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.