scar is another word for seam

by Amie Souza Reilly

Laura Adai

From the pen of Ms. Ana Lara Sousa 

27 Church Street

Essex, New York, 65143

June 12, 1994

Dear Mere,

Last week, inside a book of May Swenson poems, I found a note on a slip of paper, written in your handwriting: “Yesterday, while we were at Semyon Alexeyitch’s, my wife made a very good joke about you, saying that Tatyana Petrovna and you were a pair of birds always on the wing.”

I know this is Dostoyevsky but I do not know why it is inside this book of poems.

It was hot and also raining and I had been working in my studio. Your note stuck to my fingers. I think about you often, Mere, and sometimes I wonder if you think about me back. Were we the pair of birds always on the wing?

The last phone number I have for you, written in an address book I’ve had for so long it’s held together with rubber bands, is more than thirty years old. I went to the phone and dialed, my finger finding the buttons as if they still call you every day. My digits know your digits. A muscle memory.

When I heard the intercept message—“The number you have reached has been changed, or is no longer in service”— I stayed on the line, wondering how long the phone company waits before assigning it to someone new. Then I stood up and retrieved the phonebook from the top of my refrigerator.

I am living again in Essex, but I know you are not because if you were I would have seen you in town. Your sister’s phone number was listed, in Elizabethtown, and so I called, and she answered. Her tone was flippant but also matter-of-fact, as if she still thought of me as being twenty, as wayward and searching, and maybe she’s not wrong. She told me what is happening to you and the news cratered me.

When your mother’s kidneys killed her you threw yourself, face down, on your bed and lifted your blouse, asked me to draw on your back where your kidneys were. I filled those bean-shaped marker lines with the smooth stones you kept in a peanut butter jar on the windowsill and played that Joni Mitchell record with the yellow cover and “Free Man in Paris” on it. We made up stories about made-up people, and lived outside of ourselves, laughing until we got hungry. I thought for sure it would not happen to you.

After I hung up with your sister I decided to come visit you in the hospital. I felt the decision in the roots of my hair. I will drive down to Boston and then take the train into New Haven to save on gas.

I wonder if you remember the time we protested in front of the fur coat store near Yale, waiting with buckets of viscous red paint, planning to dump them on the coats of fancy women, hoping to stun them with the visceral-ness, so convinced we’d shake them of their cruelty that they’d vow to never wear fur again. But no one came to the store that afternoon. We brought the buckets back to our apartment and left them in the closet when we moved out.

Do you remember when, instead of calling you “Mere” like everyone else did, I tried to call you “Red” instead? It’s in there, MeREDith, but you got so angry with me. Why were you so upset, Mere?

Maybe you won’t want to see me when I show up at the hospital or maybe you’ll be asleep or in too much pain to talk to me. Or maybe you will think that I’m coming to apologize just because you’re sick, or worse, you will think I’m coming to give you the chance to apologize to me.

I just want you to know that I remember how you used to do that funny thing when you saw a yellow moving truck. Lick your thumb and drag it across your palm, snap your fingers and then make a fist, hit it against your open palm. The popping sound it made, the light snail trail of your spit still there. “For good luck,” you said. I think of you whenever I see one of those moving trucks. This means I think of you every time someone moves.

My nephew loves this game, too. He looks on the highway for yellow moving trucks. His name is Jack and he is four years old. Jack looks a bit like me, he has my nose, poor thing. David, you remember my brother, looks a little like Ponch from that old show Chips, if instead of a police uniform Ponch wore cable knit sweaters and loafers. Sometimes I watch reruns of it on Nick at Night.

I only moved back here a few years ago and I’m not planning on staying long. David and his wife (he married Gloria) live here, too. I came to help them when Jack was born, and soon I think I’ll move back to the city, though I can’t be sure.

David and Glor and Jack live in my parents’ old house. They moved in after our parents died. I am not bringing this up for any other reason but to tell you that Essex looks the same as it did when I brought you here that summer. How old were we? (How young we were.) Twenty-one, I think. We carried matching blue purses. The ferry still slips back and forth and never sinks.

It is hard to imagine you looking any differently than you did the last day I saw you. All those years we talked about being artists like Hannah Höch, those bits of cut-up photos, those dolls she made, and then you, moving forward, glossy magazines embedded on canvas. Until, The Mere Josepha Gallery Event.

I have frozen you into that night, cannot picture you walking out of the gallery, can’t imagine you dressed in anything other than that black shift dress your sister made. I just now closed my eyes and saw you there, the light over your hair, the flip at the ends just barely skimming your shoulders.

I know you are not there anymore, I know you are at Yale New Haven Hospital, I assume you are thin and your skin and eyes are yellowed. I can’t possibly have gone so long without knowing you, but I did.

Did you ever take a trip on an airplane? This seems like a question I should already know the answer to, it seems like a question that only a stranger would ask another stranger, but I realized today that I don’t know the answer.

The airplane question seems like a silly one to ask, when I should be asking about marriage and children. But I feel like I already know those answers and that the answers are yes and then no, and then no again. I imagine you got married and then divorced, I imagine you didn’t have children. I imagine that’s why you are no longer married. Though today when I was driving, I realized that this might not be true of you, only of me.

I think about those collages you made. How you took something that once was whole and chopped it up, then rearranged it. Laying it out like that, the freedom to destroy something in order to make something. Even though that painting was something new altogether, it still appeared broken. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Perhaps that is why you found success, and maybe why I didn’t. You understand something more about the way things can be reordered, the ways things never actually stay the same.

But what about all the pieces you didn’t use? There are magazine pages somewhere, glossy photos of models’ faces with their eyes cut out.

I stopped painting after that night. I make dioramas now, sculpting tiny animals and putting them into domestic scenes. I tried a few times to do the reverse, to sculpt tiny people and put them in nature, but that seemed ridiculous. Full-sized humans are always in nature, plowing through, and nothing about it in miniature seems to bewilder. (Be wilder.)

Today I made a tiny deer, a doe, and put her in a tiny kitchen that I built from an old wine crate. I tiled the floor and papered the walls. I even macraméd a small plant holder to hang from the ceiling, which I also tiled, and inside the holder I put a spider plant, a real one that I cut off the large one in my living room. On the stove there is a carrot in a frying pan, and I arranged the deer so she is standing at the stove, her tail turned up in alarm, and as I placed her there I thought that maybe you are still angry at me. That maybe this letter is not something you want. I almost stopped writing it.

It was making this diorama that sent me to the May Swenson book. I needed her “A Lake Scene” poem: “So innocent this scene, I feel I see it/ with a deer’s eye.” For this is what I will title this diorama when it’s finished, which it almost is.

And in that book was the note from you, Dostoyevsky’s story in letters.

That night, after I walked out of your gallery, I went to a bar. I was so angry, I thought because you had used that photo of me in your collage, the one where I was looking across the lake, my hand shading my eyes. I was angry that you’d cut me up, but angrier that it was there, hanging beneath those lights, all those people looking at me looking out into nothing. And you, the shift dress, the white placards with your name, in italics the word: ARTIST.

When I left I went to a bar and had some gin martinis. I left with a man who wore his hat too low on his head, went back to his apartment for another drink, and when I left I realized he had stolen the handkerchief right out of my purse. I walked to the train without anything to wipe my nose.

Each morning after that, tomorrow seemed like a better day for me to apologize to you.

Sometimes I still think I see my mother out of the corner of my eye. When I see her, she appears to me in other women. Other women have her hands or her hair, other women walk like her, somewhere between a heron and an ice skater. The woman at the library in town has earlobes like hers—they attach to the side of her face. I never see my father this way, imagined but feeling real, and I don’t know what this means.

When they died, I thought that you would know, cosmically, that they were gone. I thought you would show up at their funeral, and the two of us, thirty-year-old women, the edges of us that we were still sketching back then filled out, would embrace and share a tear-filled reunion. My loss would make bygones be bygones. But you did not come.

After they died I had a dream about you, and in the dream I was standing in the lake instead of on the shore, but I was still shielding my eyes the way I was in that photo, blocking the sun as it set, and when I turned around, you were there, holding out a pair of hedge clippers.

I forgive you of this, and not just because you are dying. Today I was cleaning out my refrigerator, a bunch of mustard greens in the crisper had somehow become slime at the stem and crumbled to dust at the leaves. When I shimmied the drawer out, dumped the crumbs and yellowed water into the sink, I thought: she may not have known. Or, perhaps, she knew but did not know that I needed her still.

I am leaving on Tuesday, in the morning. I have already booked two nights at a chain hotel, I keep forgetting whether it is a Marriott or a Holiday Inn, they are all the same anyway, except that one is reserved for me and the other doesn’t know I exist. I wonder if it’ll be rainy when I arrive.

I am leaving on Tuesday so that I’ll arrive after you’ve read this letter, but not before you can write me back.

In my suitcase will be my father’s fisherman sweater and my deer diorama. I will bring the book of May Swenson poems, too, and perhaps, if you are feeling up to it, we can read them to each other, and maybe I will write down a line or two on a thin paper napkin and slide it beneath your bowl of Jell-O when you aren’t looking.

When I get there, I will take off my shoes and I’ll be careful when I slide into your bed, on the side closer to the window. This way, when you ask me what is happening outside, I can tell you about the two little girls hopping in a puddle, one wearing a yellow hat and the other letting the rain drip into the folds of her dark brown braids. I’ll explain the sound of them laughing, like nickels in a can, their mouths as round as moons. How their legs are speckled with pinpricks of mud. I’ll explain exactly what shade of blue the taller one’s stuffed duck is. When you ask why they are here, I’ll tell you it’s because their mother is giving birth to another daughter, who will come out hollering and the doctor will say “boy, she has a set of lungs on her!” and then her father in the waiting room will start handing out candy cigars. I’ll tell you that the potted trees by the entrance are strung with white lights like stars that fell from the sky. I’ll tell you that the cafeteria food is actually delicious, and that I’ve quit smoking. I’ll tell you that I saw three yellow moving trucks on my trip down, each one luckier than the next. None of this will be true, but that is not the point.

We won’t need to say we’re sorry, Mere. Because it’s like that sometimes, when time passes, like when a wound is closed with stitches and the itch is worse than the cut itself so you remove the sutures with cuticle scissors, and you never think of the cut again until you see your reflection in the mirror and notice the scar.

After I tell you about the girls in the puddle and their mother’s new baby I will open up your hand. Even though it will be too warm inside your room, the lake stone in my pocket will still be cool, and I will put it in your palm. Then we will sing what we remember from that Joni Mitchell album, perched in your bed, your head against mine, skull to skull, until the rain stops, because we have no place left to go but everywhere.

Yours,

Ana

---

Amie Souza Reilly lives and teaches in Connecticut. Her work can be found in Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel and elsewhere. Tweets @Smidgeon227.