Glazing

by Gladys Haunton

I stood at the window. . .and thought, I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped around my throat like a scarf.                                                                    
–Annie Dillard

Windows for Watching Cats

Bouncer is stone deaf.  This drives a wedge between us.  Deafness is common in white cats with blue eyes, my brother tells me.  But I am too young to understand that though she is never going to come when I call, it’s nothing personal.  Now, she suns herself in the flower box outside our kitchen window.  Where she leans against the pane, I—sitting inside at the table—see the fur of her left hip flattened out in a silvery swirl with a pink flesh center.  I want to touch my finger to that pinkness, but that seems too intimate, and I’m afraid of being caught in the act.  So I place my finger elsewhere on the glass—many places, making a game of avoiding that magnetic pink.  I discover that my lightest pressure on the windowpane, even far from Bouncer’s rosette of contact, makes her turn and look at me over her shoulder.  I think this sudden breach of her aloofness is a miracle.  The solid plane that separates us somehow connects us. We interact as we never have before.  It feels like we might get to know each other.

Next to my little bed—my crib with its sides removed—a window overlooks our driveway and beyond that our fruit cellar built into a steep, wooded bank.  Some days during my nap (I am not required to sleep, only to lie quietly) I see four feral cats scale that bank.  Forming a single-file line, they snake through the leaf litter, up and over the mound of the cellar, and on through the trees until they disappear over the ridge.  Because these cats are nameless and secretive and always flee at my approach, viewing them like this, without their awareness, makes me feel knowing and a little bit powerful.  I always watch for them, even though the watching puts me at risk of falling asleep, and most days they don’t show up. 

Window with a Stained Glass Panel

When I stood at the picture window of my first childhood home, on certain days in certain slants of light I could perform a little mental trick for which I had no name.  The magic depended on a panel of stained glass stretching horizontally above the window’s large, rectangular primary pane.  The colored glass formed a flower-like geometric pattern, mostly in watery, translucent hues, but glorified by four tiny, blood-red rectangles that I mistook for jewels.  Usually, I could stand at the window and think nothing of it, focusing my attention fully on the view beyond it: the long drop of lawn toward a street hidden in the angle of the grade, then the trees, brick buildings, and walkways of a college campus.  On some days, though, that upper, decorative pane cast a smeared version of its shapes and colors across our gray carpet.  At those rare times, I could step into that colored light and become the object of the light’s attention.  The whole purpose of the window altered, so that instead of affording me a view of the park-like scene, it became the frame through which the world saw me.   Never mind that no one was looking.  The mystery lay in the reversal of the window’s function and, as I would say it now, in my shift from perceiver to object of perception.

I made up a little story to explain this sensation.  The stained glass was a lone remnant of some elegance that once marked our family.  All other such evidence had been hidden away successfully before my birth, so that I could lead a normal life among my normal neighbors.  But whenever the colors spread themselves across my path and I stepped into them, the whole house remembered who I really was.  Then it did what it could to show me to the world.

Magical Window of Transformation

The rules forbid me from looking directly at my father when he is doing this work.  I understand this shields my eyes from the white-hot light in the fountain of sparks he creates and controls.  I think, though, that it might also be to spare me the shock of seeing what my gentle dad becomes when he pulls on those gloves with their huge leather gauntlets and lowers his welding mask over his face.   The mask, as menacing as the Dark Knight’s facial armor, is crafted from a sweep of black metal with a small, smoke-gray, rectangular window through which Dad can see out, but I cannot see in. When he strikes a spark from a hand-held device shaped like a huge safety pin and calls to life the flame of his welding torch, the mask window flares golden.  From my perspective it appears not like a reflection but like interior light, as if Dad has transformed into flame or an angel within his protective gear.  I can believe, though I try not to, that the real function of his special outfit is less to shield him from the showering sparks than to save the rest of us from exposure to his sudden, heavenly incandescence.  At this point I am always instructed to look away.  “Absolutely,” I think.  “Absolutely I will look away.”

Once, during a partial solar eclipse, Dad brings out his welding mask and lets us take turns using it to watch the moon’s silhouette cross the sun.  When my turn comes, though I hardly dare fit my face behind the metal curve, I am breathlessly beholden to Dad for granting us each this honor.  Through the gray window, I can see the slow progress of the moon’s transit.  I regret, however, that the window casts everything else into such blackness that I can’t watch the lovely altered daylight turning the familiar world soft and secretive.  Nonetheless, to show my gratitude, I stay inside the mask until Dad says my turn is over. 

First Window onto Academia

When Professor Clifford Jensen stayed on campus to work late into the night, as he often did, we could see the glow of his office window from our kitchen.  My parents commented on it regularly, speculating that Clifford’s immoderate bookishness was ruining his health.  They knew and admired this gaunt, gray-faced scholar because he was a kind, active member of our church, but I understood that they pitied his entrapment behind glass in a punishing and impractical place. 

Though we lived directly across the street from the college, with faculty members for neighbors, we were far removed from academia.  Neither of my parents had finished high school, and it seemed to me that they viewed the campus as a foreign country with mildly ludicrous folkways.  They knew which window belonged to Clifford’s office only because Dad was involved in the construction of the building that housed it.  He crafted the decorative metal railings of the central staircase.  I remember his frustration at trying to convince the builders that the design they gave him was too delicate for the brittle metal they chose. 

So Professor Jensen’s window seemed to me a cellophane seal on a world of unwise excesses and faulty judgments where books sucked the vigor from one’s veins and the structures housing those books were, beneath their ornate surfaces, untrustworthy.

Second Window onto Academia

My older brother Keith showed it to me when we were eight and five years old, respectively.  On his campus ramblings, Keith discovered that first-floor windows on one side of Old Main, the college’s venerable original building, were set so low to the ground that even small children could look into them without stretching.  In doing so, he made a second discovery that he shared with me the next time our games led us out of our own yard and onto the campus.

First he demonstrated how to press my face close to the glass and cup my hands beside my eyes to make reflections and the glass itself disappear.  Next he led me to three windows in succession where this gesture revealed only rows of empty wooden chairs, each with one ridiculously wide arm—for resting your tablet while you write, Keith explained.  Then, with impressive showmanship, he positioned me at a fourth window and said, “Now look in here.”

With face and hands in place against the glass, I grappled first with perspective.  Something obstructed my view of the desk-chairs, and it took me a moment to work out that the interference was a strange apparatus just inches from my face.  I was peering—first through and then at—a horizontal arrangement of dull metal rods, some longer than the window’s width, the shortest about the length of a new pencil.  At the end of each rod rose a metal orb, like a bubble emerging from a bubble pipe.  The orbs, too, varied greatly in size.

It quickened my pulse—partly because Keith had invested it with such significance through his sequenced presentation, but also because it was so clearly a thing adults would caution a child not to touch, all metal and spokes and, I now noticed, cranks and gears.  I had no language for making sense of the thing, no story for taming and familiarizing it.  And further agitating my heart rate was the guilt I felt at the way I viewed it, so literally from the outside peering in.    

Then Keith gave me the story, as well as an eight-year-old talking to a kindergartner could.  He explained it as a model of the planets, including our world, and their orbits around the sun.  His story did not so much tame the machine for me as it destabilized the ground beneath my feet.  But the mystery of what he said and the stretch and curve of metal beyond the window pane that represented that mystery overturned my understanding of what Professor Jensen’s world might offer, undermining my faith in my parents’ skeptical view of it.

Years later, however, when I began my college experience with a freshman year on that campus, I discovered that Dad was right about the stair railings.  I saw that their metal intricacy was broken, at almost every step, in exactly the way he had predicted.

Car Windows at Henderson’s Drive-In Café

Most diners at Henderson’s Drive-In Café behave as if windows are solid walls.  Between taking orders and delivering full trays, I sit on my carhop stool waiting for blinking headlights to signal some need—more ketchup, a Coke refill.  Just steps away, parked cars ray out around my stool like the spokes of a wheel.  In one, a man wearing a Texaco uniform nestles his nose into the ear of a girl who is sucking his chest hair.  In another, the church secretary lunges over the back of her seat to smack a toddler’s face, then rises up on her knees to strike the six-year-old cowering in the far corner.  In his squad car, a cop from the neighboring town shares a Sloppy Joe with my homeroom teacher’s wife.  They alternate bites, and she wipes a drip from his chin with her index finger.  Twice.  Watching this does not empower me, as did the cluelessness of the feral cats.  It erases me.

Still, I prefer that erasure to its rare but disturbing opposite.  Sometimes a lone diner, lingering over a chili dog or sucking languidly on a malt straw, makes a show of riveting his attention on me.  Through a dusty windshield, his eyes follow me everywhere.  I know this for a display of power.  Though I am not yet equipped to understand its malevolence, I can smell it like toxic gas sliding toward me across the crushed rock.

Window at Home after Closing Time at Henderson’s Drive-In

In the dead-deep quiet after a 1:00 a.m. closing at Henderson’s, I slip through our dark house to reach the bathroom without waking my family.  The odor of French fries follows me into the little room, where I peel off shorts and shirt, sneakers and undies, then turn the bathtub’s spigots.  As water thunders against the porcelain, I lean close to the medicine cabinet mirror to check a pimple building pressure beneath the skin of my chin.  I lift two rose-shaped guest soaps to my ears like earrings, checking from several angles their effect on my face and the effect of raised arms on my breasts.  I move over to the stool and sit down to urinate, from there reaching over to turn off the flow of bathwater.  The silence is sudden, expected, but—I gradually realize—not quite complete.  I should hear nothing; the water has stopped, and I am not moving.  I take a second to confirm both of these obvious truths.  A soft rustling or rubbing sound continues, then stops, then resumes.  Though my mind tries denial first, I eventually know that the sound comes from the window—from someone’s hands and face against the glass at that little space where the shade does not quite reach the sill.  My body prepares to vomit, but instead, I leap up and turn off the light.  My exposed skin—I feel as if I have miles of it—seems to me to retain visibility like a glow-in-the-dark plastic Jesus.  Now the silence is so complete that I can hear air move across my nostril hairs as I breathe.  Next:  the slightest shuffle and a rapid, diminishing “fump-fump-fump” of someone running away across soft ground.  In the morning, checking outside for evidence, my mother finds our daffodils crushed and bleeding beneath the bathroom window.

Metaphorical Windows

Three landscape paintings hang on the wall above the kitchen table in the house where I now live.  When my sister painted them, she was a young adult and I still an awkward adolescent steering as close to her wake as I could manage.  That day, she loaded paints and lap board, paper and Mason jars of water into the trunk of our family’s car.  I rode along as Mother drove her south from our little town until some rise in the land or placement of distant farmstead suggested things I couldn’t see, and she said, “Here.  This will do.”  Mother pulled off onto the road’s shoulder, and we all three carried Thelma’s equipment to the shade of an Osage orange tree.  She secured the water jars upright among tough knots of pasture grass, settled herself against the tree’s base with lapboard and paper propped on her knees, and opened her tackle box of paint tubes.  We left her there for the day, though I couldn’t imagine her finding a day’s worth of subject matter in the folds of that familiar terrain.

Later, when we drove back through long shadows to pick her up, she was still at work.  Spread around her on the grass was a startling number of watercolor sketches, the beauty of each scene a surprise to me, a revelation.  I couldn’t have expressed it at the time, but now, looking at the framed remnants of that day, I understand what thrilled me then and still moves me:  washes of color trailing through and around white, unpainted spaces so that sunlight and shadow have substance and mystery, like the portraits of ancestors; ordinary elements of that landscape—a tree, fence rows, haze above a distant river—transformed by the minimalism of their representation into movement or memory or some unnamed body-pleasure. 

I knew at the time, even without the words for it, that Thelma saw the world differently than I did, more richly, deeply, expansively, imaginatively.  I hungered for that view.  Sometimes I thought I was developing it, like the blustery day I stood beside her on a bluff above Lewis and Clark Lake.  Wind tore the water’s surface into planes of color that seemed to separate from one another distinctly, as they do in paint-by-the-numbers seascapes.  I saw the whole lake as splintering patches of jade, spruce, and emerald.  Heady with the sense of my own discernment, I said to my sister, “Look. The water makes three separate greens.”

“The water makes a million greens,” she answered.

Crestfallen, I coveted her vision, but not as desperately as I would have had I realized then that it is not something every girl eventually gets with maturation, like breasts.

I sit at the table with the framed landscapes to my right, exactly as I sat by the glass against which, in my childhood, our deaf cat sunned herself.  Here are three small windows onto the astonishing world Thelma saw.  I want to touch my finger against the glass and strike a tiny vibration that breaches the long silence between us.  I want to touch it here and here and here, and every time see her turn around and look at me through the pane, meeting my gaze.  

Volkswagen Windows

In the later half of her twenties, when Thelma worked as a designer and illustrator in Kansas City, she negotiated the streets in a black Volkswagen beetle.  She drove it back and forth from her apartment to her office, to the stable where she took riding lessons, to the Atkinson Art Museum where she nourished herself on the works of other artists, and to the homes of friends, who were for the most part also artists.  She drove it to the doctor who treated her for clinical depression and to the pharmacy for medications to correct the chemical imbalances that cause depression and may—who knows—have contributed to that intensely illuminated visual engagement with the world that I so admired.  One July day, near sunset, she drove her Volkswagen into Swope Park, where from behind the close curve of its windshield she must have seen a million greens.  Looking through that window, she registered her world’s last images, then killed herself with a small handgun.

In dreams, the arched black form of the car, its windshield suddenly illuminated in a flash of light, becomes strangely confused with the welding mask, and I know I must never look.

Extinguished Windows

Windows surround my bed on three sides in the small sleeping quarters of my first apartment.  I described this abundance of light to my sister the last time I saw her, though I wouldn’t take final possession of the place until a month after her funeral.  Who would have guessed that when the time came, I would value the light in this third-story room much less than I appreciate the darkening sky that folds around me after sunset.  From twilight until just before dawn, nighthawks dive past my windows after insects, their feathers whistling.  This is the sound the world makes when you think it should stop but it won’t.

52^nd Street Windows

I have watched my mother negotiate loss and the aging process through the triple front windows of the house in which I’ve lived most of my married life.  Always, her treatment for everything from sciatica to grief has been physical, outdoor work.  After my sister’s death, I was too blinded by my own disbelief to notice how Mother managed to anchor herself among the living.  But years later when she bought the house across the street from ours and adjusted to widowhood, I began to witness in brief glances between parted curtains, and to understand incrementally, the extent to which she drew strength from her body’s mechanics. 

Through window glass and across the distance of our two yards, I’ve watched her cope with my father’s absence by raking leaves wearing his weathered denim chore coat and hauling rocks in his old wheelbarrow for a rock garden on the southern slope of her tiny lawn.  I’ve raised my shades to find her crouched in early morning light filling spaces between the rocks with marigolds and evening primrose to replace the three acres of garden she and Dad nurtured every summer.  I’ve watched her mow her grass, in spite of my husband’s efforts to do it for her, on the theory that doing so stretched and relaxed the muscles she strained moving rocks, then crawl on hands and knees digging dandelions because—as she explained when I tried to intervene—it was a good way to restore muscles grown tired from mowing. 

When her own yard didn’t call for enough therapeutic labor to meet her needs, Mother turned to ours. I’ve looked up from adjusting the air conditioner in July to find her seated on our sidewalk clearing crabgrass from its cracks.  Seeing her shadow fall across the curtains on a December day, I have discovered her trimming our yew bushes and piling the clippings on our front porch so that I could use them for Christmas decorating.    

I have lived in this proximity to Mother’s determined physicality as she aged from 68 to 94.  She never imposed it on me, never suggested that her way should be my way.  She was, I’m sure, no more conscious of being watched than Professor Clifford Jensen was when his late-night lamplight caught my parent’s attention.  My life choices were much closer to Professor Jensen’s than to Mother’s.  She did not, as I might have expected in childhood, discourage my movement into academia.  She celebrated it, reading everything I wrote, from freshman compositions through my doctoral dissertation.  But she remained on her side of the glass—resolutely incarnate, a physical being perpetually locating herself in a physical world—while I built a life of language and letters on the professor’s side.  Sometimes, as I observed her unaware of my attention, I felt a little wave of kinship with the voyeur who once stood in our daffodils and peered at me as the bathtub filled.  I, like he, was gaping in curiosity and confused longing at a kind of physicality that I would never possess and never really understand.

Final Windows

For a time in California’s earlier stage of car obsession, some funeral parlors had drive-up windows through which mourners could view the deceased lying in state.  I read about this during my teens in an article meant to shock readers with the superficiality of the arrangement.  I liked the idea, not because of the option to remain in one’s car.  I would have gladly parked the car and walked to the window.  I liked it because this use of glass, like that through which we viewed new babies in maternity wards, offered a film of separation and an organizing frame.  The atoms and molecules of glass arrange themselves like those of a liquid, perpetually in the process of solidifying from the molten state, but without the crystallization of true solids, never completely stilled.  This glacial fluidity, contained in its firm sashing, was as perfect a medium for meeting with the newly departed as with the newly arrived and all the bewildering beauty that joins the two.  Contained but constantly altering mediation.  The visual equivalent of never stepping twice into the same stream, but this a brittle stream, with just enough surface strength to keep me from falling through.

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