Blinded me with silence
And, of course, we would call our crushes, just for the adolescent thrill of hearing the love object's voice, or knowing that the phone was ringing in his house. When someone answered -- was that him? Or his brother? -- we didn’t breathe heavily. Instead, we sat on the other end listening, our hearts beating faster. The relieved laughter came after we hung up the phone.
When I woke up this morning in the quiet after a night of lightly drugged sleep, in the silence of a house about to be filled with people, one of our crush calls came to mind, which I only remember because Maureen wrote about it in a letter at the time. Funny what sticks in one’s mind.
Phone: Ring! Ring! Ring!
D (my eventual boyfriend) answers: Hello?
Silence. My face flushes and my heartbeat quickens.
D: Hello?
Silence. Heart pounding.
D (blows into phone) woosh, woosh Hello?
Silence.
D (raps receiver with knuckles) knock, knock, knock
Silence.
D: Hello? (blows into phone) woosh, woosh… (knocks receiver with knuckles) knock, knock, knock
Silence.
etc. etc., until D hangs up and Maureen and I collapse into a heap of giggles on her dining room floor.
(D wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. I think he actually believed something was wrong with the phone.)
For D, this silence indicated a mechanical problem. For me, the silence was meaningful, it said volumes, told of my immature love and maybe held my regrets as well, regrets for letting him take something he shouldn't have away from me.
On its own, silence is fine, of course, it isn’t a bad thing, it can be totally neutral. It can be partially neutral. Or it can be a canvas onto which we paint our insecurities.
I've just finished reading The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir, a well-written and somewhat brutal compilation of three novellas on women going through crisis. One of the things about it that struck me is how each narrator interpreted the silence of the other (the wayward husband, the absent child), what the silence meant to them and how they created an entire story about what was going on in the other's head without ever having a conversation about it.
We each come with a history. The history has taught us to interpret signals, to read facial expressions, body language, and silence. I grew up in an atmosphere where I could get yelled at for entering the room and sitting down in the wrong way, where my very presence was apparently odious and led people to turn away from me, where most silences held anger and resentment. I am very versed at reading (or misinterpreting) the signals of rejection, to anticipating the moment when it will all end. Silence. An eyebrow raised. The friend with arms intertwined facing away from me. Furrowed brows. Frowns. The tone of a voice. I tend to go for the most negative interpretation and wrack my brain for how it happened, how I finally did it, how I gave away my true ugly self (this is not how I am really thinking about it, but I do think it's part of the underlying framework of my thoughts, one that I have been slowly exposing and rebuilding).
At least now I am aware of my reaction, of the way I read faces and stances and silence, and of the internal struggle between "what did I do wrong?" or "when will this person leave in a disgusted huff?" and the mantra of I'm ok, I'm ok, I'm ok.
Still, it's hard, these internal pep talks, these nights of deep breaths and afternoons of well-massaged panic. And each time I worry, each time I go down that dungeon path, I also have to remind myself that I might be right! That maybe the silence, the stance, the raised eyebrow does mean something bad. But that doesn't mean that I am bad or that the meaning will destroy me.
On some level, it seems ridiculous to make this clear and obvious to myself. Still. That's how it is for now as I renovate and rebuild this strong solid self of mine. I just have to accept it and get on with life.
Image by gilderic.
Desire's silhouette
Other people watched, too, like that guy in C-town who befriended my roommate and me, said he spied on us, that he used to take binoculars and set himself at a window in the house across the street, could see our nubile forms through the loose weave of the curtains. He told us about watching girls in the daylight, too, girls lying out by the pool in their string bikinis or one pieces with plunging necklines. He loved the beauty of young flesh, the fantasy of his hands on it.
This was being wanted. In the first case, the want was amorphous. Did D come in search of sex, for a bit of warmth, to see his face reflected in my eyes, all adoration, my sense of self shaped by his choice to be there? I tell myself now, practically thirty years later (oh aging, oh early introduction to sex) that he liked something about me beyond the thrust. We certainly moved past those early days, got deep enough for me to break his heart.
In the case of the peeping Tom, my value came from being a desirable object. Yes, it was creepy that he sat in the crepuscular fading of day to watch us undress or walk around naked or pick our noses or whatever he could witness through greened tree limbs and curtains and evening glow. But I had been taught that to be desirable to men, to be pretty and thin and – above all – yielding was not only proper but the way to see myself, the thing that men wanted to grasp, to kiss, to fuck. It was validation, a measurement of worth.
Darkness allows the stare through bedroom curtains, the ramping up of desire, desire of something, the warmth of another human being, the opening of legs and a mouth panting for acceptance, for the entry. We all want to be desired, we keep our baser needs in the dark, too, the shame of the unfulfilled self. The key is to get a sense of self from within, to accept the desire by others as an extra, the bit of honey in the coffee, the icing on the brownie, that soupçon of want that we separate from our self worth.
From the prompt "Black." This is something I wrote before 6:00 a.m. and returned to after getting home from a therapy appointment, the type of appointment that left an ache in my chest and a sense that the day has been bifurcated into distinct moods: before the appointment and after the appointment. It's a good ache, or a kind of good ache, but, damn, I wish it would go away now. It's affecting my ability to think. It's affecting my ability to be effective. It's affecting me.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This is a 12-minute prompt with a bit of editing,
Image by Smedenborn.
Erase you
These are the things she lost: the desert highway, a single lane cracking the parched earth, her parents in the front seat, their voices not raised but tightened. Her brother is sleeping beside her, resting his head on her shoulder and her stomach wants to revolt. She wills it to stop. Tight words, short. Her father takes his eyes from the road, his fist shoots from his arm, a move of precision against her mother's nose. The car goes silent. By the time they get to the motel with the pool and the sheets translucent as onion skin, the blood has left a trail down her neck and into her cleavage.
The smell of sugar and butter and flour, the standing mixer going on the counter, her grandmother’s fleshy arm, her swollen hand cracking the eggs. It’s a birthday cake. Or is it cookies? The memory is slipping away. She is left with sweetness and powder in the air, the oven radiating heat, the sound of talk radio in the background.
The boy with the scar just above his lip who stared at her for two years before finally speaking, his body language suddenly confident, the proprietary lean over her locker, his breath of spearmint, the circles of underarm sweat on his polo. He fades, turns into a man, and then the man becomes mist as well, all because of the night she picked up the telephone to hear whispers and dirty words. She read the pauses, pictured the work of hands and imagination, the power of language. And now the boy is gone, every version of him, the memories sucked away.
Spring. The soft green leaves, how they feel like thin rubber between her fingers, the competing smells of flora and fertilizer and liberated earth, the year she and her daughter planted sunflower seeds by the front fence. Every morning they would tumble from bed to see if the seedlings had pushed to the surface yet, the girl pulling her mother towards the door. Her daughter's first word was flower, she remembers that, and the memory warms her skin, gives her the feeling of dirt under fingernails. She pictures the arc of a hose, watches a pair of chubby feet stumble across grass. Flower. What does it mean?
What if. What if we could erase the bad memories? It’s a movie plot, yes, and also the premise behind the development of a new drug (or, really, a new application for an old one). Why not erase the bad? But what are we without our memories, good and bad, those learning experiences that made us? And what about the integration of sense with event, the way we cross-reference smells and songs with our stories?
Ralph Lauren’s Polo cologne, the ubiquitous background scent of the 80s, reminds me of a boy I knew just long enough to suffer the consequences, The smell brings back his small lithe body, the dance where we met, the quiet bit of nothingness on a bed in the Little House that led to my ruin. If I couldn’t identify the source of distress – if the smell made my heart race, switched on my adrenals without me knowing why – then how would I interpret it?
Instead, I use this stuff, his wrist with the heavy gold bracelet, the swoop of hair over his sweet young Italian face, the inexperienced handjob in the back of a family car and the way the girl doesn’t give a shit but goes along anyway. There he is at the cousin's wedding, a plastic glass of champagne in his hand. There they are in someone's parents' house, sitting on the steps after another messy event. I see his tortured face hovering over her by the light of a television. She is silent, always silent, silent and enduring.
From the prompt "We finally did it." I know that this drug doesn't really erase bad memories, that it's more subtle than that, and I know this topic has been tackled elsewhere ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), but it got me thinking.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I extended this one and it feels very much like a snapshot, a work in progress with lots of flaws.
Image by paulineRroupski.
Not about Oprah
She was on long enough that I associate her with high school and early college, with that stretch where my boyfriend D and I played house during breaks at his brother’s place while his brother was away (me with the pork loin and the cocktails and the afternoon television, him with the construction job and the dirty laundry, the laundry that I washed). In fact, I associate her with another show that is disappearing, All My Children, my soap along with that stalwart, General Hospital. She is part of this faraway world where there was cable, yes, but not so much of it, and no Internet, and cell phones were these monstrosities that you only used in your car, and didn’t we have horses and buggies then, too?
There I am in the living room with the shades drawn. I’m nineteen years old. I’ve cracked open a beer (some habits die hard) and dinner is cooking in the oven. I’ve set myself up for the waiting game again, trapped in this house because I don’t drive and it’s near nothing convenient. Oprah is on, she comes on after GH, and there is a row of transvestites or sad broken women on their way out of the gutter. She hasn’t yet gotten to the decades of largesse, where she gifts her audience members new cars, vacations, makeovers, husband swaps. D comes home a little late, musky, he smells like sweat and pot, and I don’t want to talk to him because of the pot. Maybe I’m a little drunk, too, from the half beer, and I’m tired of waiting, always waiting for him.
The passivity of it! My ass on the floor or on the sofa, the feeling of the waiting inevitable, waiting for someone else to take over the narrative. I’ve never thought of it as passive before, but now I see it. Oprah tells me I can do it, that it will be ok, that little abused girls with moxie and ambition can go anywhere, can roll out wagonfuls of fat in front of a studio audience. They can act, they can interview, they know what the people want. So I watch and I wait and when D emerges from the shower we fight some more.
From the prompt "Oprah."
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. I'm getting to the point in the RR where it's harder to write about things that interest me.
Image from the blog Dave's Lunch. I'm sure Dave got it from somewhere else, but if you want to see a blog with lots of pictures of a man putting food into his mouth, this is the place to go.
Written in the body
This man, the first familiarity, melts away and suddenly I am kissing my body double. His legs match the length of mine. His feet are tanned and small. Our similarities, the smallness of our combined frames, surprises me. I mourn the body who went before. It is the last time I let the physicality of someone, their solidity, the feel of their lips, the way their legs intertwine with mine, become an object of attachment.
When my body double leaves me, I don't mourn the loss of his corporeality. I mourn the loss of tenuous connection, the closeness of two damaged souls meeting periodically to solve the problem of the human need for touch. And when the next man comes along, his feet like miniature anvils, his body broad and short, I let the concept of physical attachment go completely. I don't record the feeling of him against me, the pressure of his hand in mine. It simply doesn't matter anymore. All that remains are the labels. After that marriage ends, I often catch myself almost calling the new man by the old one's name. A matter of habit.
This was the sloughing off of connection and association. We are animals of contact, of the burrowing together under covers, the familiarity of the loved one’s body, of their smell and the way their chest rises and falls, the cadence of their walk. I remember the first man best and after that let go of the musk, of the tracing of thighs and knees, of the texture of hair between fingers. I simply do not want to get too attached. The pain of the inevitable break is too much.
But to realize it! There I am in a fast car looking down at his feet, here I am on bright blue wall-to-wall and he is about to kiss me, here we are together at a country-western bar, talking talking talking. And here he is, boyfriend #4, husband #2, with me for over thirteen years now, the long history, the beauty of context. He knew Kevin, my mother’s cruel boyfriend. He met my grandfather, dead since Valentine’s Day 2002. He’s known my animals. He’s the father of my child. Our history goes on and I know the feel of his hand in mine, have cried in his arms, a sensation I have deliberately and slowly forgotten.
I need to remember again.
From the prompt "The key." But this had nothing to do with the prompt. I've been thinking about this bodily attachment, how detached I am from it now and why that happened. When I was up at 1:30 this morning, one of the images going through mind was of D's feet, his foot on the gas pedal, and how strange it was when I started dating J, how the differences between them were so obvious and palpable and how I missed what had come before. That was the last time I mourned someone's physical presence, more of my self-protection system doing its job overzealously.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I rewrote this one entirely, though I'm having a hard time taking it further. They've upped the dosage of the little purple pills (because that's how it works) and my thoughts are hard to hold on to this morning.
Image by William Degen.
Tain't no big thing
What is so appealing about going back to the beginning, before the assumptions build up and our patterns form, patterns of avoidance, of self-protection? One could argue he was part of the forming of that system, and he certainly didn’t treat me properly for the first two years, yet I look back on him with sweetness. Maybe it was because, at the end, he really loved me, and we were young enough to be optimistic, to think that life was only going to get better and better.
As I mess with my brain chemistry, with the way my neurons fire, I’ve been thinking again about love, the way it works, its chemical properties. My nonromantic self sees it as a combination of how the love object fits one’s past (in ways we may not detect) combined with a surge of neurotransmitters. Right now it’s hard for me to think of love as anything but a series of neural equations that extend until the chemicals start to peter out and it becomes a different kind of love. Familial. Or it disappears altogether.
In my dream, I told D that I loved him. He was noncommittal. We shared someone else’s bed in a strange house in the Netherlands. The room was in a basement, anonymous white walls, anonymous sheets, no windows. When the real occupant came back with his girlfriend, we had to leave. I struggled with my stuff, the bag of spilled earrings, the clothes on the floor, while D just up and left.
Love. Past + chemicals = delusion. Is this the optimistic future I had hoped for? Is this outlook just a case of another set of faulty neurons, of a brain bathed in sadness, stuck in a pattern of blah and don’t get used to it and how could we really know anyone anyway? I return to D because of the simplicity, his, ours, for the memories of wind-whipped hair in a too-fast car. I return because of the excitement, the fights, the stupid ones about the color of a boat or the cleanliness of the bathtub, the deeper ones that always ended in something closer, closer, not further away.
I don’t want to become more cynical as I get older and yet that’s what is happening. Maybe I’m on the precipice of a choice: a return to optimism and connection or the perpetual wading through the shallows of fear-based avoidance.
I’m scared. That’s it. It’s plain and simple and deep and all I want to do is look at its depths from a distance, but here I am approaching, one foot in front of the other, ready to run, run. My calves twitch. My heart betrays me. The fear is glassy and it reflects my expression and here I am, a foot extended ….
From the prompt "The first time we met."
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 by drusilla Lainee.
Confidential to Dissed in Detroit
You will have to rely on my accounts, on this unreliable narrator.
For Mr. Stop and Shop
Remember the night the streets pulsated, how the restaurant rug snatched at our feet, the pressure of the sky? "I don't feel anything," you'd told me an hour earlier, so we split another tab and entered the nightmare of a landscape alive, the trees tapping with bared bone branches, the apartment buildings and houses glowing temples to evil. At every pay phone you called your girlfriend collect, looking for calm in the bad trip. Finally we took a cab, a roller coaster ride along the DC streets with a grim reaper cabbie to my place in far-off northeast. And, yes, you slept in my bed, and no, nothing happened, but when my boyfriend, WASP #1, came the next day and I was so strung out and exhausted and freaked, he sniffed my sheets, looking for evidence. Like we ever did anything but kiss, and even then it was lighthearted, even the week before I left for Illinois and I thought I'd never be back and we drank sambuca and fooled around on the couch.
I'm lucky to know you.
For the one who was once my Platonic Other Half
How did those two men end up in our apartment? It was something to do with drugs. Were they connected to the "give me a cell" guy (who in my mind looks like Mike Tyson, but that can't be right)? It was winter and maybe I had already dropped out of school or was on the precipice of doing it and there were those guys and that's all I remember about it, the shiver in the living room, the undercurrent of danger. I'm not sure we could talk about it in person now. That moment belongs to the former us, the former we, to a friendship that crumbled.
We survived each other, the craziness, the tequila-fueled dances along the edge of the roof, the teary reunion at DC Space, the alcohol and strangers. We each have a son now. I'm relieved that there aren't any daughters in the mix. Girls scare me with their complications and symbolism. Or maybe I don't have enough confidence in my parenting abilities to think I could pull it off, could separate myself from my own girlhood enough to raise a girl right.
Oh: one more thing. Sometimes I still laugh when I remember the night you called M drunk and sang the Star Spangled Banner into his answering machine. There are some people I still want to do that to just for the surreality of it.
Miss you.
For Wasp #1
I was sick that weekend with one of those horrible stomach aches that still slam me every other month or so. We were at your ancestral home on the water. I was useless.
"Maybe you're pregnant," you told me jokingly. Mean. "Maybe I am," I replied sarcastically. Scared. A year later, we were on the phone and you mentioned your new girlfriend. I finally told you the truth. We cried. I mailed you a copy of the receipt as proof and we've not really spoken since.
For You Know
Haunted by history and habit, I phoned you a day late to tell you the news. We pulled through, worked together to prepare for his arrival, for the finest thing we've ever done. We had months and motivation and togetherness and then he showed up and he's still here.
I love you both. Will forever. No matter what happens. But you know that.
For Me
I know you still dance along the edge of the abyss, that you have to keep reminding yourself that with ambiguity comes creativity, that the solution isn't always simple and immediate, that no matter what it will be ok.
Remember this: the image of you with fists upraised, the permanent fighting stance, that gave way to a new interpretation, the tree in the meadow with a thick shaggy trunk, its branches feathered over with pale green leaves. You reach for the sun, you reach into the earth. You are strong.
Image: Flowers for the weary and ignored and forgotten.
I write this stuff and I believe in it with all my creative force when I'm writing it. Then I put it out there and doubt, doubt, doubt, until I write the next post and can leave this one to the past. Tell me what you think about it if you wish. Silence is ok, too. And if you see yourself here, know that I valued you enough to write about you, to hold you in words.
Forget me not
The muddy bottom of the Bohemia glittered with Budweiser bottles, the emerald necks of Molson 12-ouncers submerged jewels peeking out of the muck. Above, his daysailer, an stretched oval of white, bobbed in the wake of a speedboat. We were joined like in porno below the jib. From the marina a pair of binoculars focused on us, the watcher's eyes trained on the fools in the boat who believed in the false privacy of an almost-empty river.
"I don't know if I love him anymore," I thought afterwards, pulling a beer from the pack, letting him adjust the sail so the wind could drag us back home. We were browned and bleached by sun, by Saturday afternoons on the water. A starburst of new freckles marked his right shoulder blade. I counted them, added them up. Every trip started with a struggle, first with the boat as we pulled it from its grassy hiding place, next with him as we moved the daysailer onto the rollers and slipped it into the brown water. I could do nothing right.
If glass is made of out of sand, is the substrate holding the liquid in place, then we were returning the bottles to their rightful place, sending them home. The bottles became worm homes, mud collectors. They carried the memory of what they once were, of being small enough to sift through his fingers. The shards on asphalt, loose mosaics on the edge of driveways, scattered into cornfields, were part of the process, too, the breakdown, the slow return of glass to rock to sand again.
"I don't know if love him anymore." The thought followed us up the street to his parent's house. Inside, it smelled like him: spicy with a hint of sawdust, like soap, like freshly-dried paint. His mother, a rangy woman, gangly and tanned, was cutting the grass. We walked downstairs to his room and I collapsed into him, breathing him in, his family, the threatening safety, the years of sameness that would await. From the window, his mother's feet did their dance with the mower, the tip-toe push and back-up, her calves rippling with each move. He wrapped his arms around me as if I was a child.
I can hold on to a moment for as long as my memory holds out. I can warm myself with love, the love object, the glow of his attention. I can take the walk after dark cozied up to my man, telling my secrets, letting the tears flow in the dark. But I can't make the moment last forever. Eventually, the road beckons and I become a cliché of non-commitment: If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? Because I will remember everything about you.
Instead, I remember landscape: the crumbling decrepitness of fallow cornfields in the moonlight, the languidness of July air after midnight, the crackle of dead leaves on the oak as the new growth forced them out.
That evening, I found a baby rabbit by the birdbath, tiny enough to be practically newborn. My grandfather had cleared out the undergrowth at the birdbath's concrete base and left it homeless. I tended to it with an eye dropper and sugar water, made a nest in a shoebox. I let the creature sleep next to me, cuddled up against me for warmth. When I woke up, it was dead, crushed by my weight.
Motherless animals don't stand a chance.
He stopped by late the next night. I recorded it like a photograph, like a movie: a knock on the door, my head pressing into his chest, the thin fabric of his sleeveless t-shirt soft against my cheek. I switched the television off. Every night was what if, the romance of not knowing, the worry of the no show. He redeemed me again and I forgot my worries about love for the moment, for the sweet moment when he hovered above me.
Image: Small rabbit, Summer 1985.
I've taken license with space and time in this post, compressed events from a couple of summers together.
The kiss
This is where we did it:
In the back of my stepfather's car after the Sadie Hawkins dance freshman year of high school, my friends beside us, my mom at the wheel. It was my first real kiss with tongue, all for a relationship that lasted about three hours, most of them spent dancing slow, me in my Gunne Sax dress (burgundy, form-fitting with lace trim), you so short that you could rest your head against my chin.
Down at the beach, the moonlight playing off the Elk River, Led Zeppelin floating out of a car, the yellow street light making us into silhouettes as we walked away from the parking lot. We were arm in arm up the road, clung to the shoulder as a car passed. It was all anticipation, the best part, the tingle before everything tips, your lips against mine, me leaning my head back, back. A year later we kissed as I sat on the hood of your car, sweet, entangled, a moment I recorded forever in my mind: this is going on right now this is going on right now this is going on right now. I measure time against it even now, the way we can hold on to sweetness after it sours, can erase the bad for the simplicity of two bodies.
In musty movie theater seats, the armrests pressing into our chests, popcorn scattered on the floor, our shoes tacky against the remains of spilled soda. It was the second time we had not watched Ghostbusters. Your hands here and there, mine struggling against them. We were just this side of shameless. Our friends turned their heads. Later, you were sad. You told me you loved me. I see you now, see how much a part of the Eastern Shore you were, you are, like another life, the reality I could have lived, the ribbon of road that bisects cornfields and woods.
After dinner at the Iron Gate, you a gentleman, the long wanting kiss at the door. You waited deliberately to go further, three dates of gradually ratcheted passion, so by the time we got beyond extreme make out sessions, we were in love. I still dream about you, J, despite our almost total incompatibility on most levels.
In my apartment or on the street? Our first kiss is lost, all of them are, but I remember how we met "cute" -- me drunk (alone) on some horrible watery beer, making the walk after midnight through a thin-wind Illinois night, carefully stepping over the ice patches in the sidewalk. I struggled with the refrigerator doors at the 7-11, not noticing that the beer cases were locked because it was too late to buy. There was a witticism, likely yours, since I could barely talk. Did you know I was drunk? Were you drunk? Somehow I gave you my number. We made plans. We went out. Eventually we kissed. You spent the night a time or two. Made me a couple of Pixies tapes. We wrote letters to each other over break. You even picked me up at the airport. But then I met someone else.
After your marriage was over. Before: we held hands in your car and you told me you were poison. Later you said you hated the melodrama of that line, but it fit the situation, you at the end of a marriage, the unfinished business that made us impossible. We didn't kiss then, though I had dreams about it. We waited five months for the air to clear and then, in the fresh-scrubbed beauty of April, it happened. Arrangements for divorce. The kiss. The Squeeze tapes you lent me beforehand, me wandering around Champaign with my Walkman on, happy to be alive, to be chosen. Stolen lilacs, gallons of beer, the celebration of love and food.
In a bar in a different city, both of us drunk, you chain-smoking American Spirits. After closing time, we danced. You spun me around by the waist before losing your grip. I ragdolled to the floor, laughing as I got up, leaning back to find your lips. I'd seen you before at that bar, the nightly drunk, the troubled man, and knew that after I stumbled out the door, I'd never see you again.
After a day of laughter, back at my place, you lunging across the couch. A couple of weeks before, you told me you were "interested," but I was too confused and sad about my marriage ending to know what to think. Then, kisses on the couch, kisses upstairs, you falling asleep fully clothed on the bed, my first exposure to your nap talent ("Did I fall asleep?" you asked at 2 a.m. groggy and happy.) The beginning of something larger than I expected.
This is where we didn't do it:
On the Metro, you visiting from out of town, me living apart from my husband but still married, still a good girl.
Over my cubicle at the library, me blushing in your presence, you talking out your fears over turning thirty, how you wanted to make a film of me smoking and riding a scooter, wanted to capture the suppressed me, the relief of exhale. You were going to call it "Smoke."
During the Friday night dinner or maybe during a class, all of the other women batting their eyes, lucky to be in the presence of the young, cute, talented chef.
This is where we shouldn't have done it:
At the door. In the car. On the couch. On the bed. Against the wall. At the bar.
Anywhere mistakes can be made.
Image by gmayster01.
I was going to write something about my latent (or not so latent) pull towards self-destruction, or really I was going to write about self-destruction, the urge to be bad, in a fictional or evocative post, but a conversation with a Facebook friend about how I categorize my FB friends pushed me in this direction.
In case you are wondering: I have actually kissed 4.5% of my Facebook friends, have wanted to kiss 6% of them, and wish I hadn't kissed 1.5% of them.
Artifacts
But these tapes don't necessarily show that part of my musical history. They contain shared memories or were meant as part of my musical education. I've held on to them because I hold on to everything, old letters and pictures, ephemera from boys long gone. I hold on to people in my mind, too, keep them close and safe, warm in the glow of a shared past.
In no particular order, here are three samples:
The relationship mourning tape
The this is music you need to know about tape
Part of my musical education, a tape made for me by a Hollywood Beach regular, M, who was about seven years older than me and had a plethora of albums from the sixties onward. This was my first exposure to the Velvet Underground. It still has the best version of Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing that I've ever heard (and haven't been able to find anywhere else). Sometimes I track down Heartbreaker's Beach Party on YouTube because I want to remember M and the Hollywood Beach crowd, the beach bonfires, the alcohol, kind M hanging out in the background.
The college friendship tape
This mixtape is from freshman year in college, made for my roommate Martha and me by fellow Third Floor Nerd Floor resident Kitty Hill. Kitty lasted at our small liberal arts college for a year before going back to Cincinnati (and that is her real name: I'd love to find her). I lasted slightly more than a year and Martha finally graduated a few years behind schedule. I'm attached to this tape less because of the music than because of the fleetingness of the time it represents, that brief strange period I had in the dorms. My memories of Kitty include her drinking Purple Jesuses (grape Kool-Aid and vodka) and singing Unhappy Birthday on her birthday and the spring 1988 trip we took to Annapolis in Imran's crumbling Mazda RX-7 to see the Navy boys.
If I were to represent my current life in a mixtape, I'm afraid it would be high on the melodrama. That's where my emotional musical tastes lie at the moment, in songs that can coax the feelings out of me. I do better when I can cry about something else, something unrelated to the present, like a memory from 25 years ago or a song about someone else's pain.
I'll spare you the drama. Let's start with something fluffy and light, danceable, a nice accompaniment to a glass of white wine or sparkling water, that 80s classic, Things Can Only Get Better (thanks, Kitty).
Top image: Keep it in Mind, a clip from ZigZag magazine that used to be on the wall of the Little House. I regret tossing the old issues away.
Worth it at any price?
The above email came from my husband before he was my husband, when my last name was Ingersoll-Casey (there, now you know) when our relationship was about four months old, a few weeks before my divorce became final. July 1998. I remember the circumstances that led up to it well: a joint business trip to Santa Monica, some scheduling conflicts with getting together, my solo dinner at Locanda del Lago where I flirted with the Italian American waiter, an aspiring actor from Brooklyn. It was the usual -- for me, anyway -- early relationship feelings of uneasiness and worry.
The astrologer I went to a couple of months ago mentioned that I test the people that I'm involved with. "Expensive, but worth it," was the phrase she used to describe me. I'll take her word on it, that I'm worth it. It's true, now that I look back at the early days of our relationship and see in this email and another that I printed out back then, where my husband is talking about visits with various cancer doctors for his mother . . . I think back to my petulance, my demands: expensive. Time-consuming. Maybe overwhelming at first. Not good at holding back, at least not in the beginning, no matter if a parent has cancer or if you're also working on a dissertation or working through other personal stuff. "Look at me," I shout. "Notice me! Aren't I worth it?"
And yet he loves me still.
I've been thinking about what to write for Elizabeth Harper's fabulous Write About Love Project, going through my small box of love mementos looking for inspiration. The box has letters from D (love letters and very sad post-breakup ones), directions to my former crush's house written in his hand, an inconsequential note left at my E Street apartment by the philosophy student who broke my heart, a postcard from Estonia from Peter, a joke Christmas card from J signed with someone else's name, and various cards from my husband. It's a mix of ephemera and deep love and silliness. Maybe it's inspiration.
At any rate, I'm working on my piece, Elizabeth, though it still may take me a while to get there.
What I've been up to: finishing up my class, working on writing about love, still doing prompts, working on the new blog in dribs and drabs. And, last night anyway, not sleeping.
Clove-scented memories
I've barely gone through the letters yet, but one thing is clear: I was obsessed. With D, with R, with being bored, with feeling depressed, with obtaining alcohol (aka "impedimential liquids"). I cursed a lot. Joking insults between the two of us were common. We had code names for everyone -- common pink marshmallow, the Yick, the Dick. We covered the backs of the envelopes with jokes or long notes to the mailman.
And I mixed my metaphors, my music, my thoughts. In one letter, written on January 14th, 1985 on Susan Boynton paper (picture a mouse dragging an elephant, with GO FOR IT written in floppy yellow letters on each page), I wrote SKANK OR DIE! in angular print on the first page, as though I was some skateboarding fiend. I moon over D, who was seeing someone else at the time and apparently showed up at the Little House one weekend, which confused me. I worry over an English presentation. I quote extensively from Careless Memories, a Duran Duran song (also the name of a post I eventually deleted, but lives on in ignominious glory on feedburner), then conclude with an Echo and the Bunnymen line. On the envelope, I have other lyrics: Darkness, by the Police and Ha Ha Ha by Flipper. Geezopeet, as I used to write. Was I a fan of pop or punk or post-punk? At fifteen, I could afford to be flexible.
I'll probably be posting some of the letters here. Maybe. Most of them have peoples' names in them, too many to redact. I sound like a teenaged idiot. I sound like a broken record.
Here's a sample, part of a four-page letter I sent in September 1984.
First, the back of the envelope:
Then, my diatribe against Maureen's phone. Here I show my talent for the delicate insult. In my defense, I think "moralistic bitch" was kind of a pet name for her at this point. "Dumpkopf," however, is not only misspelled, but goes beyond the pale. Still, it's nice to have proof that I once talked regularly on the phone:
Image: Letter to Maureen, September 1984. Is this interesting to anyone else but us?
I had other post plans today, worked for a while before daylight on something, but it will have to wait for the weekend. Still have to finish my assignment for class, too.
False starts
him
In my intermittent dating life, I don't remember many "first" dates.
My first boyfriend D and I stumbled into each other in the dark, went from acquaintance to midnight visitor in a matter of days. We didn't go on a date until we'd known each other for a couple of years. My ex-husband and I were classmates. One month we were flirting at library school happy hours, two months later we were lamenting the love that could not be (because he was married, albeit very unhappily and long-distance), four months after that, his marriage counseling failed and divorce arrangements made, we were practically living together. There were a couple of now-nameless people in between, contrived experiences over candlelight. The meal out with the graduate assistant of my politics class, who later complained that I never paid for anything (it was the summer of poverty, when I wasn't even able to pay the rent on time). Hamburgers with the freshly-minted architect in Georgetown on Halloween, a night that ended with an awkward unwanted kiss as I exited the cab. Nothing came of them, no drama, no further relationship.
Even my husband and I just kind of fell into step. I met him at work, out in the library atrium where we kept the magazines. I remember thinking he was sweet, cute in his green shirt, and funny, especially because in our first conversation he made some amusing remark that I was just about to make (something that is a daily occurrence between us now). We worked together. I helped him with dissertation research. We became friends. And when my first marriage fell apart, shortly after I made the decision to pursue divorce, we became a couple. Was that dinner at Lebanese Taverna, a just-friends get-together, our first date, all that talking over gamey lebneh and unctuous stuffed eggplant? How about that cold, rainy March Saturday in Ocean City, Maryland, where everything made us laugh, from the wind-whipped, half-dead palm trees to the corny motel names, the night that ended with dinner in Annapolis and our first kiss? We just became, morphed from one thing to another, naturally.
But then there was J, my second long-term boyfriend, my first "first date."
I was 19 years old and a recent college dropout. J, 24, was a teller at my bank, cute with his blue eyes and unruly blonde hair. We had run into each other two weeks earlier when I was leaving the local bar. “I know you’re leaving with this guy,” he said as the room swirled around us, “but could I call you sometime?” I wrote down my number on a napkin and we briefly made small talk before I walked out into the heady March night air. My age was “discouraging” but he called anyway and we made arrangements for dinner.
So there we sat at the Black Gate, one of two good restaurants in our small Eastern Shore town, the same one where my roommate Martha had just gotten me a waitressing job. The lights were low. Romantic. Thankfully, Rebecca, our waitress, didn't card me when J ordered a bottle of white wine. We sat in silence as she wielded the corkscrew and poured a taste. This is how our slightly awkward evening started, lubricated by wine and romantic interest and the fact that people with crushes forgive awkwardness for the sake of proximity. Our sad three-year journey began with oaky white wine and, for me, the cheapest thing on the menu. Stuffed boneless chicken breast. Of the rest, I remember nothing.
I had dropped out of college only a couple of months earlier, just decided to quit halfway through the second semester sophomore year, a decision I made immediately after I turned in a philosophy paper declaring that I could no longer believe in god. I spent several weeks sleeping in and fielding phone calls from my panicked mother before Martha got me the job. We quickly fell into a late-night lifestyle, hanging out at the bar, staying up until 3 a.m. with our tequila and our gin and tonics, sometimes with drugs that would keep us awake until dawn. We befriended Joan, a college senior who was also waitressing at the Black Gate and didn’t mind downing a drink or two with us.
Joan, who would soon be dating J’s brother, had given me background on Rebecca and J before our date: Two years earlier, when J returned home from college, he was a manager at another restaurant where Rebecca was a waitress. Their work relationship quickly became an affair. (Picture illicit sex after hours on cool veneer tabletops, quickies against the rippled metal door of the walk-in freezer.) They were almost exposed when Rebecca came home late one night and had to explain the rug burns on her knees (picture two pairs of knees chafing on tired restaurant carpeting or pressing into threadbare wall-to-wall at J's house, the Sugar Shack). She came up with a story to appease her husband, and although plenty of other people in the small town knew what was up, he remained in the dark.
Knowing my date and our married-mother-of-two waitress had slept together, at least once in a position that resulted in rug-burned knees, added an odd element to an already stressful situation. Still, it brought a little depth to J, who up until this point had just been that cute friendly guy at the bank. Joan, who was working the night of the date, reported later that Rebecca was nervous, too, that her hands had been shaking as she pulled the cork out of the bottle, but I was too shaky myself to notice. I never found out what J thought of the situation.
One date led to another. The spring of 1989 was kisses and new love, drinks at the bar (Dirty Irishmen, Black Russians, Dark and Stormies), a drunken loverly haze sweetened by the scent of tulips and magnolias and the religion of sex. But as summer came, things went south. I took advantage of Martha, who was carrying us financially, and we had a falling out. She moved out early and slept with my barely-ex-boyfriend, D, whom I had also treated badly. When J was out of town on a family trip, I was unfaithful. By August, when I left for college in Washington, DC, Martha and I weren’t speaking and J and I were trying to repair things.
It was the booze, it was me, it was the fact that I was barely out of a lousy adolescence, that I was 19 and then 20 and then 21 and a mess. It was so long ago that sometimes I can’t believe that was me. I was grappling with myself, stuck, fulfilling my internal monologue that I was a bad person. It's a monologue I still battle against, try to remove of its resonating power. I battle it with good behavior, with the reminder that just because bad things happened to me doesn't mean I am a bad person, that I am good and as such will make the right decisions.
And I'm grateful to have avoided more first dates.
Related posts: I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin, Beware of Estonians bearing basil *recipe not included*, Love letter
Image by Lottery Monkey.
Other houses, other lives
Offer me tea, kombucha, beer in a glass. I sink into your couch or perch uncomfortably on the edge of the easy chair. I cross my legs and lean against the wall as your cat rubs his chin against my fingertips. On the opposite wall, you've hung a still life, a single mottled pear resting on a wooden pedestal. I want to pluck the pear from the painting, cup its coolness in my warm palm before I take a bite. The juice coats my chin. It drips on my shirt. I apologize for my lack of control, the drips marring your futon, ask you to forgive me my destructive ways.
Will you reach for the core? Do you fetch me a warm wet cloth and dab it against my chin, press it against the fabric of my shirt?
For now, I smile behind my glass. I gesture awkwardly, sit on my hands when they threaten to take me somewhere I'm not yet prepared to go. I note the stacks of papers, the dishes sitting out on the table.
***
1975, Kindergarten. My mother drops me off early at my best friend's house (whose mother is also my after school babysitter). The contrast between outside, the grey winter morning, car exhaust trapped in the air, and inside, the house sweet, warm, and comforting, makes my heart ache. In the sunlit kitchen, her family sits around the breakfast table. I smell pancakes and butter, syrup and sausage, coffee and cream. It's as though I have stumbled onto an extra family, intact and loving. I am grateful when they invite me to the table, but also embarrassed, as though they think I don't have breakfast at home.
The warm house, the sunlight against the table, the bronze copy of the Kiss by Rodin in the living room, the older brother's mysterious attic sanctum. It was my introduction to other peoples' houses, their dinner tables, the pantry with the garlic salt I sprinkled on my palm, the stairs that led from the kitchen down to a dark cellar, the sleeping porch off the office where a lobster trap hung in the corner.
***
The damp living room in the Sugar Shack, J's brother's painting on the wall (keep this coupon/drop this coupon). The rattan furniture. The college apartment with the bed on the floor. D's family's house with his grandfather's artwork (The Fall of Icarus, the family portraits), his mother's loom in the corner of the dining room. Family dinners, blurry with Grolsch and toasts (proost!). We met at the tot lot my first week in Berkeley or we introduced by mutual friends on a street corner. We were an old item, a new item, had barely touched, had already kissed (in Metro tunnels, on the floor at my place, on the tan couch with the dog looking on). Now here we are, exchanging parenting stories. Making out on the couch while the movie Hairspray flickers across the room. Spending Christmas Eve in sleeping bags on the basement floor because your parent's house is full of family.
1998. My husband's old family home, empty of people. His mother was in the hospital and his father was by her side. He wanted to show me this place that was so much a part of him, more the landscape than the house, though the house was that, too. I admired the open floor plan, stood out on the deck and breathed in eucalyptus and sage from the canyon that he and his brother used to scramble down. That Christmas was my first with him, the only one where we stayed apart. In later visits, we slept in his old bedroom on crumbling foam mattresses, listened to the coyotes howl from the yard while his brother cocooned in a sleeping bag on the deck.
***
Maureen's house. The front porch swing on Canal Day, the two of us wielding 20-inch sparklers at the line of cars leaving town. The mysterious plumbing, with separate faucets for hot and cold. The couches, formal downstairs, soft velveteen upstairs. The walls with their Williamsburg colors.
Gayle's house, midcentury, clean-edged in a neighborhood of Colonials. Boxy furniture, teals and turquoise, black and white. The tiny room she shared with her little sister, the slumber parties downstairs, watching Fridays and laughing at her goofy dad.
Climbing through Peter's bedroom window to sit on the tin roof of his porch, talking about James Brown or Tama Janowitz or Washington, DC.
Mr. X's apartment in Champaign, forbidden territory at first, then a love den with its treetop views and Ikea furniture, a little kitchen for the hollandaise sauce, for the bacon, for the hot and sour soup, twelve Berghoff bocks stacked in the half-size refrigerator.
Resting my head on DT's couch the day of my divorce (the early morning flight to Columbus delayed so that I almost miss the court appearance, the awkward lunch with Mr. X at Rigsby's or was it at the brewpub we used to go to, a sad heavy pint between us?). Hot July day mitigated by cool air conditioning, the blinds closed, the feeling of sadness and happiness, of relief and comfort. One thing ends, another begins.
***
I don't know what your house will bring. I will remember the way the light slants through the blinds in the late afternoon, that painting opposite the couch, the conversations built around a core of curiosity and contrast, the moments before, before, before.
Image: Another person's house (my mother's house), mid-1980s, by me
This started with a photo prompt and went off from there. I'm not sure what to call this, a mix of fact and fiction, memoir and concealed wish.
Disambiguation
I remember you, how you fit into my small world, expanded it briefly before disappearing, how you coaxed me into feeling comfortable before kicking me in the shins. You didn’t understand what you were doing. How could you? You were barely 21 years old and knew nothing of the rest of my life.
We talked, it was endless talking, you speaking, me listening, interested, supportive, engaged. It wasn’t until I reread your letter that I remembered we met in a Shakespeare class, though I can bring the class to mind, the prof with lank chestnut hair and metal-rimmed glasses. I loved that class, especially the paper writing, the way I could take a topic and mold it, how it was all about language. We were all about language too, discussions of plans, what we were working on, your school paper movie reviews, your thoughts on lacrosse, on philosophy, on writing.
Mid-October 1991: We stood at the base of the concrete steps by the campus convenience store. I clutched the iron handrail. I wasn’t wearing gloves and my hands were cold, my cheeks flushed. The ATM in the tiny bank on the hill still gave out one dollar bills and I was still in love with DC and all it meant, the power, the machine. The sun was low, the sky glowing pink. You made me laugh. Soon I would take the Metro back to my claustrophobic studio apartment where I'd eat mashed potatoes with plain yogurt for dinner again. But before that, I swam in the words, bobbed along your stream of consciousness. It was entertaining. Like me, you are a thinker. You’ve upped the vocabulary, have years of scholarship holding up every linguistic diversion, but essentially your approach, the free flow of ideas, is the same.
We talked before class. After class. About class. Did we talk on the phone? No matter, it was talking, always talking. I don't remember how it got romantic, but once it did, the air around us deadened and stilled. We walked in silence.
Another memory: a nighttime drive in a beat-up car to Gravelly Point to watch airplanes land at National Airport. The tall trees of campus swayed and blurred as I stared out the passenger seat window. At the Point, the planes lit up the water, blew our hair around, filled the air with fumes and noise. It was one of those moments that I was a part of and apart from, pulled into the drama of the landing gear, the inevitable worries about how close the planes were to the ground, and the anticipation of what was happening between us.
I wish I had kept a journal then, had some primary source to pinpoint our brief romantic turn. I remember the pain of it ending, but can scarcely concoct the joy of it beginning. Was the night at Gravelly Point before or during? The after has lasted years. Our brief romance? Weeks.
Autumn pressed on. It grew cold and dark. We spent an awkward evening at a Capitol Hill bar (you told me that Magic Johnson had AIDS, a shocking revelation at the time), we shared an awkward dinner at my place -- do I have the order of events right? -- and then you put an end to it.
The ending was painful, a deep heavy pressure on my heart, out of proportion to the amount of time that we knew each other.
As usual, I drank. I listened to James Brown (and Friends, Live: The Soul Sessions), to Robert Palmer. I turned the music up loud and danced. Cold Sweat, Out of Sight, Sneaking Sally Through the Alley, I'll Go Crazy: In the weeks after you dumped me, I gyrated in a funk frenzy around my studio apartment, jostled the roaches out of their hiding places, made the parquet floor shimmy. I danced until I was gasping for air, until my mind was empty and my heart numb.
I didn't know then that the future stretched before me, beckoned with promises that things would get better. At least I had a brain and some semblance of good looks. They would make up for my pathos. I still had time to create a life. Which I did. Two years later, I found someone (reasonably) normal and supportive who wanted to spend his life with me. With his help, I built that life up. I dug deeper than I needed for a foundation, the walls were two feet thick, and every window triple-paned. In the end, I left it and him behind. I knew I was capable of stability, that I didn’t need a fortress around me. But that was later. When I met you, I was struggling to figure out how to live like a normal person. I identified more with the homeless people scattered across my block, interrupting me on my way home from the Metro station, than I did with our classmates. I didn't let many people in. You were one of the very few I trusted.
Over the rest of that school year, I slowly shut down my college life. I studied for comps, wandered around the Capitol Building almost every night, reveling in the view, the beauty of the spotlit dome, the Washington Monument piercing the sky, my Walkman on Nirvana and James Brown and Ministry. I worked and read, drank and cried. J, my on-again, off-again boyfriend (did you even know about him?) visited sometimes, as did Martha, my old roommate. Some weekends I traveled to see them on the Eastern Shore. I loved them both. We each had pain between us, had gotten comfortable with the ambiguity, with our carapaces, our walls.
My last memory of you is from graduation, a crowd of twenty-somethings muted by robes, the campus swarming with parents, siblings, relatives. I looked up and there you were, focusing a video camera. Perhaps we smiled. I turned and walked away.
Later that weekend, after hours at Andy's bar in Chestertown, I danced slow to Frank Sinatra songs with Mark, a regular who was a decade my senior. He was a kind man, easy to talk to, no pressure. We slipped into a kiss against the wall in the back. I freed my heart without giving it away, knowing that J would be there again for me, or maybe you, that Martha was waiting behind the bar, that time would flow in and out and back again. Someone would find me, would recognize that I was worth more than I believed. I was getting away from this place soon. The rest of life was waiting.
"You've got to live for yourself, for yourself and nobody else . . . "
For a different take on this same time and the time immediately after, read Hello . . . Columbus?
Fantasy interrupted
The other night it was an acquaintance, someone I've known peripherally for a few years. He is an attractive man, truly tall, dark, and handsome, and I’ve always had a bit of a crush on him. There he was, in the flesh, soon enough half-naked. Things were progressing when I put a stop to it: my husband would be there any minute. The acquaintance kept coming up with schemes to get together at another date, every one involving bringing our children somewhere for a rendevous.
It wasn’t going to work and I felt horribly guilty about it anyhow. I don’t have it in me to be unfaithful. I woke up, in fact, still feeling that warm tingly make out feeling that comes with new love intermingled with guilt. Although desire and guilt are a classic combination, I prefer to experience them separately. But the thrill of it all . . . not just the physical thrum of kissing someone new – it was the emotional thrill of being attractive, the idea that this person liked me and wanted to kiss me, too.
I love my husband and what we have together. Keeping my family intact and spending the rest of my life with this man are important to me. I can't imagine my life without him. But then I get these crushes, have these dreams, and I think: I am alive, I want the rush, the fluttering heart, the chance to kiss someone new. I want just a little taste again of falling in love and I want it without any of the fall-out, the doubts and worries followed by mundane reality, the clashes, the little irritations, the chores. Each relationship starts with the threat of loss, the end is written in the beginning, and couldn't I just skip all that and go for the endorphins?
So I develop crushes (long term, generally -- I am faithful in these, too), which isn't particularly satisfying, but allows me to indulge in escapist fantasy, where I am the object of desire, but also a paragon of virtue and fidelity. Sometimes I distract myself from the slog and drag with imagined scenes of a different life, exciting and dysfunctional and fueled by pursuit. In this life, I would yield to melodrama and romance. I would love and hate and fight dirty. I would experience fleeting joy (and intense sadness). I would stomp out a path of destruction, but surely life would be interesting.
I've been thinking lately about what purpose these crushes serve. A way to escape reality? Yes. A method of distraction? Of course. Compensation for the fact that, as a stay-at-home mom, the only males I've hung out with for the last five years are my husband, son, and cats? Yes: I miss men. But some of this feels like an attempt to recreate my father in other men. I want to be seen, to be noticed, to be interesting to certain kinds of men, incompatible ones who ignore me, despite my desire for attention (just like my father? well, close enough). My long-term crush was cool, unemotional, truly unreachable. My (imaginary) pursuit of him was fueled by a desire to be seen. His coolness kept my interest at a low burn for years. It was a relief when I finally figured out the mechanism and let the crush burn out. Fantasy interrupted.
I soothe myself with the idea that I tamp down these desires because of a stronger desire to do no harm, and because I already have love. I experience more moments of happiness than I often feel I deserve. Still, a small part of me wonders if I haven't taken the darker path because it isn't an option, because I am not attractive, a boring little wren of a woman, not worth the pursuit.
So I write about desire thwarted, evaded, rekindled. I duke it out in my mind. I pick apart the impure thoughts as I push them aside. Nothing is simple. The thoughts have a source, the source has a reason, and over time I uncover it and cover it up again. I file my wants, I organize them and pack them up.
I focus on the beauty of life outside me.
From a few prompts: I woke up, Down to the wire, and the photo, which is by the talented Jane Underwood.
Scar stories
Early on, when the skin is fresh and tight and we are still hopeful in matters of love, we offer our scar stories. Enamored, we sit too close and trace each other's skin with our fingertips, tell of the night of the emergency appendectomy, the fall chin-first onto a step, the fist through glass. Later, as things get more intimate, the emotional scars get the attention. The stories grow more complicated: the nasty drunk of a father, the high school bully, the silence around the dinner table. It's a great show of vulnerability before the gates come down and love gets old. We find reasons not to trust. Our eyes dart to the side, to the ceiling, before they close in exasperation. The scar stories become faint irritations, reminders of our past.
My ex-husband had a scar I never saw. I knew the story of the kitten who gave him cat scratch fever, which led to the surgical removal of a lymph node on the underside of Mr. X's chin. As soon as the incision healed, he grew a beard to cover the scar. He was bearded when we met and was still in full beard the last time I saw him in person. The scar was his to hide. His third wife (I was no. 2) convinced him to shave it off, to show his scar to the world. I see him now in Facebook photographs with his infant in his arms, looking confident, clean-shaven, and happy.
Me? I have a short dark mark by my right eye, some jagged lines under that eyebrow. Car accident sophomore year of high school. The uneven triangle on the underside of my left middle finger came when I opened a package of smoked gouda with a dull knife on a car trip home to Ohio from Maryland. There’s a mark on my right calf from an old boyfriend’s too-sharp toenail. I don’t have to look to find it. I feel it there, remember the minor moment, the former intimacy.
As we age, the scars get more serious, the minor ones knit over with experience. These become our scar stories: The near-fatal car accident survived. The place where a breast used to be, where they excised the lump, removed the shrapnel. My grandfather was in his fifties when he was burned in an industrial accident. I never knew him without scars, his skin melted and fused, ears damaged by flames. He was always the cranky near-deaf man missing one foot, with knotty pine skin and thick fingers. No one cared or knew whether he had stepped on a piece of glass when he was ten or what that mark on his knee was all about.
When surgeons removed my mother's boyfriend Kevin's spleen, they left a thick track down the length of his abdomen, the ghostly shapes of surgical staples like railroad ties. Eight years later, after the tracheostomy, Kevin had a scar marking the experience on his neck, a scar that was reopened twice and didn't heal before he died. His frequent emergency intubations scarred his epiglottis, which meant that he couldn't swallow food properly. The food would go into his lungs, which was a pneumonia risk. He "ate" via a stomach tube for the last five months of his life. But the worst scars predated his illness. They were from his boyhood, from the beatings and the cruel words, the experiences that marked him from the beginning as the family scapegoat. Those scars affected the way he interacted with the world.
Physical scars are experience written on the body. It's the emotional scars that are more sly. They form when we aren't looking, maybe before we can even talk. They are pre-rational. These experiences change the way our brains are wired, help determine how we react before we are even aware of our reaction. And sometimes talking about them disturbs the memories, makes us focus on their creation in unsettling ways.
After about a month of appointments and increasing anxiety on my part, I dropped my therapist. Maybe it was a matter of therapeutic fit. But maybe I was stirring things up that were best left alone, tweaking scars because I thought I should, over a backdrop of bland therapeutic platitudes. Some emotional scars need space, to be apprehended on their terms in a way that acknowledges their integrity. After all, these scars mark our strength, our history. We survived. They served a purpose, protected us from total ruin, from being hurt again.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling impossibly scarred, I remind myself how far I've come since starting this blog. Telling my stories in my own time works. Maybe the best approach is to deal with the scars as they surface and to let them be until they do.
From a photo prompt very much like this image by dougfelt.
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 from my job at the college bookstore 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. A boyfriend 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 my boyfriend 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 Martha 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, Martha 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. Martha 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, Martha 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. Maybe Martha 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.
What actually happened 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.
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.
Remember part of me is you
Where it takes me:
*A hot Delaware day, late July or August of 1986, D. at the construction site. He wears cut-off shorts and a torn, sleeveless shirt, has wrapped a red bandana around his head to catch the sweat. Somehow on him sweat is sweet, necessary, like the damp of a spring rain. D. stands on a ladder at the roof line, swings his hammer. On the backstroke, the claw end meets his eyebrow, tearing a gash that requires fifteen stitches. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it, the blood, the truck ride to the emergency room, the endless bowls of marijuana that he probably smoked to counteract the dull throb. Later I held my fingers above the stitches, lightly kissed the jagged rays of black thread.
*D. at the wheel of the Newport Custom, gunning it over 100 miles an hour on Town Point Road, the flash of grey-green cornstalks rushing past the window, the curve before we reached the woods, cool and dark, my heart pounding, the tape deck blasting Manic Mechanic. I cupped the wind, I caught it, let it flow across my body to his.
*Early on: waiting by the flicker of the television set in the Little House, falling asleep to Kung Fu or Fantasy Island reruns, waiting until 1 a.m.. Waiting even later. Just waiting, sometimes for nothing, a replay of my waits of early childhood.
*Still early on: The weekend he rode his bike home from college, logging almost 100 miles, to wish me a happy sixteenth birthday. Me, waiting. Him, appearing at 10:30 or so, a reasonable hour, with a half-consumed bottle of vodka. My present. He knew I would be leaving Maryland soon, but he didn't know why. He didn't find out until after the drama was over.
But it actually wasn't a photograph that brought this back, it was a poem from one of my Round Robin writing partners last week, something about the love of men who work with their hands. D. was (and still is, I presume) a talented carpenter, a man who framed houses and built furniture. Despite the endless nostalgia of my brain, the way the past rolls out of my fingers and clogs up my mind on a daily basis, I don't think about him very often. He's from the far-away past. I don't wish I was back in Maryland living the life I rejected when I was still a teenager, making the roundtrip from home to grocery store to liquor store and back again. And although I look back on him with sweetness, the pain I feel in writing this surprises me. It's a secondhand ache, pain at his early treatment of me that echoed my parents' treatment, sadness at how I ended up treating him ultimately.
I still puzzle over how people drift away after love, after the intensity of the burn is over. In early 2002, when my mother's boyfriend Kevin was in for his final hospitalization, I called D. to talk once or twice. I called him because he was there during the worst of my teenage years. He was my closest friend then, the only insider. He knew Kevin as a healthy, often cruel man. D. was there through nights heated by kerosene and electric heater, he held me when I cried, and he cried in my arms when he found out about my pregnancy after the fact. So I called him from Kevin's hospital after a particularly harrowing day. I was nervous, paced in front of the wall of windows in the Critical Care Unit hallway. We had an awkward, didn't-I-used-to-know you conversation. D. didn't remember much. Who can blame him? It wasn't his intense life, it was mine. I remain the only witness.
When old friends disappear, a bit of our memories go with them. I mourn the shared experience, the fading away. I wish I could gather them all up, friends long gone, the ex-boyfriends, the ex-husband. We would talk and laugh again, would remind each other of our once-live connection. I would pull them with me into the present, link the people we used to be to with who we are now. I would tell them, "Remember part of me is you."
Image: Pixelated D. in the Little House, Winter 1985/86. Some of my readers know this guy and I feel a little strange for putting his picture out there. Hence, the pixels.
Some of this is from a prompt, "Rectangular."
Because I craved the contrast
I moved west in part to escape the relationship, to wash the taste of salt and blood out of my mouth. And there was Shelton, clean-smelling, like soap, like a freshly-washed window, sitting across the aisle at our graduate school orientation. He was thin and pale with a cap of dishwater blonde hair. When he contributed to class discussions, he pushed his rimless glasses back and wiggled in his chair before over-intellectualizing a dot point into a master’s thesis. Silence filled him with anxiety. He adorned it with linguistic frills, explaining simple concepts with an academic loquaciousness. It was cute, for a time.
I've been working on a short story and doing very little other creative work (outside of the Round Robin). This is an excerpt of my story, still in infant form. And since I'm in the middle of it, I have absolutely no perspective on its quality, but I wanted to put something out here, a crumb, a thought, a naughty word, a study in contrasts.
The bitter scent of coming winter
I remember preparing a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.
Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi, tucked among thick slices of potato. My husband and I grow sage in our front yard. The plant sits between the flat-leafed parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver green leaves upright, purple flowers still drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon, deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider webs in preparation for the feasts and sadness of fall.
Here is the original recipe, from Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons slivered sage in the last ten minutes of cooking to recreate my more winter-scented dish.
Roasted Autumn Vegetables
1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired
In a bowl, toss together the potatoes, quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled large roasting pan and roast them in the middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25 minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally, for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the vegetables with the thyme sprigs.
Gourmet
October 1990
Image: Attractive sage bush, much nicer than ours, from eHow.