| Homing In |
Homing In
by Theresa Moritz
Jordan isn't talking to himself. His lips aren't moving. But he is
doing something very like talking to himself. What to call it? How about
listening to himself? Yes, the signs are all there: a grimace of concentration
contorting the lines around his nose and mouth, the direction of his gaze away
from everyone else's line of sight, tension across his shoulders as he draws
himself slowly and ever so painfully, and with one arm in a cast, toward his
future, along the infinite rope of time that extends down even into this dead
place. Yes, Jordan is following the movements of his mind. It would be clear
to everyone at the table, I think, if only he were holding a hand up next to
his head, cupping his ear. But then, that's a gesture for enhancing external
sounds. Suppose we imagine him making that gesture with his inner hand,
alongside his inner head, around his inner ear. Yes, that's it. If we could
see him that way, we would see at once that he is listening to himself,
listening intently, rather than risking, as I am, drowning in one of the
conversational tsunamis of silence that follow on every few words spoken, by
me, or by his mom, my sister Shari, or by his stepdad, Ron, but not by
Jordan, since he isn't talking to us any more than he is talking to himself,
at this first family dinner after his return from a summer away.
I do not read minds. But I can imagine what might be going on inside
Jordan's, in part because of a chance conversation we had upstairs before dinner. He
is thinking about open sewers, for one thing. "She's always on about keeping things
clean," he said to me, meaning his mom, of course. "So I said to her, 'Well, then,
turn off the television. It's like an open sewer running right through the living
room, right next to the kitchen where you prepare food.' And you know what she said,
Aunt Celine?" He couldn't decide whether to dismiss it with a laugh or force it from
his mind with anger. "She said to me, 'You're riding for a fall, Jordan, you're
riding for a fall.'" Then, he waved his cast at me, like a victory flag, to
underscore the irony that she had used this particular cliché without a sign to
him to indicate she knew she was ironizing. After all, she had been speaking to
someone who had recent life experience of riding and of falling, Jordan's cast
being the result of a spill from a horse during his summer away. Yet, Jordan
wasn't inclined entirely to say that the cliché suited his situation. "There
was no way I was riding for a fall, Aunt Celine. I was riding for a ride."
Doesn't he deserve a hearer outside his own head if he wants to say
things like this, even if they involve me in an impossible division of loyalties
between him and his mother? And yet, if I really believe I'm right, why can't I
say it out loud? Shouldn't I be saying, explicitly, "Go to it, Jordan. Make fun
of her. What does she know about you and how you feel about riding?"
Riding, that's another thing he must be listening to himself about, I
think, especially each time a flush arcs along his cheekbones. Even in summer's
wind-down, even in the air-conditioned dining room, the color comes and goes
often in his face, which has a freshness and moisture about it that rebukes
the middle-aged desiccation of the rest of us. Although it may seem I've changed
the subject, I protest. Jordan is a life force in a house of death. Even before
I saw him, briefly, upstairs, I knew all about it. For weeks, his emails, never
long, had consisted of links to new photos in his online collection. I had
watched him transform from a city boy, a graceful, physical one, but a city
boy, nonetheless, into a suburban centaur.
That's another irony, one to which Jordan is very much alive. The
gift of riding was not the gift he thought he had accepted from Shari's new
husband Ron, who had arranged a job for Jordan at a summer camp across the
state line in Kentucky. What he thought he was getting was an additional
reprieve from moving in with his mother and Ron. They had returned in April
from an Acapulco honeymoon to Ron's house near Atwood Lake, in Tuscarawas
County, Ohio. But, they had allowed Jordan to spend the rest of the spring
term at the home of a classmate so that his third year of high school, in
Canton, north of Ron's house, wouldn't be disrupted. Ron's suggestion of
the summer camp job had once again preempted the discussion of what would
happen for Jordan's fourth year. The irony was that the gift of riding, which
Jordan had the grace to acknowledge, at least to me, must surely affect how
that delayed conversation would finally be conducted.
I am not so sure he's any more ready to make peace now than he was when he
emailed me just before coming home. "You know Tuscarawas County, Aunt Celine," he
wrote. "Where can I go to ride?" Flattering to be the one he asked, that he had
not gone to Ron, first, or to Shari, or to his father, Dale, Shari's bum high
school sweetheart. All of us had a claim to the information he was seeking, after
all. All four of us had grown up in Tuscarawas County, within a few miles of one
another. Shari and I were not far from where Dad was born, in a house on the land
Grandpa worked as a tenant farmer. But, perhaps my sister and I had a lesser claim
than Ron or Dale, because for Shari and me, the vector of growing up had always
been determinedly north, toward where our mother's family lived, and toward white
collar society, rather than blue. It would have been inconsistent with Mom's ideal
of ladylikeness to be cruel. And yet, there was a harshness about the way she
uprooted any small shoot of country that showed in Dad's manners or speech or
dress that, today, looks disturbingly like cruelty. And she was not alone in it,
either. Shari and I took her part for years.
I've never really come back, not the way Shari has. Visits don't count. After
years in Canton, where she insisted Dale find her an apartment, and where she lived
for many years on her own with Jordan, she has been drawn back into the landscape
of our very early years. She's been drawn back to Tuscawaras County by Ron,
certainly, and perhaps by some sense of regret for the pain she inflicted on Dad.
Whatever her reasons may be, they don't appear to contain much concern for
Jordan. I can feel how glad he is to see me, just as surely as I feel from him
the frustration he has always manifested in his mother's presence. It's tough
to resist the old game of triumphing over Shari, even though I have known for
years, understood for years, the injustice of taking what I had not earned,
taking what I was being given only because of Shari's hard work in carrying and
then raising a son. Besides, I'm the older sister. Why couldn't I prevent the
crazy high school romance that defined her for, well, almost all her life? Why
couldn't I have helped her through the narrow passage that, somehow or other,
I had found into a world that wasn't defined by its distance from New
Philadelphia, the Tuscarawas County seat, or from Canton, or, north of that,
from Cleveland, for that matter?
Cleveland is where I live now. I'm amused by the increasing reports among my
office mates of the ease of commute and great house prices to be found down
Highway 77 around Canton. It may come someday, but right now there's little
talk of exploring Tuscarawas County for commuter homes, except, I suppose,
for some few Cantonians. The County itself is mellow enough, still grateful
for a rest from the old days of wresting a living from the ground through
farming, and not too concerned about what, if anything, might be coming next.
It's on Jordan's mind, I suspect. He's always had drive impatient of
constraint. Even the possibility of riding likely won't be enough to reconcile
him to life here.
I feel a little rebellious, myself, as I look around the room, letting
my gaze move slowly, without, I hope, attracting attention from Ron, whom I
scarcely know, or from Shari, whom I used to know. There's a lot of money
here. But its distribution only confirms my sense that Jordan's prospects here
are frightening. The only difference between Shari and Ron's house and a
funeral parlour is the absence of the customary centerpiece – the body. Who
will take that role? That's what's got Jordan worried. Am I here – he is
listening to himself whispering it, in terror – because I'm dead and just don't
quite know it yet, the way children always hear things after everyone else knows
them? Wouldn't you think, about your own death, at least, that they would tell
you first? Wouldn't you?
I can't be dead, he is screaming. I can't be dead, not when I have only
just begun to experience energy, passion. You are all corpses, but I am a living
body, a body that glorifies the space it occupies. Where I am, there is beauty,
and women's desire grows hard inside them, making their stomachs move in
anticipation, without even knowing what they long for.
I notice a change in Jordan's face. He has begun to listen to the dinner
conversation, which has turned to riding. Ron is telling a story about his
honeymoon with Shari. "Every day, boys your age would lead strings of horses
along the beach, Jordan. And I would say it would be fun to go out, but Shari
would say no, she didn't like riding. But then, I talked her into trying a
guided tour on horseback of some local farms, and she was hooked. So, the
next day, we hired beach horses. And when the boys who handled them offered
to guide us along, I went ahead and said we'd go all on our own. Shari was a
little worried. But the boys said that the horses would be fine without
them. So, we paid for an hour, and we went for a ride."
"Well, it was great, at first. The horses were easy to manage, and Shari
and I began enjoying ourselves. We were feeling pretty smug as we passed other
tourists in front of other hotels. At the half hour point, I said to Shari,
we better turn back. The horses made the change of directions just fine, but
then, they bolted. I had been just a little quicker than Shari to start the
turn, so I couldn't tell what was happening to her, and I was too scared to
look back. I was bouncing up and down so hard at first that I thought I'd fall
off. And when I tried to get a better grip with my legs, I could feel the saddle
leather burning away at my bare skin all the way from my heels to my crotch."
Ron pauses over this detail, and Jordan asks at once, "What did you do then?"
"Well, I could see she wasn't really trying to throw me, so I began
drawing her head with the reins toward the water. She turned and, when her front
hooves began sinking a little in the wet, she stopped. As soon as I loosened the
reins, she was ready to take off again. So, I had to keep pulling her back. Being
still for a second gave me a chance to look back, finally. And there was your mom,
with her horse completely under control, just walking along toward me as calm as
could be."
"I was scared, too," Shari protests.
"You're just trying to make me look good," Ron says. "She's quite a
rider, your mother. I was never so glad to see that hotel when we finally made it
back there. The boys said, 'Oh your time's not up,' but we said, 'No, thanks.' And
they were off."
"Yes, but why did the horses do that, do you suppose?" Jordan wants to
know.
"Well, the next few days, we watched. Every time the horses went off,
whether or not the people chose a guide, they passed slowly away from the hotel,
like we did. But, when they came back, they were often coming very fast. The boys
should have told us about that. But then, when I didn't want a guide, maybe they
thought I was a good rider, or a fool."
"It was all right," Shari says. "After all, I don't much care for
riding. But I've been riding since I was a kid. Not like Celine, of course,
Jordan," she adds. "Celine was crazy for horses when we were growing up. First,
when she started reading, she was crazy to read about them. And then, she was
crazy to ride them, too. She had read so much about horseback riding, she was
sure she'd be great at it. She could name all the pieces of equipment, you see,
and all the different gaits. So, she was ready to go. All summer long, summer
after summer, up there in Canton, she would be after Dad and Mom, 'Take us
riding, take us riding.' Finally, Dad said, sure, he could find some place. There
were always places like that around.
"He took us for Celine's eleventh birthday. It was a farm not far from here,
actually, which makes sense, since this was where Dad grew up. When we got
there, they were just organizing a ride, and there was only one horse left in
the group. So, Dad said we should let Celine have it. (I have to admit, I was
a little jealous as she set out.) Where we were, in the stable yard, we could
see the horses just fine. The ground dropped down a little, away from the farm
buildings, and then there was a pasture on a hillside that the horses began
passing through toward a little stand of trees. Celine's horse began to drop
back a little and then a little more, until she was alone. The rest of the riders
just disappeared into the trees, and she was sitting there on her horse, all alone
in the middle of the field.
"At first, we didn't think anything of it. Dad said that she would get moving
again right away, he was sure, but then she didn't. Instead, she began
shouting, 'Dad, Dad, Dad,' and then 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.' Dad's hands were
gripping the fence rail, and I could see his knuckles going white as her shouting
intensified. The guys from the farm were laughing and saying to him, 'Well, she
can certainly shout, you have to give her that.' But then he got mad and said to
them that somebody better get on a horse and go get her already, which they did,
soon enough."
Shari pauses and then adds, "After that, they put me up on that same horse, you
know, and led me out so I could join the rest of them, and Celine stayed behind."
I should say that from the moment she began telling the story I have
been laughing along with her. As she ends her account, I am quick to
speak. "I haven't thought about that for years, Shari. Horses! How could I
have been so wrong about them?" And then, quickly, to get the whole thing over
with, I add, "Ron, Jordan was asking me a few days ago about ideas for places
to ride around here. It occurs to me that you're the authority."
They have done it. My only hope is that they didn't mean to. Though,
what consolation is that for me? Whatever Jordan may think of me, they have
changed the way I think of him. I'm afraid. There it is, as it always has
been, the fear of the rush of the blood up through the body, into the
extremities, the fingertips, the toes, the top of the head, and into the
body's portals, the inability to feel that rushing blood and glory in it,
to say that this is nature, my nature. I think of Jordan as different from
me, because he has no fear of the life that's awakening in him. All this
time, all this time, I have been saying to him, in so many ways, "This day
will end, like all the others. It will end, and you will be free to go." Now
I feel that this is the day like no other day. This is the day that will
never end. And I have to tell him, "Make it end, Jordan. You can do it. Make it end."
Theresa Moritz |