In the Year of Long Division by Dawn Raffel

Author:Dawn Raffel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: In the Year of Long Division
ISBN: 9781936873920
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1994-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

SOMEWHERE NEAR SEA LEVEL

HERE is my father. He is tucking in a tongue. Coaxing. Lacing, doubling a knot. My ankles are weak. The rink is lit. My father’s hands are darkly livered, veined. Use, he says, has done this.

“Can you stand?” my father says.

The ice, I see, is swept, wet, white. “Try standing,” my father says. “Up.” There is forcefully dampered music, piped. There is no sky. No rain, no threat. “See it?” my father says. “Look.” No hint. It used to be something else, this forceful place. “Before your time,” he says.

He looks like my father.

“Gone,” he says.

“Dad?” I say. I am gaining my feet. There is something, I think, or nothing, hairline, cleft.

Deep. The voice. “Steady.”

A person could be dizzy.

“You almost can see it.”

“Dad?” I say.

It is dizzying.

“Things I could tell you,” my father is telling me. He is inflection, timbre; unfamiliar and expected in the faraway, fatherly way he always has. “Gloves…” he says. “Folds…” I feel the after-rills of phrases, words between the words I am invariably failing to catch. “A curtain there…an arch…”

A ramp’s slope.

What I want is to skate. I do. Want to. Want and want to want. Pulsing my toes, my fingers restless, ragged-nailed. “Now?” I say.

My father is talking marble and Saturday. “Nights,” he says, whatever, I don’t know. “Glass,” he says, or “Hats,” he says.

“Tails,” he says.

“These skates,” I say. “My toes.”

My father is pressing for fit, says, “Gutted.” I feel it. “Better?” he says.

I have had practice.

“Better,” I say. “Better, please.” My ankles flinch.

There is a woman in the middle of the middle of the ice, going backward. Curve and grace is what she is, and speed, and speed.

There is knowing in the body. My father is touching my elbow, glancingly, knowingly, fluidly moving beside me, before me, ushering me from behind.

“The center is lower,” my father says, “in a girl.”

The woman appears to me to be weightless.

“Why?” I say. “What center?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” my father says.

She is all lift.

I am in a wobble.

“Never mind,” my father says.

I am making my father fall, almost. I almost could.

“Easy, easy does it,” my father says. “Use your head, for heaven’s sake.”

I am flailing for his arm. “Tell me,” I say. “Now.” My father is smartly just past reach. “Why?” I say.

“You know,” he says, “a person can not hear you.”

Habit. Fearborne. Sleeves, snaps, cuffs. I am speaking to a bead, to a fearful pearlish glinting in myself. “This place,” I say, “was what?”

“Careful,” my father says.

There is a ceiling, of course. Always was. Flight’s worth up. It burns, the ice, rebukes my back. Flat flung limbs. Nothing is broken, my father says. Birds, I say. It is terribly high, even given style, even given flights, even given tricks with scarves. A person could stand on a person’s shoulders, given even balance, a bent for stunt, feint—a lady fluttering, swooning, waft and lilt and pale, light, sweet perfume, airily, deftly arcing off a balcony—taken down, removed.

My father is furrow and how many fingers.

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