Tag Archives: father
The Way of Tiny Swordfish, a prose poem
The Way of Tiny Swordfish, a prose poem
Sitting in the living room next to the indoor fish pond. Watching the tiny swordfish jump up the miniature rock waterfall, knowing and empathizing with their drive to go somewhere farther along, somewhere even unknown, somewhere presently unattainable.
Sitting on the floor next to the black Naugahyde, Father-Knows-Best chair and matching ottoman, which no one actually ever sat in, as if knowing we were not worthy occupants. Wanting a father badly, asking my stepfather if I could call him Daddy. My mother made me ask him myself, but I wanted her to ask him for me!
They married when I was four, then went away to New York City – actually the Dick Van Dyke show suburb of New Rochelle – for a year, while I lived with my grandmother. My mother worked as an “executive” secretary for Norelco, and every time I saw the commercial with Santa riding the Norelco razor down the snowbank I swelled with pride.
I started kindergarten at four, Catholic school. Nursery school, kindergarten, and first grade with the Catholics. They say if they have you until age seven, they have you for life. Saint Teresa for Halloween! I came home, told Mommy I couldn’t wait to die and go to Heaven, so I could be with Jesus; pictures of Jesus taped to the headboard of my four-poster bed. Mommy said, “That’s enough Catholic school!” So public school for second grade.
Loving the families shown in black-and-white on TV, where the biggest problem was fighting over your curfew, getting a bad grade on a test, not being allowed to go to some party where, in the end, father knew best because some kids got in a car wreck either on the way there, or after.
Having a kitchen where there were no roaches living in the toaster, or the silverware drawer. Where I could ask my mother for advice, and not have it be wrong, not have it break my heart. Dreaming of and longing for a life of being saved and shepherded by your parents, like on TV. Trusting their wisdom. I wanted to trust mine.
The First Time I Met My Father, a very, very short story
The First Time I Met My Father, a very, very short story.
The first time I saw him, I was not dazzled. He was too tall and wiry, and he had too much red hair, flying off his head like an unmown hayfield. His eyes were too chilly, a piercing blue that made me feel like an insect on a pin. He was brimful of himself, but at the same time tried to project a false humility. When he found out I was trying out for cheerleading, he tried to talk me out of it. He’d only met me for the first time and hadn’t even met my friends, but somehow he’d already found them incomplete, just because they weren’t political radicals. “Why do you want to be a cheerleader?” he asked, chewing on the straw of his soda while he squinted.
“Because it’s fun,” I said. I shook my head, throwing my bangs back out of my eyes to glare at him. “Because it’s good exercise.”
“Do you know that the players will feel like it’s their right to sleep with you?” he asked.
“I’m not sleeping with anybody,” I said.
“I hope not.”
“You think anybody’s going to be able to talk me into something I don’t want to do?”
“Maybe.”
The arrogance he displayed made me want to slap him, punch him, kick him, or at least knock a couple teeth out.
Filed under absent father, daughters, family, fathers, fiction
Inside A Red Heart, a short story
Inside A Red Heart, a short story
Ella’s life hadn’t always been like this. It was hurricane season, always the worst part of the year, but especially so this time. The cheap, post-divorce apartment Ella had moved to had flimsy sprayed-Styrofoam interior walls so thin she felt she could easily stick a pencil through them. The doors felt like balsa-wood, so hollow and weightless she couldn’t even slam them when she got mad, only sweep air currents through the frames. The rooms were carpeted wall-to-wall in a sticky celery-green shag which she could not bring herself to walk on barefoot. Hurricane preparations were meaningless in such a place, like diamond jewelry on a dying prostitute.
But today, Hurricane Naomi was 52 miles offshore, moving steadily along a stubborn, eerily direct path toward Ella’s apartment, when her father decided they’d better start getting ready, taping the windows. “They say this doesn’t help in the slightest,” she told him after finishing the first window, her arms already trembling and aching from reaching high over her head. She wanted to be an eagle, aloft without moving. “Even in a solidly built building,” she added spitefully.
“I don’t care what they say,” he said. “At least it’ll keep the broken glass from taking our eyes out.”
They finished taping over the second set of windows. She looked up at the sky; the brittle palm-fronds rattled and shook like frantic spiders. The bamboo rustled, probably full of rats. Tiny ants raced back and forth over the side of the house in some sort of military maneuver. Dropping hibiscus blossoms had stained the sidewalk red. A crushed bug was what captivated her attention. A sudden gust of cool air rushed over her neck, then after a moment everything stilled and the sun came out from behind the clouds. Against the dirty gray sky it looked abnormally bright.
“You look good in sleeveless tops,” her father said. “You should wear them more often.”
“Since when do you care how I look?” she asked.
“Is that how you usually take a compliment? No wonder you’re single. Forget I said anything,” he said. “Go inside and get the rest of the tape, please.”
Ella was mad about everything. Men especially, all the men she’d tried to get along with to no avail. Now, even strange men spitting on the sidewalk made her gag and retch. The phone rang — it was another man trying to sell her something. Listening to his voice on the machine, she decided she didn’t want any more goods or services, ever. She was fully capable of ignoring the outside world for weeks at a time. Finally, when her mailbox was stuffed so full nothing else would fit inside, she’d empty it and burn the contents.
After her divorce, she had refused to bring any of the old furniture from the house, not a stick. Granted, none of it was in such great shape, but she certainly couldn’t afford to buy new. Instead, she slept on a clammy air mattress for months, kept her clothes in cardboard boxes. Friends told her she was an idiot for not taking everything she could get from that tiresome lying hypocrite she’d married, but she just glared and shook her head, pressing her stubborn mouth against her teeth so hard her lips bleached white. Nobody knew how she managed to pay the rent or bring home groceries on what she made. Flying bullets couldn’t have been any more stressful than this, she thought.
There was a vague analogy between Ella and the rest of the world, that was all. She tried to understand men, but couldn’t quite manage it: they spoke, their lips moved, and sound issued forth, untranslatable. How was it they rose out of bed every morning so chipper? She was missing something they had. She navigated through her day like a ballerina dancing on broken glass.
When they’d finished taping the windows, her father poured a second cup of coffee for both of them. Breakfast consisted of coffee with plenty of cream. There was the long day to get through, then they were going fishing that night off the pier. They would stop at the bait shop for a bucket of shrimp and they would get ice cream cones — mint chocolate chip — and they would sit with their poles and wait for a nibble. Every now and then, without intending to, they’d sideswipe the truth.
He was visiting Ella for a week. He lived down in the Keys now, where he had always wanted to live; he loved to fish. Her mother had died three years ago, totally unexpected. No cancer for her, just a heart attack, plain and simple. Her parents had been happily married, but as soon as her mother died her father sold the house and went as far away from his past as he could get. Illness, for Ella, was something she would not allow time for, in that way she was exactly like her mother — though Ella wanted a good, solid tomb as a memorial when her time came to be one of the dead.
Her dog growled at her father as he moved his feet under the table. Ella’s crazy dog — he growled at everybody but he didn’t mean anything by it. He had long white whiskers and a moth-eaten coat.
“That damn dog,” her father said.
“I know, Pop,” she said.
“I don’t know why you put up with that,” he said.
“He’s harmless,” she said.
“I suppose he’s a good watchdog,” her father said.
“Not really,” she said. “He only growls when it’s someone he knows.”
“You mean he doesn’t growl at strangers?”
“No.” She laughed. Was he going to find a moral in this somewhere?
“Should I be flattered that he growls at me, then?”
“Sometimes he even growls at me.”
“I wouldn’t keep a dog like that.”
Since childhood, she’d loved to watch her father bait fishhooks. His long hands were careful and slow and the deliberateness of his touch delighted her. Not like her — she’d been falling over herself since puberty. Invariably she felt like a nuisance underfoot. She missed the neat quick grace of childhood. Whatever synthesis produced her from her mother’s and her father’s body, she couldn’t now imagine. Her father’s laughter was musical — her mother’s and her own like the braying of an ass. She secretly decided her mother had been cheating on him with someone else when she was conceived.
Until adolescence she’d been a precious little thing — then a hostile barrage of hormones turned her into somebody she didn’t even recognize: braces, knobby knees, confused skin, rebellious hair. To call her a girl was a misnomer of the highest magnitude. Something dark had entered the world along with her own blood the first time she got her period.
Once, in high school, her father had walked in her room without knocking and caught her masturbating; what a shame, he said, if you didn’t have so many pimples you might be able to get a boy to do that for you. His mind, like his body — like his heart — was angular; without softness; without love — he wouldn’t give her a second chance. The walls had zoomed in and out like they were breathing. She remembered the dress she wore, white with red and blue sailboats. Just like a ship being launched, only she kept running aground.
To this day, she wore only plain pearls, believing her skin too pasty to carry color. The only exotic thing about her was the color of her hair. Her hair was the color of rust; decaying iron. Growing up, her father never told her how pretty she was. But one night after a bad dream he took her back to her bed and rubbed her back.
Woken in the middle of the night like that, he was a different person, wordless and gentle. He’d held her so tight she couldn’t inhale. His silent, bulky warmth radiated through her and she wasn’t scared of anything. Everything in her room was painted either blue or green — how was painting any different than telling a story? He started rubbing her arm below the elbow; she was his. She wanted him to touch her underneath her nightgown but he didn’t. It made her feel awful to remember that now.
The TV was on with the volume turned down, and she was tracking Naomi on a grocery bag chart. She perched stiff on the couch, uncomfortable in her ragged cutoff shorts. Her father took a chair from the dining table and sat on it turned backwards, leaning toward her, his big perfect hands hanging over the chair’s back, his legs spread out like a cowboy’s. The dog growled from under the table.
“If you died right now,” he said, “you would go straight to Hell because you haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior.” Pop loved his simple theories. He loved his cut-and-dried formulas. From the time her mother had died, her father had become born again and worried far too much about the condition of Ella’s immortal soul.
“How do you know?” she asked. “Isn’t God the only one who can judge a person?”
“It’s very simple,” he said. “Right now you’re a Nonbeliever. Nonbelievers go straight to Hell.”
“Says you,” she said.
“Says God,” he said.
“So according to you I could break every single one of the Ten Commandments, but as long as I accepted Jesus one second before I died, I wouldn’t go to Hell?”
“God’s grace,” he said. “His gift to us. Ask, and you shall be forgiven.”
Her father was telling her to ask for forgiveness! Selling all the gifts he’d ever given her and frittering the money away with nothing to show for it appealed to her. The flowers he sent for her birthday always wilted immediately, anyway.
“So God will forgive me for whatever I’ve done,” she said. “But will you?”
“First, you have to ask,” he said.
Hurricane Naomi wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow or the next day. Though at first Ella had looked forward to fishing off the pier, dusk arrived too soon; the coming darkness was like a funeral shroud. Her father drove his old rattletrap pickup truck towards the beach like it was a priceless antique. At the bait shop, they stood in line behind a girl, about 10 or 11, and her mother, also buying bait. The girl got into a silly argument with her mother about what they should buy, what sort of bait. “Shut up,” the girl said to her mother. Ella recoiled. Was there ever a place to be, truly, anonymous?
She remembered a time she’d told her own mother to shut up. Upon hearing, her father had slapped her across the face and broken her glasses. Her skull buzzed for a long time afterward, her jaw aching where the heel of his hand connected. She didn’t believe she’d been the same person at all back then.
She almost never cried in front of him, and especially not then, not about being slapped: she flat-out refused her tear ducts the indulgence. Nothing physical he did could get her crying — he had to use his voice, his drawling sarcasm, to knock her senseless enough for tears. She’d be so ashamed to cry in front of him like a big, blubbering idiot.
But then, getting her fishing pole ready over on the pier, a hook jabbed her finger. She’d been stabbed with hooks before; she didn’t remember it hurting so much. Was the air pressure from the coming hurricane making her stupid? She sucked blood out of the puncture. Her eyes started to sting, her throat to burn. She froze, her body paralyzed by embarrassment. She couldn’t help it, she started to cry, the convulsions shaking her.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Is your finger that bad? Let me see.”
“It’s not my finger,” she said, still in the grip of the horrible tears. He took her hand and held it close to his face, peering.
“Doesn’t look that deep,” he said.
“It’s not,” she said. Her nerves were strung out, yes, aptly put — as if her spine had been stretched, her entire body hanging off it in tiny sections which at any moment might start whirling away in terror.
She grabbed his shoulders and stood on tiptoe, leaning into him with all her weight. She kissed him full on the lips, pressing the whole length of her body against him the way she had when she was still too young to know any better, and for once he actually let her. She kissed him as though her life depended on being kissed back. And it did. And he did.
He had never told her she was pretty until after her mother died. Family tradition was for the parents to wait, remote icebergs, for warm currents of love to reach them from their children. She didn’t see the harm in that. The truth was, she had always wanted him as much as he wanted her. Tall and silvery-blond, his pool-water blue eyes fringed with gold lashes, he was still handsome for his age. He only smoked those awful cigars when he fished. Since her mother died, he hadn’t so much as looked at another woman, romantically speaking.
Even her ex-husband had been jealous of her father. He, her husband, was smaller than her father in every way measurable, emotionally as well as physically. Her ex-husband was such a small man. He had mewled incessantly about his boundaries, his boundaries — which didn’t keep him from stalking her and her post-marital lovers whenever his feelings were hurt. But if she read his journal, she was guilty of a great crime. What were boundaries, anyway? Even her ex-husband’s new wife was commiserating with Ella now about his smallness.
Too late, Ella had figured out she only got excited by what was forbidden, by a body’s unfamiliarity to her. Anybody like her who chose to marry was making a mistake. Once a thing became familiar, that took all the life out of her desire. She and her string of relative-stranger lovers ate Chinese takeout in bed, soy sauce dripping on their skin, which added another flavor to their mouth play. Fried rice, hot and greasy.
What neither Ella nor her father talked about that night on the fishing pier or any other night was how, way back when, she had left the back door unlocked one day and the baby, Ella’s little brother, had gotten into the backyard unsupervised and drowned in the canal. The water had seemed too shallow for anyone to die in. She was eleven — the next day she bled on her underpants for the first time. She wondered which was the bigger reason her father never looked at her the same way again.
Just now her father’s lips had tasted like his cigars, sour and sweet all at once, when she kissed him. Ella removed herself from his arms only after her skin against his grew slick with perspiration. The two of them finished up their bucket of shrimp after that, but they spoke little and caught nothing worth keeping. Back at her apartment with its ridiculous taped windows, her father began packing his small suitcase. The bellicose dog lay on the armchair across the room, for once not growling. “Damn hurricane,” he said. “Maybe I can get all the way home before they evacuate the island.”
“Are you crazy?” she asked. “You’ll have to leave again as soon as you get there.”
“I don’t think I can stay here tonight,” he said.
“You’re blaming me, aren’t you?” she asked. “Like you always do.”
“It’s not that, Ella,” he answered. “It’s got nothing to do with that.”
She touched his arm, and he flinched, then caught himself. “It was all my fault,” she said.
“No, it wasn’t,” he said. “If you’re asking, I’m answering.” He looked up from his suitcase, and for the first time all day his eyes looked old and tired. “Please don’t ask me to stay,” he said.
At midnight she sat awake, wondering what would happen next. Nothing good, she imagined. She didn’t know how she’d become such a curiosity. She was looking for what had gone wrong with a vengeance. Rooting through out-of-date phone books, through cards and letters she’d kept packed away since college. Excavating her past life, like an archeologist, was a great haven of sanity; as soon as she opened the first box, she felt safe from the present, it was suspended from happening, nothing more would ever happen to her until she straightened out all the previous mistakes. A pale blue chiffon scarf of her mother’s was folded underneath a stack of them. She was perennially accused of wanting to rehash the past. But it hadn’t been properly hashed over the first time, couldn’t any of these dolts see that?
A spider laid in the bottom of the box, its legs curled tightly. Though clearly dead, she worried lest it should somehow jump on her. A handmade Valentine’s Day card stuck out of the jumble like a sore thumb. The card was unsigned, but she recognized the handwriting. It was hers. She’d drawn a picture of a naked man inside a red heart. Her first boyfriend, a creative type, had insisted they make each other cards. How had she ended up with all this stuff? Ella flung herself back onto the bed so hard her teeth snapped together and she bit her tongue. Her bones ached. Her desire was killing her; she didn’t even know what it was she desired. She had to get out of the house for a bit, hurricane or no hurricane, or she’d go nuts.
She dragged her quivering dog — not so crazy after all — out to the car and drove over to her parent’s old house through Naomi’s outer fringes. Thunder rolled above her along with heavy sheets of rain like pronouncements from God. The dog cowered in her lap. She turned the car engine off and got out, the dog in her arms, hiding his head in her armpit. She stood searching the horizon, letting the rain wash over her face. It was the same whenever she made love to a man, she made sure to shower afterward.
Behind the house she’d grown up in, behind the canal her baby brother had drowned in, sat the northern edge of the Everglades. A flat, wet landscape — one she never tired looking at. Dun-colored saw grass, rippling under the steady currents of wind, stretched as far as she could see. Her mother’s chiffon scarf, monogrammed with her maiden initials, was her new good-luck charm. There was, as usual, no witness to her actions.
At least I’m brave enough to come back here, she thought. Her hair blew into her eyes and she held the dog tighter. She was startled when from behind her headlights moved over the undulating saw grass; she turned to see who it was. Squinting against the light, she saw her father’s tall figure get out and stand next to the car, calling and waving — she couldn’t hear much of what he was saying over the wind but she could tell he was crying. Like a flag on a pole, her mother’s scarf whipped in the wind around her neck, causing her to lift her chin and stand taller and straighter than she had for a long time. She could feel it. Her life was going to change.
Filed under childhood, compassion, daughters, death, development, divorce, ella, eternal, father, fathers, fiction, forgiveness, girls, health, heart, hope, justice, karma, kindness, life, love, marriage, men, mortality, mourning, mysterious, personal responsibility, regret, relationships, short stories, soul, spirit, women
The Nearness of Heroism, a short story
(Originally published in The Paumanok Review)
The Nearness of Heroism, a short story
They tell me he was the first man I ever saw nude; that when I asked him, pointing, in my high, three-year old’s simper, what “that thing” was, he didn’t even flinch. He stood in the big tiled shower stall, holding the door ajar with one hand, toweling himself off with the other.
“I’m a little teapot,” he sang, in his exuberant tenor. “Short and stout. This is my handle, this is my spout.”
They say I stared, and then frowned, running out to demand of my grandmother on the spot — I want to be a little teapot! Show me my spout! Where is it? Where is my spout?
Where, indeed? If only the gulf could have been reduced to those dimensions. Am I wrong to feel we would have been closer, had I been a boy? Would he have loved me more, or less?
***
I liked to sneak up on him while he used his glove, just out of the shower, a white towel tight around his waist, his hair slicked back, parted precisely. Even from my earliest memories, the old baseball glove was missing one or two fingers, the ball deprived of whole sections of its leather wrapping, worn through to the string-mended core in several spots. Both glove and ball had darkened to the color of cured tobacco, carrying a sheen of sweat-polished grime that lent a gleam akin to the finest shellac. Arms moving, hands a blur, he would move in automatic rhythms of meditation, pounding gloved fist with clenched ball as his lips moved, the words inaudible, his gray eyes focusing up and out at an angle, viewing a corner of patterned plaster, seeing something I wanted to share but couldn’t.
Then he’d notice me. He’d stop in mid-pound, his mouth open for an abrupt chuckle, too embarrassed to be embarrassed. “Hey there, lady,” he’d say, the broad vowels of his Brookline childhood making his words seem exotic.
He kept the glove and ball on the highest shelf of his closet, a level I couldn’t reach, not even with a step-stool.
***
He was, in fact, the only male presence in my life, even after I started to dwell on the concept of boys, the one I ran to in the early morning — crawling into his bed, burrowing deep under the covers, where he sang the old songs he’d learned from his Irish mother and held me in his arms, my nose burrowing into his soft feather pillow, into his wrinkled cotton pajamas, seeking out his bitter-tea-with-lemon smell, seeking out his body’s distinctive shape and radiating warmth, which possessed a steely eloquence no less comforting than my grandmother’s padded torso. Since he was home with us every day, having retired years before I was born, I didn’t realize he was different from other men, other fathers, who were defined not by their presence but by their absence.
“Oh, you dirty little devil,” he’d sing, “Does your mother know you’re out? With your hands in your pockets and your shirttail out?”
I would hear my grandmother fuming from across the room, not speaking but moving the various brushes and trinkets around on the glass-topped surface of her dresser with snappish clinks and taps. At other times, whenever he knew she disapproved, he’d make disrespectful rubber-faces behind her back until my face couldn’t keep a secret any more, and, looking at me, she’d see some sign of what was going on, then wheel indignantly, catching him in some fish-lipped, pouting impersonation of her, their demeanor so ridiculous, so upside-down, that for a moment it seemed that he was a small boy again, no one’s husband, and she his strict governess, no one’s wife.
***
He was related to me by marriage, not by blood, something that seemed to bother him a lot more than it bothered me, especially near the end of his life. From the very beginning, I had pledged my allegiance to him, had given him that affirmative declaration of the heart, and for a short time, during childhood, it seemed that he had pledged the bond in return and accepted me as his own. Not even in dreams did I measure him any differently than I measured his wife, my grandmother. As I grew older, however, and he grew more and more frail, the absence of an actual cell between us appeared to chip away at his feelings. “I don’t have any family of my own, you know,” he’d say, gazing at me as if for sympathy, never knowing how caustic the mild-sounding words were to my ears.
“I’m your family, aren’t I?” I asked him, the first time he brought it up, but he shook his head, smiling at me with a thin-lipped yet dreamy smile.
“It’s not the same,” he answered.
***
On various occasions, as his health became less certain, I promised him one of my eyes, one of my ears, one of my kidneys, half my heart, half my liver, half my stomach: everything and anything he needed to survive, anything he might need to be comfortable, which I swore to give to him when he got “old.”
***
In my last year of college, I had a boyfriend who got physical with me on several occasions. Nothing serious, no marks: a thump on the head with one knuckle, a scuffle in the yard, pushing matches. One day I reacted badly, bolting my apartment door and calling home. He answered on the first ring, but, having expected my grandmother, I found I couldn’t stop the tears. His voice deepened, becoming rough around the edges as he interrogated me. An old man, on six kinds of heart medication, he swore he’d drive the four hundred miles and teach the boy a lesson.
“No, Grampa,” I said. “It’s all right. I’m breaking up with him. Don’t worry.”
“Call the police if he comes to the door again,” he said. “Have him arrested.”
This reaction, despite his often-repeated joke: “Never hit a woman,” he’d say, shaking his head, staring at my grandmother’s back. “Use an axe.”
***
His fourth heart attack came only days before my wedding. He managed to walk me down the aisle anyway, spiffy and broad-shouldered in his plain black dinner jacket, a single pink rosebud clipped to his lapel. Since both my parents were dead, he was “giving me away” to my fiancé, a practice I found offensive on feminist grounds, because it seemed to exclude my grandmother from the giving. So we compromised: when asked by the priest, “Who gives this woman?” he was to answer, “Her grandmother and I do.” Except, when the moment came, he said only “I do.” My grandmother, standing in the front row in her baby blue satin lace and picture hat, whacked the prayer rail with her wedding service programme in frustration. The sound echoed off the front wall of the small church and stayed with me for the rest of the day.
Later, at the reception, he was critical of the music we had selected without consulting him: a wandering string quartet. “All your guests are leaving,” he said, after his fourth or fifth glass of champagne took hold. “Why didn’t you have a real band? Some dancing. It’s like a funeral in here.” I trembled all over from the exertion of holding my tongue. Only if I had screamed at him, my face reddening under its halo of white silk flowers, would he have been happy.
***
I was home for a long-overdue visit when the last battle came. Semi-invalided, by then, Grampa moved only from the bed to his recliner, spending the day reading the paper in a slow, deliberate rustle. The television blared for hours each evening, his expensive hearing aids — the same kind Reagan used, he’d told me — plucked from his canals and discarded, tossed into a dainty porcelain ashtray: hand-painted with a rising, twisting phoenix, it was the only memento he had kept from his service in Germany during the war.
He didn’t like going to bed at night, waiting until two or three in the morning to call for my grandmother to help him to his room. Arising no earlier than noon the next day, he’d swear he hadn’t slept a wink. “He snored like a baby all morning,” my grandmother would whisper.
His appetite was slight too, and then one day, nonexistent. Supper waited out in the dining room: over my grandmother’s objections I took him in a bowl of ice cream. He lay against his pillows while I spooned it into his mouth, noticing how he lipped the spoon as I withdrew it, sucking it like a baby. The bowl finished, he thanked me, his voice hoarse with exhaustion. Turning to leave, I heard him start coughing, a deep cough that seemed to come from his gut, his eyes widening under the thick cataract glasses, his cheeks bulging, seemingly an imitation of his old comic fish-face. For a moment I laughed, thinking it a joke, but he put his hand over his mouth and made as if to hold his lips together with his fingers. He was trying to keep from throwing up all over the bed, I realized, running for a basin, almost too late.
After Gran and I cleaned him up, I felt his forehead. It was hot, dry, but the rest of him was clammy and covered with an oily sweat. As I took his temperature, Gran called the doctor, who told us to get him to the hospital right away. When we told Grampa where we were taking him, he shook his head. “Now what’d you go and do that for?” he said.
He looked so small and frail laying there it was a surprise to find I couldn’t carry him — what remained of him was deceptively heavy, as if his bones were filled with lead. It took both of us to get him out to the car. Each step seemed so difficult, so impossible — by the time he lowered himself clumsily into the front seat, he was glistening with a symmetric pattern of droplets, the sweat beading his skin like opalescent sequins.
***
At the hospital, an orderly dressed in green surgical scrubs helped Grampa from the car into a wheelchair. The orderly was tall and long-limbed, and moved with an ease, a lean fluidity born of professional indifference. His arms were the color of imported chocolate, warm coppery highlights underlying the pigment. His arms were like a god’s: so full of life and possibilities, I held my breath as he lifted the skeletal, ashen old body of my grandfather out of the car. I couldn’t say what the orderly’s face looked like other than that it was — like the motion of his limbs — devoid of both pity and scorn. His eyes remained downcast, looking only at Grampa in the chair — and I wanted to speak, but nothing came to mind, only regret at not being permitted to be similarly borne away, out of my own uncertainty and into a place defined by someone else’s ministrations.
The young man’s arms, in that moment, seemed to emit forensic signals, speaking without words to a pain I hadn’t realized was there, the arms themselves justifying birth, justifying suffering, justifying death: paying for perfection all over again — skin so smooth it looked hairless, poreless, as if it smelled of allspice and cinnamon and blood and salt. The arms were immaculately sculpted; the bones just long enough, granting a perfect inertia between muscularity and leanness. The miracle of such arms and skin held my attention like a time-release dose of whatever manna makes heaven heaven, and so it was that I found myself spiraling into an upward-rushing eddy of panic when the orderly left, forever, just seconds later, rolling my grandfather to the admitting desk like so much cargo, then vanishing into the angular whiteness and pulsing fluorescence of the hospital corridors.
***
We left Grampa there, in the midst of a cotillion of duly licensed strangers — what choice did we have, not knowing, not wanting to know, not capable of that knowledge? By not speaking, we maintained a positive attitude. His room seemed comfortable, his nurses kind. His glasses glinted, the reflection obscuring his eyes, as we waved goodbye from the doorway.
By the next morning, he had been moved to the intensive care unit. He was comatose, hooked up to a ventilator, stripped of his pajamas, gleaming plastic tubes invading his throat, his nose, his bladder, his veins — his heart had stopped in the night, from the pneumonia: the doctors speculated he might have had irreversible brain damage before they got it going again.
Machines everywhere, whirring, beeping — my grandmother and I couldn’t even touch him. His chest shook under the ventilator’s control, his whole body quivered. The vent itself hissed, clicking, coaxing his reluctant breath, forcing it when it hesitated. Pushing his lungs in and out without his body’s permission. The respirator had a device to allow him to breathe for himself, if he could, like training wheels on a child’s bicycle, and sometimes he did, but even that primitive desire for oxygen would vanish, and the machine would kick in to bring him the next breath.
We were there when the respiratory people had to change his breathing tube. With the most well-meaning, tender sort of violence, they ministered to the tubes, his whole body curling into a fetal position with the deep, gaglike coughing that resulted. They couldn’t say if he’d ever wake up, or whether he’d come off the ventilator. His arms were twisted, contorted, the hands grasping at nothing with a desperation that made my shoulders quiver in an involuntary spasm of sympathy. I bought him a tiny teddy bear, uncurling his stiff fingers to place the bear against the taut, unyielding palm. His other hand appeared to relax once the toy was in place, but perhaps it was only my imagination.
***
My grandmother and I, without speaking, understood our own feelings clearly enough. We wanted him gone; this kind of life was too painful to watch. We wanted it to come: but at the same time felt wicked and evil. Who knew what he himself would have wanted? In the end, she signed the thick sheaf of papers authorizing no further “heroic measures.” Each place for her signature was marked with special red removable tabs.
***
In a sort of minor miracle, in several days he did awake, and they removed the intrusion of the ventilator. He was himself, more or less, and knew who we were, but underlying that surface was a terrible confusion. “How’s Jessie?” he asked me calmly, the name of my great-grandmother, dead long before I was born. His memories suffered no restraint; no contradictions existed in his inner flow of time. “Seeing you’s the best present I could have gotten,” he told us. “I’m going to take us all on a vacation when I get out of here.”
He seemed better than he had in years: I left for home, knowing it wouldn’t last; for the first time not wondering whether he would live or not. Later that day, I called him at the hospital from a thousand miles away and let him speak to my husband and my daughter. Say I love you, I told them. Say I love you, Grampa.
***
The next day he slipped back into unconsciousness, gently, easily, as a bar of soap floats downward in warm water. Notwithstanding the papers, the hospital wanted to put him back on the ventilator. No, Gran told them, no ventilator. No more.
***
I asked her what he had looked like, at the end. He lay on his side in the bed, she said, breathing shallowly. He didn’t seem to be in pain. He panted a little, she said, not moving, his face smooth.
I feared perhaps we had decided it the wrong way. Grampa’s doctor, without saying anything, seemed to look at us as if we were bad people, as if we cared more about ourselves than Grampa himself. As if we were selfish.
***
It wasn’t until a couple months after the funeral I thought to look for his glove and ball. I searched his closet first: most of his clothes and things were already gone, and the closet seemed a different space, altered by no longer containing him. When I couldn’t find them I didn’t panic — I knew Gran had put them away somewhere safe for me.
“Where’s Grampa’s glove and ball?” I asked her, not wanting to reveal how much I wanted to have them, now that he wasn’’t there to keep them away.
“What, those old things?” she asked, incredulous. “You wanted me to save those?”
I gaped at her then. The floor under my feet got soft; my knees turned into grating stone stubs lashed together by rusted wire. She was right, in a way, since at the last the glove hadn’t been a glove, just a thumb, the ball not a ball, either, but a roundish wad of wrapped string, its leather covering gone. That was all he’d had left, all I’d wanted: a piece of him I’d thought I was entitled to.
I would have kept them in a little box and looked at them every now and then, touched them with my finger. Maybe, if I was feeling daring, I would have taken the glove thumb and slipped it on, holding the ball in my hand, sliding the brittle thumb piece back and forth over the grimy string. I would have smelled them: a few tentative whiffs of the powdery leather.
***
I didn’t yell at her, there was no point. It was over. In spite of my outward act of forgiveness, I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps what Grampa had said all along was true — maybe people did reserve the deepest sort of caring for their own blood, maybe that kind of caring was inseparable from cells, inalienable from life. Gran hadn’t cared as much about his feelings about the glove as she had about mine, for example. Or was it just that she didn’t care as much about the archival, historical things as I did? Whatever the explanation, it was done: she had not even understood enough to realize the issue existed.
“Why didn’t you tell me not to throw them out?” she asked later. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted them?”
It was simple: I thought she knew. “I just assumed you’d keep them,” I said. “They meant so much to him.”
“They were ratty old things,” she said. “Just pieces, really. They were unrecognizable.”
***
I told myself that perhaps it was a good thing that the glove thumb and string ball were gone. I’d wanted them for the wrong reasons. I’d wanted something I didn’t deserve. I felt hungry — empty — but without focus, without specific appetite. He — damn him! — was leaving me all over again, and for the third time: the person I’d wanted him to be; the person he’d been; the person I’d wanted him to remain.
I thought of all the other useless things I already had in my personal archives, from my father’s crocheted baby blanket to clothes worn by my mother in college. I thought of letters they’d written to each other before I was born, airmail letters on thin blue tissue, drawn in irregular strokes of faded ink. I thought of brittle brown paperbacks and the curling edges of photographs. We are naked in our mourning, we cannot speak, and we cannot touch.
Grampa was gone; the glove and ball were gone; I was still here. The hell with it — I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to hear what the dead had to say anymore. Only in dreams would the dead be able to seek me out again.
The dead never say much, anyway, not even in dreams. They look into my eyes, mainly, their own abrim with a solitary sort of gentleness, hoping to inoculate me against what they know is unnecessary sorrow — unnecessary love? — hoping to protect me from whatever it is that only they can see: all the while, nodding their heads in a slow, assured rhythm, a rhythm nearly invisible to the unaided eye.
Filed under beauty, boys, childhood, compassion, death, development, eternal, eternity, fathers, fiction, funeral, god, good, health, heart, history, identity, justice, karma, kindness, life, logic, love, man, manhood, maturity, men, mortality, mourning, mysterious, parenting, personal responsibility, regret, relationships, short stories, soul, spirit, spiritual, truth, universe, warmth, youth
Elf Therapists I Have Known, a short story
Elf Therapists I Have Known, a short story
I went to a Reichian therapist (a disciple of Wilhelm Reich, who was a student of Sigmund Freud) once, and it was some experience. She was this neat little lady named Lila. She had these big flashing eyes and she looked like an elf except she didn’t have pointed ears. Well, actually, maybe she did. I’m not sure. Wow, I think they really were pointed ears! So, like, dude, I think she actually was an elf! How spooky is that? The elf Reichian therapist/analyst/spiritual counselor? Who just happened to be counseling my dad? In group therapy? With my Aunt, his baby sister, who was ten years younger than him? Like I was ten years older than my baby brother? My two daughters that I have now, thirty something years later, are ten years apart. How many times do we have to repeat this generational pattern thing to get it right? To infinity, and beyond, it would seem.
***
So, the reason I went to see her, Lila the elf therapist, is that I was in California visiting my father the Communist criminal defense lawyer. He was really tall and thin with wild, curly hair. He was what I call now an “interesting” person. Which my older daughter will tell you really means “eccentric,” which is supposedly good, and which my younger daughter will tell you means “weird,” which is not so good, in fact, is bad in a major way, that is, any way which embarrasses her in front of her friends, which may be perfect strangers, but, you can never be too careful. Someone might turn out, in the end, to be a friend. Or they might turn out to be your worst enemy, so don’t give them any ammo they might be able to use against you in future.
Well, anyway, I was out visiting him, my Commie criminal defense lawyer father whom I didn’t see from the ages of four to twelve, over Easter break when I am fifteen going on sixteen, the exact same age my younger daughter is now, and he had an appointment for group therapy while I was there, and for some unknown reason, he invited me to go along with him. Because I guess he thought exposing a vulnerable adolescent to some of the wackiest, mid-1970s-counterculture, radical German existentialist-inspired group therapy that ever existed was a great idea to heal our battered and bruised father/daughter relationship! Which is exactly the sort of thing my father would think! Which is one of the things I most love about him now, but let me tell you, then was a completely different story!
***
I didn’t love this characteristic of Popsy at all when I was fifteen. No, that characteristic made my stomach hurt. In fact, the entire time I was with him, mostly, I was always on the verge of passing out, throwing up, breaking into a horrible sweat, having diarrhea, or all of those things simultaneously! Not that I was tense, mind you, just that he made me ever the teensiest bit nervous because of his unpredictable-ness. Excuse me while I wipe the tears from my eyes from writing that last couple of sentences! Tears of laughter! Now! Tears of sickness, then. See what a difference 36 years can make to a person? From one of your most horrible experiences to one of your most cherished, a few dozen deaths and a few divorces and a couple of children later! I’m laughing so hard I have abdominal cramps right this second! Whew!
Filed under boys, daughters, fathers, girls, health, humor, love, mothers, mysterious, short stories
the divided self, a poem
The Divided Self
That lonely man and that sad woman
are dead now, but I still can’t
get away from their lawful claims.
They possess my hands, my feet,
my face. I have only been loaned
these things: possessions assembled
for me out of unseen molecules
I believe in by faith, with thanksgiving.
Blind, jerking passion such as this
nurtures the kind of organized madness
I learned to live with a long time ago.
Short and sweet, to the point:
I hate them bringing me into the world!
What on earth were they thinking,
warm lust pressed against the cold metal
of a postwar kitchen table?
Or did they simply writhe on the linoleum?
Alone, I existed weightless, unknowing, free.
I never approved the intrusion of his
sperm, wriggling madly for oblivion;
tiny kamikaze. No wonder men feel
like clumsy, oafish gods half the time.
As for Mother, she arched dizzily beneath him
half-clothed: strapless formal, silk stockings,
shiny pumps with spike heels,
and though she opened her flesh,
how she longed to kill him with her shoe.
Such war made me. Secret wishes
do a body in. I am that frail universe
mindlessly created, allowed to run wild.
Filed under legal writing, mysterious, poetry
Possessing My Daughter, section one of a short story
Possessing My Daughter, section one of a short story
I think the human race somehow needs to evolve beyond children. Beyond parenthood. I certainly didn’t want to be a mama. I resented it and I still do. Even from the land of the dead, I still begrudge her all my time and effort. She took so much, so much from me. She was never grateful, never. That’s why I’m making her write this now.
I almost had an abortion, but her father talked me out of it. He could talk a dog off a meat wagon. He carried me off across the desert to Las Vegas to get married. My own father was so angry when he found out. There I was, suddenly, on my own at 19, out of my father’s house. My new husband and I took a small apartment in Venice Beach.
David had this asinine idea of being an artist. He had this notion that my father should pay the bills indefinitely. I had dropped out of college halfway through sophomore year. I was seeing a psychiatrist. It was 1959 – need I say more? Freud was God. My doctor said I hadn’t resolved my Electra complex. That, he said, was what was making me so tired. I slept more than 12 hours a day. When I wasn’t sleeping, I shopped and went to parties. The only bad part was knowing that eventually I’d have to make a decision and do something with the rest of my life. It appeared that being deb of the year in my hometown wasn’t going to cut it much longer.
The first boy I loved broke my heart. I vowed that it would never happen again. So I did nothing to repair that broken heart. I let it stay broken. It was the only way I could think of to protect myself. It’s been so long….
Since I’m already dead, I suppose you’re wondering what the point of all this is. The point is this: I don’t want anyone else to suffer what I suffered while I was alive, and especially not what I’m suffering now that I’m dead. Passing from life to death was supposed to bring me some sort of enlightenment, wasn’t that the fairytale? I was supposed to experience an end to all my worldly cares – joy, peace, rest, or just plain oblivion. Well, I didn’t get any of those things. I’m not surprised: why should my death be any different from my life? I got the exact opposite of oblivion. I got awareness and clarity of vision, a vision so merciless and sharp it would make my head hurt, if I still had a head. Yes, I see everything clearly, for the first time, and let me tell you, I’d settle for oblivion any day of the week. All I want to do with my death is shake all of you by the scruff of the nectk until you get clarity of vision, too. Then maybe, since you people are still lucky enough to be alive, you’ll do something with that vision while you still can. Maybe you won’t end up like me.
My poor daughter, even after I died I wouldn’t let her alone. I visited her over and over again in her dreams until she couldn’t stop thinking about me. I took control of her heart and her mind – actually, now I see I did that the day she was born – and I never let go. Now I can see how I really wanted her to tell my story all along – that’s why I raised her the way I did, to give her the necessary skills. It was like heating iron in a forge and pounding it into a useful shape. She’s writing it all down, every last bit. I won’t let her stop until she’s done, and I’m satisfied.
Oh, she’s so much like her father. What a mistake I made. I’ve told so many lies since then that I’m not really sure what happened between us. I think he could sniff out the complications I carried and wanted nothing to do with them. He didn’t want to hear about how I’d suffered during my parents’ divorce and their custody battle over me. He didn’t want to hear how I’d stopped eating after the judge sent me to live with my father. He didn’t want to hear how much I’d hated boarding school. But I do remember wanting to have sex with him and him turning me down. He was too fastidious to have sex with a girl he thought would make for a Problem Breakup. That would only make the problems more problematic. The excuse he used was that he still had a lot of schooling to get through – a year or two of college, then law school – and he couldn’t afford to get serious with anyone. Not, he said, that I wasn’t beautiful and desirable. The issue was I was too beautiful, too desirable, and getting serious with me was apt to derail his train, headed for success. He’d lose sight of his goal, and so we had to stop seeing each other.
Filed under mysterious, short stories
A Collection of Matchbooks, a short story
A Collection of Matchbooks, a short story
1952, the Wayland Manor Hotel, Providence, Rhode Island.
The day is warm and humid, the yellow roses in the park across the street are in full bloom. Eva tugs at the sleeves of her powder-blue silk suit. She’s meeting Neal, the young lawyer she met at a Republican fundraiser last week. Though Eva’s handsome, prep-schooled husband played tennis for Yale and still buys her wonderful presents, she’s lost her passion for him after five children. Neal doesn’t have a dime, but he has smoldering dark eyes and soft, manicured hands. He’s a good talker, very charming, the way he lights her cigarette seems so Continental. Ever since the night Eva ran that girl over with her car after too many glasses of White Star, she’s been looking for a way out. She knows her husband will never let her take the children, that’s what bothers her most.
1953, the Ambassador Hotel, Chicago.
Eva sits in the lobby waiting for Neal. On the train back East from Los Angeles, Neal didn’t sleep more than two hours a night. He’s frantic to make this business deal. Eva’s money can only go so far, and though her mother contributes what she can, Neal’s ego is suffering. Maybe if he didn’t spend so much time playing gin at the Club, he’d do better. His wife really stung him in the divorce, he paid her a lump sum he could ill afford, but he felt so guilty. He was only the second person in his family to divorce, the first was his older sister Nina. She married the guy because her father told her to, so when he started getting weird in the head, she bolted. Has her own dressmaking business back in Providence. She dates the young boarder she took in.
1955, the Roosevelt Hotel, New Orleans.
Neal and Eva are stopping over for the night on their way to Savannah. This trip was Eva’s idea, she wanted to revisit her childhood home, show him the house that survived the ’26 hurricane. Her mother grew up there, raised by an aunt. Eva remembers the switchings her nurse gave her for crossing the road by herself. Lilly Mae had a gold tooth in front and wore the most outrageous wigs, red, blonde, honey chestnut. Her bosom was soft, like feather pillows. Eva is disappointed when the hotel can’t give them the Honeymoon Suite. Neal shakes his head, smiles at Eva, pinches her fanny in the elevator on the way up to their room.
1956, annual convention of the California Polled Hereford Association, Berkeley, California.
Neal dances with his daughter, and Eva snipes at how clumsy the girl is. Truth is, she’s gorgeous, and Eva’s feeling old. They got both of Neal’s kids to live with them, Neal’s idea, Eva only wanted sweet little Patrick, not this sullen teenaged girl. She misses her own children dreadfully. Her ex-husband lets them visit in the summer. Still, Eva manages to be kind to Neal’s daughter, she pays for Liza’s boarding school, the very best in the state. Neal had this idea to raise prize Herefords, Eva’s mother thought it was a great idea, so they bought the ranch in Ojai. The cattle women all look the same — brown cheeks, pale orange lipstick. Eva doesn’t fit in, but she doesn’t care. She orders another chilled vodka, downs it in three swallows. Her throat burns, it feels cleansed.
1956, Diamond Jim Moran’s, New Orleans.
Liza’s in the ladies’ room, helping Eva to vomit. Liza wipes Eva’s forehead with a damp towel. The attendant turns away, afraid she’ll start laughing. Eva’s hair flops over her forehead and Liza takes the comb and smoothes it back into her thick French twist. Eva and Neal are on their way home after taking Liza and Patrick to visit their mother in Jacksonville. It was the least Neal could do, considering his ex-wife’s frame of mind. When the children left her, she lost 40 pounds in a month. Liza misses her mother, but doesn’t want to move home. Next summer, she’ll be a debutante.
1959, the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.
Liza’s on break from Mills College, meeting a boy, Ted, for drinks in the lobby. She wanted to go to UCLA, but her father wanted her at a girls’ school. It won’t help. She’ll be pregnant within the year. Ted, the baby’s father, fancies himself a Beatnik. He grew a tiny goatee, sparse but bright red. Liza is getting tired of the same old thing. She sees a woman without legs being pushed in a wheelchair across the lobby. Ted’s right behind, and Liza knows they’ll have sex in the car later. She wonders what it would be like to have no legs to get in the way.
1959, the Luau, Beverly Hills.
Neal’s throwing a reception for Liza after she eloped to Las Vegas. He put a good face on it, announced the wedding in the local paper, but he tried to talk her into an abortion. Liza refused, and Neal thought about having her committed, but Ted talked him out of it. Ted swears he’ll do the right thing, but Neal has a sick feeling. The kid has dollar signs in his eyes, just like Neal at that age. Neal should have listened to his heart, not Ted. He envisions his daughter in a roach-infested apartment on Venice Beach, wearing nothing but black leotards, her enormous belly heaving as she dances to jazz records. He wants to kill someone.
1960, Arnaud’s Restaurant, New Orleans.
Eva and her mother are on their way back out West after a shopping trip to New York. Her mother bought a hat covered with white peacock feathers, and Eva hates it. She wants to strangle her mother, wants her to hurry up and die so Eva can inherit the family money. Eva’s ancestors made their money in shipping, sailing goods up and down the Eastern seaboard, and she is absolutely certain none of them owned slaves. Eva’s mother is a spiritual nut, always falling for some Asian philosophy or another. Next, she’ll run off with the little Mexican gardener, and Eva will have to concoct a suitable cover story. They’ve never been close, not since her mother left for Mexico when Eva was two.
1961, the Redwood Room, Clift Hotel, San Francisco.
Ted and Liza are filing for divorce. Neal is listening to his daughter sob. She thinks Ted needs her, but Neal knows there’s nothing wrong with the kid that a good bank account won’t cure. He had that illness himself. Ted’s refused to work, has taken only art classes instead of working for his MBA like Neal wanted. The baby lives on fried chicken and Pepsi. Still, the little thing is cute — ten months and she walks, no, runs, already. She’s got more of Neal in her than anyone else. Ted’s parents pleaded with Neal not to interfere, but he can’t stand by and watch his daughter worry where her next meal is coming from.
1963, the Seven Seas Restaurant, Miami.
Neal sent the baby to live with his ex-wife, and sent Liza back to school. Liza chose secretarial training, and works in a bank by day, looks for men at night. Liza gets jealous sometimes at how happy her mother is with the baby, but Liza’s not very maternal to begin with. This man she’s involved with is a sailor. She’s never dated someone who didn’t go to college. Even his hands are different.
Filed under mysterious, short stories
The Art of the Javelin, a short story
The Art of the Javelin
There were certain lovers who never let you go, not even when it was over, officially over ‑‑ the kind of officially over where you both married other people. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s something about chemistry, the chemistry of their skin on yours, your skin won’t ever stop wanting theirs and this is a really, really bad thing. Marriages have been wrecked because of that skin, engagements broken, the valuables pawned. The skin fling always started well, of course, the mad passion, so heated you never thought about the consequences. And there were always consequences: huge, nasty ones. Perhaps those terrible consequences were what doomed the love affair from the very beginning. Nothing so lovely and delicate could survive the stamping black boot of your own despair.
You loved him, but it was never enough. Being with him was not enough. Being without him was not enough. Maybe your children, both dead, would have been enough. You saw the first child, sleeping, its head tilted back, its eyes closed. You do not know what color its eyes were. You never saw its eyes. It saw, and in seeing, died. Suffice it to say the child would have been a master of language. It would have been love, a fountain of it. You left, not taking your child home. You let someone else take it away. Psyche never saw Cupid, and you cannot see him anymore. Psyche is and was whatever Love loved. You were loved by Love. You died with the child. You were crushed like a butterfly hovering in front of a fast-moving truck. You were a crushed soul.
The land was flat, barren ‑‑ the horizon stretched like a satiated woman ‑‑ supine, theatrical, unconscious. You missed the children, and you missed him. Was it a garden you were in? Was it a prison cell? There was never enough air, anywhere.
Who wanted, as a woman wanted, simply to be loved? All the boys wanted something else. Girls, on occasion – and more than once — want abstract worship, admiration from afar, poems, flowers, sweet nothings in the ear. Is that what the boys wanted, too? With that divining rod in front of them it must have been difficult to remain abstract. There was something embarrassing about need rendered visible. They could not hide it from the world. Did boys say, “No?” As often as girls? The urge was outward, not inward – the desire to pierce, rather than contain. The needle ‑‑ the eye of the needle ‑‑ threaded with what, exactly? The female soul? Your feet were so cold in the water, wading for freshwater mussels, that your toenails turned stark white. The mussels were brown and slippery, and the empty shells painted with pale, pearly rainbows in the light. The little girls around you murmured with delight, squealing when they found a really big one. Their little hands were sandy and damp on your arm. Their voices piped so impossibly high. You saw them at age 35, still hunting for the perfect shell.
You were tired of living your life. It was satisfactory only in the material sense. The lights were never turned off for lack of payment. Your husband went to bed hours before you did; you sat doing needlepoint in the den and watching obscure re‑runs. You resented your husband’s bulk upstairs in the king‑sized bed, you resented him sleeping turned towards you, resented the warmth of his breath wafting across the hump in the middle of the mattress that had arisen over the years between the depressions your bodies made on either side. Once or twice you tried to get her husband to talk to you about God; he declined to do so, saying it was “too personal” a topic. What is the use of a husband, you thought, without conversations about God?
So you wondered whether to leave him. Suddenly, a young man, black‑haired, black‑eyed, entered your life, with a piercing gaze, but shy, downturned head. He was marrying his girlfriend: you thought they were both too young and naive to know what they were getting into. You tried to talk him out of marriage, saying not that yours was terrible, just that marriage itself was really hard and bound not to live up to anyone’s expectations for it.
He married the girl, anyway, and in about a year was desperately unhappy. His wife left him, run away several times, stole his money and his car and told him he was worthless both in bed, and out. In another moment, you found yourself in bed with him, never once considering how you would get out again. You were not ready to be called an adulteress, but he persuaded you that since you had already committed adultery in your heart, what did it matter in the flesh? Oh, it mattered, it mattered plenty. Only in a purely theoretical sense did it not matter. It certainly mattered to your husband. He wanted the child, all the money, the house, and your head on a platter. Everyone told you not to be honest, not to tell him, but you couldn’t deceive him that way ‑‑ it would kill you to be so deceived by someone else.
It first happened on a rainy afternoon, the kind of afternoon that made sitting on a park bench impossible. All you really wanted to do was talk. You were lonely, you wanted to be alone with him in a comfortable place where you could take your shoes off and lie down flat and tell him your life story. He was so kind and understanding. You wanted everything to happen slowly. Both he and you were married to other people at the time and you had a broken ankle so you couldn’t walk through the woods or the park, even if it weren’t raining. You weren’t planning on committing adultery. You wanted an affair of the heart, of the mind. You were either hopelessly naive or lying to yourself.
When you were feeling bitter, you wore red clothes, covered with lint, and did not bother to go over them with sticky tape. You slept only on goose down pillows, and drank only water bottled in France. When hurricanes were coming, you cooked elaborate cream sauces, and served lemon and honey tea shot with brandy in a crystal cup. Your rage gave you a sore throat, the tears and tissues a sore nose. Anger was only depression turned outward. Always, you received presents in the wrong size, but consoled yourself afterward with icy lime sherbet. You slept a bitter sleep, on sticky sheets, dreaming of French noses, and purebred geese, white with pink feet. On Halloween, you changed your name for good.
You took bitter medicine, while he slept through the hurricane. He gave you red clothes, always the wrong size. You fed the geese cracked corn with your bleeding hands. The brandy shattered the crystal glass. Cream sauces were poured over ice. You strapped the pillows to the bed with sticky tape. You cried while he was bleeding. You whimpered after giving birth. A deep, abiding melancholy. Our Lady of Perpetual Melancholy. The symbolism of the golden arches. An icon for the ages. Our Lady of Perpetual Cholesterol. Our Lady of Sodium. Our Lady of the Mall. Where is food for the spirit? Charge it on your MasterCard. Ring it up on your Visa. A deep melancholy, not easily abated or debated.
It happened on a day when you’d been fasting for religious reasons even though you weren’t religious. A friend called that morning before you’d eaten breakfast and happened to mention it was Yom Kippur. You felt ready to atone for everything you’d ever done regardless of whether you’d actually caused anybody to suffer. Your husband, for example. Your husband was suffering although he didn’t realize it. He thought he was content, but he was wrong. You knew that having sex with a woman for 12 years without her having a single orgasm constituted suffering. You wanted his suffering to cease, quickly and permanently. And it seemed you were the cause of all suffering, everywhere. You had daydreams about running away and never coming back, living in a small rented room, anonymous.
So the fasting and the marital woes had taken their toll on your common sense, and the broken ankle had taken its toll on your ability for locomotion. You were faint from low blood sugar and hobbled wearily into the motel room, collapsing on the lumpy mattress. Being called a neurotic bitch by your husband had long lost its appeal. You needed somebody to love you, not somebody to fuck. But, as your soon‑to‑be lover undressed you, he told you it didn’t even matter whether you actually had sex with him because you’d already committed adultery in your heart. At the time, you took your lover’s reasoning for spiritual altruism. You snapped at it like a starving bass would snap at a rubber worm. Hook, line and sinker, you purchased your fate. It was silly to think you could ever keep a secret. You obtained a divorce, slinking away from the ruins of your marriage guilty, nearly suicidal, your ex‑husband spitting contempt and moral integrity even as he made plans to marry his own recently‑acquired lover.
Then over and over again, between your ex‑lover and yourself, things exploded, imploded, burdened by your guilt and remorse and terror. All this ruined mess wasn’t what you had in mind, you were just lonely and wanted to talk. He thought everything was conquerable, everything, by the human will and true love. Slowly, unmet needs that at first seemed unimportant loomed enormous and unsolvable. He didn’t feel safe with you, nor you with him, albeit for completely different reasons. You were nastily divorced, and suddenly a major skeptic when it comes to love. Between your dead marriage and your dead alcoholic mother, you finally learned to cut your losses, and quickly. What started with a bang ended with a bang? First the relationship was a misery to you, and then it was a misery to him.
The copper gleam of your helmet hair was blinding. Ivory soap floated in the tub, pale and fatty. Hard gray metal breathed like a ghost. The stains of divorce could not be removed with bleach, no matter how hard you tried. Women in bikinis reminded you of how you used to feel in summer, naked, nearly free. You decided to be laid out in a salt pine coffin from Jerusalem, your wake illuminated by jeweled lamps fueled by liquid chicken fat. Stone gargoyles copied from Paris originals would be worked into bench seats. For refreshments, cold meats with baked garlic.
You loved him even though you knew it was doomed, and that love kept pulling you back to the maybe‑I‑didn’t‑really‑give‑it‑the‑old‑college‑try sort of mistake. So you got involved with him all over again, and it was a disaster, again, but to him the fact that you came back only proved the point that you two should never have broken up to begin with. In the end, he never understood why you kept breaking it off, and each time it got over somehow you couldn’t understand exactly why you ended it, either. It was the same kind of destructive amnesia that keeps a woman having babies after that first one. She forgets how hard it was, how much it hurt, how much it broke her spirit. This entire sad sequence repeated until you finally had enough.
That night, you dreamed your mother was unpacking long‑forgotten boxes ‑‑ animals carved out of brightly colored stone, gold‑glass paperweights, things you loved, and your mother was getting rid of it all.
Six months later you got a bill from the library for $173.00. You remembered your lover checked out a bunch of library books on your card. So you called him, asked him to return them so you don’t have to pay. Time goes by, and you wondered. You called his house for days, but the line was always busy. You decided to drop in.
You knocked. It took a long time, but finally he came to the door, disheveled but looking good, except around the ears. His house smelled strongly like man. You were startled by the smell. Vanilla, cinnamon, and a touch of dirt, of mushrooms. The rooms of women smelled like yourself. You have been in other men‑only houses, and it was always the same. There was a strength to their smell, a lasting power, an earthiness under the scent of the body that made you want to burrow into the bed-sheets. This time, you did not. He was growing a beard and wore jeans with holes in the knees which made him look as sexy as the third time you slept with him, the time in his father’s falling‑down barn ‑‑ you couldn’t wait one minute longer so you did it right there on top of some mildewed couches. You broke up for the last time almost a year ago. It was shocking, the physical part you’d thought was long gone.
You wanted him again, though you’d never let yourself have him, and he sensed it – that made him really angry, angrier than you had ever seen him. For once, you ignored the physical passion. You didn’t touch him, though you wanted to, badly. He sensed it, and that sensing is what drove him mad. He screamed. He accused you of being shallow, insensitive, a manipulative bitch with the emotional capacity of a rock. You were meant to be his, you did everything wrong, you shouldn’t have broken up with him, because it was meant to be, him and you, forever. He forgot how you cried all the time, and how you couldn’t quite put your finger on the reason. He forgot what it cost you to be with him: half your daughter’s life. He had no children himself, yet, then: he couldn’t know how guilt had you in its death‑grip.
He screamed, he let you do things, “get away with things,” he shouldn’t have. He didn’t want those things to occur, but he didn’t object at the time because it seemed like what you needed to do. You told him maybe he should have given you his true opinion, back then. Maybe, if he had given his opinion when it was so desperately needed, you’d have chosen to be with him. Maybe it was his essential passivity that caused those late‑night crying jags. Maybe you were crying because you felt like his parent, his dorm mother, his baby‑sitter. You, too, sometimes wanted to be cared for, nurtured, sometimes you wanted to feel safe, to be warm in your own bed on your own pillows, not scurrying around in the corners playing catch‑up with the dust-balls.
But he did not, could not, and would not hear anything you had to say. You were supposed to be with him forever — he believed this and never let go of it: his personal Holy Grail. He wrote you love letters up until the week you got married for the second time, after that, came only hate letters. There would never be a remedy for his hurt. There was no way to make amends. The wounds between you never healed, because he never stopped being angry with you. He was, is, and will always be angry with you. For this reason, your affair with him will never be over.
Will he be angry, forever? Yes. Will his jealous wrath burn like fire? Yes. Blessed is the man whom God chastens, and God will chasten him in time. Yes. His entry into vagina, and your life, was like someone throwing the couch over, slitting all the cushions, smashing the picture glass, sawing the bookshelves into firewood.
Someone knelt. Someone asked to be blessed, forgiven, and made whole. Two people danced, and at the same time drew blood from one another. The man you loved stood remote, erect, unbending. You died, to him. You murdered him, years ago — it was an accident, a terrible wreck of the heart and body. You wanted only to find your true home. They why did your heart feel like cold‑rolled steel? It clanged shut — you were alone, again. And, again, no one could reach you.
While his plane took off, you did jumping jacks next to the runway fence. The chain link made you feel like you had a vision problem. The vessel making up your love for each other was glass ‑‑ white but somehow full of colors, opalescent, and its inner lip was scarlet ‑‑ caressing the outside of the vessel were golden-brown, radiating leaves, quivering with life. Nothing could hold that vessel down ‑‑ it rose of its own accord. Once shattered, it could never be restored. Your fault, you never knew how to live in this world. You always desired things which could not be possessed ‑‑ could be kept, could not be domesticated. Your own heart was not domestic, but, rather, wild, savage, and cruel. It was the opposite of serene. It held mother‑love and murder, sometimes in the same instant. You were the living damned. The only answer seemed to be to keep moving. That is why you decided to entomb your legs in rock, solid and immovable. That is why you always tied yourself to the ground. The caged butterfly smashed itself over and over again, beating impossibly against prison bars of cold‑rolled steel. Finally, its wings shredded, and the butterfly could only remember flying. It knew only that something had gone terribly, terribly, terribly wrong.
Filed under health, legal writing, mysterious, prose poetry, short stories
Kimberly Townsend Palmer 