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.