Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Of Vinegar Of Pearl (an excerpt)

2021; University of Missouri; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mis.2021.0023

1548-9930

V. Penelope Pelizzon,

Irish and British Studies

Of Vinegar Of Pearl (an excerpt) V. Penelope Pelizzon (bio) "The elements return to the body of their mother." —Paracelsus 1. Like pulp-and-spittle wasps' nestsbuilt in their season to lastonly until winter, bonescrumble in her as she sits.She sections the day's clemenciesinto mouthfuls, hawks outany bitter pips, swallowsgood pungence with sips of smoke—Lapsang Souchong or Laphroaig,depending on the hour—preferring solitude tosolicitude from the kind,including her children whowere hard to bear and are hardnow to hear. Nine decades havedrawn her, masterwork of tendonand vein illustratingfrailty condensing to oneferocious node, a will stillrefusing to cede. But now?When the heart no longer turnsthe blood's tide. When fluid pools,refusing to be sluiced backinto its channels. She's walkedso far down the strand that sealsbarely lift their heads as she [End Page 55] steps over them, returningfinally to her sisters.She's up to her knees now ina flosh of her body's ownsea-wash. Dying? Or dyingish?Is this it? Is it this? [End Page 56] 2. Her limbs are Lear's daughters—all promise, then paring awaythe tyrant's power with refusalssmall at first, then cruel.On clement afternoons we driveout to a paved greenwaycurving along the esker, where,as her doctor advised, she plowsto and fro behind her walkerfollowing an invisible mule. There's no help I can givebut silence, trailing her doggedrows. Then their reversals.It's on the third carve slowly upthe furrow her body's cutbefore me I begin to thinkif I were a landscape featureI would be an esker, my distinctivesediments layered belowa once-imposing glaciernow going extinct. [End Page 57] 3. You're the meanest bitch I've ever known,I hiss. It's venomous; a cursebelow the breath is somehow worse.(Does she have her hearing aids turned on?) Well, you're a dictator! You micromanage everything!she howls back, livid. (Yes.) I've organizeddoctors, insurance, prescriptions, bed.Neither diagnosis is wrong. We dose each other with silence.At suppertime, she comes downstairs to testher patience once more with my presence.Wine palliates. We limp through the visit. * Outside her room's door each morningI stall, steeling myself—is she still herself?Or stolen off?—until I can face anything. Slowly, I open. Every morning it surprises mehow soothed I am by her expressionbuttoning its scorn back onas she eyes my tray's offeringof toast and jam and tea. [End Page 58] 4.They say the mother's death is hardest. Her bodyour first loss, burying or burning it repeatsthe fleshy severance we can't remember, thoughour limbic systems bear the ultraviolet tattooof birth, when adrenaline rushed throughour infant blood in floods no after-stresssurpasses. In death's black light,those ink pricks glare. Is this shockthe long-suspended echo of her emptinesswhen her labor ended and I lay there, the anchoringcord was cut, and I breathed the air? * Alone, guest in a western town so spare the trainrattling through it cut each night in half, my mindall day would void itself, and darknessconjured ghosts of long-forgotten talk. Late,a whistle pulled me drowning from the lakeof sleep, and there I found myself in a summerdecades back. Decades back, my mother had phonedunable to catch her breath. She was calling from her station,from the platform payphone, and I could hearwatery rushing behind her, like surf or rainy traffic.Her train had come and she'd boarded first, she said,to get a forward seat. As she'd settled in, a man,delayed somehow, somehow running fromthe parking lot across the tracks, had duckedbeneath the guardrail. She'd heard a shoutas her window shuddered with a flashingthunder, an express blown through alongthe other line, not stopping. She'd seenthe man caught in the narrow scrimbetween the trains...