Isadora Read online

  A woman once worked the pedals of a loom broader than her spanning arms to make this lovely rug, easing back at times to rest on a rolled rug of lesser quality, one of her own early attempts. The finished product was sold or loaned or given in good faith, and the woman was paid or thanked or allowed to remain alive to make another, and the rug continued to exist beyond its creator’s desire to know it. My body may move gracefully without attention but cannot move artfully without intention, and so my art will die with me. A certain sturdiness is asked of me! I am rug and woman both.

  Our hotel suite is a well-stocked womb. Some Monastiraki Marie Antoinette had a glorious fantasy of what a French hotel should look like, and it shows on the tin trays stocked with useless little carved pieces, elephant figures in ivory and amber, and empty perfume bottles shaped like cut jewels and smelling of cinnamon and mold. The old armoire splinters at the base, but they did a fair job of patching it up with wood glue and covering the rest of the damage with a few strategically placed hatboxes. I removed six pinecones from a biscuit tin in the bathroom, poured in the childrens’ ashes, and found they have taken on a pleasant woody flavor.

  Removing my wet dress reveals in the mirror a slab of noonday flesh, belly puckered above the mound, strong legs drawing down to a pair of ankles that could stop a door. Under the thin skin of my doubled tit, fine blush organs hang sweetly from their skeleton frame. Arching back and bending forward, I go hand to feet in a dancer’s hanging stretch. My bones complain, but the organs go along with their alignment turned entirely upside down. My liver and heart work some magic to keep themselves from tumbling out of my mouth and pooling on the floor. My body is proof of resilience and witness to it. Even if I had leapt from the cliff’s edge, the men who fished me out would find me buoyant and bound, my heart and lungs intact in their human raft, holding out against the invasive attentions of fish and waterfowl. Deep in my stretch, my spine begins in gradations to ease.

  Once during a period of nagging injury I was treated to an impromptu demonstration by a doctor, who held a rat’s cleaned skeleton as he spoke. The animal evolved for a life of labor, he explained, tracing his finger along the bucked bridge of the rat’s spine, showing how the bone and its attendant bits were supported by the four legs, the brain sending simple telegraphs to the heart and tail. But humankind, the doctor said, was unusual among nature. He tipped the rat so that its front paws reared in surrender and showed me the stress it placed on the hips. Mankind is born to bear its own faulty frame. The skeletal ridges of the human spine do their level best to lift the brain. Every one of us is born in balance, everyone stands to crumble.

  Fingertips to floor become hands pressed flat and then, breathing with the body’s need—draw in like a bulb sucking blood from an infant’s mouth, hold and expel, the lungs compressing—the arms slacken and cross, wrist to elbow laid gently on a rug trimmed to uniformity, a million dyed fibers experienced all at once. This pose requires stillness, steady breath, patience, strong circulation, and a general stubborn nature. One panicked inhalation will send you falling back, and the brain’s rational suggestions of surrender will have you stumbling over your own feet. The heart pounds, desperate to pull its blood back from the extremities. The solar plexus thrums.

  What would it mean to follow my every impulse? I need to make water and without a second thought I follow my need, making copious water gloriously down both legs right onto the floor, something I haven’t done since a performance years ago when I was heavily pregnant and too stubborn to feel shame. This time there’s a strange freedom to it, and I watch it pool atop the rug for one arch moment before it sinks in all at once, the poor rug lying there as quiet as a lady and allowing it.

  The door rattles, Elizabeth behind it entering. Crying out in surprise she hauls a quilt off the bed and throws it over me as if I am a pan on fire, adding such sudden weight that I collapse into my own mess, saying, “The sibling relationship!”

  “They’re weeping over your memory downstairs,” she says, her judgment only slightly muffled by the quilt. “What are you doing under there?”

  “I was just asking myself the same.” A musty warmth under the quilt contains and cultivates my own animal odor. “Feeling rather ratlike. If only you had brought a cheese.”

  “The Italian is torturing himself with shame,” she says, lifting the corner of the quilt. “You should come down and speak with him. He is a sculptor and says you are one of his greatest inspirations.”

  “I won’t forgive him until he replaces my dress.”

  She tucks her head inside. “Everyone saw it happen and they laughed and he is ashamed.”

  “Very dramatic!”

  “And you’ll catch your death, running naked around your room.”

  “Could you have my mail forwarded to this quilt? I rather like it actually.”

  She crouches close as she did years ago when we were children, our hair frenzied across the blanket which served as stage and ceiling both. Our cloth dollies were dressed as we were, in salmon-colored nightgowns, and we would press them side by side to dance the pas de deux from Blomsterfesten i Genzano, the ladies’ promenade. Mine did an aggressive polka while hers, en pointe, offered the porcelain hand sewed at the tip of her rag arm and coyly drew it away. Then the solos: Elizabeth took hers by the head and twisted to wind the cloth body up before releasing it to spin underneath, the simplest execution of a tour en l’air, suggesting that the ideal form requires a freak quality of brain-based gravity anchoring gyronic limbs, overshadowing the technical perfection of my doll’s grands jetés and creating a new and unsettling standard over which we would viciously fight, the performance forgotten. On one occasion she forced me to swallow one of the porcelain hands, and we had to wait days before it could be sifted out of the pot, rinsed, and sewn back on in secret, and still mother noticed and reprimanded us in her weary way, looking around for something to punish us with and ultimately having us shell walnuts for the rest of the afternoon.

  Elizabeth’s balconet nose twitches as she both smells the air and gives the appearance of smelling the air, an air of smelling, her theatrical gesture felt more than seen in the half dark. “Are you drunk?”

  “I don’t feel well. I’m coming down with something.” Saying this makes it true—a weakening in the lungs.

  “Fine, then. Come out when you’re ready and not a moment sooner, lest you give the impression that anyone else has the least say over your mood, and thank you very much for dragging your brother and me away for a season to prove your point.”

  “Please send my deepest apologies to the Italian and dry his tears with your left tit.”

  The door opens and gently closes, and it seems she has gone, until I hear her sharp sigh and then feel the pointed little toe of her shoe, which lands well into my midsection before I can tense against the attack. The door opens again and slams. Elizabeth always has her say in the end.

  Rolling onto my back to splay my gut to the morning air like a sunning crab, the quilt my seaworthy shell, my mind snaps at a morseled krill of a thought: Deirdre would have taken strong exception to this nakedness, her offense brought about on a child’s boundless moral grounds—surely taught by some well-meaning nurse trying to keep her clothed in public—but sweet Patrick would have crawled in with me and played moo-cow until the bell rang for supper.

  The whole cremation process came too quickly. Perhaps there was still some sense of life in them, some flickering pilot light; if we hadn’t turned them to ash, they could have had the dignity of a gradual death. They could have held hands in a marble crypt and eased themselves into the slow way of the dead, which is so foreign to young life, keeping one another’s secrets as they eased down onto the stone. I shouldn’t have agreed to burn them, Paris made me do it. If it were up to me, they would be in there with a bell to ring in case we made some kind of mistake.

  I spy with my good eye a rolled stocking tucked in the springs under the bed. It contains one of the crystal sherry glasses fro
m downstairs, as thin as a fallen leaf with winnowed glass spurs. I’ve found rye makes a better friend than sherry, brown liquor being a warming spirit and rye as warm as a rug distilled to its essence. The stocking’s patient mate behind the bed holds the pint.

  A dram for the pair! Tippled to the crystal brim and raised to catch the light for a solemn oath:

  Blessed be my children, LORD—

  Bless’d be their hearts and the soft flesh of their hands.

  Bless’d be their hands in the hands of their white-capped nurse.

  Bless’d be their bathtimes.

  Bless’d be their wailing times and the curls framing their tears.

  Bless’d be the noses given by their fathers—one puggy, one sharp—and the hearts given also.

  Bless’d be their shits up the backs of cloth pants to make a rind above them.

  Bless’d be their spelling lessons and smocks and their books and dolls, their traveling trunk.

  Bless’d be their dimples and the pinked flesh of their mouths.

  Bless’d be their mouths saying Love.

  Bless’d be their Love.

  Bless’d be their games made up with curtain cords.

  Bless’d be their hands, their mouths, their flesh,

  And bless’d be the flesh of my children, LORD—

  AMEN—

  The story of a Viennese boy who became a German man, thanks in unlikely part to Benjamin Franklin

  When Max Merz was a boy, he wanted nothing more than to grow up to become an intellectual. He was ten years old when he first had this idea, studying English under the casual tutelage of an American student who found in Max an eager pupil and extra income every other weekend at the Merz family grocery. To teach the boy clauses and tense shifts, the student loaned him a copybook featuring the writing of Benjamin Franklin. The words were designed to be traced, to hone penmanship rather than theory, but Max found utility in both. And so his very first experience with philosophy came to him in a new language. Florid and lush, Franklin’s paragraphs bloomed in his own hand, the central tenets half obscured by his own understanding but slowly revealing themselves, the curtain drawing aside.

  He began to take an immodest pleasure in his book each night, arranging himself by the lamp and touching the silver nib of his pen gently to his lips as a serious scholar might before tracing Franklin’s words with passion and vigor, pausing at times as if he were inventing the ideas and then noting them swiftly, before they flew away. He repeated the action, laying sheet after sheet of parchment over the original and tracing until the words were etched onto the page.

  Max loved the feeling of writing more than the process of thinking, and it was immaterial to him that the words he put down were not his own. He copied another page from memory, daydreaming of long nights at the dinner tables of his future professors at university. He would communicate with these men as equals and love them as brothers. Late into these intellectually rousing nights, the professors’ young wives would pour themselves another thimble of port and smile at Max with the same tender look of sentimental pride they had once given their husbands.

  Once he mastered every word and knew it all by heart, he took an empty notebook to a café. He seated himself at a straight-backed chair and copied the entire book from memory. It took a full hour to get everything down, including a short break wherein Max pretended to consult a menu. When he was done, he gazed at his work until eventually a man came out from behind the counter and chased him off.

  Max took on more hours at the grocery and began making deliveries to collect an additional stipend. With his meager savings he bought a biography of the man, which included more of his writing. Franklin, who despite speaking of Austrians as stupid and swarthy, otherwise seemed like a worldly fellow. He pursued knowledge all his life. When he was twenty years old, he created a virtue list designed to keep the course of his mind straight through the wickering ways of adulthood. Even as a youth he appreciated silence and order, chastity and industry. It was as if he knew how powerful he would become.

  Max enjoyed the biography, but the copybook remained his most faithful friend. He kept it under his pillow, sneaking a secret glance every night after he pressed his hands together and made the studious murmurings of prayer.

  Keeping it close was his first mistake, he realized in hindsight; it would have gone completely ignored had he kept it stacked on the table with his ordinary school materials. His second mistake was in how he reacted the morning his mother found it.

  She was changing his bedsheets when she found the book under his pillow and an unopened tin of tobacco under the mattress. She left the tobacco tin on his desk but brought the book to him, holding it pinched at the base of its spine like a rat she intended to thrash against a wall. His heart broke to see it like that, and he burst into shameful tears, further dismaying his mother.

  Frau Merz was a devout woman, and hated idolatry in all forms. She was horrified to see her son following the dark path; as Nebuchadnezzar worshiped Daniel, so Max worshiped this American politician. Something would have to be done.

  She pushed him into the backyard, where the first thing she saw was the bucket of muddy rainwater she kept by her vegetable garden. Taking him by the back of his neck and forcing him to his knees, she ordered him to put his beloved copybook into the bucket. He refused, hoping for a simple slap in the face, but she was coursing with horror at his betrayal and duplicity. In one motion, she tore the book from his hands and plunged it into the water herself, and when the pages touched the murky surface Max screamed as if bitten. He pleaded with her, sobbing, but she took both his hands and made him hold the book down until the bubbles quieted.

  Finally, she let him take it out. The words had gone cloudy and slipped from their bloated pages. Max bowed his head and was sick. His mother watched him clean himself off, her anger turning to shame. As a kind of consolation, she allowed him to bury the book beside the turnips and left him alone while he said a few final words.

  It would cost him dearly to buy his tutor a replacement copy, but the worst part of it all for Max was the feeling that he was burying Franklin himself, a man who had already suffered the indignity of one death and didn’t deserve to suffer again. He scraped the earth over the ruined book with a sad little spade—his mother used nothing larger to tend her garden—and, wiping his face with a dirty hand, resolved that he would commit thenceforth his strongest-held ideas to memory so as to keep them safe. There in the garden, chewing on a carrot he had accidentally unearthed in the interment, Max made an oath in the man’s memory and with the man’s words: Lose no time.

  Elizabeth returns downstairs to find the mood completely ruined

  If anyone could make herself sick by willing it, it was Isadora. She was cruel with the power she held over her own body, the despotic ruler of a nation constantly on the brink of civil war.

  Lately she was such a bother, but Elizabeth could remember a time when this power had served them all well. For years, when this party or that got too tight and someone had to answer the door to make apologies to the police, Isadora was the one they sent to play the virgin up late with her studies: Of course, Officer, I’m only grateful you arrived and yes, these are all my friends from school, won’t you come and join us for a tipple? Whenever she met someone she wanted to impress, she would mirror their expression until they mistook her for a friend. Isadora was working so hard to make everyone believe she was unwell that she had likely convinced herself, but Elizabeth would not be fooled.

  Romano was still too embarrassed by Isadora’s dismissal, so Elizabeth left him to sketch by the window, blinking hard, as if he had a physical compulsion. Artists were so delicate, the men especially so. The Italian reminded her of her brothers, who had been dear boys and fearful of strangers. Perhaps it was how they were raised. Their mother involved them all in her anxieties and put on an elaborate show for Mass before divorce shamed her away from the faith. But even after they no longer had anything to dress for on Sunday, s
he heaped velveteen expectations on her children and treated them with an extraordinary care, which taught them to be extraordinarily careful.

  Elizabeth remembered her gathering them all around the dinner table to tell them there was no God and no Santa Claus, that they had only themselves to guide them. Elizabeth as the oldest knew better than to believe this, having witnessed both transubstantiation and Christmas stockings, but Isadora took the note to heart and announced that she would find herself a job. That was how she started teaching dance, though she was only eight years old at the time and the mothers who brought their children by seemed more interested in child care than instruction. The family business was started, and everyone found their life’s purpose. It was just in time, since Daddy had gone to Los Angeles, promising more ice cream on his way out, which poor Raymond would ask after for years.

  Mother landed on her feet, as she always did. She doubled down on their training in Greek myth and encouraged them each to pick a muse: Raymond chose Clio for her books; Gus chose the globe and compass of Urania; Elizabeth picked dancing Terpsichore before her sister had a chance; and Isadora, pouting, went with Melpomene. They left California, and though Mother was right there with them from the trip to Chicago and then New York and eventually London, the Bay drew her back; she was a child of the Gold Rush, and never lost the foolish idea that glory was there for those patient enough to wait for it.

  All to say that Romano, with his sentimentality and easy tears, had immediately felt like home. He and Elizabeth had enjoyed the Victorian photo album together, laughing at the clothes their grandmothers wore in their graves: leg-o’-mutton sleeves, funny old coats. Next to the pictures, Elizabeth felt like a goddess, bending solicitous in her tunic to hear Romano’s stories of home, its mild surprises of climate. Even though he asked after her sister and she realized his angle, she still played along, answering questions about their working life together.