addressing us both. “We’re not dealing with an ordinary house made of beams and timbers and walls and windows. What roof does righteousness have? What shingles cover justice?” He sat at the table, hardly tasting the dinner I had made—roast lamb with gravy he always liked. It had been work. Could there be a conversation? No, it was a one-way street, if there was a street there at all. Had he been working on the same passage all day? But hadn’t I been with the same ziggurat all day in my shed?
“What does that mean, ‘His lightings lighted the world’?” Frank continued. “The stars. The suns. The moons. The comets and meteors. The fire-tails of their frictions. How is it applicable to us here in our little lives? In our studies? At our tables and desks? In our work sheds? At our books? What hope is there that we could understand?”
I called him back from despair with news. “You misread the words, Frank. It’s hard enough when you read biblical language correctly. How much harder when you don’t?”
But he considered it a divinely inspired mistake. A misreading of the highest order. He would spend the evening and the next several days seeking the meaning of that mistake. Where was it guiding him?
I looked at the photographs of our three children, Daniel, Winnie, and Warren, as I listened to Frank. They were on the wall behind him, with their wild Winscott hair and freckled noses.
“When you say ‘lightings,’ you make it sound like the heavens are wired with electricity and God just throws a switch and there is light.”
“I don’t want the children hearing our arguments over semantics,” Frank said.
“I don’t want them hearing us argue at all,” I insisted.
“If you want to argue, let’s make it something that counts.”
“Let’s argue over the pile of leaves you leave in the yard,” I told him. “Maybe Mrs. Woodruff’s husband or son would rake for us. Maybe I’ll get out there while she cleans the house. Maybe I’ll do your work for you. Let the children see that.”
“Eugena—” He used my full name. Not Gena or Jean. Not Euge, which reminds me of “huge,” which I am not. Or any of his other words for me. Leaving me to figure out exactly what he meant—leaving my name hanging in the air.
—
I was a maker of clay figures. I was caught up in the ziggurat—making likenesses of Dante’s nine rings of the Inferno. The tower of Babel also was a ziggurat, upright as the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, though the Guggenheim is inverted, its smaller rings growing larger as it climbs. Other ziggurats started larger and became smaller as they ascended. Dante’s Inferno began with the larger rings and became smaller as they descended. The tower of Babel and the Inferno would make a palindrome, if the ziggurats were language.
Most of my ziggurats did not even look like ziggurats. They were my interpretation. My indirect approach. What a ziggurat was at its essence. Its abstraction. Its meaning. There was something about the word I loved.
The brain is amazing. It is a ziggurat that cannot be penetrated. It can hide a city inside it. The coils of the brain are gray ropes of clay worked together, inextricable as a body wrapped around the broken pieces of a car. I was the shaper of those clay forms. The maker of larger rings growing smaller as they ascended—or descended to the pit of Dante’s Inferno, as if ropes let down to retrieve Daniel, a son who took our love for him and turned it into fury so malformed that no one guessed it could be love.
—
I was in my work shed behind the house working with another form when I heard the car.
It couldn’t be the children. They weren’t scheduled to arrive for several hours.
I returned to my clay, knowing Frank could answer the door. It was probably someone for him anyway.
At dawn, the side of a shed in the distance reflected the morning sun. Otherwise, during the day, I didn’t know the shed was there. It disappeared among the trees in the woods. By afternoon, in the other direction, the sun moved toward the west, shooting its light backwards across a field. It was then that I watched the rows of crops and pasturelands. Sometimes I marked my ziggurats with their rows. Usually, I worked until I could look at the trees in the yard and know they were tired after holding up their arms all day. Sometimes the different rungs of the circles of my ziggurats caught my attention as I passed there, maybe the way Dante stopped to take note of who was in the rings of his inferno and why.
I heard Frank call my name, irritated enough that I knew it had not been his first call. Our visitor was Edwin Harsler, an old friend of ours who had been recently widowed. He made a habit of driving around the country, stopping at houses where he knew people. Ours must have been the house of the day, but I was at work with my clay and didn’t want to leave. Frank called again.
I didn’t want to stop work. I felt inhospitable. When I passed through those moods, I felt a sourness I didn’t feel otherwise. Spaces appeared in the ziggurats I didn’t know were there.
I went to the house and found Edwin at the table with Frank. The coffee pot was empty. Frank could have made more coffee, but he used it as an excuse to call me.
“How are you, Edwin?”
“Fine,” he answered. “I was on my way to town when I passed.”
“I’m glad you stopped.” What was I saying? Was that me or Frank who spoke? It was me, I saw by Frank’s eyes. He was enjoying seeing me uncomfortable at the interruption. He liked the way I covered my feelings.
“My daughter’s coming for a visit. I wonder if you’d drop by.”
“Our children are coming also,” I said. “Why don’t you and Helen come by here and we’ll all have dinner and catch up?”
That must have been what he was looking for, because he seemed pleased.
“She’s bringing someone with her. A young man she’s been dating.”
“Is it serious?”
“I don’t know, but I suspect it is. She doesn’t usually bring anyone with her. Or if she does, it’s been girlfriends.”
“Winnie used to bring boys, but none of them ever seem to come back,” I said.
“You think it’s us?” Frank asked. “After they see the mess in my study and your clay infernos covering every open space in our house, they must find excuses to make an exit.”
“Yes, it’s harder to get married these days,” Edwin said. “The young are not so anxious. Or they take longer. To make sure, I suppose.”
“How are you doing, Edwin?” Frank asked. “There’re widows at every turn.”
I looked at Frank. When had he begun noticing widows? And what widows was he noticing?
He looked away.
“Yes, I’ve been invited to dinner several times. I’ve found a basket of biscuits on my doorstep. Saide doesn’t bark any more when the women leave a casserole on my porch or stop to slip an invitation in the mailbox.”
Was Frank wishing he could ride with Edwin past all the mailboxes, reviewing the names
