Charting by the Stars

PART ONE

Chapter I

DREAMING BIRTH

My father’s a man you can have faith in. Even my mother goes to him when she needs advice, though, if possible, she likes to come to her own conclusions. In bed at night, a performer of mental gymnastics, my father seeks to outwit any problem my mother might mention. He thinks about it deeply, picks it up like a barbell, turns it around in his mind, hoping to raise it above his head with the straight arm of solution.

Today, as it happens, just when we could use his muscular shoulder to lean on, he’s not here. The weightlifter is out of town. Still, he calls the hospital every half hour from phone booths. He has twenty dollars’ worth of quarters and dimes in his suit jacket pocket, which makes it bulge.

Any news? he asks the floor nurse.

Your wife is still in labor, she answers. It will be at least another several hours.

All right. I’ll call back, he says, and he hangs up.

My father’s apprentice, I lay out the facts for myself like a set of weights. This is what I know about the birth canal: others are excavated, dug out (the Panama, the Suez …); this grows itself hollow from the inside out. The atmosphere here is the gray foam of clouds. This is the dark and tubular cylinder of a gun barrel, and I’m the bullet waiting for my mother’s trigger finger. My head in readiness, my mother cocked for birth.

My heart beats to her contractions. I snap my fingers to her pulse. Her muscles are the straitjacket I wear; she encases me like a tunnel with light at the end. I want to see this light, and my head will lead me: cue ball of my opening shot, football helmet of my first forward rush. Bald round planet in search of a halo. But what, exactly, are all these things? I wish my father would call back and tell me how to be born.

(My father lay next to us in bed.

What if there’s something wrong with it? he asked.

I kicked him through my mother’s belly.

Warren, my mother told him, the doctor says everything is fine.

I mean what if it has only one arm? he said.)

If these are my arms, I have two. I have ten toes. Is this too many?

More facts: I’m going to hear jazz. I’m going to taste martinis. I’m going to make love.… I’m going to watch plants go dancing. I’m going to listen to a time bomb tick. When? I’m exhausted, dispirited.

Speculations: If my mother has given up hope, false alarm, she’ll say. It’s clear that Angela has decided against being born after all.… But this isn’t true. I’m getting anxious. I do a flip to try to calm myself.

And what if our doctor is incompetent or a drug addict, even, hooked on his own prescriptions? Or what if he’s not here yet? They’ll have to send a caddy out to the ninth hole at top speed, ducking golf balls as he runs. If the doctor makes it to the hospital in time, perhaps it’s we who are late, speeding through traffic in an ambulance at full siren or stopped for a red light in my grandfather’s Packard.

What, if by a miracle, the birth is successful, and in a case of mistaken identity, the nurse delivers me into the arms of the wrong woman on the morning she’s to leave the hospital for home? Her milk will taste like brine; I’ll refuse to drink and grow weak. Neighbors will speak of her bad habits. She’ll figure in her husband’s nightmares. My own mother wears dresses in the latest styles; she makes them herself on the Singer. Sailors whistle at her in the street. She and my father will jitterbug until almost sunrise just five nights after our return from the hospital. But what if they’ve claimed someone else instead? Surely my father will recognize me first and set the nurses straight.

Into the nursery he’ll stride, in search of his daughter. He’ll thread his way through row upon row of babies, like a farmer in the field looking for a particular hybrid he has invented himself. Perhaps he’ll tire slightly because there is something happening during this time called the baby boom and not a single crib is empty. But he’ll persevere, and when he arrives at my side, This is Angela, he’ll say.

(Ros, do you want a boy or a girl? my father asked.

I have no preference, said my mother. But perhaps a girl would be nice. To go with Benjie.

When they grow up, we can do all sorts of things together, he said.

We’ll have a foursome for bridge, she replied. We can play mixed doubles.

A child in the arts, a child in the sciences. You can take her to the ladies’ room. I’ll take him to the men’s.…

It will be so convenient, said my mother. But what if it’s not a girl … if it’s Arthur instead, after my father?

Then we’ll put a wig on him, my father said.)

Arthur. In a long horse’s mane. How I rode him like a jockey down the final stretch, outdistancing all the other possible contenders one by one, until just before the finish line when I rose in the saddle, leapt from his back, and hurled myself before him over the wire. How we set off for my mother’s affections in two identical, gassed-up cars, just after my father’s single sperm found its mark, how I altered Arthur’s road map imperceptibly, gave him false directions at the genital junction of the legs and sent him off. To where? Arthur behind my ears, Arthur under my fingernails, Arthur in the tiny cracks between my toes. Still, I’m the luck of the draw, and my mother will know it’s me.

Suddenly I’m jingling like the change in my father’s jacket. I’m the coin seeking to escape my mother’s pocket. I’m tumbling falling doing somersaults reversing my direction with a twist of the hips. I’m an expert diver, slowing my descent. I’ll make her wait a second longer how she’ll hold her breath how she’ll wonder if ever I’m coming. Is this a child, she’ll ask herself, who will never be born? Sinking. Swimming. Pirouetting. Leaping down her …

I’m on my way, I shout. The walls of her vagina muffle the sound. Can she hear me? My mother awaits me; she anticipates my arrival; she’s received the message of my kicks and spins. I’m shooting down her, my mother like a slide, and when I reach midair, a cork shot from the popgun of her thighs, I’ll find her.

I’m wearing my mother’s cervix like a hat, like a pair of eyeglasses, like a belt, like an anklet. Now the anklet is the doctor’s hand; his hand is the hook I dangle from, bait for my own life, target for the slap that inflates me like a tire. Breathing is like speeding. My mother’s eyes are the green lights, her two arms the tender roadblock of the criminal who longs to be caught. Angela, she whispers. Red and wet with blood, I rest my cheek on her breast.

Waking up is knowing that you have been asleep. I sleep much more than the average person, the one who wakes early to a stomach of worries. It’s time to sleep again when the mother sings. All my mother’s melodies sound the same, but the lyrics are varied: Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me.… Oh it’s a long, long way to Tipperary.… Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing.…

When my father joins in, I sometimes hear harmony, but after a few bars my mother always changes to his tune.

Baby, he says. Can’t you stay on key?

No, I can’t, says my mother, but, after all, you didn’t marry me for my singing voice.

I sure didn’t, he says, and he puts his two hands on the sides of her head and gently combs through her curly, thick hair with his fingers. This is affection. Then he kisses her on the lips. This is affection, too.

They blow me kisses from the doorway. Kisses are in the air. The light’s extinguished with a quick flick of my father’s finger. Kisses are lurking in the dark.

Soon sleep will cover me like a mask, and if you remember what it has been like to be asleep, this means you’ve been dreaming. My dreams are a saga; the mask is always changing its features, transforming itself through a lineage of faces. I’ve dreamt my family from the first kiss.

Today, all day, I’ve been dreaming about my grandmother’s wedding, about the train trip she took with my grandfather to California for their honeymoon. She can’t get over how here the sun sets on the ocean.… About how they stopped off in Mexico City, to visit their friends Patrick and Llewelyn at the embassy, which is where they bought the silver brooch. I’ve dreamt through 1926; my mother has just been born. My grandmother says the brooch will be her daughter’s marriage gift.

My grandfather is a Methodist. He doesn’t smoke or drink, and while he passed out no cigars after the delivery, this is not to say that he wasn’t pleased. My grandmother is weak from childbearing. She lies in bed under a flowery, hand-sewn quilt and realizes that she must have no other children. The doctor has told her so.

The dream continues and the mask’s hue changes; my mother is a blue baby. When she grows up, her favorite color will be blue to remind her how narrowly she escaped an early and tragic death. The next week a pair of movers came into the bedroom and took away the big mahogany bed, replacing it with twins, light, the moving men said, as feathers. But the two beds weighed on my grandfather’s mind.

During her convalescence, my mother’s mother passed the time quilting an identical cover to the one she had made for her nuptial bed and a miniature copy to adorn the crib of her daughter. For a year or more, the three of them slept side by side by side in the close bedroom of their familial circumstance.

Once my grandfather rolled over to face his wife and daughter; his bed was on the end, nearest the door, lest a burglar might enter. He got up in his bare feet then and stood above my grandmother’s bed until she opened her eyes.

Do you think? he asked.

No, said my grandmother, but she threw back the marriage quilt and moved over for his body beside hers. He kissed her on the throat and slept the whole night through with his arms about her waist. He dreams of the long, full skirts of his youth, of the parasols and hats trimmed with bright ribbon bands. He sees her in her high school bloomers, captain of the girls’ marching team:

I’ve set my cap for you, he told her one night.

And what a nice cap it is, said my grandmother, who was shy in receiving compliments, and while he traveled to St. Louis and Cleveland, selling soap powders and pastes, she finished high school and started playing the piano for the church. She gave recitals; she taught young girls their scales; she accompanied opera singers in Boston. When later her daughter turned out to have no ear for music, she was disappointed, but by that time she had grown older and realized that there were fewer things to sing about than when she had been young.

In her twenty-seventh year, she received a letter from Chicago, return address the YMCA where her husband-to-be had taken up residence almost a year before.

DEAR VIOLA [she read],

Chicago is windy and colder than Alaska this time of year, and I think it’s about to freeze me solid. I need a new overcoat to replace the one I came out here with. Would you order me one at Sweeney’s? Same size. Only don’t have it sent because I’ll be there to pick it up on December 15th. I’m coming home for Christmas and for good. I’d be the warmest guy in town if you’ll marry me in the spring.

Yours,

ART

In the return mail, she sent him a letter with a single word printed at the top of the page. Then she sat down at her piano and wrote a song. The lyric was simple:

Yes, yes, yes. [she sang]

Yes I will marry you.

I have waited.

I never dated other beaus.

Now I’m slated

To be mated to the one I chose

Long ago.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yes I will marry you.

The musical composition was intricate. She repeated the lyric over and over, using it backwards, arranging it in counterpoint, deleting every other word, interpreting it in all the different ways she could think of; she made a sort of chorus of the yeses, and every bridge was a yes, yes, yes.

That night she took from the trapdoor of the piano bench every sheet of music it held. She played each one through and all the rest she knew by heart, not skipping one movement, one verse, one repeat. She played feverishly to an empty house, and her performance was flawless. When she finished, for a single moment she made the keyboard her pillow, and anyone entering the room just then would not have heard the few quick sobs beneath the jarring chord her forehead had played. She shut the piano then, turned off all the lights, and went up to bed.

My brother has learned to burp. He has added burping to his repertoire of noises.

Stop burping, Benjie, says my father. To my mother he says, Not a word out of him yet, but he can make every sound in the book. He’ll probably grow up to have an enormous vocabulary.

The dog is eating the chocolate cake. From my high chair I spy the dog eating the chocolate cake. From my crow’s nest, the dog out in the sea of the kitchen is eating our dessert.

Damn, says my mother as she runs to the clatter from the dining room. Shotsy, she cries. No. The dog scampers on her short legs back through the dining room, her dachshund snout camouflaged in chocolate frosting. But it’s a poor disguise; the ruse doesn’t work. Daddy chases the dog and puts her out the back door. Daddy has an eye for camouflage.

Here behind the curtains of my eyelids, my mother has imagined it a changing room, having shed her smocked dress, her wool skirt with the matching V-neck sweater, her black cap and gown for a suit. My mother has grown up.

On the lapel of her suit is pinned a small beige button. Yellow is for basic security clearance; gray is for the next level up, permitting access to more important documents and otherwise restricted areas of the building; green is for selected congressmen and policy advisers. But sporting a beige button, there’s nowhere you can’t go, no information you can’t be privy to. Beige is for the President, the battle strategists, the Ph.D. specialists, and, of course, the generals who even in peacetime bustle in and out of the Pentagon. My mother’s color is beige. My mother can be trusted with secrets.

Beige is also the color of Gwen’s uniform. Gwen is my mother’s roommate in Washington. Gwen is a marine.

So what’s going on, Roslyn? she asks over dinner. They don’t tell the enlisted man anything.…

Sorry, says my mother. She knows that although Gwen has a claim to beige, she is not top-secret beige. The truth is, Gwen, I’ll have to go to the grave with what I know, some of it.

That’s sort of romantic, isn’t it?

Yes, says my mother, who in spite of her commitment to her country and the war effort is a young woman at the time, too.

Well, what if somebody got you drunk? asks Gwen. And tried to pry information out of you? A spy or someone. In the throes of love … They find this funny.

I’d never marry a spy though, says my mother. She sighs. Marriage is on her mind.

(Will you wait for me? the sailor asked her in the dream yesterday. He held her close with one hand; the other held his white hat. I mean, will you not say yes to anyone else until you talk to me first? He chuckled. I wish you weren’t so popular, he said.

But his gray eyes reminded her of two portholes looking out on fog, and she started to cry; she buried her face in his shirt; she saw torpedoes coming through the portholes, silver invitations for the whole ocean to follow inside, to in turn swallow up the tiny ship that had swallowed it down, gulp after gulp. She looked up. His shirt was all wet. I will, she said.)

By the way, says Gwen. I met some handsome marines today. Two.

Really? says my mother.

They’re at Cherry Point, says Gwen, in training. But they fly in once a month. They have our number.

Of the two marines, who do call, my mother likes best the one who is my father. He tells her what it is like to be an airplane navigator. We have a complicated instrument panel, he says. But if it fails I know how to chart by the stars. I’ll tell you a secret, he says: I often fly the President himself.

He explains to her all the particulars of his work. My mother, because she is good at hers, doesn’t tell him anything.

If only I could go overseas, he says. Besides, on the tests, I’m particularly good at sighting enemy positions from the sky, especially those that are heavily camouflaged. My mother is glad that he’s not overseas. My mother, the keeper of secrets, tries to disguise this. But the camouflage expert, he sees right through her.

Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub: Benjie and I, mum in the middle. She holds me upright. Just like a convoy, says my mother. Want to do the dead man’s float? she asks Benjie. He tickles her back, lowers his face into the water, and blows.

I’m an only child, my father said on his next trip.

So am I, said my mother.

I was born in Savannah and both my parents are dead, he told her. When I was twelve, my mother expressed the desire to move from the farm where we lived, so my father set her up in a house in town, and he and I stayed on at the farm. But I visited her often. It was a quick train ride.

My father owns a soap company, my mother told him. My mother was once a pianist. I graduated from Bryn Mawr last year and I’m twenty-two years old.

I’m twenty-seven years old, he said. I went to college for one year when lack of money prevented me from continuing. I was going to be an engineer.

I’m going to be a lawyer when the war is over, she said, if they start accepting women at law schools.

My mother was very well educated, he replied. When I had to leave school she was especially disappointed. My father, on the other hand, figured I could do it the way he had. He told me I could jolly well teach myself. My father would often sit with a bottle of whiskey until sunrise, reading, when he’d get up from the chair, change his clothes (he was a very particular dresser), and head off for the railway office where he worked.

My father doesn’t drink at all, she said. We’re Methodists.

I’m an agnostic, he told her, and I’ve been in barrooms all over the world. When I was twenty, when I left school, I became foreman in a cotton mill. And there was nowhere to go from there, no possible promotion, so I packed my things and went to sea. I shipped out. When you’re in port, all you do is drink.…

I’m fluent in French, said my mother. I was a government major, and great literature makes me weep.

I cried for the first time, he told her, when I received word of my mother’s death. We were docked in New Orleans, lucky thing for me, so I just followed the rails to my father’s office, and we buried her together. When he died, I packed up his personal effects, sold the rest, and withdrew the hundred dollars that was in his bank account. It was cancer that got her. And he drank himself to death. I would ask you to marry me, he said, only I’m married already and I have a son.

And I’m engaged, said my mother. To someone overseas.

This is how they fell in love, and as it was already eight o’clock in the morning, my father put on his cap and left.

When he arrived at the base to report for duty, he sent his wife, whom he hadn’t seen for several months, a telegram (asking for a divorce), which my mother received later that day (the words were different but the message was the same) as notification from the war office of her fiancé’s death at sea. As she lay awake that night, she reread all the sailor’s letters and invented what their life together might have been like. My father, in his bunk, willfully recollected the two years of his marriage.

My grandmother and grandfather are peering over the railing of my crib. Smiles and waves like a bon voyage from a cruise ship deck. My grandfather has a package. He’s unwrapping it. Is it for me?

See how pretty she looks in it, says my grandmother. It kept pretty well, didn’t it, Arthur?

That it did. That it did, says my grandfather, tucking it under my chin.

It kept pretty well. Just like us, she says and shakes her head. Did you remember the other present? He nods and I shut my eyes for sleep.

I wonder if we should have waited for some appropriate occasion, I hear him say.

I’m getting married, my mother told first her father, then her mother, when she called from Washington. She has had trouble getting through; all the circuits are busy. The war is over. Today, when the news was announced (although my mother knew a few days before), a general picked her up in the street and twirled her like a top, danced her around like a crazy waltz. And she kissed him, although it’s my father she plans to marry.

The bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima where the heat was so intense it caused the flowers to bloom instantaneously, like the ones on the quilt that covers me now. The war is over.

To whom? asks my grandmother, thinking of the sailor drowned in battle. She can’t imagine who my mother might be marrying.

His name is Warren, he’s southern, and he’s a marine, says my mother. And we’re not getting married right now (she hesitates) because he’s in the middle of getting a divorce.

You bet you’re not, says my grandmother, and she hangs up the phone with a bang. This hurts my mother, who never, herself, expected to get married under such circumstances.

My grandmother starts packing right away. My grandmother is planning a trip.

He’s uneducated, she tells my grandfather after the letter arrives. He even has a child. We had such plans for Roslyn … and besides … She looks at him. We gave up everything for her.

I’m mad about you, says my father.

I dream about you, says my mother. When he’s there, he spends the night on the couch because if, by mistake, he gets her pregnant and his divorce is delayed, they’ll be in big trouble.

We’ll be poor at first, he says. I’ve got to support my son.

When is your discharge? she asks.

In ninety-seven days. Will you marry me? he asks her again.

Yes, she says, as usual. They are always asking each other to get married. They propose to one another all through their engagement, waiting for the divorce. They’re storing up yeses for the times ahead.

Will we always be in love? my mother asks.

Oh yes, says my father, gleaning another to store away against the future. He won’t think about his first wife; he won’t think about his parents’ separation. He knows that being in love dictates that every proposal must be the first no matter how many times he asks her. It is the continuous present, a vacuum.

Will you marry me? he asks every day on the phone when he calls her up.

My grandmother has taken up residence in Mexico City with her friends Llewelyn and Patrick. She’s been visiting for three months. She will not help with the marriage plans.

I’ll come home on the day of the wedding, she tells her husband in a letter. My mother shops for her wedding dress, the invitations, alone. My grandfather sees to all the details of the reception.

Marriage. Ha, says my grandmother.

Some work and some don’t, says Llewelyn. But the truth of it is, you never can tell at the beginning anyway. That’s the time everything looks rosy.

At the reception, everyone is red in the face from drinking or dancing, or just because it’s warm for June. My parents are having such a good time they don’t leave their own wedding until three in the morning. My mother dons a new suit for their escape. Her fingers miss the beige button, searching her unadorned lapel while the rice pelts them.

I wake up in the same pose in which I left my mother in the dream, pausing on the stairs leading down from the reception hall. My hand is clutching the