Monday, April 26, 2010

36. LARK and TERMITE

Jayne Anne Phillips 2009

Two parallel narratives in time, place and hardship, July 26-31, 1950 and 1959, war in Korea and flood in West Virginia. Termite is a boy who cannot talk nor walk and Lark is his half-sister, protector, the one who can hear him. Robert Leavitt is fighting a war, longing for Lola, Lark and Termite's mother. The plot is simple, the writing is not. It is complex, dense, poetic and marvelous.

"He'd shipped out to Occupied Japan in December'49; whatever baby was a tucked seed inside Lola's sex, a nub the size of a tailbone."

"Lola's voice drifts close unbidden and it's like she's standing in the war next to him. No matter how loud the ordinance or artillery, how loud his own heart hammers, he hears her. Words she said when he could touch her."

"He might be thinking how great it would be, wind and rain, real hard rain, not like the summer rain we let him sit out in sometimes, He likes motion."

"Dish washing doesn't make money but I like at home when I'm alone. I'm so used to being with Termite, he feels like alone to me. He's like a hum that always hums so the edge of where I am is blunt and softened."

"He sees through the blue and it goes away, he sees through the blue and it goes away again. He breathes, blowing just high. The blue moves but not too much, the blue moves and stays blue and moves.He can see into the sky where there are no shapes. The shapes that move around him are big, colliding and joining and going apart."

"If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad."

"Pregnant felt like nothing else. Not tired exactly, not sick or nervous, but edgy, distinct. Focused tight, in sync, like when you've hit a phrase in a song just right and it lays itself out through your throat, moving from you across the lights into faces you can't see in the dark, faces whose eyes you feel play across you."

"It's a fact. Termite can only tell the truth. I know she means she wishes, she wishes, he could say something more than the sound of what he's just heard. I pretend he thinks more, backward and forward for miles."

"Oceans have waves like a pulse, Lark says, and she puts his fingers on her wrist to feel the tiny beat. The sound in her skin surges but the sound in the shells only circles, coming and going in one curled space. His birthday comes and goes and Lark makes every birthday."

"Taking Termite to the ocean has always seemed to me like taking one full space to another. The ocean is the biggest sound I could ever show him, bigger than rivers or trains."

"She's told him that whirl and thrill that opens songs is an orchestra, men playing horns before the voices sing asked me how I knew. He moves the blue and moves it and hears Lark singing true is true. She's told him replied means yes and denied means no. Cannot be denied means always yes. No in songs is yes and smoke gets in your eyes."

"The air is white with cloud, and the sun is flat, bright blade at the horizon, like a slit under a door. All else is drifty, misted. The warmth in the ground rises in a fog over the cold water, stirring in slow parches over a dark, swift weight."

"The moving air is full of dense wet cloud. Termite hears it rain and rain the story of the train. The water and the train and the pounding are raining and pouring through. Even on a clear day, he can hear it. Now the sound is wide. He listens."

Personal Note: Thanks to Bibliophiliac whose great review convinced me to read the book.

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