The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [32]
I suspect that I felt sanctified by culture. My grief at the end of my marriage to Stan translated as well as grief over the loss of that sense of sanctification.
By way of attempting now to drop this pretense, there are new things to consider. What are they? They are hard to name. They begin without language. Or they are imbibed with a privacy that refuses words. They seem to come from the same place my poetry does, as if all these years I'd sought to house each in different chambers in an attempt to keep my mothering separate from my art. Did I believe that one was more pure than another, that their morals were at odds? Was my work my wildness and my mothering its antidote?
What is Vasalisa learning? The first task demands that she let the memory of her own good mother die. She must stop looking for her mother's blessing. She is cleaning Baba Yaga's house, separating mildewed corn from good corn, poppy seed from dirt, dusting the bolts on the doors and shutters made of human fingers.
The steamer trunk so carefully packed for Stephen pending the event of his abduction to the residential treatment center sits gathering dust in the basement. Of his own accord Stephen has set the car keys aside and turned in his license. At a recent court appearance the judge told him unequivocally that were he caught again in the car, he would be arrested, charged, and sent to juvenile detention for no less than a year.
Coming in from Boston one evening, I find Stephen amidst bike parts in our garage. “I'm fixing it up,” he says. “If I get caught driving I'm fucked.” Without looking up at me he asks, “Do you want my keys?” He laughs. “I've got about six or seven sets hidden around here …”
“I've got keys,” I answer. “But hey, it's good to know there are extra ones around.”
As for the gun incident at school, he is excused of any crime, the dilemma of whether holding a gun constitutes possession decided in his favor. The grace of these two resolutions stuns us. We seem to want to hold on to the feeling, which renders us terribly polite to each other.
And now it's summer. We are relieved that school is out. We sleep in, we are lazy Stephen stays up each night working in the darkroom we've created in the basement, or mixing music on his synthesizer. Friends come and go. I've taken to gardening. I like to work after the sun goes down, carrying candles and a thermos of iced tea into the dirt. I, too, work past midnight.
I'm thinking, digging, planting. If study is a kind of prayer, then I am praying. I begin to understand that there is no rescue after which we are returned to our old lives. Of all the expectations I've entertained, perhaps that one has been the most destructive. I'm thinking of Vasalisa's name. It sounds to me like vacillation.
One night I leave my gardening to go look up the word in the OED. Dirt smears the page where I read, “from the Latin, to sway, totter …” “I accept that,” I say, returning to the garden, musing on the moment of the word, the slide and now of it. Vasalisa, vacillation. From the basement windows I can hear Stephen mix and remix phrases of music as he carefully dubs in each transition, backs up again and again to smooth out and resurface voice to instrument, voice to voice, instrument to voice.
Sometimes I'm invited down to Stephen's darkroom to watch by cave light the faces of friends and strangers, now and then my own, float to the surface of the page, take on definition, light and shadow.
“Wait till you see this one.” Stephen stirs the water in the pan. “The bike's turned out to be a good thing for my pictures. I'm closer, I notice stuff …”
“Who's this one?”
“Watch …”
I begin to make out shapes, gray on gray rising, a pile of stones,