We stopped before a painting where a woman was reading a book in a garden in the shade at the edge of a park. Her dress of white linen edged in blue rustled when she turned the pages. Such a delicious blue-green, the picture smelled like mint, the grass deep as ferns. I saw us in the picture, Niki in trailing white, myself in dotted swiss. We walked out to the woman slowly, she was ready to pour our tea. I was here in the gallery, but I was also walking through the damp grass, my hem stained with green, the breeze through the thin cloth of my dress.
The acid came on in waves, we rocked as we stood before the paintings from the force of the drug. But I wasn't frightened anymore. I knew where I was. I was with Niki in the true world.
"This is out-fucking-rageous," she whispered, holding my hand.
Some of the paintings opened up, like windows, like doors, while others remained just painted canvas. I could reach in to Cezanne's peaches and cherries on a rich white crumpled tablecloth, pick up a peach and put it back on the plate. I understood Cezanne. "Look how you see the cherries from above, but the peaches from the side," I said.
"They look like cherry bombs," Niki said, gathering her fingers together and then flicking them out wide. The lively stems of the cherries flicked out like firecrackers.
"Your eyes want to make it normal but it won't go," I said.
I imagined painting the picture, I could see exactly what order he did what.
The owlman sidled over and hunched his shoulders. "No touch."
"Yodo," Niki said under her breath, and we moved away to the next painting.
I felt I could have painted all the paintings myself. The acid kept coming on and coming on, I didn't know how much higher I could get. It wasn't at all like the Percodans — stoned, stupid, escape. This was higher than high. Two-hundredth floor, five-hundredth floor. Van Gogh's night sky.
We stopped to get something to drink at the museum cafe. I knew exactly where I was, in the same building as the auditorium, my old classroom just downstairs. My own personal playground. I got into the drink dispenser, I played the opening of the "Sleeping Beauty Waltz" with the different soft drinks. "What am I playing?" I asked her.
"Be cool," Niki said.
I tried to be cool, but it was too funny. When it was time to pay, I couldn't remember about the money, how it worked. The cashier looked like a tapioca pudding. She wouldn't look at us. She said some numbers and I pulled out my money, but I didn't know what to do with it. I held it open on my hand and let her pick the right combination from the palm. "Danke, chorisho, guten tag, Arigato," I said. "Dar es Salaam." Hoping she'd think we were just foreigners.
"Dar es Salaam" Niki said as we took seats on the plaza.
This was exactly how I should have been as a child, joyful, light as a toy balloon. Niki and I sat in the shade and drank our drinks, watched the people go by, noticing how much they looked like certain animals. There was a gnu, and a lion, and a secretary bird. Tapir and a curly-haired yak. When had I ever laughed like this before?
After we were done, Niki said we should go use the bathroom.
"I don't have to," I said.
"You won't know until it's too late," Niki said. "Come on." We walked back into the building, found the doors with the ridiculous stick figures in pants or skirt. The ridiculous way we thought male, female, as pants or skirt. Suddenly, the whole sexual universe and its conventions seemed fantastic, contrived. "Don't look in the mirror," Niki said. "Look at your shoes." It was dark gray tile, bad light, dirty floor. I felt the fear return. A metallic taste in my mouth. An old lady in a tan pantsuit, tan face, tan hair, tan shoes, a yellow belt, came out of one of the stalls, stared at us. "She looks like a grilled cheese sandwich," I said.
"My friend's sick," Niki said, trying not to laugh out loud. She pushed me into the handicapped toilet, closed the door behind us. She had to unzip my pants and put me on the pot like I was two years old. I couldn't go, it was too funny.
"Shut up and go," Niki said.
I swung my legs. It really felt like I was two. "Make tinkle for Annie," I said. And I let go. I really had to, after all. The sound made me laugh. "I love you, Niki," I said.
"I love you too," she said.
But on the way out I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked very red-faced, my eyes black as a magpie's, hair tangled. I looked feral. It scared me. Niki hurried me out.
We were in the Contemporary wing. I never went there. When I came with my mother, she would stand me in front of a Rothko, a blue-and-red square, and explain it to me for an hour. I never did get it. Now Niki and I stood in front of it, in the same space I stood when I was young, and watched the three zones of color throb, pulse, and other tones emerge, a tomato, a garnet, purple. The red advanced, the blue retreated, just like Kandinsky said. It was a door and we walked in.
Loss. That's what was in there. Grief, sorrow, wordless and unfathomable. Not what I felt this morning, septic, panicked. This was distilled. Niki put her arm around my waist, I put mine around hers. We stood and mourned. I could imagine how Jesus felt, his pity for all of humanity, how impossible it was, how admirable. The painting was Casals, a requiem. My mother and me, Niki and Yvonne, Paul and Davey and Claire, everybody. How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.
We walked out into the sunshine, gravely, like people after a funeral.
I took Niki into the Permanent Collection, I had to see the goddesses now. In the Indian rooms lived the rest of the ancient equation. Ripe figures dancing, making love, sleeping, sitting on lotuses, their hands in their characteristic mudras. Shiva danced in his bronze frame of fire. Indian raga music played softly in the background. We found a stone Boddhisattva, in his mustache and fine jewels. He had been through the door that Rothko painted, and held both that and the dance. He had come out the other side. We sat on the bench and allowed his heart to enter us. Other people came through but they didn't stay. Their eyes flickered on us, and they moved away. They were like flies to a stone. We couldn't even see them.
IT TOOK a long time to come down. We sat with Yvonne for a while, watching TV, but it seemed incomprehensible. The room swirled with color and motion, and she was staring at tiny heads in a box. The lamps were more interesting. I drew the way the air filled with perfect six-sided snowflakes. I could make them fall and make them go back up again. Sergei came into the room, he looked just like the white cat that followed him in. He talked to us about something, but his mind was a goldfish bowl. The skirts and pants thing.
Suddenly I couldn't stand to be inside our cramped, ugly house, with Sergei and his goldfish, its mouth opening and closing stupidly. I took some paper and watercolors onto the porch and painted wet on wet, streaks that became Blakean figures in sunrise, and dancers under the sea. Niki came out and smoked and looked at the rings around the streetlights. Later Rena and Natalia shared their Stoli with us, but it didn't do a thing. Rena was the fox woman and Natalia an Arabian horse with a dish face. They spoke Russian and we understood every word they said. ,
By three in the morning, I was getting awfully tired of snowflakes and the way the walls were breathing. Make tinkle for Annie. That's what I couldn't stop thinking about. At first, I thought, maybe it was really make tinkle for Mommy, but when I heard it in my head, it was always the same. Make tinkle for Annie. Who was Annie, and why do I make tinkle for her? I was trembling, my nerves shot, as Yvonne lay sleeping on her tide-foam and the snowflakes fell in our room. Annie, who are you, and where is Mommy? Yellow, was all I could get, yellow sunlight, and a white swan, a warm smell like laundry.
IN THE MORNING, I cut out words from the funny section of the paper:
WHO IS ANNIE
29
As I HAD PROMISED, I accompanied Yvonne to baby class at Waite Memorial Hospital. I held her tennis balls, her towel. I couldn't seem to take it seriously. I didn't know if it was the aftermath of the acid, but everything seemed funny. The plastic doll we handled looked like a space alien. The young couples seemed like big children, playing a game, the pregnancy game. These girls couldn't really be pregnant, they had pillows shoved up underneath their baby doll dresses. I liked the feeling of all the baby things, even washing the doll and diapering it with the Mickey Mouse diaper.
Yvonne pretended she was my sister-in-law, and that her husband, my brother, was in the army. Patrick, she liked the name. A TV actor. "I got a letter from Patrick, did I fell you?" she told me during the break, while we all drank sweet juice from tiny paper cups, ate ginger snaps. "My husband," she told the couple next to her. "He's getting sent to, you know —"
"Dar es Salaam," I said.
"I miss him, don't you?"
"Not that much," I said. "He's way older than me." I imagined a big blond man who brought me dolls from his different tours. Heidi dolls, dope hidden up their skirts.
"He sent me five hundred dollars for the layette," she said.
"Made me promise not to go to yard sales. He wants everything brand-new. It's a waste of money, but if that's what he wants ..."
This was fun. I was never a little girl playing games with other little girls, dolly mommy daddy games.
They showed her how to hold the baby to her breast, holding the breast in one hand. She suckled the plastic child. I had to laugh.
"Shhh," Yvonne said, cuddling the space alien, stroking its indented head. "Such a pretty little baby. Don't you listen to that bad girl laughing, mija. You're my baby, yes you are."
Later, Yvonne lay on the orange mat, blowing and counting, and I put the tennis balls under her back, switched to the rolled towels. I held the watch and timed her contractions, I breathed with her, we both hyperventilated. She wasn't nervous. "Don't worry," Yvonne said, smiling up at me, her belly like a giant South Sea Island pearl in a cocktail ring. "I been through this before."
They explained about the epidural and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the pattern for orderly disembarkation in case of crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie.
RENA SOAKED UP the fierce April sun in her black macrame bikini, drinking a tumbler of vodka and Fresca, she called it a Russian Margarita. The men from the plumbing contractor next door loitered by the low chain-link fence, sucking their teeth at her. She pretended she didn't notice, but slowly applied Tropic
Tan to the tops of her breasts, stroked down her arms, while the workmen grabbed their crotches and called out suggestions in Spanish. The metal chaise was half-collapsed beneath her, we were lulled by the sound of the rusty sprinkler watering the lawn of crabgrass and dandelions.
"You're going to get skin cancer," I said.
She rolled her bottom lip out. "We 're dead long time, kiddo." She liked to say these American words, knowing how they sounded in her mouth. She lifted her Russian Margarita, drank. "Naqdaroviye."