Sharon White
Once I lived by the bay in a place called a crib. There were chickens the size of elephants and birds that called out like merry bells. The trees were all millions of years old. I could count their rings if I really wanted to. The windows were latched with brass and the ferns touched my face each time I moved from the cottage to the gravel, white pea gravel that bordered the house.
If you asked me to tell you a story, I think I could make one up. I'm so old after all. I think I could make one up about my mother. She loved me from the very first look, she loved me when she felt me kick. No, I think I made her sick, I was too early or too late. I took up too much time and then my brother arrived too soon and then my sister too late and almost dead, her skin blue, her head the size of an orange.
Once upon a time when my mother and father were alive they rented a house in the Cotswolds. There were five of us then. We dressed up at night in fancy clothes and during the day I walked out into the countryside past ancient churches and quiet horses and the flashing wings of hawks. I'm not sure where everyone else was. Drinking, shopping, sleeping in the dark rooms with the heavy curtains until the light soaked through. That light that stayed around all night. Persistent gold. The house was full of antiques and belonged to a friend of my father.
Once there was a time when I loved a man who told me stories one after the other. Presents from a northern place where there were reindeer with heavy heads bent over the vidda, cropping the lichen with their teeth. Do reindeer have teeth? He was persistent and smart. That much I know. We slept by a crashing waterfall in a place as wild as they come.
Once upon a time the trees were blowing in the wind. The man I loved died. In a hospital by cornfields. There was a plane that landed around that time in a cornfield too. Everyone survived. But so many turn their eyes away, their molecules flying off to the universe. Or maybe a galaxy so many years in the past. I see them here by the water. A different sky, full of lost light.
If you want to know about once upon a time don't ask me. I'm stuck in the present with swarms of dreams infesting my nights. Who wants to see their mother picking up crumbs on a counter, their father shifting logs in a stove? Sister, brother taunting as we climb up a sand dune as high as a forty story building. Sea lions asleep on the sand under the crystal blue sky. A glass dome.
How do you calculate loss and then laugh it off? I think it settles somewhere in your bones. My neck is stiff this morning after a woman washed my hair and blew it dry. Near me a man had his blond tresses partitioned on his head with clips and the stylist painted each root with gold. He was practicing longevity. He wants to live eternal life. Grow as old as the trees in the garden. Sometimes he takes a bow and arrow out into the bush and shoots possums.
Once upon a time the man I loved in the north, once the man I loved in the north, the bell bird calls, the white fox hides in the esker, the water crashes near the cliff where the buzzards nest, the water frozen, the earth covered with snow, the man dead for years and I didn't know it. Not long after his parents died. Harald fair hair who mourned his wife so long his kingdom crumbled. He refused to leave her side, until they pulled him away.
Once, no twice, perhaps thrice.
Once upon a time I climbed down the steep stone steps on an island in the Aegean. There were old men clicking their tongues and goats tied to skinny ropes on steep slopes above the harbor. Olive trees shimmered in the heat. A boy tinkered with his motorcycle in the little yard bordered with stone. I've been to the States, he said, I want to go back. His mother peered out a tiny door and wiped her hands with a towel. I was seeing double and didn't know why. There was two of the boy and two of the mother and two of the motorcycle. Does this mean they had more of a chance to get what they wanted?
Once upon a time the tui sipped nectar from the kowhai. I watched him dip and twist and sip with his long curved beak. I could do this forever. Or not.
Once there was a woman who never washed her beautiful black straight hair. Unusual for someone so worried about cleanliness. But there it is. She was once a little girl and then a woman who painted her lips cherry red and then she had a husband and three children. Once a week she visited the salon where one woman or another through the years would wash her hair, now fashioned around her head like a halo. When she got old, and she did, she never washed her hair at all. That made me sad, and my sister was sad too. There was a sorceress who had a bag of spells who brought a magic cap when the woman, my mother, of course, was in a place where most people never left and the sorceress, her hairdresser who had a mane of curly red hair, set the cap on her head and presto, the white powder would do its trick and my mother's hair was clean.
I think the light must be like this in a fairytale. And the music of the tui. And the trees upside down and the coast, the harbor where the big container boat comes once a week and discharges its wares, refrigerated the whole time the boat moves from one port to another. The boat makes the whole harbor shudder for a day. The thumping like some prehistoric murmur. This is what the silence will feel like millions of years from now. This is what the light will do when the morning has left us for another galaxy.
Once there was the time and then there was the other time and then the time after that, remember? A time on the lake, time listening to him chop wood, a time where the child was born, a time when the stove was hot, a time when the man I love walked through the garden with his cup of tea, bending underneath the tree with the mottled skin, above the harbor clearing now from rain, pattering on the room, early morning, too early for the birds here to care about song. They wait till the brilliant evanescence of the earth pops up and fashions itself into red and yellow blossoms they can dip their beaks into. Those nectar sipping sopranos.
Once upon a time the little girl broke her arm on the steep hill between her house and her best friend's house. The grass wove all the houses together. She told the little girl to scream until someone heard her. Her mother was hanging clothes on the line, her father was away on business. Inside her friend's house the au pair was kissing her father. Who knows where her mother was. The only tree on the street was in the little girl's backyard. Sometimes her mother read to her. The light moving in the wind from one spot to another. She's sure her mother read to her. And then when she was old and dying her mother didn't read at all. And all this time when her mother was not reading, in the far north the man she once loved was gone. He was not fishing, pulling the nets in with his father, or pouring the milk from the cold white jug, or kissing her in the hayloft or in the sauna. Or driving the tractor above the wide cold river in a place as beautiful as they come.
Once there was a garden behind a house, different so different from anything she'd seen before. It was sweet with grapefruit trees and oranges. Her great aunt and uncle lived in the house. Their living room was gold and had chairs that swiveled back and forth. The breeze was sweet too, not at all like the city she lived in on the steep street at the edge of the woods. She can smell the fruit now, the tangy taste of grapefruit, the bitter taste of orange. The birds here are just waking up in a garden oceans away from the first. Tui, bellbird, silvereye. The polished gifts of succulents holding their hands up. Here I am, I'm perfect, and the birds dipping into the yellow blossoms on the tree just outside the kitchen. And, of course, her great aunt and uncle are dead now for half a century, but birds, back to life in the bushes, on the blooms, beyond the metal fence in Rob's backyard. Outside it looks dark, but in the garden, the light is growing. You can make out the shapes of the chairs sitting just there at the edge of the cliff above the bay where black backed gulls shout out their news.
Once there was a house where her parents lived with three children. Her brother, her sister, along with the oldest girl. A small version of who she is now in the ever-present. The cabinets were overflowing with china, big bowls with red and blue flowers. The glasses were neck to neck in the hutch. Her sister kept borrowing a blue sweater, too small for her now. Her brother came to her rescue when the cabinets started to list and she held her arms up to keep everything from crashing down. Her father appeared from nowhere as she took a rusty knife and threw it in the garbage. We don't need this, she said, or this and was about to throw away a spatula as long as her body with a spear at the end when her father said, stop! We can use it when we move to the small place. I'll put it in the garage. She calls her sister and tells her about the dream. In the world where her sister lives, her boss says his sister married a man who had seven wives before Julie and was ready to dump her for the ninth. Her boss had to help his sister move. Once she was part of a family with a son and a husband. What happened? she asks her sister, and her sister says, Would you believe it, he was murdered.
If there's a once, a then will follow and then an ever after, but who knows how often the ever after is happily. Looking into the bush she thinks the ever after is here, now. A bay that mirrors the sky, an hour after dawn. The multitude of birds who almost weren't here. Almost devoured by stoats. But shouldn't the stoat have an ever after, imported by Scots to eat rabbits along with the possums for fur? She's not sure. No song is quite like the tui's or the tau tau or the bellbird. Her world is not like this, less complexity, older, not folded red rocks or pointy hill, suspiciously steep. No taste of salt in the wind. Or settlers multiplying their rooms with the same shape but twisted right or left. The tui calls out to her, mimicking the bell bird. I'm here in the tree beyond the window filled with yellow blossom sweet to eat.
Were there dry valleys once? Were there rivers of ice? Were there birds that couldn't fly? Were there mirrors and mirrors framed in gold? Was there a bird as big as a buffalo? Did people row here from thousands of miles away? Is there a way to restore words? Put them in their place when the dictionaries are smashed. Why does everyone have matching woodstoves here? Why do the birds start to mutter at six when light, when light. When light is still hours away. Would it have been a good idea to marry him, when the dark lasted months? And there were only cold carrots to eat? What did they find in the dry valleys and in the harbor where Cook landed? Why does the brush glowing gold speak to me? Is he still somewhere writing at his desk, bringing the sheep in, driving the tractor, arguing with his mother in the kitchen as she makes the bread? The table covered with flour.
The man wearing the woven blue hat tells me there were slaves shut up in the hills. They made the roads. There were chickens as big as elephants. There were suns and moons and the reliquaries of saints. There were people who rowed across the wide ocean from Polynesia. They had eyes of amber, bones of wood. There was a man who loved me once, but I didn't believe it, and another who died. His bed was cold when I got there. His hand was warm. Do you believe this, he said to me. No, I said, none of this happened except maybe in your dreams. Your sister is selling diamonds, your father runs a car wash. Definitely not, I said, Where did you get all this? Made it up, he said.
In the once upon a time just over the hill there were sea lions roaring, sunbathing, flicking the sand up on their backs as the tide pulled out the violet water on the sand. A small sea lion roared up the dune after a human with a beard and a dog. We see their tracks all over the beach on their way to sleep. The pied stilts with the orange legs dip their bills into the muck of the inlet. Currents intersect and roar their way from the ocean to the mud flats. You could drown if you got caught in the rush. The narrow road lurches this way and that as the man maneuvers the white car back to the town. Back to the trees full of tuis and bellbirds, back to the fire on the hearth, the goods in the shop, the shimmering water of the bay. Back to the man with the orange hat and big scarf, dead now on another continent, another bay. Just about ready to move into a new house with his books and guitar and wife.
At the table is one fairy princess from Germany and her companion, a man with a dark brow. There are two weight lifters from Australia who'd flown across the sky with a striped sail. Below them in the lake sharks with motors are dipping in and out of the water. The water sometimes blue, sometimes gray, sometimes washed with glacial silt from the mountains. The princess is a poet and she knows at the head of the lake is a monument to men killed in the first two wars. Sometimes in minutes at the first battle, in other cases from measles on the ship home. That's how it goes sometimes. The woman from Australia says, My grandmother is German, she still has a strong accent and when we asked her she would say no, she wasn't German. She just didn't want to talk about it. In a tiny cabin at the head of the lake the poet finds a woman bent over a computer, like a sewing machine. Fur hats and fur cloaks and nipple warmers and belly button rings of fur are piled in baskets. Someone has been making these objects for hundreds of years. My husband has a weird sense of humor, the fur maker says. Dark possum, so soft to the touch. She's seen the animals spread out on the road for miles.
Once there was a gardener who showed me how to fold the dry leaves of the cabbage tree and start a fire. When a fire's gone out and you want to get it started again, she told me. Her son was a farmer who lived over the hill you can see from the secret beach. Once her grandchild was just a little boy and he sailed the ship all by himself to the far harbor. He's forgotten how to sail now that he's in school. Once the gardener bent on her knees and scrubbed the slippery stones and then pulled the dainty oxalis from the beds. Once there was light that remined me of home, my father rolling the newspaper to light the fire. Once the white faced heron patrolled the rocks and brown sand below the road. The gardener told me she notices things, she notices how she can't quite write a note anymore, she can't quite remember how to spell that word.
In the story she saw fifteen kingfishers sitting on the wires, preening on poles, dipping into the water for a bath before sleep, eating minnows, posing against the sky on a dead branch. How can you even imagine so many on the edge of the inlet bordered by blue hills? The kingfisher so turquoise in the sun, not at all like the steely blue of his northern cousin. His beak darkly sharp, proudly held, a kind of royal posture in the world that holds so many surprises still in this time.
Once upon a time it was now. The bay just there outside the window. The bellbirds in the kowhai jumping from one slender twig to the next. The water filling the dark cove with rippled silver. Wind gesturing in the leaves. Ferns bent back against the bark. The stove clicking behind me.