Dissident Gardens Read Online Free Page B

By reaching for her impossible policeman, her Eisenhower-loving giant, Rose had practiced a radicalism, a freer love than Sol Eaglin could know. The critique was implicit in the gesture. Yet she wasn’t tempted to translate it all into Marxism for him, not at this late date. Rose might be slightly weary, at last, of Communism. Yet Communism—the maintenance, against all depredation, of the first and overwhelming insights that had struck the world in two and made it whole again, and in so doing had revealed Rose’s calling andpurpose—was the sole accomplishment of her life, short of balancing a pickle factory’s books. It was also, and not incidentally, the sole prospect for the human species.
    “I’m cold,” she said. “Let’s go inside.”
    “You’re lying.” Now Sol was turned on, getting a little humpy, she knew the signs. “You’re not cold, you’re hot as a baked potato.”
    “I won’t argue, the world is founded on such contradictions. It’s possible I’m all at once cold and hot
and
lying. But not lying as much as you, Sol.”

2
    The Grey Goose
    Hello, boys and girls, this is Burl Ives, and I’ve come to sing some songs for you. Here’s a song about a grey goose, the strangest goose
. The year after Miriam’s father left she was given an album.
Last Sunday morning, Lord, Lord, Lord / Oh, my daddy went a hunting, Lord, Lord, Lord
. Miriam was forbidden to operate her parents’ hi-fi, built into a long rosewood cabinet that also included a radio, the most fantastical item of furniture in their lives, purchased on installment at Brown’s Appliance on Greenpoint Avenue, and fixture of contention in any number of speeches on the subject of what her father termed, in grip of one of his baroque and finicky tantrums, their “slavery to commerce.”
And along came the grey goose, Lord, Lord, Lord
. Miriam had to request the Burl Ives each time. Rose handled what she’d only call “an album” in a manner Miriam related to the Jewish ritual actions Rose hastened to despise: the slipping of scrolls from a cabinet, her grandfather’s tender sheathing of the afikomen within its napkin at Passover, really anywhere Miriam had ever witnessed a Jew handling papers of importance or turning the pages of a book as if unworthy, grateful, ennobled, discreetly defiant, all of these at once. Rose tutored her in this action of handling a long-player like the Burl Ives, or her own Beethoven symphonies, narrating what she’d still forbid Miriam even to attempt getting right: middle fingers paired at the label, steadying thumb at the disc’s outer edge. Never so muchas a breath grazing the sacred dark-gleaming music carved into its canyons, during the disc’s passage in and out of the crisp inner papers. That the papers themselves should ride back into the cardboard sleeve just so. A wrong glance could probably scratch the thing. God knew this was a house of wrong glances.
    He was six weeks a-falling, Lord, Lord, Lord / And they had a feather-picking, Lord, Lord, Lord
. For what seemed a whole year of life Miriam sat entranced or bored, stilled anyhow, mulling what Ives seemed to have to impart, cheery parables of ducks and whales and goats and geese. Once, Sol Eaglin, making his mysterious visits, dapper bullshitting Sol before he’d been humbled, Sol on the make, stopped in the living room to jape at Miriam and her album.
    “What’s your kid know from ducks, Rose? You ever been to a farm, doll?”
    “She knows from ducks,” said Rose. “She’s been to a Chinese restaurant.”
    Animals, in Rose’s remorselessly unsentimental urban-pragmatist’s views, were for eating, sure. (No filthy pets for Miriam.) Rose frowned at children’s books when they veered in directions zoological or anthropomorphic to any extent beyond Aesop, with his ironclad morals (always, with Rose, special emphasis on the bitterness of grapes, the inaccessibility of tidbits residing at the bottom of a vase). To sentimentalize a