Museum of Stones. Lynn Lurie
linen. Father clarified, only the frame. This half-offered thing, reminiscent of so many other half-offered things, and I slump into the glider’s tufted seat, upholstered in a repeating pattern of dancing dogs.
I would like to be on that cushion now. Instead I selected something far less expensive: three black and white zebras twisting on translucent twine, having read the experts who claim babies are far more responsive to black and white.
A cherub-faced resident points to a picture in his textbook. There are too many sections and competing diagrams and not enough spaces between the words. My eyes resist moving left to right, habituated not to drift from my son’s screens.
It is your job to explain, I say, my voice breaking the nearly pin-drop silence that is the norm in this room. The incubator staff and parents look over at me. I stare back and most turn away.
We are so many it is possible the doctors and nurses will, with one quick waive of a hand, dismiss us.
Guests stand too close and hover too long. Once the naming is over, the water sprinkled and the silly outfit removed, I take my son to the backyard and sit on a faded plastic swing.
My husband carved his initials into the seat when he and his sisters played here, the factories’ smokestacks skirting the horizon then, just as they do now.
A strong wind draws black billowing exhaust from the paper mill towards the ocean. Sulfur and other particulates, dense and acrid, hover overhead.
For his seventh birthday he selects a wooden swing set with a blue tarp for an archway, strung taut between two poles. Not long after, he takes it apart piece by piece, jamming the thick metal screws into the dirt, arranging the beams and the rounded climbing bars like matchsticks along the swing set’s former footprint, each fractured post a decomposing monument to a childhood he wanted no part of.
Miss Wells sat me next to Billy Grabard because I knew the alphabet. Poor Billy, she mumbled, he can’t tell one letter from the next.
I helped Billy draw a straight line on the dotted penmanship paper, watching his knuckles turn white as he held tightly to the pencil. He struggled most when it came to making the two half-moons in the letter B.
A week passed and Billy still hadn’t been to school, then two more. Eventually the janitor cleaned out his desk, putting his books on the shelves and his pencils in the storage cabinet.
I asked Miss Wells what happened. She said Billy climbed to the top of his swing set and couldn’t get down. Why, I wanted to know, didn’t anyone help? All she did was shrug.
Mother said Billy’s neck got caught in the joint where the top arm fit into the bottom pole. When he tried to pry himself free, there was too much blood. He was slow, not good at thinking things through. He should have been supervised. I wanted more, but she was walking away.
When everyone was at music I asked Miss Wells one more time. She took my hand and led me to the back of the classroom. I told myself to pay attention, but all she said was, please, take a pecan cookie.
At every backyard swing set I saw Billy pinned at the neck, his white Keds with the blue label dangling. Even though his feet stopped moving, specks of red continued to dribble onto his white shoes.
I could not participate in the game the other children played, hanging a stick-like figure, body part by body part, on a hook drawn like the letter S, and when the bell rang for recess, I did not rush outside to grab a swing.
From my bedroom window I watched two men in a pickup truck carry Billy’s swing set away. The longest pole was his torso and the two on either end that supported the structure were his arms and legs.
The art teacher showed the class how to fold a piece of white construction paper and where to make the first cut. We concentrated as we guided our rounded scissors with the rubber handles along pencil-drawn lines. Even still, a boy would cut his hand. The bloodied cutout wasn’t displayed. Yet even the simplest diamond shape or sloping line was taped to the art room window. After ruining three sheets of white paper Billy succeeded in cutting a snowflake suitable for hanging.
Counting three across and two down, I found my snowflake as the bus pulled into the parking lot. Billy’s didn’t look like snow and now that we knew he wasn’t coming back I wanted to ask Miss Wells to take his down.
Streetlights illuminated the falling snow. My future husband and I made our way across college walk lightly dusted in shimmering mica. I thought, confetti, the way it is tossed from rooftops in victory parades.
A bouquet of deep-colored roses, red wine, a bath in an antique tub, two matching terrycloth robes draped over a pedestal sink. Black and white subway tiles, finely veined, three missing.
In the honeymoon photographs I pose beside bronze busts, a woman’s profile sculpted by Picasso arranged geometrically on a promenade overlooking the sea. At each rendering the structure and symmetry of her face is more distorted, and in the last she is a mawkish, half-human, halfbird, falling into the water.
When my great aunts saw me their voices formed a chorus, confirming that the features of my face were the same as their long dead mother’s. But because there were no pictures of my great grandmother, I was never able to confirm if what they thought they saw was even close to the truth.
The eldest focused on the shape and color of my eyes, while the youngest, a sculptor, drew in the air the curve of my chin. She took my hand. You can feel it, she said, as she moved my palm over her cheekbones and then across mine. They are nearly the same.
When she leaned in, I breathed deeply, hoping to hold onto the odor of mentholated cigarettes, hair spray and sweet perfume. These are smells I still associate with power.
She owned a dress store of women’s eveningwear and allowed me to run up and down the aisles, touching each gown with the palm of my hand, memorizing the feel of velvet, brocade and lace, but it was the word organza I loved. Sometimes she would begin a sentence that way. Organza, are you ready for lunch?
When she packed to leave on buying trips I hovered nearby, in case she might decide to take me along. In my closet I kept a small bag of clean underwear and socks, a notebook and my set of colored pencils.
I waited for her postcards of animals, ornate buildings and exotic flowers, but the stamps in colored ink from Italy were my favorite. She searched for starched crinoline and fine handmade lace, returning with swatches of fabric stuffed into pillowcases.
Near to the border with Bolivia in the department of Puno, I found a postcard in the Indian market dated 1931. Seated on the ground, a woman works a floor loom. The caption on the postcard is: La Tejedora, The Weaver.
I looked through the vendor’s leather satchel filled with glass plates. There was one of a bride wearing a woven shawl loosely draped over her head.
Master weavers, he said, used a four-stake loom, saving their best work for this particular garment, a wedding veil that covered the top of the bride’s hair. He called it a lliklla.
A woman selling corn nearby tried to describe the loom to me in Quechua. What I mostly understood was the drawing she made, using her crooked index finger to trace the outline into the road dust.
I taped La Tejadora to my bedroom wall made of dried mud and pressed straw. It followed me to subsequent bedrooms where I positioned it over chipped paint or holes where others’ pictures had once hung.
Even though I knew I would not find my Aunt in the postcards I looked at the details hoping she might be there. She taught me how to remove the stamps using the steam from the spout of the teakettle. Once free, we slid each stamp between two pieces of wax paper, sealing it with the tip of the hot iron. I catalogued them in a bound book of handmade paper, arranged alphabetically by country.
My son keeps records of ‘matters important’ in a leather album. There are the letters he received when he was sick, and neatly folded sheets of paper crammed with lists of his numerical codes.
There was nothing sentimental about Mother’s wedding dress. But, by selecting