An Old Family
At some point your distance became my distance.
She resisted touching the fabrics that hung outside the shops. Scarves, towels, thin blankets that brightened the walls of merchant streets. Most of the fabrics were cotton, though some of the scarves were made of synthetic materials. One or two pieces she thought were made of silk. Her favorite colors were pale blues and whites and dark burgundies that bordered on purple. Natural materials were her favorite. The cottons, the silks reflected light differently. The synthetics reflected only their colors. They did not vary under the sunlight or wind. Natural fabrics revealed something more of their origins in sunlight. They displayed their colors, yes, but they also showed their weaves, the slight frays that reflected light. There were differences between those pieces that had been in the sun longer than those pieces that had been recently displayed.
The sound of people vanished as she ascended the hill and entered the narrows of the stairways. Her own steps were absorbed into the passages. The enclaves of houses and neighborhoods were more modest the further she walked from the port. The people who lived there had closed their shutters. They did this to keep the rooms cooler. She heard about this practice, but she had forgotten to close the shutters of where she stayed. The house would be hot. She would sweat in it. She was fine to sweat. She had once lived in a cold place and never wanted to live in the cold again. She preferred the liquidity of heat. Heat opened her body, opened her. Sunlight, she believed, was a caring element. It nurtured. The indifference of weather was impossible for her to believe. Cold crippled her. Her joints, her ligaments were trapped by a constant pain in the cold.
The poet had asked her once, “Would you rather freeze to death or be burned to death? Maybe not burned, not like by fire, but like a heat stroke or something.”
“Burned to death.”
“You didn’t even think about it.”
“I have thought about it.”
“You understand that at some point you’d feel warm if you were freezing.”
“I don’t care.”
“You would rather burn to death than freeze?”
“I would. It’s an easy choice for me.”
They had hiked that day into a canyon in southwest Utah. The temperature had dipped into the 40’s. Clouds clung to the canyon rim like some prophecy against the world. He wore a sweater. She wore three layers and a coat and shivered.
“I guess you would rather freeze to death than burn.”
“I would,” he said, “Yes.”
“And to me that’s crazy.”
“Maybe not that crazy. At least I’m not the one saying I’d rather burn to death. Good god.”
“No. You’re saying you would rather freeze to death. Like a piece of meat. Like a cow hung in a meat locker.”
“That may be true, but you would rather go like a witch.”
“Fine.”
“And those cows are dead on arrival.”
They laughed together. In those days they laughed together.
He had brought along a lunch and a camp stove to boil water for tea. He kept the stove, the tea, a bit of food and utensils in a 30mm ammo can. He kept the ammo can in the back o his truck, like something permanent. He re-stocked it after every trip. He had known the place where they ate lunch from a time when he had went there with his father. He told her there had been no signs back in those days, nothing to indicate the name of the canyon. He told that it felt like he and his father had discovered the place, but people had tramped in and out of the canyon for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years. The ancient petroglyphs on the walls told that story. They sat beside a creek and under a stand of cottonwood trees. Some of the trees had been gnawed by beavers. He found a flat stone upon which to position the stove. He next drew cold water from the creek and checked to see if there were bugs or flakes of some kind floating in the water. He then set the pot on the stove and checked the balance. He lit the stove and covered the pot and sat back to watch them. He next pulled a cutting board and a chef’s knife from the ammo can and sliced a red onion, a sausage, and an apple. He put the slices on a plate and set the plate and a jar of Dijon mustard on the rock with the stove. They didn’t need to say aloud what was between them. They knew. They knew that the unsaid between them was love.
“Here you go.” He handed her a mug of tea. “Do you want a little milk in it?”
“I do. Thank you.”
He got up and went to the truck and took a pint of milk from a cooler.
He walked back to where they sat and tipped a little of the milk into her mug. “Is that good?”
“That’s perfect.”
He capped the milk and set the carton beside the rock.
They drank tea and studied the creek and the cottonwoods. He told her that he wanted the world to stay this way. He never wanted another world or for this one to change. After this world was gone, he told her, he no longer knew where to go. There were things he did not tell her, and when, years later, he tried to speak about what had been in those days, what had been between them and the world he had once loved and how he had loved her, she believed it was too late for a return. He could shed a past but never borrow a future. She could not shed a past. He loved her more than any world he could have summoned, but he could not express this well enough to her.
That night in the guest house, Eleanor sat at the table in the upstairs room. Earlier, she had pushed back the curtains from the balcony door and the windows and did not close them. She turned on the lamps and fixed a cup of coffee. She typed out the notes she had scribbled throughout the day. She took comfort from the light in the room without noticing the lamps. She typed what she recorded at the chapel: its approximate dimensions, the trail where she had walked. She typed a note about the dead cat in the weeds. She typed about the views of the sea. There were notes about the port and about the conversation she had with the waitress at the café. How the waitress had been lovely. How her father owned the grocery store where everyone shopped. After this, Eleanor took a break and listened to the sound of people walking back to their wherever they stayed. The joy in their voices and laughter. The balcony door was open. There was a breeze. She sipped the coffee and leaned back in her chair.
The warmth welcomed her. Maybe this is what she felt most, the welcome. No one saw her. What was so necessary about being seen.
She had never felt it important to claim her independence. She lived independently. There were women who felt it necessary to assert what they had already achieved. Position, mobility, influence, wealth, these had been difficult gains for women in the academy. Most of her professors had been men. Yet there were women in the academy who were self-proclaimed healers who constantly destroyed. Men destroyed, too, though she had never heard a man claim that he was a healer.
She got up from the table and stepped out onto the balcony. She wrapped her arms around herself. The lights of the village and in the houses glowed with their stories. She could imagine the lights sheltering her within their joy. She loved her family and camp meetings. She loved those who could not love her. She loved men, some of them gentle, who needed her as a fantasy or as some phantom of their imagination. To love, she decided, was her obligation. She stayed outside long enough to identity three constellations. Hydra. Cancer. Aries.
When she went back inside the house, she shut the door behind her. She left the curtains pulled back.
She sat down at the table again and took out a number of postcards. One was a view of the port, another of the monastery at the top of this island, another of monks, one of fishing boats, of mules, of Elijah. She picked the one with the port. She took up her pen, hesitated, then wrote:
I drank coffee today at the port and sat as close to the water as I could. The waitress and I talked about coffee and churches. She called them churches, and she knows the lady who will take me to them. It sounds like everyone here knows this lady. I have also started to read your manuscript. It’s good. I remembered when you took me to the canyon in Utah. You made tea. Did we stop being those two people? More later. Eleanor
At some point your distance became my distance. I had to rescue myself, not as a selfish person but as someone who needed rescued, as someone who could not stand to lose anymore more of myself. She needed her life to go in a way, in a direction that life itself was calling her. She believed these things, but she did not like to admit them. She put her pen down and pushed away the other postcards. She could live alone easier than she could live outside of someone.
Maybe more coffee. Too much coffee. It was late. She stood up and stretched and then started to tidy the table. There is an order to things, a necessary neatness is required. She could not work if the house and its rooms were not clean. Clean first. Then work. This was a habit of her childhood. Clean your room. Then do your homework.
She was nine years old when her mother had a hysterectomy. She didn’t know what the surgery accounted for, not at nine years old. She knew what having a surgery meant or thought she knew. It was explained to her that the surgery was to remove her mother’s lady parts. Those were her mother’s words, her lady parts. On her own, she went to the library and found a book that told her what a hysterectomy was, what the parts were and their function. Two years later the doctor found cancer growing along her mother’s spine. She was twelve when her mother had a mastectomy. The surgeons removed both her breasts. And when Eleanor reached her teens, she understood that her mother would never recover from cancer, though there wasn’t an oncologist who would say or could say how long they expected her mother to survive.
She sat down and opened her notebook. She studied the sketch of the chapel. We look and we look. She thumbed through the notebook. Between the pages were old ferry tickets, boarding passes, postcards from museums and exhibitions, receipts from hotels, cards. She purchased the cards because she liked them. She did not purchase them to send. She liked best those cards with foxes, crows, ravens, magpies, or badgers on them. She didn’t care for rabbits or mice. The depictions could be realistic, though they were more memorable if they weren’t. Birds and animals dressed in blazers and bowties were her favorite. Although, a recent purchase was a realistic watercolor of an owl. She had bought it at a bookstore in New York before flying to Athens. Below the drawing of the owl was written, Northern Saw-Whet Owl and below that, Aegolius acadicus. All of these bits and pieces. Ticket stubs, cards, receipts of one kind or another, they were all from this year. There were her own poems and scribbles.
How easily the light became you.
How often we stand between lives.
We require moments of grounding.
Her mother had given her a smart looking edition of Little Women, but the first book she bought for herself was The Prisoner of Zenda. Anthony Hope’s tale of King Rudolf and Rudolf Rassendyll and the daring Princess Flavia caused her heart to beat for adventure. Swordplay, duels, horses, faraway kingdoms became the early stuff of her dreams. The lives of King Rudolf and Rudolf Rassendyll summoned rivalries and bliss that Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and mother Marmee could not conjure. She would never finish Little Women. Instead, The Prisoner of Zenda, Scaramouche, King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and other boys adventure books filled her bookcase. As a child, she approached her bookcase as she imagined grown-ups entered an airplane. How they might marvel. How they might anticipate seeing the world from above. How they might emerge from their travels with stories of enchantment that, like some books, could never be forgotten.
Her family did not find a permanent home until they moved into a house where her mother wanted to live. Her mother wanted to be closer to her extended family. She had six sisters and one brother, all of whom had been raised by their mother. Their mother, as life would have it, became Eleanor’s favorite grandmother. She was the woman who brought Eleanor into the family, who told stories about past camp meetings, who held up Eleanor to the old people and to her own extend family, calling Eleanor as her own true granddaughter. Her name was Willie Hawks. She had raised seven children alone, without a man. She sewed and cooked and washed clothes. She made just enough money to support her family by sewing for her neighbors. And when her children came of age, they went to work, the first being the oldest, a boy named Henry. The father of these seven siblings was a man called John Hardy. John Hardy would have been Eleanor’s living grandfather had he not died the day he turned forty years old. But then life and maybe God Himself caused one of those unexplainable turns when John Hardy, forty years old, stood up to conclude a Chamber of Commerce meeting. He stood up and hit the gavel on the sound block. Then he dropped dead. Just like that. He left behind a fine wooden house, a widow, and seven children, one of whom, the youngest, would become Eleanor’s mother.
Eleanor’s mother and father were in their forties when they adopted her. They were old parents from old parents. Eleanor did not realize this until her middle school years. Other parents drank sodas and scarfed down take-out food and watched television and went to the movies. Her mother sewed and baked and cooked as long as she had strength to cook. Until she got too sick with cancer, she worked part-time as a legal secretary. Her father worked as a manager of a tire store. He drove and sang along to 8-tracks tunes. He loved best evenings when he could drive into the mountains to watch the sunset. Eleanor watched her mother and father pad about their house as tenderly as possible. Daddy kept the yard. Mama kept the house. They adopted Eleanor into the manners and habits of a generation that was not their own generation but their parents. There was an attentiveness. There was grace. There was love. There was also a dullness. Yet she saw something triumphant in her parents. She agreed with their lives and the rules they had made for her. She agreed until she entered her teens and wanted to stay out late with her friends, most of whom were boys. She wanted to stay late at waterfalls where they swam together. She wanted to go on long drives with them. She didn’t mind when they drank or felt amorous towards one another. She went on walks with these same friends, as they talked themselves into and out of beliefs and identities. She did not tell her mother what they talked about. She knew her parents. She knew herself. She weighed the scales of what she would and would not do in given situations. Knowing herself, she desired to command her own freedom. But as a child of older parents who themselves had the habits of their older parents, she was not permitted certain freedoms. She was, after all, a girl. Boys could not enter her bedroom, not even when her parents were at home. No boy could meet her by honking a horn. A boy must walk to the door. There wasn’t enough reason in her logical mind to convince her parents of the silliness of a curfew. Afterall, immoral behavior was not a function of time. Her logical mind clashed with her mother’s emotionalism, and her mother’s emotionalism didn’t win her arguments but kept her position as Mama. In her family, good girls would no more defy their mothers than they would initiate a kiss with a boy. Passions were not to be displayed. Passions could flame in her heart. They could flame in anyone’s heart. They could flame and be kept hidden irrepressibly, maybe permanently, if necessary. And she did not know, never knew, what passions her mother or father carried. They had loved each other quietly. They had loved unconditionally.
She closed her notebook and looked up and felt almost surprised to see herself there. The way she saw herself was like looking into someone else’s life. She was not her mother. Her mother could not have imagined herself in this place, with the sea outside and the near constant chatter of other words in other languages and where all the light in the room registered from a concord of lamps. They glowed. Still, her mother would have turned on the over-head lights. This had not been her life. And that was fine. Eleanor stood up from the table and clicked off all but one of the lamps. She then lay down on the couch and covered herself with a blanket. It was not a lonely room. She fell asleep with the curtains left drawn open and the racket of a single rooster confused about the hour.
This story by Damon Falke is a continuation of a series, titled Love, Eleanor. The previous installment was The Port, which you can read here:
The Port
The path led to a house situated by itself. From the house, the path cut sharply up a steep hill and ran to the chapel on top. It was one the few houses on the island that existed in semi-isolation. A laundry line had been secured between the two porch posts. Bright colored swimsuits fluttered in the wind. How oddly be…
Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.
Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton is a multi-disciplinary artist, art educator, and lover of the outdoors. She lives in Washington State. See more of her work at www.bekawp.com
If you enjoyed this post, hit the ♡ to let us know.
If you have any thoughts about it, please leave a comment.
If you think others would like it, hit re-stack or share:
If you want to read more:
And if you’d like to help create more Juke, upgrade to a paid subscription (same button above). Otherwise, you can always contribute a one-time donation via Paypal or Venmo.
lovely, damon. learning more about Eleanor in this one. beautiful writing, as always