Highway Trade by John Domini

Author:John Domini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Highway Trade
ISBN: 9781936873616
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1988-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

At last a place she knows: a church. She knows the church and she knows the country: the mild, homey sun that catches the designs on the cathedral floor, the ancient Imperial tile recycled to make those designs—mosaic circles and whorls, such designs—and she knows the worshippers too. Everyone’s dipping down on one knee, down into a three-point genuflection, and she herself dips down, with knee and toe and knuckle to the mosaic floor before the Resurrection. She knows well that dip and touch, as natural as surf, and yet personal, intensely personal. Mary knows the whole stony arena so well that at first even the film director carrying on behind her doesn’t disturb the stodgy warmth with which she waits, almost asleep in her pew, for the Host to come around.

But he’s impossible to ignore, the director. He’s nothing like a man at mass, shuttling people around with the full vocabulary of gestures this country is famous for, with meaty thoughtful pouts and eloquent shrugs. The director does so much of this—too much, really, for someone in such a good silk suit—that Mary’s eyes open again and stay that way. She understands that the national instinct for gestures is bound up in the rituals of the church: in that brief stagger as a worshipper enters the sanctuary. She understands, as she watches the director taking bearings through a lens that dangles around his neck (at first glance you might mistake it for an icon), that the cathedral is missing its fourth wall. The tile underfoot is plastic. The sun in the stained glass is halogen.

How long has she been in a movie? When, she demands, did I ever say I’d play the hero?

The director is nothing but compassion, kneeling beside her with a lippy expressive face almost a mother’s, a sister’s. He speaks apologetically, though with something in his tone that makes clear he’s explained this all before. He must have her face, he says. He simply must have her face.

What’s this, she asks, a fairy tale? The old magic?

Looks like it: now through the cathedral ceiling—no, through boom mikes and track lighting—descends the oldest magic of all, the Great Mother herself. The Great Mother in her famed watchful pose, down on one knee so that she may spy on the latest indiscretion of the Great Father: on his latest “epiphany” before her pretty young votives. Slung on a rig beneath an ear-shattering helicopter, the Mother drops hugely into place before the Resurrection. And she’s not marble, not white, but honest brown.

Hides-the-dirt brown—hashish brown, cuckoo-clock brown—all these and other browns spin through Mary’s head (the color’s basic after all, she reminds herself: as basic as dirt) because now she’s spinning literally, or her face is at least; the director has taken her face and flung it towards the low-hanging head of the goddess. In the wash of the rotors Mary spins, she crosses vast distances—crosses oceans and continents, tossing and turning—but there’s no denying gravity. She ends up the face of the Mother.

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