The Paris Review

I

She was born Sarah Gossett Ballenger—
Sarah our mother's proper name, Gossett our mother's
family name, Ballenger the name of her father.
Following our mother's second marriage,
her name was changed to Sarah Ballenger Santos,
and when she herself got married, she became
Sarah Santos Knoeppel. After her divorce, she changed
her name to Sarah Beth Ballenger, though Beth
was selected simply because she "liked its sound,"
and because, for once, she'd felt entitled to name herself.

Following a stillbirth in the twelfth year
of her marriage, she instructed her daughters
to refer to her as Mimi—not Mommy, not Mother,
not Mom. At some point after she'd left home
(she was sixteen or seventeen at the time),
she changed the spelling of her familiar name
from Sally to Salley, and of her proper name
from Sarah to Sara, though here too the reasons
she gave were largely a matter of preference:
she just found those spellings more personal.

Thus all her life she felt her names referred to presences
outside of her, presences which sought to enclose
that self which separated her from who they were.
Thus all her life she was never quite sure who it was
people summoned whenever they called her by her name.
And, more specifically, she was never quite sure
they recognized her when, and if, she responded.
As she put it, at various periods in her life
she'd "lent" herself to particular names, only to reclaim
herself in time, only to suppose all over again.

III

Her hair was dark and irregularly parted,
and there was something undecided in the way
she chose to present herself to the world,
though her power over others (if not herself)
seemed to come from the confidence
of someone who felt she'd suffered more,
and so, perhaps rightly, assumed she possessed
the kind of spirit most favored by God.
But there was always something in the way
she dressed—an oversized brooch, a man's
sports watch, a garish hat or neckscarf—
which attempted to reverse that odd impression,
like those cowering dogs that so often appear
in seventeenth century religious paintings.
Those mongrel shapes that seem added to counter
some otherwise unabated spiritual yearning.

VIII

A dream I started having several weeks ago.
As in the newsreel of some dignitary-or-other
arriving in a foreign country, she's descending alone
the movable staircase from an airplane cabin,
and as she descends her face grows steadily younger
and more beautiful, like someone coming into
her own life. But instead of the pathos of kindled hopes,
I feel this moment as something that happens
to endanger her, something she is helpless to defend against, as though the newsreel presaged an assassin's bomb.
This feeling brings with it a desperate urge
to "roll back the film," which succeeds only in slowing
it down to a pace that further accentuates the dread,
as though the newsreel'd slowed to capture the instant
the bomb goes off. Each step seems drawn out
endlessly, and falls so heavily on the heart
that I can feel—in her—the unearthly weight
a life takes on in the final moments it has to live.

X

My sister at thirty or thirty-one: stripping off table varnish
while her daughter naps on a folded towel beside her.

In the archangel section of the plaster cast gallery, she holds
her breath until the security guard stops looking her way.

On the table beside her bed: A bowl of dried wild roses
she would mist each morning with . . . was it rosewater?

Standing beside a photomat, staring at a strip of pictures, her look
of puzzlement slowly gives way to a look of recognition.

In the middle of the night—I was eight at the time—I wake
to find her patting my head, because she had just had a bad dream.

Her lifelong habit of momentarily closing her eyes, as if testing
the truthfulness of some emotion, then releasing a barely audible sigh.

Visiting hours over, her returning down the hall to her hospital room:
head down, shoulders stooped, her hands clasped behind her neck.

(That same morning, when she'd started to cry, she somehow managed
to distract herself by repeatedly crossing and uncrossing her legs.)

Overjoyed to be going home finally, then, mid-sentence, falling silent
at the thought of it, as though her mouth had been covered by a hand.

A warm spring night. A streetlamp beyond an open window.
Beneath the sill: a girl's hushed voice exhorting itself in whispers.