Disappearing act
Just yesterday, just this morning, even, I was wondering why I bother to be good – what’s the point in it? If I wasn’t good, fair, faithful, wouldn’t my life be more exciting? Would I start to dress in flamboyant reds and yellows, would wrap my body in stretchy, curve-revealing knits and dresses that are almost sheer? What am I afraid of? I imagine a trip to a different city, a clandestine meeting, the dark taste of red wine on our lips, the giving-in. But it’s a fantasy anyway, an impossible one. Not only would giving in cause pain to the people that I love and destroy the good life that I have but it's not who I want to be. I don't want to be untrustworthy, someone who hurts others for the sake of a cheap, temporary thrill.
I’ve thought about it with the Round Robin, too, my writing prompt class, how I faithfully respond to my partner every day, even when there are some that I know won’t do the same, even when what I get back isn’t what I put into it. Still, I treat others how I would wish to be treated and then feel vaguely resentful when they don’t follow through.
I’m good. I pay my bills on time. I remove myself from temptation. I follow the rules unless the rules seem foolish or would hurt someone else. I do my daily work even when it bores me and I understand that my son will only be a child once so I try to appreciate it all (not always possible of course), even when I’ve played the same game too many times to count.
The balance is off, though, and I’m not sure why. I’m hardening into marble, pock-marked and weathered, Mother Mary. Or a nun. This might be solved with a clothes-shopping trip or maybe I just need to take the next opportunity I have to flirt with a man. If I can find one in my travels. The world I live in is scented by estrogen and dirt. It’s skinned knees and snacks at 3:00 and is populated by mothers and babysitters.
I miss men, the tension they provide, the chance to pretend before I return to the safety of my husband's arms. But it could be that what I need is a day off where the only thing to pursue is pleasure and I don't have to keep track of the dirt, the stuff, and the meals, a day when I don't have to be the timekeeper.
From a photo prompt.
The few readers I have left are probably tired of reading this, but I am still distracted: house-buying stuff, stuff-jettisoning stuff (the joys and pains of craigslist), getting-ready-to-go-on-vacation stuff. I know I'll be back and present at some point in the near future. In the meantime, the only writing I've been doing is for the Round Robin class and I'm barely even reading magazines. Perhaps that's why I feel like I'm disappearing.
Houses are a sickness
It has to be this house-buying thing, the paperwork, the memories of the life I once had. The last remaining pet that Mr. X and I shared is getting weak and thin. She'll be checking out soon, too, my final connection to youth and early love. How I could have been so sanguine about buying houses with that guy, how I could undertake such a permanent thing without a thought? And then I remember: those houses weren’t permanent at all, no matter how solid they appeared. We were in and out, removed some wallpaper, slapped up some paint, and then woosh! it was back to DC or bang! back to Ohio for him.
Houses are a sickness.
Here’s what I would like: to live in San Francisco. Or Brooklyn. Or back in the right neighborhood in DC. Or, since we’re going to be here, I’d like to move this wonderful house just a tad bit north, maybe closer to BART, closer to where the hills start to roll. Or maybe I just don’t want to grow up and be beholden to a particular space. I want it to all be permanently temporary.
Mr. X left Takoma Park within four months for Columbus and I was out of the house by the next summer. There was nothing permanent about it. So now I struggle with my ideas about the past and houses and though I know buying this house is the right thing to do on so many levels, it scares me.
I look forward to thinking -- and writing -- about something else.
From a prompt, "I paid for it." I'm still very distracted by house-thoughts and haven't been to another blog in weeks (with a few exceptions). Don't worry. I'll be back.
Top image: The back of the house.
Bottom image: Our front porch.
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.
B is for . . . bad influence
There’s nothing like picking up your son from preschool where many of the other, much smaller, kids are talking about “pwison,” knowing who exposed them to that grownup concept. The kid is the oldest there by almost a year and sometimes two, which is a big deal for the under four set. He spent his first year and a half at this place just watching, sitting on the bench and observing, so we (and, more importantly, the preschool director) decided it was a good idea for him to stay while other kids his age moved on. And it's been wonderful to see him change from the boy on the bench to the kid running around and having fun. He's ready now to play with kids his own age and we are looking forward to kindergarten in the fall.
But at the moment there's the weapon thing (swords and now guns, with a vengeance) and the prison thing, which can sometimes cause discord. And on Friday evening, when we were talking about war and soldiers (thanks, Looney Tunes – "Bunker Hill Bunny" and National Geographic – article with a picture of woman whose legs were blown off by a land mine in an issue with something innocuous, like dinosaur fossils on the cover), I decided to bring up the song “War” as sung by Frankie Goes to Hollywood on YouTube. For the music. But, oh – the footage, compelling black and white shots from WWII (and perhaps earlier) of soldiers with guns and grenades and that picture of dead bodies piled in a foxhole. I think he should start to get an idea of what it's all about, war, or at least that part of it is about death, and he seems to understand on the level he needs to now, so I don’t mind him seeing those fixed images so much. We talk about them, the weapons and the damage done. What I know is going to come back and bite me is the line he fixated on: “Who wants to die?”
Monday afternoon I’ll pick him up at preschool. He’ll be there in his cop hat/helmet, climbing a hay bale castle, screaming “Who wants to die” at the top of his lungs. The other kids, the two- and three-year-olds and four-year-olds, might be shouting it, too, to the best of their ability. If I’m lucky, he won’t start planting “land mines” there, like he did in the park last week, me trying to play along (wan smile, less enthusiasm) while also trying to explain how terrible land mines were.
“These are cartoon land mines, Mom,” he told me. We talk about it. He knows the difference. Anything with a trigger, full of explosive capability, is huge fun, as long as no one gets hurt.
Image: Army set up on our porch.
From a prompt: B is for . . .
Strong enough
The rope is going to break.
It's inevitable. Why hadn’t he bought a new
rope, something made out of synthetic fiber,
white interwoven with blue strands, a miracle
of modern technology? A rope that would never
break, that you cauterize with a lighter or
with a long match in order to melt the
strands together forever. Something that
would last through the apocalypse.
“This is an heirloom rope,” he told me,
smiling as though he was joking but I knew he
wasn’t really joking. “My grandfather gave me
this rope when I was a boy.”
“So why don’t you put in a frame? You know,
box it up and stick it on the wall? Why did
you leave it on the boat?”
“The rope is fine. It’s a good rope. Strong
enough. And if it breaks, what’s the big
deal? We drift for a while. Our plans change.
We adjust.”
He drove us here in a car the color of the
sky before the storm, a car of no color,
another heirloom piece passed down to him
when he graduated from college twenty-five
years ago. His shoes were hand-me-downs and I
could see his heart beat, the quivering in
the neck, underneath his frayed shirt collar.
The man could throw nothing out, held on
until the emergency, the car dead in the
middle of the night, the sole of his shoe
lapping up the rain.
I grasped the rope with both hands, pulled
hard, willed the inevitable. The rope didn't
break. It burned my palms, punishment for my
lack of faith. I l waved them through the
air, dipped them in water as absolution.
"See? Strong enough."
Image by
Jane
Underwood.
The image was the prompt.
Note: As was brought to my attention by an
experienced sailor, on a boat one calls ropes
"lines." This sounds vaguely familiar (I
haven't been on a sailboat or motorboat since
1990 and even though I grew up around water,
I know zip about boats. Read
Would
you like bloodworms with that?
to get a
sense of the extent of my knowledge). I
just can't bring myself to replace the
word "rope" with "line" here. So my
apologies if the use of it is
grating.
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."
Dream police
You know the type of dream:
the key doesn’t fit into the lock. It
crumbles into dust before you even get a
chance to try it. Or the door has a series of
complicated bolts and attachments and there
you stand, in the rain, in the snow, on a
hillock of desert sand, holding this
old-fashioned key. Or a roller skate key,
which at first you don’t even recognize –
does anyone use those things anymore?
But I’ve never had a key dream. There is
nothing to unlock. I have no inaccessible
thoughts, just a stream of consciousness and
overflowing bins in the mind, intermingling.
The kind of dreams I have are telephone
dreams: me in a phone booth, the phone
an old-fashioned dial model, and I can’t
quite get my fingers to pull the dial to the
comma of metal, to the kissing point. Or I’m
a dark room heavy with curtains and carved
furniture, waiting for the pick-up, the
throw-out, the end, fingers tangled in heavy
plastic. I keep on trying to connect (the key
word here, no pun intended), but never quite
make it.
In these dreams I’m always trying to call my
mother, which is funny, because in my waking
life I talk to her on the phone every day (on
the cell phone, where I have her various
numbers linked to single digits: the
only possible mistake my fingers will make is
hitting the wrong one and dialing my husband
or my father instead). As I write about it, I
remember that these dreams are more of a
thing of the past, a symbolism my
subconscious has rejected, perhaps as being
too trite and obvious. I like to think that
the connection between my mother and me, the
path of communication, has opened, is free of
static and complication.
Technology has changed as well. Maybe I’ll
start having keyboard dreams: me
sitting at the old-fashioned desk on this
chair with the pillow for comfort, cozy in a
circle of light against the early morning
darkness, my fingers unable to find the right
letters. I turn the letter “a” into a
semi-colon, type symbols when I want numbers.
It could be the keyboard is against me or my
own mind, that my fingers, trained in typing
class in ninth grade, are starting to
stumble, to forget, the muscle memory fading
away. So I’ll return to the pencil,
scratching out my thoughts onto a piece of
paper, my grip loosening, until all I can
write is a series of scrawls.
Image from
Vitroid.
From the prompt "Write about a key."
And just in case you want to hear the Cheap
Trick song, here's a
link. After watching it once,
all I can think about is how unhealthy they
look.
Cinnamon savior
Pour sugar into a small bowl. Add cinnamon until you are satisfied with the mix. Will the sugar be light, café au lait? Or will you keep pouring in the cinnamon until the sugar seems like a sweet afterthought? Toast bread (Sprouted California Style), spread with butter. Sprinkle generously with cinnamon sugar. Cut each piece into diagonal quarters. Present to the boy.
Warm olive oil in a large pan over medium heat. Sauté onions, garlic, ginger and a seeded hot pepper (chopped, minced, whatever fits your mood) until the vegetables give in. Add cinnamon (use a light touch), ground coriander, maybe cumin. Toss in a small can of tomatoes with juice or, if the season is right, a couple of cups of peeled and seeded fresh tomatoes. Cook, crushing the tomatoes with the back of a wooden spoon until all that remains is their saucy memory. Add a cup and a half or so of cooked chickpeas to the sauce to warm. Sprinkle with chopped cilantro, an enthusiastic squeeze of lime juice. Serve with brown rice and cooling raita.
Think about cinnamon and its antiseptic properties. Use it during times of illness – the stomach bug, the flu that lingers in the lungs. Return to the day after your mother's surgery. You walked to her house to make cinnamon toast. She didn't own a toaster, so you used the oven rack, burned your fingers pulling the bread from the heat. Her days of fertility were over, so you soothed her with cinnamon. Remember the heavy feeling of your own body, the baby growing, hidden, suppressed.
Remind yourself that food is comfort, is nourishment. If you cook the right dish at the right moment, you could still save her. You could save yourself.
Back to the Round Robin prompts. Today's prompt was "Cinnamon."
Image from Chai Pilgrimage.
What my body is telling me
Stop eating so much cheese. Eat more nuts. You’re never too tired to brush your teeth. I’m beginning to sound like a bully, aren’t I, full of advice on what not to do, telling you what you should be doing? So let’s get contradictory: there are no shoulds. And we’re not going into what that means. Not enough time.
What are you doing well? How can you keep up the good work? You do exercise, get that heart rate up and jump around like a maniac at least four times a week. You’re writing. That’s good for our mental health, though I think you could do more of it more consistently. You generally eat well, whole grains, good veggies, yada yada yada. Your fruit consumption is pitiful, but that’s how you’ve been your whole life. Not a fruit eater. And while I believe you could probably make more friends, you seem to be have a healthy relationship with your husband and son. Thought you could never pull off that one, huh? Yeah, well, stop thinking that way. Have some confidence in yourself, woman.
Here’s the thing: I can’t promise you a lifetime of health, even if you take care of me. Things happen. Cells go awry, brains leak memories. Try your best (please: I want to be here as long as I can), but don’t get angry at us if it doesn’t work out the way you expected. How does the song go? Hold on loosely, if you cling too tightly … well, the comparison falls apart from there, but I hope you get the idea. You should. We are one and the same, know each other intimately, cheek by jowl as we are. We’re on the same page, read from the same book, are cut of the same cloth.
Yes. Yes. Clichés all of them. Sometimes we’re lazy. But you already beat yourself up enough about that one.
Image: Me, as recorded by my computer.
From the prompt: what my body is telling me.
Wild horses
Summers when I was a little girl we would drive past the horse farms owned by the Duponts, would pull our rusty Datsun over to the side of the road and tiptoe up to the fences, holding hidden handfuls of Dominos sugar cubes. Two cubes in each flattened palm, we would wait for the horses to whinny and walk over, for their soft lips to graze our hands as they picked up the sugar.
The memory is faded now. I hold the fact of it rather than any sensation, and what I see are long grasses and dark, tall fences, a blue sky with clouds raked across it, the vague sense that we were getting away with something.
Image by Jane Underwood. The image was the prompt.
I promise that, after two days of sunshine, I will smile
What is it about my son’s
illnesses that plunge my life into despair,
knock me into a pit for the duration? Four
days at home with a sick four-year-old, four
nights of not-enough sleep, his body
sandwiched between my husband and me in the
middle of the night, exuding heat, the
constant bark of his cough punctuating my
waking dreams.
“Just spit it out, cough it up and spit it
out,” we told him Wednesday night as he
hovered over the sink. His coughs have been
from the center of his body, deep and hoarse.
He let loose a fishing line of spit, coughed
again, and threw up into the basin. It was
very matter-of-fact, but he was concerned.
"Will I need to go to the doctor now?" he
asked. "That's not the bad kind of throw-up,
is it?"
“I used to cough until I threw up when I was
a kid, too,” I told him as I rubbed his back.
“It happened to me all the time.” It did. I
had a bum pair of lungs and was prone to
bronchitis and middle-of-the-night asthma
attacks. It didn’t help that my mother and I
lived in a series of mildew pits, that I
slept hemmed in by cats drawn by my little
girl warmth. I was allergic to both mildew
and cats and probably the cigarette smoke
that twisted through my grandparent’s place.
Used tissues would pile around me like snow
drifts. I had a lot of “melodramatic”
coughing fits.
The doctor said the asthma was nervousness or
hysteria or some such nonsense. I remember
turning it over in my mind, that these
terrifying attacks, the desperate quivering
of my lungs for breath as I sat up in the
dark, were emotional. They were my fault, or
maybe my mother's, for being a single Mom,
for being a bit of a hysteric herself.
The unfortunate thing about running on fumes,
about being stuck to the side of a sick boy
for four days – I have no perspective. I wish
I could tell you of the helpful doctor who
helped me manage my asthma, who held out her
hand for mine. There was no helpful doctor,
though I did at least get an inhaler.
The truth is, I've never wanted to be helped,
except maybe in my secret inner heart, and if
you don’t want to be helped people generally
don’t help you. Maybe it’s safer this way,
but it’s also a drag, and when you’re in a
funk it only drags you down further.
But give me two days of sunshine and maybe a
week of health for the boy and the rest of us
and I will leave the funk behind. I promise
you that everything will be different, that I
will smile back at strangers, will embrace
friends and acquaintances. After the long
gray winter, spring will come again and I
will be filled with warmth and perhaps
something resembling happiness. Or
contentment. I'd settle for contentment, the
absence of grayness.
Image: Kid in between
colds, disguised as a mummy.
Prompt: Write about a
time someone helped you
Never tasted so sweet
Tanning butter. Warm sun, a plunge into
comfortable water, like being in the womb, no
difference between you and what surrounds
you. Afternoon nap in a hammock with your
hair giving off a touch of chlorine. Dinner
by candlelight, light ocean breezes
flickering the flame. The fish on your plate
stares back at you with a dulled eye. Fish
never tasted so sweet.
Creamy potatoes with a layer of crunch.
Haricots verts steamed and tossed with sesame
oil and ginger. You tap the skin on the crème
brulee into shards, take a deep drink of
Sauternes.
In the dark he comes to you, smooth muscles,
breath underwritten by cigarettes and mints.
It isn’t a surprise. It isn’t expected. It
just is. You accept the gift, a kind of
reawakening, the necklace of kisses, his
rough voice, the burn of an unshaven cheek.
You interlace fingers and he speaks of your
beauty, your irresistibility, how you taste
like papaya. He has been watching you all
week.
Morning brings an empty bed, a
freshly-plumped pillow, a trio of hairs
tangled on the sheet. In the shower you sigh.
Remember. Anticipation only lives once.
(Soundtrack:
La vie en
rose, sung by Yves Montand.)
Image by besia.
From a prompt: Just
imagine.
Because I am hungry for art
But worse than feeling the real world slip away is the feeling that I get when I don't write. It's a kind of lovesickness, an ache of not-having. The only way to feel better is to sit down and start typing. Even if it's painful to write, even when I procrastinate, when I avoid turning on Freedom for the Mac and bop around the Internet looking up information on John Quine or Anya Phillips (I've been re-reading Please Kill Me and the 70s punk scene is haunting my brain), eventually I get around to writing. Because I have to. It fills me. Without it, I am empty.
I want to write all night, sipping on red wine and smoking the occasional cigarette. I want to go to sleep at 3:00 a.m., sated with language, and wake up for a light lunch of mineral water and salad, of warmed baguette slices smeared with roasted garlic and chevre. After lunch, I want to linger over a book, sip a cup of muddy espresso in preparation to wrestle with words on and off into the night. I am up at 3:00 a.m. these days, listening to a frustrated cat howl, staring at the billowing curtains as my mind forces me to consider various bleak scenarios, feeling the heat of a feverish, fitful boy as he pushes me off the cliff's edge of the bed. A week of just the two of us -- me and the words -- would cure my angst. One week of writing in a dark room, embraced by a circle of lamplight, feeling the sediment on my tongue as I drain a final glass of wine, letting my mind dance with the headrush of unfamiliar nicotine. Just a week. I would take the time to focus on this useless fantasy in order to discard it before returning to the here and now.
The Round Robin, with its daily prompts and sweet feedback, helps, but sometimes I still feel like I'm bouncing around in my own mind, where (as usual) it's all about me. Other times, though, I create something that I can't explain, but I like.
So here you go, a piece that is a mix of homesickness and the past and an attempt to transcend. And let's hope for a few weeks of health and clear weather, of writing and creating. Of sanity.
Stained
I want
a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the
door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from
the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that
is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the
hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks.
Against the cool glass, set into block, the
mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch.
I will rub my hand against it before I enter
the room, think of the times we went
waterskiing or just bobbed around in the
muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading
a dark stain on the boat seat.
Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord
wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit
in the water all winter long. The varnish
wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year
he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in
the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated
the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against
my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against
the boat into the heavy water.
So, the room. It is lit from within, white
light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of
factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I
will go inside, lock the door, and remove my
clothes. I will press myself up against the
glass. See if you can tell me what you are
looking at, my blurry image refracted in each
square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff
it out on the rounded wall, again and again.
You will see flesh, the death of ember, the
end of the spark.
Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though
not in the way you would expect. It had
nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The
dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big
hole opened in his roof and the house filled
with rain. You want me to tell you about it,
to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his
boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down
the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think
about my cylindrical factory glass room. I
picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims
slipping off his nose, one hand marking his
place in the book. I mystify him and he likes
that.
Image by
Vinje.
While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and
there were potholes and too many trees by the
side of the winding road. The first to go
were two juniors who were cutting school,
doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast,
maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the
tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They
ended up upside down in the creek that snaked
by the road. They died. There were others in
high school who died in car accidents, too,
though at this point I mainly remember the
names of the survivors (thanks,
Facebook,
with your updated images of people from the
past).
Since my grandmother
died, I’ve developed a
strong sense of mortality, of my own, of
other peoples’, of the various cats and
dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes
it hits me more than others, generally
when I’m feeling low and isolated, when
the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It
doesn't help that I've been spending an
hour or two a day writing out the details
of illness and death for my novel
manuscript. And I’ll have
dreams about
these people, the dead from high
school, usually as represented by David
Anderson, the last one to die, the one who
made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the
time the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them,
like Carolin, a friend from college who had
some sort of birth defect that we never
discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen
years, sometimes still visits me in my dream
version of our college dorm. My grandfather
shows up less and less now as I deal with the
past, though I am sometimes reminded of how
much there is to deal with (another nod to
Facebook, where people who knew me
peripherally during one of the darkest times
in my life show up, and I remember just how
bad it was and I want to die with the
memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago
past, something that I keep thinking should
be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was
having a good cry after washing the dishes
Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel
hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She
likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably
lonely, especially if it involves a pat or
two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest
and was struck again with memory. There I
was, ten years old, in what used to be my
grandmother’s room, petting Greta the
miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and
soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her
ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't
stop." At the time, I was struck with the
exquisite transience of it all, the way a
heart stops and the lungs give out, the
vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate
skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a
tree and then into you. You ignore the deep
cough until it is too late. No matter the
trajectory of the story, we all know how it
ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when
I was in seventh grade, about six months
after we left my grandfather's house for
Wilmington. He let her out when he was
getting the mail. As he limped to the
mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard.
She was halfway across the street when a car
came tearing past and knocked her into a
ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or
didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught
only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It
was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief
story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora,
and added up the dead. I felt their hands in
mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of
a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty
sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her
heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of
capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under
the door. Louise
curled up on
the dining room table, a dog pretending to
be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a
hallway as he ran by, late for class. And
my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow
Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing
that hung from the maple tree. Even the
tree is gone now, but like the rest it
exists in my memory, in the stories I
tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the
moment, knowing I would think about it when
she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost
killed me.
Top photo by Jane
Underwood, Writing
Salon mistress and photographer
extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week
with us in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with
various versions of it for the blog, I got
out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A
Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high
school yearbooks had themes), just to check
on some of the facts. There was David
Anderson, still in with the living seniors,
but at the front of the book was a dedication
to three other people from our class who had
died, two of them in car accidents: Pat
O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe
Lombardino. There were others who died while
I was at school, specifically those
upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this
post, though I could have some of my facts
wrong about the accident. They died in the
mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally
monitored, before you could have a Facebook
page even after death. The fact that there
was no trace of these young men made me sad.
It was almost as if they had never existed.
Swann song
I miss the tall ginkgos with their rotting
fruits, the way the berries felt beneath my
feet with just enough crunch, a pleasure to
step on. The sidewalk was covered with ginkgo
leaves, too, bright yellow fans dampened with
the rain. A storm had come through the night
before, had knocked the leaves off along with
the fruit. The air was full of the smell of
them, acrid, rotting, sweet.
We were lost and I was defensive about it,
but if you were going to be lost, this was
the neighborhood to be lost in. The street
was tunneled in by wide brick rowhouses,
voluptuous Victorians with turrets and
whimsical windows accented with stone. Each
house had a set of black iron steps, shiny
and slick, one-two-three-four, up to the
entry. The steps made little caves over doors
to English basements, a term which conjures
up mold and damp and a view of other peoples’
ankles, the angling of a dog’s leg as it
releases a spray of urine against low iron
window bars.
He got angry with me after I got angry with
him and we had an embarrassing fight in front
Martha, a hissy fit that revealed more than
we intended. A tense moment with the map
revealed my mistake and our luck: we were
three blocks from Adams Morgan, a short walk
to a few cold beers and a platter of
Ethiopian food. The three of us marched from
Swann Street to 18th Street, walked uphill
against a thin wind. It was getting dark,
people were bundled up against the cold. We
walked without talking, single-file past the
homeless, the crazies, the young people with
their know-everything attitude. And then we
shared a meal with all the awkwardness of
something being over, knowing we had years to
go before it would really end.
This is from a Round Robin
prompt this week, my (slightly edited)
response to a very different photograph.
Photo by
Antediluvial.
I serve in this fashion
I trace an outline of my daughter’s hand on
thin tissue paper. The paper is pink as
cotton candy and her hand is limp. She is
asleep.
I’ve spent the last weekend tracing her limbs
and torso while she sleeps, working my way up
to her delicate head and wispy hair. I just
want to catch an idea of that hair, a tendril
here, a mass of frizz there. In her sleep her
toes flex like a dancer en
pointe. I follow the stretch of
the arch of her foot, sweep up the ball to
the tip of her big toe. Elizabeth stirs and
tenses as the felt-tipped marker grazes her
flesh, but I am stalwart and stay the course,
capture the foot for posterity’s sake.
Elizabeth is three years old, red-haired and
long of limb. Her knees are like mine were
when I was her age, stretched and knobby all
at once, awkward joints connecting leg bones.
I can already see how her hips will jut out
at thirteen, will buffer themselves in fat
and muscle. Buying pants will become almost
impossible for her, will become a source of
frustration, and she will start to wear
slimming flat-front trousers with wide legs
no matter the going fashion. Her skinny legs
will protrude from an ample rump, those
now-slight hips will grow to temporarily
house the wide skulls of ten-and-a-half pound
babies. She will slap the first man who
remarks on her child-bearing hips and then
she will marry him and bear two children in
three years.
They will exhaust themselves with fights over
money and discipline. When she discovers that
he's been sneaking out to Bible study
meetings and is on the road to becoming born
again, Elizabeth will leave him. I'll take
the family in, my 26-year-old daughter and
her two preschooler boys, will put aside my
plans to redo the upstairs in preparation to
sell the place. She'll be practically
unemployable, her only experience being
reproducing and windexing the glass off the
windows, running a vacuum cleaner across the
floor so thoroughly that you could eat off of
it. It will be as though she were a teenager
again, the petty little fights over who left
what dish in the sink without washing it, her
stealing my cigarettes and popping diet pills
so she can stay up all night. I will wonder
what happened to my golden years, my "me"
time. She'll get an earful every night.
Eventually she will go back to nursing
school, will find a new place to live and get
a job. One of the night-shift orderlies, an
atheist, rational and compelling, will seduce
her with stories from his service in the
Persian Gulf. He'll move in after their third
date and will start whipping that fatherless
household into shape. The boys, teenagers by
this time, will be desperate to escape the
two of them, sick of the discussions of Ayn
Rand and the tyranny of other people's gods.
There are other things that will keep them
away, the sounds that leak from the too-thin
walls of the tract house, the atheist's cries
in the middle of the night followed by the
low dove-coos of their mother soothing him.
They will visit me for dinner almost every
night and I'll serve them roast beef and
potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, fish
sticks and french fries. Sometimes one of the
boys will sleep on the pull-out couch, his
brother in a sleeping bag on the floor.
But for now Elizabeth is a little girl with
chubby feet and dimpled elbows. Her neck is
thick, strong muscles leading to an
unremarkable chin that dips out blandly from
under her lower lip. Her dad and I are still
debating about whose nose she will have. All
children have cute button noses. It takes the
hormones and stretching of adolescence to
reveal the nose’s true nature.
Suspicious minds
Because Frank Smith is an
investment banker. A lawyer. A high-powered
PR executive. Or so the rumors have it. He
showed up in Bank Nile about a month ago,
rolled into town in his ’49 Ford truck, which
looks beat up but runs suspiciously well.
Maya thinks he’s wearing a mouth piece. He
talks like he’s been eating ice cream, his
tongue slightly numbed, the words not totally
clear, but there is no stink of alcohol or
sign of the needle. There is no ice cream
cone. She swears she’s seen him adjust those
just-so nubs of his when he thought no one
was looking.
His hand are smooth. Even though the palms
are filthy and his fingernails blackened with
earth and compost, those aren’t the hands of
a man accustomed to hard work. He keeps a
dust bowl hoe by the garden patch, makes a
show of rustic tools, the rusted metal rake,
a long pointed shovel. Frank claims to know
about healing herbs, says he’ll fix you up
with something for those migraines, will make
a poultice for your aching back.
But don’t let that investment
banker/lawyer/PR man sell you a goddamned
thing.
****
Image from an online
costume shop. This post was originally my
response to a photo prompt. I keep on
returning to it for the blog, but didn't want
to use the original picture, for obvious
reasons. And if you are in the market for a
fake beard, I recommend the fine selection at
the Etsy shop I Made You a
Beard.
I've been struggling to write and hopefully
will be back on track in the next week or
two, writing, thinking, and visiting other
blogs.
Berkeley type
There’s a man with thick silver hair who will
save me. I’ll run into him at Good Vibrations
or while thumping melons at the Berkeley
Bowl. Eyes quizzical, brow scrunched, I'll
ask his advice as I peruse the erotica or the
tomatoes. “How do I pick a ripe one?”
I'll say, then press my lips together in
anticipation, run a nervous hand through my
own uncombed mane, worry the tear in my
formless tee.
He’s capable, my man with silver hair, knows
what I require. “I haven’t read this stuff in
years,” I’ll tell him, batting my innocent
eyes. “A girlfriend of mine recommended the
selection here. Do you have any
recommendations?” Or: “My naturopath
has finally given me the green light for
nightshades, as long as I don’t combine
potatoes and tomatoes in the same week. But
how can you tell when a pineapple tomato is
ripe?”
He’s firm, my man with silver hair. Turns out
his name is Nathanial and he stays away from
pornography and tomatoes. He scrapes a thin
layer of coconut oil on his multigrain toast
and makes his own organic soy milk. He lives
in a house constructed of bales of hay coated
in plaster, collects the rainwater and the
grey water to pour over his lush,
nightshade-free garden. In a far back corner
of his yard, a former girlfriend has
constructed a pyramid of empty television
sets and we sit and watch in calming yogic
poses, balancing our diminishing frames on
iron loungers furred with ivy.
Nathanial leads me away from temptation. He
slices layers of butternut squash, thin as
sashimi, dries them in the sun, and layers
them with nut cheeses and frothy cucumber
juice: lasagna! With him I learn the
taste of a peach, the value of chastity, the
length of my arms from fingertip to
fingertip. During our monthly fasts, we see
visions, hummingbirds like fairies in the
passionflower, fabulous eagles, strong and
formidable, emerging from sketchy fog. And my
parents appear before me, penitent and
humbled. They kneel at my feet and I dismiss
them with a forgiving wave. The vision
repeats and I never tire of it, my power, the
moment of clarity.
When it’s over, when I am saved and clean and
about twenty-five pounds lighter, after my
visions start to wear thin, Nathanial will
move on to the next orphan. He is
evangelical, gathering souls away from
processed foods and packaged T&A, a beam
of light that moves from soul to soul. I want
to warn them, the lady paused in front of the
cornflakes, the college boy reaching for a
six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best, the skittish
dog-walker about to cross Dwight: It isn't us
he wants. It's the karma.
From a prompt last summer:
I am counting. Despite the first-person point
of view, this is fictional. Just a reminder.
Image: The infamous Berkeley
Bowl, from a
2005 New York
Times article.
Chiaroscuro
Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.
I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon: develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.
Part II:
Resonance
OK, OK, OK, Part I was the
result yet another prompt, from a family
visit in September. It was a photo prompt
that had nothing to do with the resulting
piece. I was going through my old stuff,
looking for something, saw this, thought:
Aha! That feeling some of us get after too
much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I
haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years,
and if I did, it would actually be wonderful
to be with my mother, though
Kevin's
absence would still be
palpable.
Sometimes I'm afraid that
you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe
you think that I sit around immersing myself
in the past, feeling sorry for myself and
penning various memorials to the me who used
to be. Or that I prefer to
dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy
and light.
I write about what resonates and I have a
complex relationship with both happiness and
the past. The past is always present for me;
it informs the present, keeps me grounded.
And it provides me with great material. Don't
even have to think about it. As for
happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy.
I'm generally happy,
except when I'm not.
The hollows,
shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me.
Light is meaningless without darkness. I need
texture, a rough patch here and there, a
little complexity and strife to make it more
interesting.
But maybe my next post will be about puppies.
More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my
husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or
maybe it really will be about puppies, cute
little fluffballs, good enough to
eat.
8:37, Saturday morning
Every Saturday he and his mother make
pancakes and he watches the drama unfold. The
eggs, chilled in their container, ignorant of
their fate. Then, she selects two. It is
never random. She moves from the back of the
carton to the front. Surely the last eggs
know what’s up, though she shuttles them back
to the refrigerator before destroying their
brethren. This is when he insists on touching
an egg, on holding it for a brief minute,
transferring his warmth to its cold shell.
“Do you want to crack one?” she will ask and
he always shakes his head: No. The
mess! Tom can tell she is relieved, even
though she doesn’t let out a sigh or stretch
her thin lips into a smile. It’s the way she
angles her shoulders, the slight relaxation,
the slump, when he returns the egg. He has
become a master of the nonverbal, of the
facial expression, trying to figure out the
scene before inserting himself into it.
One Saturday, he did drop an egg, just let it
go onto the kitchen counter to see what would
happen. “Whoopsy!” his mother exclaimed in a
too-bright voice as she hurtled herself
across the kitchen to get a wipe. The clear
white was oozing over the side of the
counter, had just started to drip down the
cabinets and onto the floor, and the dog,
attuned to any utterance that sounded vaguely
like “oops” had already honed in on the
trail.
This time his mother did sigh, gave out a
loud sigh, before taking out her frustration
on the dog. “Mandy! OUT OF THE KITCHEN!” She
threw up her arms and stomped her feet,
glared as Mandy slunk back to the living
room. “I’m sorry, Mama,” Tom said, his heart
fluttering, as she picked pieces of shell off
the counter and attacked the remains with a
sponge. The air around them, charged with
anger, calmed as she looked up at him.
Everything stopped. She reached out and
cupped his cheek, leaned over to kiss his
forehead.
It’s always the way, she thought, the anger
that explodes out of nowhere, like an egg
cracked into hot oil. The expression on Tom's
face, the knowledge that she
is
her mother,
that she will be apologizing forever for her
lack of self-control, for the spark that she
passes on unwittingly. Here's hoping he isn’t
as delicate as an egg.
From a prompt: You hold it.
As Anne
told me
recently, the prompts have been good to me
lately. Though very shatter-focused.
Image by Petr
Kratochvil.
Away from here
We kept on digging that night, pushed through
soil rich and dark, encountered earthworms as
long as Joe’s middle finger. He had a trowel
and I had a pick-axe, but most of the time we
used our hands, took off our gloves and did
the dirty work directly.
Nobody had told the little one about what had
really happened to Tristan. I mean, he knew
he was sick and saw the old cat collapse on
the kitchen floor, heard the pained meow. He
saw me cry and hyperventilate and gather
calming forces, but we couldn’t bear to tell
him what was happening, what would happen. He
hadn't known loss and I swore he wouldn't,
not until I was old and sinewy, not until
Joe's alcohol-pickled mind had gone south and
his hands were blurry with the shakes. I had
seen enough of loss myself by age eight,
learned early to keep a tenuous hold on other
people. My boy, he could remain untouched.
There wasn’t time or money for the vet, so
Joe lifted up Tristan's lank body, bony at
the spine but swollen around the belly,
carried him off into the back yard. I tossed
him a kitchen towel still wet from the dish
rack. The boy, always his father's shadow,
made for the door, but I knelt down and
blocked him with a hug. "Tris needs a little
privacy, that's all. It's like at the
doctor's office. Daddy's giving him medical
attention. Why don't we read a book?" We got
through two stories when Joe finally came
back in, eyes red, the towel clinging to his
fingers. "Tristan's ready to see you, kid,"
Joe told him. I sent the two of them out
there alone.
Joe told me later that Tris hadn't put up a
fuss. He and the kitty had sat together by
the corner of bamboo that Tris loved to hide
in, where all you could see in the thick
stalks was a pair of shimmering green eyes,
maybe the hint of white whiskers. Joe had
professed his love while the cat panted,
glassy-eyed. Then, a little business with the
damp towel. Tristan had even rested a paw on
Joe's trembling hand. It was true mercy, over
in a few heart-breaking minutes. Before he
came back into the house, Joe had shaped him
into a comfortable round, pressed his thumb
gently against each eye to close it.
He told the boy that it looked like Tristan
was taking a little rest now, sleeping off
his fit. “Give him a quick pat like a good
boy.”
That seemed reckless to me, letting the boy
touch him. Didn't Joe remember the heavy
quality of dead flesh? Once the heart stops,
it's like petting wax. But the boy didn't
seem to notice, came in dancing and told me
Tris was better, was sleeping.
That’s how we ended up at Strawberry Creek
Park, looking like grave robbers, sifting
through the dirt in the dark, Tristan in a
Teva shoebox tied with butcher’s twine. Fog
had blotted out the moon and the damp had
sunk into my bones, made me drop the
flashlight more than once. Mid-dig, a mama
raccoon and her kits peered at us out from
the bushes, rustled the leaves with interest.
Joe tossed a trowelful of dirt at them. "Git!
Git! This isn't a midnight snack." They
shambled off in the direction of the creek,
looking like hunchbacked cats themselves, all
the fur with none of the grace.
A half-hour later, we had a hole two feet
deep and just wide enough to jam the Teva box
into. Tristan's stiffened body shifted as we
pushed him into the hole, hit the sides of
the box. I hadn't looked at him since the
collapse, but suddenly I had the urge. I made
Joe cut the twine so that I could shine in
the flashlight and take a final look, could
stroke the tips of his fine orange fur.
The next morning we told the boy that Tristan
must have taken off, shimmied through a hole
in the fence, or through some miracle of will
had scaled the nine-foot planks and taken off
for a better place. He put his little hand in
mine and asked, "Is he OK, mama?" There was
only one way to answer it: Tristan was fine,
perfect, whole.
Maybe he’s sitting on a rock by the Bay now,
eyeing the ground squirrels, dipping a paw
into the cold water as he searches for fish.
Or he’s stalking a bird in a field of waving
grass, tail quietly twitching before the
final pounce. Tristan is somewhere out there,
away from here.
This was from a writing
prompt last summer: write about something you
don't want to write about. I didn't want to
write about our cat's
death, at least not directly,
so I wrote this instead. It seems to fit
the theme around here these days. It was
originally three paragraphs with very
little spelled out, but as I expanded it
the details it became more gruesome. Not
sure what I think of it, but here it is.
Thanks to rcb for the advice to slow down.
This one's slower than usual at least!
Image: Strawberry Creek, by
Edwin
Deakin, from
Berkeley Architectural
Heritage Association.
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.
Shoot him 'fore he run now
J. had a freezer full of
goose breasts riddled with shot. His family
owned property on Broad Creek with a duck
blind right against the water, where the
menfolk, clad in camouflage, would sit on
brisk fall mornings, guns poised. He showed
me the blind that first summer, took my hand
and led me through a tunnel of cornstalks
gone brown. We sat close on the austere
bench, hidden behind grass that had become
hoarse with whispering over the years. I am
sure he kissed me in that humid July air
because we did a lot of that then, sweet
lingering kisses in between fights and
sarcasm.
He’d told me that a former tenant of the
Sugar Shack, the house he and his brother
were renting from their grandmother on the
far side of the property, had keeled over one
afternoon in the back bedroom, dead from a
heart attack. By the time they found the
body, the man’s faithful dog had chewed off
half of his face. It probably started with
wake-up licks that progressed to nips and
then frantic biting. But J. was often full of
shit, and I’m not sure if he was just trying
to scare me. If so, it worked. I’d spend the
night there holding it, too nervous to walk
the ten feet to the bathroom, picturing the
gory scene, the spiritual remains of this
lonely person floating over the room.
One muddy November night, when lingering
kisses had turned into the fire of post-fight
sex, I realized I was on the edge. J. and I
had gone from chemical intensity to a kind of
in-between thing that wasn’t satisfying but
was just enough to keep me hooked. We’d spent
the evening at the bar, drinking and picking
at each other. By the time we shoveled into
the Sugar Shack driveway, my brain was
crackling. We had a fight about something
ridiculous or something deep-seated and
heavy, it doesn't really matter, and at some
point I grabbed a shotgun from the gun
cabinet.
As I write this, I can’t believe that I did
such a thing, so dramatic, so serious. Could
I be making this up? No. I was drunk and sad
and teetering on the edge of the abyss, so I
grabbed one of his (unloaded) shotguns and
pointed at my face. Maybe we struggled. All I
can remember is me stumbling in the shabby
living room of the Sugar Shack where it was
cold and damp. J. was lit from behind so that
his face was cragged in shadow. I was
hysterical with pent-up emotion, struggling
to keep hold of this unwieldy gun. Eventually
J. took it away and returned it to the
cabinet. We went to sleep. I woke up the next
morning barely able to move, felt around for
his sleeping form and remembered that he was
probably hunkered down in the duck blind with
his cousins.
I’m sure he chalked the night up to my
overgrown sense of drama, another mark
against me to go with my unfaithfulness and
love of alcohol. Thank god I've tossed aside
those crutches for the most part, though I
miss the drama sometimes. Drama sparks up the
night, shines a little light into the abyss.
Without it, you have only darkness, have to
bravely perch on the edge until the abyss
slowly creeps away. And that's where I seem
to be right now for reasons that are unclear
to me, dirging it out until the fog
lifts.
"Shoot him 'fore he run now," is a lyric to
the song "Shotgun," originally by Jr. Walker
and the All Stars. Click
here for a danceable,
levity-producing version from the
documentary Standing
in the Shadows of
Motown. It features some of
the original Motown sessions musicians and
the late Gerald Levert as singer.
Image from the Washington
College magazine.
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.
