I serve in this fashion
I trace an outline of my daughter’s hand on
thin tissue paper. The paper is pink as
cotton candy and her hand is limp. She is
asleep.
I’ve spent the last weekend tracing her limbs
and torso while she sleeps, working my way up
to her delicate head and wispy hair. I just
want to catch an idea of that hair, a tendril
here, a mass of frizz there. In her sleep her
toes flex like a dancer en
pointe. I follow the stretch of
the arch of her foot, sweep up the ball to
the tip of her big toe. Elizabeth stirs and
tenses as the felt-tipped marker grazes her
flesh, but I am stalwart and stay the course,
capture the foot for posterity’s sake.
Elizabeth is three years old, red-haired and
long of limb. Her knees are like mine were
when I was her age, stretched and knobby all
at once, awkward joints connecting leg bones.
I can already see how her hips will jut out
at thirteen, will buffer themselves in fat
and muscle. Buying pants will become almost
impossible for her, will become a source of
frustration, and she will start to wear
slimming flat-front trousers with wide legs
no matter the going fashion. Her skinny legs
will protrude from an ample rump, those
now-slight hips will grow to temporarily
house the wide skulls of ten-and-a-half pound
babies. She will slap the first man who
remarks on her child-bearing hips and then
she will marry him and bear two children in
three years.
They will exhaust themselves with fights over
money and discipline. When she discovers that
he's been sneaking out to Bible study
meetings and is on the road to becoming born
again, Elizabeth will leave him. I'll take
the family in, my 26-year-old daughter and
her two preschooler boys, will put aside my
plans to redo the upstairs in preparation to
sell the place. She'll be practically
unemployable, her only experience being
reproducing and windexing the glass off the
windows, running a vacuum cleaner across the
floor so thoroughly that you could eat off of
it. It will be as though she were a teenager
again, the petty little fights over who left
what dish in the sink without washing it, her
stealing my cigarettes and popping diet pills
so she can stay up all night. I will wonder
what happened to my golden years, my "me"
time. She'll get an earful every night.
Eventually she will go back to nursing
school, will find a new place to live and get
a job. One of the night-shift orderlies, an
atheist, rational and compelling, will seduce
her with stories from his service in the
Persian Gulf. He'll move in after their third
date and will start whipping that fatherless
household into shape. The boys, teenagers by
this time, will be desperate to escape the
two of them, sick of the discussions of Ayn
Rand and the tyranny of other people's gods.
There are other things that will keep them
away, the sounds that leak from the too-thin
walls of the tract house, the atheist's cries
in the middle of the night followed by the
low dove-coos of their mother soothing him.
They will visit me for dinner almost every
night and I'll serve them roast beef and
potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, fish
sticks and french fries. Sometimes one of the
boys will sleep on the pull-out couch, his
brother in a sleeping bag on the floor.
But for now Elizabeth is a little girl with
chubby feet and dimpled elbows. Her neck is
thick, strong muscles leading to an
unremarkable chin that dips out blandly from
under her lower lip. Her dad and I are still
debating about whose nose she will have. All
children have cute button noses. It takes the
hormones and stretching of adolescence to
reveal the nose’s true nature.
Pictures of Atlantis
This is a record of young love and wobbly
stability. There's Mr. X in male cheesecake
pose, lying in front of the newly-planted
impatiens in the backyard of our first
Columbus apartment. Here's Loudon the
sheltie-dog, a ball of fluff, on his first
day home. Sidney
and Zoe
appear as young kittens, playful,
flexible, and sleek. In one set of
pictures, Mr. X and I pose separately,
each of us holding a champagne glass and
wearing the dark-lensed glasses that came
with my grandmother's 50s-era sunlamp. We
look like goons, but that was the point.
And then there are the shots of our
wedding, that great party we gave, where
his relatives filled the space and made it
joyous while mine were reserved and
inward, quiet in their happiness. These
photos are relics of another time, part of
my life but outside of it, too.
As time went on, Mr. X and I took fewer
pictures. Fifteen months after we were
married, we both got jobs in Washington, DC
and life got much more stressful. Mr. X
clashed terribly with his incompetent boss.
Our living situation wasn't comfortable. The
basement tenant in the house we rented, a man
named Dewey Wayne (I've since forgotten his
last name), had an intense personality. Dewey
Wayne had sold his house in Raleigh and put
all his money into a move to DC, which
included paying a year's rent in advance. He
had a habit of leaving his front door open
while he took his dog on walks, which was his
business, except that his place was connected
to ours by a door that we couldn't lock and
our neighborhood wasn't a good place to leave
doors open. The washer and dryer for the
building were in his apartment and he freaked
out (rightfully) once or twice when we walked
in on him, unannounced, to do our laundry.
Then there were the rats. The backyard, a
rectangle of bare dirt dotted with ratholes,
held a thriving rodent commune. We had a
parking space out by the trash cans and the
rats began to use our car as storage space,
something we discovered on our way to the
grocery store one weekend. As Mr. X pulled
out onto 15th Street, the engine began to
smoke. Over the course of our ten-minute
ride, the car slowly filled with the odor of
roasted, rotten meat. We rolled all the
windows down and covered our noses with
tissues to filter out the smell. When we
pulled into the parking lot, Mr. X popped
open the hood: two smoldering pork rib bones
had adhered to the carburetor. The car stank
for weeks. Later a rat actually chewed its
way into Dewey Wayne's apartment ("I came in
and there he was on top of the refrigerator,
munching on a bagel. Like Mighty Mouse," he
told us).
Mr. X and I finally fled the rental after
five months and bought a house in Takoma
Park, Maryland. The night before the house
inspection, our car was stolen from our
street, though it was recovered somewhat
unscathed a week later. In the meantime, Mr.
X's job had gone from horrible to
intolerable. His old position in Columbus was
still open and they were happy to take him
back. On the weekend of our second
anniversary, only eight months after we had
arrived in DC, he returned to Ohio. There
were solid reasons for him to leave that had
nothing to do with our marriage, but it was
the beginning of the end, or at least I can
mark the final slide with this event. We were
doomed from the beginning.
Mr. X is remarried now. He and his wife have
a child on the way. We haven't spoken in a
couple of years, though we are Facebook
friends. And while the past is always present
for me in some way, I don't think much about
that time when I was young and in love and it
was all fresh and new, when I was with
someone who was my loyal protector, when I
was learning to be an adult without drama. I
wasn't good at living without drama and still
courted it with alcohol and arguments, with
cruel remarks and coldness, but there was an
underlying sweetness to the relationship. Mr.
X helped pull me out of my childhood, was the
first person to hold out his hand.
The only evidence I have of that time is some
paperwork and photographs. We had no children
and the last living pet we shared is fading
fast. There are no friends in common with
which to reminisce, to verify that it all
happened. But I'm still not sure what to do
with the artifacts, the pictures that show
the world that we created for a brief moment,
now submerged in memory.
Image: Champagne on our
first anniversary, Columbus, November 1996. I
still have the glasses and -- strangely, but
coincidentally -- my son just fished them out
of a toy box this morning and put them on,
even though he hadn't worn them for months.
The bottom of the sea
Tom was pinned to the sea
floor, staring into the gloom of pale green
water, when his family started drifting past
like surreal floats in an underwater parade.
The first one to show was Faye, his father’s
girlfriend, jammed into a one-piece bathing
suit with a plunging neckline. It was the
same suit she had worn on the Mexico trip and
even in the murk he couldn’t stop staring at
her cleavage, worried that something would
pop out. Faye was bounteous, but untidy. She
was a concern. He tried to speak, to get her
attention, but his words came out as a giant
bubble. Faye’s pale blue eyes were open and
unseeing. Tom watched with increasing
tension, staring into them, not noticing the
pocket of air that contained his voice had
winnowed its way to the surface. It was the
same with all of them, his sister Veronica,
his parents. They floated past one by one
without purpose or reason, looking as they
did in life. Except for their eyes.
Unresponsive, flat and always open, their
eyes were sightless. It was as if they were
dead. Veronica, in her pajamas, wearing one
of those high-necked flannel nightgowns their
mother insisted on buying, clutched a leash
with a stiffened hand. Tilly was on the other
end of it, pulling in undeath as in life,
stretching the girl’s arm past her head as
she floated by on her back. From the look on
his father’s face overhead – his eyebrows
raised, mouth shaped like a giant O, as if he
were in mid-shout – the man was surprised to
find himself there with the rest of them. He
was dressed for a pickup ball game, with
catcher’s mitt and a ratty Phillies baseball
jersey over a pair of running shorts and his
legs, weighted down by over-technical
sneakers, just missed brushing Tom’s face.
It was only once his father floated away,
became a speck in the water, that his mother
showed up. She was almost within touching
distance, if Tom could have moved his arms.
Her body slowly began to turn, the white
terrycloth robe twisting around her legs and
then spinning out again. With each turn the
fabric fluttered and fanned in a slow motion
dance. There was a beauty to it. For a second
Tom thought he caught her eye, thought he saw
a flash of recognition, but then she, too,
was gone, carried away by the current.
He was emptied. Bereft. How could they leave
him tied to the bottom of the sea where there
was no air? But he was alive. The air just
came. He became aware of the heaviness in his
chest, how his lungs, thickened and clogged,
would fill like balloons, suddenly buoyant.
His chest would start to expand and his body,
reborn, light, would pull against its
tethers, and then his lungs would empty
again. He would wait for the next breath to
push into him, to refill his body with
lightness.
An eleven-year-old boy lies on a hospital
bed, his body a pale thread under bleached
sheets. A cap of greasy blonde hair clings to
his forehead and underneath his sallow skin
blue veins trace a map of the body. Sleep
glues his eyes shut. White Velcro ties bind
his wrists to the bed frame and his arms are
so thin that the elbows jut out like smooth,
rounded stones. Two lines run from a plastic
port in his hand to an IV stand. A tube
snakes from his mouth to a ventilator sitting
to the left of the bed. The night nurse
re-taped it a few hours ago, inadvertently
placed the tube at a rakish (though more
comfortable) angle, so that Tom looks as if
he should be holding a candy cigarette
between his teeth instead of a ventilator
line. For the moment, his lungs are
receptacles. They expand and contract at the
ventilator’s bequest. Intake and outtake, the
machine does the work with quiet hums and
hisses. His breath is external. Electric.
The room is dark. His mother sleeps in a
slate blue reclining chair by the window,
mouth slightly open, head slumped against her
shoulder. A copy of the New Yorker lies open
on her lap. In this light the circles under
her eyes look like shadows and her unwashed
hair has the tousle of sleep. Because she
keeps forgetting to brush, her teeth are
mossy and her breath sour. When the
respiratory therapist, a large square man
named Joseph, walks into the room, she
doesn’t stir, having become accustomed to the
strange cadence of hospitals, where day and
night are delineated by the migratory
patterns of doctors and residents, the
dominant physician leading his or her flock
with authority during business hours. The way
they trample! At night, residents travel
alone or in whispering pairs, quiet in
soft-soled shoes, not wanting to bring
attention to their drawn faces and wrung-dry
minds.
Joseph visits twice on his shift to check on
Tom’s numbers and clean the vent line. He
pulls a pair of gloves from the box by the
door, struggling to get them on. Underneath
the latex, his pale hands shimmer with a thin
layer of sweat. He smells of cooking grease
and baby powder. Tom’s vent tube is gummed
up; he has pneumonia and the thick secretions
interfere with his breathing. As the man
bends over him and attaches the vacuum line
to the vent tube, his body exudes heat. Tom
feels the warmth of breath, of Joseph’s
proximity, followed by the industrial pull of
the vacuum. It sucks away thick clots of
mucus. Every ten seconds or so Joseph dips
the tube into a glass of clean water. The
water rushes with the joy of movement, of
life.
With each suction Tom’s lungs sag. They
deflate, go limp, until they spasm in
protest. He begins to cough. The coughs are
productive and Joseph continues with his
careful cleaning, until, satisfied, he leaves
the room, nodding politely to the bleary-eyed
mother who has just woken up. Exhausted,
scraped clean, Tom falls into a deeper sleep
while his mother adjusts his blankets and
smoothes her hand over his forehead. She is
grateful to feel his skin under hers, is even
relieved by the warmth of a fever. Tom is
still here and fighting.
The bottom of the sea is murky. Out of the
green, a small shape moves toward him. It
travels in a nimbus of light made blurry with
disturbed silt. The slow movement is hypnotic
and Tom is filled with a sense of calm. As
the form emerges, he recognizes the fine long
hair of his maternal grandmother, white as
bone, a flash of brightness in the deep. The
mud and sand, the irregularities in the sea
floor slow her down. She catches his eye and
waves. Tom feels warm, well-fed, almost
satiated. Gram will catch up with him.
Everything will be ok.
But someone is tugging on his elbow. His
mother has returned with purpose and
animation. Tom looks into her eyes, her face
a series of hollows, furrowed brow over
darkened eyes. Her dark hair floats around
her head in crazy corkscrews.
We love
you. Stay here with
us,
she demands. Gram waves again, smiling,
encircled by jaunty bubbles. There is no
hurry. When it is all over, the end will only
matter to the people left behind. He has
infinity stretched out before him. His
suffering will eventually be a memory and
such memories are stored in the body,
destined to rot.
Give the living a little more
time.
Image: "Murky Water"
by
-Ebil-Bils.
Suspicious minds
Because Frank Smith is an
investment banker. A lawyer. A high-powered
PR executive. Or so the rumors have it. He
showed up in Bank Nile about a month ago,
rolled into town in his ’49 Ford truck, which
looks beat up but runs suspiciously well.
Maya thinks he’s wearing a mouth piece. He
talks like he’s been eating ice cream, his
tongue slightly numbed, the words not totally
clear, but there is no stink of alcohol or
sign of the needle. There is no ice cream
cone. She swears she’s seen him adjust those
just-so nubs of his when he thought no one
was looking.
His hand are smooth. Even though the palms
are filthy and his fingernails blackened with
earth and compost, those aren’t the hands of
a man accustomed to hard work. He keeps a
dust bowl hoe by the garden patch, makes a
show of rustic tools, the rusted metal rake,
a long pointed shovel. Frank claims to know
about healing herbs, says he’ll fix you up
with something for those migraines, will make
a poultice for your aching back.
But don’t let that investment
banker/lawyer/PR man sell you a goddamned
thing.
****
Image from an online
costume shop. This post was originally my
response to a photo prompt. I keep on
returning to it for the blog, but didn't want
to use the original picture, for obvious
reasons. And if you are in the market for a
fake beard, I recommend the fine selection at
the Etsy shop I Made You a
Beard.
I've been struggling to write and hopefully
will be back on track in the next week or
two, writing, thinking, and visiting other
blogs.
The power of positive and sometimes delusional thinking
I skipped ringing in the
new year, chose to switch off the light five
minutes before midnight on December 31st.
Still, I was awake at the moment it turned,
was lying in bed whispering to my husband in
the dark. We heard firecrackers and whoops of
happiness, the joyous drunken sounds of other
people. My heart wasn't in it. I just wasn't
ready to give up on 2009, didn't feel like
shoving into another year with all that
pressure to change my ways, to become a
better person.
I finally celebrated 2010 on January third,
got a little crazy. Yeah. I moved some
furniture, switched an entire room around.
The living room had become a stale and
cluttered space. Even the furniture seemed
bored, stuck in place for over two years. Our
couch had stretched into a permanent yawn,
the lamps sagged with boredom, and the chairs
were slouching in defeat. It's been this way
for so long because the kid has an attachment
to sameness, to stasis, but yesterday I
offered him a very compelling reason to shake
things up: with the couch across the room, we
could build a huge fort between it and the
dining room table. Never underestimate the
power of a fort on the will of a
four-year-old boy: it did the trick. I've
included a picture of the perked-up room at
the top of this post. It's airy and
wood-textured, a comfortable and open space.
It fits.
This post was originally about spaces made
fresh, about a new year beginning and the
value of shaking things up. The living room
felt stuck and so did I, but as I shifted the
furniture things opened up. My possibilities
expanded. My mind, however, wasn't quite
ready to completely commit to this topic, or
perhaps my mind just works in very mysterious
and cloaked ways. Typing "living room" in a
preliminary draft led to thoughts of
the Bye Bye
Birdie song "Got a Lot of Livin'
To Do." Oh, yes, there are versions of it out
there, including several high school
productions muddying up YouTube, but I then
stumbled upon Shirley Bassey
(to see the
movie musical version, in all its campy
glory, click
here). The song runs for the
first three minutes of this clip:
Ms. Bassey is a little
brassy here, not too subtle. She belts it
out. Still I like her attitude. And look at
the date of the recording -- February 22,
1966. This is the actual birthday of a
significant person in my life and as I was
listening I suddenly pictured him as a tiny
thing, a mewling newborn swaddled in white.
Maybe his mother cradled him from her
hospital bed as she watched Ms. Bassey
perform on television. There he was,
untouched and innocent, with the whole of
life ahead of him. He had a lot of livin' to
do (still does, he's just lived almost 44
years of it). I started to cry. It was
everything, the hopeful song, the image of
the baby full of potential, this strange
feeling of inevitable loss, the relentless
passage of time, that brought me to tears.
The tears weren't totally about him or about
the time that we all lose just by living.
They were about babies.
Or about how we start off so small, so
dependent, waiting to be imprinted by
circumstance, by imperfect parents, by our
own built-in limitations. But the song isn't
meant for tears, it's meant for inspiration,
an encouragement to live life to its fullest,
a message that I may need more than most.
This somehow led to thoughts of another
unlikely tearjerker of a song, coincidentally
titled "Shirley", by the all-female
grunge/punk bank L7. It's about
Shirley
Muldowney, the first professional
female drag racer. L7 mixes simple,
in-your-face lyrics with drag racing
announcer commentary and the sound of an
engine gunning. I have never gotten
through it without breaking down,
including the four times I heard it while
writing this post. Maybe it's the naive
idea that it proposes, that we are capable
of anything: "How many times must you be
told, there's nowhere that we don't go?"
(The song is specifically about women
being just as capable of men, but I think
it can be a universal battle cry for the
downtrodden.) I think it's also Shirley's
absolute confidence in herself that gets
me. In one sample from an interview an
announcer asks "What's a beautiful girl
like you doing racing in a place like
this?" which Shirley answers with one
word: "Winning."
Listen to the song if you'd like, though you may need to link to the music site above to hear it in its entirety. Shirley probably won't have the same effect on you as it does on me, though I'd love to know if it does. I've reprinted the lyrics below, but you'll need to hear the chords, the heavy guitars, the whiny machismo of the announcers' patter to feel the full effect. It's almost enough to make you believe in infinite possibility.
These two songs are connected by optimism, by the fantasy that we have time stretched out, a gleaming eternal path of joy, the idea that if we just have enough confidence, enough inner strength, we can let the bad stuff roll right off, can experience the heady completeness of fulfilled potential. "Halting me is a fantasy," as the L7 song goes. The line itself may be a fantasy too, but perhaps one worth believing in, the power of positive and sometimes delusional thinking. If either one of these songs doesn't convince you, try moving some furniture around. It can help to create the illusion of control.
Oh, and Happy New Year! You're alive, so come on and show it -- there's such a lot of living to do!
***************************************************
(This post is written in
the style of Lydia of Writerquake. She often writes
compelling mixes of song, image and word,
pieces that point to the core, the heart,
of the matter. I'm not claiming to do all
that, just thought of her as I was writing
it and wanted to shout
out.)
Shirley by L7
Welcome the first lady to
try and qualify in an NHRA-dragster
competition ~ Shirley Muldowney!
Feels so real
Crushing the steering wheel
How many times
Must we toe this line
Halting me
Is a fantasy
Cha-cha! call her cha-cha!
What's drag racing coming to?
How many times must you be told
There's nowhere that we don't go
she's got good traction!
I suggest you find a seat in the grandstands,
because you don't want to miss this!
She's just here wants
What she wants to do
I wonder if Shirley's got in her to hold that
throttle down
kills your joke
as she's burning smoke
Shirley Muldowney is pulling ahead... and she
takes the red light
And you will find
Crossing the finish line
Shirley Muldowney has just set a new track
record!
Satisfaction!
How much
times must you be told
There's nowhere that we don't go
She's got good traction!
What's a beautiful girl like you doing racing
in a place like this?
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
The lady got through it
Winning.
What's drag racing coming to?
There's nowhere that we don't go
What's a beautiful girl like you doing racing
in a place like this?
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.