Medusa Tree , livre ebook

Untreed Reads - Mylene Dressler

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83 pages

English

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When she reaches the orderly house of her Dutch-Indonesian grandmothers, Marget learns quickly that if she only pays attention to them, then she can go unnoticed herself.And that is exactly what she needs just now.Marget is pregnant and alone. With her dancing career over and her mother absent, as always, Marget must decide for herself whether it is wise to continue the raveling line of her extended family.Mylene Dressler's powerful debut novel, The Medusa Tree, is the story of a family of displaced women, not all related by blood, who manage despite distance and conflict to provide one another sanctuary.In the tradition of Amy Tan and Gloria Naylor, Dressler brings us a bold and heartfelt debut, rich in culture and character."The Medusa Tree is one of the best books I've read this year. Dressler's characters are unforgettable and her style fuses grace with power. I look forward to reading more of her." -Cynthia Shearer, author of The Wonder Book of the Air

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Publié par	Untreed Reads
Date de parution	21 mai 2013
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781611875645
Langue	English

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Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
The Medusa Tree
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
The Medusa Tree
By Mylène Dressler

Copyright 2013 by Mylène Dressler
Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing.
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in print, 1997.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

http://www.untreedreads.com
For Dennis
The Medusa Tree
Mylène Dressler
Chapter One
My grandmothers’ faces look out from behind the screened porch cautiously, like two nuns ready to leap back into their old habits.
“Oh dag , kind ! Dag!”
“ Dag Marget!”
Whatever has been happening inside, whatever tables have been lifted off their legs, cups and spoons floated around the room, cards shuffled of their own accord, or secret knowledges exchanged, my grandmothers settle them down again and come out, smiling, with upturned hands to greet me, into the Northern California sunlight that turns the dust on their skins a faint, sparkling orange.
“ Dag Gerda! Dag Fan!”
I kiss them, tasting the familiar chemical mixture of salt and powder on their cheeks. My grandmothers’ faces are soft and folding, like fallen peaches. Their fists, hardened with age, push me up onto the porch and inside the house, their knuckles digging sharply between my shoulder blades. My grandmothers like to show their strength these days. They push and slap and poke, as if to say, Hey you, you are young, you are flexible, you can still take whatever we have left to give out to you. Gerda doesn’t push as much as Fan, because Gerda is older and so much the stronger of the two of them. It’s Fanny who has always had to push to be felt, to be heard, because Gerda can be so overpowering.
Gerda is using a cane to walk around now. She’s short, hunched, and has the look of an old fighter. She stands as if she’s hanging a little underneath her clothing: a man’s shirt over polyester pants. She smiles at me from under her curled black hair, out from under the bridge of her painted eyebrows, while Fanny, in her gilded Indonesian kabaya, stands taller, thinner, slightly faded behind her.
Fanny was the great beauty between them. Her moon face is still held up by high cheekbones. Gerda’s face is plain and flat. Her cane is the excuse I’ve used to come out here.
“Sit down,” Gerda says briskly. “Fanny will go bring us some coffee.”
In the living room things appear to be in their usual places. In front of the pulled curtains sit their prim Danish loveseat and chairs, wooden-armed and elbowing, brought over from Holland long after the war. Above the television hangs an old clock, pointed around the edges like a compass or star. Some of Corinne’s cheap brass candlesticks scale from small to large on the false brick mantel. Dusty bottles of airplane liquor crowd the rollaway bar. Only a few gleams of elegance are left: a gold wall lizard, called a tjitjak, a lucky charm, gift from my mother brought back from Indonesia after one of her many travels; and a few watercolors and sketches done by Gerda’s dead husband. Palazzi in Venice. A spired church in The Hague. They hover, unsure of themselves in their American home.
My other grandmother comes in from the kitchen on geisha steps. Her batik rustles softly as she walks. Floating in front of her are the translucent cups and saucers that are so like her. Fragile. Egg-thin. She sets them down, fills them with java, then sits back beside Gerda inside the loveseat. Fanny’s eyes are watery, sleepy with age. But she smiles at me, because she is glad to see me. Or at least she might be, if I could ever see anything behind the veil of those dreamy looks.
“So,” Gerda says, slurping her coffee, the china dwarfed in her creased hand. “Drink.”
*
My mother called me last week from her hotel in Belgium.
“Gerda wants to have it done,” she repeated distractedly. (The connection was good that day; her voice sounded close, brittle.) “The procedure,” she hurried. “That thing, that replacement surgery she’s been wanting. I told her, What do you want to go and put yourself through all that pain for? What are you thinking you’ll still do? Wimbledon? But of course there’s no talking to her.”
Mama sighed as though exhausted-a sign she was getting ready to avoid strain. “We can’t leave Fan alone like that while Gerda’s in the hospital, Marget. You know what Fan is, she’s just-helpless. If anything happens-if anything happens, she won’t be able to go on. And then you know someone has to watch out for Corinne. You know how she’s always snooping around, looking over their things, like she can’t wait to get Gerda out of the way. Your father and I are going to be out here for at least another two months…. So what do you think, hon? Can you go, when your season is over? Can you go out, and have a look at them? I hate to interrupt your life this way, I’m sure you have big plans-but can you get a flight out next week? La Guardia is best. And please don’t say anything about that I, that we, it’s just. You know. I’m getting vibrations. And hon. Please let us pay…?”
My mother’s concern had trailed off, reaching blindly. My near-sounding, distant mother is like a hand in the dark, groping to tie our loose ends. My mother is often away.
I hung up the telephone, stared at the walls of my apartment, and thought suddenly of my grandmothers. It was like coming upon an iceberg. Huge. Simple. I could see myself drifting along with them for a week, a month, aimless, spellbound, sharing with them their anonymous piece of California coast.
Sitting now beside them, with my battered flight bags piled in stumps around my knees, I can see how much I might be able to help them-how much my grandmothers might really need me. How busy they’ve been, applying pencil to their shrinking eyes! Curling their thinning hairdos, tightly, getting their lipsticks just right. My grandmothers are trying, they are staying. Even though they are hiding themselves, they are demanding something, they are making themselves plain, they want to be seen. All I have to do is notice them, and I can go unnoticed here myself.
My grandmothers look at me. East and West mingle in their faces: circle, conflict, dance, and merge. In Fan the effect is harmony. In her half-moon Indies eyes lurk melodies to charm the still, Dutch face. But in Gerda the Dutch and Javanese features war, turning flat, broad, plain, irreconcilable.
We sit and say nothing, sipping our coffees, facing each other like three pyramids searching our neighbors for cracks.
Chapter Two
I drop my bags upstairs in their guest bedroom.
On the wall above the bed are photos of each of the three of us. I nudge my suitcase aside and sit near the headboard, staring at my own image first. I can’t help it. I feel some distant responsibility for that gangling girl, seven years old, grimacing in her pale pink tutu. Her little eyes are so wide, her eyebrows so arched, her hair pulled back so tightly she could feel the skin giving way under her ears. My mother is in the next frame, posing at seventeen. Here she is a young woman I never knew, with a voluptuous body in a scoop-necked leotard.
Mama’s was a lovely arabesque.
Fanny stands alone in the last gilded frame, nearly naked underneath her Grecian costume. She trails a white scarf over one bony knee. Gerda took this picture in Holland after the war. You can see it: the affection in the angle. Very few pictures survive of my grandmother before then, few pictures, that is, of Fanny when she was young. I asked Gerda about it once, when Fan was out of the room. But Gerda had whispered only, “Well, and what? You don’t think they kept pictures for her, do you, in a terrible place like that?”
Across the hall is my grandmothers’ bedroom. Everything in it is open. It is Fan’s terrible fear of odors. The windows are flung wide, the chests, the sliding closet doors. I see neat double peaks of brassieres, folds of white underwear, shelves of shining purses over hangered rows of polyester pants. Gerda’s beige girdles, embarrassing for their size, hang to dry on a wooden rack beside the window. A breeze ruffles through the room. The girdles rise and fall, swinging like gates.
On one nightstand is a picture of Gerda’s dead husband, Rollie. Rollie sits astride a sweating black horse. A small Malay boy holds his bridle. Rollie’s face is blond and wan and damp under his pith helmet. He is young and handsome, already hollowed by his disease. He was a proper Dutch colonial. On Fanny’s side of the bed there are no pictures of a husband, only a miniature Swiss grandfather clock ticking faintly, like a watch. No place there for him, for Han, for the young man who abandoned her and my baby mother all those years ago to join, of all things (Mama used to hiss the word), a circus.
Now I’m older I think I know how the old man must have felt. Wife and baby waiting for him, right after the long, terrible war. Right after the blood and muck of the Burmese