POUNDED GOLD AT THE FOUR CORNERS

Sara Barnett

“I don’t wish to be disturbed. By anything, ever at all.  You hear me?

I am in writing mode.”

Dad growls this to us, me and Tammy, who still has a nice tan where I have nothing.

“Do, too,”  I say about it.

“Do not.”  Tammy says.  Sick enough to make you want to punch a twin brother in the face.  God I love Tammy.  Aggravating amazing little bitch.

Our father, like this in the afternoons, we, tumbling on the soft wool rug laid out in woven braids, in circles, comes from the city. Orange, yellows, brown.

There is a turquoise coffee table.

And no one around when we get too vicious, me and and Tammy, wrestling hard.  I am littler, by “exactly no inches.” Which he tells me doesn’t make any sense!

And he pounds me one, right up under my right front shoulder, and it flips my head back, and 

when my head comes down, loose on its tethers, and hits the hard turquoise of the coffee table –

I get a cool scar over my right eyebrow. Gnarly.  It didn’t even hurt.  Well it did.  But. 

I am really really tough.

My mother can’t even tell us apart. Not right now. Right now, she lives mostly in her sock drawer, bawling and unballing.  No one has died.  She goes crazy.  Which is why the three of us boys must love her: me, Tammy, Dad.  We three men, we hold her up.  For she isn’t always crying.  So, we must be holding her up!  

She is a woman who lives with three boys, now, alone for several seasons, in a remote fishing village in Maine.  A paradise, according to the pamphlets. In the city, she would belt it out on the mike with a lack of abandon.  Songs, all the way across the country, now.  And we three, two kids and a mom, we’re following dad’s dream.  This is dad’s dream.

Why not?

Tammy and I know where the gauze is when we’re bleeding.  And how to boil water, make the macaroni.  Dad makes sure we have butter, milk, and a side of something green.  He is forager in the morning at the green grocer’s. “I am the hunter and gatherer,” he says, like the alpha and omega.

It is 1:30.  He won’t reemerge from his cave with its typewriter till well after six. 

Tammy, who plays it all sweet and innocent, is the leader of just us two.  He smiles that smile people call ‘impish.’  Man, if they only knew what Tammy was really up to.

And if you know, please tell me.  I beg him not to go, each night, out the window.

“Dude,” he says.

“Look at the moon.”

I see it fine from here, I do, but I throw back the covers of my twin bed, run over to the window seat. 

I get up, on my knees even! on the cushion, and pointing with one finger, a little unbalanced, I say:

“See?  I can see it just fine from here.”  I could fall out! This is brave!

He smiles at me.  A few of his hairs in the front are stuck up, static electricity.  It is cold outside, and instead of worrying about if he might freeze, I think, 

‘I bet that messed up hair, if we stood back to back right now, would make him a lot taller than I am.’ 

And that thought, it angers me. Sore.

“I wanna go closer to it,” he whispers, and I shove him away.

“Go then,” I say.

He smiles, impishly, and I, I go right back to bed.

This happens every night now. Rhombus, wrong bus, in this squared-off new town I don’t want to ever know.  Everyone’s weird.  Talks funny. New school, dumb haircuts.  The opposite coast.  Metropolis.  I miss the metropolis.  I love the word metropolis.  I love everything about where we came from, and hold it smack up against all this nowhere.  

But tonight, the first night, before Tammy’s leaving becomes routine habitual, this is the first and last time I get up on the cushion.  Then up on my knees.  Dangerous.  The open window. Rocking, close to an escape unto the higher air.

When he is gone, I frown a lot.  It kinda hurts, wrinkling my forehead.  I lie back down in my twin bed, I rub the smooth bandage on my brow with my finger, and it really hurts.  Good.  This is good.

It’s a better scar if I rub it.  Good.  And soon enough I’m sleeping, like Peter, like Heidi.

I am tough little man.  A mountain goat.  Ice.  Mom has just been in here, reading to us.  She doesn’t know Tammy is still in all his clothes under his covers, and will be leaving as soon as she does.  Our room.

Mom reads to us about Heidi’s mountaintop, and extreme poverty, and the careless winds that batter the Alps.  I am a tough little guy.  I am.  Though restless, even in my slumber. I am somehow and always aware when my brother is missing.

Well before the the nighttime story, earlier this evening, dad has returned to the living room, crossed the colorful floor, and so we four, we have macaroni and cheese, and Brussels Sprouts, (Mom, who keeps a budget list, swears that’s how they spell it) in the small kitchen.  It is, I am told, only “a nook.”

And she nods, she is listening to our father, who has been alone with his thoughts for hours, and now cannot shut up, and her cheeks are bright red above the steamy bowl of noodles. 

And she laughs when my father says something funny.

It has been a good day for him at the typewriter.

When no one, for no reason, no matter how big or small, “under no circumstance,” can disturb

him.

Not even mom, not even the moon.

It isn’t until about about age fifty, I realize, quite latent and stupidly, mom really only went crazy with the sock drawer, the sorting of it, probably just a few times, at the worst.  It must have been rare, such contained fits of madness, though she was likely unhinged all the time, even with us, far and beyond far, and too too alone.  

But when it did happen, it was always in those hours – eyes glazed, her own hair wild – during long empty afternoons, when dad was writing.  

Not to be disturbed.

I wonder if she felt as lost then as I did. Crazed, and eager to howl! My brother’s secrets too heavy.  Tales of who he would meet up with.  The very what of the what they would do. 

This wide lake-pitted nowhere, too weird.  Severe. Cloistered. And just two restless boys breaking each other’s craniums open on a turquoise table, which had sharp edges save where there were appliquéd corners of fake gold, molded in something spray-painted and springy to look real, and what might have even softened my blow the first time I cracked my head open. 

On top of it, the table, was a wide strewn collection of ugly dark green malachite animals, badly hewn and often referred to as “the lumpy things.”  I wonder if they reminded her of the city, like the sunburst woven rug.  Only this lame menagerie and ground cover left of time before in San Francisco.  Just a few of the smaller items we carried to the fishing village. And I wonder if these objects were, for her, a source of joy or of pain.  I wonder, for of course things in the city were also hard – must have been.  Ours maybe wasn’t extreme, but we were poor, I know this now.  

I wonder – was it less frightening for her as well, in Maine, among these lower buildings, and shacks, to hide, or to feel so hidden.  I like to think that sometimes, even when the locals snubbed us or spoke in what seemed a different language, garbled and grimaced-menacing, that she was at least equally captivated by the much bigger wide open sky.  

But in the end and all through, it must have been horrifying.  To know that in a remote place such as that was, she had no recourse if, say, there were a snow storm as vicious the one we had that day. It felt everlasting. Closed down the lone three shops, the roads, and one school.  And there was so much blood. She had no recourse.  This is what there was. And she, a bombshell, sequestered by force, and only twenty-five.

Sometimes boys need an ambulance.  But none could come.  And it was the three of us, alone, every day, for years, until dinnertime.

When she herself is much much older, I hold her hand and say,

“Thank you.  You were everything.”

Of course, I see it now.  Yes.  It must have only been a few times, there, such a wild woman, raging beautiful at the bureau drawer. But those select visits into her unrestrained madness stayed with me, scared us, me and Tammy, who was also a wild child, but just a child himself, hurling ourselves around a shabby living room. My brother, Tamalpais, eventually in a different metropolis than the one we used to know.  Dead, by the age of thirty-six.

It isn’t until I myself am sixty-eight I realize, there was no one to help her.  Either.  That is obvious.  You would think that would have come to me a lot sooner, too, but since the accident… so many scars.  And I was a selfish little thing, angry a lot of the time.  Wrestling.

But for her, giving and warm, there was truly no one. There were fishing boats. And private closed groups of homesteaders. And a small tiny school filled with only a handful more children, a bunch of ignorant adults, with that grumbled way they had of speaking so as to confound normal communication.  There were always clouds, and that window seat, which seemed so tall to me, skyscraper.  Tall to me, as a mountain peak in Switzerland, and all around, a sense of potential avalanche.  It was oppressive, and while Dad eventually eked out his book, he’d spend his remaining life seeking its publication, and I think – I think he would have lived longer had someone, besides his wife, if anyone at all in fact, had ever once said “yes.”

I myself don’t die until I’m ninety-seven, which is far too long to live, in my opinion.  Far too long to be alone – rough two thirds of my life without my twin brother.  Over sixty years.  I would take him slamming my head into that table, its corners, pounded into that old faux gold.  I would take it every time over this low constant burn of contemplation.  But I remember, most of all, and would take far above a fraternal lonesome violence, hearing my mother read to me, or singing the way she once did, once could, in a Western city that had everything and anything you could want.

And just as I am going, mom takes me, a poor fool, from her place in the sky, where moon and sun are bobbing equal – I can see them!  She lifts me, by the hand, and shows me the ring my father bought her. Real gold. Diamond chips and promises.

It glints, and in its bright light, with only one second to decide 

I –

wish to be born again.

That night, at the kitchen table, when the battling wasn’t the worst, the sock drawer stayed closed, and dad was happy about his pages.  That night, over steaming noodles and the red bowls, she took my chin in her hands, saw the bloody glob of gauze.

“Who did this to you?”  We say nothing.  Like always.

She takes me by the hand to the bathroom, washes the gash.  Applies one of the many soft cloth bandages from a box we keep in a cabinet hung on the wall behind a mirrored glass.

I can sudden feel her fingers again, the metal of that ring.  I am pushing old wounds around, hoping at best to make a scar.  

I want to make a mountain chain.

That gooey ew ew ew of bloody platelets mom says “only boys like.”  By secret push, then as now, when Tamalpais would jump the bedroom window, and I, in my bed, awake in my rest. 

It was Tammy who could go out.

So that I could stay in.

And everything would be fine.  How could I know?  This is what we had.

She must have done it all.  Everything.  Our mother.  I even doubt our father ever shopped that much.  It was mom who would feed us, keep tabs on small spending, who would take a fresh strip of gauze, smooth it out nice and long, not the way me and Tammy would string fibrous bits of its fabric onto our broken skin, clotting like clumps of cherry gum. 

I remember – we would use Scotch Tape for adhesive.  Mom had real stuff, something that she’d saved from a hospital.  She’d saved, had forethought.  Entering another man’s dreams.

I can feel her hand now, reaching for me as it did at story time to tuck me in, close. Our mother, dragged across the country from the Bay Area.  Even there, way high up, up up in Maine, she would find these little dotted scabs or flooded red rosettes, under clear tape.  Our battles, our head wounds. Attached by bloody bone when dad was writing. We thought they were our epaulettes and boutonnieres. Not signal and sign of a greater abandonment.

She must have had to do this hundreds of times.  Remove things. Patch up.

Wipe away the tears.

All our cheeks.

She must have been very very afraid.

Early to grief.

It is sudden cold.  The world becomes a swirl of black and white.

I think “Oreo Cookies, ice cream” back in California at the Dairy Queen, where she’d hold my hand, and say, “and what do you want – anything, darling, try it!”  and so many choices. 

Flavors.  

And then I die.

My father, who rarely, if sometimes, went out for a stroll holding empty bags in the morning.

And would write, for five hours, undisturbed in the afternoon.

I don’t see him. Anywhere.  

I just feel my mother’s caressing palm.

And there is nothing but cool, and I gone, finally sound and sound asleep, in my hayloft of sweet smelling straw.

photo NASA