Ringing true
Nora led me on the slow walk along Dwight. She concentrated on sidewalk scents, the deep contemplative sniff, totally ignoring the grumble and gunning of car engines and their acrid exhaust. She’s getting older and I cut her some slack, let her enjoy the spicy roots of roses and street trees, the metallic bitterness of security gates. Outside the store, I tied her to the stoplight post, knowing from experience she hated to be left out. She jumped and barked and pulled at her leash as I entered the double doors.
Bamboozled is for last chances, last-minute alcohol, milk for when you run out, bananas for a burst of health after the fried fish sandwich. Most people come here for six-packs and lottery tickets, for the cigarettes behind the register.
The girl at the counter, glossy black hair, cinnamon skin, was speaking into a mobile phone in a language I didn’t know. Somewhere behind her my pack waited, anticipating the tap-tap of nervous hands, the ceremonial unwrapping of cellophane, my trembling choice: which one would burn first? Even through the closed door I could hear Nora's yelps. The girl made eye contact. I put an empty hand to mouth and inhaled deeply, pantomimed the satisfaction of holding and releasing smoke. Phone crooked between ear and shoulder, she turned to the cigarettes, letting her hand pass from brand to brand. I nodded when she got to Camel Lights.
This was the start of my escape and I noted the details: the dog's distress, the store's faint odor of disinfectant, the rows of 12-packs in the sunlight, the layer of dust on the cans of Coco Lopez. I dug into my back pocket for a ten and one of my fingernails bent against the denim. The girl and I slid our offerings across the counter, my cash for her cigarettes. A pale scar divided the back of her hand in two. Someone stuck his head in the door to ask if anyone knew whose dog that was, the distressed one tied to the post? She's mine, I told him and ran out to Nora, leaving my change behind (oh, her dance of recognition, of joy in not being abandoned she gave as I freed her from the post). We continued our walk to University, past Indian restaurants, cafes, and small grocery stores, turned left, and went to the water.
Cesar Chavez Park, a former landfill, juts into the bay. The grass is uneven, the ground underneath lumpy and booby-trapped with gopher holes. As Nora obsessed over gophers and ground squirrels, I looked across the water. San Francisco glittered in the distance, a taunt for what I could never have, another thing to bemoan, and my chest ached.
But suddenly the feeling changed. This is the mystery, the real topic of fiction: that moment of change -- is it a moment? A process? What brings it on? What is the key to the transformation? Did the kites flying above push me toward acceptance? Was it the family picnicking near us, two silent and exhausted parents watching their chubby toddler rip up handfuls of grass? Had I been working on it unconsciously all along? This was when my heart shifted toward truth and yet I can't get at the truth of the moment, at least not here.
As we left the park, I sent the pack of cigarettes sailing into a trash can, a sacrifice to note my sacrifice, an acceptance of the delicate balance in my life between ambiguity and love, novelty and stability, lightness and darkness. Cleansed by bay breezes, baptized by the city's exhaust and the hum of the highway, Nora and I returned to the humid familiarity of home.
That night I woke to chains dragging and ghosts howling, the sound detritus of a rowdy party up the street. But I was having a dream, too, of coming to the edge of the impossible, flirting with it while knowing it was impossible. I kept changing my clothes, rejecting my outfits, my disguises. Nothing fit or it was dirty or ripped, long out of style or season. The impossible and his progeny waited for me. In the end I told them to go on ahead. I would make it to our destination on my own in whatever identity fit.
Yesterday morning I did tell my husband I was going out for a pack of cigarettes (har har har). It was day four of the boy's illness and my husband was also laid up (and continues to be) after hernia surgery. I felt trapped by other peoples' needs. A dog walk, some studying, some time almost-alone, and a little more sleep helped shake the feeling. There is nothing to escape. This is my life and I am committed to it and to whoever we will become, me, the man, and the boy.
Besides, I already have a pack of cigarettes in my desk, a remnant from the truly horrible spring of 2011. The pack is almost full. I’ve never finished a cigarette. But I like the fact that it is waiting for me in a drawer, that I can take on the role of rebel or angry girl or self destructive harpy without taking it on at all. Because I am not any of these things.
It doesn’t mean that I can’t return in my mind to the time when home meant my erasure, that I can't wear the dark coat and scuffed boots even on a sunny October day. The cigarettes and stories act as a pressure valve for my dark side. I dance with the impossible in my dreams and I return to reality when I awake. In my first version of the cigarette story, the fictional me got to the edge of the bay and kept on going. The water submerged her. The dog barked as it swallowed her up. But there was no point to this ending, no transformation, just the further disappearance of self.
It didn't ring true.
I got very absorbed in this one -- probably best to think of it as a work in progress.
Image by meddygarnet.
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