a collection of short stories
Mazie Louise Montgomery
by Dicey Brown Media Publications
THE SIMPLIFIED SKELETON
Karen Ashburner
First Edition Chapbook Published 2003
Dicey Brown Publications, Inc.
Lillington, North Carolina
Names, characters, places, and incidents of these poems are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
DICEY BROWN PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Manufactured in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Copyright © 2003 by Karen Ashburner
All rights reserved
First Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
upon request.
ISBN 0-9723415-6-0
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications where certain stories of the collection have first appeared or are forthcoming: “The Simplified Skeleton,” Eyeshot. “This Old Hammer Killed John Henry,” Eyeshot. “You and I,” Word Riot. “The Persistence of Memory,” Yankee Pot Roast. “The General Appearance of the Human Form,” Public Scrutiny. “Baby Bunting,” Pindeldyboz. “On Values and Other Positions,” Yankee Pot Roast. “The Lady-killers,” Parenthetical Note.
CONTENTS
ON VALUES AND OTHER POSITIONS
THE SIMPLIFIED SKELETON
SOME THINGS
THE LADYKILLERS
THE GENERAL APPEARANCE OF THE HUMAN
FORM CAN, WITH EVERY HIGH PROBABILITY,
BE ASSUMED UNIVERSAL
BABY BUNTING
THIS OLD HAMMER KILLED JOHN HENRY
YOU AND I
FERRIS WHEEL
THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
ON VALUES AND OTHER POSITIONS
My room is hot. My room is hot and I have spent the last five minutes staring at my bracelet. My bracelet is old and the chain is made of some kind of metal that is supposed to look like silver; I bought it at an antique store for twenty dollars, I think it is worth about fifty cents. If I had fifty cents in my pocket I would spend it. I would turn my pockets inside out and gather up this fifty cents with all the other pennies and dimes and nickels that are scattered about my hot room and I would run to the store and buy a pack of cigarettes even though I don't smoke anymore and I don't own an ashtray. I would buy the unfiltered kind of cigarettes that make your lungs hurt the next morning because my lungs are bad and they need to be punished. My lungs go up and down all day long, they never stop. They are irritatingly repetitive; they are spoiled. I would flip my ashes onto the floor or into an old Coke can that I could surely find shoved underneath my bed along with my old college yearbook, three or four pairs of dirty socks, and a worn out portable CD player and my vibrator.
I would light these cigarettes with matches, the kind with the red and white tip that you strike on the side of a box because I've always liked the smell of a burning match and the way you have to push those matches out of the box, in their little drawer, as if the box were a tiny chest filled with something important from the past. Then I would inhale deeply because there are lungs in China that would kill for the prosperity and clean air available in my hot room. But my lungs and fingers aren't satisfied with clean air and prosperity; they want enduring irrational emotional involvement; they want intellectually progressive and complex joint activity; they want to drag and flip; they want to wheeze and cough and regret the things done in a hot room the night before. They are just like my thoughtless hands, my careless arms and my insensitive wrists, always thinking of themselves; they don't deserve this beautiful antique bracelet. They don't deserve this silver-like chain or the iridescent, blue plastic gemstones that sit happily on top and shine like polished marbles. They are irrational and difficult to please, like my mouth, always stealing from strangers, always complaining about the heat.
THE SIMPLIFIED SKELETON
He is walking in circles. He is walking in circles around a woman and he is smiling. His smile is sharp-witted and happy. The woman is stopped at a bench; she is tying her shoe. Her shoe is small and white. While she ties he is walking in circles; he walks around the bench, and around the girl. She has blonde hair; it is stuffed into a tight ponytail. Her hair is very blonde; her legs are very tan. I can tell she walks a lot of circles, though I've never seen her here, at my circle, before today.
After the shoe is tied they walk the big circle, together. A man and a woman. Left, right, left, right, left. They are walking ahead of me, but I can hear them talking. They are talking in circles. He is explaining the rules she does not understand. It is a complicated sport. There is a net. There is a court. There is a fixed height and width. She is not listening. "The ball is round," he says, "like a solid circle." She is not listening, she is thinking of someone else. "Yes," she says. "Like a solid circle." He smiles. "Who were you thinking of," he asks. "No one," she says. "Don't be silly." She pokes him in the side. His mouth forms a small, perfect circle, like a silver dollar or the face of a watch.
In the center of the big circle there is a park. The park is filled with green clovers and trees and three children who are running and playing. The children are loud; there are two boys and one girl. The boys are running in circles and screaming, one is very dark-skinned; the other is very light. "There is mold in some cheese," says the dark one. "Muskrats eat cattails," says the light one. They begin to chase the girl. Her hair is long and blonde; her neck is wet from sweat. She stops at the swings and hits the dark one in the arm. There is a clump of hair stuck to her forehead. There is one freckle on the center of her cheek and one at the top of the point of her lip. "You're not supposed to stop," says the light one. The girl pushes an empty swing, she is smiling; her smile is like a half-moon, or a round oatmeal cookie, bitten in half.
The mothers are watching the children run and play; the mothers are now sitting on the bench where the blond woman stopped to tie her shoe just three circles before. The mothers talk loud, they are used to the children screaming. "He killed my cactus," says one. "You have to do something," says the other. "I know," says the first. When the woman passes, they look at her tan legs. They are not afraid to stare.
The woman's walk is quick, her circles big and convincing. "There are rules," says one. "I know," says the other. The mothers did not walk many big circles tonight; their circles were small and slow, their circles were interposed with many gestures and sighs.
The man and the woman finish their circles. The man stretches his leg on a bench by the water fountain. His legs are tight; he cannot straighten his knee. I can tell he does not walk many circles. He tells a joke but the woman does not laugh. He pokes her in the side; her mouth forms a straight line. A faded red Honda pulls into the parking lot, behind the wheel, another man. His radio is loud; he screams at the woman. "Terry," he shouts. "Terry." The woman looks away, rattles her keys. "Who is that," says the man. "No one," says the woman. They leave in a green SUV with large tires and shiny wheels. The mothers gather the boys and the girl runs into the woods toward a neighborhood where her name is being called. It is getting dark, the streetlights snap and buzz. The man in the faded Honda and I are soon alone; he sits and stares at the bugs as they begin to circle and dive. His radio is playing a song I like. My legs are sore and I have lost track of my circles. I begin to run, around and around, my hands in tight, round fists as I hum.
SOME THINGS
I have bathed the dog. I have bought him a new collar, a new leash, flea spray, and a wire brush I used to comb his hair. I washed him with my botanical shampoo, dried him with one of my mother's pink towels. He was covered with red mud from his romp in the woods and now he is fluffy and white once again. He sleeps under my bed now, not out in the yard. When he dreams he whines and kicks at the slats that hold up my new mattress. His eyes are blue, like mine, and sometimes he looks at me in a sad way, like he wants to romp in the woods all the time but he could never leave me for more than a day. His bark reminds me of an old man, fussing at his wife.
I have bought new jeans, two new shirts, a toothbrush and two new pairs of underwear: one blue, covered with red cherries and trimmed in red; one blue, trimmed in yellow and covered with the words: Quack Quack Quack Quack Quack Quack... They are hipster underwear, something new for me. They are low-rise, to go with my new low-rise jeans. My new shirts are small and tight, like something a teenager would buy. I wore one to the grocery store last night and imagined someone handsome and bold would stare at me in the frozen food aisle as I reached for a pizza or a gallon of ice cream.
I have lain in bed and stared at the ceiling. I own new curtains but have not put them up. They sit in a wrinkled pile in a recliner my mother gave me to sit in and think and watch TV but I have no TV and I'd rather think while staring at the ceiling. On top of the wrinkled curtains is a dirty clothes hamper, filled with unmatched socks, running shorts that don't fit me anymore and an ice bag.
Across the street from my house there is a school lit very brightly with street lamps surrounding the parking lot. One streetlight in particular shines into my window at night and casts a shadow through the eight perfect panes of my new bare window. The light reaches in at a funny angle and it is no more a rectangle but several triangles intersecting one another at odd angles. It is something new. Sometimes I think about tracing the pattern onto my ceiling, so I can look at it during the daytime. But that seems a very serious thing to do.
I have sneaked into my old house and looked around for things that are mine in places where things that belong to me would not be kept. I have taken my grandmother's chest of drawers and my books and a
bottle of wine I once bought but never drank. I have opened the door to my old room and taken a nap in my old bed, on my old sheets. There are still pictures of me on the wall that I am thinking of sneaking in and taking down.
I have looked through a plastic box filled with old black and white photos of my mother and my aunt and my grandmother and grandfather. In one picture they are in New Orleans, taking a carriage ride through the French Quarter, all four of them. They look very happy. My grandfather is smoking a cigarette; he does not look like an alcoholic, he looks young and handsome. His body is not wrinkled or broken, his legs are not frozen into a bent position from burns; his hands are not shaking. He is smiling.
I have walked around my new house, wondering what you might be doing, who you might be talking to, and if you were behind on your work. I have wondered: if you saw me at a bar, would you turn to look? Would you buy me a drink? Would we talk about all the things we've fucked up in our lives? All the people we've left behind. Would you take me out for pizza and a movie? Would I come back to your house, look through your books and your record collection and your t-shirts while you poured me a beer into a plastic cup?
I have read over all your old letters and stories and the poem you sent me. I have noticed that you often set things on fire: a cigarette, a couch, an electric kettle, a woman. And then I wondered if we all do this from time to time when we get bored; set our lives on fire in one way or another. Maybe we burn ourselves up slowly, one day at a time, waiting for the right person to come along, and in the process turn ourselves to ash and cinder.
THE LADYKILLERS
There is always some impatient young woman lurking about, eager to meet a man who is going to kill her in some vicious manner, to preserve her body in a petrol-drum full of alcohol, or bury it under the floorboards of a rental house. In late June of 1946, a film extra named Margery Garner was murdered by Neville Heath, a young Air Force hero just home from the war. The Commissioner of Police described Heath as a tall, handsome man with a broad forehead and nose, firm chin, and good teeth. Margery was described as a "bohemian" who drank and danced her way to a notable death by having her face pressed into a pillow. Compulsion is a two-way process: the compulsion to kill and to be killed; to be the nude with a basket of fruit, the nude at the window; to be the cool man-of-the-world and speak laconically in the course of afternoon tea. The assassination habit dies hard and there is always some young woman waiting to be turned upside down, decapitated and dissected, to have the pieces of her scattered into the air.
The Lady-killer is a man of boundless sexual appetite, a man reputed to have eyes that could make a girl do anything; he is the juggler, the aged lion in the Fable of La Fontaine. He is interested in the bone structure of the human body, of the manner in which birds flap their wings, of the microcosm of the microscopic insects that swarm, the crisis of color, and the texture of spatial limitations. The young woman is not concerned with the credit card bill, or the gas bill, or the underwear or the socks; she is the acrobat, contorting herself with the grace of an exotic flower that hangs from the end of a fragile stem. She is the luminous fantasy, executed with great precision. She knows it is not the literary or symbolic world that affects change; it is not the green donkey, or the yellow, fiddle-playing moon, or the one-handed fish that holds a bouquet of flowers, but the blood itself that creates the blue circus she lives inside.
THE GENERAL APPEARANCE OF THE HUMAN FORM CAN, WITH EVERY HIGH PROBABILITY, BE ASSUMED UNIVERSAL
This thought is the result of a search. A search is like a question and provides no clue to the relationship of the searcher to the object of his search. The result of a search is not equally significant or convincing. The degree of intellectual conflict varies accordingly. The fervor of controversy depends on the severity of conflict. Investigations and studies of this kind lie. Science deals with the limits of knowledge. Matters lying within these limits become the task of the engineer. The complex problem is divided; answers that seem implausible or fantastic are discarded. The engineer develops structures, determines shape, faces the task of thinking. The shape resembles more a child's toy, the humming top; the choice of shape indicates shrewd planning. The primary reason for the shape is aerodynamic: but the engineer knows only wheels that roll. What kinds of wheels are these! Their color is a light greenish blue, and on each wheel, motions he cannot comprehend, rotations unfamiliar to the rotations he knows. There is more than one wheel within a wheel. He cannot understand how they move on the ground. The wheels he knows roll in one direction. Such details have no technical significance, as he is a believer. This has no influence on configuration. This man is not distinguished from the others; not notably different in shape or movement, his movements a consequence of combined moments. The optimum number of legs, arms, and fingers may be a matter of argument, but we know the minimum: two legs, two arms and three fingers, outlined in basic essentials, leading to the structure called the human body. Sensitivity is particularly relevant, and the surface of such beings cannot consist of a shell or callus-like wrapping. Even the writing of a poem or musical score requires the mechanism we call a hand. A string quartet would be inconceivable with the hands of a frog, an anthropoid ape, or the paws of a dog. But as noted in Die Bibel oder die ganze Heilige Schrift des Alten und Neuen Testamentes nach der Ubersetzung von D. Martin Luther, the individuality in a text structure can be classified into three categories: localized confusion, incompleteness, and unmotivated changes of theme, the last category, more than likely, a direct result of the previous two.
BABY BUNTING
I would mention the rain. I would mention how hard and how slow, but I know you'd rather talk about Ferris wheels and how the world has dragged you down, how this town owes you a fat girl in your bed, a fat girl who will keep your secrets and bear your apologies. You think you are a charming man. You think one gin and tonic will turn you into some kind of New South Tony Manero. You spend your time in gay bars and discotheques trying to pick up fat girls in drag. You think the rain owes you a living. What difference does it make to you that I am ill from too much alcohol, that a handsome man wearing clogs and a plaid shirt stole my clothes? I need love. I need a handsome man in my bed. I know people will stare.
We could go to the library. We could read Keats under a blanket. You think your hand controls the pencil, but it's the earth that controls your hand as it moves around the sun; it is the stars, as they move around a talented sky. You spend your days in a scholarly hush; it is something we have in common, you and I, with all the plants and animals and people in the world. The streets are crowded with venders and gypsies. At home you sit and stare at your mother's wallpaper or the drapes at the windows. You sit and wonder at the patterns as she knits by the window. You wonder at the pleats in her dress. You won't go out tonight, the clubs are full and you like sitting in your pajamas, thinking of things that matter: a ball is half a bowl, hollowed out; a cup is just a bowl with a handle on it; a plate is just a flat bowl. A boy wears his ear on his back.
I will not apologize for sleeping late; I'm too tired. Nobody knows why different kinds of birds always build their own particular kind of nest. The pantry is empty and I am naked. Turn on some music and I will dance the Charleston, I will fling my legs and you can prance an old-fashioned cakewalk. Oh, what a charming man you are, if only you could stop talking and listen to the happy music: Bye, bye Baby Bunting, Papa's gone a-hunting. You said it was going to happen. You said the street would be crammed with children, instead I only see white-faced hornets. When you said "it's going to happen," did you mean now? Did you fall in love with the words? All the streets are crammed with children demanding a higher allowance, of men reciting the word "bedlam." The dogs are barking; the ducks are quacking; the cows are mooing; the chickens are starting to cackle. And now, tell me, what exactly does it mean?
I would mention hope, about it being gone and swallowed by shoeless children playing in broken glass, but all the streets are crammed and you are such a handsome devil. Let me get my hands on you. I just want to be seen on your porch, rocking back and forth in a wicker chair. I would crack the whip, but I know I will never see you again and I am surrounded by too many fat girls. Tie me to a butterfly. Slap me with a hammer. There is more to life than dancing a Viennese Waltz to the skip and hop of your badly played square dance. Are you still there? Last night I dreamed you said "thanks" in that tone, and then I watched your mother beat cake batter. Did you know the lines of her dress are French? No one talks about the rain. Keats wrote awful poetry. These are the things that destroy me.
THIS OLD HAMMER KILLED JOHN HENRY
You bought some books, they were fashionable books and that is why you liked them. There was no reason for you to buy them; we had a house full of books. "This one is about the rhythm of nature," you said. For the next week you became convinced that falling rain was what gave man the idea to paint stripes on his wall. I said it was something more effortless, like the blades of grass and the stems of flowers and the trunks of trees. In the movie theatre you almost broke down watching the previews. You wanted compliments; you were going to have to buy something to wear with the books because nothing you had matched. You bought a series of shirts printed with the columns of Greek temples, the pyramids of Egypt, and the skyscrapers of America. The shirts were so charming, everything pointing upward, day after day, the temples and buildings of man rising toward the sky. People gave you compliments and you felt good. "Almost nobody builds a house, church, or any kind of building underground," you said. For the moment, you were calm, we went to see a play, but walking out of the theatre you became upset because it was a modern play and for ten minutes of the second act all the actors did was emulate the drowsy hum of a bumble bee. You began to question the logic. Why the hum of a bee? Why not the chirp of a cricket, the roar of the lion, the lonely howl of a coyote, the gurgle of a brook flowing to the bottom of the sea? You cried in the car and I started crying too because I didn't want to be middle-of-the-road. On the way home we stopped at a bookstore in the mall. You talked to the girl behind the counter about the zebra and the tiger, the graceful neck of the giraffe, the delicate hoofs of a goat on a ledge, the scoop of a cat on a pillow. But it was hard because you knew you could not be one of those actors just playing a part. You bought a book about the unseen rhythms of electronics and a shirt you said represented the drift of clouds across the sky and the constant pulse of circles on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
That night in bed I said, "Do you remember when you bit down on that tube of lipstick in your mouth?" I thought this was a funny memory, something that would cheer you up, but the lipstick had been a special flavor of cherry, something you could never replace. You had put the tube in your mouth so that you could use both hands to pour yourself some wine. This was when we still drank wine out of red plastic cups and got drunk in the driveways of rented houses. When you were pouring the wine a spot of it dripped on your favorite shirt and you tried to say, "Fuck it all the hell," because, back then, you really liked to say fuck. But what you did instead was bite down really hard. The shirt had been a favorite of yours; you had worn it to impress someone who doesn't really matter anymore; now the memory of that person and the stained shirt and the ruined lipstick matter to you. The wine is important now too because you realized how you liked the way wine looked in a silver foil bag. The memory of all this made you long for the past and you fell asleep talking about how we use to love Irish folk songs. "The Irish love American jazz," you said. "Sometimes American jazz and Irish melodies combine to make a single song." I fell asleep knowing there are no accidents in nature, that in Bechuanaland there are beehive huts that look like Japanese pagodas. I think you probably meant to bite down on that lipstick. But what do I know?
When we were seventeen you told me a ghost story about a girl who died after kissing a boy who swallowed a fly. "The boy tasted bitter to the girl," you said. "She was sure he had passed some disease on to her." You said the girl died six months later and spent the next ten years following the boy around, forcing him to buy Spanish shawls, Persian ties, and jackets made of her family's Scotch plaid. I told you I didn't believe in ghosts but resolved to walk with my mouth closed whenever we were together. I took a job at a radio station that broadcast nothing but Cuban music and convinced myself that I had a small but significant cult following that would one day catapult me to fame. In between commercial breaks I broadcast subliminal messages that suggested you buy nothing but pink shirts. When we were nineteen the station began alternating between classical music and guest speakers and I interviewed a bacteriologist who worked for the CDC. "Most people catch diseases from mosquitoes," he said, "not flies." But you weren't listening, you were at a late night cafeteria eating cheese grits and scallions with a man who made a living playing the guitar and covering Bob Dylan songs. He liked the ghost story, said he liked stories about the mouth, and that he liked to use his mouth to kiss, not his lips. I asked you to marry me. At first you declined. "Certain tones on the piano or violin hurt a dog's ears," you said. "The tones make them howl." There were so many people around back then. You loved the taste of Jasmine tea. You still believed a person could get the hiccups for life, and you liked the sound of men plowing or sawing or breaking rock.
YOU AND I
You and I will move away from The Bronx, buy a house in a glass-enclosed tropical rain forest, collect old Blondie records, and get in on the ground floor of something big: post-war painting and sculpture, a revival of geometric art, something bizarre and strangely beautiful. To avert a mid-life crisis, I'll write a series of self-help books on how to be accepted, how to find direction, and how to get out of a rut. In our spare time we will perpetuate endangered species such as the snow leopard, the red panda, and the hairy rhinoceros. We will build museums, collect rare books, restore historical America, and collect old buttons made of wood or enamel. With a worried eye on America's exploding population, we'll sell our shares in Romanesque art and buy into a corporation that transports dead human bodies to disposal centers where they are ground into high protein patty-cakes that aggravate the usual carbon-dioxide pollution. Fortunately, no one will care because a person can get used to anything. The first generation will think it's dreadful, they'll think the human dust that collects on their cars is repugnant, they'll use words like "vile" and "abhorrent" while they stand in line, pushing and shoving for one cake. One human protein cake will feel like ecstasy; empty bellies will knock down doors for one handful of human dust. The past will feed the future, floodlit at dusk, in a mansion once owned by Billy Rose. We'll make millions, you and I, while politicians and dignitaries ask questions of one another while drinking bottles of Russia's best wine and vodka: How critical is famine? What is our reward? They will begin to lament: We are a long way from becoming an elective dictatorship. If only we hadn't voted for the lottery. Our house will be guarded by Bishops entertained by court musicians created by an unknown artist inspired by nine great heroes of the past: three pagan, three Hebrew, and three Christian. We will triple-glaze our windows to keep out the noise, and each day at 2pm, exotic birds will soar free, surrounded by simulated tropical thunderstorms and artificial waterfalls, their calls recorded for future generations, their bones enclosed in coffins trimmed with gold leaf and silver.
FERRIS WHEEL
First of all you woke up tired and alone, hung over from the night before because you mixed Heineken with Coors Light and a lousy gin and tonic your mother made from the cheap gin she had left over from the “going away” party her co-workers held for her when she left South Carolina to be near you, her only daughter. And now here you are, living in her attic, hung over from her cheap gin, lonely and tired, wondering if a move from South Carolina to Alabama was a move up, a move in the right direction. You know a move from a four-bedroom, two-bath home in a “nice” suburban neighborhood to an upstairs attic loft with no bathroom is not a move in the right direction. Somewhere you made a wrong turn, and now you're starting to think this mother-daughter thing isn't really working so well, that your mother spends too much time telling your kid, “Sit up straight, Baby” and, “Mind your manners, Sweetie” when you've spent ten long years trying to teach the kid not to “sit up straight,” and not to “mind her manners” because you think this makes you a progressive mother. You think this makes your kid question authority. Your mother thinks this makes you a bad mother and now your kid sits up straight and places a white cotton napkin embroidered with butterflies on her lap before eating her PBJ and is on the cheerleading squad. She even knows how to do one of those cheerleader jumps, a “Herkie” she calls it, “named after Lawrence “Herkie” Herkimer,” she says. She's full of trivia, this one, even knows all the common misspellings: “Hurkie, herky, hurky,” she says. “These are all wrong.”
Things didn't get any better once you got up and moving. You were jumpy from the pills your mother said you needed to, “Make your back feel better from all that lifting, Sugar,” and you didn't feel like taking a shower or brushing your teeth or combing your hair or putting on make-up but the errands still had to be run so you went to the drug store, and the Super Wal-Mart, and the “United States Post Office” looking like that. “What the Hell,” you said and while you were standing in line, waiting for your book of “Pressure-sensitive adhesive stamps, please,” the last guy that you were temporarily “in love” with walked through the door. You tried to hide. You tried to bend over the counter and look for something you might have dropped, like a penny or a dime, but when you came up for air, as the postal clerk asked, “Are you OK, Doll?” and a line of angry postal customers began to
form behind you, he saw you. And then he smiled and you remembered why it was that you fell “in love” with him in the first place.
You met him at a party, one of your husband's work parties. He flirted with you, told you how pretty you were while your husband “smoked” pot and watched girl-on-girl porno in the basement with his boss so that he could, “Get ahead, Honey.” You were bored, he talked to you all night; you stared into his eyes. “I've never seen eyes that color,” you said, “like chocolate.” He smiled. His lashes were long and dark; he blinked hard. You told him the story of your first Ferris wheel ride. He seemed interested, told you how funny it was that people always remember the small details. “I was ten, almost eleven,” you told him. “I was wearing a blue polyester Adidas jogging suit.” You told him about the sleeve of your jacket, about the iron-on patch you got out of the cereal box. “I ironed it onto the sleeve myself,” you said. He laughed. You told him how you were an only child and had ridden the Ferris wheel all by yourself, how your mother and father watched from below, waving. You told him about the cold night air, how it tugged at your hair, about the small, dirty man with the golden eagle tattoo on his shoulder, the one who opened the gate for you, smiled at you, touched your shoulder and ran a greasy finger over the outline of your training-bra strap.
But this morning you were not so suave. For forty-five minutes you stood on the sidewalk talking to him, sweating in the hot sun, catching up on what's been going on in his life. He was “still a teacher,” he said, at the local college that “didn't pay shit.” You thought he probably still fucked his students. You remembered the pretty blonde one who phoned him every day at noon after her Psych class. You spent five minutes saying things like, “I'm such a mess today,” until he finally asked, “What's wrong with you, why are you so jumpy?” and you finally said, “Nothing," and then, "My marriage is over,” and he said, “Oh, where are you living?” In my mother's attic until I find something better, you said. You told him you were hopeful, that you've always been a go-getter; you know something better will eventually come along. He asked about your mother's house and you gave him directions as if he would come to visit, as if your mother would make him chicken and sweet tea and bread that would make his mouth smell like garlic. You told him about the heavy boxes; boxes full of needless things like books and papers and fancy red-lace underwear you never got around to wearing. “I left some on the curb,” you said. Some of them were still in the trunk of your car as you stood on the sidewalk of the USPS, sweating, talking, burning in the heat. You finally said you had to go and that you should “get together” for “a drink some time” and he said he “needed your number” and you fumbled around and said “oh” as he grabbed a pen and ripped a corner from a paper sack you think probably last held a bottle of
whiskey. You wrote your name (first and last), and number (with area code) on that piece of ripped paper sack and are now not sure which you are more frightened of: that he will or will not call. The afternoon did not get much better. Your daughter spent it asking you about airplanes because she's still traumatized by the ones that “rammed into the buildings in New York” and wants to talk about it, all the time. She asked if there are any buildings in Alabama that might get rammed. You said, “No,” that, “Nobody cares much about Alabama.” At least not enough to ram it with an airplane, you said. “Jet airplanes and airliners use big airports,” you said. “We live in a small town, with a small airport.” She was not satisfied. You said the airport was more like an “air strip.” She asked about the flying farmers who fly their planes from the pasture fields and spray cotton around her small Alabama town. She has heard about the possibilities. “I watch the news,” she said. You tried to divert her attention by talking about the baggage and the moving belt and the little truck that takes it to the plane. “I saw the little truck,” she said. “When Grandma took me to Disneyland. Sometimes the men drive it in circles.” You told her, “Go ask Grandma about the Eskimo women who must chew and chew heavy sealskin before they can make shoes to keep their feet warm.” That is something to worry about, you said. Your mother told her that Eskimo women can now buy their shoes from the discount outlet in Anchorage and gave her a cookie.
When nightfall came at last you hit your head on your slanted attic roof five times before wallowing in the bed and obsessing about a letter you received from your former boss, the one who moved to south Florida six months ago to “escape the hot Alabama summers” and “frolic” in the surf. “Dear Molly,” he wrote. “I am in Florida. My house is a funny green color that shimmers in the sun. The swimming is great. I know they have hurricanes here, but none yet. Mother has gone to Chicago, but will be home tomorrow.” There were five paragraphs of these observations and it was signed, “Sincerely, John.” You wondered why it was that you were still obsessed about someone so far away, someone you would never see again. You thought about the letter you would write in return: “Dear John, It seems I wrote you the wrong letter, then I addressed it rightly, and you got it. I am glad of that, at least. Lately I have made so many mistakes.” You thought about the fact that most women don't care to be forgiven, that no one ever writes about adequately about the boredom of love. Then you turned off all the lights and undressed in the dark; tomorrow you would make a more determined effort to pay attention, to notice the faces, to notice the lovely blue flowers on the dining room table.
THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
First of all, I'll admit, I was a little extreme back when we first met. I knew you liked good food and beer and literature so I memorized the entire "Restaurant and Bar" section of the New York Eyewitness Travel Guide. I walked around saying things like, "You can get almost any alcoholic drink you fancy in New York bars; the most popular drink is ice-cold beer." I sounded like a tour guide, and not the sexy kind of "I'm so hot and stifled under this uniform take it off of me" kind of tour guide. Maybe I was more like a part-time waitress, snappish and uninformed. I read things like the Czech Black Book on my lunch break because I thought I would sound smart if I could recite pieces of a letter written to Ludvik Svoboda, former President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic: "The occupation organs have so far failed in gaining the support and population. This failure heightens their nervousness." I was wrong. Worse, I began to lie in bed at night thinking of the same word, over and over: Dubcek, Dubcek, Dubcek, then began to fear that I would say it out loud, that I would say it loud in some place quiet.
God, I hope I was nice to you last night. I hope I said something fun and good- natured and hopeful. I probably didn't though, did I? I probably said "Dubcek." Did I say it three times in a row? I was probably some kind of shit-faced, fuckhead about it all. I hope I wasn't shit-faced. But I probably was. Fucked-up as Cooter Brown is what I was. I know it. But it's not my fault. Some good-looking guy is always leaving me something "Hecho en Mexico" on my desk. And what am I? A saint? I have to drink it. If you don't drink the Hecho offered to you by good-looking guys, then the mean gods of fire and non-redemption send you nothing but uglies for the next six months. But that's not your fault. There you were, a good-looking short guy from Philly trying to be nice to me. And what do I do? I shoot you down. Just like that. I'm such a shithead. I probably gave you some condescending blow-off, or even worse, gave you some nondescript, polite, limp-wristed finger wave and a "So happy to have met you, so happy to have met you..."
I can't help it. I'm from Alabama by way of Mississippi, or is it the other way around? I know, you could give a shit. You're busy pouring your heart out on paper; you're a goddamned poet; your writing is haunted by the echo of a woman, of a woman and carrots. I'll bet she was a beautiful woman. I'll bet you still kick yourself in the head every morning for fucking that shit up. That's deep. I love that shit: women and carrots. Nothing better. Not that I'm a homo or anything.
No way. I really love men, deep men that have the nerve to tell the fucking toaster to fuck off. My toaster is always getting my shit too, that's one thing we have in common. Not that we have chicks in common or anything. Okay, there was that one hot chick at summer camp, but every girl has a summer-camp story. Me having a homo summer-camp story doesn't make me special or anything. I'm just too in love with myself, that's my problem. Who am I, anyway? What do I have to be in love with? Nothing.
So, anyway, I'm sorry. I really am. I wasn't myself. I was the Diana of Central Park; I was an unmarried goddess; young women left their dolls at my altar; in the depths of the woods I could hear the baying of the hounds and the cries of the nymphs as they hunted the stag. I sought the advice of Bishops and ballet dancers; in my dreams they married and danced Swan Lake in front of an audience of mounted police. I laughed when a drug dealer robbed you, laughed at your six-dollar haircut, told you I was a Christian, told you I could go to war and still love my enemy. I was harmonious, like Stan Musial batting a ball, or Allie Reynolds winding up for the pitch: just as the drumming of the rain, just as the feet of a thousand soldiers marching.
But that's all too poetic, isn't it? That's too fucked up and poetic. What kind of a girl compares herself to Diana? I'm fucked up right now, aren't I? Yes. Shit. Goddamn it all to hell. I'm sorry. I've watched too much television today. It was that Mathew Perry movie that did it. That guy always pushes me over the edge, reminds me of a guy I used to know in Mississippi. A walking Gap ad, that guy. Don't get me started. You know, that Mathew Perry would be a hot guy if he weren't so tall. But, okay. Now I really have to apologize. I mean, who the fuck gets fucked up to write an apology letter? I'm a shit, but I'm sort of good looking in that squirrelly kind of way. Does that count for something? Do you know how you write a word and it looks weird? Like it's not spelled right? Like squirrel. Squirrel is that kind of word for me. I've looked it up in Webster's twice already. I know I've spelled it correctly, but it just looks wrong. I could stare at it all day.