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Feathers I
Rolled up in the top cupboard in Tel Aviv, tied with string and covered in a garbage bag is a flock of feathers. Feathers that once flew over the blue pools of water and the fields gold with wild mustard, daisies, and dried grass. Feathers that once belonged to Canadian geese on their migrations between Canada and Mexico or South Texas, where they’d winter, filling the skies with their vees for weeks, the traffic of their wings and honks. They’d wake us in the morning, and they’d clutter the air every night. Geese my uncles shot half a century ago at least, maybe even a century ago. And my grandmother and aunts plucked. Feathers my grandmother stuffed into a comforter. I was so happy when I’d asked for it, and received it. I’d also asked for the breadknife thin as the moon the geese passed over each November. It was thrown away. And the wedding ring, which my grandmother actually gave me herself. Or rather, gave it to my mother to give to me, and then my mother decided to wear first until she died, at which point she’ll give it to me if I am still alive by then. Inside the top cupboard are the feathers. I can feel them beating against the door. I can feel the comforter shift with their weight. And I don’t know if it is the feathers or if it is my aunts or if it is the stitches of my grandmother, but that comforter is filled with nightmares. I have to air out the dreams for two weeks before I can sleep. Even Lorena, who came home with me for Christmas, since she couldn’t go home to Mexico in semester break, said, “your grandmother was deeply unhappy when she made that comforter for you.” But that’s the thing, I tell the feathers rustling, even now, for I will take them down when I am done writing. You were not made for me.
Feathers II
I can’t wait to go to sleep each night since F and I had sex on top of my grandmother’s down feather comforter the first night I got it down, aired it out, and lay it out on the bed. My dreams have been spectacular—not a single nightmare among them. They are not my own dreams, of course, just as the nightmares the comforter used to bring hadn’t been mine. Which makes them even better. Last night I was in Mexico in the mountains—chocolaty red earth and bronze shrubs lining the cutbacks. Close enough to the Texas border for there to have been a Czech kolach and Christmas decorations, gas station and diner. The night before, my daughter was my sister and my mother sent us off to camp.
One night I dreamt I was a kite. My dreams remind me of Mary Ruefle’s essay “Snow,” in which the narrator opines that everyone should celebrate the first snow of the season by having sex with someone. She herself advocates the same partner every year, even if you both eventually marry other people. She imagines being in a classroom, noting the snowflakes, and announcing to her students, class dismissed, children. It is snowing. I must now go and have sex.
In the case of my grandmother’s down feather comforter, I must reevaluate my image of my paternal grandmother, an immigrant with a scar on her cheek from her brother’s hatchet (she’d been standing behind him as he was chopping wood) and a fourth grade education. You wouldn’t notice unless she pointed it out—it blended with her laugh lines. I am sorry she is dead.
My grandmother’s house had been decorated like a Hapsburg estate—two sets of silver, dark furniture, a formal sitting room (perhaps the only one in Texas) and the walls hung with scenes of the Austrian Alps or else blonde gorgeous saints looking particularly virginal against dark backgrounds, clasping crosses or rosaries to their breasts and gazing at the viewer with tears in their eyes to inspire feelings of remorse. Maybe, like the wrathful feathers and ancient sorrow of my grandmother’s down feather comforter, or Mary Ruefle’s snow, they were simply lacking a certain sex offering, and that made them very sad. Especially galling, then, must have been the usual platitudes and prayers directed at them instead. One night I dreamt I was running across the savannah, gallivanting with giraffes and zebras, as if I’d stepped into one of those National Geographic children’s puzzles.
One night I dreamt I was a smooth beige stone skipping across the surface of a pond.
I made such pretty ripples.
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