The beast with five fingers
But right now, I am balancing my two 42-year-old hands on my laptop. Later I will use them to grasp spoon, knife, bowls. I will run them through my wet hair, I will pat the boy and the dog and the cats. The hands work, they are mine, with little scars from little accidents, and I am grateful for their smooth movement.
I used to watch old style horror movies on Saturday afternoons when I was a kid, schlocky things on the UHF channels. After I saw The Beast With Five Fingers (with Peter Lorre!), I imagined my hands somehow escaping from my arms at night and tiptoeing around whatever poorly heated mildew-laden apartment my mother and I lived in at the time. They would climb the pipes in the kitchen, play with matches in the dark, crawl into my mother’s room and watch her, stroking her hair as she tossed and turned. If I was lucky, they could figure out how to open the front door. My hands would be out on the street, watching the stumbling adults with their twisted agendas. My hands were pure, but they wanted to watch, they wanted to learn what adults did under the cover of night, while inside I slept under my Mickey Mouse blanket.
Thank goodness I never woke up gasping for air, in the middle of another midnight asthma attack, only to discover that my hands were missing, that the things I needed to grab my inhaler, to push my covers down before leaving my room to wake my mother, were gone, out on the town, watching the dissolute souls tying one on at the corner bar, the hands making plans for our adulthood, for the grasping of bottles and other people, for the long slow stroke down another's back.
They've been corrupted, my hands. They know the scene, they've played the games, they can't be trusted. Sometimes I let them take over just to see what they'll get up to, to watch them feed their appetites. Eventually they'll forget their grasping neediness, the way they always want more and more. Time and arthritis will tame them. My hands will start to fall in line, to fit the expectations people have of the old. Wine glasses and beer bottles and stolen cigarettes will be replaced by warm milk before bed and weak tea in the afternoon, and when I do hold that grandchild's hand, if I make it that far, no one will suspect my hands of their crimes. We will be innocent by association, trembling with the memory of what we once held.
From the prompt "Reaching out."
Image from Black Hole Reviews.
It's a very happy day
I love my birthday.
I love things about my birthday. It’s in the best possible month, October, when the skies are generally blue and the weather is often beautiful, just warm enough with a breeze that brings the tantalizing threat of what is to come. My birthday usually falls on a holiday weekend in the U.S., so I often have the option of getting out of town and making it special. I like the fact that I am here, existing and struggling and sometimes feeling intense joy, or normalcy, or pain in all its exquisiteness. It is cause for celebration even as the years plunk down one on top of the other.
But every year on my birthday, a strange melancholia strikes me, a feeling of distance between me and the world. I am trapped in my own head. This happens on other occasions, too, like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and even on the birthdays of those who are closest to me.
I remember keeping my birthday a secret in elementary school, avoiding the songs and the typical drawings of birthday cake that each child was required to create and hand to the birthday girl. I was proud of my quiet deception. This may have been because I didn’t want to be noticed. Or maybe I liked holding on to a fact, a piece of me that no one could have.
Later there were slumber party birthdays (six screaming girls conducting séances and looking in the family room mirror for Bloody Mary) and even later the college bacchanals where the drinking started early and I was supposed to consume one drink for every year. Later on things calmed down and I had dinner with other people, my boyfriend’s family and later my husband and then the husband and the kid.
Today, probably tomorrow and on the actual day . . . I’m moody. Clammed up. It’s not the kind of feeling I want to dwell on. I’d like to snap out of it. The day is gorgeous. It’s calling for me. The house is empty. I’ve done my studying and some of the boy's Halloween costume preparations. Even if I didn’t want to go out in the world, there is plenty to do here. Perhaps after I post this, I will do it, get off my ass, get out of my mind, and get back into life.
First, let’s talk about my real birthday, the one coming up on Monday. My 42nd. My former stepfather used to tell me I was like a 42-year-old woman. He meant that I was too serious, a little girl with a furrowed brow who offered smiles only to those she trusted and her trust didn’t come cheap. It wasn’t a kind assessment. As someone who is almost there, I raise the metaphorical finger to him, something I couldn’t have gotten away with as an 11-year old, but can as a 42-year-old woman. One of the benefits of age.
42. It’s the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. It’s eight years from 34 and eight years to 50. I’m accepting the fact that I am aging and changing, that there are things that I may never get to do again, but that there are also ways in which I have become more myself, have a deeper understanding of life. There is always a flip side to loss. I have to believe that through loss we gain something intangible, strength, or knowledge, or depth, that each year brings deeper understanding no matter what possibilities fall away.
Enough of the melancholia. I am going to accept my mood, not fight it, but not indulge it either. I am going to turn off the computer and open the door. In the sun-warmed herb-scented air of the garden, I will sit in the light and think about connection and love, feeling the rays of hope shining from my battered heart out into the world.
Happy birthday to me.
Facebook friends -- I am taking a break from the FB, pretending like it's two thousand and five. Or almost like that. But I will be back. You can always drop me a line at writingtosurvive(at)gmail.com.
The image is of Nick Cave in his Birthday Party days and the title comes from the lyrics of Happy Birthday by the same band. Not most peoples' cup of tea. You have been warned. Image from Made to Measure NY.
Forever young
It was true, I would sometimes see her getting out of her car at Northeast Liquors by the golf course, alone save for a yapping rat terrier in the back seat of her boxy Ford. I was always gliding by in a car, in the passenger seat, my mother or boyfriend at the wheel. The cars were small or large, old clunkers at any rate, with gas gauges that were out of tune, the remains of someone else’s childhood on the back seats, the scuff marks of small rubber soles, the sticky soda stains.
Once, in the confusion of spring, when all the kids wanted to be outside, making out under the bleachers or smoking pot in their cars, Elliot, my blue-eyed middle school crush turned 6’2” stoner, offered me a line. Of what – speed? cocaine? – I don’t remember, but I took it. I snorted a line of something in social studies class while Mrs. Ackerman lectured us in her high whiny voice, the voice of loss of youth and idealism. A few months earlier, I had scored some mushrooms for Elliot, courtesy of my older (also stoner) boyfriend. Maybe he was repaying the favor. I don’t know.
She talked on and on and we looked at her with the cockiness of 16 and 17, disgusted with her weakness, the weakness of flesh and adult predilections. My mind in a rush, my words suddenly tumbling, and the images, too, I tried to imagine her as we were. Perfect, without decades of questionable decisions behind her. We would never drone on to classrooms of hormone-engorged teenagers. We would do amazing things, would never get old. There would be no rumors of our youth, and when people looked at our old pictures, they wouldn’t be able to see the difference between yesterday and today. Our skin would remain tight, we would always be up on the latest music.
The 80s would last forever and so would we.
From a photo prompt that wouldn't look related to what I wrote, but is in a roundabout way.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image (from found film ) by hartman045.
The forever passenger?
At 41, I'm still more than half a lifetime away from old old age. I don’t feel like I’m in my forties, though I am more tired and less connected to pop culture than I ever was. I am afraid for the future, for what is to come, and once again, I wonder what the point of it all is, living. This isn’t a new thought for me, worrying about the meaning of life in the face of sadness, seeing life's trajectory as expansiveness followed by loss after loss after loss (and the losses start early for some of us). I am prone to seeing life through cracked and blackened glass. Still, if we’re lucky (??), we get old. Our bodies melt and harden in place. Our minds leak information. We lose ourselves to time and free radicals and the sun. It’s built into us. We were made to deteriorate, to go from growth to rot in an alarmingly short period of time.
The best that I can hope for is that my memory will hold the beauty of my youth, the baptism in muddy river water, the singing in my bones as I walked under cherry blossoms, the spring night I pulled my boyfriend into a spreading azalea in full bloom near the Capitol building, the taste of good bread and ash-covered goat cheese and basil on a slow Illinois summer day. Imagination and memory allow a perpetual escape into youth, into love, into a rich internal world that almost mimics reality. Slowly my body will give up and fade. My eyes will become watery, my eyesight hazy. I will hear nothing but the buzz of my own fritzed mind. The past and present will intermingle in the never-ending movie in my brain.
I want to remember the good things: the feel of my grandmother’s bed in the air conditioning on an Eastern Shore July, the sway of my swing as I pushed against the maple tree, the first time I felt love, hot, intense, sensual. I want to remember the leafy smell of spring at Hollywood Beach, the thrill of first touches here and gone, the feeling I get when the words rush out of me and make sense without effort. Memory is the only escape I have. I am setting the stage now for the good ones. I don’t want to spend my last years caught up in the Little House, the waits, the quietness at dinner tables, the feeling of grief revisiting me again and again and again. That scares me more than losing my ability to walk, to see, to hear, this idea that at the end I'd be trapped, stuck in childhood, weak and dependent, the forever passenger.
The forever passenger. A funny thing to come out of my fingertips, rushed and without effort. Because that's what I am at the moment, a passenger. I'd like to believe I could just think my way out of this one, come up with the proper memories (the sweating glass of Coke on ice on my grandmother's bedside table; the moment of escape from school, pulling out of the parking lot in Lisa's car on our way to somewhere, anywhere, else; the conversation that doesn't stop, that is pure comfort and challenge and attraction) to inoculate me against the bad memories (waiting for my Dad to never show; waiting for D to eventually show; the ache of never being good enough, for being left in bad circumstances). But the first step is to leave the passenger's seat, to take control, to propel myself on my own power.
How long can I write about this shit without taking action? What does action look like? If I start at the beginning of this blog, go back three years, I can see progress. So I'll have to trust in the process. I'll have to give myself a kick to get started, too. Tomorrow, tomorrow, right? After the tears have dried and my heart has healed. I'm taking small steps to get there. I'll be there eventually, in spite of my current emotional wasteland. I'll make a plan. I'll trust in small things. And, hopefully, I'll stop writing about it, letting off steam in this safe contained way.
From today's prompt, the winner. Edited and expanded.
Image: Chair outside the Little House, circa 1986? I've used this before, but just like I have certain songs I return to, I have certain images that stick in my mind. The earlier incarnation was in the post Thanks for the memories, from a little over a year ago. It starts "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." Memory and selective forgetfulnes. A theme.
A facsimile of truth
“You come up with the first sentence and go from there. Don’t think about it any more than that,” she told me as she looked over the tops of her reading glasses. Giving writing advice like she knew what she was talking about.
“It’s like I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other," I replied, "like I’ve never learned how to walk, metaphorically speaking. And who am I to think I can tell a story? I should have taken up poetry.”
“Leave it to you to make poetry sound like the easy way out.”
She waved at me dismissively and returned to her biography of Virginia Woolf. I no longer recognized her hands. Sometimes I would find her staring at them, too, the swollen knuckles and liver spots, the transparent skin. We were both thinking: is this what life comes to? A brief period of expansion, of shining hair and growing strength followed by decades of shrinkage? Aging, the long great loss of looks and faculties, terrified me. Yet it was happening to me. Sometimes I thought I visited her for the contrast, for the feeling of her papery skin against my plumped cheek. I planned to off myself before I got to her age, to embody the cliché of living fast, dying (relatively) young, and leaving an attractive corpse. Except I could stand to lose forty pounds and I wasn’t sure that being a law-abiding reference librarian qualified as “living fast.”
My mother had already set up the scene. Her life had become this room, food and liquid ferried in by home health aides, a bedpan on stilts to hover over when the need arised. Twice a week Noelle gave her a sponge bath, wheeled in a basin of soapy warm water and scrubbed off the must. Some old people stop washing. It is no longer worth the effort, or maybe they don’t notice the stink. But Mother didn’t sweat. She didn’t do anything. Frequent scrubbing aggravated her sensitive skin and a daily splash of scent covered some of the rot.
She slept, briefly, book still poised in her hands. She was a talented napper, had always been able to squeeze in rest. Me, with my permanent eye-circles, my aching temples and nap frustrations, I wasn't so lucky.
Her eyelids heaved open. “I made a point of never lying to you.” Here we go again. “There were no myths about the Easter Bunny, about Santa. When you lost a tooth, we just handed over a quarter. There was no sneaking about.”
“But what about that night with Henry?”
“Oh, him.” She let out a woosh of air. “Henry was just a friend.”
This room used to be mine. The walls were semi-permeable, let the moods of the household flow in without flowing back out. Everything was pink, from the rug to the ceiling to the canopy on my bed. On the night in question, my father was away on business. It was early summer and a breeze tapped on the blinds. Max, our fat tabby, pressed himself between the slats and the screen in my window, staring at the shaking leaves. I was supposed to be asleep, lights out by nine for the nine-year-old. But the house was restless. She was restless. The doorbell rang at 9:15. Their conversation was unrelenting, words like waves, eating away at my calm, the low rumblings and crashes of talk. I smelled pipe smoke, candle wax, the clean burn of the gas fireplace. My head pounded. The mattress felt like it was resting on gravel. I waited in the dark, tossed and flipped until my sheet wrapped around me like a shroud. When I woke at 6:00 a.m., I found my mother on the couch, snoring under a thin blanket, two glasses sticky with liquor on the the coffee table.
I recorded the white lies, the outright fibs, the sins of omission, the cover-ups. All children do. I was just more canny about it. I remembered.
Henry showed up periodically for family dinners. He was tall and extremely thin and dressed in an early 70s professorial uniform, tweed jacket with arm patches, a pipe that probably contributed to his death from mouth cancer. He and my mother had met in a freshman philosophy class. I tried to picture them in 1959, fresh and young, earnest in their discussions of Nietzsche and Sartre, living the cliché of what it was to be aware and thinking in those fraught moments before the sixties, before her marriage to my father changed the game.
“So, you don’t tell a kid the story of Santa Claus and that makes you honest?”
I didn’t know why I continued these conversations.
“You know what mistake most writers make today?” Now we were back to writing.
“No, Mother. I don’t.”
“They make it too complicated. They toss too much into plot, subplot. Isn’t the reality of life enough?”
As she continued to speak, I buffered myself with lousy poetry, described and contained her in my mind.
My mother’s hands
no longer grasp
the glass of bourbon,
but instead
hold onto the memory
of things that never happened.
Totally false. She wasn’t a bourbon drinker and her memory is tight.
My mother no longer drinks coffee,
but inhales the smell
of water filtered through
roasted beans
left on the burner
until all that remains
is black sludge.
“Phoebe?”
I looked up.
“Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”
I shook my head and excused myself from the coffin. The rest of the house was bright, every curtain open. I stepped into her old room, into the walk-in closet where my father’s clothes hung, carrying the scent of cigarettes with them. Outside it was a May Saturday haunted by ghosts of other May Saturdays, the hum of the mower and the over-green smell of freshly cut grass, the chaise lounge getting damp with my sweat. I traveled in nostalgia and every turn brought me back.
It was a curse, a narrative without ending or moral, just endless scenes and scents. I wished I could transform it into a story, into paragraphs, with twists and turns and a narrative arc, and if I failed at that, into poetry.
Henry died six years ago, alone.
When my mother and I cleaned his apartment
I found a box of photographs,
her naked in black and white,
and decades of her letters,
the last one a month before he died.
My mother used to tell me that I knew nothing about poetry, that my language was rich without structure, that I should keep a notebook of words and impressions. When it was full I was to toss it into the air, to watch the words fall and form themselves into a facsimile of truth.
Image: the dark room by ~Mongibello on deviantART.
I am trying to rid myself of the shoulds -- what I should be writing about, how I should structure my fiction. I have to let go of some ideas about length and structure and just accept the fact that I have themes that I am drawn to (family, guilt, the past as constantly present, the difficulty of connection, what it takes to be good, to be loyal, how we handle betrayal and the trampling of trust) and that borrowing from my life is ok and necessary at this point. There are risks in all of this, the most terrifying of which is the risk of writing lousy crap. But I'm hoping (and thinking) I usually write better than lousy crap. Serviceable writing is fine for now.
Oh, and this is a draft.
Sweater dress logic
That's me up there, in our office/guest room/exercise space, dressed in full stay-at-home mom regalia. Baggy cropped pants? Check. Shapeless long-sleeved t-shirt? Check. Hair in desperate need of a cut or at the very least a comb? Oh, yeah. And then of course, there is the room itself, the armoire mirror obscured by smudges, the partially-made bed, the pillow propped on my desk chair so that I don't get a backache when I write, the old boxes in the corner that my mother puts in the back windows at night during her visits to block out the neighbor's porch light (she likes to sleep in near darkness). Welcome to my glamorous world.
I don't tend to get dressed up during the week (or ever), because what's the point? Most mornings I sit around writing or letting my mind go in four or five dark directions, and afternoons are kid time. I'm not going to put on my fancy spandex pants to go to the library. Over the years I’ve worn many short and form-fitting outfits, but since my son was born I've apparently given up on looking good. It isn't worth the bother or the expense, and who am I trying to impress? My husband finds even frumpy-mom me attractive and I have no female coworkers to dazzle. The game of dress-up, of wrapping myself in appealing fabrics and styles, is no longer familiar.
But feeling frumpy is depressing, so I'm starting to think about what I wear, to attempt to dress like I'm still in the game, like I haven't given up completely on feeling attractive. It takes work, sometimes it isn't worth it, but I make the effort. I've started to go shopping for clothes in person again, not online or at outlet stores, but in resale shops, places like the Crossroads Trading Company, where I might find funky, offbeat duds on the cheap, where I'm likely to find interesting options in small sizes.
This is where I found the sweater dress.
The dress was short, slate blue and formfitting, with a princess waist and a cozy turtleneck collar. It went well with a pair of knee-high black leather boots that I bought at the same store. When will I wear this thing? I thought, but clothes shopping often puts me in fantasy mode, a sunny place where I shower seven days a week and get my hair cut four times a year, where I remember to brush my teeth hours before I pick up the kid from preschool, where I decide to put on cute dresses every day instead of baggy pants. The dress was under twenty bucks, so I went for it. I made an investment in fantasy. My husband and I were planning a nice dinner at Oliveto to mark the completion of his dissertation, so I had an occasion.
On the evening of our dinner, I laid next to the boy as usual, waiting for him to fall asleep, for his breathing to become even and light before I tiptoed out of his room to change. Boy asleep, dress safely on, I applied the tiniest bit of makeup and pulled my hair back. As I creaked down the steps, my husband was talking in the living room with our babysitter. She is freshly twenty-one, effortless with both adults and children, and as I came closer I realized that I was wearing a dress, that I was wearing the dress. It was as though I had just put on a buttless formfitting leather jumpsuit. I felt exposed, like I was pretending to be something I wasn't, a young person, a stylish person, non-maternal.
I had brought a coat with me downstairs and I whipped it on before the babysitter could see me, then ran behind the magazine rack to put on my boots. Indecency covered, I fluttered out the door with my husband before she could notice that I was dressed as an imposter, that I was attempting to play the part of an attractive, stylish woman. And in the cold restaurant, I kept my coat wrapped around my shoulders, covered my cheap disguise.
Did the blame for my discomfort lie within me or was it the dress? Was I over-thinking the whole thing? (Remember how neurotic I can be?) The dress had one more chance to prove herself. We had a cocktail party to attend.
The party took place in a typical Berkeley house, a small two-bed, one bath, and it was hopping by the time we arrived at 8:30. It was my kind of crowd, mainly parents that had escaped their kids for the night, a mix of thirty- and forty-somethings. The women were brightly plumed, showing off cleavage and shoulders, wearing dresses in thin colorful fabrics. The room was a tangle of bare legs, and men in dark colors, of manicured toes peeking out of exotic shoes. I felt positively demure in my turtleneck sweater dress with black tights and scuffed black boots. The princess waist seemed too youthful, like I should have had an oversized lollipop in my hand instead of a beer. And it was hot in there, so steamy that a bloom of sweat broke out on my wooled-over torso. I could have removed my boots and taken off my tights, could have swung the tights seductively around my head, grazed the faces of the other partygoers before tossing the hosiery out of an open window. But instead I pulled on my turtleneck, looked enviously at the bared collarbones around me.
Apparently clothes are all about context.
I haven't given up on my sweater dress or on regaining my fashion mojo. But I might need to start fresh, to begin with the foundation garments. Next week I will jettison my vintage underwear collection for a more contemporary look.
You won't be reading about it here.
First image: Me, in the office, this morning. The frump-quotient has gone up since then. I got cold and put on a fuzzy sweater and socks.
Second image: Sweater dress.
Lordy, lordy
Guess how old I am today?
Just add one to this number.
I'm fine with it. Really.
Image: Me in 1970 at Hollywood Beach.