Lure

I flicked a career away as easily
as I tossed down shots of vodka. The brown shoes and
heavy overcoat, the thick wool suit in regulation
blue, opaque hosiery that marked red rails around my
waist, that made a serpentine path from my navel
down: the uniform is all I remember, how the wool
smelled alive in the rain, the flecks of mud that the
shoes, too high for the job, splattered against my
ankles as I walked.
If Robert hadn’t kissed me, I probably would have
stayed. We were in the claustrophobic break room,
sitting a little too close, but I liked it that way.
He smelled like brandy and coffee, with a touch of
rot underneath, the sweetness of the grave, reached
out with his gloved hand to cover mine. I
wanted
him to kiss me, willed
it to happen, just to breathe in the warmth, get a
little taste of humanity. An exchange of knowledge.
Or maybe it was the lure of touch, a desire for
contact beyond a fatherly pat on the hand.
Sweat was forming on his forehead. I reached out with
my handkerchief to blot it away, traced the scar
above his right eyebrow. “Hunting accident,” he said
mysteriously. I saw the flash of a Bowie knife, the
wince of fists, felt tinny redness fill my mouth.
Pouting in concern, I leaned in close, he leaned in
closer, and we kissed. His delicate fingers, soft in
their leather coats, relentlessly explored my nape.
Obedient, I followed his lead. We went from peck to
panting and pawing until the door opened.
Filler for NaNoWriMo, from a
revised Round Robin prompt last spring. Impossibly
short in the face of all the other words I've been
tallying lately.
Image: Kiss V, 1964, Roy Lichtenstein.
Faking it*

Surely there are hidden meanings everywhere, waiting
to be uncovered. This was my hypothesis when I
started my latest self-improvement project “Barbara’s
Weekly Epiphany.” All I had to do was approach the
world with a childlike sense of wonder, to keep my
eyes and mind open, maybe even wear my heart on my
sleeve. All of that information that has beaded off
my consciousness, repelled by my cynical attitude and
“been, there, done that” grubby cliché-ridden
approach was going to be captured now, in a mind as
open as my VW sunroof on a light-pierced June
afternoon.
I started a blog about the project, wanting to share
my insights with others: epiphanyquota.blogspot.com.
First epiphany? You have to sell your ideas, sell
yourself, if you want to succeed. You have to believe
in you, or no one else will. Second epiphany:
fake it ‘til you make it is more true than you
think. Third epiphany? In the middle of a crowded
public park, if you close your eyes and quiet your
thoughts, you will hear the vibration of the world,
the sound of its heartbeat.
The blog started getting a fan base, made up mostly
of earnest young men drawn by the stock photo I’d put
up that looked vaguely like me fifteen years ago.
They were drawn by that and the supportive and
slightly flirtatious comments I’d left on their own
blogs, encouraging observations on the quality of
their writing, the strength of narrative voice and
character, how close I felt to them though we’d never
met. These exchanges led to other epiphanies, ones
that I didn’t share on the blog: bullshit
actually works; the reality of the online world both
mirrors and denies the reality of the solid world;
men will believe anything.
One of them -- let's call him Brad, a name that fits
in its brevity and practicality, that matches his
corny, Hemingwayesque writing style -- got a little
too interested. How was I supposed to know that he
would take my ego-stroking seriously? I thought I had
covered my tracks (always cover your tracks, a
too-late epiphany), but somehow he found my phone
number. I have an old habit of letting the machine
pick up and would stand over it, listening to these
silences injected with anticipation, the light touch
of breath, the occasional throat-clearing. The
messages hovered in the air, sticky and thick, for
hours after the caller hung up. Brad eventually told
me he was responsible, in an email where he attached
a photo of someone, I presume himself,
in
flagrante.
I immediately moved the sordid pic to the trash,
changed my number, and blocked his emails. There are
some sick fucks out there.
I type this in my ratty old bathrobe, a mangy
Pomeranian on my lap. But I could be lying. You never
know.
*From a Round Robin prompt last winter
("my latest epiphany"). Every word of this is made
up. Really. And I'm all for positive thinking, have
spent years faking it and am on the cusp of making
it.
Image: "Epiphany," Henry Ascensio. From Tavistock Gallery.
Foundation

The story was that he and Willard were drunk when
they poured the foundation. It was a hot day, unusual
for May, and the sky was cloud-veiled, the sun
nothing but a glowing round cloaked in grey. The men
mixed the cement by hand in a wheelbarrow, kept
taking slugs from the whiskey bottle. Vi and the
girls started out planting flowers, then prepared a
lunch of liverwurst sandwiches, sugary potato salad,
and coleslaw. Finally all there was left to do was to
sit on the metal lawn chairs and watch.
Everything went down so easily. The cement had a nice
resistance, just yielding enough, like Vi on a good
night. It was a perfect mix, Willard agreed, as he
passed the whiskey bottle back. Running a trowel over
it was soothing, could almost put you to sleep. Dusk
was enveloping the neighborhood as they wrapped up.
One of the girls had fallen asleep on a blanket on
the dirt, and the other one glowered as she kicked up
clouds of dust in the rutted driveway. Al struggled
with the wheelbarrow until he decided the hell with
it, it was just a rusty piece of shit anyway.
Vi finally had to drive everyone back to Delaware,
the men singing a song she didn’t recognize, the
girls bleary-eyed and hungry. When they returned the
next weekend, excited to start building the cottage,
Al ran his hands across the foundation and groaned.
It didn’t take a level or a plumb line to figure out
that they had to start all over again.
Image: The house at Hollywood Beach,
August 1957.
A crumb

But first, a preface to the crumb.
I haven't been here lately. My son is out of school
until after Labor Day and we've had a series of
pet-related good things and bad things. Cat dying:
bad. Adopting a kitten and a new adult cat: good.
Nora the dog passing a pea-sized bladder stone at the
Emergency Vet: bad, though it could have been much
worse. Attempting to dissolve remaining stones
through antibiotics and diet: good, though if it
doesn't work she will still need surgery. Me giving
Nora cranberry extract pills with xylitol in them:
potentially very bad, since xylitol can be fatal
in small doses to dogs. Nora surviving xylitol
exposure unscathed: amazingly, wonderfully good.
In between pet-things and kid-things, I'm still
taking the Round Robin, a writing prompt-based class.
So here is a crumb for those of you who are still
reading this blog, from the prompt
I
remember.
I
remember that her fingers were thickened by
arthritis, were scattered with freckles. Helen’s
nails were coffee-stain yellow, bitten down to the
quick, and she kept fumbling at the wedding ring on
the fine silver chain around her neck.
I looked at her hands because it was easier than
looking into her eyes, or letting my gaze drift to
her useless foot in its bright blue stocking.
Sometimes after a visit I’d look at my own hands and
realize that time is written on our hands the fastest
of all. Already my knuckles are puckering in
idiosyncratic ways and the backs are beginning to
resemble the uneven surface of a barren planet, ropy
with rocky veins and hairline fracture wrinkles.
Helen wasn’t a worker. The hardest work her hands had
seen was the kneading of whole grain bread dough,
maybe a bit of digging in the garden. She’d cracked
open books, propped them up, her thumb and pinky
keeping them open. Me, though, I’d scrapped carcasses
in the field, held up splintery boards with the meat
of one palm while I grasped a hammer in the other.
Some jobs we worked all winter long, if we were lucky
inside, but we weren’t always lucky.
I read a book once about men working on a tower,
applying mortar and making repairs in the ice and
slush of January. They were suspended from ropes
attached to scaffolding, wore gloves with the fingers
cut out as a symbolic act. Their hands were gouged
and scuffed, palms smoothed by rough passes over
granite, life and work written on the
body.
Image: The
kid, pretending to be a cat, because we don't have
any good pictures of our actual cats being actual
cats. Yes, he is holding an egg mold, which is this
fictional cat's weapon of choice. It makes him fly or
it's a bomb or he shoots it or something.
Join one sentence with another

For about eight months now, I've been taking a course
at The Writing Salon
called the
Round Robin. Once a week the instructor,
Jane Underwood, sends a class email with that
week's writing prompts and partner assignments.
Every day, for no more than twelve minutes, my
partner and I each write on that day's prompt,
sending the resulting "writes" to each other by
email. Occasionally, the prompt is a photograph.
Usually it is a phrase (yesterday's was "I feel
exasperation tensing my face"), sometimes just a
word.
The point
is to just do it, to see what happens when we let our
words flow without forethought or editing. Each
partner responds to the other's work, pointing out
the things that they like, encouraging the good. The
process is exhilarating and a little scary. I read
the prompt, gnash my teeth, and then start typing,
not knowing where I'll end up.
And where I end up often surprises me. Mainly I
divert my thoughts from real life, bored with the
worn roads of me, well-traveled and devoid of
wildlife. The words don't tumble, exactly, they waltz, softshoe
onto the page, join me at a leisurely pace. I
start with one sentence, join it with another, and
before you know it, I have a story. A vignette.
Like this one, so different from what I write here.
Writing
prompt: The test
It’s nothing. Just a blank sheet of paper, 8.5 x 11
inches. The doctor passes it to me. I stare at one of
the desk legs, slit my eyes until the carpet and wood
blend together, a fuzzy field of sand and tree.
Did she mention what I am supposed to do with the
paper? Is that the whole point of this test, to see
how I react? Origami isn’t my thing, doc. I can’t
even fold a paper airplane. And I am not up to
folding a cootie catcher. The idea makes me smile,
though, a cootie catcher with various diagnoses
hidden underneath the flaps, with pictures of clowns
and crazies decorating the outside. Pick a number,
say the riddle, figure out the problem.
The sheet of paper sits there, like a command: Do
something. So I do. I grab it and growl, start
ripping, take what I’ve ripped and rip through that
as well, doubling, tripling the thickness of the
paper until I can’t rip anymore. By now I’m stomping
around her desk, going in circles. I take what
remains of the paper and toss it into the air,
cackling as the confetti drops around us.
I sigh, sit down. “I feel so
much better.
Thanks, Dr. Krapinski.”
She offers me a cigarette.
Image from here by way of I Am the Cheese.
More on cootie
catchers.
Writing prompt: Write about a box
Photo from
Columbia News
Service
It wasn’t just one box. It was twenty. Or probably
more than that – thirty or forty at least. Her mother
was a pack rat and a compulsive shopper. In between
this visit and the last she had acquired a juicer, a
new microwave, an iPod (did she know how to program
the thing?), and a set of wooden spoons from a
charity based in Africa, in addition to countless
other things that Janine couldn’t identify. Some of
the boxes were opened and empty; others sat waiting
for the knife, their contents in darkness.
It wasn’t just the boxes. It was the newspapers. The
books. The bills. There were piles obscuring the
windows. Her mother had beaten down a path back to
the rest of the house, like a deer makes a path
through the brush and undergrowth, to get to the
kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom. Could she get to
the bedroom? The couch -- the only piece of furniture
without boxes and papers on it -- had been made up
like a bed, with a soiled set of sheets and a
blood-stained pillowcase.
Janine followed the trail back to the bathroom,
walking carefully, one foot placed in front of the
other because there wasn’t enough room to walk
normally. Willow, her mother’s ancient grey tabby,
all bones and croaked meows, darted in front of her.
Janine didn’t respond in time and her fall triggered
an avalanche of boxes, a flurry of papers as her
mother watched from the kitchen.
“Find the birth certificate?” her mother asked.
Oblivious.





