FIRST DIBS, LAST WRIGHTS: Chapter Three*
ROSEMARY, DIBS'S GRANDMOTHER, RUMINATES ABOUT A SECOND ARRIVAL FROM THE OTHER REALM WHEN A THIRD ARRIVAL OCCURS
(Above: An early discarded draft of the opening spread of illustrator Isabelle Follath and writer Jeanne Willis’s feminist take on nursery rhymes with some, as the one above, reimagined by Willis. From What Are Little Girls Made Of? published by Nosy Crow.)
*You can read Chapter One here. Chapter Two here. Chapter One is open to all subscribers. All subsequent chapters are for paid subscribers except for the introductory paragraphs.
It has taken a lot of thought and work to get this third chapter written but fiction is different than posting and writing columns and ruminating on one’s own life. I can spend a whole day on a couple of paragraphs honing them until in their humming density I sense the distillation I’m attempting to decipher with what I am hearing as much as what I am writing. So much of writing is instead just that: listening.
I also write to Bach being played by Glenn Gould who himself finds finally that hum within himself.)
###
CHAPTER THREE
The days passed - and then the years - after the twilit Pan and Lucifer not only joined forces but did so right here in Rosemary’s living room. Was it a mystical vision? Were they actually there to be seen by her? Or were they visiting her granddaughter to anoint her alone with their entwined presence and Rosemary was just collateral consciousness or whatever ectoplasmic explanation would please the covens of Wiccans laced with lesbians and busty ex-Baptists holding a grudge against their own grandmothers up in this part of the state, or the pagans who’d prance about - she’d spy them bemusedly from her windows- costumed for Celtic celebrations who’d light bonfires down on the river bank timed to the cycle of the moon or some holiday when their well-paid jobs down in the city allowed them to be staying in their second homes up here, or the undignified old hippies and hipsters who lived here year-round like her and thought they’d defy their fogeydom instead of actually defiling it by their doing the drugs that should only be the domain of the young and then wonder if portals were being opened along with the now-wrinkled orifices in their roused still-ready bodies? Performative, the lot of them, Rosemary would snort to herself when she’d spot them around town as if this little village of hers - yes, she had lived up here long enough to feel proprietary about it - were some sort of gathering place for those in need of ritual but not religion, per se, that human longing to worship something other than the God of their childhoods since they’d never understood “The Old Gendered Gent,” anyway, a term Rosemary used for the concept of God in her early feminist days when she’d denounced the deification of the masculine pronoun long before the debate had widened to address the specificity of pronouns in more mundanely human terms. And yet the added swirl of a certain sort of fancy folks she began to notice gathering in this area of upstate New York did give some spice, she’d give it that, to the spate of churches around here where worship was more shopworn with surety, more fanciful - at least to Rosemary - than overly fancy although the Wrights had moved their makeshift little church a couple of years ago from the mechanic’s garage where they had started it to an old VFW lodge they had retrofitted with a steeple topped with a rooster and weathervane and put stain glass in its windows that had an eerily high-end sheen to its pronounced amber tints during certain times of the month when the light here in this tiny spot - this pinpoint in the world - could make it seem as if it were the illuminated keyhole though which all else spied.
Rosemary, for a time, had sensed that she’d had this notion of this singularly lit place - a metaphysical mecca with a Mephistophelian feel to it - all to herself, but she had noticed ever since that twin twilit arrival almost a decade ago now in this very room and that first visitation of that little sprite of a Wright that this town’s otherworldly energy was being … she wasn’t sure … polluted? … was that it? … by an entitlement tethered to the appropriation of such energy needed to fuel even that faux performative aspect of these gussied paganish posers with their worldweary dubiety instead of the sense of wonder that, though battered, buttressed Rosemary and was once the source of her now-lapsed belief in such faux sorcery herself for she had long since moved on from the stifling academicism of the mythic narratives about which she lectured to mostly bored students at Bard. At first she sought a thaumaturgical solution for the psychological thawing she so deeply needed like the warmer two of the four seasons up here that could thaw her out physically along with the natural world that still so gloriously abounded in such a place no matter how gentrified it all became because so many of these pagan gadabouts with their gadgets and labels and libidos - and even some of the more churlish of the churchy lot that seemed to increase in numbers right alongside them - had plenty of money (too much of it for her tastes) to maintain this lifestyle of second homes which was the actual alternative realm they had all found to worship.
“Genuflection and gentrification,” Rosemary once scribbled in her journal when jotting down ideas for a book of essays instead of the overly-researched incantations she uncovered that at first she thought had conjured the intrusive gestural jut of the usually unseen realm when Pan and Lucifer let her know she was right: they existed. But in their arrival she’d had another epiphanic furthering of her understanding: their existence could not be conjured with incantations or the more woeful warble of what is defined as worship, whether it be of the devil or of that deemed more acceptably divine. Pan and Lucifer conjured themselves. All that was required was to stand differently in their light. Maintain a spirit of watchful welcome. Sharpen one’s willingness to wait by coupling it - this was the biggest surprise, this other coupling with their own - with a refusal to worship. They required only this: a witness.
And so she stood differently.
Waited.
Watched.
Embodied welcome.
Looked on as Dibs behaved as a manifested child.
And paid witness to that in place of parenting her.
The waiting just became their life, hers and Dibs’s. Rosemary had never felt with her own daughter that she had been a good enough mother. Mothering and parenting were just other fields of study she’d read about in yet another book. She researched them as subjects while pregnant and would read passages aloud to the man who had impregnated her and with whom she’d lived, a handsome political activist she’d met on a march for someone else’s rights who could play the guitar and gall her with his chauvinism which riddled his otherwise radical leftwing politics with holes big enough to stick his dick through since he liked to stick it in every other hole he could find she herself found out and who, finally infuriatingly, had hounded her to quit her more arcane graduate studies and stay home once the child was born. Instead, she just doubled-down in a kind of dare to him by being even more studious and making motherhood itself her field for those gestational months. Fed up with her feminism aborning, he’d left her before she could, still pregnant, leave him. He’d never even seen their child for he chose to remain down south, where he was from, and where he’d gone to organize workers into unions before a truck ran over him one night, which Rosemary had read about in a letter written to her by some woman on some assembly line in Louisiana who said she’d loved him. Rosemary could no longer remember the woman’s name though she did still, from time to time, think of him and, more important, how she had rid herself of him by being her truest self, someone who, finding any feeling a kind of nuisance, researched, studied, comprehended, then imparted that knowledge embedded in her to others. But it was a baby - not knowledge - that was embedded in her by him and she came to resent him for it, that resentment the only thing she could finally rend from the love that she thought she’d felt for him before she realized when Dibs’s mother was born - that’s when the realization had really sunk in - that feeling anything was somehow beyond her. She wasn’t a sociopath. This lacking in her had not surfaced as that, a danger to others or herself. Rosemary had instead felt for her whole life like a sieve through which all emotion, too watery, needing a funneled focus, could flow and leave what was solid behind: learned knowledge, a lodged legerdemain of handier instincts, a steadying wedge of stillness, desire’s debris.