That yearning
It was a small-framed beach cottage two blocks from the Sassafras River, built in the 1950s for lazy summer living. The house belonged to a friend of my mother’s, another poet, and was in a state of construction, the kitchen and living room gutted and draped in sawdust-coated plastic. The friend and her husband were on a sailing trip, a neighbor needed a sitter for her elderly cat, and would Mom like the job? It was the summer after Kevin died. My mother lived in a suburb of Washington, DC and I was in the city. We ached for Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for the cornfields and woods, for the roadside vegetable stands piled with corn and tomatoes. We missed river swimming and barefoot walks on tarry blacktop.
For more than half of their 18-year relationship, my mother and Kevin moved from place to place on the Eastern Shore, from the community on the Elk River where both my mother and I spent our childhood summers to a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. When Kevin was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, Mom had just bought a red cottage in a neighborhood they eventually nicknamed Hatefulmoor. This was where Kevin insulted the neighbors, built curtain rods and trellises out of driftwood, and gathered beach glass to make jewelry while Mom made the money, prepared most of the meals, washed the dishes, and drove an hour each way to Wilmington and back for work. When that house slipped out of their fingers, they moved from place to place, to Stillpond and Chestertown, and points in between. In the end, it was hard to separate the place from the relationship, to disassociate the fights and cruelty with the landscape, with those long walks through fallow cornfields and along beach cliffs.
Kevin's absence hung over us that summer, the last six months of his illness hung over us, the horrible long hospitalization, the pain. We wanted the good parts back, the lingering dinners by candlelight, the conversations about philosophy and literature. We wanted the old times, the glint of Kevin's glasses across the table, the juice glasses of red wine warming in our hands. In the morning, we said, we would walk to the river, delight in the shock of water the color of late-summer moss, brown and green and cool in the delirious humidity.
The water was gorgeous. But the house was occupied. The living room and kitchen echoed with someone else's presence and every moment I was in the place I felt like I was being watched. The only habitable room was the bedroom, where my mother and I shared the bed and Kevin's son slept on a couch. We set up a fan in the window and tried to sleep, but the air moved in strange ways. I slept fitfully. One night Kevin's golden retriever, Woody, barked, a sudden sharp cry. My mother grabbed a flashlight and searched the house, but no one was there.
The physical ache of mourning -- the desire to see, hear, and touch the one who has gone away -- lingers. Our bodies mourn the loss. Was Kevin with us? Or did we just wish him there? It felt like he was present, hanging over our conversations. We were so dull and pedestrian without him. Maybe he came to mourn himself, the rush of being alive, what poet Marie Howe calls that yearning: "We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it."
My mother's friend had a large collection of poetry books in the bedroom, some purchased from Kevin during one of his purges. Mom removed them from the shelves. She scanned the pages, ran her fingers along the print. Some passages were heavily underlined and in the margin, Kevin's writing recorded his long-ago reactions.
"It's stupid to sell books when they really matter," she told me recently. "You don't know what you are giving away. It might be something you never can replace."
WHAT THE LIVING DO
by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Image: I think this is the beach at "Hatefulmoor" in the early 1990s.
I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin
The kitchen on Queen Street was out of proportion, with a large linoleumed space that could hold a table for six but contained only an old refrigerator and a telephone jack. The stove, sink, cabinets and counter space were jammed into an adjacent galley. Everything we owned -- pots, pans, dishes, and silverware -- was a parental hand-me-down. In the mornings we would linger over percolated coffee diluted to a muddy brown with half and half, the perfect solution to a mild hangover. Some days I would come home for lunch to make BLTs on poppy seed buns, the bacon still hot from the pan, tomato juice and mayonnaise dripping down my fingers.
This was the place where we learned to cook, tried recipes from Gourmet Magazine and the Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. In our year there, we made pizzas from scratch, cleaned and fried squid, and grilled chicken marinated with olive oil, lemon juice, and rosemary. Peter showed us how to make pesto and a cook at the Ironstone brought us a bushel of crawfish that we steamed in a cauldron of boiling water.
I have a file of recipes from that period, most of them copied by hand from D's mother's cookbooks, some of which I still make, like Lebanese Cucumber Soup, and Rice with Garlic and Walnuts. I even have the pizza recipes from Gourmet, which seemed so exotic at the time (Sun-Dried Tomato Pizza with Peppers, Onion, and Garlic Confit, Broccoli and Ricotta Pizza). Going through them reminds me that I never clip recipes anymore, just search around on the internet or Epicurious to see what looks good. Recipes on paper are another thing I miss from the pre-internet days, another reason to toss our modem out the window. I want a paper trail blotched with oil and tomato sauce. I want tangible memories. I want to have my mind and time returned to me (brief interruption while I look at Facebook: see what I mean?).
Still, the memories remain. When my family returned from vacation last Friday, there was a half batch of gazpacho, vinegary and bright, waiting for us, courtesy of our housesitter. Gazpacho was one of D’s favorite foods and I thought of that long-ago summer, which was also the first time M and I made the soup. The recipe called for peeled, deseeded tomatoes and we were mystified. How did one peel tomatoes? Like, with a vegetable peeler? Or by hand somehow? And, umm, the seeds? What was the problem with seeds? Finally, M called her mother. She gave us instructions: put a big pot of water on to boil, remove the tomato stems and cut Xs in the blossom ends before immersing them in the boiling water for under a minute. Then remove the tomatoes with a strainer and plunge them into an ice bath.The peels would slip off in our hands.
Gazpacho recipe, copied in the summer of
1988.
It worked. M and I pureed
the still-seedy tomatoes with bread crumbs,
garlic, vinegar, olive oil and tomato juice,
adding onion and cucumber at the end. The
soup chilled while we chopped the garnishes.
It was late July on the Eastern Shore. The
air was resistant, fluid, like water. Heat
flattened the landscape, made the houses
across the shimmering street one-dimensional.
While I poured the soup, M filled two cups
with ice and gin and topped them with tonic
and thin wedges of lime. We sat in the living
room with our drinks, the bowls of gazpacho
balanced on our laps. The soup was bracing,
the acidity of the tomato and vinegar
complemented by the bite of onion and
coolness of cucumber.
Sometimes all that remains
is sense memory -- the taste, the scent, the
aching loss, the joy of conquest -- or a
suspicion that something
else must have happened. So
maybe M and I went our for a walk that night
after the sun went down, barefoot on
sidewalks that radiated a memory of sun. Or
maybe we refilled our cups again and again
and cried about our crazy mothers, our absent
fathers. Or we danced to Prince or sung along
to Paradise
by the Dashboard
Light. D may have spent the
night, the two of us still and quiet on
checkerboard sheets, feeling the pull of
the window fan in my attic bedroom, while
downstairs M let the smoke from her
cigarette drift out of an open window.
That night is lost. But I remember the heavy
air and the smell of gin, our kitchen counter
splattered with tomato juice, the closeness
of friendship at a time when the world was
new.
Images:
Top: Me, a blurry goofball in the yard on
Queen Street.
Middle: The original gazpacho recipe.
Bottom: The checkerboard sheets, the
I
Love You This Much
statue, the orange crate. The
artfully-placed bottle of Corona.
Tell your story walking
It was May and the sun was shining bright. A row of cars sat by the creek, stereos blasting as other people enjoyed the sun. Monkey Hill, a steep road paved in cobblestones, rose above the park. I took off my strappy sandles, so grown-up, by the old fountain. And then I stepped on a bee. As my foot swelled, I hopped the half mile home, dragged myself past the Brandywine Zoo, stopped briefly under the dramatic arches of the Washington Street Bridge. At home, I made a paste with baking soda to soothe away the sting.
I walked home from 213 the morning my mother and I had a fight and she told me to get out of the car, just get out. We were living in Maryland by then and it must have been early spring, because the ground was thawing, had gone from rock-hard to mud, yielding and thick. She couldn't back out of the driveway. Her tires made deep ditches in the mud, but the car stayed in place. We emptied bags of kitty litter underneath the rear wheels; I pushed against the hood while she revved the engine. In the end, we borrowed my grandfather's car, but I had already convinced myself that school was out of the question. We fought. I obnoxioused myself out of it pretty early, right after we made the turn onto 213 from Town Point. Still, it was about three and a half miles back to the Little House, past cornfields on a road with no real shoulder. I remember a couple of neighbors driving by and waving as I picked my way back home, walking in between the road and the gully.
What did I do when I got to the woods? The road there was dark and curvy and any semblance of a shoulder disappeared. Maybe my mother changed her mind and returned to pick me up. Or more likely I clung to the side of the road, walked against traffic. I kept on going.
I have a recurring dream, about once a month, where I must walk from Elkton to Hollywood Beach. I march past traffic, climb up and down the bridge over the C&D canal, stop by the small shopping center closest to home. In dreamland, the store where I used to work is still there, in expanded form, all florescent lights and earnest employees in dark blue cotton uniforms. No one there can help me. I walk out into the dusty afternoon, plodding across brown cornfields where the remains of last year's crop still poke out of the ground and the footing is uneven. At the edge of the woods I discover a path off the road. And that's where I get stuck. I run into D. or I am so scared that I just stop, or sometimes I don't want to walk forward. The trees reach into the sky and it's so quiet that I want to stay forever.
Until now I've never tied the dream to the morning my mother kicked me out of the car, the forgotten fight, the abandonment of those years again, again. It always seemed like a not-driving dream or a stress dream, but now I wonder if it all started in that walk during that terrible time. I wonder what it means, how it ties who I was then to who I am now, whether I should start to peek under the surface of its meaning.
From a writing prompt, a song this time, Tell Your Story Walking by Deb Talan (video above). I spoke to my mother after writing this and she told me that she thinks about our fight, me getting out of the car and walking home, often. She thinks a neighbor gave me a ride home. I think she's right.
And in the room locked up inside me
I remember what it was like to care about fashion and boys and what the other girls thought, all the other girls with their money and their bright sweaters in primary colors and their designer clothes. When you’re a teenager you think everyone else is better off than you, except for S. whose brother would beat her up or F. whose father didn't know he existed or N., who lied about her address, too, and had an alcoholic dad. My friends were the exceptions, but the rest of them, the money flowed like water from a tap and their parents, they might have been strict, but it was in good ways that showed they cared instead of being random like my mother. The other kids had stable parents who drove newer cars. They lived in the suburbs, not the middle of the city where the houses slammed against each other, where you knew everyone's secrets, could smell the neighbor's dinner burning.
It was a time when I joined the consumer world with its fashion and makeup and music to buy (Def Leppard morphed to Wham! and Duran Duran bled into the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks, Echo and the Bunnymen) and then retreated from it. In the Little House I was stuck with the dull depression of being fifteen and separated from the world, first alone, then alone and pregnant, and then the survivor of both, still alone, and with life experiences that made me feel so, so old.
But there was beer to drink and a guy who bought it for me. He eventually came around more often, was there for real, for love. D. still lived at home, was the youngest of four in a tight family. They got together for big extended family dinners, would greet me with a hug, kiss my cheek when it was time to say goodbye. The womenfolk prepared delicious food and it always seemed like there were at least twenty people at the table, with toasts ("Proost!") and heated conversation and endless bottles of Grolsch.
I loved that family, their sheer number, their passion and personality, the safety net of so many people. In the photographs, however, I look small. Contained. A little scared, like I knew a secret that could destroy me.
Image: Me, late December 1984, in my grandfather's yard. This was before I moved to the Little House, but I still spent most weekends and school vacations visiting. I remember this day very well, the abnormally warm temperatures, the feeling of anticipation that D. might show up that night, that he actually did show. Ah, redemption, brief and sweet.
The original prompt was a photo. You can look at it here.
The post title is a line from a Yaz song that I listened to a lot in the Little House: In My Room.
Big water
I pedaled down to the river;
it wrinkled dark and green.
A kingfisher caught a fish like a silver
comma
and flew into a sycamore tree.
-- Kevin Sheehan, excerpted
from poem published in Slow
Dancer (North American Edition),
No. 29, Spring 1993. Full text
here.
Where I'm from the water is
vast. Salty. It's twisting miles of mucky
rush, river bottom composed of leaves and
mud. Children swim with sleek eels and
glimmering fish, fight the pull of container
ships in the channel. Traffic gets backed up
on 50, on 213. Bridges fling cars over the
C&D Canal, the Chesapeake Bay, the
Bohemia River. Below, fishermen hook rockfish
and net crabs.
We spent summer holidays at Ocean City,
basted ourselves with tropical coconut oil
before stretching out on blankets anchored to
sand, begged Mom-mom for quarters for
skeeball. Aunt Mildred, who wasn't really an
aunt but some sort of foundling my
grandmother's parents took in, had a trailer
on Striker's Gut, a brackish strait that fed
into the ocean. At least once every summer
Bert, Lucy, and I looped chicken necks with
string and dangled them in the water, a
bushel basket waiting for our catch.
In college there was the house on
Smith
Island, 50 feet from the
water. Kevin spent one foul humid summer
building a gazebo and dock, my mother the
sunburned helper. He'd grunt and hammer, a
thin muscular man with an inexplicable pot
belly which later revealed itself to be a
sign of his swollen spleen, a
symptom
of myelofibrosis. When the dock was
complete, I tethered a raft to the end of
it, careful to keep my limbs out of the
water where the jellyfish pulsated, ghosts
with shaggy legs. At night, midges got
through the screens and we yelped and
growled, our hands throwing shadows by
candlelight.
But most of my memories are of the
Elk
River, the walk down to the
beach, tar staining the bottoms of my
feet, the line of benches, somebody's
grandparent always sitting there,
cigarette shedding ash. Depending on the
heat and the tide, I would either wade in
until I couldn't stand the feel of the
muck or dive and swim out to the raft. The
houses were beach cottages built in the
1950s and '60s and the landscape rolled
with cornfields and small tracts of woods.
Everything was green or brown or white or
black. My grandparent's house was
cigarette smoke and mildew, creamy coffee,
sawdust, the sound of the tractor cutting
another swathe of grass.
I was Vi and Allen's granddaughter, willful,
brown as a berry by September.
Image: Elk River, Hollywood
Beach, Spring 2009 (picture taken on our trip
to the East Coast last year).
Some of the names have been changed, some of
the facts moved around.
Wild horses
Summers when I was a little girl we would drive past the horse farms owned by the Duponts, would pull our rusty Datsun over to the side of the road and tiptoe up to the fences, holding hidden handfuls of Dominos sugar cubes. Two cubes in each flattened palm, we would wait for the horses to whinny and walk over, for their soft lips to graze our hands as they picked up the sugar.
The memory is faded now. I hold the fact of it rather than any sensation, and what I see are long grasses and dark, tall fences, a blue sky with clouds raked across it, the vague sense that we were getting away with something.
Image by Jane Underwood. The image was the prompt.
Thanks for the memories
To scrape your memory
clean, you need only a handful of pills
washed down with gin. You need a good wallop
to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp
granite. You need to take the prescribed dose
of anti-malarial medication before the trip
to the tropics. The combination of drug and
sun and strange circumstance will have the
desired effect, the wake-up in a stranger’s
room, the philosophical conversation in a bar
strangely devoid of smoke, you speaking in
tongues, memory gone.
But without my memory I am nothing. There is
no story, no me. You could tell me about my
life and I would smile and nod, sometimes
gasp. Maybe I wouldn’t believe parts of it,
just like I don’t believe the stories you
tell about yourself, about first grade and
that teacher with the wheedling fingers. He
cornered you in the empty classroom and you
knew something was wrong and then you let it
happen again and again. OK. I can believe it.
Maybe it happened; you wouldn't be the first.
But the one about your mother, her fingertips
coated in lotion, rubbing your bare chest as
she tried to erase your budding breasts? The
chair was cold, her hands were warm. You were
obedient, pulled between pleasure and
confusion.
Are you sure that you're not confused now?
I don’t need my memory to tell me that I am a
skeptic. It's built-in, a defense mechanism,
maybe, or just hardwired into me. So you
could tell me about my life, the room done up
in pale pink, my chenille bedspread soft
against my cheek. You say he came in through
the window after I went to sleep and the
image is so surreal it could
be fantasy, the
fluttering curtains, the dark shadow of
stubble on his familiar cheeks. And then,
seven months later, in the same room, the
push and shove of labor and my mother
screaming. The silent bloody bundle that
neither of us knew what to do with.
Or you could lean across the table and tell
me my secret, say that I let him in, did
nothing to prevent it. The curtains didn't
billow: the windows were closed. I unlocked
the door and held out my hand for his. You
could cup your hands and whisper, "Some girls
get the ending they deserve."
No.
You could tell me and I would be polite about
it, would raise my eyebrows in mock surprise,
but inside I would fold your stories on top
of themselves, like the handkerchiefs I wash
and fold for my husband. I would make them
smaller and smaller. I would compress them
and leave them on the table for someone else
to put away.
Prompt: In the blink of an
eye (heavily edited from the original and
then avoided for a few weeks).
Image: Chair outside the Little
House, Fall 1986.
Swann song
I miss the tall ginkgos with their rotting
fruits, the way the berries felt beneath my
feet with just enough crunch, a pleasure to
step on. The sidewalk was covered with ginkgo
leaves, too, bright yellow fans dampened with
the rain. A storm had come through the night
before, had knocked the leaves off along with
the fruit. The air was full of the smell of
them, acrid, rotting, sweet.
We were lost and I was defensive about it,
but if you were going to be lost, this was
the neighborhood to be lost in. The street
was tunneled in by wide brick rowhouses,
voluptuous Victorians with turrets and
whimsical windows accented with stone. Each
house had a set of black iron steps, shiny
and slick, one-two-three-four, up to the
entry. The steps made little caves over doors
to English basements, a term which conjures
up mold and damp and a view of other peoples’
ankles, the angling of a dog’s leg as it
releases a spray of urine against low iron
window bars.
He got angry with me after I got angry with
him and we had an embarrassing fight in front
Martha, a hissy fit that revealed more than
we intended. A tense moment with the map
revealed my mistake and our luck: we were
three blocks from Adams Morgan, a short walk
to a few cold beers and a platter of
Ethiopian food. The three of us marched from
Swann Street to 18th Street, walked uphill
against a thin wind. It was getting dark,
people were bundled up against the cold. We
walked without talking, single-file past the
homeless, the crazies, the young people with
their know-everything attitude. And then we
shared a meal with all the awkwardness of
something being over, knowing we had years to
go before it would really end.
This is from a Round Robin
prompt this week, my (slightly edited)
response to a very different photograph.
Photo by
Antediluvial.
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.
Beautiful simplicity
When you go to the ballet,
sitting up in those nosebleed seats, don’t
look up at the ceiling. You might find
yourself dizzy with the height, lightheaded
on the knowledge of the distance between you
and the stage. The ballerinas are fleshy
blurs, their tortured feet rustle and tap,
sounding the effort of weightlessness. The
chandelier, heavy with crystal and planetary
glass, is so close you can practically touch
it. Your bones flutter with the thought.
Your mother has put you between him and her,
and you are wearing a floor-length skirt, a
little quilted number that befits the time.
1973. His fingers are thick. You remember the
marks they made when you were bad or weren’t,
red welts across your bottom, three broken
circles around your skinny arm. When you are
three years old, it doesn’t matter who makes
the rules or what it means to break them. To
be a three-year-old girl is to be too much of
everything: lower lip pout and high screech,
pounding footsteps interspersed with tiptoes.
You are flesh-and-blood will.
His hand kneads the bulb of the lacquered
armrest. As he reaches across your back to
touch your mother, the scent of underarm
sweat, whiskey and Vitalis floats into the
air. Below, the dancers’ feet hover above the
wooden planks of the stage, hard legs defined
under delicate pink.
His smell envelops the three of you.
From a prompt that morphed
into a longer piece. The longer piece
currently lies dormant on my computer,
waiting for me to be ready again.
Image from DanceHelp.Com.
The noises of destruction
One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.
It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.
From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.
Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.
Halloween, 1972
She and Paul shepherd you
into a blank-faced building with a mirrored
lobby. There is a gorilla in the elevator. He
stands upright and powerful with black fur
that tufts over his arms and legs. You dig
into your mother’s thigh with angel nails.
“It’s all right. It’s just a costume,” she
says and the gorilla, with some difficulty,
removes his head to reveal another one
underneath. “See?” he says. “Just a costume.”
Your heart flip-flops. The gorilla struggles
to replace his head and turns toward you, ape
face askew and fixed in a lipless grin. He
attempts to give the thumbs-up sign with a
rubbery hand. “Shit. How am I supposed to
hold a drink with this,” he says, tugging
awkwardly at his digits. More people collect
in the elevator: a flapper, a man in a Nixon
mask, a woman mimicking the hangdog face and
lanky body of Cher. Paul, making a joke, has
dressed in prison stripes, while your mother
has Cleopatra-flat hair and a beige tunic
with gold accents.
You flow out with the crowd toward a door in
the hallway. It swings open and Catwoman
steps out, revealing a room cloudy with smoke
and conversation muffled by faux fur and
latex. She reaches out with heavily lacquered
nails and rakes the hair under your halo.
People are always touching your hair, cooing
over your thick blonde ringlets as though you
were a doll.
The gorilla closes the
door.
This is an excerpt of a
work in progress. The entire piece isn't
written in second person, just those bits of
dredged-up memory. For another Halloween
story, read The
orangutan did it.
Image: Man in gorilla costume from
Compassionate
Spirit.
The intersection of food, love, and memory
If it wasn't frozen,
processed, or heavily laced with sugar, my
grandmother didn't cook it. I have her old
recipe box, which includes many selections
from the "Kitchen of Duncan Hines," as well
as things like Pow-Wow Sandwiches, English
Liver Bake, and salad molds, recipes that are
products of the sixties and seventies. My
grandfather made the box, designed it to hang
between the refrigerator and the stove in the
kitchen at Hollywood Beach. We use it to hold
keys now. One of the first things I do when I
move to a new place is to hang it by the
front door, a reminder of a past so long gone
that it feels like fiction. I may look
through the recipes, but I never feel an urge
to actually make any of them.
When the corn
and tomatoes are at their peak, however, and
I steam a dozen ears to eat for dinner
alongside a salad of freshly-picked tomatoes,
I feel a tug on the line that connects me to
those long-ago meals. Corn on the cob with
butter sits at the intersection of food,
love, and memory for me. It has the power to
bring me back to a time before I was born, to
Hollywood Beach in the late fifties and early
sixties when my mother and aunt were still
children, before my grandfather was
injured in
an industrial fire. On late July and early
August evenings when my grandfather was
working late at the plant, Mom-mom could
be persuaded to abandon the freezer and
let the canned food gather dust in the
cupboard. She would prepare farmstand corn
and sliced tomatoes for dinner, maybe add
some sliced bread on the side. Perhaps she
was feeling as lazy as Ludlam's
dog, unwilling to turn on
the oven or chop loads of vegetables,
happy with simplicity.
It's the only meal she made that my mother
and I still talk about. When I was a kid, my
cousin and I were given weekend corn shucking
duty, sent outside with paper bags to do the
messy work of removing the husks and
cornsilk. We would sit on the white-washed
metal lawn chairs out front under a canopy of
maple leaves, kick our heels against the
grass. After passing the naked corn to my
aunt through the side door, we would wait for
the moment at the table when we could smear
the cooked kernels with squeezable Parkay. I
was fascinated by the prongs, shaped like
tiny ears of corn, that Mom-mom stuck into
either end of the cob, and studied them
between bites, felt the neat rows of
miniature kernels like braille against my
fingertips. We ate until we are too full for
anything else but a thin slice of tomato.
You probably have summer food memories of
your own, can bring back an evening lit by
fireflies, your lips stained purple by
blueberry cake. Your parents didn't care how
late you stayed up and you got to light a
sparkler even though the fourth of July had
been over for days. Or maybe you remember
your mother, already unsteady on her feet,
placing a platter of swaying Jello on the
picnic table. You swirled the first bite
against your gums, pushed it between your
teeth before swallowing and then refused to
eat any more. After dinner you and your
brother played tag in the dark while the
grown-ups drank bourbon on ice and talked in
voices too low for you to understand. When
you slipped in a pile of dog shit, they
laughed until you started to cry.
Image: Recipe from my
grandmother's collection.
Education of an impostor
Because folding is the metaphor, see? For domestic knowledge and stability. For normalcy. When you don't feel normal and want to fit in, you observe and try to copy. Everything is a clue to the right way to behave. Nobody needs to know that you are an impostor.
Last night my small book
group met to discuss Michael
Ondaatje's novel
Divisadero.
It's a flawed book, or at the very least a
book that requires both careful reading and a
lack of attachment to resolution. I was the
only one who really enjoyed it. Yes, the
characters are damaged and abandoned,
solitary types with hidden motivations. But
they are my people, sketched out in
Ondaatje's poetic language. I can't be the
only one who knows how to fill in the blanks.
What I can't get from
careful observation, from cracking open other
peoples' linen closets, I get from books.
Stories show me the possibilities in life.
Sometimes I know
the characters,
fellow strangers in a strange land. There is
solace in the world of quiet ones, solitary
bookish people trapped in the amber of
personality and circumstance. Freedom is
possible. Maybe it is as simple as
self-acceptance and if there is hope for
them, there is hope for me. Or maybe there is
no hope and I should just get on with it.
“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refused to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” -- Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 136.
Without stories, I would be a series of events waiting for an author, searching for a unifying theme. Without memory, the raw material of story, I am nothing. But a strange thing can happen when we start to tell our stories, to mix memory with narrative: the stories can change. We can change. Our past can drop away, defanged.
I am here to gather the pieces and make them into something new, a narrative, a mutable monologue: this is who I am. If I'm lucky what I write will spark something in you.
Maybe it's time for another story.
Image: Me, Wilmington, DE, circa 1976?
More on the villanelle.
Marked by heavy hands
This is the sensory soup of
childhood. It is a mix of family and
location, of bad luck and lucky streaks. We
continue the pattern with our own children,
begin the silent lessons, mark them with
heavy hands: this is who you are, who we are.
Whenever my son smells oatmeal pancakes or
plucks a plump blueberry from a glass bowl,
the past will live. "You Are My Sunshine"
will conjure up a darkened room, my soothing
cuddle against impertinent wakefulness. He
may spend years in therapy trying to get my
voice out of his head, only to find that same
voice coming out of his mouth in middle
adulthood.
I can only hope that his experience is as
painless as growing up can be. Sometimes my
best won’t be good enough.
I remember being seven, lying on that
flowered couch in my grandparents’ family
room, my hand sunk into a plastic bag full of
cherries. Cold from the manufactured air,
goose-pimpled, I clutched a pillow for
warmth. The television, which was as much a
piece of furniture as an entertainment
device, was showing Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers in Top
Hat.
That night I would have another asthma
attack, whether it was because of mildew, cat
hair, cigarette smoke, or my own melodramatic
emotions is up for debate.
Image: Me and my grandmother,
Hollywood Beach, 1973.