THE CICADA
by Lindsey Noelle Nichols
Elise was standing on the back porch in her blue terry cloth robe, sipping black tea with sugar and ice. It was a little past nine, the sun already focusing gold into the August day. She thought of how inhabitable the silence was that surrounded her; instead of the ringing silence of a closed room, it was the silence of outside, complicated by birds, rustling leaves, and the roar of open air. Ice cubes popped in her glass. Dark hair to her waist fell in waves around her awkward, fifteen year-old face, eyes of a Japanese father and a cowlick to the left of her widow's peak. Under her white feet, the planks weathered to a velvet parch. Creative architects had planned the porch around jutting boulders too large to move without a crane. The arrangement of wood around rock gave a sense of order and serenity to the rocky promontory. Cactus and creosote bristled through wooden railings, past which the fine red dust took over. Their house was built on the side of a mountain; the back porch overlooked the muddy adobe and glittering strip malls of the Albuquerque valley. The sky curved overhead, already too bright to stare into without squinting. Cloudless. The cowboy's dream of space. Valley and sky like a halved geode, sparkling azure and dun earth, interrupted by the sharp cutaway of buttes, the arroyos waiting for a flash flood, the clumps of dusty green juniper and silvery sage receding into the distance.
An exhausted cicada dropped from the sky and bounced, buzzing, clacking like an empty seed pod, across the porch. With no one awake to share her squeamishness, she watched the insect expire at her feet. Like a top, it buzzed in circular shimmers of gold and green, then slowed to a gasp. She squatted down for a better look, her hair hanging and a shine gathering on her forehead. The cicada hissed as a weak tremor passed through its body. The tough green legs, thick as twigs, curled beneath it. She set her tea down hard, hoping to provoke a sign of life with the vibration. Tea sloshed out of the mug onto the bleached wood. The cicada was still. With her finger she poked the fragile exposed wing. and recoiled from the imagined buzz and flutter. Crows cawed overhead, floating in the miles of rising thermals over the valley.
She curled her fingers over the cicada, round and brittle as an egg shell, her heart hammering. Silly. It's just a bug. The underbody was segmented and greenish brown, the shiny wing casings like semi-precious stones. Did cicadas have mouth parts? She couldn't tell. In her mind, she felt the wings thrumming and the legs flailing against her hand. She held the cicada now between thumb and forefinger, turning it, admiring the glitter of the wing casings like opals.
She could slide pins, if she had them, through the wings and body, secure the cicada to a spreading board, and frame it in glass. She could keep it in the coffee can under her bed, which normally held a dozen old Japanese coins (the square hole in the round bronze) and a silver anklet. She could put it on top of the percolating coffee maker and wait for her mother to find it, wilted from the steam. She could leave it on the planks to bake in the sun, a shiny bauble for the crows to toss back and forth.
She padded to the edge of the porch, leaned over the wooden rail creaking at her hip bone. With one hand holding her robe closed at the neck, she lobbed the cicada into heat-shimmering space. The small body rose in the air, almost light enough to be caught by wind. She shaded her eyes against the glare. At the apex of its arc, the curled cicada burst into a shattering buzz and shot into the sky, alive.
Gutters roared under University Street while her mother cried, hiccupping through her goodbye. A torrent. Do you have your umbrella? Did we remember to bring your clothes hamper? You won't even miss me. I'll miss you so much. Honey, I love you, she sobbed, be good. Write.
I will. I won't. I'll try. I'll try, Mom.
Elise stood on the curb, dark hair bobbed to her chin, eyelashes sticking together, drenched in the downpour. Paralyzed by the shock of parting. Years ago, her mother had told her (as Elise brushed her teeth with her tiny blue toothbrush) that she would be leaving for Beijing on business for a week. Elise had burst into such excruciating tears—toothpaste, snot, and tears everywhere—that her mother had cried at the adjacent pain, found an excuse, canceled the trip, and conducted what business remained by conference call.
Across from her now, on the other side of the hurt, her mother cried while the water ruined her favorite brown loafers. Her face crumpled as she stood in front of the gray rental car's yawning trunk, her fat curling-wand rolls falling flat, her mascara running. The younger girl-woman with the elegant cheekbones of her mother at eighteen; her mother, the image of the girl at fifty-three, comfortably plump with sinking jowls and lipstick beginning to soak into the lines around her mouth. Still no turkey neck in sight, though her eyebrows required repairs with pencil these days. She gave birth to the girl, her only child, when she was thirty-five, the family surprised by the Japanese father and the sudden overseas marriage too far away to attend. Never send your daughter overseas until she's married to a missionary, they said, with their fat blond babies falling over in their laps. It's a shame to let a girl get away like that, and when she finally does, it's too late. She's had a little slant-eyed baby. And what do you do with a child like that?
Elise remembered a different departure. Her best friend, Kathy Kim, a little Korean girl with an imperious California accent, stood in the hall with her while they watched her mother. She was packing, moving from room to room with linens, artificial orchids, and silver napkin rings. They were changing countries again. Not any financial crisis, not any romantic trouble, just her mother's itinerant life. A diplomat keeps shallow roots. It was the stress of moving, the pressure of bids (passports stamped Brussels or Riyadh or Dhaka ?). Boarding passes and sea freight squeezed tears out of her face as it was then, rouged, with a firm jaw.
Elise had stood helpless with Kathy Kim and watched her mother cry. She wondered when the sky would fall; a chunk of blue striking her temple, killing her dead. Kathy Kim had demanded with her hands on her skinny hips, Why don't you hug your mother? Can't you see she's upset? As if this was the only thing to do, the natural thing to do in these commonplace situations. Now she had the horror of seeing her mother break again, clutching her car keys in the rain. Elise wouldn't return to her impotence, pretending the world would take care of itself if she only allowed the gears to turn. Mothers, like storms, will exhaust their fury eventually. Why was the resignation still so searing the second time around? Why did the earth shake?
Elise's mother was single because her Japanese husband argued too much. She was passionate but frank, an American woman inconsiderate enough to paint her nails on dark transatlantic flights. Elise remembered how the solvent fumes had reddened the eyes of nearby businessmen as her mother applied the second coat of bright red, the last coat of clear polish. Elise had been her mother's satellite, the id with the same teeth and hair color, a small creature fueled by unconditional love. Now she, “the accident,” “the best mistake her mother ever made,” was being released into a private Catholic art college. It was a thoroughly middle-class heartbreak, tremulous and saccharine, a standardized jumping-off point for jet-set baby boomers and their quivering progeny.
Elise was in the habit of holding people loosely when saying goodbye because the distance would only grow and no embrace could possibly repair the stretch of miles. Few friends could withstand it; relatives did not even attempt it. But her mother was omnipresent and, like the grand yacht which tows a dinghy in its wake, her mother kept her reluctantly, sometimes dangerously, in motion. How do you say goodbye to an extension of yourself, knowing you will never be as close again?
The trunk slammed shut. Her mother's new husband, Jim, a balding ex-military man with thick, wooly forearms, wiped the water from his mustache and told them to hurry the hell up. It's raining, ferchristsake. He yanked the car door shut and put his hands on the steering wheel. He was angry when her mother was upset, as if the sadness translated into anger as it bounced from her to him. Elise wasn't sure if that meant he was sensitive inside, or just callous with a sensitive exterior. Her mother and Jim were happy together, in an obscure harmony of opposites that Elise seemed to destroy, Oedipus-fashion, by her mere presence. The drive had been marked by her mother's hourly fast food flutters. The motel rooms had been filled with his chain smoking, Elise's red-eyed silence behind a Joyce novel, and her mother's querulous requests for civility. Her mother and Jim had paid for her pancake house dinners. They had dragged her two blue suitcases, her cardboard boxes, her fishhook cactus, and window fan, into the dorm room on the second floor. They had met the roommate (pierced nose, blonde dreadlocks, blue eyes) and shaken hands suspiciously. Now her mother stepped forward onto the street, sniffling, with her hair matted across her forehead. Even in the rain, the smell of her mother's perfume overwhelmed Elise as she allowed herself to be crushed. She looped her arms over the round shoulders and kissed the wet cheek. Her mother shook against her, hiding her face, mewing like a kitten.
Elise choked. Unable to keep her distance, unable to stay small. She squeezed her mother's rain-soaked white sweatshirt as hard as she could. Letting go was only a moment away.
Twelve years ago, Elise pushed through the crash and hiss of the steel dormitory doors, and left her mother in the gray rental car, patting her puffy eyes with a tissue. Now her mother was dying and Elise hunched over beside her bed. Not quite thirty years old, she was still wearing her running tights because the hospital had called before she had time to change. She knit her hands in her lap -- they looked so much like her mother's at this age -- and stretched her sinewy legs, poking the toes of her muddy sneakers under the bed. The woman in it was not so old, though she was plump. Fat. Bigger than the doctors approved of, though not as large as the rest of the women in the family. Just a little too much cake, a few too many glasses of chardonnay, an extra crab puff on the gold-trimmed china. The wealth and comfort of extended middle age. Elise, in sharp contrast, had become one of those angular, windblown women with whom her mother found conversation difficult. You're so fit. How do you do it? Isn't that nice. Fudge?
When she was younger, she had been terrified of the worst case scenario: her mother invariably kidnapped by terrorists, executed in Yemen , in Lebanon , on a business trip to Mauritius , hit by a stray bullet on their vacation cruise down the Nile . None of these things, though possible in the faint sense that everything is possible, had happened. All her childhood terrors had instead culminated slowly in her mother's body, in her high blood pressure, palpitations, angina. Heart attack. Machines breathed for her mother, her dark curls flat on one side from the pillow, and her lips tinged blue. Elise's own heart was strong enough to warm her through six miles of winter jogging, breathing easily on the uphill. Green beans, tofu, and hot tea afterwards. These were the necessary measures one took in interrupting generations of large women, flushed and short of breath.
Strengthening the mechanics of the heart was a simple thing, but how did one bolster the will, the courage to face unavoidable loss? There was a pit in her stomach. Elise avoided the gray face, instead watched her mother's chest rising and falling under the starched sheets. The private room smelled of Betadine soap and linen, not as unpleasantly antiseptic as Elise had expected. Sunlight filtered through the yellow chintz curtains and their gauzy backing. Sprays of evergreens and holly stood in a thin vase on the nightstand. Beside the bed, the click and hiss of the ventilator, the beep of the heart monitor and the green digital surge of EKG. Would this moment, or the next, or the next, be the final letting go? You'll always be my baby, she had said when Elise came home late from a junior high dance. You'll always be my child.
Everyone has parents, none will live forever, someday you'll be alone. Elise bent over the clipboard of insurance forms. No grief is new, she thought. But how to stand up under the weight of it? The ball point pen dropped from her hand and clattered to the floor. What sort of woman would she become without her mother behind her, insisting on a skirt instead of jeans? What if there was no immutable being inside her, no individual, but only a series of her mother's suggestions? Elise rose and walked unsteadily to the window, her leg muscles stiff from sitting too soon after running. She threw the curtains apart, knowing the shriek of the rings moving on the steel rod wouldn't reach her mother. A square of sunlight stretched across her mother's feet tenting the sheets. The machines beeped. Outside, mirrored glass reflected the sun, focused it into sharp white stars on the corners of the buildings, charging the city haze with brilliance.
Elise looked down. A drainage canal bisected the commercial district like a gray half-pipe with a silver ribbon of water running through its center. She lowered her eyes further, to the foot of the hospital high-rise. A knot of school boys stood on a narrow utility bridge, wind whipping their hair. Elise had to lean against the window and crane her neck to see what they were doing. Some of them had their blue blazers unbuttoned, white shirts untucked. They bent their bodies over the railing and dropped litter into the silver river below. Lunchboxes, crumpled paper bags, glinting silver implements that might have been compasses or rulers. One boy dropped his textbooks. The splash-back from the books rose in the water. Their heads bowed as they watched each projectile on its downward arc, waiting to see which one would sink, which one would float.
