Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [83]
“I want out, out, out,” I mutter to the click of the train wheels, in which I also hear my mother’s voice screaming at me. I hear her in train wheels, in the ocean, in the rush of running water. Always I hear her—even to this day.
“Ma—I love you!” I scream. “I really love you!” And with that Theda vanishes into the middle of my pond like a rock making infinite ripples.
My face is wet with tears. They fall to the mica-flickering rock on which I sit.
“Mother!” I scream into the green leafy woods. “Mother!”
And the echo tells me she has heard.
And then it comes. The earth beneath me—pebbles, soil, insects, all—suddenly becomes transparent, and I am sitting poised above a starry sky.
Below me, there are constellations—Orion, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the Pleiades. Below me the infinite emptiness and fullness of space. A rush to my head tells me I am seeing for the first time. In my stillness, there is infinite activity; in this activity, there is infinite stillness.
I know that sex, the dance of hormones, the shimmer of flesh, the gleam of the grape, the linseed oil drop, the tear, the turpentine, are but small manifestations of this changeless and ever-changing infinity. And I know that this infinity is what I was meant to see, and that without sobriety I would never have the eyes.
“Knock on the sky and listen to the sound,” goes a Zen proverb. I knock.
“Mother!” I call, like Hamlet to his father’s ghost. “Mother!” And the green leaves of the trees rustle back: “Hush, Louise, I love you, I will never die.”
Then silence. The woods settle down to their own sounds—cricket, leaf, the fall of a sparrow.
Out of the forest walks a doe, followed by two little Bambis. They graze and nibble on low-hanging branches and tender shrubs, perking up their big ears, putting down their delicate hooves, walking very close to where I sit in my practiced stillness, on the edge of my pond.
The mama deer walks to the edge of the pond and peers in, as if at her own reflection, and the babies follow suit, making delicate twig-snapping noises with their little hooves. The woods are alive with life of all sorts—deer, raccoons, mushrooms, insects, grubs, snakes, worms, butterflies. “Nature will bear the closest inspection,” says Thoreau. “She invites us to lay our eyes level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plain.” It is as if the arrangement of molecules settles on different forms—now deer, now man or woman, now leaves—in response to some divine energy force field, but that all these forms are, in some sense, one.
Two wild little human Bambis whoop out of the woods, screaming, “Mommy!” And the doe and her Bambis are banished, back to the shimmering green world of the forest, lost in its dapple.
“Whatcha doin’, Mom?” asks Ed.
“Nothing.”
“Why?” asks Mike.
“Because it’s the hardest thing of all to do.”
“She’s cuckoo,” says Mike to Ed, “but lovable.” And they come to hug me on the edge of the universe.
14
The Qualification
Listen to my story, an’ everything’ll come out true.
—Bessie Smith
I had never qualified at a meeting. I had seen others do it—tried to hear them and not to hear them—but I was terrified to make that leap. Now Emmie thought I should make that leap. I hadn’t even been sober a month. I wasn’t qualified to qualify. Nonetheless, one day I went to a meeting in my little white church and the slated speaker did not appear.
“Who needs to speak?” asked the secretary of the meeting.
My hand went up as if without my conscious knowledge.
“I do!” my sane mind blurted out.
And before I knew it, I was sitting at the shaky trestle table before the whole group, spewing out my story to the smoky room.
Can I even remember what I said?
Qualifying at a meeting is like childbirth, like falling in love, like The Land of Fuck. It is hard to remember what you did there, said there, cried there. The words tumble out, burst between your lips—and somehow, without your knowing what transpired, your whole life is altered.