Trick of the Light

A Trick of the Light

a short story

by

Tina Ryon Propst

Daphne, faded with age and ruin but still colorful, intriguing, full of truisms –like an ancient Pompe fresco, or the book she handed me. Cecelia’s vintage Audubon Bird Guide: Eastern Land Birds.

I hadn’t seen my youngest sister in years, our paths spread by age and circumstance, and vast duality. She was my only surviving family. So, when she called to give me some of our mother’s heirlooms, I went out of pure curiosity.

“Remember Mommy’s obsession with this thing?” she asked as I took the bird guide. She adjusted the colorful silk scarf which slipped down on her forehead. The meridian pushed through the window, illuminating the dust, and sparked the gold, purple and royal blue paisley pattern on the scarf. In final days, she still insisted on vibrance.

I swallowed a bitter urge to say, of course I remember. I was her eldest. “That scarf was Mother’s, too, right?”

“Oh, yes. It was her favorite,” she smiles wanly. “She wore it to keep the wind from her hair in any given beau’s stylish convertible on a warm day, or maybe on a day cruiser gliding across the Chesapeake with Mr.-Right-at-that-moment,” she laughs. “I think she even went horseback riding with it once. I don’t think anything boring happened to her in this scarf. I can still feel her adventures in it. It helps me through my journey.” Her journey, she said, romanticizing her cancer.

She called me here to give me some possessions that passed from Mother to her, some jewels I’ll never wear, some clothes that won’t fit. A pewter box I may press into service as a candy dish. But the books – those I’ll keep. They represent two of the true loves of her life she actually found – the incontestable freedom of birds and the bendable wisdom of poetry.

Amara and Daphne – we were Mother’s bookends, eldest and youngest of her five.None of us shared a father. Different we are as a barred owl with silent night flight and the birds of the dawn chorus – cardinals, wrens, blackbirds clamoring before the sunup. One lives to survive, the others simply to put music in the air for nondescript joy – a ‘just because’. I could never fly in her atmosphere or make lovely music just because it was a new day. I’ve always needed a reason. Daphne was just like Cecelia.

“This one too,” she said, handing me another shelf worn book with a creamy white dust jacket, a trio of vague blue flowers – asters maybe? – etched on its dustcover. It smelled of mold and dust and vaguely of Shalimar. A 1960 copy of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems. It was fat at the spine from the earmarks she made on so many pages, treasuring more her ease at finding a beloved poem than preserving the books integrity.

Not surprisingly, as an odd awkwardness slid between us, I did the obligatory thing and asked how she was feeling. I regretted it at once.

“Oh, you know,” she said, sitting in a high-backed wing chair that’d seen better days, a few more books in her hands to peruse. “Good days and bad, as they say. But the days I can reflect and go completely into revery are honestly pretty comfortable. And the pills do their thing, mostly. Tired, but really, I’m ok.”

She flipped through the pages of a few more old books – there was an odd mix of philosophy, science, even a flimsy Harlequin romance in there. That one I will certainly pass on to the nearest Goodwill. Pure fluff.

In the silence I fingered through the Audubon book, the one I remember that stayed with her always. It didn’t matter what new man she’d taken up with, or how they’d used, abandoned, stolen from her or just generically broke her heart. She never managed to lose that book or her unsatiable sense of folly. Everywhere she followed a man, various always kids in tow, she found birds to watch and marvel over, as though each common cardinal were a religious event. I can remember once in the old brown Buick heading back from whatever failed tryst, tears streaming down her face as Jim Croce crooned, “Time in a Bottle” on the car radio, she saw a flock of starlings approach from the east. She pulled over and through her tears she laughed. “Oh, look kids! Starlings! Look closely as the sun sparks the bright feathers hidden in the black! If you see them close enough, they are iridescent!” I looked toward the west, I remember, embarrassed at her roller coaster emotions.

As I flipped absently through the book, somewhere midway two pages part and I realized there was something between them – a bluejay feather. How old it was, I’ve no idea . It seemed a good distraction from our awkward silence.

“Hey,” I said, showing Daphne. In profile I saw the shadow of her former lovely face, stretched thinner over ungiving bone. Still, with her sparkling green eyes, she was still one of the most beautiful women I’d ever known – just like Mother. Her tattoos, all delicate and feminine themes like flowers and hearts, seemed to be sliding from her skin.

“I wonder if there are more feathers she kept in here,” I said, paging through but finding nothing. “Maybe she thought this made an appropriate bookmark.”

Daphne reached out, touched the feather with a boney little finger. “Oh, bluejays were her favorite!”, she cried, and again the bitter knowledge that she knew our mother more thoroughly than I made my jaw tighten. “Yeah, I know,” I lie.

“Do you know why?”, she asked, taking the feather from my hand and examining it, holding it to the light still bright from the window. I didn’t answer.

“Well, she adored those colors, those varieties of blue. The tail patterns reminded her of stained glass,” she said.

“Stained glass?” I quipped. “Cecelia wasn’t religious.”

Daphne chuckled. “That doesn’t mean she couldn’t think stained glass is beautiful. She looked at it as art, not as sacred representation of church. She didn’t take things so literally, so encapsulated,” she said. It was a jab at me.

“She loved the way you can’t see, no matter what, what Bluejay feathers really are.”

“And what are they?”, I ask, mindlessly reading the spines of the other books on the shelf.

“Brown.” She smiled wide.

I wondered briefly if the cancer had metastasized to her brain, or maybe the drugs were a bit too strong. Doubt showed on my face.

“Brown? What are you talking about Daphne?”

“It’s scientific, Amara. It’s kind of like prisms – it’s how the light hits the feathers and refracts only the blue light we can see. It’s the way they are structured. There’s actually no blue pigment in the feathers at all – they are really brown.”

I looked closely at the feather –faded from age, it still shown with shades of cerulean, indigo, and royal. I squinted and willed my eyes to see what she was telling me.

“You can’t see it, Mar. It will always look blue. It’s a trick of the light. Your brain seeing something that’s really not there, but you can’t see it any other way.”

“I’ll look it up in Cecelia’s book bird book,” I said dismissively.

She got that look on her face like she did when she was small, like her feelings were hurt and her eyes were about to swell. She got most anything she wanted as a child because of that look. I knew what was coming.

Her voice was weak, a strained whisper. “I always hated when you called her Cecelia. She didn’t even like you calling her “Mother” but referring to her as Cecelia always… seemed so cold. I know you two weren’t close, but…”

“Daph… come on. It wasn’t even about closeness. I know you two were – you lived with her longer than anyone. But you weren’t there when…” I slid my hands across the cover of the poetry book. "You didn’t see as many men, so many stepfathers and “uncles” and random weekend guys. Eight moves in two years. You weren’t abandoned in a hotel on the way to California by a guy who took her car and left us there. There was only me and Peter and Miranda then, that was before Paul, way before you.Having to figure out how to feed us while we got back to Maryland…how to get back to Maryland.” I stopped short, realizing I was dredging up the ugly with a dying woman. This could be the last time I saw her; I didn’t want to take belongings and leave her with the heaviness of memories.

“I know all about the men, Mar. I saw enough myself. Hell, I don’t even know who my father was. At least you have that. But I am glad she had me so much later in life; she was already winding down and growing softer and more comfortable just being with herself. She was less adventurous with me by the time I was a young teen. We had some wonderful times.”

“Adventurous,” I say. “That’s one way to put it.”

Daphne pulled the cardigan – no doubt another one of my mother’s classics – closely around her shoulders. The sun had moved on from the window that had earlier brightened her scarf; no doubt a chill had found her.

“She wasn’t a tramp, Amara,” she said.

“I didn’t call her one.” She ignored that.

“She was classy and educated and dressed in pedal pushers, matching sweaters, pearls even when they fell out of fashion. And she still looked amazing, like she walked out of any old glossy Look magazine from the 50s. She spoke three languages. Does a tramp read poetry and Shakespeare? She didn’t even smoke or drink. Barely wore makeup – just that dusty pink lip shade and some mascara. She was charming and sweet. And men were drawn to her.”

“She certainly didn’t chase them away, did she?”, I said. I felt unable to hold my tongue.

“She was a hopeless romantic, Amara. She just wanted a perfect love, someone to look at her like she looked at sunsets. She didn’t see things the way you do, or I for that matter. She saw life like…”

“Like you wish I could?”

“Like I wish everyone could. She saw life in life and lived it to her fullest. I don’t know why she never found the right man but, maybe that was one thing she couldn’t look for through rose colored glasses. Unlike all the beauty she could pull from thin air, she eventually saw the ugly come through bigger and wouldn’t settle.”

“Why weren’t we enough? "I close my eyes, don’t even want to look at her.

“There’d be no we if there weren’t so many men. And we were enough – God, I felt her love so deeply. She kept us fed, and a roof over our heads. But she held us too, made us laugh. I think you know it too, but you pushed it away. She loved us fiercely, but children grow and drift away.”

“You didn’t,” I say.

“Wanting love is not saying you don’t want to be a mother. That’s unfair. She deserved both. And she was a hopeless romantic,” she repeats for good measure.

“What’s the difference between a hopeless romantic who makes innumerable bad choices in the pursuit of the “right man”, and a tramp? Looked pretty much the same to me growing up, and to our siblings.”

“What’s the difference?” she smiles. She fingers the little broach on her sweater, slides her hands on Mother’s scarf.

She was quiet for a moment, staring into the empty air.

“Apparently, presentation,” she said with a grand flair of her hand.

And at once the laughter broke from us both and danced together in the stuffy room. We fell together, my tall frame folding around her delicate frail smallness like petals around a stigma, two very different parts of the same flower. I wiped the snot from her button nose, she the tears from my face with her sweater sleeve.

We flipped through the Dickinson collection, lighting on the pages with folded corners and wondered at their significance to our Mother.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

Success in Circuit lies

Too Bright for our infirm Delight

The trust’s superb surprise…

Maybe she thought, as the poem seemed to say, that the truth is too blinding for many, and you can’t nor shouldn’t look directly at it, at least not all at once. And what amazing things can you see in that off-kilter glance on your way to a full stare?

We found another page, corner turned down. This time, a sweet gift colored the page – Mother’s elegant handwriting.

“Cecelia the bird”, she wrote in the margin with flourish and surrounded it with the shape of a heart. “She’ll fly, she’ll sing, until she can’t.”

Hope is a Thing With Feathers, the Dickinson poem that lived on that page was titled.

My baby sister and I spent most of the next several weeks together. We reminisced about the parts of our youth, however meager, that overlapped. With warm tea and short bread cookies, we filled one another in on the missing gaps. We talked of our sister and two brothers, what made them unique, and loveable, or not so. We talked about the same blight that robbed us of all of them, and Mother too. Perhaps I am lucky to have my father’s genes. I told her I always regretted not knowing Mom or her zest for life, my bend being more toward the stoic and sinical. The irony I see now is that I, the one who lived the thinnest life, clutched my bitterness close to my chest, was gifted the most time. It was time to readjust the scales.

Daphne took her last breath, and I was beside her, whispering for her to tell our Mother I was sorry. “She knows,” she mouthed. “And trust me, she didn’t feel you had anything to be sorry for. She’d just want you to be happy. She thought regret was life’s biggest waste of time.”

***

I have Daphne’s ashes in a lavender urn, which I’ve placed it next to Mom’s blue urn that Daphne kept before she died. They share close quarters on a small oak end table, near an east facing window where the morning sun comes in and lets them gleam as if the light is theirs to begin with.

***

My heart pounds as Coral, the tattoo artist, calls me back for my appointment.

I shakily open the book of Dickinson poems, take out the bluejay feather that was marking the page.

“This was my mother’s book, from 1960. We are the same vintage,” I say trying to ease my nerves with wit. I’m decorating my 65-year-old skin today for the first time. I feel foolish and excited and confused and terrified. It’s a heady mixture I’ve never consumed.

“I want the feather with the first two lines of this poem running across it,” I tell her. She doesn’t acknowledge my audible nerves, which is think is a smart tactic.

She reads the words aloud, to make sure we both understand the assignment.

“Hope is a thing with feathers / That perches in the soul. Ok, cool,” she says. Her short hair is all the colors of a rainbow, a glorious thing that only exists because of a trick of the light. “I do lyrics and poems all the time. And I’m digging your vibe,” she says, pointing to my pearls and my black t-shirt. “Very unique.”

“Yeah, they were my Mom’s.”

“I do lots of feathers. You want it these same colors? That takes a little more time, and it’s a little costlier.”

“No,” I said, putting the feather back in the book. I don’t care if she thinks me daft when I answer.

“Don’t color it. It’ll still be blue. I’ll just see it in the right light.”

The End