Museum of Stones. Lynn Lurie
time I had to spend with her, searching the reduced racks, going from sale house to sale house, arguing over price, knowing whatever I selected it would be too expensive.
Buttoned and cinched within Mother’s yellowed gown, its borders too voluminous for my small frame, I begged my childhood friend wrapped in tight-fitting black silk with shimmering sequins to switch.
As my father walked me down the aisle, I realized he had in a different decade unbuttoned the same dress. I tried to steady myself by digging my fingernails into my palm. The cut I made was long and deep. By the time I noticed it was too late to blot the red away.
Specially laundered, the dress came back in a long, white box vacuumpacked in durable plastic. Mother kept it in the attic alongside the disassembled metal bed frames, the mattresses and green plastic matching suitcases. Discarded objects arranged as if someone was living upstairs in that windowless space, putting them to use.
As we brought each thing down, Father cut his wrist on a piece of broken glass. Whitish-yellow, he clutched the railing of the pull cord ladder. Mother came into the bathroom where I was washing and dressing his wound. She dropped the box at my feet and said, you are to take the wedding dress when you leave.
I was preoccupied with my father’s skin. It was like tissue paper. This thinning of the skin was the beginning of the ending of his life, yet Mother nattered on about the box at my feet.
I carry the box with the dress to the beach and unwrap the veil and train. Even the bra I wore is inside. I place it under the bodice after positioning it in the sand and wait for the tide to take it.
It does not float or drown but sloshes back and forth.
Covered with sand and seaweed and entangled with broken bits of seashells I do not want it, but I also do not want to leave it.
At the reception my mother took me aside. She said, your mother-in-law is dressed in all white. I had no idea this was a problem.
There on the other side of the threshold are the new rooms I will inhabit, the heavy furniture upholstered in muddy colors, dishes too precious to use, and the people I will now be expected to call family.
I buy a salmon-colored dress and bone slingback shoes, a leather skirt with pinking shear trim. A strand of fake pearls. Styles and colors I never wore before, and even though they are expensive, I do not take them off the hanger or remove the tags, but leave them pushed to the far end of the closet.
My sister and I played dress-up when we were supposed to be doing our homework. She was the expert at make-up. I could turn her curly hair straight and my straight hair curly. Make me unrecognizable, even uglier, if no one will know it is me. Don’t worry, she said, one day we will be able to leave.
There were the dresses that had belonged to our grandmother in the attic, the silk ones with matching hats and mother’s hoop skirts and saddle shoes, the bright pink tops.
My husband takes me to a favorite place from childhood, and as he is explaining he doesn’t know why he calls it Peggy’s Cove, a wave splashes over me. I lose my footing and slip waist deep into the freezing water. He helps me over the moss-laden rocks as the cold creeps upward, numbing my legs. He doesn’t hear when I ask if we can leave, my voice faint against the breaking of the waves.
I sprawl across the back car seat’s stained fabric, rife with the odor of my father-in-law’s cigar smoke, a habit my husband later takes up. At night I see him on the deck, the red burning tip of his cigar, as the half-arc of light travels from his hand to his mouth. He drives in silence thinking I might sleep.
Feverish, I drift in and out of sickly sleep, unable to recognize anyone or any of the places that come to me. My husband brings me medicine and the prints of the pictures he took at Peggy’s Cove. We are flipping through when his mother calls him. I place the stack on the nightstand, turning the top one over. It is of a large seagull with its mouth wide open. Between its teeth, a silver fish squirms. The sky is blocked by a swath of low flying birds.
His mother wants to know if he will join her for a round of golf. Eighteen holes will take all day.
Laundry piles up. I shrink clothes and bleed colors. Other houses have toy bins, cupboards filled with food. Rarely can we find the tennis rackets, the balls or winter coats. Everything is stacked or shoved into whatever space we can clear.
No one I know repeatedly runs out of toilet paper or uses crushed lasagna noodles to make a kind of spaghetti.
My husband and I fall into a deep sleep mid-morning and wake to the smell of burning plastic and rubber. The nipples and bottles I am sterilizing have melted and merged, forming a sticky mess at the bottom of the pot. A dark smoke stain in the shape of peacocks’ quills forms on the white tiles above the stove.
I open the windows wide and by the time I collect our sweaters a pigeon has flown inside. Leave it, my husband calls from the hallway where he holds the blanket in front of our son’s face, protecting him from the smell of burning plastic. It will be drawn to the light and be gone by the time we return.
As we walk aimlessly I worry more pigeons will fly inside, that one will asphyxiate, and if it were to die in the nursery it would be an omen.
By the end of the day we are too tired to stay out any longer. Strapped to one of our chests in the corduroy carrier, our son has not rested but has flailed his arms and banged his tiny head back and forth.
I use the broom to shoo the pigeon toward the window. It flits about and when it flies out, I slam the wooden frame. Pieces of chipped paint fall across the sill. Beneath the white is another layer, pale blue like the cracked shells of the robins’ eggs my sister and I would find under our favorite climbing tree.
One year we watched a baby break its way out. For three weeks the mother came and went bringing food. By the fourth week all of them were gone.
Pigeon shit in his crib, dribbled over his stuffed animals and the hand-knit blankets, greenish yellow with flecks of red leaching into a white oozing paste. His full diapers nearly that same color.
The nightly news reports that formula cans sealed with lead may have leached lead into the liquid. It is the only thing he has ingested his first three months. Could it be why he is the first to get sick and the last to get well?
The first year I know everything he drinks and eats, what he sees and hears, where he feels pain. Then I lose track.
A man, tall and blonde, blue knapsack slung over his shoulder, walked down my path. The rattan walls of the latrine did not keep the wind out. I mounted colored advertisements torn from TIME magazine on planks of wood and hung them over the gaps. When they became weathered by the wind and rain he replaced them with glossy pictures of cars and fancy kitchens, stories from the news. Nancy Reagan on a boat heading toward Ellis Island, a soybean harvest in the Great Plains.
The cover of the children’s school notebooks showed Peru as including part of Ecuador as well as the northern tip of Chile. I ripped the cover off and added it to the latrine wallpaper.
We took a bus to the coast, swallowing our malaria pills with cheap red wine he poured into his leather wine sack. Embroidered in jagged yellow stitching and red twined cord, Espana was written across it in script.
On the other side of the mangroves, having plied our way through in a rented rowboat, we found a small island with black sand. Not thinking about how close we were to the equator we stayed all day. That night the only relief was to float in the cold saltwater. I was in a light sleep when I startled myself awake, the roots of the mangroves, like the gnarled hands of an old woman, had risen from the water and had wound their way around my neck, making it difficult for me to catch my breath.
Our machetes and rubber boots lined the interior wall of our two-room barn. Every evening before bed we hung our ponchos from a hook. He was in the habit of straightening them when he walked by, making sure the bottoms did not brush against the loose dirt floor.
I dreamed of a tribunal of men, their parchment pages spread across a worn table. All but one had feathered pens. They questioned the assembled held against their will,