Christopher Woods, White Stripe
Assumptions
Aliza Wyman
Passing by the boneyard on our way to mass, my hand tight in my mother’s because we had to cross the street and she did not trust me even at seven to travel anywhere on my own, I asked her about the casket we had planted the autumn before.
“Does she still look like herself?” I needed to know.
She winced like I’d bit her. “Let’s just try to think of granmere as she was.”
But all I had ever known about her was her dying, the tubes and her face caving in on itself, the colostomy bag taped to her yellow stomach.
Twenty years later, the graveyard doesn’t look the same. They have pulled up the old dead tree beside the road. The space where the roots were leaves a gaping hole, a wound in the soil. It was a tricky excavation. The tree had grown itself around the coffins, laced its fingers under lids and through the ribs of other people’s beloveds. When the workmen tore the oak out, someone had to leap into the pit with a chainsaw, his heart eye level with the corpses. When I go to visit in the dusk, when the Canadian geese fly low, I crawl into the hole the tree left, nose filled up with the smell of dirt and rotting leaves. It is a quiet, muffled place. It doesn’t panic me at all. But maybe that is because it is temporary. I can crawl in and out of here at will.
My grandmother’s grave is permanent, a granite stone block that only half belongs to her and half belongs to a man who had once thrown her through a window before apologizing for it, while there was still blood running down her brow into her eyes.
I don’t remember what my grandmother’s laugh sounded like.
It’s Laura who starts it. She brings the funeral director’s catalogue to the staff lunchroom, lays it down like it were a Seventeen magazine between our salads and microwaved spaghetti.
“Do you think my mam was more a light oak or a dark maple?” she asks.
Laura hasn’t spoken to the woman in twelve years. She did not know any of her grandchildren. None of us ask about the schism, about how sharp a knife has to be to carve a split like that. The woman left Laura the house and all its contents. She has left her the care and keeping of her vacated body. Laura plans on selling everything and bringing the children to Disney World.
“Pink silk interior or lavender?”
How do you pick out the eternal home of someone you no longer know?
Laura says that when she goes, she wants to be cremated, that at a certain point, your body turns to bone soup. She doesn’t want to be soup. She wants to go out in a blaze, to strip her flesh down to the skeleton in an instant. She never wants to be a rotting thing.
Lane wants to be fertilizer, bits of her spread over a garden so she can help new things grow. No marker, just gone. Her son hates this idea.
“But where will I go visit you?” he asks. She had him when she was twenty.
“You’ll be in your seventies,” she says. “You’ll have bigger things to worry about. You won’t need me.”
We smile at this. This is the promised land, to get to a place where we are no longer needed.
I want to be buried at sea, with a rock strapped to my still chest. I want to be sunk down in a river Virginia Woolf–style, stones heavy in both pockets. I want to be washed away.
We are not interested in leaving behind monuments. We have been taught all our lives not to be anyone’s burden. Our choices are about freedom; they have little or nothing to do with legacy. We do not care if we will be remembered or visited. We just can’t stand the thought of going through all this just to have someone shut us up in another box.
When the church bells sound I wonder if the sound rattles the teeth of the dead. The boneyard stretches for miles, encroaching on the backyards of the neighbors, casting shadows over the town park. You can read the names on the headstones from the top of the swing set. Beloved wife and mother, again and again and again until your eyes blur and you let yourself fall, sick, dizzy and stumbling to the ground.
The Catholic church that raised me is a tall white place with thick stained-glass windows depicting all the saints. I bring my children here, but we never arrive at the right time for mass. The doors are always shut, the pews empty. Mary stands out front, barefoot and ghost pale. A snake wrapped around her ankle. Chin pointed toward heaven, palms open, holding nothing. The calla lilies blow, stems scraping stems. Below ground the dead snooze. All is soft and sticking as quicksand. Wind blowing in the branches, spirit voices whispering that old hypnotic promise. Child be still.
On her death bed, Mary Wollstonecraft’s mother’s last words were recorded as being, “A little patience and all will be over.”
The children scream at each other in the back seat of my car. I pull the van into the drive of our just-right house, in our just-right neighborhood. I lift the groceries into the just-right house. The same boxes as last week and the week before that, which will be consumed at more or less the same pace. I cannot call this living.
I don’t remember the sound of my grandmother’s voice.
I wake up summer days at nine thirty, body sunk low in the mattress. I can hear the children’s voices echoing down the hall, laughing without me. I cannot move my arms, my legs. Everything is made of iron, too heavy to lift. My husband has already left for work. Downstairs there will be dishes in the sink, laundry to fold, children to entertain. A whole day will pass in a blink, without me having to make a choice, without my own self showing up to the table at all. I curl back into sleep, where at least I know who I am alone in my dreams.
My husband finds an old drawing I made for him. I mailed it to him during basic training, when my only goal was to convince him to fall in love with me. So we could have this future, this hell that I am currently treading water in. It’s a butterfly with camo wings, a yellow ribbon for a spine. He pins it to the wall of his new office. He has carried it around with him for these past ten years.
Depression can be characterized by a lack of interest in activities you used to enjoy. I look at him and feel nothing. I once wanted so much for us just to be in love, to be happy.
Our church’s youth group coordinator takes a pilgrimage to Mexico. She has cancer in her bones. She has gone to beg for blessings. She comes back with a bag full of icons for each of us, four small circle images of Our Lady of Guadalupe that have been bathed in holy water. Mary watches me now, from the bookcases and windowsills of my house, from the dashboard of my minivan. Her serene, flat forehead, the untroubled line of her lips. She sends daggers of guilt right through me for this churning vortex in my chest. Nothing is wrong, but nothing is right.
I pray to her, hail Mary, while my husband sleeps in the dark. I pray for the strength not to stab or divorce him for snoring, for watching cartoons beside the children instead of helping me with the dishes, the laundry, the groceries. For saying “nothing’s really going on,” when I beg for him to speak to me. The prayer turns to song, me whispering, singing, the Beatles to the darkened windows.
Whisper words of wisdom.
I remember running through the night like it belonged to me, on pointed shoes, barreling in short skirts, trying to outrun the sun, chin raw from the stubble marks of a stranger. At seventeen I was only ever happy when I was walking out on a knife’s edge. Now everything is wrapped in cotton. I am suffocating. While everyone around me tells me how cute my kids are, while everyone around me tells me everything is fine.
Let it be.
My grandmother’s history was told by the sons she left behind. Her story as it was told to me, was constructed entirely of the bruises and lacerations dealt to her by men.
I do not know my grandmother’s favorite song.
There is produce rotting in the fridge. This feels like a personal failing. I should have meal planned better. Should have been peeling eggplant instead of reading. I should have raised children who eat something, anything, besides dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. The broadcasters on NPR tell me that the consumption of overly processed foods leads to a lower life expectancy. Every time I hand my children a plate of something they will actually eat I feel like I am killing them slowly. Food turns to ash in my mouth. I can’t swallow it. I wake up ravenous at two am, stumble down the stairs to stuff my cheeks full of Wonder Bread until my stomach feels heavy and whole. Until the movement of my jaw convinces me that yes, I am still alive.
A little patience and all will be over.
The old lady in line behind me in the supermarket squeezes my four year old’s arm without his permission. He has gone out today in the ninety degree weather dressed like the Incredible Hulk. I did not have the energy to stop him.
“Enjoy every minute,” the stranger tells me. “It goes so fast.”
I do not know what my grandmother’s favorite book was. I don’t know the stories she told herself about her life.
When my grandmother was in hospice, I made a drawing for her on our home computer, two button-eyed angels floating in cerulean blue. I printed it out and brought it to her, snuggling close among the tubes. She smelled always like baby powder and spilt white wine, although I’d never seen her drink.
“This is you,” I said, pointing. “This is where you are going.”
I look back on this and wonder why nobody stopped me from bringing such a cruel gift to a dying woman. But I think maybe neither of my parents saw anything wrong with it. That makes it worse. Knowing that makes everything else impossible.
I’ve moved away, but I bring my grandmother flowers when I can, standing on the same patch of dirt, watching the landscape change. I wonder if she feels the rumbling of the tires out on the road. If the vibrations make her teeth ache. Will she forgive me for desecrating this grave so often with my words? The archaeologist of the family, I am trying to piece the fossils together. I need to figure out what went wrong. I have made my art and living as a tomb robber. There is no real forgiveness for me in this life.
In Regency-era England, communities used to collect the bones from all the graves once every couple years. They piled the remains into tall skeletal stacks and lit them. Bone fire night. Bonfire night. It was necessary, or else the cemetery would fill to bursting. The old dead had to constantly make way for the new. The groundskeepers planted large trees, willows and oaks around the headstones to soak up the moisture caused by a person breaking down. No dead go quietly into that good earth. They rage, sink, weep. We are never done with them.
I remember my grandmother’s hands, pale at the knuckles, blue under the fingernails, with little white marks just above her cuticles from where she had closed doors and drawers and cabinets on herself without noticing. Her hands rolled out pie dough on the counter, palm lines coated in flour. Everything we ate then had her fingerprints baked into it. She tucked dough around apples, blueberries, thick chunks of ground meat and nutmeg. She slipped a knife into my hands, told me to hold my feet steady. Her hand over mine, she showed me how to punch the airholes in the top of the pie so that it wouldn’t explode under the heat of the oven.
“Everything needs to breathe,” she told me.
Edgar Allan Poe had a real fear of being buried alive. In his time, it happened. Coffins were exhumed with fingernail marks cut deep into the underside of the casket lids. The deceased’s hands were found to be bloody and broken, the cuticles peeled back. A man invented a bell to wrap around the corpse’s finger. Every time it gets too quiet, I can hear my ears ringing.
Holy Mary, mother of God.
What did Mary do after she delivered Jesus? Her personal history goes blank. All that we know of her after is the way that her life collided with her son’s. She is never spoken of in a separate breath again. I do not know if things would have been different if the god we prayed to looked like us.
My grandmother picked out my name. She heard it on a game show once while she was folding clothes. It was what one of the contestants was called. I wanted it to be something deeper than just after a stranger, a woman watching a wheel desperate for the sliver of a chance to win.
If I have a daughter, I will name her Joan or Heloise or Simone. Someone who died with her sword drawn and her teeth bared. I will name her after witches and women who became kindling for wanting more than the world allowed them. I will raise her up to be a warrior. I will never teach her that patience is a virtue. But even this is not a novel or noble thought, but makes me complicit in my own disappearance, by hoisting my responsibility to be somebody onto the next generation, who may not be equipped to do any better than I am right now.
I am afraid of being buried alive.
I do not know what kept my grandmother up at night.
Every year, I lose a piece of my grandmother’s face, the elegant slope of her nose, the color of her eyes, the angle at which her teeth were set into her gums. I spent most of my childhood pressing her image into my brain, again and again, like a book-bound flower. I am tired. My fingernails hurt from trying to bend themselves back, keeping hold of the past.
My children do not know her name. I do not know how to tell her story. I am failing at it, even now. I failed her yesterday. I will fail her tomorrow. Our lives are not as different as I would like them to be.
The teachers that retire from the school at which I work all come back to sub after a year or two. They come back, slumped and loose skinned, refreshed and shining, but desperate looking. When I ask them why they have returned, they tell me that time is long, there is not so much to do out there as one would think.
Only one grabs my arm, tells me, “Outside of these walls, I don’t exist.”
There is no peace for us, not even in old age. A woman’s identity is a fragile thing that can still be bartered, bought, sold. Stolen. Our maintenance of it must be constant even with aching bones. We are not allowed to rest without facing the threat of invisibility.
A little patience and all will be over.
I do not know my grandmother’s laugh.
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners.
I do not know my grandmother’s sins. I want to be able to count them like rosary beads, the choices and missteps. The forks in the road that made her human. Her life has been told to me through the things that happened to her, through the things she endured valiantly. The unexpected pregnancy, the angry husband, the cancer.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave was moved to make way for a railroad track. Her body has been taken elsewhere. Only the original marker remains of the cemetery where Mary’s daughter and her lover once fell together over her moldering bones. We are locked at the door to this history. We cannot travel back and stare up at the same sky that Mary Jr. blinked at, her head heavy on Shelley’s chest.
The groundskeepers have yanked up the tree beside my grandmother’s grave. Now it stands stark and unguarded beside the road.
Nostalgia is a lie. It hobbles me, brings me down to all fours, groping. My children scream at me from the next room, demanding gummies, freezer pizza, mac and cheese in the quiet after-dinner hours. I barrel toward them, seeking a reclamation of my own childhood. To go back. It was all I wanted for so long. It cannot be done. I have disfigured myself in trying.
They do not know my grandmother’s name.
My grandmother was always cold, weighed down in heavy wool in warm weather. I imagine her with skin chiseled out of marble, cool to the touch and unbending, weathered slowly by rain and erosion. She used to skip meals, boiling hot water and lemon on the stove top.
All the family says I am cold like her, teeth chattering in August heat. I wonder if this commonality has something or everything to do with our inability to feed ourselves.
My grandmother died hungry.
Mother Mary left no grave when she went. She was swept up to heaven, body and all, so that she would not have to suffer the humiliation of death. That is to say that the most perfect woman left no trace of herself, not a bone or a tooth. Her track of footprints ended abruptly on the ground, like she was never there.
Resurrection is a man’s sport. Despite Plath’s best argument, biblically, there is no Lady Lazarus. No tombstone pushed aside, no bandages pulled from our eyes. The best a woman can hope for is this strange brand of alien abduction. The best we can hope is that we will not burden the earth with our crumbling bones.
Love breaks my spine. It twists my bones and gives away each strand of my hair, each scraped-clean fingernail. It cracks open my skin like bread. Love takes from me my name.
Love is a magic trick. The magician’s assistant steps into the box in her stilettoes and sparkling tights. The door seals shut. Three taps of his wand and she is replaced by a hat, a chair, a speechless plain white dove. The audience applauds, but not once do they ever ask for her return.
Aliza Wyman
Passing by the boneyard on our way to mass, my hand tight in my mother’s because we had to cross the street and she did not trust me even at seven to travel anywhere on my own, I asked her about the casket we had planted the autumn before.
“Does she still look like herself?” I needed to know.
She winced like I’d bit her. “Let’s just try to think of granmere as she was.”
But all I had ever known about her was her dying, the tubes and her face caving in on itself, the colostomy bag taped to her yellow stomach.
Twenty years later, the graveyard doesn’t look the same. They have pulled up the old dead tree beside the road. The space where the roots were leaves a gaping hole, a wound in the soil. It was a tricky excavation. The tree had grown itself around the coffins, laced its fingers under lids and through the ribs of other people’s beloveds. When the workmen tore the oak out, someone had to leap into the pit with a chainsaw, his heart eye level with the corpses. When I go to visit in the dusk, when the Canadian geese fly low, I crawl into the hole the tree left, nose filled up with the smell of dirt and rotting leaves. It is a quiet, muffled place. It doesn’t panic me at all. But maybe that is because it is temporary. I can crawl in and out of here at will.
My grandmother’s grave is permanent, a granite stone block that only half belongs to her and half belongs to a man who had once thrown her through a window before apologizing for it, while there was still blood running down her brow into her eyes.
I don’t remember what my grandmother’s laugh sounded like.
It’s Laura who starts it. She brings the funeral director’s catalogue to the staff lunchroom, lays it down like it were a Seventeen magazine between our salads and microwaved spaghetti.
“Do you think my mam was more a light oak or a dark maple?” she asks.
Laura hasn’t spoken to the woman in twelve years. She did not know any of her grandchildren. None of us ask about the schism, about how sharp a knife has to be to carve a split like that. The woman left Laura the house and all its contents. She has left her the care and keeping of her vacated body. Laura plans on selling everything and bringing the children to Disney World.
“Pink silk interior or lavender?”
How do you pick out the eternal home of someone you no longer know?
Laura says that when she goes, she wants to be cremated, that at a certain point, your body turns to bone soup. She doesn’t want to be soup. She wants to go out in a blaze, to strip her flesh down to the skeleton in an instant. She never wants to be a rotting thing.
Lane wants to be fertilizer, bits of her spread over a garden so she can help new things grow. No marker, just gone. Her son hates this idea.
“But where will I go visit you?” he asks. She had him when she was twenty.
“You’ll be in your seventies,” she says. “You’ll have bigger things to worry about. You won’t need me.”
We smile at this. This is the promised land, to get to a place where we are no longer needed.
I want to be buried at sea, with a rock strapped to my still chest. I want to be sunk down in a river Virginia Woolf–style, stones heavy in both pockets. I want to be washed away.
We are not interested in leaving behind monuments. We have been taught all our lives not to be anyone’s burden. Our choices are about freedom; they have little or nothing to do with legacy. We do not care if we will be remembered or visited. We just can’t stand the thought of going through all this just to have someone shut us up in another box.
When the church bells sound I wonder if the sound rattles the teeth of the dead. The boneyard stretches for miles, encroaching on the backyards of the neighbors, casting shadows over the town park. You can read the names on the headstones from the top of the swing set. Beloved wife and mother, again and again and again until your eyes blur and you let yourself fall, sick, dizzy and stumbling to the ground.
The Catholic church that raised me is a tall white place with thick stained-glass windows depicting all the saints. I bring my children here, but we never arrive at the right time for mass. The doors are always shut, the pews empty. Mary stands out front, barefoot and ghost pale. A snake wrapped around her ankle. Chin pointed toward heaven, palms open, holding nothing. The calla lilies blow, stems scraping stems. Below ground the dead snooze. All is soft and sticking as quicksand. Wind blowing in the branches, spirit voices whispering that old hypnotic promise. Child be still.
On her death bed, Mary Wollstonecraft’s mother’s last words were recorded as being, “A little patience and all will be over.”
The children scream at each other in the back seat of my car. I pull the van into the drive of our just-right house, in our just-right neighborhood. I lift the groceries into the just-right house. The same boxes as last week and the week before that, which will be consumed at more or less the same pace. I cannot call this living.
I don’t remember the sound of my grandmother’s voice.
I wake up summer days at nine thirty, body sunk low in the mattress. I can hear the children’s voices echoing down the hall, laughing without me. I cannot move my arms, my legs. Everything is made of iron, too heavy to lift. My husband has already left for work. Downstairs there will be dishes in the sink, laundry to fold, children to entertain. A whole day will pass in a blink, without me having to make a choice, without my own self showing up to the table at all. I curl back into sleep, where at least I know who I am alone in my dreams.
My husband finds an old drawing I made for him. I mailed it to him during basic training, when my only goal was to convince him to fall in love with me. So we could have this future, this hell that I am currently treading water in. It’s a butterfly with camo wings, a yellow ribbon for a spine. He pins it to the wall of his new office. He has carried it around with him for these past ten years.
Depression can be characterized by a lack of interest in activities you used to enjoy. I look at him and feel nothing. I once wanted so much for us just to be in love, to be happy.
Our church’s youth group coordinator takes a pilgrimage to Mexico. She has cancer in her bones. She has gone to beg for blessings. She comes back with a bag full of icons for each of us, four small circle images of Our Lady of Guadalupe that have been bathed in holy water. Mary watches me now, from the bookcases and windowsills of my house, from the dashboard of my minivan. Her serene, flat forehead, the untroubled line of her lips. She sends daggers of guilt right through me for this churning vortex in my chest. Nothing is wrong, but nothing is right.
I pray to her, hail Mary, while my husband sleeps in the dark. I pray for the strength not to stab or divorce him for snoring, for watching cartoons beside the children instead of helping me with the dishes, the laundry, the groceries. For saying “nothing’s really going on,” when I beg for him to speak to me. The prayer turns to song, me whispering, singing, the Beatles to the darkened windows.
Whisper words of wisdom.
I remember running through the night like it belonged to me, on pointed shoes, barreling in short skirts, trying to outrun the sun, chin raw from the stubble marks of a stranger. At seventeen I was only ever happy when I was walking out on a knife’s edge. Now everything is wrapped in cotton. I am suffocating. While everyone around me tells me how cute my kids are, while everyone around me tells me everything is fine.
Let it be.
My grandmother’s history was told by the sons she left behind. Her story as it was told to me, was constructed entirely of the bruises and lacerations dealt to her by men.
I do not know my grandmother’s favorite song.
There is produce rotting in the fridge. This feels like a personal failing. I should have meal planned better. Should have been peeling eggplant instead of reading. I should have raised children who eat something, anything, besides dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. The broadcasters on NPR tell me that the consumption of overly processed foods leads to a lower life expectancy. Every time I hand my children a plate of something they will actually eat I feel like I am killing them slowly. Food turns to ash in my mouth. I can’t swallow it. I wake up ravenous at two am, stumble down the stairs to stuff my cheeks full of Wonder Bread until my stomach feels heavy and whole. Until the movement of my jaw convinces me that yes, I am still alive.
A little patience and all will be over.
The old lady in line behind me in the supermarket squeezes my four year old’s arm without his permission. He has gone out today in the ninety degree weather dressed like the Incredible Hulk. I did not have the energy to stop him.
“Enjoy every minute,” the stranger tells me. “It goes so fast.”
I do not know what my grandmother’s favorite book was. I don’t know the stories she told herself about her life.
When my grandmother was in hospice, I made a drawing for her on our home computer, two button-eyed angels floating in cerulean blue. I printed it out and brought it to her, snuggling close among the tubes. She smelled always like baby powder and spilt white wine, although I’d never seen her drink.
“This is you,” I said, pointing. “This is where you are going.”
I look back on this and wonder why nobody stopped me from bringing such a cruel gift to a dying woman. But I think maybe neither of my parents saw anything wrong with it. That makes it worse. Knowing that makes everything else impossible.
I’ve moved away, but I bring my grandmother flowers when I can, standing on the same patch of dirt, watching the landscape change. I wonder if she feels the rumbling of the tires out on the road. If the vibrations make her teeth ache. Will she forgive me for desecrating this grave so often with my words? The archaeologist of the family, I am trying to piece the fossils together. I need to figure out what went wrong. I have made my art and living as a tomb robber. There is no real forgiveness for me in this life.
In Regency-era England, communities used to collect the bones from all the graves once every couple years. They piled the remains into tall skeletal stacks and lit them. Bone fire night. Bonfire night. It was necessary, or else the cemetery would fill to bursting. The old dead had to constantly make way for the new. The groundskeepers planted large trees, willows and oaks around the headstones to soak up the moisture caused by a person breaking down. No dead go quietly into that good earth. They rage, sink, weep. We are never done with them.
I remember my grandmother’s hands, pale at the knuckles, blue under the fingernails, with little white marks just above her cuticles from where she had closed doors and drawers and cabinets on herself without noticing. Her hands rolled out pie dough on the counter, palm lines coated in flour. Everything we ate then had her fingerprints baked into it. She tucked dough around apples, blueberries, thick chunks of ground meat and nutmeg. She slipped a knife into my hands, told me to hold my feet steady. Her hand over mine, she showed me how to punch the airholes in the top of the pie so that it wouldn’t explode under the heat of the oven.
“Everything needs to breathe,” she told me.
Edgar Allan Poe had a real fear of being buried alive. In his time, it happened. Coffins were exhumed with fingernail marks cut deep into the underside of the casket lids. The deceased’s hands were found to be bloody and broken, the cuticles peeled back. A man invented a bell to wrap around the corpse’s finger. Every time it gets too quiet, I can hear my ears ringing.
Holy Mary, mother of God.
What did Mary do after she delivered Jesus? Her personal history goes blank. All that we know of her after is the way that her life collided with her son’s. She is never spoken of in a separate breath again. I do not know if things would have been different if the god we prayed to looked like us.
My grandmother picked out my name. She heard it on a game show once while she was folding clothes. It was what one of the contestants was called. I wanted it to be something deeper than just after a stranger, a woman watching a wheel desperate for the sliver of a chance to win.
If I have a daughter, I will name her Joan or Heloise or Simone. Someone who died with her sword drawn and her teeth bared. I will name her after witches and women who became kindling for wanting more than the world allowed them. I will raise her up to be a warrior. I will never teach her that patience is a virtue. But even this is not a novel or noble thought, but makes me complicit in my own disappearance, by hoisting my responsibility to be somebody onto the next generation, who may not be equipped to do any better than I am right now.
I am afraid of being buried alive.
I do not know what kept my grandmother up at night.
Every year, I lose a piece of my grandmother’s face, the elegant slope of her nose, the color of her eyes, the angle at which her teeth were set into her gums. I spent most of my childhood pressing her image into my brain, again and again, like a book-bound flower. I am tired. My fingernails hurt from trying to bend themselves back, keeping hold of the past.
My children do not know her name. I do not know how to tell her story. I am failing at it, even now. I failed her yesterday. I will fail her tomorrow. Our lives are not as different as I would like them to be.
The teachers that retire from the school at which I work all come back to sub after a year or two. They come back, slumped and loose skinned, refreshed and shining, but desperate looking. When I ask them why they have returned, they tell me that time is long, there is not so much to do out there as one would think.
Only one grabs my arm, tells me, “Outside of these walls, I don’t exist.”
There is no peace for us, not even in old age. A woman’s identity is a fragile thing that can still be bartered, bought, sold. Stolen. Our maintenance of it must be constant even with aching bones. We are not allowed to rest without facing the threat of invisibility.
A little patience and all will be over.
I do not know my grandmother’s laugh.
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners.
I do not know my grandmother’s sins. I want to be able to count them like rosary beads, the choices and missteps. The forks in the road that made her human. Her life has been told to me through the things that happened to her, through the things she endured valiantly. The unexpected pregnancy, the angry husband, the cancer.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave was moved to make way for a railroad track. Her body has been taken elsewhere. Only the original marker remains of the cemetery where Mary’s daughter and her lover once fell together over her moldering bones. We are locked at the door to this history. We cannot travel back and stare up at the same sky that Mary Jr. blinked at, her head heavy on Shelley’s chest.
The groundskeepers have yanked up the tree beside my grandmother’s grave. Now it stands stark and unguarded beside the road.
Nostalgia is a lie. It hobbles me, brings me down to all fours, groping. My children scream at me from the next room, demanding gummies, freezer pizza, mac and cheese in the quiet after-dinner hours. I barrel toward them, seeking a reclamation of my own childhood. To go back. It was all I wanted for so long. It cannot be done. I have disfigured myself in trying.
They do not know my grandmother’s name.
My grandmother was always cold, weighed down in heavy wool in warm weather. I imagine her with skin chiseled out of marble, cool to the touch and unbending, weathered slowly by rain and erosion. She used to skip meals, boiling hot water and lemon on the stove top.
All the family says I am cold like her, teeth chattering in August heat. I wonder if this commonality has something or everything to do with our inability to feed ourselves.
My grandmother died hungry.
Mother Mary left no grave when she went. She was swept up to heaven, body and all, so that she would not have to suffer the humiliation of death. That is to say that the most perfect woman left no trace of herself, not a bone or a tooth. Her track of footprints ended abruptly on the ground, like she was never there.
Resurrection is a man’s sport. Despite Plath’s best argument, biblically, there is no Lady Lazarus. No tombstone pushed aside, no bandages pulled from our eyes. The best a woman can hope for is this strange brand of alien abduction. The best we can hope is that we will not burden the earth with our crumbling bones.
Love breaks my spine. It twists my bones and gives away each strand of my hair, each scraped-clean fingernail. It cracks open my skin like bread. Love takes from me my name.
Love is a magic trick. The magician’s assistant steps into the box in her stilettoes and sparkling tights. The door seals shut. Three taps of his wand and she is replaced by a hat, a chair, a speechless plain white dove. The audience applauds, but not once do they ever ask for her return.