Tag Archives: forgiveness
This Road I Am Traveling, a prose poem
This Road I Am Traveling, a prose poem
I used to think it was possible, even desirable to order the world into alphabetic categories, though I never dared cut someone open with such a blunt knife as you. The most I ever tried was harvesting a few drops of blood — they oozed through the cleanly raked skin underneath my claw like rare jewels.
You do not offer help. You are scientific, curious, high on espresso, perfumed with the thick odor of fatty, fruity soap. You tempt me to weep on your flannel jacket, though you don’t for a minute pretend to love me — or anyone. It is all part of your elaborate theory.
You ask me what it was like to watch her body go, you say you hesitate to dredge up old muck, yet you persist in an ignorant, wheedling way, pulling the raw edges of the wound farther in your fretful passion to get at the truth. I can’t believe a word you say.
Death is foreign to you. Open your eyes! See mine, clouded with the desire to cause your enlightenment. Yes, I recall a hundred details: the way a hand is not any longer a hand after that last breath, just a heavy piece of meat. I remember the stiffening of flesh, the way heat emanates in nearly visible waves from the stilled body. Though as you observe, time has continued to flow, my thoughts have not yet moved on — you are deluding yourself to think they ever will. Shut up! Your sympathies are worth nothing.
There are a million out there who know what I know — until you have allowed the fleeting soul of the one you love to pass through you, risking the internal injuries, the scarring from radiation, you can forget trying to follow for your own amusement.
This road I am traveling is ice — I have been skating with my silvery feet for more than ten years, and though it grows ever wider, I can see no end. I grow tired, but there is nowhere to stop. Living is grieving — sooner or later, only grief survives. Once you learn to skate down memory lane, it’s something you never forget. Though my legs ache, I have to keep them pushing. Still, the bare trees arch gracefully overhead. This cold air burns, yet cleanses.
Filed under acceptance, courage, death, forgiveness, grief, life, loss, love, poetry, prose poetry, transcendence
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
Lovely Girl, a short-short story
Lovely Girl, a short-short story
Jan. 11, 1979
Kenneth got into a big fight with his father last night. His Dad said that he follows me around like a puppet, and that he’s being bought. Then his Dad told him he was a lazy little bastard for not fixing his car & going somewhere with his mother. Then Kenneth said something back and his Dad tried to choke him and Kenneth left & went to the library.
I have a feeling Kenneth’s Dad hates me, or at least dislikes me. He would probably be a lot happier if I wasn’t going out with Kenneth. I would like to go up to his Dad and say that if he would prefer Kenneth not go out with me — because he thinks Kenneth would be better able to concentrate on sports & school — I will comply.
All I know for sure is that I don’t know anything anymore. Sometimes, I want to go far away – to Europe, maybe – and meet strange people and find out how to live. But then I get scared and I am suddenly glad to be in my safe room with all my possessions that tell me who I am supposed to be. I don’t know who I am – I used to, but things have changed so much, I’m not sure anymore.
Ever since Mom and my stepdad got divorced, it’s been harder and harder to just live. Mom is getting worse with the booze and sometimes I get so angry that I scream at her. Then I feel awful and try to hug her and tell her I’m sorry, but she’s so out of it she just stands there, swaying a little with her eyes half-crossed, and I end up stomping into my room and slamming the door and locking it. Then I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and sigh.
It’s the best just after I get home from classes at community college. Mom isn’t here, and I am alone. No one can bother me, and if the phone rings I don’t answer it. It gives me a sense of power – listening to that phone ring and ring and ring until whoever is calling hangs up, frustrated. I close all the curtains and put on records and smoke cigarettes. In my cool, dark cave I find peace for a few hours.
At six o’clock, though, I hear that fucking bitch, my mother, put her key in the lock, and I jump up and run down the hall to my room to get away. If Mom says something to me, I try to be nice, but it’s usually only a few minutes before our voices become sharp and anger is in the air again. Until she’s blotto, that is. Then, wobbling and bleary-eyed, she’s all lovey-dovey, but also by then all I want to do is shake her until her head falls off!
The only positive things in my life are Amy and Kenneth. Amy is my best friend and Kenneth is my lover. They know, and once in a while I can talk to them about it, but I know that friends can only take so much before they are tired of hearing it. The only person that would listen to everything you said and be interested was a psychologist or psychiatrist, and I’ve thought about going to one, but it’s really too expensive. So I just don’t let myself think about things most of the time.
I keep this journal and write my thoughts down, and that helps a little. Most of the time I’m fine, but it’s always there, hanging over me. Actually, I function very well. I graduated in the top five percent of my high school class, and after a year at junior college I have a 3.8 average. And I’ve never gotten into any serious trouble at all. I’m what grandmothers like to call a “lovely girl.” On the outside. Happy? What did happiness ever have to do with any of my fucking life choices?
Blood Mother, a poem (sculpture in the Orsay Museum, Paris)
Blood Mother, a poem (sculpture in the Orsay Museum, Paris)
She is made of wood, a silken hardness that begs touching.
Should anyone reach, trail a fingertip across her flesh,
the man in straps would speak, his mumbled words rasping
through the stopped air, turning beating cells boorish,
piercing desire’s heart, killing a love so old, so pure,
it has no real name. Such is obvious from the way she stands,
lifting her heavy hair, each hand the careful cynosure
of being — she drapes the primal fiber like garlands,
letting it flow free only to capture the thickness of trees.
Her eyes are closed. Under abraded lids resides the look
everyone knows: pupils enlarged by pain; simple refugees
from knowledge received of the body, woman’s final textbook.
The belly asks first. It says come, reside here within me,
neither cold, nor afraid, nor desirous — twirl and dream
of nothing but this spare salt universe, wear only veins, silky
wisps of hair, discreet, pale limbs enfolded by soft cream.
Her feet nourish the ground, her head becomes the forest.
Walk where her shadow falls, seek the margin of her arms,
soothe your tired neck in mother’s lucid heat, hedonist
entity you have become, set in blind motion under charms
worked by no laboratory scientist in a trim white robe.
Rather, you emerged redly from a thousand other deaths,
one messy cauldron holding shapes; the patient, springy web
of chosen elements drawn together, joined by many faiths.
The breasts want, too. Child, they sing in unison, nourish your
body with our thin white blood — suckle, cradle the nipple deep
against the palate, pull the flow from a dozen small pores, gnaw
strong like a velveted vise, drink true until you swallow sleep.
The need to believe is more than skin. Need is the whole glossy
image on this lonely wall; what it means to be such a mechanism!
She never schemed for her fey power — nor does she expect mercy.
You exist, mere fragile accident, in perfect jeweled synchronism.
Not as simple as punishment, nor as complex as grace, her skills
for life reside at a place men cannot enter, no fault of their
own. They build instead the world, of brick, stone; shy stabiles
meant to appease longing, courageous memorials to light, to air.
Why I Hate You, a poem
Why I Hate You
You know why I hate you? You’re a weak vine, needing to be propped up, needing more comfort than a baby. You imagine bugs, crawling up the walls, down your hair. Their wings whir in the night like soft sobs.
I hate you because you’re ugly — a slob, a slut, a sucker. Because you saw your mother passed out on the carpet in front of the television, one too many times, but you didn’t kill her the way she wanted to be killed. You didn’t help when she needed you. Because you let yourself be unimportant for so many years and did nothing to help yourself until it was too late, until you’d already lost the war. Peace came on unfavorable terms, the enemy couldn’t be placated.
I hate you because you’re afraid of the dark. When you’re with a man, you lean on the solidity of his body, the real beat of his heart, you listen to his rhythmic breathing, and you’re not afraid anymore, but you start to get antsy. His body sounds so much stronger than yours. They don’t cry the way you do. Does that mean they don’t feel? Why do they want to be with the likes of you? You don’t have the slightest idea what you want from them. Late at night is the worst. The stars unfold ahead of you, and you can’t find your way to the future, stupid bitch.
That’s when I hate you the most. You’re utterly without honor. You imagine your ex-husband, fat and happy in his bed, eating candy. He doesn’t suffer like you do, he has already forgotten why he married you in the first place. He is perfect. He is way above you in the cosmos, he is light, reason. Your life is insignificant, ignorant and small, and won’t leave a shadow.
Filed under karma, love, poetry, prose poetry
Heavenly Dances, Heavenly Intimacies, a short story
Heavenly Dances, Heavenly Intimacies, a short story
“Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?”
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
How can I be “dead” to any of the men I once loved? They are not “dead” to me. Not even H. How can I be “dead” to H.? They — even H. — are each as alive as when I was with them; as alive as the first time they touched me, whether tentatively or with confidence; whether softly or roughly; whether with passion or mere lust. It is shocking and appalling how H. lurched so radically to the right after 9/11. He began that journey to the Tea-Party-Mad-Hatter-Neocon-Bill-Buckley-Wall-Street-Apologist-Fringe-Brainless-Faux-News-Right when Ronald Reagan was shot; I was with him the very night it happened. We had a short affair, right then, because we started thinking the end of the world had arrived and we decided, like the crazy college students we were, to get married to celebrate our courage in the face of chaos! I realized very early on (but still way too late!) I was embarrassed to be seen in public with him. Did you ever start seeing, and marry someone whom you later realized you were embarrassed to be seen with? Perhaps the person in question was “dorky,” “geeky,” dressed “badly,” or had questionable “taste.” H. readily admits he was a “dork” in high school. He was on the debate team; need I say more? When you can’t bear to be seen in your lover’s/spouse’s/significant other’s/partner’s company, things usually don’t work out.
Still, I put in ten dutiful years, trying to make amends for my mistake in marrying H. The second he started making the big bucks, he dumped me. He left me for my best friend! I guess I deserved it, not taking control of my own life & filing for divorce two weeks after we married. And I guess I deserved how my ex-best-friend S. ruined me, as she subsequently did. She was in charge of the whole group we had socialized with: dictating how everyone in our “circle” should think, speak, act, or react. H. was dead wrong about most everything, but, to his credit, he was dead right about her. At the time I thought him merely woman-hating, but I see now, even though he did hate women, there was something more than simply being a “woman” he hated about her. He was covering up the fact he loved her by pretending to hate her. Now, I have no desire to see her, not ever again. She is definitely “dead” to me. Yes, I understand intellectually, a living death (call it shunning) can happen to anyone.
The upshot of all this boring history? I’ve been waiting for something a long time. I can’t blame anyone but myself for my unhappiness, not anymore. There is something dispirited inside me, something empty, drained, and beaten — something sick, something tired, something that has surrendered. I gave up, when? When my first ex-husband arbitrarily said no to children, breaking his solemn vow. When I realized I couldn’t find happiness outside myself — not with an old love, not with a new love, not with any of my subsequent husbands, my friends, my eventual children, or my family. Yes, to casual acquaintances and virtual strangers I am “happy, happier than I’ve ever been.” And it’s true! I’ve never been this happy, this contented, in my life. Yes, there are still problems. My oldest son is still half the world away, fighting an endless war on behalf of my “country.” My youngest son still has an ignorant, racist, rabidly conservative father. I am getting old. My face is melting. My neck is turning into a wattle. I am drooping.
Still, I cannot imagine any of them, the men I have loved or made love to, being dead to me the way my former best friend, S., is dead to me. Yet that is how they must feel about me, the way I feel about her. Wanting her removed from my memories. Wanting never to have met her. Not missing anything about her. She wants to see me, I heard from a mutual friend I still speak to. I don’t want to see her, or even see the mutual friend. I don’t even want to get as close as that! Because of reasons. Top secret, NSA, DOD, CIA, FBI, SEC, IRS, FDLE, GPD, ACSO reasons! No further comment!
Filed under artistic failures, assholes, boys, con man, con men, criminal, criminal behavior, criminals, fathers, he, health, humor, hypocrisy, idiots, jerks, karma, love, mothers, mysterious, sex, short stories, tea party mad hatters, ultra right wing loons, users
A Lot of Men That Year, a novel fragment
A Lot of Men That Year, a novel fragment
I was going through a lot of men that year. All men seemed like works of art to me, like sculpture. With body hair, without ‑‑ the buttocks, the thighs, the chests. They were all quite lovely to look at. Their emotional content was something else completely. They seemed cruel, without love ‑‑ not that it mattered that much to me; I kept myself armored against hurt pretty well. It was all casual dalliance, a form of gymnastic exercise, no permanence intended. That was how I was protected.
Francisco was the handsomest man I’d ever dared let myself be attracted to. We were cast in the same play, that’s how it started. His friend, Vincent, was also quite handsome, though not my type ‑‑ blonde, blue‑eyed.
During this same time, my father and I were trying to get to know each other, 20 years too late. He wanted instant fatherhood: I was just confused by it all.
His VW van ‑‑ his hippie ways. He thought I was so conservative. When he told me he was attracted to me physically, sexually, I was only half‑shocked, because I suppose I had felt it too. I almost wished he would act on it, just to see what it felt like. It wasn’t like I really saw him as a father figure.
Meanwhile, I slept with every guy who interested me, except the ones who had love in their eyes. Lust, intellectual curiosity, and admiration for my body ‑‑ these were all OK. But love? It gave me the willies. Long‑term commitments were the last thing on my mind.
My father was living in his van ‑‑ I didn’t want to see him all that much, and that hurt his feelings. I don’t know what, exactly, was going through my mind. Attraction and repulsion, like magnetic phenomena.
Then there was the boy who punched the wall and broke his hand. The short boy, musclebound. He had sort of, kind of, almost-but-not-quite fallen in love with me. He wanted to sleep with me, but I refused him. He didn’t understand why. I was sleeping with everybody else. I sensed that a sleeping relationship with him would get too messy. He would be jealous, passionate, moody, and neurotic. I only wanted men who were vaguely indifferent?
I loved my film as literature class teacher from afar. He was balding, blonde, and wore thick glasses. I mean Coke-bottle thick. I wanted everybody to make passes at me. I was almost offended if they showed no overt interest in taking my clothes off. My only excuse? I was nineteen years old.
Filed under mysterious, science, short stories
People Like You, a poem
People Like You
I’ve known a lot of people over the years, hundreds
in fact, and I’ve made it my serious business to know them
extremely well, both inside and out; it’s what I do,
it’s what I like to do, quite possibly it’s what I do best —
but in all this time, I’ve only stumbled across two people
like you in my entire life, there’s just you and him,
two truly dangerous human beings, two walking disasters,
two men obviously wounded so deep inside
that even after it was over, even after
examining all the mixed-up feelings I’d coaxed
out of us both; shoveling and pouring them
into the leaky jar formed from all our human needs;
even after the feelings had settled into pretty layers
of sand and sediment organized by density;
even after I poured over that the shimmering crystal
water of my tears, (not just the real ones I cried,
but the ghost ones you always wished you were able to shed)
I did not hold you responsible for your actions.
Not a bit. I had my eyes open from the very first
moment I heard your voice. I freely allowed you
to hurt me, I asked for the pain to be given to me,
then I made excuses, I made allowances, I forgave you,
and I am not very often a forgiving person.
Ask anyone who knows me well. Rather, I hold a grudge;
it is how women are as a race, I am told;
and I am told I am a woman. Do you think I am a woman?
Do I look like one? The private physics of our bodies
differs — does that create a real disparity in power
or just a real disparity in perception? You point always
to the internal risk of damage women carry within them.
You say, men do not have to fear women the same way
women have to fear men. With good reason, you have helped me
to learn this — now there is nothing left to do but file
your memory away forever, attach the bright red warning
stickers that proclaim for all to see: hey, wake up,
look twice, look close, look long, we all know
people like this exist, they exist for a reason.
Do you mind if I ask again, if I pry one last time
where I am not wanted? Oh, dear heart, what is your reason,
your sweet reason, your sweet reason for existing?
Filed under mysterious, poetry
Our Villain, a short story
Our Villain
Back when these events transpired, we consisted of three lawyers representing two plaintiffs against one defendant. We were, then as now, made up of two males and a female, the female of medium height, one male taller than average, one male shorter. Both the male lawyers were older than the female lawyer by in one case, seven, and in the other case, ten years. Only one of us, however, had blue eyes. And only one of us was in love with the other two simultaneously, to her great consternation and guilt, as all three of us were married, but none to the other. Hence, once possible source of difficulty for her.
The case was ponderous and slow-moving though not terribly complicated, legally speaking. The theory of liability was straightforward; even a child could comprehend it, and in actuality two children already had. No, in our case it was not the law that was causing our increasingly troubling reliance on several rounds of stiff drinks in the early evening and several rounds of antacids later on. It was rather, the facts. In the end, had any one of us been asked if we felt we had done the right thing, the answer would have been not yes, but a glare of outrage that the question had even been asked, and perhaps a violent cuff or two to the side of the questioner’s head. On our way this morning to the small, cold and windowless room we now sat in, we had driven together, singing long-memorized childhood standards to relieve the tension we all felt. We had, by way of example, upon arrival at the designated meeting place, arm in arm, skipped across the underground parking lot while whistling “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”
Thus fortified by silly notions of camaraderie and invincibility, we sat across from the villain, whom we only in public termed “the defendant.” We were there on that heartbreakingly beautiful late spring morning — the kind of morning when even had we been working on a less distasteful set of facts, we would rather have been anywhere else — to ask him questions about what he’d done to two little girls, our clients, aged 9 and 12 when he started, aged 11 and 14 now. The natural beauty outside — redbuds and Japanese magnolias, falling camellias — was to us that morning like a knife in the chest. We had just the night before come back from a visit to the girls’ current home, a grim apartment in Little Havana, furnished with a couch and chairs upholstered in bright gold plastic, molded to resemble brocade and velvet. The girls’ mother sat out in the kitchen while we talked to them, then the girls went to the bedroom they shared with their mother while we talked to her. Our talk was intended to help them feel that what they were going through now, the legal system, was not as bad as what the villain had taken them through. But the villain’s lawyers, also three in number, were trying to convince both girls and their mother that what the villain had taken them through was, in fact, the best of all possible worlds, and that the uncertain future they now faced was simply a result of their own stupidity and greed.
After the psychic shoring-up session at our clients’ sad, ill-lit lodgings, we had departed hastily for the bar at our hotel. One of us, as it turned out, was unable to handle her drink as well as the other two — though all three of us drank more than the AMA preaches, though not, perhaps, more than the AMA actually practices when faced with the sort of evening we had just experienced and were trying to bury in the way a dog buries a nasty, rotting piece of meat that said dog knows will be needed the following day for its very sustenance. Indeed, one of us was so incompetent at the art of self-medication by drinking she made inappropriate remarks to the other two of us, remarks involving her shameful, growing adulterous sentiments toward the other two, and though the eyes of the second two softened and grew misty and mutually receptive to the first’s silly, childish emotional exuberance — and one laid a tender hand on her wrist while the other stroked her cheek — they nonetheless raised to her as gently as they could the issue of how negatively our spouses might react to such sentiments, fully realized in all their permutations. Besides, the possible effects on our case loomed, immeasurable and frightening.
From the beginning we’d agreed that if we’d been casting directors for a Hollywood movie, we couldn’t have found a better physical type to play our villain. He was tall, well over 6 feet, and hulking, with a belly that strained the buttons on his shirt and spilled over the waist of his trousers. His skin was pale and so were his eyes, a faint blue behind thick lenses. Even his hair helped us — thinning, the color of burnt toast, combed greasily back off his forehead and swirled neatly behind his ears, but curled up in the back as if it couldn’t bear to be a part of him and would have jumped off at the first chance.
He’d met the girls’ mother when she was on the verge of becoming homeless. He discovered later, to his satisfaction, that she was always perched on that edge, that he could forever hold her in his hand as long as that hand was gentle and lined with cash. He moved them into his fine house, a low-slung, four-bedroom ranch in the suburbs of Miami. His family home was far, far north, and he’d long ago fled the harsh winters for our near-tropical climate. The brief, almost nonexistent winters we enjoyed led to the closets of young girls such as he favored being full of short-shorts and tank tops, and in, say, February, when his mother and his brother and sister (his father was dead) shivered inside their wools and furs, and drove haltingly along just-plowed, still-icy roads, he could climb into his Corvette convertible, top down, his thin, lank hair fluttering gaily as he drove, usually humming, to find his favorite sights at any city park. For free. He could look as long as he liked, newspaper over his lap, and no one had any idea what he was really thinking.
As lawyers, we thought we were familiar with how most people, even people not as far off the beaten path of normal human desire as our villain, are nonetheless filled with bizarre, inappropriate, even disgusting impulses. We believed we understood how everyone is, underneath the legally complex bounds of civilized adulthood, in many respects still the naked, screaming, bloody baby ejected suddenly and not altogether politely from mama’s throbbing womb. As lawyers, we possessed staid, naïve notions that because we had already experienced myriad cool, appraising looks in boardrooms and courtrooms, (in combination with startling internal questions of our own, seemingly unrelated, sudden pulsing engorgement), nothing could truly touch us, make us feel, by mere legal contact, soiled. How wrong we were.
The day he met our girls and their mother, he’d spent the afternoon pursuing one of his favorite hobbies. Top down, cruising in his car, trolling for the bright yellow buses that never failed to stir his loins. He’d follow behind one, fly unzipped, smiling at the young faces gesturing frantically to him behind the glass windows marked “Emergency Exit.” The kids loved his car. He loved the kids, and that was what nobody else seemed to understand. He loved them more than anything. Their clear eyes and bright, uncomplicated peals of laughter were what drew him to wake up each morning, were what made life not a chore but a gift from God.
The day we sat across from the villain, what appeared to offend him most was the nervous gaze of the court reporter. Maybe dressing the way he always did, in an open-throated shirt, his neck, wrists and fingers hung with heavy, 18-carat gold ornaments, had been a mistake in judgment. He met our eyes shyly — trying to use his best manners. Had he used that shy, hesitant gaze the first time he approached our girls? Had he, by reason of blushes and stutters, brought out their still-developing maternal instincts? Had they seen him as nothing more than a big, rubbery doll of a man? Had he clasped his wrists the way he hung on to himself now? For dear life? What part of his life was dearest at this moment?
We, in our turn, met his eyes with blankness, hiding our feelings, our ultimate goal — we wanted to inspire in him only trust. We were, for the next few hours, dedicated to convincing him we had no malice toward him, no, simply the same heartfelt weight of concern for his girls — our girls now — that he’d always maintained. We differed only in how we wished him to express his deepest feelings toward his beloveds. We simply wanted to redirect his fingers from the clasp of his own member to the clasp of an ink pen. All he had to do, to satisfy us, was sign a check representing a sum equivalent to all he now possessed. It was no more or less than the great love he’d always felt for them, for all of them, all the dear children who’d brought such golden light into his otherwise empty days. He was worth millions.
Our girls had been shocked when he first made his desires known to them. Shocked not in the sense one is shocked by a car accident, but shocked in the way one is shocked the first time it is made plain that one will be required to someday provide food, clothing and shelter for oneself. His desires for them quickly brought material comfort to their mother and to them. At first, the knowledge of their importance to him brought them a sort of heady pride, a child’s pride at having found in the soil a shiny gold coin. For a while, there was no great weariness at his requests. For a while, our girls still felt it was worthwhile to each day shower, brush their teeth, and comb their hair. It was, at its best, a game, a stage play, a dream. They would feel something click over in their heads, and suddenly the hands on their bodies would be outside the real. What happened against the skin of their bodies in the villain’s king-sized bed atop his black sheets happened in another country; a parallel universe.
We knew their seduction had been a gradual procession from blushes, hesitations and startlement to coy fumblings undertaken first under cover of a cheerily false, overgrown childish abandon, then beneath a camouflage of compliments and toys, shopping expeditions to the nearest air-conditioned mall wherein nothing was refused, nothing. If our villain refused them nothing, how weakened became their own ability to refuse! He had become quite skilled at fulfilling the ache that seemed to start in his toes and rise up to his scalp. His entire body loved those girls — his kisses covered them like a fine mist of semi-tropical rain.
When the teachers at school sent home notes advising the girls’ mother to assist in ensuring their personal hygiene, how delighted he was to purchase fine soaps and bathing salts, sponges and silken wash mitts. Neither he nor their mother, busy in front of her TV, saw the circles under the girls’ eyes, the listlessness which every day crept deeper into their skins, as symptomatic of anything other than transient sleep deprivation or chronic growing pains. The girls were, despite the recent flimsiness of their appetites, growing like kudzu vines after a good hard rain. All was well in the quiet house.
The villain and our girls’ mother were, as a result, quite alarmed when the child welfare worker showed up one afternoon unannounced. Our villain was napping in his dark, cool cave of a bedroom, covered only from the knees down by the sheet which yet retained a certain pleasant odor and stiffness from the previous night’s adventure. Mother was engrossed in a particularly compelling news broadcast of the Pope’s South American tour when the doorbell rang. She was stout and somewhat put out at having to leave her seat as she huffed her way to the door. Those Jehovah’s Witnesses could be such an annoyance.
The social worker stood on the doorstep in the bright afternoon sunlight, mopping her forehead with her bare hand, and then drying her hand on the side of her slacks. As soon as the girls’ mother answered the door, the social worker felt something hard to describe, something which she would, with great reluctance when pressed later by the district attorney, label nausea. She felt nausea as she stood looking at the girls’ overweight, unkempt mother, but she could not be sure if it was due to the heat, the greasy chicken sandwich she’d wolfed on her way to this visit, or the physical presence of the mother herself, a short, stocky, large-breasted, flat-footed creature with no discernible joie de vivre.
Now, in our tiny deposition room, our villain began to perspire as we questioned him. He remained of good cheer, evidenced by an easy, toothy smile and an absence of muscle tremors. We asked many things which in ordinary onlookers might have produced discomfort. We asked hundreds of detailed questions involving the breasts, buttocks, mouths, hands and genitals of both the villain and our girls. Every possible mathematical combination of the body parts mentioned had to be imagined, catalogued, and inquired into.
But our villain’s lawyers, though he had already been criminally prosecuted and sentenced under a plea-bargain, instructed him after the very first question to invoke his rights against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment, using those simple, nearly poetic words we had studied in school and grown to love — but would never love again — hiding behind those words as behind a hideous, absolute shield. His lawyers stared at the table, unable to meet our eyes. Surely their job was worse than ours, at that moment. Because the villain wanted so badly to tell us, he wanted to explain that he had never, ever done anything to harm those beautiful children. He only wanted to tell us how much he had, and would always, love them. His body trembled as his lawyers touched his arms to keep him in his seat. Our bodies trembled as we continued our litany of questions, preserving for the record his only defense.
We couldn’t, as we had imagined, pierce the villain upon our lance of questions like knights on chargers, and thus protect our girls from exposure to cross-examinations by his white-glove law firm’s most skillful roster of evil, carrion-eating dragons. We could not keep him — by virtue of the Constitution — from further harming the children we sought only to recompense for the harm he’d already inflicted. We might now be forced, if he would not voluntarily settle the case, to put his victims upon the witness stand only to be reminded in excruciating detail once more of the very things we wanted them most to forget. What we didn’t know, at that moment, was he would the following week agree to settle the case, not, unfortunately, for every cent he possessed, but for enough of his funds to cut short his career as lethal sugar-daddy. What we heard, we heard only from our girls. In private.
Please, he had said, the first time, when he made “love” to them both within a half-hour. Please. His words flayed the girls open like a rawhide bullwhip across their chests. I need to, he had said, curled up on the bed next to them like a baby. His hands reached, grasped, fumbled, and then grasped again. He unbuttoned their shirts, unzipped their pants. The sensation was at once terrifying, sickening and pleasurable. Our girls turned their eyes away, looking out the windows, down the hall. Their dread and revulsion butted up against his sickness, his addiction. He left the door open, the curtains flung wide. It was a beautiful spring day outdoors that day — full-blown white camellias fell off their perches with heavy, helpless plops at short intervals just on the other side of the window-screen next to the bed. The flowers had to bloom, had to engorge each formerly folded petal, to force themselves open toward the light, the slow-moving caressing wind. The girls tried to see him as a bee forcing its way into a closed flower, a male bee burdened by his own desire, his own weakness, and his own ignorance.
After the villain’s deposition was over that day, he somehow made it to the door before any of us did. He stood in the doorway waiting, his hand out, as if a greeter in a department store. His palm was soft-looking, glistening with perspiration and as we glanced at it we saw not a hand, but a weapon carrying the stain of everything we already knew he’d done with it. Ladies first, the villain said with a smile. Then, while that unfortunate member of our trio shook hands with the villain, the other two slipped by him with relief and gratitude toward the first. His flesh turned out to be hotly moist, unpleasantly springy, and what we found out later, as the three of us walked arm in arm to the bar on the corner — the two who hadn’t shaken the villain’s hand supporting the weight of the one in the middle who had — it seemed his touch (no matter how much scrubbing with soap and water so hot it seared the flesh had taken place immediately afterward in the washroom of the courthouse) his touch had made all of us feel irrevocably soiled. Like we’d shaken hands with the Devil.
Filed under legal writing, short stories
Kimberly Townsend Palmer 