The Bread We Eat in Dreams, Page 24

  “Be careful,” said Idun.

  The woman in black reached up and plucked an apple, a beautiful one, shining in the twilight and the mist of the end of the world, white on one side and red on the other. None of the other apples were like that. She could barely hold it in both arms. But the apple got smaller as the ferry drifted back over the water, until it could fit in an old woman’s basket.

  Years later, she came back. She was old. Her feet were covered in blisters. Idun shook her head and kissed them. Idun is like that.

  Well, that was a long time ago. The tree punishes pride, it’s always had a bit of a thing about that. I can’t really walk anymore—some things don’t ever heal. I mostly sit by the wall in my old boat deck chair and watch the wind blow milkweed into the meridian. I watch them silently vanishing as the moon comes up. I knit, when my arthritis lets me. Frigg sends up a nice home-spun wool from New Hampshire at the end of each semester. Black, of course. When tourists come, I hand them headphones and an audio tour on cassette tape. On it, I tell them all the apple-stories I know. Except one. I used to do a live show, but the kids seemed so bored.

  When winter comes to the end of the world, the sea freezes over, and we all have a little peace. The dock is clotted up with chunks of ice, and even the meridian freezes in places, huge circles of ice floating in the air like mirrors. It’s so quiet. That’s when I think about her the most, when I touch the great apples, hanging red and bright even in the cold, as they always will. I think about chances, statistics. What was the probability of choosing so badly? One in a hundred? A thousand? Less? Was there ever any chance that I might choose the right one, or did the tree choose, all along?

  I dig my nails into the flesh of one, and the juice like blood runs over my wrinkled hand. I look up, helpless, palsied, childless, into the flat, frozen heavens, a sky like skin, skin as white as snow.

  The Wedding

  Last summer, my aunt married a rime giant.

  The wedding was lavish; neither clan approved. My uncle-to-be stood dripping in the hallway of Grandmother’s great, sprawling house, miserable in a black suit that had already split twice at the shoulders.

  Aunt Margaret always had a thing for foreign men. When they were kids, she and my mother tried to learn French from tapes so that they could grow up and marry Parisian dukes and dance in pink dresses with peonies on the shoulders. When they progressed past je vous renconterai au palais vendredi, Grandmother sat them both down and gave them ginger cookies and explained to them very gently about the revolution, the impracticality of flowers as personal decoration, and the difficulty of obtaining an EU visa. My mother shrugged and promptly threw over the French for mathematics. Margaret simmered and seethed in the kitchen.

  “Ces paysans stupides ne peuvent pas m’arrêter,” she whispered, and took two more ginger cookies just to spite the guillotine-masters.

  Her wedding dress was the palest possible pink, so pale you might be excused for thinking it white. Two enormous violet-rose peonies nodded from the shoulders, wilting lightly in the June heat. I told my cousin I thought it was cruel to our prospective uncle—couldn’t they have done all this in January? But my aunt has always had a perverse streak. At the reception, Volgnir put his wet blue hand to her cheek and whispered: I melt in thy service. They didn’t think I heard, but I did. I’m quiet; I sneak. Nobody really notices me, so I get to hear all kinds of things. Like when Grandmother took a lover from the local university—she had four of them come to the house and line up on the lawn like prize horses for her to choose. Grandfather sipped his limeade and gin and laughed at all of them, all discomfited and nervous, anxious to please.

  I just sat and watched her examine their calf muscles. I took the three she didn’t want. Our family is like that—waste not, want not.

  When Margaret came home from Norway, Grandmother pursed her lips and stared her up and down. I was washing dishes, careful not to clink the plates. Grandmother sniffed and picked at a dropped stitch in her knitting.

  “I’ve always suspected our family has giant blood, you know,” Grandmother said at long last. “On account of the twins being so tall. Mind he wipes his feet—there’s ginger cookies in the jar.”

  On the day before the wedding, we all gathered in the front room for iced tea and awkward conversation. We stood around, cubes gently melting. All of us younger girls wore light green and no stockings and delicate little bits of silver at our throats and ears. Volgnir’s people came in bronze and horsehair, burnished and I’m sure very fine, their braids greased to a high shine. We all avoided looking at each other, unsure of how we were meant to progress. Grandmother had dyed her hair blue in honor of the rime giants and clipped it back with diamond clasps that looked very like clusters of icicles. One of Volgnir’s sisters eyed them longingly, as the ice on her shield cracked and broke. Everyone ignored the sound. What could you say? Margaret seemed delighted at every moment; the more uncomfortable we all were, the wider she smiled. I could see, when she sat, that her ankles had little sheens of ice on either side, like anklets.

  Finally, my brother Lucas suggested barbecuing, and we all thought this was grand. We took our shoes off to feel the dewy lawn between our toes; my cousin Rose made lemonade with fruit from our trees. We slapped marbly steaks on the grill, and sausages, a few chicken breasts and soy chops for the out-of-towners. Lucas felt at home, with a steel spatula like a spear in his hand, and slowly, we became ourselves, laughing and sharing the kinds of familial gossip weddings encourage. Little Shana’s off to college, majoring in biochemistry. Her boy’s run off with her—very romantic, but he can’t do the math, you know. Did you hear Eli’s insufferable wife is pregnant again? Modern science is a wonderful thing, I told them.

  It came time to eat and we all sat in our accustomed yogic poses, balancing paper plates on one silk-clad knee with a glass of tea or lemonade crinkling and tinkling in one hand. The Hrimthursar—that’s what Margaret called them—we all took it to be rather an over-stuffed surname, but no more, we supposed, than the time Emily married her Hungarian secretary. At least there were a few vowels to spare this time. Anyway, the Hrimthursar just stood around the grill, their nostrils flared huge and dark, sniffing the last smoky wisps off of the meat, their eyes closed in ecstasy, their hands all joined together.

  “Don’t you want to eat?” Lucas called in his friendly, bear-bellow voice.

  “Don’t be ignorant,” snapped Margaret. “They are eating.”

  When I was little, I wanted to be like Aunt Margaret. She wore flowers in her hair every day, and the flowers always matched her stockings, even when it was winter—then, she wore Japanese bittersweet in her brown curls, and flame-colored stockings that I thought were the height of elegance. She knew how to ride a horse, and make ice cream in a bucket, and could do algebra in her head. She knew about engines and crocheting and mountain climbing, and once in her twenties she wrote a potboiler novel about a murder in a French museum. She could do just anything, and I loved her. Once she went to Tibet and came back with purple prayer flags for my room. I sat in her lap—there were little whitish-green grape blossoms in her hair—and listened to her sing sherpa-songs and tell stories about the snow-maidens that lived on Mt. Everest, who would only love humans who could climb all the way to the top.

  It’s important to marry someone, she said. Not because you need them to complete you or because you ought to be someone’s wife by hook or by crook. It’s just that worlds want to combine, they want to marry, and they use people to do it, the way you mix medicine in with something sweet, so it’s easy to swallow. That’s why we have to have all those silly things: a frilly dress and something blue and a bachelor party and a priest. Just so that a boy and a girl can live together and make babies? Posh. Because the big worlds inside us are mating, and they need the pomp.

  Aunt Margaret talked like that a lot. She left a few days later to learn about Norwegian investment banking. When she had gone I picked a little bouquet of blown dandelions and sto
od next to my favorite maple tree in the meadow beyond our house and put my hand on its bark. I swore to love it forever.

  The wind moved in its branches, and that was vow enough for me.

  The Hrimthursar brought fermented milk and honey to the bachelor party.

  Of course, that’s just what we call it, but it’s not your usualstrippers-and-gin-and-no-women affair. We don’t really know how to separate like that. So we were all there, girls and boys and grandfathers and grandmothers, lanterns strung up between the trees, big tins full of beer and yellow wine, and just about everyone with the means to make a good bit of noise. Lucas spun his double bass, Rose tweedled her flute, there was a drum section a dozen cousins strong—Evan and Lizzy and Katie thumping leather with the heels of their hands. Aunt Betsy squeezed her black cello between her knees. My mother grinned over her old guitar, picking out a little melody line, and Grandmother brought out her best violin. Me, I sing. It’s the only time everyone looks at me, even Margaret.

  I sang about snow-maidens. The Hrimthursar, for the first time, smiled big and broad. Their teeth were frozen.

  They were uncomfortable—they think it’s best to send the women off to make wedding bread while the men drink. They stood around with their clubs waiting for the ritual violence that comes with too much fermented milk, but instead Grandmother fiddled like a devil, her blue hair coming loose, her arms and knotted fingers still so strong. The stars above us were terribly bright, as bright as the lanterns, and Margaret danced in bare feet, her hair flying, her frothy violet skirt spinning, while Volgnir watched her in a rapture of devotion. She reached out for him, her lover, her world, and he stepped into the circle of light and music. But Volgnir was enormous, squarish. He was not a slim prince eager to ply waltzes, even if we were inclined to play one. His folk gathered around him and they began to sway, to stomp, to circle around Margaret in a complex, deliberate side-step. They howled in harmony, their craggy faces turned up towards the moon.

  After awhile, I joined them, my high little voice swooping over and under their billowing baritones.

  Margaret kept dancing, in the middle of the ring of giants. Violets dropped from her hair.

  The ceremony took all day. Margaret wore three dresses. The pink one, with peonies, when she came down the big white staircase of the house. She was holding a bouquet of milky blowing dandelions, and winked when she caught my eye. Volgnir stood sweating his ice-droplets in a tuxedo that we dug up out of the attic. About thirty years ago, Uncle Orrin married the brief Aunt Jo, and he was a good three hundred and fifty pounds on the day of it. After a few years of carrots and cucumbers, he was a trim one-seventy when they divorced. Aunt Jo never had much use for skinny men. Anyway, Orrin’s suit was far too small for Volgnir, who stooped under the ceiling, and tugged at the coat-sleeves, which only came down to his elbows. His blue, tattooed forearms showed bright in the parlor. He swore to honor and obey, breathless, starry-hearted.

  Margaret swore to love, and that’s all.

  Greta, Greta, he whispered, eyes shut in rapture, on thy breast I write my Edda, at thy feet I lay the keys of Niflheim, by thy leave alone, I live, and breathe, and die.

  The second dress was brown leather and bronze studs, a shield, a spear. I dipped her braids in cold water and stood in front of the freezer with her until they hardened up pretty good. Volgnir’s sister, a Valkyrie with pale red hair, lashed their arms together with rough rope, and spoke in whatever language they all seemed to know. I caught Freya, and Hel. She touched my aunt’s face with her hoary, frosted hands and kissed Margaret on the forehead. The kiss was still there when she pulled back, faintly blue and gleaming. Each of the Hrimthursar came forward to kiss Margaret, who grew quite dizzy and breathless with each one, and her forehead shone. Together, they drank mead and ate hard, cold bread the color of ashes.

  The third dress was green as summer, and though there was champagne, and more dancing, and Grandmother sitting happily in the lap of Volgnir’s uncle telling him stories of her youth in Hollywood, what I remember is Margaret, her face like a candle, drawing me out of my chair to dance with her. Her arms cold and tight against my waist, she twirled me around the grassy lawn, her smell already like snow and distant black pines. Her shoulder was hard and slippery under my hand.

  It’s all right, she laughed. It doesn’t hurt. And he’s been melting for months. We’ll meet halfway. Remember what I told you.

  I looked over her shoulder at one of the Hrimthursar, a young one with a great dark nose and muscles like stones. He blushed blue, looking up at me through long lashes.

  The Secret of Being a Cowboy

  Did I ever tell you I used to be a cowboy?

  It’s true.

  Had a horse name of Drunk Bob

  a six shooter

  called Witty Rejoinder.

  And I tell you what,

  Me and Bob and Witty

  we rode the fucking range.

  This thing here is two poems and one’s about proper shit

  mythic, I guess, just the way you like it and the other one

  isn’t much to look at, mostly about what a horse smells like

  when he’s been slurping up Jack and ice from the trough.

  The first poem goes like this:

  A few little-known facts about cowboys:

  Most of us are girls.

  Obsolescence does not trouble us.

  We have a dental plan.

  What I can tell you is cows smell like office work and

  the moon looks like Friday night and the paycheck just cashed

  rolling down to earth like all the coins

  I ever earned.

  Drunk Bob he used to say to me:

  son, carrying you’s no hurt—

  it’s your shadow weighs me down.

  That, and your damned singing.

  And Witty she’d chuckle

  like the good old girl she was,

  with a cheeky spin of her barrel

  she’d whistle:

  boy, just gimme a chance

  I’ll knock your whole world down.

  Me and Bob and Witty,

  we rode town to town and sometimes we had cattle

  and sometimes we didn’t and that’s just how it lies.

  Full-time cowboy employment is a lot like being a poet.

  It’s a lot of time spent on your lonesome in the dark

  and most folks don’t rightly know

  what it is you do

  but they’re sure as shot they could manage it

  just about as well as you.

  Some number of sweethearts come standard with the gig,

  though never too much dough.

  They dig the clothes, but they can’t shoot for shit,

  and they damn sure don’t want to hear your poems.

  That’s all right.

  I got a heart like a half bottle

  of no-label whiskey.

  Nothing to brag on,

  but enough for you, and all your friends, too.

  I quit the life

  for the East Coast and a novel I never could finish.

  A book’s like a cattle drive—you pound back and forth over the same

  ugly patch of country until you can taste your life seeping out

  like tin leeching into the beans

  but it’s never really over.

  Drunk Bob said:

  kid, you were the worst ride I had

  since Pluto said Bob, we oughta get ourselves a girl.

  And Witty whispers: six, baby, count them up and just like that

  we’re in the other poem, which is how we roll

  on the glory-humping, dust-gulping, ever-loving range.

  Some days you can’t even get a man to spit in your beer