I accidentally posted the wrong other story a while back. So, that's been removed and here is the real 'prequel'. After Jeff contacted me about "A Measure of the Sin" I told him that there was a related story that described Meredith's childhood. When he read it, he decided that instead of making a short film, he'd make a feature length film combining the two stories. Then we started working on the screenplay!
ARMS THAT HOLD ME BACK
by Kristy Nielsen
1.
The memories bleed together, but that is because so much of the time was the same, the days all a single spinning image now, a long white room whirling in space. If I pay attention, I can see whole scenes replayed over and over, as if the past exists somewhere, indelibly inscribed.
I see mother singing, wrapped in filmy curtains. We didn't worry about clothes. It seemed we could just dance out of bed, across the bare boarded floors and into fabric. I watched her out of the corner of my eye so I wouldn't lose track of her and she went spinning down the hallway winding more and more curtains around her, all white, so she would blend with the walls.
At the end of the hall, she stopped suddenly before the last window and the yards of curtains spiraled off behind her in a wake. Such delicate folds of gauze, so graceful the way she lifted her ankle, pointed her toe toward the window and looked back down the hallway, one hand extended artfully. But then that look came over her face when she caught sight of me. I stood naked, fingering the edge of some silky fabric and trying to stop my lips from shaking. She was so far away. Her face had gone dark again.
If I look closely, I can see mother in a corner, her face alternating between hard and soft like a magic picture in a child's book: light, dark, light, dark, depending on how you hold your head. I am doomed to make the same mistakes, the end unavoidable. I never turn in time.
In the spring we opened the windows and piled everything onto the bed shoved under one of the eaves. The breezes came and lifted patches of fabric, paper scraps, and fluffs of hair and dust that had gathered in corners and we would dance along with these fragments in the current, using our hands to imitate the rising and falling fabric, swaying our heads like the dust that defied gravity and seemed to settle on the ceiling.
Sometimes we wore our lightest nightgowns, and other times nothing at all. On those days when she danced naked, mother's breasts would move in counterpoint to her hips and bits of cloth seemed drawn to her, not to cover her, but to accent a curve or provide shadow. The curtains blew in and were sucked back out with gusts of wind. I used them as dancing partners, but Mother let them push her into something completely different, something other than my mother. She sang along with music I couldn't hear, ignored my voice when I pleaded with her to look at me, flared her nostrils at my smell when I was right in front of her, and removed my hands when I caught hold of her.
This twirling, arching creature wasn't my mother; she was a ballerina with a swollen belly, a bird flapping along the wall toward a window, a trapped and beautiful but nearly extinct species. How could she be my mother? I thought, and I practiced being motherless even when she was still there. I sculpted her in the air in front of me, and then I caressed and clung to her, I held on tightly. I held my own hand and guided myself across the room, or I rubbed the side of my face with hair and closed my eyes. I held on tightly.
One day she looked me right in the eyes and said, "I am sorry." I was so startled I pretended not to hear. I picked a nightgown off the floor and smelled it. It was hers.
She dropped to my level and told me, "I am your mother.” But I just turned away to the white wall and kissed it. "Yes, mother." I spread my arms along the wall, turned my cheek to the cool paint and let the breeze brush my hair away from my eyes.
Mother walked around the room slamming shut all the windows until the last curtain hung slack and all the dust and scraps of fabric settled back on the floor.
I remember so much of our time with white curtains skimming bare floors, light-colored silky fabrics flying around, and us dancing naked. But on this day, I turned around and she'd gone dark again. Her lips pursed on a cigarette. "Before you were born," she said, releasing smoke, "I woke up every morning with dread. I went to bed with dread, slept with it." Then she stubbed out her cigarette and I watched her walk away.
2.
Mostly her voice sounded like wind chimes or a flute. When she had them, her words were magical and could transform time. She would spread her fingers in front of my face and speak pictures. When I looked again, it was as she said, everything spread out before me in the colors she'd promised. "Today the walls are purple," I remember she said once. "The food is eggplant and the music funky."
"Isn't it a beautiful day?" she would say, and I would gasp. "It is the most perfect beautiful day ever." For me, it was true. For her, it was a choice and it wasn't a choice she could make every day.
Words seemed to keep away the darkness, so I listened even when she forgot to feed me or when I was too tired to really hear. I sat there amidst the flying colors, the subway careening through her invented city, people hurrying in and out of buildings, walking quickly to the ends of streets, turning into smaller and narrower alleys, rushing to meet her. In the stories, she always waited in her second floor flat, a record spinning, incense burning, her hair braided. She sprawled in a bean bag chair, or she sat backwards over a straight-back wooden chair reading a book while her admirers climbed trellises and fire-escapes, rang all the bells and hoped to be let in.
In some stories, she stood on a corner smoking a cigarette, waiting for a bus, or maybe observing the people streaming by and listening to music coming from a nearby record store. I enjoyed this part, just my mother in the world wearing colorful clothes and moving independently up and down the streets. When she walked, there was an unrestrained dancing in her steps, and both men and women sitting in the restaurant turned to watch her go by.
Somewhere in the crowd the man who would become my father watched too. He saw her independent stride and thought, here is a woman all right. The dancer's muscles in her legs flexed and he thought, here is a woman who could do the work.
Sometimes in the morning I would ask, "What colors today, Mother? How perfect?" But she wouldn't answer. Or, she would drag on her cigarette and look out the window at the same stretch of sky, making faces as if she were talking to someone. If she saw the man in the garden, she pulled me to her and we stayed back far enough that he wouldn't see. At those times, we were both silent.
She gave me the words she loved, and with those I was able to invent stories to make sense out of most anything. I memorized the words that captured a sense of freedom. I could sit in a net of my mother's voice and ignore almost anything else that happened. Her words, when she had them, held off night and fear, sickness, hunger, and guilt.
She often neglected to feed me, but when plump violet and grey birds landed on the white window sill, she put the words for them in my mouth. She fed me nouns and adjectives, and wrapped me in myths. She alphabetized my toes and named every plank of the floor. I loved her fiercely, mutely, and with a panic that sometimes stopped my heart.
On the cramped third floor, the ceiling sloped and our windows looked out only on sky. But I didn't need to see much. Mother gave me such beautiful sounds. She gave me bougainvillea and trillium. She said horseradish, turpentine, and phlox. I didn't notice how cold my feet became while I listened through the night and when I got hungry I just curled around my stomach and whispered, "buttermilk, granola, tapioca."
3.
In my memory the white room spins. I see the still nights and then the bright days of dancing. I remember those happier times before I knew enough to be unsatisfied. I wanted to go on for years in that room, dancing, singing, listening to stories. I was a child and didn't know that things can't last forever.
I had never looked at myself in a mirror. I had never seen a word written out. I knew little except the great facts about my mother, her hundreds of moods, her fifteen smells, the brand of cigarettes and the way she held them between thumb and first finger, pointing the smoke away. I knew how much she would eat at each meal and which morsels she would leave on the plate. I could say even before she knew that she was tired, or needed to go to the bathroom, or wanted to be alone.
One morning, we danced across the floor as usual, but mother sailed on toward the window at the far end of the hall as if she forgot it were there, as if she thought the clouds would support her, wrap her in gauze, and set her down in the garden outside with a breath of encouragement.
I knew what to do. I leapt after, a little less graceful than usual, and caught her arm to stop her spinning. Mother ceased twirling, swaying a little as she found her balance. Almost immediately, I had to let go of her and then I dropped to the floor, an animal sound coming out of my own mouth. Across the bottom of my foot was a long cut and in the arch, a thick splinter protruded. I had never seen blood before. Red came into the room shocking and bright.
Mother stood dazed, inches from the window. "Be quiet," she said to the air with a puzzled look on her face. I shut my mouth and the sound stopped. Silently, I worked the splinter out of my foot. She looked over my head to the other end of the room and said the word "door" out loud for the first time.
Just that quickly, everything changed. The floor gave me a splinter and mother wanted to use a door. Suddenly, the curtains were old and dirty and the breeze wanted nothing to do with them. All our songs for the different times of day and night turned out to have the same words and music. The swathes of fabric disintegrated.
The questions I had always wanted to ask her came flooding out. "How many things would you die for, Mother? Where are all the other people? Where does that door lead?"
"None of our doors lead anywhere," she told me, "except this one." I watched her stick her fingers and then a barrette through the keyhole. She peered through, panting. She shoved her hair behind her ears and looked wildly around the room.
I couldn't stop my mouth. "What's a telephone? Did we ever have one? Do I have a father?"
Mother didn't answer. She ripped a piece of baseboard off the wall and slid the piece under the door. I watched in amazement. I didn't know there was anything beyond the door.
"Mother, what's out there? Where does light come from? Who made me yours?"
"Be silent," she said, and I was.
She picked up the key she had pulled into our room and looked at it. She held it up to her face and smelled it, then held it out on her palm in front of me. I ran my tongue along the bumpy edge and swished that taste around in my mouth. There were so many new things I needed words for and she wasn't giving me any.
She opened the door and stepped out. I followed her, holding a clump of her nightgown in one hand and keeping three fingers of my other hand in my mouth to remind me to be quiet. My one cut foot smacked a little on the floor as we walked down and down and passed through two more doors that weren't locked. We passed through darkness out towards more and more light. Finally mother opened a heavy door and we walked into the day. I sucked air in over my fingers.
"We're going to do some gardening," mother announced loudly, too loudly, and then I jumped, noticing the man sitting in a green metal chair just two feet away.
Mother grabbed me hard by the arm and started walking around the house. Then she slowed and pointed out the birds. I didn't want to see anything yet. Until we got around the corner, I looked only at her face which seemed to have changed color, and at her eyes which were very wide and darted all over.
In the garden, I noticed only flowers at first. They looked just as mother promised when she had drawn them in the air with her finger. Hundreds of ants worked the peonies at the edge of the yard. "That's a good sign," mother told me, still gripping my wrist. Rose bushes climbed the house with yellow and red blooms. Purple, white, and orange irises tongued the fence and gate. The colors kept me still and silent.
Mother just started digging, tossing dirt around, uncovering one thing and then another. I plunged my bare feet into the dirt, heedless of the cut, labeling everything with the words I'd learned but never used. "Worm, beetle, soil," I said. "Root, potato, dark, seedling." Mother didn't seem to need me to be silent anymore so I sang away, running through my dictionary of terms.
I could not have imagined this world based on the little I knew from looking out the window. The sky was not just a patch of blue like any other scrap of fabric. It was an immense quilt stitched of uncountable colors and textures. This ground felt more solid than our wood floors and the air was simply everywhere, rushing up under my nightgown, reaching into my armpits and ears.
I wanted to run over the yard, but mother kept me in one small area bordered by the fenced-in garden and the shed. I wanted to ask more and more questions, but her face was shut. She moved from one patch of dirt to another, smelling, occasionally tasting, and once she was crying.
In one corner near the shed, new shoots arched white necks through the dirt, but mother said she felt queasy at the thought of touching the firm stems. Then in the garden, she gagged. "Let me," I said and took the shovel and hoe. I didn't know what to do, but shoveled dirt into piles, patted them flat, then dug them up again. I turned the soil over and over and hacked it into rows with the hoe.
Later, I ran water over the dirt, and a smell just like her came up. I ran to the shed's white wall, sank down next to her, closed my eyes.
"We can't leave," she told me. "Don't even ask."
I laid on my back that night next to one of the windows, trying to imagine the whole sky based on the tiny square that was again all I could see. Then I closed my eyes and remembered my one red footprint that led all the way from our room to outside.
4.
I thought about the sky a lot, its endless and hopeful variations. I discovered the constellations as they spun by our windows, which I learned faced north. I read every book that showed up in our room and learned how to find the area of a rectangle, a square, and a triangle. I read about the probable origin of our planet from a solar dust cloud, and I read the story of Job over and over in mother's Bible. "My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope."
Those were quiet years and the room no longer spun through space in a white blur. It moved slowly enough for dust to settle in every crevice while we got older. I remember mother lying on the floor with a cigarette in one hand which she would hold up over her in order to make spirals and shapes out of the smoke. Occasionally there would be the sound of her inhaling and exhaling and every few minutes the sound of me turning the pages of one of my books. We no longer danced or sang and if mother spoke her stories out loud it was always under her breath. Mostly, she just moved her lips and no sound came out.
When there wasn't any heat, we would lie close together under all the blankets and when we were low on food, we each cut our portions smaller to give the other more food. We would sit at the table saying very little, passing smaller and smaller pieces of meat from plate to plate.
"This has gone on too long," I said one day.
"Please be silent," she whispered, but I only stayed quiet until she fell asleep.
At the far end of the room I sat on the window seat and looked through the screen. My face was covered with mesh imprints from leaning there when I noticed the clasp that held the screen in place. I undid it, set the screen aside, and climbed out onto the roof, gulping air.
In summer, I saw the oak's leaves when they blew toward our windows. In winter, I heard its branches scrape paint. That day, for the first time, I could see the whole tree pressing against the house, furrowed bark like wet fingered hair all the way to the ground, new leaves tossed out. Without the screen, the window frame, and the eaves to shape it, the afternoon unfolded brazen and fresh and I felt an opening in myself grow.
5.
Life for us had begun changing the day I got a splinter in my foot, and changes kept happening, though slowly. I imagined one change was tied to another with a rope that was pulling a ladder closer and closer to us. I couldn't know what came after the ladder, but I knew that once it was close enough, it would be an easy leap from the roof.
"Let's imagine where I will be in ten years," I said to mother one day when she was doing nothing but lying there smoking.
"You will be ten years older," she said in a hoarse voice.
"Yes, but will I have a body as rounded as yours? Will I be on a road, in an apartment? What color am I wearing?" I wanted her to take me away with words again, to imagine another world like she used to.
"You will be ten years older," she repeated.
Please invent something, I thought. Give me a color, a word or a name, a frame to keep the future bearable. I wanted to know that she would be there with me, but I was afraid to ask. I waited and waited for her to tell the story with me in it, I waited until her nose whistled a little and then I knew she was asleep.
I had practiced being motherless for years, but I still didn't know how.
"Mother!" I said. "Where will I be tomorrow?"
"One day older," she yawned.
"Where was I yesterday?"
She smiled. "Sitting in front of me in your yellow cotton nightgown while I braided your hair and sang 'Frere Jacques'."
That had been years before. I let her go back to sleep and climbed out on to the roof to watch the birds.
I wanted another change to happen, something irrevocable even if horrible, something to break up the terrible repetition of days and years. While I sat there wishing, a storm moved in and all the birds started to disappear. The sky darkened, the light turned a bruised green.
The oak's leaves became purple, and its trunk turned ash grey. I could feel my heart wake up and I stood, even though it was dangerous. It was then I noticed a small door in the eaves, left of our windows. I laughed out loud as the first drops hit me. Thunder rolled. The wind came in gusts, first pushing my hair back, then sweeping it across my face as I sidled down the roof to the door.
The door was half-sized with no knob on the outside, but I pressed it and it opened inward. Inside, I found more furniture than we'd ever had: walnut chairs with needlepoint cushions, a settee, a tiny oak desk with a pull-cord green lamp, and rugs to cover the floor. It made me laugh. I had only imagined.
I walked through a dark hallway, into the half-lit kitchen, and switched on the light, still giggling softly. Across the room, a small woman slept, folded up on a chair, her face turned to the side. She was the only other woman besides my mother that I had ever seen. She had orange hair and a large, round face, orange from make-up. I stepped closer and watched her, fascinated, as her eyes lifted open and slowly rolled toward me.
Then all at once she leapt at me face-first, like a jack-in-the-box, or a giant sunflower caught in the wind. "What are you doing in here?" she screamed. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?"
I bolted through the rooms, out the tiny door toward my window, the laugh now stuck in my chest. The storm had hit with full force and rain pushed my nightgown into arms that held me back. I stepped across the slanted roof as quickly as I could but then the window slid down, and mother didn't see me. She looked right through me as she twisted the lock into place.
6.
The stories I most want to forget are those that stay with me. For many years, my memories were kind. They came and comforted me, saying just what I wanted to hear and promising that they'd caress my hair and sing to me. But one day, my ghosts began to betray me. They came with blank stares. They told me horrible, horrible lies about myself and I believed them all. They told me the truth about the past and wouldn't let me forget.
The day the white room was spinning towards all along, the day whiteness ended and red came in to stay.
I awoke expecting to see mother lying on the floor with a cigarette, but she was up and busy for the second day in a row. She was even humming to herself and her face looked less grey than it had since I was a child. She had put on a soft cotton white dress with a garden of flowers embroidered across the chest, and she'd braided a red ribbon into her hair.
When she saw that I was awake, she called to me softly like she used to. "Come here, Meredith," she sang. "My baby."
The door that once led to the outside was still bolted, but I saw that two other doors I thought led nowhere were wide open. Through one was the orange woman's kitchen. The other door opened onto nothing but sky.
Mother had the orange woman in a pile next to a stack of boxes. "It doesn't hurt her," she said.
Mother ran twine under the woman, looped it over the top. "Is she missing bones?" I whispered. "How can you fold her up?"
The orange woman opened her eyes and I jumped back. "Put your thumb here," my mother said. She tightened the knot and patted the woman, two quick pats on the chest.
"There now, that's done."
"Who is she?" I asked.
My mother kissed the orange woman's cheek. "Don't look, Mother," she said. The orange woman closed her eyes. Even my mother had a mother.
Mother took me by the hand and led me to the doorway to the sky. She stepped with me to the very edge and began to smile. "Let's step out, Meredith," she whispered, clutching my hand.
I hadn't seen her so happy. "No, mother." I tugged at her to move back.
"Come with me."
"No."
She looked at me as if I were a small child and took my hand more tightly. "Come on sweetie. Just one step out with me."
"No, no, no."
"Say yes," she whispered, and dropped my hand. She lifted a foot, looked at me sadly.
"No!" I said softly after her, and then instantly I regretted it. I sat for hours in the doorway with my legs hanging into space, crying, "Yes, Mother. Yes, yes."
7.
Every time I go through a door, I think about the consequences. What will be unhidden? Who will be sacrificed? What can be taken and what given back? The day my mother leaped into freedom, I realized my burden, the guilt I felt for being more alive, and my shame for feeling relief about being a little less bound. I was alone with a terrible secret. I wish I had known then how many beautiful things I could have promised to show her. "Hold on a little longer," I would have said. "I'll find flowers the size of your head and costumes so light you fly."
I didn't think to invent those things because the day before mother had seemed freshly hopeful, as if about to embark on an adventure.
On our last day together, we packed up the kitchen, talking and even singing some. We wrapped china plates and bowls, serving platters, casseroles. Mother gave the back of my hand a tiny slap when I was not careful. She prepared the crystal vases and wine glasses herself, gently cushioning stems in tissue paper, filling insides with cotton balls. "Where are we going?" I'd asked.
She didn't answer. She put her hands in front of my face and said, "Imagine a new world with more colors." But when she pulled away her fingers, I didn't see anything but the boxes and mother's face, smeared with dust.
In the back of a cupboard, I'd found a wooden hinged box with purple lilies painted on the cover, Dear Mother engraved inside.
"Who gave this to you?" I asked. Mother just looked at me. I looked back. The heat that day gave us smell. Our nightgowns swirled with it as the ceiling fan ticked overhead. The bags under her eyes had trembled, and her breasts, wilted daisies, pointed to the floor.
"Sweetheart, baby, precious," she had said with real tears in her eyes.
"Mother," I answered. Don't ever leave me, I was thinking.
She twirled across the room just like she used to. "My baby, my first, my little crooner."
"My mother," I called as if she were mine, dancing into her arms for the last time.
"My ballerina, my purple flower."
