Her Body Knows by David Grossman

Author:David Grossman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

February 2002

Her Body Knows

She interrupts me after the third sentence: “I saw something on TV yesterday and I thought of you.”

I put down the pages. I can’t believe she’s cutting me off like that.

“I woke up and it was 3 a.m.,” she says, “and I had nothing to do.” She laboriously moves her swollen face on the pillow and turns to me. “It was something about a bunch of hippies in America. Saving birds that keep crashing into towers.”

I wait. I can’t see the connection.

“I thought you could have been with them.”

“Me?”

Her hands make jittery fists on the blanket. Nervous flutters, a little like the ones you get after a nice dose of Haldol, although that’s the one drug she isn’t taking. I try to disassociate myself from those movements of hers, remind myself that they have nothing to do with me and that it’s not a criticism of my story. Just jumpy little tics that will drive me insane in a few seconds.

“Every day at four in the morning, they walk past the skyscrapers.” Then she explains: “That’s because the birds migrate at night.”

“Well, now it’s clear,” I say as I emphatically straighten my stack of papers. I’ll never understand her way of taking in information or, even less, her way of spewing it out. It’s taken me two months to prepare for this evening, and she just cuts me off like that.

“They collect the remains and put them in plastic bags,” she continues, “and if there’s a need, they treat them. I even saw them giving cortisone to one bird.” Her common lot with the bird amuses her. “Then they fling them back, set them free.” She is astonished. “They look like normal people, they all have jobs, one’s a lawyer, another one I saw was a librarian, but they’re also, how should I put it, kind of principled.”

“With that sort of self-righteous expression?” I ask slyly.

“What … yes,” she admits, embarrassed. She herself probably didn’t know why she had connected me with them.

I laugh, somewhat desperately. She is my mother, the ultimate seer, and yet she’s a complete ignoramus when it comes to me. “I actually tend to side with the tower colliders,” I tell her.

“No, no.” She shakes her head heavily. “You’re strong, very strong.”

She says “strong.” I hear “cruel.” She dives a little deeper inside, where she may come across another crumb of memory to salvage. We are both quiet. I haven’t seen her for two years, and there are moments when I can’t reconcile her with the woman she used to be. Her lips move, mumbling thoughts, and I make sure not to read them. She turns her head and looks at me. “Why do you think we have eyelids?” I used to yell at her, and now I say nothing, dutifully taking what I deserve. It’s one thing to sit at home in London and write the story, and feel shitty for half a day after our weekly phone calls because

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