Time's Mouth, page 1
Time’s
Mouth
ALSO BY EDAN LEPUCKI
FICTION
Woman No. 17
California
NONFICTION
Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them
For my dad, Bob Lepucki,
whose license plate reads: ORGONE
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Three
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Four
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Five
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Six
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Time’s
Mouth
YOU’VE WONDERED ABOUT ME. WHEN A DECADE PASSES as quickly as a year, when you look up and see that life is half over, that it’s almost over—that’s when you wonder: How did it all pass so quickly? You try to conjure the past, and yourself in it: that thing you used to feel, what you wore, how the bed felt in the dark, how you carried your body through space, the depthless mysteries the world created only for you. It’s as if those versions of yourself still exist. Somewhere, on another plane, you’re sure of it. If only you had access to them.
You close your eyes, and you can almost touch the past. That’s you, grasping with tiny hands at the scruff of the family dog. Or you’re doing cartwheels with your sister. Or you’re getting a popsicle at the store down the block. There’s your dad. Or you’re in a low-ceilinged room you’ll never see again, listening to someone whose voice you’ll never hear again. Or there’s a baby in your arms, and that baby is already the only person you can’t stand to lose.
You can almost touch what’s been lost. Almost—
That child isn’t a child anymore. Neither are you. This moment is gone and this one is too. It’s slurped away from you.
I guess I do the slurping. Not that I have a mouth. Or I’m all mouth, or mouth-like. I’m not time, but I hold it. Again and again, on and on, I witness how people return to the past in their minds or avoid it altogether. Build an altar or dig a hole, pray or bury, try to relive or forget.
I am a space that precious few have been able to inhabit for more than a moment.
Those who can? Those who can slip the membrane and visit those moments again?
Well—
I want to tell you about them.
Part
ONE
1
LET’S BEGIN WITH URSA.
She is Ray’s mother—though, in 1938, when she is born in the caul like a mystic in Mystic, Connecticut, that lineage is yet to be written. Her name isn’t even Ursa yet. It’s Sharon.
At first, Sharon is only a beautiful baby, and then an adorable little girl, living with her parents in a creaking clapboard house with a narrow staircase and the faint tickle of mildew in both bathrooms. On a chair by the front door her father’s hat settles like a mound of dark soil.
Imagine Mystic, Connecticut, back then: the brick post office, the ships in the port, the sea salt in the air. Imagine young Sharon, the child she used to be, bows at the end of her pigtails, saddle shoes on her feet, porcelain dolls lining her bedroom shelf. Nothing amiss. Or everything.
Imagine her a few years older: slipping into reverie during a dull classroom lesson, or riding her bike through town, or biting her nails.
Picture her at sixteen years old, lying on her twin bed in her room.
It’s a Wednesday. About five in the evening. Mid-October.
It was chilly out, but because Sharon didn’t want to have to remake her bed, she lay very still atop her pink chenille bedspread. There was a hole in her left sock, and she wiggled the exposed toe before tucking it back into the white cotton. She was tall, and her feet reached the end of the mattress. Downstairs, her mother cooked dinner, and Sharon could smell the pot roast and the mushy carrots, no doubt too much food for a widow and her daughter.
She felt bored—desolate with it. The lamp on her dresser cast a sallow glow across the pale blue wall and the painting of the teddy bear that had hung in her bedroom for her entire life. The bear’s black marble eyes were beseeching and needy, but if she took the painting down, its absence would reveal a darker rectangle of blue on the wall, and what then?
Sharon was a high school junior and hated everything about it except slamming her locker shut between classes, and afterward, tossing her majorette baton high into the sky before catching it in her fist. Right now, she wanted a cigarette, yet she didn’t dare steal another from her mother. The widow had begun counting them.
The days were getting shorter, and within weeks the trees would be spindly and bare. At the thought of the red and orange leaves fluttering from the trees to a soppy ground, she closed her eyes. She held her breath for as long as she could before letting it out in a rush like a swimmer coming up from the deep.
It was then that she felt it. Something. It brushed her as a breeze might—it wasn’t a breeze. It was like a spirit, only not one. It was like an invisible butterfly tickling its wings against her skin, or like a stirring. What was it? Nothing like this had happened before.
Her eyes remained closed. The nubby roses on the coverlet nudged her spine. She didn’t consider herself spiritual, or mystical, and she wasn’t much curious about the unseen. No matter. A lack of interest isn’t the same as prevention.
She took a shallow breath. Her body prickled with goose pimples.
She—went.
She found herself . . . elsewhere.
Her backyard, at night. In the dark, the tall trees bordering the lawn had turned into craggy monsters, the moon a fingernail clipped against the black above. A few feet away, she saw herself, kneeling on the grass, as if praying.
How could she see herself? She could feel her own body, back in the bedroom, but she was also here in the backyard, without a form. She was a floating consciousness. This other self, the one on the grass—Sharon recognized herself. Three years in the past. She was thirteen. And, still, sixteen. Here and there at the same time.
This was the night of her father’s funeral. The best day of her life. Her younger self wore the new black dress her mother had purchased for the service. With effort Sharon had zipped it up herself that morning, and now she never wanted to take it off. If she could wear it forever like a new skin, she would have.
Even though she was only watching herself from afar, she could feel the top of the zipper’s teeth against the nape of her neck and the grass poking her arms, just as she could also feel the coverlet in the bedroom and the hole in her sock.
For a moment, Sharon opened her eyes, and she was once again on her bed, in her room, with the portrait of a teddy bear begging. She was also watching herself in the yard. A palimpsest of two realities. She had no word for this.
In the bedroom, the yard began to dissolve and she closed her eyes to will it back. Already she wanted more of this—whatever this was.
The Sharon in her funeral attire had flung herself on the scratchy lawn, the air around her humid and heavy, and she was running her arms up and down as if she were doing snow angels. She was smiling to herself. This Sharon was staring up at the stars, at her favorite constellation, the big bear, feeling free for the first time in her young life. Her father was finally dead. The feeling returned as she watched herself: a kind of full-body throttle, a drunkenness, the whee! of a balloon released into the windy sky.
Sharon tried to get closer to herself on the grass—she wanted it so badly—and quick as a snap she was back in her bedroom with the smell of overcooked meat in the air, the sallow light, and the hole in her sock. The other world was gone. She felt exhausted, and then terribly woozy. Her head was heavy as an anchor, the stink of dinner too much.
As she vomited onto the carpet, her mother called up from the kitchen, “Sharon? You all right up there?”
She didn’t answer. She hated that name.
She wanted to do that again. That thing. As soon as she figured out how.
By the time Sharon packed her knapsack and ran away from home, she had been doing the thing for a year.
How was she able to do it? And why, on that autumnal evening, bored out of her mind, dreading dinner with the widow, had it begun?
Sharon didn’t have a name for what she did, let alone a reason for how it worked. She only knew that something had called her to the past, and that it respected her enough to not pull her too far backward, to the horrors she so assiduously kept out of her mind. She wasn’t used to being respected.
Even so, these were the early days. Traveling made her ill afterward, and she couldn’t do it on command. In the beginning, she felt no purpose, especially since she could only return to moments in her own life. It wasn’t as if she could help anyone. Including herself.
And yet. It showed her that anything was possible. It’s what gave her the courage to run away.
She decided the only place for her was California; she had seen pictures of San Francisco and Hollywood, and of ancient trees wide as houses. Ther
She left in the middle of the night and hitchhiked across the country. Bad things happened to her, that’s what she expected, as if she were marked for trouble. She told no one where she was going. The widow had no idea and that was how Sharon wanted it. If her mother had loved her, even in her own deranged way, why hadn’t she protected her? It didn’t matter that Sharon’s father was dead, not unless her mother had killed him. She hadn’t; a stroke had. No, her mother had cooked that man breakfast and lunch and dinner and served him his drinks and starched his shirts. She left that chair by the door for his hat. And all along she knew what he was doing to Sharon.
He was—
No. She did not go there.
As she crossed the border from Nevada into California her old self became unreachable, the name her parents had given her just some word. She was different now. She would call herself something else. She was Ursa. Nothing would hurt her.
According to Ursa, her story begins here. Although she was seventeen, the years before that might as well not exist. Ursa struck them from the record. Sharon was born in 1938; Ursa wasn’t. She arrived, fully formed, in 1955.
Ursa, tall, broad-shouldered, breasts like a bulwark, hair black as a beetle’s back, steps out of a stranger’s Buick in San Francisco with only a knapsack and fifteen dollars and an idea of herself as untainted and free. It’s half past nine o’clock in the evening at the end of September. Almost a year since Ursa discovered what she’s capable of.
The man driving the car leans toward the open passenger window and asks if she needs a place to stay.
“I do not,” Ursa says and walks away as if she has somewhere to go. No one has to know that she doesn’t.
It took only two nights of sleeping outdoors and one frantic run from a police officer before Ursa secured employment as a maid at a large white hotel on Market Street. The tourists were pouring in, the manager said, and they needed strong and punctual girls like her to make the beds and bleach the toilets. It wasn’t awful. There were stale dinner rolls to eat, and she liked how stiff the sheets were, and she occasionally discovered spare change behind the dressers. She was required to wear a uniform, which meant she did not have to buy any more clothes, or not right away. She kept to herself. She didn’t have a safe place to go backward and so she stopped herself from doing so, which was the hardest part of running away from home.
One night, a few weeks into her new life, Ursa walked from the fancy hotel where she worked to the shabbier motel she was staying in. It was late, nearly midnight, she often got the late shift, and the block Ursa hurried down was deserted; it was the kind of street where humanity evaporated as soon as the sun set and the shops closed. Ursa had almost reached the corner when a man in an expensive suit and the broken capillaries of a drunk stepped into a streetlamp’s pool of light.
“Good evening,” he said in a nasally voice.
Ursa said nothing, only clutched her pocketbook tighter, just as her mother used to whenever they were in a big city. She hated herself for being like her mother and let go a bit.
“I have a proposition for you,” the man said.
They stood beneath a sign that read FISH DINNERS, its neon extinguished.
“I have to go,” Ursa said and tried to step around him.
The man stepped forward, blocking her, and the fear was a drip into her spine.
“What do you want?” Ursa asked.
“I’ll give you ten dollars for your soiled undergarments.”
“That’s it?” She meant, Will you also hurt me?
“All right, I’ll give you twenty.”
She glanced at the fish sign over their heads and couldn’t help but laugh. A cackle, really. It seemed like something someone named Ursa would do.
The man didn’t follow.
“Give me the money first,” Ursa said.
He sighed and pulled the twenty-dollar bill from a brown leather wallet. A crisp bill. Ursa plucked it from his hand, and he waited as she put into her purse.
“Now,” he said when she was finished.
He watched her with his tongue peeking out of his mouth as she removed her hosiery and then her panties. She looked away and emptied her mind, trying to do the thing—to go backward, to get out of this moment and into another, better one. It didn’t work. She was out of practice, and, besides, it was never convenient like that.
Once he had her panties she ran past him, her bare legs cold in the night air. She ran all the way to the motel. Once she was able to calm down, she felt exhilarated. The rich drunk had her sweat-soaked undergarments but she had his money.
She was able to rent a permanent room in North Beach with one small window sheltered by a bay tree, and here, she was able to do the thing. Unlike the motel, the room was safe and private. It was in a Victorian house that had been cut up and reassembled to accommodate her and eight other tenants, all women except for an older man on the top floor who rarely left his bedroom. There was rumor of a chamber pot.
In her room, furnished with a twin bed and an armoire, Ursa locked her door, pulled down her window shade, and practiced. She did it as much as she could, which wasn’t very often because it always made her sick, and she had to stay well enough to work. She managed it about once every month; she had gotten so much better at it since coming to California.
Why was that? Perhaps it was the cool air and the thick fog, and the gnarled rocks jutting out of the Pacific Ocean, which struck Ursa as so much more powerful and dangerous than the ocean she’d known all her life. The fat seals, slick yet pocked, lolled about on those rocks. The city had been built on sand dunes—and on a landfill too. The bright buildings and homes were so young, built after the earthquake a mere fifty years before. This place was proof that you could not only recover from destruction but emerge better and more beautiful than before.
Ursa decided that there was no darkness here—no brick, no drab colors. The women wore fabulous coats in pink and red and turquoise, and once she’d seen a lady in yellow pumps the same bright shade as the yarrow blooming in people’s front gardens. There was a restaurant that had once, a century ago, charged gold dust instead of dollars. Chinatown was strung with paper lanterns and packed with antique stores and curio shops, and there were Chinese people, crowds of them, Ursa had never seen so many Chinese people before. Downtown, the cable car terminus wasn’t far from the hotel, and sometimes she watched the motormen push and pull the trolleys around on the turntable until they faced a new direction, as if the cars were stubborn horses. Down the street from her house were jazz clubs and cafés, the tables of which were crowded with bearded men in corduroy coats, smoking and talking. The girls wore no makeup. Once, Ursa had seen a woman in black-and-white-striped pants and a crisp black top, and bare feet, and she was drinking coffee at eleven o’clock at night, as if she had no plans to sleep, as if she didn’t need shoes, or anything at all, to protect her.
Here, everyone was seeking their own transcendence, and the and-you-should-too atmosphere was a seduction Ursa couldn’t deny. She loved California and San Francisco within it. It wanted her to explore the thing. It was as if it whispered to her its encouragement. The tree outside her window smelled of nutmeg.
And so, in her room, she experimented. At first, as in Mystic, Ursa couldn’t make it happen at will, and sometimes, when she was tired, or grumpy, it would begin unbidden. Once—only once—did she slip into a time too far back, and she found herself in the kitchen with both of her parents. Her father’s voice, his heavy gait—no, no. It took everything she had to get yanked out of there.
Eventually, Ursa got better, more deliberate. Even if she might never understand why or how it worked, or why she of all people could do it, she did know that she had to relax her body to properly find the hem of time. It was like feeling for a doorknob in the dark. She figured out that access to the past got stronger the more time had passed. She couldn’t reach anything that happened in the last two years; experience needed to marinate. If she tried to drop into the same moment more than a few times, it turned blurry, degraded as a moth-eaten sweater. And she still didn’t have a body inside these moments—only that roving consciousness that felt everything her old self felt.
