GIFTS RECEIVED

Tia Ballantine Berger

Cuba’s mother gives us a tear-drop trailer with UFW painted inside a green circle next to the door; the red enamel of the letters flaking off. We tow the trailer out to Colorado and leave it some feet back from the river’s edge. In the spring the river swells and overflows its banks, but we have no desire to float away.
__________

After making a wrong turn somewhere in Ohio, we end up in Kentucky, and at twilight when the head-lights refuse to switch on, we have no choice but to pull into a graveled driveway next to a warehouse with corrugated steel sides and a bright royal blue door. Everyone has gone home for the night, and it is quiet, away from the highway, close to the river. As soon as we switch the engine off, the night turns on. Crickets compete with bullfrogs for space, and the milky way begins to hum some unrecognizable tune. Of course, instantly a high-pitched mosquito whine kills all that romance of river edges and crickets. We will sleep in the car, wait until first light, and then find an electrician in town who might locate the problem; we have no choice, but we need to close the windows to keep from being devoured by bugs. And it is hot. Already my lower back, my inner thighs, the backs of my knees are dripping wet.
Then, headlights, and a car door slams. Someone is walking towards the car in the dark—someone large. I can feel the distance between each footfall, hear the gravel crunch underfoot, almost painfully. The crickets pause.

---What you folks doing here?

He leans his palm into the windshield and aims his voice for the still open window. The moon disappears abruptly behind the wide curve of his left shoulder. He is saying something low and gutteral about this being his warehouse, and something else—something I can’t hear. The crickets are still silent, but I can hear him breathing and can see his hand curled fingers to palm, resting on the doorframe. He shifts his weight heavily onto one foot and uses his other hand to fish something from the pocket of his overalls. When he brings his hand back to the open window, there is a small click. Metal to metal.

---Listen.

I close my eyes and wait.

---Listen.

There are beds in there, beer in the fridge, a coffee pot. Make yourselves at home. Towels in the cabinet under the drawing table and the air conditioner controls to the left of the fridge. Just slip the key under the door in the morning when you leave.
He clicks the key once more against the door panel and then passes it easily through the open window. The crickets sing again, but then, they probably had never left off in the first place. There are clean sheets and two apricot Danish for breakfast. The coffee is French Roast.

I open the letter to a watercolor of columbines. Inside three typed lines:

Dear Tia, Happy New Year; I miss your letters. I put you in for a Pushcart: did they write. I gather you’re thriving? God bless.

He signs his name as he always signs it—three fast letters.
The sun is a siren on my arm. I want to peel it back with my teeth.
There is one other piece of mail—a postcard from Madrid. Antonio Saura, Cocktail Party 1960.
___________

Before she leaves the islands, she gives me two things—a hand-woven jacket embroidered in cross-stitch with hard round buttons and button holes made of bound satin threads, and her phone number. When she leaves Texas, she gives me two phone numbers, one for the program director and one for the cottage where she will sleep and write. When I call she says: It’s cold here, but this place has high ceilings, and you are my first call. I just walked through the door this very instant. I just set my suitcases on the floor. You are my welcoming committee.
_________

The sepia photograph arrives in a green vellum envelope. She has her hands spread across her breasts, her belly round and large, and she is radiating. I put the photo on my board next to the snapshot of my father looking surprised, reading to a stuffed rabbit balanced on his knee. I attach the first photo carefully, not wanting to disturb its silvered surface. Now I want to know if the baby is born. I am glad she has De Koonings and Stellas on her wall and a rose garden large enough for a glass-topped table and four wrought iron chairs. I am glad she lives with early morning fog and blue lupine.
_________

Last night, someone left a box of macadamia nut chocolates on my chair outside the front door. There was no note. I don’t think it was the same person who occasionally leaves old unread copies of the NYTimes, but the same concrete pot with the aloe plant was used to keep the wind from blowing the box-top away. Whoever it was must have waited for some time. When I opened the box, two chocolates were missing.
_________

She sent the black jet pendulum from Yelapa, packed it in shredded yucca fiber stuffed into an empty Tampax box with a note scrawled on thin blue paper saying that she found this "magic" stone (her word not mine) on the beach, tangled up in seaweed—without the ribbon, of course. And no, she didn’t drill the hole through the narrow end. It was already there, but clogged with sand. Holding it under the bathroom faucet flushed out most of the sand, but she had to push the tiny green shell out with a sewing needle. The red velvet ribbon she found coiled in the back of the kitchen drawer backed into the beeswax candles. The pendulum was too heavy to wear around my neck, but I liked rubbing my smallest finger across the flat polished facets. The tiny green shell was crushed to dust, even though it was wrapped in layers of bathroom tissue.
__________

She writes: Shades of moss on wonderful world of walls, hedges, labyrinthine lanes. A few cherished Autumn moments before back to that other Emerald Isle. On the other side of the card—a picture of Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Samuel Beckett, and a stamp—two wolves, one with an open mouth, on a yellowing moor.
__________

After she dies, I look in her bathroom drawer for the rosewood box with Kokoshka’s cigarette wrapped in pink tissue, but after thirty years in salt air the cigarette has melted to brown stain.
__________

When she calls, I don’t want to tell her that I have been crying for three days and have kept all the doors and windows shut. Maybe she knows anyway. She reads me her poem about the red snake crossing the road in slow curves, its tail snapping at one edge of the road, its narrow head pushing against the ridged sand on the other edge. I ask her if the snake is red because of the setting sun (she always walks in the desert at nightfall.) No, she says, it stays red, even in the moonlight; the man in the gas station told her the snake is a red racer.
__________

He writes me a letter that takes apart my world.

contents