Borage and Storm Clouds by John Knight
For as long as I can remember, Moses was a fixture in our house. A two-foot-high bronze statue, Moses loomed in our living room, strained arms raised straight above his head, holding the Ten Commandments, eyes glaring furiously at those below. More of an action figure than an inanimate statue, Moses appeared enraged, ready to smash the tablets on whoever sat beneath him.
As a child I was terrified of Moses. His ribs jutted out of his emaciated frame—I guess that slogging across the Sinai desert and then being schooled by God on top of a mountain will do that to you—and his wild hair and eyes made him look deranged. He reminded me of one of those paintings whose eyes follow you wherever you walk. And in a sense, he did. For wherever we lived, there he was. At first, he stood on the lid of our baby grand piano, looking threateningly at whomever was practicing, seemingly chastising anyone who was playing poorly. My father then had a wooden pedestal built especially for Moses where he was granted a prominent position in our living room. It’s a wonder any visitors returned after encountering him.
After my father’s death, and my mother’s move to a smaller apartment, Moses even survived the downsizing, accompanying my mother to a one-bedroom in a senior independent residence. There he stood near the front entrance, like a sentry. I’ll never understand how he made the cut.
One dark and not stormy night, my mother got up and made her way through her unlit apartment to the bathroom, which was in the hallway, not far from the front door and you-know-who. She tripped on an area rug and grabbed onto Moses to break her fall. Skeletal Moses, holding stone tablets and standing on a flimsy wooden pedestal was hardly a stabilizing figure. Down he crashed along with my mother, impaling her foot with one of his bony, bronze appendages. The two lay side by side; though he was no guardian angel. Fortunately, my bleeding and traumatized mother had the wherewithal to crawl toward the emergency cord hanging nearby and pulled it to call for help. Moses was useless.
My mother survived the ordeal with a deep wound, stitches, and a couple of weeks in rehab. She recovered with no long-term injuries and returned to her feisty pre-punctured self. When visiting my mother after she returned to her apartment, I suggested that she give Moses away. Perhaps, I hesitated, she could donate him to a religious organization. At the very least, for her own safety, Moses needed to be moved into a corner immediately, which I did, breaking a ceramic candy dish and knocking over a candlestick. It was all his fault! Moses was a danger to others, though clearly not to himself. He couldn’t be sequestered soon enough.
I was surprised by how amenable my mother was to hiding or even evicting Moses since she liked to keep things and had some Depression-era hoarding tendencies. I also assumed that Moses had some sentimental value that connected her to my father. But she turned to me and declared, “I never liked that thing.” And then she proceeded to tell me the story of Moses. While my parents were dating but before they were married, my father purchased Moses from a gallery that specialized in Jewish art. It was his first art acquisition. He proudly called his mother, announcing that he had big news. When he explained that he had purchased a statue of Moses by some artist whom my grandmother had never heard of, she responded, “Oh. That’s it. I thought you were calling to tell me that you’re getting married.” Clearly my mother had no reason to feel any attachment to Moses, a rival for my father’s affections.
Many months later, Moses remains in the corner of her living room where he is in no position to harm anyone. And yet, he is an unpleasant, not to mention unattractive reminder of her accident. When I asked my mother why she’d kept him, she replied in her cavalier tone: “No one wants him.”
I can’t imagine why.
Ariel Balter has a PhD in English and American literature, taught writing and literature for many years, and published several academic essays. Her memoir, The Maternity Labyrinth, which relates her struggles with failed pregnancies, IVF, and surrogacy, was published by Plain View Press in 2010. Also, she has essays and short stories in a number of publications including (Y) Syndrome Mag, and Big City Lit, The Drift & Dribble Miscellany, a blog “A City Girl in Suburbia” (arielhbalter.blog), and she was a frequent book reviewer for New York Journal of Books.