A C H A P E L TA L K
by Rufus H. Knuppel ’22 October 29, 2021
The Cord Between Us
I
would like to tell the story of my parents and me, which happens to be a love story: I remember once finding my mother’s eyelash pressed between the pages of a book. I do not know what book or what page, but I know (from its curve) that it was my mother’s eyelash. I found it pressed, as a leaf would be, into the valley of a book spine. Then, just as I had balanced the lash on my fingertip, it blew away. The richest parts of my childhood are slipping between the folds of my memory. It happens quickly— memories of four fall away, as a piano note dies, then five, six. I want to remember my early years—a time when I didn’t quite know what would become of anything. Those days are like the shards of a broken bottle—I watch as my parents collect the pieces in a paper bag.
d My mom has the voice of a hollow chestnut and wisps for fingers, like the smoke that lingers from a put-out candle. If I draw deep from the memory of my mother, until my breath gives out, I arrive at a hiccup in her womb. And also a snip, the sound of scissors on my umbilical cord. At that moment I broke from her, and my world rested on the tip of a pin and a hiccup. Steam pours out sometimes from manholes beneath the streets of New York—billowing, like the folds in my mom’s purse I held as I stepped between cracks in the sidewalk. We would reach a light, and my mother would squeeze my hand. I recall a pressure and a pulse in that grip. And, by the park, I can see the yellow of a street lamp, pierced by the black needle of her silhouette. I recall the tick of her shoes on the cement, like billiard balls breaking in the night. In that moment, the world
34
Groton School Quarterly
•
Winter 2022
was a black box and the moon a pinhole, and I clung to my mother’s leg, her scent, her hair. I do not know when it was that I discovered my mother had a prosthetic leg. It’s not something I think to tell people about her. I often forget until, in an instant, “could you grab my beach leg?” becomes a long hand reaching into a deep well, and it dawns on me. When I was a young boy, she waited for me to ask her about her leg, but I never did—for in my early years she could only be my mom, and, therefore, she was perfect. Kit and I are the only people in the world who see my mother in this way. I remember a time when my mother had her leg off by the beach, and watching my father pick her up (she was small in his arms), and they waded into the ocean. She was, then, the same as I was in my father’s arms when he carried me to bed in half-sleep. When I let myself be heavy. I grew up under the desk in my mom’s classroom and the wingbeat in the whistle-thump of her voice. She taught me to read and spell and sing. My mother showed me the ocean and watched, in her sundress, the waves which chained me to the sand. I swam till my nose ran with salt and my face peeled. She tells me that she feels my pain on her body. When she looks at my face and sees a spot, she itches at the same place, in parallel—it is as if there were once a cord that ran between us.
d My father has the eyes of a seed. Within his iris, there’s a white tongue that sprouts and licks with wonder. He is the most curious man I know, curious as the brook and the eddy. Curious as the fish is towards his fly. If I let myself be drawn back to the Catskills, I can recall the artist’s conk, white with dew, and my dad’s hand
