Wolff
had worn for forry years, a fortieth anniversary parry in the white house where my mother was born, and her sister after her. Each morning for forry years, their mother had woken at dawn to see my grandfather rise from his bed and fall gracefully to the floor where he performed one hundred pushups before he walked happily up the road on his "morning constitutional." The rooms of their house smelled of his pipe tobacco and of her garden's flowers, and every room was filled with parry guests. My mother and her sister wore high heels and bright summer dresses and passed platters of food, while Jessica and I pushed through the crowd to reach the ashtrays of red peppermints that decorated the tables. We carried the mints inside our shirts, out onto the lawn where we lay between two lilac trees that grew beside the house. A jay screamed at us from an upper branch, the first blue jay I ever heard, and he shook petals onto our bodies, and flew from that sweet smelling spot only when Uncle attmar arrived on his motorcycle, singing a German aria. attmar was an actor and three-ring circus performer in a traveling troupe of players and stunt men. attmar was family legend. He had had wives and lovers, children and freedom, homes and travel, and he seemed to pull the whole world to him with the centripeml force of his embrace, or else with those great circus leaps of faith and logic that say, a man can fly through the air, with the greatest of ease! attmar revved his engine in the driveway and lifted his helmC[ to reveal thick white hair. "Anyone want to ride my motorcycle!" he bellowed, "and discover incomparable joy!" The parry went on, or commenced at last, with anmar yelling and singing at its center and telling his wild stories, all of which had dramatic endings and happy twists of fate and exciting plots, but jessie and I were taken away from the drama to the room of flowered wallpaper where our own mothers had slept when they were small. My grandmother came to us there, as she had once come toour two mothers, and she placed a lit candle on the bureau where we could stare into the flame. When we asked for a story, my grandmother said this: I've been thinking that forty years is a very long time, and I supfxJse I have many stories to tell after forty years. But what I remember tonight is standing on the side ofa din road in Lambeth when I was a girl. I grew up poor on a fann, and no one in my family had ever gone to school. But I did. I was [he first. I went out each morning before the sun came up. The wind
was bitter against my face, and 1wore rags from our kitchen wrapped around my hands and feet LO keep them wann. Iheld a candle my mother llad given me so I would be seen in the dark, and I had to cup the /lame to protect it from the wind. And every morning, just as the sun was showing at the edges of the [iela, my friend, an older boy, would come along with his buggy. 1 caula hear rhe horses before 1coula see them, and when they sLOpped for me 132
FUGUE #27