Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber

Author:Joan Silber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2004-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

IT WASN’T UNTIL Eli was in his early teenagehood and he flew across the ocean by himself to spend a month with his mother in England, that I decided what I needed was to go off alone for a week to Yosemite. Not to meditate—I had already hit my limits with that—but just to hang out by myself, in a landscape of noble heights and thrilling chasms, with no one talking to me all the time, no one. Mattina was disappointed that this was my idea of a blissful vacation. But it wasn’t an eccentric thing to do in California, and she didn’t try to block me.

So I took off in the car with my backpack and a new tent, and I picked the trails I thought were the least popular, although of course there were other humans often within sight. I got sprayed on by spectacular waterfalls, and I saw a Sequoia that was thirty feet thick, and I passed through meadows ringed by granite peaks. One afternoon I sat for an hour looking at the rock walls of Half Dome, and I remembered myself in a place like Prague, gazing at the tower of St. Vitus Cathedral. But when I was young I took things in differently. I thought I was giving them their meaning by dowering them with my attention. What did I know then of what else would be asked of me? I didn’t know how life would shout at me and tug my arm and bellow commands. I’d had another idea completely.

The whole week I got rained on only once, a pelting thunderstorm that was over fast. And when I came back from Yosemite, after not speaking to another person for a week, tired and unbathed and rank-smelling, I was more changed than I’d expected. It was not that I was calmer (everyone’s idea of why I’d gone), but that the world seemed newly proportioned, as if I had judged the relative size of its parts wrong before now.

When I hugged Mattina to me, I couldn’t get over the delicate sturdiness of her. How delicious the pressure of her hug was. I was spacey when I first got back, but not hard to get along with. “Just don’t feed me any freeze-dried chili,” I said. “I missed your beautiful food, girl.” I wanted to be nicer to her.

My visual sense was especially sharp—the roses Mattina had planted in the yard were a startling creamy-peach color, vibrant and lush. Not talking for so long had a good aftereffect. In the shop, objects displayed their details to me in a single glimpse. Under this spell of acuteness, I found a hairline crack in a creamware plate that Gary was going to buy, so we paid a lower price for it, although it seemed laughable to me that people cared about cracks, as if the world weren’t naturally cracking and dissolving every second anyway.

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