out of malice, I looked back, trapped you in the underworld. Once or twice I played the adversary in the darkness. He knew that you were evading him. When I think of his jealousy now, an adversarial grit closes my throat. He searches for your room in the dormitory. Ardency meets a flaw in the air. He beats you in your sleep.
I travel by bus and the freeway follows a commuter rail line. On the half hour, a train pulls up beside the bus, windows bright, and the two vehicles reach the same acceleration. I pinpoint passengers, pretend I can read lips. I speculate on the subject of chest-level books. Can you tell if someone is asleep or awake by looking at the back of their head? Richard’s eyelids were pearly. His scalp at the part was freckled. Beloved properties when untangled from the moment. Someone like him will sift through everything Richard owned, everything he kept of his mother, everything I couldn’t fit into a robin’s egg blue Samsonite I took from his shop.
The track deviates, heads east. My bus and the train still appear coupled as the gap between us expands; then the mate is lost, the train a bright girdle on the dim land. The air conditioner blower is broken, and I can smell diesel in my hair. I stay in the bus when it idles at a rest stop for a ten-minute break. Closer to my parents, to you and your mother, it’s difficult to sleep. I keep my elbows tucked so I do not touch my seatmate. Sporadic halogens between rest stops illuminate a water-poor citrus grove, a ten-mile feedlot, and the broken three-story thermometer.
Beyond animal and orchard our country urges extraction. Terraces curl into depths. Note a flaw: we excavate earth but refrain from shaping the tailings. Permit me to scrape and mound the waste- grit. The structure telescopes, reconfigured into a ziggurat. Can you see the temple that should shelter the pit? Internally, the heart of this binary ziggurat would be shaped like a bee skep, a woven spiral. The purpose of this chamber is flawless transmission, an uncorrupted language. Ziggurats have inauspicious implications, a discord with the word. I solve this problem by requiring an annual demolition, a spatial sacrifice. Positive collapses into negative. In each reconstruction, the hollow of the mine hoards its peerless grit.