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Show Moon - 26 A few discoveries like these, and you can live through anything. It's the sort of thing you forget when you're older and instructed by the people who think you have to take life by force. Then you stare and study and try to get everything exactly right. When this fails, as it always does eventually, the old discoveries are there to be dug like flower bulbs out of the hard-packed press of memory. When my mother finally came to reclaim me, she stooped down and opened her arms, but I stood staring at her, unable to move. "She banged her head on the wall," Alice said to her sister, her voice cold. "Every night." I looked at her in surprise, for already I didn't remember. The mind is like an old house. Certain rooms are locked to keep out the cold. How sensible, how kind! The heart's fuel is saved for better things, like the astonishing possibilities of hope. My mother took me to an Army base to see Daddy, who scared me when he first appeared, for he was wearing a helmet. He took off the horrible mud-green thing, reached out his hand and lifted me up to his shoulders, galloped around the compound like a horse, and I screamed with fear and delight. He bought me an ice-cream cone. He held me on his lap and kissed me. He let me unlace his heavy boots, which he said protected him from the rattlesnakes that hid in the tall grass where he practiced for war. I thought he was my father and I thought he loved me, but at night in bed with my mother, he roared like a bear, and I wanted to save her from him. In the morning, when almost no one can pretend, his eyes were like ice, and I knew he wished I were somewhere else. At dusk, he'd once again hold me on his lap and act as if I were his special person, as if my mother were the one who ought |
