Research: Journals

The Journal

Past Issues

29.1

Mimi Still Dixon

Waiting: Theme and Variations

Tempos

I am seven, and I am waiting, a red-haired, freckled girl in front of a window that spans three flights of marble staircase. At the top, on my bench, I watch people come and go, but I remain. Far down the glossy halls, I hear scales, pianos, a clarinet, maybe a French horn. I listen for my father, the oboe. No one has told me where he teaches in this big building: I must wait here to be collected. It is Baltimore, the Peabody Institute, and I have just finished dance lessons with Miss Kitkat, the eurythmics teacher, who tells us to feel a rope down our spines, hanging us from the ceiling, our heads lifted up, our bodies stretched. As she speaks, we feel the little vertebrae separating, jerked up from their huddle. We uncramp, let in the air, breath slowly, in and out. Our shoulders, she says, are icicles, and in this warm room, they drip down to our limp fingertips. Feel the gravity, she says. My body tunes to Miss Kitkat; her voice vibrates through my muscles. I love her, although she seems ancient, and I am only seven, tall and skinny. She, too, is terribly thin. Her body is a roadmap of veins, blue highways that travel her translucent skin. But Miss Kitkat can do miracles with her arms and legs. Her energy, she says, comes from "here" in the center, the solar plexus, the mystery of the cosmos. "Contract! Release!" she sings. We are all one, and we are all the mystery. We contract and release. We are seeds today, limp on the earth, and as the piano accelerates and crescendos, we rise. Feel the sun, she says.

I have decided I am a sunflower, a seed dropped from the greedy beak of a blackbird. I clutch the dirt with my toes and send out invisible shoots. The sun warms my solar plexus and my center germinates like a bean on wet tissue or the avocado pit in Mrs. Neal's third grade window. My back unfurls slowly, my elbows are drawn upward by some hesitant and invisible puppeteer, and my arms follow, inscribe my circumference, taut, listening, swelling. And then I grow: my face lifts, my stem twists, my thighs flex, I burgeon, I flourish, every tendon stretches, every muscle in my body rises toward the sun.

But outside my window, the rain has begun and I am rooted, stuck between rage and tears. The light slants in from its high, grey angle, and when I turn to inspect the street now and then, searching, the cobblestones are wet. My father is somewhere. He may or may not remember that I am here.

***

My father is the star of the show. My brother and I sit proudly in the concert hall and listen to him command order out of the cacophony of orchestral tuning up. The A floats out over the hall and everyone hushes. They hearken--first the violins, and then the cellos, and the rest, strings, woodwinds, brass, until the whole stage hums his song. We too can hum the A , and know all the oboe solos by heart--La Scala di Seta, Swan Lake, Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. The poured gold of my dad's soprano, the rich tone he is famous for, colors my silences, turns them to Mozart or to endless scales. This is what I hear all day at home, where my mother keeps us quiet so he will not be disturbed. I have been well-trained to stand in attendance, to hearken. It is my legacy.

My mother waited three years for my father to return after he enlisted in the army the year I was born. She was young and timid, and unused to being alone. First in Los Angeles, and then with her parents in Kansas City, then on the New Jersey shore, fearful of Germans floating into the beach at night, and Cambridge, and London, Ontario, she followed him and waited. When he finally returned, I refused to believe he was Daddy. That 's Daddy, I said, pointing to a photograph, a handsome soldier in khaki, squinting in the Texas sun. They had to make up another name for me to call him.

Sitting here at seven, I am beginning to think about who I am. I think about waiting. In my story, I am a princess who waits--on her monument, frozen into sleep, or in her tower above the cobbled street. Or I am an orphan across the ocean in the war, hiding in a forest of birches. I think about how good I am at this, how patient, so good and so still.

Longing

By sixteen, I am an expert at patience. I watch the street for signs and I invent interesting scenes from my attic room. Teddy C. lives down the street. He goes to Harvard, and, occasionally, when he's home for spring break, he smiles at me. He tells my mother I have wonderful toes, which embarrasses me all the way down to those snaky appendages that I curl up in my sandals so no one will notice. Even though I disown these ungainly feet, I find myself leafing through art books in their defense--Botticelli's Venus, for example, and all Praxiteles' maidens have super-sized second toes. But no amount of precedent or compliment will mitigate any of my bodily embarrassments, my nose with its bump, my freckles, ears, my lanky legs, my new breasts. I love in dreams, disembodied. I make bold conversation with the mirror. I am adept at les mots d'escalier , stair words, second thoughts, revisions. I am frequently elsewhere, seldom in propria persona . As if by remote control, before the technology was invented, I could fast forward, replay, slow-mo, and pause any sequence of my life in my private tower above my parents' bedroom. From my window, I have a sniper's bead on West Hawthorne Place. I can see just over the young sycamore and down toward the lakeside end of the street where Teddy lives. And if he, innocently, saunters down to my end of the block, to catch the Broadway bus or drop off his dry cleaning or buy some gum, I have at least ten seconds to appear, sporting my toes, in one of the guises I've painstakingly devised.

But I am always waiting in the wings, it seems, backstage and in costume memorizing my lines, practicing my roles, while the show goes on without me. Except for that night, a soft night by Lake Michigan, sitting on the rocks--those broken chunks of cement that served to break the waves--the night where he took my chin in his hand and kissed me with heartbreaking softness, and asked me to wait. Until he returned from Israel, until I turned eighteen?

Jesu, the joy of man's desiring, the cosmic thrill of the mysteriously down the block. At sixteen, I was flushed with desire. I knew, without knowing, the erotics of waiting. He never called.

Just a rehearsal, I tell myself now, for the husbands. The first, I married five weeks after we met, then held myself in suspense for the next six years, waiting for his sudden angers, his outbursts, his threats of leaving. I was a new dance--he led, I followed artfully. After all, I was good at this. Once, I almost jumped out a window to keep him home. Did I mean it? I don't know. I had a mad faith things would get better. They are getting better, I said. And then I had my son, six years into it, because my uterine clock said it was time. My friends said I was crazy.

It's an old story, a woman's story of entrapment, submission, responsibility for others. This woman's work of waiting, of standing at windows or jumping though them--once you start, you never know how to stop, always giving in to another minute, another hour, always looking for signs in the landscape, the moment to act and the moment to stay, indistinguishable. When I imagine the path of waiting drawn out like a string, I think there might have been a moment for decision, for cutting losses or taking a turn to the left; on the other hand, what keeps one waiting are those outrageous ironies that just might befall--one might, for example, have jumped up and left just before the prize arrived in the mail, or the loved one returned home to find you gone. But you never have a chance to see the whole ball of twine unraveled. You are always on a road, never flying above it.

Gestation

We women have a biological paradigm for waiting--as ladies-in-waiting, expectant mothers. Gestation: certainly women's work, but no ordinary wait. When I was pregnant, time changed. In my first pregnancy, every moment was fertile; my hours were rich, my body plumping up with its extra quarts of blood. I blossomed and fruited like an enormous summer squash. "You look like a sunrise," someone said when I wore my yellow maternity smock. I was planetary, rosy-fingered, auroral, boundless. I contemplated my ballooning navel and watched small feet run across from inside. Doing nothing, just growing, sufficed . I burgeon, I flourish, every tendon stretches, every muscle in my body rises toward the sun. My business was circumference; incorporation, doubling and division; and finally, a selving (that left its selvages). Merely waiting was enough, and at the end, a prize.

I have a picture from the hospital room, taken early in my eighteen hours of laboring to deliver my ten-pound son. The photo is shot from the feet up, so my smiling head sits tiny and composed on an enormous glowing belly. Skin can't stretch that far, I think now, but the interesting part is the radiance--not of the wan maternal smile for the camera, but of the cosmic belly, its solar energy, about to contract and release. My husband had his finest hour in that labor room, making me laugh as I forgot all my Lamaze training, threw up and spasmed, arms and legs flailing, while he improvised manic slapstick routines to distract me from the pain and to surprise me back into breathing. It was then that I discovered what they call in all the books "the urge to push." From the fullness of the wait, to the heaving and opening of labor, suddenly from somewhere deep in the body arises the need to act. Some inaudible hormonal buzzer went off and my reflex surprised me with its savagery. The nurses made me wait to push (they were wrong, I think now, and my retching body was right), but when they said O.K., I grasped the handles, dug heels into stirrups, and roared like a tornado until I got him far enough out that they could drag him, thudding across my pelvic floor, into the light.

It was worth the wait--but it was not the end of waiting. Waiting for him to fall asleep in my arms, for him to wake up, the tending and attendance, the hearkening after each breath as he slept through his first cold, the anxious wait for headlights of a returning car on sleepless nights during those teenage years, or for him to grow up, and leave. For my real life to start.

Deferral

Much later, a new marriage, a different husband, two stepsons to raise, and a new baby of our own: what stands out is an emblematic moment in a rocking chair on an island in Maine. My mother had a rocking chair when I was growing up; its shrill musical creaking leaches into memory as it must have into the days and nights my mother nursed my younger brothers and sisters while I played or slept or daydreamed through childhood. It was both irritating and reassuring: the creak alarmingly loud, the chair always seeming on the verge of collapse under the plump body of my mother and her well-nourished and long-held babies. In our rented cottage in Maine, baby Sasha just ten months old, I found another rocker, where I nursed and lulled him through a cool, sun blessed summer.

When body and child have mysteriously tuned to one another, you achieve in breastfeeding an effortless zen-like equilibrium. The baby cries, the milk lets down, your breasts fill, tingle, itch, you brush a nipple across the baby's cheek and he turns to root, he nestles his hand on your swollen breast, latches on with gums and tongue, and sucks, and with every suck you feel relief, gratitude, love--a perfect symbiosis, a tiny drama of sacrifice, with its moment of tension, peripeteia, closure, emptying out and filling up. It is the purest being, time when time stops.

But the drama of the body does not entirely absorb the mind. Rocking is like walking in its rhythmic repetition--and, as the peripatetic philosophers knew, there is a deep and mysterious connection between feet and mind, a restlessness of thought that must be expressed in space, a trot down the path that speeds thought. The difference between me in my chair and the ancients in their perambulations was that they got somewhere; by the time their paths wound round to the lyceum, they had said something intelligible. But in my chair I was immobilized in a dream of action, locked in embrace with a tiny illiterate, going nowhere but back and forth. Still, as I recall so vividly, my mind raced as I rocked, the bliss of union and the agitation of words side by side.

That summer day in my rocking chair, the baby's lids almost fluttering into afternoon nap, my mind pumped like crazy--words appeared and dissolved, sentences formed and reformed; I had the words and the tune, and nowhere to sing it. I had tried reading or writing while breastfeeding, but almost from the beginning, my sons would knock the books out of my hand, conscious of a competitor for my attention. (My mother says I did the same.) So my habit was to relax into a simulacrum of perfect calm in order to bring on the baby's sleep as soon as possible. This gave me an hour or so to myself--never a dependable span of time to be sure, but something.

But the calm was false, though I'd learned to convey it all the way to my fingertips to fool the baby. With every creak of the runners came words, words, words, and no way to write them down. There was no choice but to hold my breath and wait--while in my head I composed and held it all there, repeating the lines, revising them, gathering whole paragraphs in a breath, my unwritten story an airy scrimshaw carved on the sudden grace of a mammary moment. My maternal parole was tumescent, and ready to flow. Who knows what I wanted to say? I would tell the truth of this moment. I would tell, like Prufrock coming back from the ocean floor, or Odysseus from the dead, the truth of the bones and the breast, and the baby, and the perfect repose of flesh, and the perfect agitation of the mind in its cradle of words. Because we are creatures of talk, because we learned the mother tongue and the muscle twitch of a smile at the breast, and because we want to hold, for a moment, ourselves in eternal embrace. Even Patience, sitting on a monument, needs the compensations of poetry--I think as I swing out the minutes like a pendulum--even she wants to snatch a hard truth from the flux of living. But she is made all of marble, and we are hot flesh, our bodies wracked by the urge to say. I remember this moment of going nowhere, and my words written and consumed in milk.

There are many stories I never wrote. There have been a thousand moments of relinquishing, of letting it all go, so many things bigger, it seems, than my own hunger. I think of waiting now as an endless rocking, with its musical, grating groan.

Vegetables

Our youngest almost off to college, my husband and I are getting used to the quiet in the house. We recently bought a laptop and set it up on the dining room table, where we leave silly poems for each other. Sometimes our son joins the dialogue. Better than my garrulous sometime journals, they capture something of the day to day. The other evening, alone in an empty house, I wrote this:

Poem for You

The sun warms its color, deepens
the shadows at six tonight
It has rained, a summer
thunderstorm, suddenly
gone.
Trees are half-lit,
their backs on fire,
the yellows of daylilies
across the lawn
glow.
I am waiting for you,
I am playing out
the eternal lot of
woman, looking out a window
and waiting.
Our son is growing up.
I've opened the wine.
And the vegetables wait for me
on the butcher block. How
can I begin
when I can't imagine
your return?
Yet they wait,
the green beans,
the tomatoes,
the enchanted broccoli,
the home grown
red leaf lettuces, the
erotic cucumber.
I'm caught here
helpless.
In vegetables begin
responsibilities.

He returned, the shadows ever deeper, with another good excuse--he was swimming the mile he's set for himself each day, a promise that we will grow even older together.

And he, my vegetable love, wrote:

I am the zucchini, under vine,
hidden, almost cold. What does the zucchini
know of lots of women, or even one,
her pink tendril taking my girth: am I ready
for harvest? If not, I'll grow forever, l o n g e r and B I G G E R,
nudge her house like a mud slide in the night,
budge her to the edge of the butcher block, so she can SEE,
how far it is,
from one end of the pool to the other, further with a flip turn,
creeping up, lap by lap, on a mile workout
Sorry, babe.

What can you do? Why did I marry a man who is always late? I had clues--his father who took two hours to get himself out of bed every morning, and then spent the rest of the day getting back in. The bigger question, the one I keep asking: Why, in those lingering lights between tea time and supper, do I wait? Can't I just get on with it? Have I forgotten what it is?

The soft warbling of time sounds loud in an empty house.

When my father-in-law died, we received several crates full of 16mm reels in round, rusting, metal cases that smelled strongly of mold. In one crate we found his antique Bolex H16 from the 40s, its brown leather with chrome edges well-patina-ed, fitted with a parallax-correcting viewfinder, a three-lens turret, and an impressive chrome winding handle on the side. The man had loved his toys, and this had been one of his best. We borrowed a 16mm projector, wiped off the grey-and-white mold that was beginning to colonize deep into some of the reels, and sat back, expecting to watch the first moving baby pictures I'd ever seen of my husband. My own family didn't own a camera until much later, so it felt like we were adventuring into deep chasms of time. My husband remembered his father with Bolex in hand through most of their outings--to dude ranches in Nevada, or boating in Biscayne bay, where he grew up, or out into the Caribbean, where his parents and their friends spent days and weeks sailing and racing. We were excited--what mysteries of childhood, of origins, would we find in grainy black-and-white?

We the empty sea.

Light

I am sitting in my garden, reading. I've got a stack of books, and I'm looking for wisdom in the shade of my dwarf pear tree. My son is gone off to his own life; I'm trying to find ways to begin again. My journal, for one. I freewrite in it, to recapture moments, gather words, collect pieces from my reading, like this aphorism from James Richardson: "Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer." Or, in another mood, Ned Rorem's thought, in his journal, only weeks after the death from AIDS of his lover, Jim: "Life and all that goes with it--sex, art, cooking, war and astronomy--is a matter of killing time while waiting for time to kill us." I seem to have moved beyond the personal to the metaphysics of waiting. They also wait who only stand and serve.

Here's a collection of The Best American Poetry. It has an elegiac tone, inhabited as it is by a great and dying generation of poets, the writers of brilliant promise I read in college. Now they speak to me of aging and loss, the proximity of the end, Time's winged chariot hurrying. Like Richard Howard in "After Sixty-Five":

Once upon a time

There was only time (. . . as the day is long)

Between the wanting self and what it wants.

Wanting still, you have no dimension where

Fulfillment or frustration can occur.

Of course you have, but you must cease waiting

Upon it: simply turn around and look back.

Like Orpheus, like Mrs. Lot, you

Will be petrified--astonished--to learn

Memory is endless, life very long,

And you--you are immortal after all.

Is time, as he says, around us like my father-in-law's eternal sea? Does it make no difference whether we look forward or back? For a moment I almost believe it. And then I think about Mrs. Lot, her pillar of salt dissolved in an endless sea.

My son, back this summer from college, chides my contemplative indecision, my deferral to books. End the essay, he says. With the cruel affection of an adolescent, he tells me that I'm not good at waiting. My problem, all along, he says, has been im patience. There is something to this: a hypersensitivity to time, a sense of its physical presence, like the air currents visible only when you shrink your focus to the drifting dust motes. And there's fear, a father who might not come, a child who may be left alone.

"We can't all seize the day," I want to say. "Someone needs to serve dinner." But it's not really true. I'm hungry too.

I never sit on this bench long before the flowers--or the weeds--call on me. Suddenly I'm walking over to inspect a peony bud, or on my knees pulling some noxious volunteer, and my books are left on the lichen-spangled bench till the sun goes down. The garden is my project of middle (and old) age. I dug in the first irises one frosty spring when I was five months pregnant with my last, late child, and it has expanded relentlessly ever since. It's here that my longing has settled, a painful desire for the heartbreaking, groundbreaking beauty of flowers. The garden has reconciled me to that other time beyond, the revolutions of the stars, the resurrections of the spring, the subtle beauty of winterdeath (think clipped boxwood under snow, pale, dried grasses in the wind), and winterdreams (seed catalogues in January, the blind courage of seeds in their perlite and sphagnum). Now there are seasons and their return. There is no clock in the garden. I have an armillary sphere that wobbles and turns on its pillar because I have not yet seen fit to anchor it; its time depends somewhat on the wind, and my sense of true north.

When I dig my bare hands into the dirt to pull out a clump of lady's mantle, or nose my fingers into a root ball of hosta to tease out the plantlings, I lose myself to garden time, become a child in the mud: in-body and out-of-mind. It has taken me years of trial and backbending error, but my hands have tuned to the plants, so I know when they need a drink, deadheading, shearing or pruning. I've learned the rhythms of weeds, when they are tender, when tough, and my hand pulls them at the ripe moment on my morning walk through the beds. My eye can distinguish now the fetal leaves of a verbena bonarensis from a salvia or a feverfew or a weedy plantain; they collect between stones in the pathway, now a nursery for the self-seeders; I let them blow where they will and I prick them out and transplant when they tell me to.

The longer I live, the shorter the winter gets, the more sudden the spring; the year, like a well-known story, still astonishes me with its reversals, its recognitions: the way the winter mud, for example, is suddenly alive; the colorless fingers of the bleeding heart unfurl, the lipstick red peony stems probe the air, and in no time there are soft mounds of grey-green leavening the beds. The art of gardening is the art of waiting. There is no hurrying the roses.

But there are moments in the garden when even my hands are stilled. There's a silence in the garden that's music, beyond the squeak of a dove's wings or the shush of the leaves in wind thirty feet above me. My husband once had a blind student who said she could teach him how to hear the light. In my garden in early summer, when the sun washes the air and the roses bloom, light buzzes in my head, and I feel like I'm swimming in a symphony of sound. I'm not sure how it happens--does a chaos of refracted photons, the leaf-light that takes a polarizing lens to sort and capture on film, become confused, transmute into waves of sound and back again? At such moments--when I am cast into a world of electric particles and an iridescence of petals swells into full chorus--all waiting ends.