by Kate Braverman. Winner of the Carver Prize.

     For twenty five years, Suzanne Jordan has required her new advanced placement English classes at Allegheny Hills High School to write a 3 page creative essay describing their summer vacation. For the first time, it occurs to her that she should comply with this assignment. As she places her suitcases into her gray Volvo, as she assembles stacks of automobile club maps and state by state pamphlets listing motels and local attractions, she thinks, with sudden discomfort, that she wants a summer vacation distilled by 3 pages.
        She knows her students lie, omit the ambiguously provocative areas of their Julys and Augusts and replace them with predictable travelogues. She is given formulaic montages of interchangeable blue beaches meeting cliffs bearing the remnants of fortress walls surrounding what could be fragments of cathedrals or lighthouses. She receives lakes of contained fluids as if already safely encased in glass, the shores are striped umbrellas. Such images are the certified version of location and event. But the settings are rendered false by the sense that what is being recounted has nothing to do with the life of the speaker. It is a censored translation, a generic rendition erased of both danger and revelation.
     Introduce yourselves to me, Mrs. Jordan has asked a quarter of a century of entering l0th grade classes. Begin with the last three months. In return, she receives listless landscapes like postcards selected at random in convenience stores or found accidentally in a stranger’s drawer. The obligatory cities meet their harbors, waves unavoidably fill the centers with anonymous greens and paint can blues, all second hand and posthumous.  But there is no astonishment or discovery. She is presented views without fragrance or the possibility of vertigo.
      This is so impersonal, it might have been faxed in from another planet, she thinks. Then she writes in red ink across their pages, Nice image, but what are the sounds of summer? The specific smells of your July?
     Mrs. Jordan believes catastrophe has a certain texture and climate. Summer disasters are often deceptively intense, played out under a white light that is garish and stark and has nothing to do with illumination. It’s the light of rooms in which interrogations and autopsies are conducted.  It’s the flash of a camera freezing your face with a comprehension of circumstances you don’t even suspect you know. That’s why you reject the photograph. It’s not because the angle is unflattering. It’s rather that the image contains gestures and dialogue occurring just behind your shoulder, in the hallway or on the pier, a subtle text you pretend does not exist.
      Tell me about the quality of light, Suzanne Jordan instructs, and you will find out who you are. Some students begin to listen.
     They consider the periphery of their villages and beaches, the implications, and the words they do not actually hear but subconsciously intuit. On certain July and August nights you hear the sounds of divorce. It’s an edgy scrape across an unwashed plate, an unexpected slap on a face, a slammed car door, a phone call made in a voice too rapid and soft in a back room with the lamps shut off.  One must listen beyond the thunder and crickets, past the wind blowing the motel banner advertising free dinners for children in six colors.
     On certain summer nights, if you have trained yourself, you can hear disease and madness growing. Initiates can decipher scent like an alphabet. Cancer is sudden and yellow and smells like rotting tropical fruit and algae in the glass tanks and pebbles of neglected aquamarines. It favors surfaces like plaster hallways, the mesh of screen doors, and plastic kitchen counters in rented summer bungalows.  It might appear after lightning storms as if electrically incited. Divorce has its unique calligraphy, shadows and undertow. This is what you must search for while you are fishing. It’s not in the bucket of bait or on the nylon lines. It’s in the wake the boat leaves on the water, how its intentions are inflicted on the quiet surface and remain there, like a legible script.
     This is a good setting, Mrs. Jordan writes on the margin of a student paper. But I think there is more you want to say. Don’t be afraid to say it. The page is your best friend.
     Her students entertain the notion that she has unspecified powers, perhaps of a telepathic nature. Still, Mrs. Jordan is known to be a person you can trust. You can tell her about your mother’s new boyfriend and how you’re having trouble sleeping, can’t concentrate or finish assignments. Mrs. Jordan doesn’t require specific information, what was actually suggested in the barn or pick-up truck, and the events that followed. She understands what you are not saying.  That’s why you can talk to her the way you can’t to the guidance counselor, who will report your confidences to the principal and your parents. Mrs. Jordan, on the other hand, will not betray you.
     Suzanne Jordan is expert at keeping secrets. It is curious no one suspects her of possessing them as well. That’s what keeping a low profile, rarely confiding in another human being, and buying your clothing from the LL Bean catalogue can do for you. It can render the most salient aspects of your personality invisible. In an age of obvious labels and categories, one can effortlessly disappear.
     Suzanne Jordan is, in fact, festooned with clandestine hieroglyphics. If her subterfuges were made dimensional, made perhaps into ornaments, she could be Allegheny Hill’s annual Christmas tree. She would sparkle with the radiance of her concealment, her omissions, what’s growing in her periphery and margins, where her daughter is, how she hasn’t spent the last twenty years of winter nights alone. If Suzanne Jordan choose to tell the truth, she could blind you.
     Her students respect Mrs. Jordan for her courage. When the school board voted to ban The Catcher in the Rye and the Diary of Anne Frank, Mrs. Jordan continued to teach these books, driving all the way to Pittsburgh to buy enough paperback copies. She purchased them with her own money. When the board threatened to fire her, she replied,  “Fire is often used as a weapon against the truth. They fired Joan of Arc, after all.”
     Each year, students who have gone on to college and graduate school return to pay their respects. Mrs. Jordan does not encourage this. She does not maintain a correspondence with former students, save their postcards with literary allusions and trinkets from England and Greece, or their magazine publications. She has only an abstract and minimal interest in how many have gone on to achievements in the written word field.
     Mrs. Jordan doesn’t believe there is much field left for the written word.  It was once a frontier, a primitive meadowland like the acres beyond her apple orchard and gardening plots that become shoulder high mustard, purple thistle, and golden rod.  But now it’s a squalid cul-de-sac. It’s a footpath littered with garbage you can’t even find on a map. The quality of books has changed in her lifetime. They are made from a different sort of paper now and poorly bound, as if intended to be discarded. They are more like cereal boxes than sacred artifacts. She has seen art exhibitions where text was used as another graphic element, for the shape of the letters, how rows of words looked cut and pasted into columns, geometric patterns and collages. She did not find these representations offensive.
     In truth, few of her students want to read, not even the brightest, the most verbal. They don’t believe books provide revelation. They have been inundated by more images in their fourteen years than entire libraries contain. Sentences and paragraphs are too tedious for them, irrelevant like fortress walls. Words are a version of stone. Her students have a remarkable capacity for multiple accelerated electronic manipulations and interactive parallel processing. They spend hours in computer chat rooms, employing aliases, inventing constantly evolving identities while exchanging forms of text they believe are accurate approximations of their values and psychology. They do not recognize that they are engaged in acts of fiction.
     Once she mourned the passing of the poets, recognizing that when they became obsolete, something of what is human would also be extinct. So it was for the bards with lyres and the carvers of canoes who could navigate Pacific islands by the sound of currents and scent. The Gutenberg printing press lasted five hundred years, certainly longer than airplanes or cancer or cinema will.  In the technological revolution, there has been an abrupt compression and a swing in direction toward an incremental and collective synthesis. Who is to say half a millennia of books is not enough? She keeps these thoughts to herself.
     On Maple Ridge Road, her neighbors consider her harmless and eccentric. A middle aged woman who dresses in navy and cranberry, does her own gardening and house repairs, sells eggs and blueberries from her yard in summer and looks like she would defend Emily Dickinson’s honor with her own life if it came to it. They think Suzanne Jordan is a distillation of New England, English literature and the teaching profession in general. If there is a sense of tragedy somewhere in her eyes, an implication of shadow or scar, of an unresolved and curious deformation, it must be an ancient wound. If there is an unexpected asymmetry in the slope of her shoulders, if her gestures are perhaps stilted, it must be the result of a childhood abandonment or an unfortunate early marriage. Perhaps something about a problem with a daughter. But it’s nothing any one can quite articulate or verify. Invisible women do not invite serious investigation.
     Mrs. Jordan is aware of the multiplicity of rumors growing around her. Some are annuals, flaring like banks of early spring daffodils, red tulips and lavender crocuses. They have a short season. In point of fact, Peggy Jordan has more than a passing interest in the powers of intuition. There were moments when Mrs. Jordan thought herself an adept. She can, in fact, see. She is often luminous with clarity, with a sense of looking through the ordinary to an enormous brilliant core like an inland sea. It’s a region of pure marrow, so detailed and unspoiled she could reach out and trace it with her fingertips or tongue.
     The inland sea is a body you can open, learn its subtle anatomy and how to subdue and characterize it. It might speak with the voice of prophecy. The ridges of bone are maple leaf green, the surrounding tissues are chartreuse, and the fluids produce a jade one could split with their lips. Within these waters are ancient encampments webbed with vine bridges and tangled paths bare feet have dug alongside canals. Mrs. Jordan has a natural affinity for landscape and its seductive promise.  But all women in gardens sense there is a further purpose. Women on their knees in dirt are engaged in conspiracies of camouflaged eroticism. The shears, gloves and baskets are obvious props. Any woman gardening is prepared for acts of love.
    “Menopause is turning me into a witch,” she told Elizabeth.
     It was one of the last times they spoke.  Elizabeth is her only child, the daughter she is going to Los Angeles to find. That’s what she is going to do for the two weeks of her summer when she has the time and budget to leave her gardening. Find her daughter. This is what she has done for the past 12 years.
    “You were always unusual,” Elizabeth said.
     She still had Elizabeth’s latest phone number. That was three months ago. She had taken the phone number and inscribed it in her leather directory, in a section filled with discarded Elizabeth phone numbers and addresses. These are kept under D for daughter.
        Sometimes she just wrote it over and over, layering blank papers with the 10 numbers the way her infatuated students reproduced the name of the object of their desire as if engaged in acts of magic, as if the pencil and paper were flints and there was an angle that could be employed to produce fire. That must be the meaning of geometry and why mathematics was required. It was an attempt to stem delirium. For decades, notebook pages of Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian and Justin, Justin, Justin, Justin, Justin, Justin have fallen from folders onto her class room floors. This is evidence. The repetition of the printed patterns, the crude calligraphy spilling beyond the margins, the curves and etchings suggesting the deliberation of engineering and construction. Who was to say these were not novels of love?
     She was telling Elizabeth that it was a simple arithmetic of addition and subtraction. She had lost her hormones, her interest in men and sex, yes. She had insomnia now, needed eyeglasses and a prescription for sleeping pills. Her hair was falling out. The veins on her legs had abruptly risen like so many summer flowers, lilies and peonies and iris pushing from below.
    “I’m being tattooed while I sleep,” she told Elizabeth.
    These were not the ordinary residues of age, Suzanne Jordan intimated, not mere spider veins embossing her thighs and calves but dusk avenues with intimations of ritual processionals. Her legs reminded her of stalls on riverbanks offering yellow and orange carnations and chrysanthemums to be deposited at altars and cremations.
     “You always wanted a tattoo,” Elizabeth said, her voice husky from cigarettes, whiskey, a sequence of mouths and some unspeakable vast fatigue. “Remember? We were going to get them together.”
     Elizabeth sounds increasingly breathless, as if calling from public phone booths on rush hour boulevards above subways. There’s too much noise and static on the line. But it’s better than a beeper.
    “You sound so tired,” Suzanne realizes. “You’re not taking your medicines.”
     “You’re clairvoyant,” Elizabeth manages, pauses. “It’s too hard. How they disrespect me at the clinic. Nurses won’t touch me. Keep giving me the same forms to fill out. Won’t let me use their pencil.  And you always wanted a tattoo, Mommy.”
      During college in the sixties, when her roommates returned from weekends in Boston or New York with moons carved on their shoulders and bracelets of flowers engraved around their ankles, Suzanne longed for such ink. She couldn’t have a tattoo, of course, because her parents thought it was unacceptably vulgar. Her father was a minister. Her parents were, in their way, sophisticated for their historical moment. It wasn’t about sin or damnation or any of that nonsense, her father was quick to point out. It was about commerce. God was the family trade and a tattoo would be bad for business. It was that simple.
     But her parents are dead and she is being etched anyway from beneath as she sleeps. Why not choose the actual design? When she gets to Los Angles and finds Elizabeth, she will get a tattoo. They’ll do this together, select a symbol, an emblem, a celestial configuration, perhaps, and have it simultaneously engraved into their flesh.
     It is tattoos Peggy Jordan thinks about on her final morning, constellations of stars and the history of carving images into flesh and adorning skin. All cultures engage in this practice and see in the positioning of moon and stars recognizable objects and actions. It is a perpetual night of cause and effect. She is giving the last of her instructions to Eric, the teenage son of her closest neighbor’s who will feed her cat every day for the next two weeks. He will pet Grace for ten minutes and pick what is ripe in the garden.
     He is a polite boy, serious and attentive, following her into the vegetable and herb plots, noting where she keeps the shears, gloves, trowels, shovels and baskets. He watches her demonstrate how she wants the beans cut, the tomatoes and strawberries picked and stored. He’s a city boy and seems excited to be standing where vegetation rises enormous over his head. Jack in the Beanstalk.  Yes, it is true. The birth of cities and epics. The grain you hold in one palm is the history of life on this planet.
“What about the vet? The vet number?” Eric asks.
     Peggy Jordan tells him that she doesn’t have one. It seems an odd admission that unexpectedly catches in her mouth.
“What if she gets sick?” he asks, concerned.
       “If it’s more than fifty dollars, just put Grace to sleep. I don’t have the money.” Peggy Jordan explains.
     The boy seems stunned. Her new neighbor is a surgeon from Philadelphia. Their family has made what they call a quality of life move. That’s what the doctor’s wife, Amanda called it. Suzanne Jordan isn’t sure what this means and she doesn’t ask. The doctor bought Professor McCarty’s house after he died unexpectedly from a heart attack, and Mrs. McCarty moved to Florida. They purchased the house and virtually gutted it.
     The McCarty house was a sequence of maple, ash, hemlock, oak, and cherry. Walls were made from two hundred-year-old barns and doors salvaged from churches and government buildings, courthouses and town halls. The ceiling beams were once railroad ties. Now the interior of the house is a uniform light oak. Any surface that can be coated has been painted white. Glass and marble have been installed over the hemlock and cherry. The railroad ties are gone, replaced by a series of skylights.
    “It’s a bare beginning,” Amanda said. There was a sense of threat in her tone.
     Suzanne Jordan doesn’t like the doctor’s wife.  On the half dozen occasions they have met, Amanda spoke incessantly about her personal crisis. During their mandatory new student orientation, Amanda discussed having a second life, simplifying her life and changing her life, as if these wildly divergent concepts were interchangeable. Amanda did not mention her son.
     Mrs. Jordan was tempted to tell her that only the simple simplify their lives and having a second life was more typically characteristic of psychotics. The only plausible verbal description was, in her opinion, changing your life. Of course, behavior modification lacked immediate gratification and happened, if at all, one imperceptibly slow and painful detail at a time. Then Suzanne Jordan recognized she had little to say to Amanda.
     The doctor and his wife send their boy instead to buy eggs, to transmit information about the state of Maple Ridge Road, to inquire if she needs anything from town. They are afraid to entirely ignore her. Suzanne Jordan has a certain status in the community. So they have volunteered their boy as intermediary. Eric is staring at her.
“What will I do if Grace gets sick?” He repeats, uncertain.
“People make too much ado about animals,” Mrs. Jordan says. “They should
spend more time on babies and less on kittens.”
“That’s not what my mother says,” Eric tells her.
“How old is your mother?” Suzanne Jordan finds herself asking.
“47,” Eric says.
 Mrs. Jordan laughs. “You mean 37,” she corrects.
“No. It’s true. She’s 47. We just had her birthday. I put in the candles. Math is my
best class,” Eric assures her.
     Suzanne Jordan does not think it possible that she and Amanda are the same age. When she is with the doctor’s wife, she feels matronly, arthritic, neutered. Amanda is lithe and eager within her entirely discretionary universe. She plays tennis, goes to Yoga classes, and hosts a bridge game in her house every Tuesday. When Amanda decided she wanted a garden, she simply ordered one. A landscaper from Buffalo came with a soil expert and drawings, two men to dig and a crew to fence it. Her ornamental plum trees were put into the earth larger than Mrs. Jordan’s are now, after fifteen years of growing, of wind and ice storms, of what happens when you take an idea and let the elements define its destiny.
    When Suzanne translates this process into human terms, she thinks of her daughter. Lina is her new name. Her West Coast working name. She’s been Lina for nearly a decade. Lina does not want to live unconsciously but rather one small step up from that. She wishes to inhabit an enormous post-op, permanently on the cusp of surgery. Lina, under the squalid palms of Los Angeles, in her private version of a recovery room, waking from an operation, calling out for Demerol and morphine and getting it.
      Lina, in an apartment by a bay studded with fragile vertical palms that seem superimposed, stitched unconvincingly into the landscape. Lina, in her invented perimeter where it is artificially cold and hushed, the bleached white of nurses uniforms and anesthesia. Lina wants to be in that post-op zone forever, at the edge of coming to and then being put under again, to float in her own inland sea. For her daughter, every day feels like surgery. Sunlight cuts her like a razor. Each morning she is knifed and stitched. Night is an abuse. The gravity and air sting and wound her. Voices make her bleed. That’s why she gives herself injections for pain.
     Elizabeth is a heroin addict and a prostitute, in that order.  The order is important. If heroin were dispensed freely, Elizabeth would not be selling her body. Elizabeth would probably not be HIV positive, which she is. Elizabeth has AIDS now. In the clinic, the nurses and technicians won’t touch her. They believe she is a criminal, a woman without rights or even the privileges of the terminal. It takes Lina almost three hours to ride the buses to the hospital. They arbitrarily cancel her appointments. They deliberately misplace her chart, pretend they don’t remember her. They make her wait shivering in corridors alone through their entire shift. They want her to die.
     Suzanne Jordan thinks about order and disease as she drives, as highways change their numbers and there is nothing for her to see anymore on this journey that she takes every summer. Fields of barley and alfalfa where she searched for Elizabeth in Idaho. Regions of corn and soybeans where she tried to find her in Kansas City and then Chicago. In between, there are rocks, gravel, abandoned farmland, the edges of things started and rejected, derelict barns and boarded shut bars, the metal shells of gas stations. There are interchangeable motels, anonymous restaurants, featureless towns and ersatz suburbs that could be San Diego or New Jersey.  Of course, Suzanne can only afford motels on the margins of cities and in strips along interstates. The designated areas for travelers on budgets. This is what America wants for itself, a subterfuge of monolithic uniformity. This is the mirror in which America looks at her face and thinks she is normal.
     Elizabeth couldn’t bear to look at her face in its entirety. She could glance at her mouth one day, her eyes the next. Elizabeth’s skin was blossom subtle, not delicate but rather rare like certain fabrics, thick silks, pure light wool and cashmere. Elizabeth had a spring face and her dark brown hair smelled like espresso and harbors. When Mrs. Jordan held her daughter and breathed in her skin and hair, when she was thirteen and fourteen, before she ran away, Elizabeth smelled like a river, the Ganges or Nile, with all the intrigues intact. She was the reason for pilgrimages and shrines, why people read texts beside vases in museums, why they collect pebbles from beaches, tiles from temples, why they take photographs and seal them in cellophane.
      Elizabeth lives near the ocean. She will probably die near the ocean, too. Since she came to the West Coast, first to Seattle, then Portland, San Francisco and now Los Angeles, she has lived in sight of the water. Suzanne remembers this as she takes the last of the freeways to the final exit on the western edge of Los Angeles, at the bay called Santa Monica.
     Elizabeth’s telephone is disconnected. It takes Suzanne Jordan all morning to find the yellowed stucco apartment half a block from the beach. The manager has never heard of Elizabeth or Lina or a dark haired woman resembling the photographs Mrs. Jordan supplies. Of course, could be a blond or redhead now. But he does not recognize the image.
     Mrs. Jordan stands in the entranceway, trying to comprehend what Elizabeth would have seen. The bay lacks the spectacle her daughter craves. Elizabeth requires seas like the Grenadines and Aegean, defined strata of purples and startled turquoise. Elizabeth wants a permanent Yucatan Caribbean, a patchwork of reefs beneath her skin forming a choreography of depth and current only. There are no mirrors or monetary constrictions. You have fins and gills and glide through coral.
     Can you say chartreuse, Elizabeth? Can you say cerulean? Do you know what is half way between Borneo and Sumatra? It’s a tiny island called Palau Kebatu. I’ll take you there someday.  And the Bay of Bima to Komoda. Then there is Sumba, finally, and Bali. That’s what she promised her daughter.
     The beach is crowded with tourists and the water looks oily and degraded. The ocean smells tangy like citrus that’s gone bad from a wide-open sun that doesn’t play by the rules. The sky seems vague and restless as if remembering a nightmare. The starched white oleander along the fenced parking lot reminds her of nurse’s uniforms. Elizabeth might have made that association. And she would have been drawn to the burgundy bougainvillea covering the sides of the shabby apartment building where the paint has been abraded by wind and sand and formed what looks like scabs. Still, such an extravagance of claret vines would have caught her attention, even stumbling drugged in darkness.
     There’s a boardwalk at the bottom of the slow slope of hill with the two story stucco apartments with individual identical balconies where Elizabeth and Lina no longer live. Suzanne Jordan must touch this ocean, anemic and drained a blue as it is.  She thinks of her English class assignments about the meaning of movement in American literature. The American experience is about physical passages. The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Manifest Destiny and the wagon trains. The European immigrant migrations. Jack Kerouac and the beatniks. In any event, Suzanne Jordan must keep walking.
     Maybe we each have our own personal manifest destiny. It sweeps us from the Allegheny Mountains of northern Pennsylvania to a strip of pavement studded with yogurt shops perched beside acres of soiled sand where bikers and skaters somehow steer through pedestrians. Everyone is under dressed or dressed for the 21st century where clothing has become antiquated and melanoma is irrelevant. Each generation redefines its latitudes of necessity. And what were mine? They were moral and composed of texts clear as two-lane blacktop. Didn’t she believe that once?
     Mrs. Jordan finds a wood splintered bench engraved with knife-etched graffiti, gang names, the slang for sexual acts and assorted scatology and sits down. It’s much too hot. The sun seems lacquered. It has the texture of paint. Yes, the skaters in their bikinis already inhabit the new century where there is no AIDS. Elizabeth can sell her body to the entire navy and then take a shower, two weeks in Cancun and be done with it, rinse it off, heal in any salted waters.
    “Just don’t bury me,” Elizabeth said. “Promise.”
    “I promise, yes,” Mrs. Jordan said. They were talking on the telephone. Her daughter has been too long on this earth as it is. Her daughter, subsisting by acts of desperate translation, negotiating the patterns of the ordinary and redesigning them for her personal biochemistry of necessity.
   “I’m like an alien on this planet,” Elizabeth said. “They’ll burn me for free at the clinic. Let them.”
     Further south is a courtyard partially in sand. It’s a plaza dense with excessively magenta flowers inside an accidental perimeter of tattered palms, their texture rank. There is no logic to the stunted progression. Women mill about, standing in windows facing the ocean, on the periphery, in partial shadow. The women are smoking cigarettes on their truncated balconies as they do in the tenements of tropical dusk capitals.  Women hanging frayed sheets, women with pints of rum, women wearing slips and imitation silk kimonos with syringes of heroin in their fingers.
     Such women have divested themselves of their birth certificates and the longitudes and latitudes of their origin.  Such documents proved inadequate for survival. Once they were named Elizabeth. They rebirth themselves. They become Lina, married to a brown tar you burn with a match in a spoon, turn into a fluid like a muddy river and stick in your vein. The price is your life and you know it. That’s why such women have faces that are epics. Their eyes are like the one lighthouse on the last peninsula at the end of the world.
     None of them are her daughter. Suzanne Jordan crosses the ragged beach. She once wanted to collect waters the way some women accumulate jewelry or property. She would preserve them in labeled bottles and copper urns. That was in college. She wanted certain rivers as merely symbolic ornaments--- the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Danube and Seine. These were like one nightstand rivers, brief encounters you name drop at a dinner party. There were other rivers she came to know with intimacy. The Snake in Idaho during three successive summers when she almost found Elizabeth. Then the Colorado which began as a creek in the Rocky Mountains when she thought Elizabeth was in Denver, and how she followed it west into the California desert.
      It’s a light blue afternoon, sand offering disappointingly tiny fragments of broken shells. Still, she must acknowledge this region with her hands. This Los Angeles is a port, after all. All ports contain certain traditional elements. Sailors and the women they buy. Where are the cargoes of kidnapped girls and smuggled rubies? The refuges who floated oceans hidden in cartons, drinking rain water and burning with fever? Where is the contraband that defines time, the objects from antiquity, fragments of pottery, bronze boxes inlaid with lapis lazuli containing dragon’s teeth, the brocades and silk weavings, the essence of poppies prized by warlords and concubines for millennia? Where is the ineluctable dust that lingers intrinsic in the air after tombs and capitals have been looted and razed?
     It’s an ordinary afternoon, boys on bicycles, women hanging T-shirts on ropes, the obligatory fishing boat coming in to the dilapidated pier, water a listless bleached pastel.  Of course, the new wharves of contraband are inland and locked in vaults. The stolen computer chips and software secrets, the prototype vaccines for cancers, the formulas for extending lifespans and magnifying intelligence are kept in office buildings in Dallas and Baltimore. Here, it is a late afternoon of derelict fishing boats and women hanging sheets.
      The ocean is cooler than she expected. She places a damp hand across her forehead as if it were a kind of bandage, as if she might faint. She stands by the water until sunset, waiting for Elizabeth to call Mother, Mother. She is prepared to turn from this bay, which tells her nothing, and embrace her daughter. She stands until the sky is so livid and brutal with red it looks alive and in pain. It’s infected and inflamed, suffering, terminal. Somebody should put it out of its misery, Mrs. Jordan thinks. Somebody should put a bullet in it.
     It is sunset and Suzanne Jordan walks south past tattoo parlors, stores offering fraudulent designer purses and luggage, vintage clothing and drug paraphernalia, T-shirt and sun glass stands, bistros and body piercing shops. On the boardwalk, women younger than Elizabeth was when she ran away stick out their palms for dimes and quarters. Their eyes are tunnels, sheeted portals. They have tornadoes in their faces. Their mouths are poisoned wells. Their legs are like raw bone, emaciated. Still, they are some version of her 10th grade girls, with their round faces and wide into the wind eyes. They could wear the clothing of Allegheny Hills High School. In a group photograph, they would look like cousins or classmates.
    Suzanne Jordan isn’t going to find her daughter. She isn’t going to get a tattoo. She is 47 years old. She has lived longer than Billie Holiday and Frida Kahlo, Judy Garland and Anne Sexton. Of course she wanted less, took a measured route, but still, there is a small triumph in the simple enduring. Elizabeth will not live this long.
   Mrs. Jordan thinks of all the women in Los Angeles and Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok and Shanghai. Yes, a legion of middle aged women carrying bottles of hormones in their purses as they stroll boulevards named for royalty, psychotics and saints. They could kneel in an enormous collective plaza and feed one another’s broken daughters. In Barcelona and Amsterdam, in all port cities where the ships come in and children lay like wreckage on pavement, we must offer them bread and take them home.
       Some children do not want just one box of crayons. Some children refuse to use all the colors, demand only blues or greens. Some reject certain colors entirely and scream when offered yellow or red. Some children will not crayon within the lines. Some children cannot tolerate the air of this earth. On boulevards named for queens and madmen, teenagers with hoops in their lips and noses, Salvation Army jackets, and Tibetan and Mexican beads around their necks look up from the ground, the pavement, the sand and cobblestones, twitching and dazed, longing to be fed like malformed baby birds.
     When Odysseus encountered the lotus eaters, his crew threatened mutiny. They had to be dragged back to the ship, kicking savagely and screaming. Some girls can’t simply dial 911 and return.
     At Venice Beach, Suzanne sits on a bench facing a billboard depicting a model wearing a translucent bikini posed in front of lurid green palm trees with HONOLULU written in pink neon at her bare feet. I am 47, she thinks, and I will never see my daughter again. And isn’t it time for the women to remove themselves from the posters where they have been too long imprisoned? What if they pealed themselves off the images of implausibly flawless island resorts? What if they voluntarily separated themselves from the overly representational palm trees, the vulgar red orchids and garish yellow plumeria? They could climb down, awkwardly at first, feet unsteady on asphalt and then they could begin walking. With each step, they would enter the enormity of their own unscripted lives.
     But in the millennial global warehouse of commerce, which is not a village, our offspring curl fetal on sidewalks. We have learned not to notice them. They do not register. They’re below our radar. They’re above our pay scale. We step around them as we once did foreigners with sores and scabs and coughs that produced blood. They are lepers and consumptives. Their secret names are Charybdis and Scylla. They carry plague. We must not speak to them.
     Meanwhile, we are exchanging inappropriate confidences we mistakenly perceive as acts of friendship with counterfeit companions in an electronic vacancy. We are intimate with people in Madrid and Tokyo we have never met or ever will. The children at our feet are bad girls. They deserve to be sick and suffer. Rather than entering an unknown astonishment we have become more rigid and laminated. In the new millennium, you do not even exchange your real names and serial numbers.  We are all prisoners of war now and the Geneva Convention no longer applies. That’s what her students are telling her.
     Mrs. Jordan walks north, past fortune tellers siting on blankets at the sand’s edge, reading cards and palms as they have done for six thousand years. She walks past the body pierced young women who could be in her Allegheny Hills classes, back to the apartment where Elizabeth was. Suzanne Jordan stands near the squat stucco building her daughter no longer enters or exits, remembering the unique characteristics--- the four aggressively vertical palm trees, how the sun felt white, gritty as if layered with microscopic serrated glass chips, pieces of cactus, splinters from stranger’s teeth. Not sun but a relentless deliberate assault, a series of flesh wounds. And a single fuchsia on a back balcony, stems like manic suicides leaping into the air, dangling and longing for the pavement. They want a mouth full of gravel. They want to be burned at a clinic for free and not return.
     Perhaps Elizabeth noticed the almost full moon and smelled the white star jasmine opening in the alley, making the darkness for a moment seem sweet and bruised, scented and drunken. And the eucalyptus, vaguely medicinal, chalky and mysterious.  Things bloom in dusk harbors where the trade winds have been and gone. There are still junctures of longing and avenues of fragrance below balconies like miniature portals opening to the sea.  If it were the end of myth, what would there be to write about?
    There are smuggled girls in shuttered alcoves behind tattoo parlors. Girls who have runaway in journeys begun by prank and accident. The flesh is an acquired taste like opera and shellfish. Some girls need a professional tutor to open their eyes. Show them the ropes. Teach them the tricks. Turn them out. These girls didn’t conceive of the cliffs between Ravello and Amalfi. Big Sur and Malibu were equally distant. The highway to Hana, jungle side Maui, was beyond their ability, their perimeter. Athens and Shanghai felt contrived in their mouths. They were afraid of capitals. They were simple as stones and bells. They smelled like glass on October afternoons. They were less than a thumbprint. They didn’t wear make –up, examine their faces in mirrors, want to speak French or tour the Parthenon. Denim was fine. Spandex and bronze did not occur to them. No one had told them parking lots are bedrooms. They hadn’t heard the whisper that says lush are the ladies of the lamps, lit from within, heads dyed copper like coins. That’s why they needed a razor scar on the cheek, a fractured arm and a black eye. That’s all it takes.
     Perhaps they remember April when they were still cotton panty girls with collections of arrowheads and butterflies and a drawer for just bows. Then the powders and injections and days became Technicolor, a feast of exceptional baskets of berries, with handles a bloody gold filigree like a Turkish bracelet. Cheap costume stones but not without a certain singularity. Once fastened to the wrist, the angle of the sun changed. There was an anomalous celestial trajectory that altered perceptions and hollowed out vows. In a few short seasons, such girls carry their accidents with them. Their coats contain a sadness that doesn’t require translation.              
     Mrs. Jordan knows that in this darkness, guns and white powders are sold in alleys between the sunglass and T-shirt vending tents. Pirates and magicians, exiles and alchemists disguise themselves as beggars. New names and identities are manufactured and exchanged for cash. Flesh is bartered for packets of brown fragments resembling tree bark and tar. After such injections, the air is charged and transformed. Lamplight is calibrated an elegant 14 carat, tinged like a pear. Such a light can burn in deserted rooms for years, with no fear of suffocation or fire
      If we still believe in sin and retribution, then antiquity must be continuous. Of course, the Minotaur is in the Allegheny Mountain farmhouse. He’s your mother’s new boyfriend. In the pasture, bulls with bronze feet breathe fire. The Cyclopes is your uncle. He’s coming for supper. And the labyrinth is in the corn stalks and tomato plants behind your trailer.
    The sun is in seizure, the seams of the sky are ripped and lacerated behind her. . Suzanne Jordan drives east crossing the desert at night, then the mountains. It’s a journey she must accomplish on her three hundred-dollar budget. Three days of driving into afternoon sunlight so white the air seems leached, absorbed, rubbed way past intention.  The roof needs patching. She must return to her garden, her canning of peppers and carrots, the freezing of applesauce, and the ritual of blueberry and strawberry preserves.
      Suzanne Jordan knows that science has methods for reconstructing lost capitals. The types of crops and vessels can be postulated, what was cultivated, traded and invented.  If they can reconstruct aqueducts and gardens, assertion the inventories of wharves, and catalogue the birds that filled aviaries, it’s possible they could do this with a woman. If technology can decode architecture in reverse, reassemble villages jungles and sand ate, surely the complexities of one woman’s life could be deciphered. Someday we will bring our daughter’s home.
     Mrs. Jordan will manufacture her 3 page essay describing her summer vacation. She will mention the many varieties of palm trees and tropical vegetation and the fortune tellers on the boardwalk. The Pacific of Los Angeles is cooler and paler than she anticipated. She might have seen a movie star. This will get their attention. She certainly saw Ferraris and Jaguars and more Mercedes Benz then she could count. She will purchase postcards to provide the authority of detail, the fraudulent laminated illusion.
     She will no longer write margin notes in red ink. We live by aliases. We do not even reveal our serial numbers anymore. Mrs. Jordan has learned from her students. And she will not mention the stucco apartment on Ocean Avenue and Marine Street. These are the precise coordinates where her heart broke. She will never tell this to anyone.

Copyright 2006, Kate Braverman.