He was sitting on his bed
I tried to become singleminded and straightforward, to keep my mind set on one thought or problem until I was finished with it. It was hot and lonely. I wore a lot of clothing to keep the sun from burning me and causing my skin to peel. Sometimes I read aloud from a children’s reader. I wanted to start all over with simple declarative sentences. Subject, predicate, object. Dick opened the door. Jane fed the dog. It helped me immensely. I began to think more clearly, to concentrate, to leave behind the old words and aromas and guilts. Then I was called to the telephone. My mother had been shot to death by a lunatic. It all came back, who I was, what I was, where the past crossed over into the present and from being to being. Another innocent victim. I didn’t go home to look at her small dead body. That would have been too much of a bringing back. I was sure I would never recover from the unspeakable heartbreak and Jewishness of her funeral. So I didn’t go home.
Instead I went into the desert with a paintbrush and a can of black paint. Among all those flat stones I found a single round one. I painted it black. It’s my mother’s burial marker.”
Chapter 27
it rained and then snowed. I wrote letters through the blurred afternoons, embryonic queries on the nature of silence and time, notes really, laconic and hopeful, ready for bottling, and I mailed them to friends and former teachers, to people back home, to selfpossessed young women in prospering colleges. There were no picnics with Myna. The days seemed even longer than the meandescent days of summer. Mrs. Tom died finally after remaining in a coma for several weeks.
I took a walk down the hall and dropped into Taft’s room. He was sitting on his bed, legs bent in, back quite straight, reading a huge gray book. I sat by his desk. Beyond the window was that other world, unsyllabled, snow lifted in the wind, swirling up, massing within the lightless white day, falling toward the sky.
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