The circus men came and went and we listened. As women, we had been raised to believe that some sanctity was possible in the sacrament of attention––that attention, once received, could be enough to transform its object.
They thought we were applauding the show. We were only waiting for them to drop it. The babies were coming with open mouths.
My grandmother taught by example, how even if it hadn’t quite happened in our lifetimes––yet––it might be possible to pull them from themselves by sheer force of love. They had spectacles to offer and we watched. The point, she taught me, was not to feed their illusions but to draw them away from what deluded them, like pulling the host away from the poison to salvage what you can when it becomes clear that the poison has become the central mass. The power of the constant gaze could do this, she believed.
My grandfather was full of wind and she loved into him; it was wartime and every would-be flying man was still charging toward the sun. The war disappointed, but not the rewards that came after if you managed to come out alive; annual parades guaranteed a lifetime supply of empty praise and then with a home of his own and her inside to keep it, he sold used cars, telling stories again and again. She held on and listened, placing his vitamins in a plastic case, ordered by days of the week.
She listened until she died of a rot too long ignored. She had held it in her gut for years, in silence as we do when we know this is no ways good but knew first to keep looking in love. Not for something coming, but as an orientation. Hope is a posture. Hers never slouched.
Dammit Bob, she used to say, and I thought the rest of the sentence had something to do with how she wanted him to live already and cut the crap. His best, when he managed to pull it together, was still so much less than she saw in him. He walked around with his toolbox measuring to no end and schooling any woman within earshot on the importance of the level. A child on each hip, she waited until he left to patch the holes in the walls and mend whatever needed repair after he was through fixing, and she nursed the babies and until she died, repeated, don’t get caught up in ideas, they take you nowhere in the end. She was on morphine in the end.
They said she went peacefully, for living had taught her nothing if not to die well and full of grace. He didn’t last long after his Grace was gone, with no one left to wait for him to come around to living. Then he gave up the ghost of his self-importance and he followed after. What remains are the shadows of a collection of statues, looming. He never grew into them. They are still here.
