|
It Should Be Set to Music
by Casey Cep
“There are children. There’s red carpet. Just something that’s barely a memory,” small phrases come in whispers from beneath the blanket. Marianne breathes in small breaths from under the quilt, but she doesn’t want to face the sunlight, the light of morning in her apartment.
“That’s it. I have to come out from under these blankets.” He forces his head above the tumbled linens that they’ve managed to bunch up at the head of the bed throughout the night. “I don’t know why that’s the dream you always remember. Can’t you tell me another?”
But there isn’t another to tell. It’s always this one, more of a memory than a dream, but still visiting her in the valleys of moments when she should dream, having fallen into a sleep deep enough to harbor the resurfacing of memory in the way in which most experience their dreams.
“Only single digit numbers allowed.” The little one maneuvers her way between the two front seats, reaching just far enough to make out the time on the car’s digital clock – 5:32. Inset into the dashboard, its digits are all formed from the same seven red dashes. “Five minus three is two, two plus three is five.”
“Only, you haven’t announced you’re playing the game.” The older one turns from the front passenger seat, and though she doesn’t know the rules as well as the little one, she knows them well enough to know that you have to first announce you’re playing the game.
“Okay, I’m playing. Five minus three is two, two plus three is five.” On the sly, fast-paced and frenzied, she speaks like no other nine-year-old. “Point for me.”
“Well, it’s 5:33 now, so that doesn’t count anyway.” From the defense, angered and agitated, she speaks like any other fifteen-year old.
“Marianne and Melissa, please stop with those awful math problems. It’s just the clock, not worth fighting over, and we’re nearly there.” The oldest one is driving the car, speeding at a speed that is not fast enough for the younger two to report her behavior, but fast enough to please her own need to move faster than the speed limit.
“Did you know, whenever I turn on a calculator I have to put in the problem 25.36 plus 36.25?” Back to the little one, now looking out at the passing cornfields, trying to count up the rows as they flutter past. “If you do it fast enough, it’s symmetrical: 61.61.”
“Marianne, you don’t have to do it fast enough, it’s always 61.61. You just have to put it in the calculator correctly.” Guidance again from the oldest one, still driving faster than the speed limit but about to trust the brake and eel her way across the road, the next left is their turn and she starts to slow down in anticipation.
Lips wrapped around the steering wheel, she’s starting to cry. The older one and the little one have both left the car, already headed up the cement walkway around the back of the building. Light is breaking through the slightly tinted windshield strip, streaking across the dashboard and onto her fingers, wrapped tighter than her lips around the steering wheel. Emotion as inexplicable as it is unnoticed.
“It was put there to know the year; I wonder who put it there?” The little one’s left foot is striding forward, hesitating for a moment to cover up Washington’s face in the sidewalk.
“It doesn’t matter who put it there. When you were younger, you used to try and pick it up every time.” The older one finds satisfaction in knowing the younger one does foolish things, or did foolish things.
Both wonder why the oldest one hasn’t yet left the car. By the time she makes it into the building, into the red-carpet room, all of the children have already lined the first row.
He wonders, in between Marianne’s silences, why they still come together on the weekends. Why still—even now—they pretend to live together on Saturdays and Sundays every week. “If you’re going to tell that one, can’t you ever just finish it?”
“It’s hard—” The space between them curves, she rises from beneath the quilt, “—to remember it all.”
“You mean it’s hard to remember how it happened in the dream, or the way it really happened?” Still very early in the morning, he clears his throat between the first happened and the second.
“Is it too late?” Fingerprints visible in the meniscus of her morning coffee, through the glass or on the glass-surface, the little one swirls it in a drinking glass. Delighted with the marks, she peers at them from all angles.
“For what?” The oldest one is just now getting to the dishes, putting all the glasses into the already-dirty dish water, too many suds, so many they begin to splash from the basin. “Sorry we were out of coffee cups. Late night.”
“I don’t want to be late for school, there’s a fieldtrip. I wondered if I slept over. I mean overslept.” Fifteen now, she knows she will be able to drive in another year, but won’t get her license.
“Not too late, I’ll drop you off before I go. Another year and you’ll drive yourself.” Nervously assured, her tone is too dependent on wondering if she’d done a good enough job. Uneasy laughter follows up her comment when the little one fails to offer confirmation.
“I can see my fingers through the glass, Audrey. The more I drink, the more of them I can see.” Still swirling, now holding the glass above her head, the little one continues to analyze herself, or the part of herself which is separated by glass.
“Marianne, you don’t even like the taste of coffee, right?” Continuing to bother her about the habit of drinking coffee, the oldest one can think of no new topic of conversation and so she continues their tired morning script.
“I like discovering the length of my fingers, one sip at a time. Nineteen sips to a glass, and then the fingers are fully visible.” Moving from specificity to generality, this is how the little one escapes conversation.
“You just made that up, you’ve never had coffee in a drinking glass before, only coffee mugs. And if you give me another minute, I’ll pour what’s left of that into a mug.” Hurried corkscrews of the towel underwater, choreography tightly planned and quickly executed, hoping to evade the tragedy of clear-glassed coffee and sip number nineteen, the oldest one is always working towards something she’s missed or meant to do.
“Point taken. But the coffee is sharp. Warm on my teeth. Enough of a bad taste to remind me of morning.” Already leaving the table, she liked the idea of breakfast, but never ate it. “Do you think you can just leave the dishes? I’ll do them when I get home. Let’s just go—I don’t want to miss the fieldtrip.”
“Can you finish it, Marianne? Either way, from the dream or from what you remember. Can you just tell me what he says?”
“It’s not that he says anything revelatory. I think it’s more the setting, the pews, rows, and emotions.” She closes her eyes quickly, wanting to move back to the museum, wanting now to climb the stairs into the Early Italian Room and not into the narthex.
Walking past royalty painted in bravery and privilege, she moved toward a bird, perched on the windowsill in gold-gilded silence.
“Call it a sparrow,” she thought and said, barely audible, under her breath, but with enough force to turn it into frost against the windowpane. She’s been moving around the room looking for something worth her attention, and despite having spent the entire morning in the museum can’t find anything but framed portraits and still-life paintings.
A friend of hers moved from against the wall, leaving behind the out-of-place medieval paintings to say “Marianne, what are you looking at?”
“I think it was flown here from some temple. Probably later than the paintings. Nineteenth century, underestimated by curators and archivists who pretend they own the collection in their dark-dungeon layer workshops.”
“What are you talking about?” The friend interrupts, can’t see the minute handwriting on the archive tags, the men wearing white-gloves so they don’t damage the artifacts that are hard at work in Marianne’s mind.
“Instead of a caption, let’s call it a sparrow. It doesn’t belong here, it looks too lifeless for this room.” She continues, sounding as if she’s rehearsed it, as if she were just waiting for someone to come over and ask her about it. “On telephone wires they all look the same way to keep their feathers from ruffling. This one is too wide-eyed for the telephone wires, but he doesn’t belong here either.”
“Are you sure it’s a sparrow?” The friend turned listener turns into skeptic and starts to turn away when the curator leans loud enough for them to hear.
“Whereas the paintings have been much studied, this carved dove does not get much attention from scholars.”
Marianne, her friend, and the framed princes all look away.
“He just ends up saying something about the Gospels. Lazarus rising or coming back to life. Everything is working towards the resurrection.” Marianne wants to crawl back under the quilt, the room is too bright for her in the morning.
“You’ve never answered before. All these weeks of you waking up with that dream, and you could never tell me what he says. I wonder why it took so long to remember that.” He is pleased to have drawn it out of her, finally: the topic of the always-remembered-but-never-fully-so sermon.
“That’s the dream version, or the memory version, or what I’ve made of them both.” Undermining her own confession, she turns it back into something he can’t have.
Confusing the rather short, otherwise normally endowed reverend with God, she wondered when he might call on the heavenly hosts to join the choir and improve their weekly anthems. This and wondering when Jesus would fix the doorframe—it was crooked, angled too high on the left and too low on the right—occupied her Sunday morning vigils. One afternoon during confirmation, she had been told how Christ helped Joseph the carpenter to correct a crooked doorway, and ever since then she had been waiting for him to fix theirs.
“If the children would like to come forward now, it’s time for the children’s service.” The Reverend was short, but he had learned to do without a sound system and boomed his voice toward the back pews. A few children came forward immediately, but in a few seconds about twenty had made their way toward the altar, where on the red-carpet they gathered each week to hear the children’s sermon.
“I have a surprise in my pocket for you all.” Reaching into the side pocket of his clergy’s robe, the preacher’s hand became lost in the bunched red linen, then came out clasped around the object. “Can anyone guess what it is?”
Seeing no one raise a hand, and hearing none of the children offer a response, he continued speaking while unfolding his fingers from around the object, “It’s a key. I brought it with me this morning to help teach you about a very important part of our worship service.”
Children fidgeting on the first step began looking back toward their families, and though furthest from the preacher, Marianne’s eyes widened and fixed on the key in his hand. “Is it for the gates of heaven?”
The unworldly deepness of his voice had always left Marianne wondering if her preacher were God himself. A confused child, she looked up at him, still waving the key, and thought for a moment that his robe whitened during the moment she spent looking at him.
Laughter from the congregation behind her forced a backward glance, but she quickly returned her gaze to him when he replied, “No, I don’t think anyone of us will have one of those yet. Soon though.”
A dismissive smile, though he did not mean to dismiss her eager reply, spreading across his face, he continued, “This key will help you learn to pronounce kyrie. Can everyone say that? Key-ri-e?”
Together in a blossoming, almost brimful, chant, the children all focused on the key and replied “Key-ri-e.”
“Again” he commanded.
And again they all replied, “Key-ri-e.”
Marianne’s was the only absent voice in the chant, for she had walked back to her family’s pew, the second from the back on the left side, a church divided both by politics and privilege. The oldest one had taken her seat on the pew a few minutes earlier, coming in after the first lesson and the psalm, and handed Marianne the bulletin that she was already reaching for. Paging to the inside cover, she saw it spelled out, now realizing why the prop was necessary. Looking back up toward the altar she saw the other children were singing, one Sunday a month they concluded the children’s sermon with a small anthem or play. She leaned over to the oldest one and whispered, “I don’t like to sing anyway, Audrey.”
“It’s okay, you can sit with me.” The oldest one’s fingers are still wrapped tightly, only now around a hymnal, gripping the sides and casting her eyes away from the youngest. Each looks away from the other, and both away from the Reverend.
“Our dinner knives were full of family history. Lies sharpened through the years by different members, each with a different grip.” She’s almost dressed, moving toward the box of light coming through the windows.
“I don’t really understand that. But, kyrie is Greek,” smile forming along the curves of his lips, “You knew that right?”
“You know, I think I knew then I’d never be able to explain it.” She turns back toward him, the first time she’s faced him since getting up out of the bed. “Kyrie can mean both a complaint and a plea for mercy. Both at the same time. I know what it means in the Greek, it’s meant to be set to music.”
“I was only kidding,” his smile straightens, the yellow of the room starts to fade when the morning light changes.
There isn’t another to tell, and she knows she’ll have to ask him to leave.
“Something that’s barely a memory can’t be shared.” Marianne closes the shade with her right hand, removes the creased and folded bulletin from her upper dresser with her left, and tosses it into his hand saying, “It’s nothing you can ever have.”
back to Summer 2005 Table of Contents
|
