Surrender
I’m tired of waking to the sound of this love crashing like waves
on my broken shore. I don’t want to hear your voice anymore. I don’t
want to see your face in the ocean’s foam. I don’t want to dream your smile.
What I want to do is be. Just be. Wake up with
someone next to me who whispers, You’re pretty
when you sleep, kisses me, and makes coffee.
I want to walk the line where the land meets the sea
with someone who matches his steps to me, slows when I’m tired,
runs when I see a shell I admire, picks it up and strings it on a wire.
I want to talk, to lie in the sand studying his hand while
he presses his secrets to my tongue like candy. I want to
watch him open his lips to swallow my secrets whole.
I want someone to open doors for me when I come in
from the sea, salty, sore. Take the dying starfish I found
on the beach, give it mouth to mouth, place it on the mantle in jar.
This is the way it goes, I suppose.
You love and love, but then one day
you give up and take the thing you can get
because love without love back is just another
torn sunset bleeding out into a glassy sea
too cool to care about blood.
I want someone to open doors for me,
to take the gifts I bring in from the sea
gasp and say, For me? Really?
This is the way it goes, I suppose.
You love and love, but then one day
you give up and take the thing you can get
because love without love back is just another
torn sunset bleeding out into a glassy sea
too cool to care about blood.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
I Wanted to Call this "Beloved," but Toni Morrison Might Sue Me
Roger Clyne's music saved my life. It’s that simple.
Backstory: I grew up sequestered on a New Mexico mountain. My preacher parents were beautiful, loving, passionate people, and I will always be grateful to them for raising me in world of pure love. To accomplish this, they cut me off from the rest of the world. No television. No “secular” radio. And only one other family on the mountain. My brother and I entertained ourselves by stealing books from the abandoned hippie commune library a few miles from our house. (I learned to read on Shakespeare and The King James Bible, so don’t blame me when my language gets flowery.) We had miles of desert as our playground and ran back to the house only when we heard Daddy whistling for us at the end of the day. Luckily, my daddy thought his Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan records were pure enough for my ears, so I grew up listening to these masters. Sometimes, though, I listened to other music too, sat in my bedroom with my ear pressed up against the speaker, falling in love with forbidden fruit.
Fastforward. At the age of eighteen, I met a twenty-five year old cop. I had almost no real life experience in anything, and seven months later, I married him, thinking he was my knight in shining armor. He wasn’t. I won’t detail our marriage here, but suffice it to say that it was highly abusive. Two weeks before my beloved daddy’s death, he begged me leave my horrific marriage and come home, and I intended to, but a heart attack took him before I could follow through. I was devastated. I felt utterly alone in a world that had become cruel and dark. My religion, which was everything to me at the time, forbade divorce, so it would take an act of Herculean strength to free myself. Strength was something I didn’t think I had.
I suppose it was during this time that I became suicidal. I would imagine cutting my wrists, writing the ugly words my husband called me in my flesh with a razor blade. I desperately wanted to get back to the place where my daddy was, to be with the person who had loved me purely. The thing that kept me from doing it was my two children, the great loves of my life. But it was hard to hold on. The call of suicide was strong. I wanted to die.
One night, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my father’s voice. I heard him as clearly as if he had been standing by my bed in the flesh. He said, “Do you really want to be here?” Then, I heard footsteps leading down the stairs and to the door of my house. I heard the door open, and then, my father whistled for me, the way he had when he wanted me to come home when I was a little girl. After that, the door slammed. That experience shook me to my core. I told people from my church about it, and they told me it was “demonic.” But I didn’t believe them. I thought it was my daddy, come back from the grave to save me. And knowing he was with me gave me the courage to leave. I packed up everything I had, not knowing where I’d go, only knowing I couldn’t stay there anymore. Of course, the universe provided. But still, the next two years were living hell.
Then, along came a miracle. Since I was doing all the things I thought I’d never do, I quit my job as a kindergarten teacher and went back to school to follow through on my dream of becoming a writer. I entered one of my stories in a writing contest that was judged by Bantam and was shocked to find out that I’d won third place. At the conference where I was to receive my award, I met my second husband, a pilot. This pilot took me to his home in Phoenix on New Year’s Eve 2000, where the Gin Blossoms were playing at a street fair. We wandered up to the back of the crowd just as the opening band was taking the stage.
A mad, drunk, and restless troubadour stumbled onto that stage and lit it up like the fourth of July. I literally felt like I was being struck by lightning as I watched him play. I can’t describe what it was that made me feel like that, but I knew I’d never seen anything like it before, that I was experiencing something otherworldly. I knew instinctively I was in the presence of greatness. It wasn’t like I heard some lyric that touched me. I couldn’t even understand the lyrics. But the performance itself had an energy that did something beautiful to my heart. It woke up a part of me I didn’t even know existed. A beautiful part. A red, passionate, wild part. But. I didn’t even know what his name was. So I walked away thinking I’d never see him again.
The universe had different plans. Nine months later, I’d married the pilot. I was suddenly richer than I'd ever been. My kids were taken care of. I'd adopted a beautiful teenage girl. I was traveling the world, swimming in oceans I never thought I’d see, looking at constellations from angles I didn’t knew existed. We went to visit my mother-in-law, and she had left a newspaper open on my bed. As I sat down next to it, I looked down and saw that guy from the concert staring up at me. And the article said his name: Roger Clyne. I raced to the computer and ran a Google search, which I had only learned to do that week. (I was technologically illiterate.) Roger Clyne was playing the next night in my home town, Albuquerque, on my birthday. Happy birthday to me. I went to see him, and the rest, as they say, is history. The marriage to the pilot (though he is a wonderful man and still a dear friend) didn’t survive the test of time, but my relationship with the Peacemakers did.
I could tell so many stories of miracles that have occurred as I’ve followed Roger, because since I started doing this, inexplicable occurrences and serendipities accompany every trip I take. In fact, the universe has done back-bends again and again to make my life the malleable thing that allows me to raise children, engage with my art, and follow a rock band. Even though I’m no longer rich, the universe makes sure I somehow have the money to see Roger play. I’ve stopped being surprised when someone offers to pay for me to go to Mexico or pushes hundreds of dollars into my hand the day before I leave to see Roger or hands me a ticket to a show no one is supposed to be able to get in to or offers me a place to sleep not knowing I don’t have one. But the two songs that I credit with saving my life are “Better Beautiful than Perfect” and “Persephone.”
Suicidal tendencies don’t disappear overnight. As I began to follow Roger, I was still incredibly tortured by my past. But every time I stood in front of that stage, something beautiful and cleansing and healing happened to me. I know I made an ass of myself when I stood there crying or dancing or whatevering, but the craziness happening on the outside was a symptom of a miracle happening inside me. Those songs melted into the core of my being and healed the broken places. I wept for everything. For my father’s death, my pulverized dreams, the little girl inside me that had been broken so badly she wanted to die. And I did other things too. I danced. I laughed. I held a glass in the air and toasted this thing I had once hated. “Here’s to life,” I’d scream at the sky, and I’d mean it, because somehow, my life was feeling like an amazing, breathtaking adventure. Like a gift instead of a curse.
And on the trips from city to city, as I raced along that highway in whatever rental car I happened to be driving, listening to the song “Better Beautiful than Perfect,” watching the ocean kiss the sky outside my window, I fell in love with everything. With grass and sand and sky. Sometimes, I slept in my car, and that sensation of lying there under the stars alone, watching lightning scorch the night or stars dance, was the most holy, exquisite sensation I had ever known. I was at peace. I was safe. I was alive. I started writing as I did these things. I’d sit in coffee shops and parks and subways and write. Sheaves and sheaves of writing. I wrote from that place inside me that Roger had woken up. And the writing started to sell. I got a Master’s Degree. I wrote a novel. About rock-n-roll. And now, that novel is poised to sell. (I think, I pray.)
Which brings me to “Persephone.” Actually, it doesn’t. But we’re going there anyway. Several years ago, I was driving from Dallas to Austin, having just bought Turbo Ocho. As I listened to “Persephone,” I thought about my life, about the ugly thing that it had been and the beautiful thing it had become. I thought about the scared, tortured little girl I’d been and the powerful, luminous being I was now. And I knew into my toes if there had never been a man named Roger Clyne, I would be nothing more than a bag of bones in a box. And as I listened to the words to that song, “I will stand and I will fight with all my light here on the line between the darkness and the light, until at last I have thee in my custody,” I realized that something bigger than me, something beautiful, had seen me as its Persephone and stood and fought for me on some invisible line, brought me to Roger’s music, saved me from my hell.
I cannot explain what happened to me in that moment, except that I understood on a profound level that I was the object of an intense and indescribable love. I looked up, and I saw a billboard that said one thing: “Look.” And I felt like the universe was telling me to look around, so I did. I saw everything: the sky and the grass and the flowers and the clouds. I saw the other stuff too. The stuff we would think of as ugly: torn tires and cars and rusty cans and candy bar wrappers. And as I looked at the world around me, in a state of pure love, I can only describe myself as falling into that place great masters describe as enlightenment. The world around me, in all of its imperfection, became utterly beautiful, became heaven. I felt my connection to everything. I felt myself as being a part of God. I felt utterly and completely safe. I felt wholly loved.
That little girl that wanted to slit her wrists was healed forever that day. Because of that experience, I got the word “beloved” tattooed over the vein that I used to want to cut, that I used to imagine carving with the ugly words my first husband had called me. That day, I knew he was wrong about me. I was not a slut or a bitch or a whore. I was someone’s Persephone. I was the thing that had been worth fighting for. I was, I am, Tawni, beloved of the divine. I would never have known that had not Roger Clyne come into my world and showed me that life is grand, love is real, and beauty is everywhere. (I have that tattooed between my shoulder blades, just over my heart chakra, but that's another story for another time.)
Backstory: I grew up sequestered on a New Mexico mountain. My preacher parents were beautiful, loving, passionate people, and I will always be grateful to them for raising me in world of pure love. To accomplish this, they cut me off from the rest of the world. No television. No “secular” radio. And only one other family on the mountain. My brother and I entertained ourselves by stealing books from the abandoned hippie commune library a few miles from our house. (I learned to read on Shakespeare and The King James Bible, so don’t blame me when my language gets flowery.) We had miles of desert as our playground and ran back to the house only when we heard Daddy whistling for us at the end of the day. Luckily, my daddy thought his Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan records were pure enough for my ears, so I grew up listening to these masters. Sometimes, though, I listened to other music too, sat in my bedroom with my ear pressed up against the speaker, falling in love with forbidden fruit.
Fastforward. At the age of eighteen, I met a twenty-five year old cop. I had almost no real life experience in anything, and seven months later, I married him, thinking he was my knight in shining armor. He wasn’t. I won’t detail our marriage here, but suffice it to say that it was highly abusive. Two weeks before my beloved daddy’s death, he begged me leave my horrific marriage and come home, and I intended to, but a heart attack took him before I could follow through. I was devastated. I felt utterly alone in a world that had become cruel and dark. My religion, which was everything to me at the time, forbade divorce, so it would take an act of Herculean strength to free myself. Strength was something I didn’t think I had.
I suppose it was during this time that I became suicidal. I would imagine cutting my wrists, writing the ugly words my husband called me in my flesh with a razor blade. I desperately wanted to get back to the place where my daddy was, to be with the person who had loved me purely. The thing that kept me from doing it was my two children, the great loves of my life. But it was hard to hold on. The call of suicide was strong. I wanted to die.
One night, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my father’s voice. I heard him as clearly as if he had been standing by my bed in the flesh. He said, “Do you really want to be here?” Then, I heard footsteps leading down the stairs and to the door of my house. I heard the door open, and then, my father whistled for me, the way he had when he wanted me to come home when I was a little girl. After that, the door slammed. That experience shook me to my core. I told people from my church about it, and they told me it was “demonic.” But I didn’t believe them. I thought it was my daddy, come back from the grave to save me. And knowing he was with me gave me the courage to leave. I packed up everything I had, not knowing where I’d go, only knowing I couldn’t stay there anymore. Of course, the universe provided. But still, the next two years were living hell.
Then, along came a miracle. Since I was doing all the things I thought I’d never do, I quit my job as a kindergarten teacher and went back to school to follow through on my dream of becoming a writer. I entered one of my stories in a writing contest that was judged by Bantam and was shocked to find out that I’d won third place. At the conference where I was to receive my award, I met my second husband, a pilot. This pilot took me to his home in Phoenix on New Year’s Eve 2000, where the Gin Blossoms were playing at a street fair. We wandered up to the back of the crowd just as the opening band was taking the stage.
A mad, drunk, and restless troubadour stumbled onto that stage and lit it up like the fourth of July. I literally felt like I was being struck by lightning as I watched him play. I can’t describe what it was that made me feel like that, but I knew I’d never seen anything like it before, that I was experiencing something otherworldly. I knew instinctively I was in the presence of greatness. It wasn’t like I heard some lyric that touched me. I couldn’t even understand the lyrics. But the performance itself had an energy that did something beautiful to my heart. It woke up a part of me I didn’t even know existed. A beautiful part. A red, passionate, wild part. But. I didn’t even know what his name was. So I walked away thinking I’d never see him again.
The universe had different plans. Nine months later, I’d married the pilot. I was suddenly richer than I'd ever been. My kids were taken care of. I'd adopted a beautiful teenage girl. I was traveling the world, swimming in oceans I never thought I’d see, looking at constellations from angles I didn’t knew existed. We went to visit my mother-in-law, and she had left a newspaper open on my bed. As I sat down next to it, I looked down and saw that guy from the concert staring up at me. And the article said his name: Roger Clyne. I raced to the computer and ran a Google search, which I had only learned to do that week. (I was technologically illiterate.) Roger Clyne was playing the next night in my home town, Albuquerque, on my birthday. Happy birthday to me. I went to see him, and the rest, as they say, is history. The marriage to the pilot (though he is a wonderful man and still a dear friend) didn’t survive the test of time, but my relationship with the Peacemakers did.
I could tell so many stories of miracles that have occurred as I’ve followed Roger, because since I started doing this, inexplicable occurrences and serendipities accompany every trip I take. In fact, the universe has done back-bends again and again to make my life the malleable thing that allows me to raise children, engage with my art, and follow a rock band. Even though I’m no longer rich, the universe makes sure I somehow have the money to see Roger play. I’ve stopped being surprised when someone offers to pay for me to go to Mexico or pushes hundreds of dollars into my hand the day before I leave to see Roger or hands me a ticket to a show no one is supposed to be able to get in to or offers me a place to sleep not knowing I don’t have one. But the two songs that I credit with saving my life are “Better Beautiful than Perfect” and “Persephone.”
Suicidal tendencies don’t disappear overnight. As I began to follow Roger, I was still incredibly tortured by my past. But every time I stood in front of that stage, something beautiful and cleansing and healing happened to me. I know I made an ass of myself when I stood there crying or dancing or whatevering, but the craziness happening on the outside was a symptom of a miracle happening inside me. Those songs melted into the core of my being and healed the broken places. I wept for everything. For my father’s death, my pulverized dreams, the little girl inside me that had been broken so badly she wanted to die. And I did other things too. I danced. I laughed. I held a glass in the air and toasted this thing I had once hated. “Here’s to life,” I’d scream at the sky, and I’d mean it, because somehow, my life was feeling like an amazing, breathtaking adventure. Like a gift instead of a curse.
And on the trips from city to city, as I raced along that highway in whatever rental car I happened to be driving, listening to the song “Better Beautiful than Perfect,” watching the ocean kiss the sky outside my window, I fell in love with everything. With grass and sand and sky. Sometimes, I slept in my car, and that sensation of lying there under the stars alone, watching lightning scorch the night or stars dance, was the most holy, exquisite sensation I had ever known. I was at peace. I was safe. I was alive. I started writing as I did these things. I’d sit in coffee shops and parks and subways and write. Sheaves and sheaves of writing. I wrote from that place inside me that Roger had woken up. And the writing started to sell. I got a Master’s Degree. I wrote a novel. About rock-n-roll. And now, that novel is poised to sell. (I think, I pray.)
Which brings me to “Persephone.” Actually, it doesn’t. But we’re going there anyway. Several years ago, I was driving from Dallas to Austin, having just bought Turbo Ocho. As I listened to “Persephone,” I thought about my life, about the ugly thing that it had been and the beautiful thing it had become. I thought about the scared, tortured little girl I’d been and the powerful, luminous being I was now. And I knew into my toes if there had never been a man named Roger Clyne, I would be nothing more than a bag of bones in a box. And as I listened to the words to that song, “I will stand and I will fight with all my light here on the line between the darkness and the light, until at last I have thee in my custody,” I realized that something bigger than me, something beautiful, had seen me as its Persephone and stood and fought for me on some invisible line, brought me to Roger’s music, saved me from my hell.
I cannot explain what happened to me in that moment, except that I understood on a profound level that I was the object of an intense and indescribable love. I looked up, and I saw a billboard that said one thing: “Look.” And I felt like the universe was telling me to look around, so I did. I saw everything: the sky and the grass and the flowers and the clouds. I saw the other stuff too. The stuff we would think of as ugly: torn tires and cars and rusty cans and candy bar wrappers. And as I looked at the world around me, in a state of pure love, I can only describe myself as falling into that place great masters describe as enlightenment. The world around me, in all of its imperfection, became utterly beautiful, became heaven. I felt my connection to everything. I felt myself as being a part of God. I felt utterly and completely safe. I felt wholly loved.
That little girl that wanted to slit her wrists was healed forever that day. Because of that experience, I got the word “beloved” tattooed over the vein that I used to want to cut, that I used to imagine carving with the ugly words my first husband had called me. That day, I knew he was wrong about me. I was not a slut or a bitch or a whore. I was someone’s Persephone. I was the thing that had been worth fighting for. I was, I am, Tawni, beloved of the divine. I would never have known that had not Roger Clyne come into my world and showed me that life is grand, love is real, and beauty is everywhere. (I have that tattooed between my shoulder blades, just over my heart chakra, but that's another story for another time.)
Thursday, May 7, 2009
What the Fuck Prayers
I just prayed a holy prayer. I think I can transcribe it. It went like this. “What the fuck, God????” There was screaming involved. Also, snot. And sobbing. And a lot of other “s” words that stand for unpretty things people ooze when they are throwing tantrums.
You wanna know the weird thing? It got answered. My what the fuck prayers always get answered. The meltdown prayers that sound nothing like a page from a holy book and everything like the way I sound when I mean what I say, when I am too freaked out to put a pretty face on my acne ridden soul. God, it seems, is not so into cover-up. Or expensive shoes. God wants to see the cracks in your varnish, not the precious pot of flowers you slapped on top to cover the broken places up. At least that’s the way I would feel if I were God. Which I am not. (And I am too. We all are. But I digress.)
The fact that God seems to answer what the fuck prayers makes me think that God may be more into truth than fiction, reality than perfection. Of course, I am fully aware that every human creature must find his or her own path to truth. But maybe the quest for truth doesn't even begin until you actually tell the truth. Everything before that is rehearsal for the quest for truth. You aren’t even playing the game ‘til you get real. Maybe God is more into What the Fucks than Hail Mary’s. Maybe God digs the kids that plop themselves in his/her big fat lap and say, “You know what. I don’t fucking get it. You have some ‘splaining to do, Lucy.” Maybe, even though God is six jillion times bigger than us, and sees things way more clearly than we could ever hope to, he/she indulges our little whims. Maybe she smiles and says:
Ok, sweet child of mine. (Maybe he sings the sweet child of mine part, like a rock star.) Take a deep breath. Calm down. Now, here is a piece of candy, just to let you know I am thinking of you, I’ve got this covered. I’m not unrolling the whole plan for you all at once. I’m not ruining the surprise. But here’s a little something to say thank you for being real. Cause you know, every time one of those other kids crawls in here on her knees begging me not to smite her, I start to get a little down on myself. It can make a guy/girl a little insecure, all your children trembling every time you step into the room. “Hey, guys, I got you a surprise!” you shout, and they all start screaming, and not in a good way. What am I, freaking Frankenstein? (God runs his/her fingers through her fiery hair. ) I like you kids who aren’t afraid of me.
Maybe God gives the unafraid kids kisses on their angst ridden, wrinkled foreheads. Maybe those are the kids that remind her of herself. Maybe God wasn’t sure how this whole universe thing would pan out, but he did it anyway, cause he likes a good adventure from time to time. What if God doesn’t know the end of the story either, cause we are helping him write it? But what if, when you plop yourself in her lap and say what the fuck and kick and scream until you fall asleep, she can finally pick you up and carry you off to a safe place, the place you were supposed to be all along. Maybe God is into what the fuck prayers because they lead her children, eventually, to a place of rest, and she can finally help them out. Which is the thing he has always been trying to do. But when the kids say, “No, go away, I do it myself,” God lets them. Like any good parent would.
The what the fuck moments are coming home moments. That’s why God likes them so much.
You wanna know the weird thing? It got answered. My what the fuck prayers always get answered. The meltdown prayers that sound nothing like a page from a holy book and everything like the way I sound when I mean what I say, when I am too freaked out to put a pretty face on my acne ridden soul. God, it seems, is not so into cover-up. Or expensive shoes. God wants to see the cracks in your varnish, not the precious pot of flowers you slapped on top to cover the broken places up. At least that’s the way I would feel if I were God. Which I am not. (And I am too. We all are. But I digress.)
The fact that God seems to answer what the fuck prayers makes me think that God may be more into truth than fiction, reality than perfection. Of course, I am fully aware that every human creature must find his or her own path to truth. But maybe the quest for truth doesn't even begin until you actually tell the truth. Everything before that is rehearsal for the quest for truth. You aren’t even playing the game ‘til you get real. Maybe God is more into What the Fucks than Hail Mary’s. Maybe God digs the kids that plop themselves in his/her big fat lap and say, “You know what. I don’t fucking get it. You have some ‘splaining to do, Lucy.” Maybe, even though God is six jillion times bigger than us, and sees things way more clearly than we could ever hope to, he/she indulges our little whims. Maybe she smiles and says:
Ok, sweet child of mine. (Maybe he sings the sweet child of mine part, like a rock star.) Take a deep breath. Calm down. Now, here is a piece of candy, just to let you know I am thinking of you, I’ve got this covered. I’m not unrolling the whole plan for you all at once. I’m not ruining the surprise. But here’s a little something to say thank you for being real. Cause you know, every time one of those other kids crawls in here on her knees begging me not to smite her, I start to get a little down on myself. It can make a guy/girl a little insecure, all your children trembling every time you step into the room. “Hey, guys, I got you a surprise!” you shout, and they all start screaming, and not in a good way. What am I, freaking Frankenstein? (God runs his/her fingers through her fiery hair. ) I like you kids who aren’t afraid of me.
Maybe God gives the unafraid kids kisses on their angst ridden, wrinkled foreheads. Maybe those are the kids that remind her of herself. Maybe God wasn’t sure how this whole universe thing would pan out, but he did it anyway, cause he likes a good adventure from time to time. What if God doesn’t know the end of the story either, cause we are helping him write it? But what if, when you plop yourself in her lap and say what the fuck and kick and scream until you fall asleep, she can finally pick you up and carry you off to a safe place, the place you were supposed to be all along. Maybe God is into what the fuck prayers because they lead her children, eventually, to a place of rest, and she can finally help them out. Which is the thing he has always been trying to do. But when the kids say, “No, go away, I do it myself,” God lets them. Like any good parent would.
The what the fuck moments are coming home moments. That’s why God likes them so much.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Failed Feminist Moments (Or Hot Tub Drainage Goes Terribly Awry)
Ok, I just experienced what well intentioned but deeply misguided women like me call a Failed Feminist Moment.
To understand said moment, you have to bear with me on a little life history. I got divorced about three years ago and, in a fit of suddenly single insanity, sold my goreous, perfectly furnished and finished home, and put my winnings down on a pretty l’il fixer upper in the woods. Sure it needed work, but I had cash, and frankly, this house was freaking amazing. Latilla ceilings in some places. Glass ceilings in others. Giant shaved trees for support in the middle of the living room. A spiral staircase. And a pit roughly the size of a football field in the middle of the house that intended to become, but never really got around to becoming, an indoor pool. No problem, I would finish the pool. And refloor the entire place. Slap on a new roof. Replace all the fixtures. Finish the two unfinished bathrooms. NO PROBLEM.
After the guy I hired to fix up the house took fifteen thousand dollars and disappeared, and after I found out that the one thing the sellers never told me was that my well was dry, I had a whole lot less cash left on hand to finish said home. My plans scaled down considerably. After I finished half the work, and the house flooded, and I had to start all over again, they scaled down a little more. Indoor pools were hardly an option.
One of the great questions I had to ask myself is what to do with the failed indoor pool. I tossed around ideas. Giant planter? Fish pond? Giant cat box (which is pretty much what the old owners were using it for)? I finally settled on installing a hot tub in the pit and surrounding it with a water proof decking. I pictured myself, clad in a skin tight bikini, boasting Cindy Crawford’s body and a margarita, mobbed by adoring friends saying, “I can’t believe you have a HOT TUB in your LIVING ROOM!” and toasting me fondly. What I did not picture was the trauma of trying to drain said hot tub after said inebriated friends make their stumbling exits, having left all of their body oils gathering in greasy little clumps around the hot tub jets. So I didn’t ask the hot tub guy about drainage. So yeah, I didn’t get any.
So, how to solve this dilemma? (I am nothing if not resourceful.) I know! I will get me a young, buff boyfriend who will move in and drain the hot tub for me. Ok, that’s not why I got the boyfriend, but that’s one of the things he did while he lived with me. Without ever disclosing his super secret methods, he silently drained and refilled the hot tub on a regular basis, leaving me and my margarita drinking friends with scads of crystal clear hot tub water memories. Ok, but a few months ago, the boyfriend and I called it quits. He is still my friend, but I feel like a jerk calling him every two weeks to say, “Hey, how’s it goin? Wanna drain my hot tub?”
So the hot tub has gone very unloved for a very long time. I ignored its cries for drainage and added scads of germ killing chemicals, but really, it started to feel like every time I stepped in, I was going for a dip in the Dead Sea. It literally burned my skin. Also, it was starting to grow green stuff. It looked like a scene from Shrek. So today, in a fit of feminist frenzy, I decided, “I can drain the hot tub. Anything boys can do, I can do better.” How does a booty short clad girl go about trying to drain a hot tub with no drainage capacity? I tried to remember everything I could about fifth grade science. My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles. That’s all I got.
So then, I tried to remember what I had seen my boyfriend do when he was draining. It had something to do with a hose. A siphon? I asked my fourteen year old son how to create a siphon. He said, “You just have to make sure the end that isn’t the water is at a lower pressure than the end that is.” Eureeka! I dug up a garden hose, stuck one end of the hose into the water and draped the other through a window. Then I went outside and pulled the hose through said window and lugged it down the side of the hill outside my house. Which incidentally is covered in trees and cactus and scrub oak. So that process in and of itself took me a good fifteen minutes and resulted in several minor traumas to my skin and one possible concussion. But I did it.
Finally, the end of the hose that wasn’t in the water was at the bottom of the hill. Lower pressure, right? I picked up the hose. Nothing happened. I looked inside. Nada. So, ok, I decided I needed to create suction right, to get things started? So, the crazy lady in her booty shorts and a tank top, standing in the middle of a cactus patch at the bottom of a hill, starts sucking on a garden hose with great gusto. Sucking. Sucking. Sucking. Nothing happens. Until something does. Crazy lady gets a mouth full of chemical laced pond water that is probably infested with black plague. Patooee! Patooeee! But then the water stops. So crazy lady starts sucking again. Again, the mouthful of pond water. Again, the water stops. And it occurs to the crazy lady, who has green scum dripping from the corners of her mouth, that it is really good she doesn’t have neighbors because if she did, they might call the cops her. It also occurs to her that this isn’t working. So, she throws the hose on the ground and stomps on it. It doesn’t respond to the stomping. She swears at it. It doesn’t respond to the swearing. She sucks on it again, and it gives her another mouthful of green scum, and she is starting to feel like she is in a Shrek porno now. But in addition to being resourceful, she is also determined. She starts sucking again.
About this time, the crazy lady’s daughter gets home from school and walks over and says, in that scornful voice only a teenager who thinks her mother has finally lost it can boast, “Mom, what THE HELL are you doing?”
“I am trying to drain the hot tub,” crazy lady says, as if this were self explanatory. What else would she be doing standing at the bottom of a cactus covered hill in booty shorts sucking on a garden hose? So the daughter laughs, and the mom cries, and dashes off to the house in a fit of despair. And calls her ex-boyfriend and tells him about her dilemma. This is a moment of great defeat, having to ask for siphoning advice from an ex like this. But he only mocks her a little bit and says something about using the black hose in the garage and hooking it up to the jets and turning them on.
So she finds the freaking black hose and hooks it up to the jets and turns them on, only the jets are lower than the water line, because a lot of evaporation has gone on during the unloved hot tub months, so the jets that aren't hooked up to the hose start spraying bursts of green water all over the living room. And it doesn’t freaking work. Water doesn’t siphon. No drainage happens. None. Green scum is dripping off the couches, but the hot tub is not draining.
I am now in the process of emptying my hot tub with a saucepan, ferrying little panfuls of green, fetid water from the living room to kitchen and dumping them in the sink. It has taken an hour so far. And the hot tub is still mostly full. It is times like this I think I might wanna give up on my scruples and start sleeping around indiscriminately so I can have a host of strapping young men to call upon in just such emergencies.
To understand said moment, you have to bear with me on a little life history. I got divorced about three years ago and, in a fit of suddenly single insanity, sold my goreous, perfectly furnished and finished home, and put my winnings down on a pretty l’il fixer upper in the woods. Sure it needed work, but I had cash, and frankly, this house was freaking amazing. Latilla ceilings in some places. Glass ceilings in others. Giant shaved trees for support in the middle of the living room. A spiral staircase. And a pit roughly the size of a football field in the middle of the house that intended to become, but never really got around to becoming, an indoor pool. No problem, I would finish the pool. And refloor the entire place. Slap on a new roof. Replace all the fixtures. Finish the two unfinished bathrooms. NO PROBLEM.
After the guy I hired to fix up the house took fifteen thousand dollars and disappeared, and after I found out that the one thing the sellers never told me was that my well was dry, I had a whole lot less cash left on hand to finish said home. My plans scaled down considerably. After I finished half the work, and the house flooded, and I had to start all over again, they scaled down a little more. Indoor pools were hardly an option.
One of the great questions I had to ask myself is what to do with the failed indoor pool. I tossed around ideas. Giant planter? Fish pond? Giant cat box (which is pretty much what the old owners were using it for)? I finally settled on installing a hot tub in the pit and surrounding it with a water proof decking. I pictured myself, clad in a skin tight bikini, boasting Cindy Crawford’s body and a margarita, mobbed by adoring friends saying, “I can’t believe you have a HOT TUB in your LIVING ROOM!” and toasting me fondly. What I did not picture was the trauma of trying to drain said hot tub after said inebriated friends make their stumbling exits, having left all of their body oils gathering in greasy little clumps around the hot tub jets. So I didn’t ask the hot tub guy about drainage. So yeah, I didn’t get any.
So, how to solve this dilemma? (I am nothing if not resourceful.) I know! I will get me a young, buff boyfriend who will move in and drain the hot tub for me. Ok, that’s not why I got the boyfriend, but that’s one of the things he did while he lived with me. Without ever disclosing his super secret methods, he silently drained and refilled the hot tub on a regular basis, leaving me and my margarita drinking friends with scads of crystal clear hot tub water memories. Ok, but a few months ago, the boyfriend and I called it quits. He is still my friend, but I feel like a jerk calling him every two weeks to say, “Hey, how’s it goin? Wanna drain my hot tub?”
So the hot tub has gone very unloved for a very long time. I ignored its cries for drainage and added scads of germ killing chemicals, but really, it started to feel like every time I stepped in, I was going for a dip in the Dead Sea. It literally burned my skin. Also, it was starting to grow green stuff. It looked like a scene from Shrek. So today, in a fit of feminist frenzy, I decided, “I can drain the hot tub. Anything boys can do, I can do better.” How does a booty short clad girl go about trying to drain a hot tub with no drainage capacity? I tried to remember everything I could about fifth grade science. My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles. That’s all I got.
So then, I tried to remember what I had seen my boyfriend do when he was draining. It had something to do with a hose. A siphon? I asked my fourteen year old son how to create a siphon. He said, “You just have to make sure the end that isn’t the water is at a lower pressure than the end that is.” Eureeka! I dug up a garden hose, stuck one end of the hose into the water and draped the other through a window. Then I went outside and pulled the hose through said window and lugged it down the side of the hill outside my house. Which incidentally is covered in trees and cactus and scrub oak. So that process in and of itself took me a good fifteen minutes and resulted in several minor traumas to my skin and one possible concussion. But I did it.
Finally, the end of the hose that wasn’t in the water was at the bottom of the hill. Lower pressure, right? I picked up the hose. Nothing happened. I looked inside. Nada. So, ok, I decided I needed to create suction right, to get things started? So, the crazy lady in her booty shorts and a tank top, standing in the middle of a cactus patch at the bottom of a hill, starts sucking on a garden hose with great gusto. Sucking. Sucking. Sucking. Nothing happens. Until something does. Crazy lady gets a mouth full of chemical laced pond water that is probably infested with black plague. Patooee! Patooeee! But then the water stops. So crazy lady starts sucking again. Again, the mouthful of pond water. Again, the water stops. And it occurs to the crazy lady, who has green scum dripping from the corners of her mouth, that it is really good she doesn’t have neighbors because if she did, they might call the cops her. It also occurs to her that this isn’t working. So, she throws the hose on the ground and stomps on it. It doesn’t respond to the stomping. She swears at it. It doesn’t respond to the swearing. She sucks on it again, and it gives her another mouthful of green scum, and she is starting to feel like she is in a Shrek porno now. But in addition to being resourceful, she is also determined. She starts sucking again.
About this time, the crazy lady’s daughter gets home from school and walks over and says, in that scornful voice only a teenager who thinks her mother has finally lost it can boast, “Mom, what THE HELL are you doing?”
“I am trying to drain the hot tub,” crazy lady says, as if this were self explanatory. What else would she be doing standing at the bottom of a cactus covered hill in booty shorts sucking on a garden hose? So the daughter laughs, and the mom cries, and dashes off to the house in a fit of despair. And calls her ex-boyfriend and tells him about her dilemma. This is a moment of great defeat, having to ask for siphoning advice from an ex like this. But he only mocks her a little bit and says something about using the black hose in the garage and hooking it up to the jets and turning them on.
So she finds the freaking black hose and hooks it up to the jets and turns them on, only the jets are lower than the water line, because a lot of evaporation has gone on during the unloved hot tub months, so the jets that aren't hooked up to the hose start spraying bursts of green water all over the living room. And it doesn’t freaking work. Water doesn’t siphon. No drainage happens. None. Green scum is dripping off the couches, but the hot tub is not draining.
I am now in the process of emptying my hot tub with a saucepan, ferrying little panfuls of green, fetid water from the living room to kitchen and dumping them in the sink. It has taken an hour so far. And the hot tub is still mostly full. It is times like this I think I might wanna give up on my scruples and start sleeping around indiscriminately so I can have a host of strapping young men to call upon in just such emergencies.
Trade Secrets
This story just won the Editor's Award for Fiction from Ellipses Magazine, which made me think it was better than I had originally thought, which made me decide to post it here.
This ain’t the story I want to tell. I want to tell you the one about the shiny armored knight and the princess with eyes the color of robin’s eggs. She waits for him by the river, crying tears of blood. You know the one. There’s dragons and witches and a few close calls, but in the end, everything turns out alright. They all live happily ever after in that story. They always do.
The story I got to tell you ain’t like that. He wasn’t exactly a knight, because of the fingers he lost in the factory accident, and the way his nose was shaped like a blob of dough. He had yellow-brown, bulgy eyes that popped out like a frog, and a freckly bald spot on his head.
And me? Well, my eyes are smaller than pennies and just as round. The same color too. The rest of me is blue-white, my skin so thin and pale the veins peeks out behind it. My body is shaped like one of those party balloons the clowns twist up, round and lumpy. I got nice lips though. No one can fault me for my lips. That was why he asked me to marry him, on account of when he saw my lips all puckered up like a cherry and whistling, he had himself notions about kissing me right there on the spot. But Clement was the good kind of boy who doesn’t kiss without a contract, so instead of smooching me, he proposed. I was twenty-two by then, and hadn’t got any offers to speak of. I didn’t have room to be picky. Still, I was put off by the fingers and the mushy nose.
I was holding out for Marty Robbins. That’s who I wanted to marry. That voice! Ain’t you ever heard someone talk, and the sound sends shivers into your toes, like you’re on one of those electric shaking honeymoon beds? That was what it was like for me when I first heard Marty Robbins sing about, out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl. That’s the only part of the song I know, I ain’t much for remembering. But I know the girl in the song is named Felina, and she holds him in her arms while he bleeds all over her and dies. Ain’t that romantic? Go ahead and laugh if you want, but I liked that song, and I set my sights on marrying Marty. We were on a first name basis, me and Marty, at least inside my head. But turns out he died two days after Clement proposed, which left me with no other option but to go ahead and say, “I do.”
We live in a trailer on the east end of River’s Edge, the end where all the trailers are, where the grass only grows in ugly clumps and the flowers always die because the soil ain’t no good. I decorated it real nice though, with ceramic angels I painted myself and checkered curtains I got at the Dollar Store. Clement still works in the cement factory. Has ever since he can remember. Me, I work in the grocery down the road.
We’ve tried for a hundred years, it seems like, to have us a baby, but something in my belly ain’t right for that. Five times, I’ve got a baby inside me, and five times, I’ve bled it out just about the day I bought the first pair of footy pajamas. That’s enough to break your heart. An unborn baby dying ain’t like when Gramma died, because you don’t get no nice grave to visit and put flowers on. Instead, you get an empty graveyard belly that aches and blood in your panties. Nobody will cry with you.
“You wasn’t even showing for mercy’s sake,” they say when you tear up. Well, they don’t say it, but you know they think it. And right away, after the doctors suck what’s left of the baby from you with a vacuum, people wants to take you out for steak and potatoes, like the whole thing is something to celebrate. You get to the point where you go around sobbing deep in your belly, but smiling on your face. Even Clement won’t cry with me no more. He says, “Don’t tell me until you’re sure next time.”
So I ain’t told him about this baby in my belly yet. She’s been sleeping in there for two and a half months now, but I ain’t gone to the doctor on account of if I think of myself as pregnant and get excited about it, it will jinx the baby, and she’ll come bleeding down my legs. Like Groucho Marx used to say, I done kept this one under my hat, or under my baggy old sweat shirt, if you wanna get literal about it, which you shouldn’t, ‘cause it’s just an expression, but I know some people are picky about things like that, all crazy scared of telling lies, for fear of burning in hell. So call it what you will. Under my hat or under my sweater, this baby is hid clean away. I ain’t bought any footy pajamas either. I think the footy pajamas are what curses the babies and makes them come out. I swear, every time I buy a pair, the next day, the baby dies inside me. Still, I can’t help but get somewhat excited deep down where no one can see it. This baby is a girl, like I told you, and I’m guessing she’s gonna have long piano playing fingers like Clement’s daddy. I can already hear her little voice, saying, “Momma, would you pour me some apple cider?” “Momma, read me a storybook.”
Momma. Can you imagine that? Me, a momma? It gives me shivers up and down my spine to think about it. I’ll go ahead and tell you I’ve named this one. Shashana. I found that in a book. Doesn’t it have a nice ring? And I done made up my mind that when Shashana makes it three months, I’m gonna go to the doctor, and I’m gonna tell Clement. Maybe he’ll buy nonalcoholic cider for us to celebrate with like he did that first time I had a young ‘un in me.
“No champagne for you,” he said. “Not while you’re carrying my rug rat.”
Maybe I’ll take up knitting when Shashana has been alive in my belly three months. See, all the other’s has died before three months, so if this one makes it three months, it’s home free. But I shouldn’t talk no more about that. I’ll jinx it.
You’re probably wondering things like, what are my hobbies. So I’ll tell you. My hobbies are collecting magazines and dancing the jitterbug. I know what you’re saying. No one dances the jitterbug these days. But I do, just the same. One time, I entered a contest the radio station put on, and I won me a hundred dollars. I dance like a dream. And like I said, I collect magazines. Not for those banana nut brownie recipes or the stories about how to catch yourself a right nice man, on account of I already got one, but for the pictures of the girls.
Man, those girls. You look at the covers of those magazines, and you think, they can’t be real, with their big old bosoms and spidery little legs, and those faces. God above! Their faces are so pretty, they almost make you cry to look at them, staring out at you with those wide eyes, looking all lost and confused. They always look kinda dazed, don’t they, like someone just walked by with a gun and stole their money and their coat, which is why they’re standing there in half a dress with their peachy skin hanging out. Those pictures are so far away from my life, I can’t even imagine that there are people out there who really look like that. But they do, because once and while, one of those girls will come on the television and do an interview, and she looks just the same. Perfect.
There’s this girl that comes by the store some days, always to buy raspberry donuts, and she looks almost that pretty. Not though, because her thighs are a little lumpy under her jeans, and she gets a zit on her forehead every now and then. Plus, in the place where her pinky should be, she’s got a scarred nub that makes me wanna vomit every time I look at it. Still, my heart just pounds when she saunters right in through the front doors, and I watch her good, trying to find little signs that she ain’t as perfect as she seems. That’s how come I noticed about the cellulite on her thighs. It made me feel better when I seen that. I call her Medusa inside my head. That’s from that story about the ugly witch lady with snakes for hair, and calling the girl that is my way of getting back at her for being so pretty. When she comes to my register and puts the donuts on the scanner, I think, “Oh, way to go Medusa. You’ll be even uglier and fatter when you wake up tomorrow, you eat all of these.” She always smiles at me with those pearly teeth, never mind what I’m thinking. I don’t smile back though. Just ring up her stupid donuts and send her packing. Serves her right.
You want cellulite though, you oughta take a look at me. Man, I look like the cellulite fairy went after me with a baseball bat. I tried wrapping my legs in cellophane like they said in the magazines. But I just got hot and sweated a lot. Clement said I looked like cottage cheese in a baggie and laughed real hard. So that was the end of that.
I’m thinking about all this because right now, I’m stacking oranges high and mighty to the ceiling, and their bumpy skin reminds me of my thighs. I gotta say, I get some satisfaction from piling the oranges. You may think that it’s a mindless job, but really, it’s quite a bit of work, getting them to fit together just right. One false move, and the whole lot of them come tumbling down and go rolling away across the tile, tripping customers and making old ladies cry out with terror.
Once, when I was new at working in the supermarket, I mispiled the oranges, and down they fell. This old blue haired woman with bald patches saw one of the fruits coming for her, and she put up such a fuss, nearly popped my eardrums, screaming about oh, my god, I’m allergic to cats, someone get this animal away from me. I learned my lesson right then and there, and ever since that day, I done taken a certain pride and care in stacking the oranges perfect, knowing that I’m doing my part to keep the shopping public safe from terror.
See, I take my job at the grocery real serious. I know that in the big scheme of things, maybe I’m not making a huge splash, like, say, Jackie O. or one of those magazine glamour girls. But I’m doing my part to make sure that society has its belly filled, and when you think about it, that’s the most important thing in the whole world. Food. None of us could do much of anything else if we couldn’t eat. I’m one of the basic building blocks in the American system. Like that fancy food pyramid the government puts out to let us know how not to get fat and die of heart attacks. You know the one, and bread and cereal is at the bottom? It’s the most important thing, and it holds up everything else. Well, I’m the bread and cereal of our nation. Without me, the whole rest of the country would come tumbling down like a stack of mispiled oranges. So when I tie on my blue apron in the morning, I feel just as much pride as a policeman putting on his badge, or a schoolteacher sliding on her glasses. Because my job is maybe the most important job of all.
The people here in River’s Edge can count on me, and they know it. When they need their deli meat sliced perfect for a wedding shower, or they need to know if aspirin is on aisle ten or eleven, they come looking for me. They don’t waste their time with the other cashiers. They see I’m the one who knows my stuff. Also, I’m the one they ask if they need private stuff, like cream for hemorrhoids or birth control products. They know I won’t go blabbing about it to the other customers. I give them service with a smile, but I don’t waste their time with no chit-chat. I cut to the chase, grin friendly-like, but not over eager, say aspirin is in aisle ten. They appreciate my willingness to help and my respectfulness of their time. Time is money, people say, and I know that. I ain’t one to waste people’s precious minutes directing them to the wrong aisle, or asking them how their son’s soccer season is or isn’t going. That ain’t my business, far as I’m concerned.
Not all the cashiers are that way. Back in December, Ronny, one of them high school kids Mac hired, told some lady the aspirin was in aisle eleven. Boy, was that a big to-do. That’s what caused the grief and questioning about which aisle the aspirin might be in. Ever since Ronny done that, no one in River’s Edge has had any luck in finding the aspirin aisle without my help. I don’t mind though, ‘cause that’s what I’m here for anyways. I get paid over five dollars an hour to do this job, and I intend to do it to the best of my ability.
The only girl I cannot give service with a smile is the one I told you about, the big old green eyed, perfect girl that comes trouncing in here with her battered cowboy hat perched on head, flouncing around, looking all pretty for everyone to gape at. Medusa. Her I cannot stand.
Which ain’t a good thing at this moment, because she just walked through the door, and she’s sashaying for me now, right when I’m finishing the orange pile. I turn my back a little so she can’t see my face too good. Still, I watch her out of the corners of my eyes, to notice if she’s growing a zit today or not. She must have an oil gland problem in her forehead, because pretty often, she’ll get a pimple there. She pulls the cowboy hat low those days, but I still see it. Today, she does not have a pimple, which chaffs my hide.
“Excuse me,” she says. She is standing right behind me. I can feel her hot breath on my neck, and it smells like onion rings. I can hear her smiling. Have you ever heard someone smile? You know, their voice is all lilty and perky, and you just get a notion to ring their necks, it’s so irritating. That’s how I feel with little miss perfect smiling and panting her reeky onion breath down my neck.
“Yeah?” I say.
“Can you tell me where the granola bars are?” she asks. Right away, I get to wondering. Is she going on a diet now, no more donuts, granola bars instead? Is that it? But I don’t ask her those questions, because like I said, it ain’t my way to waste people’s time with chit chat, plus I just plain to don’t like Medusa, nor do I want to spend one more second smelling her bad breath.
“Aisle three,” I say, “right next to fruit roll ups.” I myself have a particular liking for fruit rollups, especially the kind with rainbow colors in them. But she don’t need to know that.
“Thanks,” she says, and off she goes. I can hear her flouncing the same way I heard her smiling before. Geez, she gets on my nerves. I keep pretending to stack the oranges, because I don’t want to go elsewhere while she’s in the store. If I do, chances are, I’ll see her again. I’ve got my fill of Medusa for one day, thank you very much. So I just jostle the oranges around a bit to look like I’m still working, not the ones on bottom, because that would send the whole stack rolling, but the two or three on top, because it’s pretty safe to mess with those ones without creating havoc. I’m just about to call it safe and go off and find some shelves to stock when she flounces up behind me again, only this time I don’t hear her flouncing. The first thing I hear is “EXCUSE ME!” loud like a sonic boom. I jump so high, I topple my whole stack of oranges, and down they go, rolling and dancing across the floor.
“Oh, that’s a pisser!” I say, wheeling around to face her. “See what you made me do!” She looks all wide-eyed and shocked, and I’m pretty rankled that she can look so forlorn and pretty at the same time. When I’m forlorn, my forehead wrinkles up like a deflated balloon, and my eyes just disappear, but her, she looks like she’s at some modeling shoot, and they camera guy is saying, “Ok, Medusa, now look forlorn and shocked for me.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she bends over to help me pick the oranges up, only when she does, her cowboy hat goes flying, and a-ha, I see it, she does have a zit after all, right up there along her hairline. So that’s why she wears that old Stetson. She reaches for the hat. But while she’s reaching, an orange rolls right up under her high heeled boot, and down she falls, flat on her butt. I gotta laugh at that.
“Serves you right,” I say.
And you may think that’s mean-spirited, or even downright nasty, for me to kick someone when they’re down like that. But that ain’t usually my nature. Just a while ago, I told this guy exactly where to find fresh honey, even though we don’t carry none in our store. I gave him directions to the Foster’s bee farm and everything. That’s the kind of person I usually am. But Medusa gets under my skin
“I didn’t mean to mess you up,” she’s saying now, and she’s got a little tear in her eye.
I feel like a first class heel when I see that. “It’s just I take some amount of pride in my orange stacking,” I say by way of explaining myself.
“Yeah, well, I’ll help you restack them,” she says, and she’s reaching for my hand.
I got no choice but to yank her to her feet. Her fingers are all soft and sweaty in mine, the way my goldfish feels when I catch him so I can wash his bowl. I try to discourage her from helping me with the oranges. I tells her its kinda an art form, and I’d just as soon do it myself as have an amateur help me out, but she don’t pay me any mind. Before I can tell her the part about me being sorta like that guy who painted the Sistine Chapel, and her being sorta like the pope who kept sticking his nose into the business and messing up the painting, she’s stacking one orange on top of the other. She’s stacking them crooked, but she’s quick. I gotta give her credit for her quickness.
And pretty soon, like it or not, me and Medusa are a team, chasing oranges around together and piling them up. I show her all my trade secrets, how to stack the fruits perfect so they won’t slip and ruin the whole project, how you got move slow, not fast. She asks questions that most new grocery store workers don’t think to ask, and I’m starting to suspect she has a natural talent.
She says, “What if there’s an extra big navel, which way should you face it, up or down?” And, “Should you wipe off the fly spots before you put the orange in the stack?”
When the stack is halfway done, I go on and ask her about the granola bars, if she’s gone and given up donuts for good, or if this is just a fluke. She says no it’s not a fluke, she’s put on ten pounds in six months, isn’t that unbelievable?
I say, “I put on ten pounds in a week once. That’s when I quit weighing myself.”
I haven’t had a conversation like this with a real grown up in years. After Daddy died, Momma moved off to a retirement resort in Arizona, without so much as a goodbye to her shameful, fatty daughter. Since then, Clement is mostly the only person I do any kind of talking with, besides, apples are over in the produce aisle, and feminine hygiene’s aisle twelve. And come to think of it, even Clement don’t like to talk much when he gets home from the factory, he’s so dead dog tired. Weekends, he goes out with the boys for beers. So that leaves me having conversations with our beagle Frosty, but Frosty don’t talk back, except to say, yip-yip, yap-yap, bark-bark-bark when he’s hungry.
So talking to Medusa, whose real name turns out to be Melina, is like going out to the ice cream parlor and getting a whole mountain of ice cream. It’s that big of a treat. I mean you should see us, stacking the oranges real precise, but laughing some too while we’re going. She tells me a joke that goes like this.
“What do you call a fish without eyes? Fsh.”
I laugh pretty hard at that, isn’t that a good one?
So I tell her this one, since we’re on the subject of critters missing important body parts. “What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef.”
She giggles something awful, shrieks more to point, like a fire engine or something. She’s got a laugh so sharp, it cuts right into your brain. She snorts a lot too, like a big fat hog. Still, it feels nice having a good laugh with another human being.
I’m so busy having fun, I don’t even notice the pain in my belly until it gets deep and strong. Feels like my guts are twisting together.
“Oh God,” I sorta whisper.
I don’t have to check my panties. I know there’s blood in there without looking. I know that baby died right there inside me while I was laughing. I know that I’ll spend the afternoon in the hospital knocked out while they suck out my baby with that vacuum. When the first baby died, the doctor didn’t give me no anesthetic while he vacuumed me. I screamed like hellfire. One nurse I met says I shoulda sued him, it’s common practice to give anesthetic for the vacuuming, but I didn’t know that then. Anyways, every time since, they’ve given me some knock out medicine, so I know they will this time too.
When Melina sees that I stopped laughing, her peachy face gets all confused, and she says, “Something wrong?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m bleeding out my baby now. I gotta go to the hospital.”
She does something funny then, something that I think wraps chains around our hearts and ties us together forever. She starts to cry. Not big, you understand, just a few tears. But enough to make me feel like maybe someone else in this world thinks this baby inside me is worth crying over.
We walk out through the store hand in hand, both of us blubbering like little children. I don’t even stop to tell Mac where I’m going. When we get outside, tiny puffs of snow are flurrying all around us, and the sun is invisible behind a swirl of gray storm clouds. Semis are honking down on the freeway, and someone’s listening to heavy metal music in the apartments next door. But I only halfway notice all of that. Mostly, I’m seeing the face of this baby girl in my belly, maybe all wrapped around with pretty blond white curls, smiling up on some cloud in heaven with the angels, playing a harp with her piano fingers.
“I’m sick and tired of my babies running off to heaven,” I tell Melina. “I wanna hold one of them sometime. Change their diaper once. You know, everyone gripes about the mustardy smell of fresh baby poop, but I’d give my heart and soul to smell it just one time.”
Melina laughs and cries all at once. Her eyes are red and puffy, but those perfect teeth are wet with spit and smiling. As she walks along the slick pavement in those high heels of hers, I’m thinking she’s gonna fall, but she never does. And I’m saying inside my head, gosh darn, she’s prettier now than ever. I bet she’d dance a mean jitterbug.
Suddenly, I’m hot way down deep into the middle of my heart. This must be what love feels like, I think. I don’t suppose I ever knew ‘til just now what love was. I thought in my own way, I loved Clement, maybe in a quiet way, not like the Marty Robbins song, but still real. But this thing I feel for Melina right now is like nothing I ever knew. I want to reach out and grab her, hold her head to my chest, tell her all my secrets. I wanna study the wrinkles on her hands. I wanna know what are her hobbies, what makes her tick. It’s just pure and true what I’m feeling, looking at the way Melina’s soft brown curls falls down over her eyes. It’s like rainwater on a summer day. It takes away some of the pain of the baby dying inside me. My guts are all bunched up and twisted from Sashana dying, but they’re all twisted up with love too.
Melina leads me an old caramel colored Buick and helps me into the back seat. “His name is Pedro,” she says. “Lay down.”
“Whose name is Pedro?” I ask, clutching at my belly.
“The car. I just thought you might want to know his name.” She puts a checkered coat under my head for a pillow.
When she slides into the front seat, she reaches back and holds my dry, old, fat hand in one of her pretty ones, tells me it will all work out. She believes in fate, she says while we’re driving. She believes she was brought to the grocery today for a reason. She believes we were meant to meet, maybe so we could just say goodbye to this baby together. But maybe so we could save it too. Don’t give up just yet. She honks the horn real hard then, to make other cars get out of the way.
“Her name’s Shashana,” I say.
“Hang on, Shashana,” whispers Melina.
Outside, cars are whizzing by us on the freeway, and I’m thinking, what in the world is happening to me? This baby inside me is dying.
But, God forgive me, even with the pain in my gut and the sadness of losing Sashana, I feel more alive right now than I ever thought I could.
This ain’t the story I want to tell. I want to tell you the one about the shiny armored knight and the princess with eyes the color of robin’s eggs. She waits for him by the river, crying tears of blood. You know the one. There’s dragons and witches and a few close calls, but in the end, everything turns out alright. They all live happily ever after in that story. They always do.
The story I got to tell you ain’t like that. He wasn’t exactly a knight, because of the fingers he lost in the factory accident, and the way his nose was shaped like a blob of dough. He had yellow-brown, bulgy eyes that popped out like a frog, and a freckly bald spot on his head.
And me? Well, my eyes are smaller than pennies and just as round. The same color too. The rest of me is blue-white, my skin so thin and pale the veins peeks out behind it. My body is shaped like one of those party balloons the clowns twist up, round and lumpy. I got nice lips though. No one can fault me for my lips. That was why he asked me to marry him, on account of when he saw my lips all puckered up like a cherry and whistling, he had himself notions about kissing me right there on the spot. But Clement was the good kind of boy who doesn’t kiss without a contract, so instead of smooching me, he proposed. I was twenty-two by then, and hadn’t got any offers to speak of. I didn’t have room to be picky. Still, I was put off by the fingers and the mushy nose.
I was holding out for Marty Robbins. That’s who I wanted to marry. That voice! Ain’t you ever heard someone talk, and the sound sends shivers into your toes, like you’re on one of those electric shaking honeymoon beds? That was what it was like for me when I first heard Marty Robbins sing about, out in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl. That’s the only part of the song I know, I ain’t much for remembering. But I know the girl in the song is named Felina, and she holds him in her arms while he bleeds all over her and dies. Ain’t that romantic? Go ahead and laugh if you want, but I liked that song, and I set my sights on marrying Marty. We were on a first name basis, me and Marty, at least inside my head. But turns out he died two days after Clement proposed, which left me with no other option but to go ahead and say, “I do.”
We live in a trailer on the east end of River’s Edge, the end where all the trailers are, where the grass only grows in ugly clumps and the flowers always die because the soil ain’t no good. I decorated it real nice though, with ceramic angels I painted myself and checkered curtains I got at the Dollar Store. Clement still works in the cement factory. Has ever since he can remember. Me, I work in the grocery down the road.
We’ve tried for a hundred years, it seems like, to have us a baby, but something in my belly ain’t right for that. Five times, I’ve got a baby inside me, and five times, I’ve bled it out just about the day I bought the first pair of footy pajamas. That’s enough to break your heart. An unborn baby dying ain’t like when Gramma died, because you don’t get no nice grave to visit and put flowers on. Instead, you get an empty graveyard belly that aches and blood in your panties. Nobody will cry with you.
“You wasn’t even showing for mercy’s sake,” they say when you tear up. Well, they don’t say it, but you know they think it. And right away, after the doctors suck what’s left of the baby from you with a vacuum, people wants to take you out for steak and potatoes, like the whole thing is something to celebrate. You get to the point where you go around sobbing deep in your belly, but smiling on your face. Even Clement won’t cry with me no more. He says, “Don’t tell me until you’re sure next time.”
So I ain’t told him about this baby in my belly yet. She’s been sleeping in there for two and a half months now, but I ain’t gone to the doctor on account of if I think of myself as pregnant and get excited about it, it will jinx the baby, and she’ll come bleeding down my legs. Like Groucho Marx used to say, I done kept this one under my hat, or under my baggy old sweat shirt, if you wanna get literal about it, which you shouldn’t, ‘cause it’s just an expression, but I know some people are picky about things like that, all crazy scared of telling lies, for fear of burning in hell. So call it what you will. Under my hat or under my sweater, this baby is hid clean away. I ain’t bought any footy pajamas either. I think the footy pajamas are what curses the babies and makes them come out. I swear, every time I buy a pair, the next day, the baby dies inside me. Still, I can’t help but get somewhat excited deep down where no one can see it. This baby is a girl, like I told you, and I’m guessing she’s gonna have long piano playing fingers like Clement’s daddy. I can already hear her little voice, saying, “Momma, would you pour me some apple cider?” “Momma, read me a storybook.”
Momma. Can you imagine that? Me, a momma? It gives me shivers up and down my spine to think about it. I’ll go ahead and tell you I’ve named this one. Shashana. I found that in a book. Doesn’t it have a nice ring? And I done made up my mind that when Shashana makes it three months, I’m gonna go to the doctor, and I’m gonna tell Clement. Maybe he’ll buy nonalcoholic cider for us to celebrate with like he did that first time I had a young ‘un in me.
“No champagne for you,” he said. “Not while you’re carrying my rug rat.”
Maybe I’ll take up knitting when Shashana has been alive in my belly three months. See, all the other’s has died before three months, so if this one makes it three months, it’s home free. But I shouldn’t talk no more about that. I’ll jinx it.
You’re probably wondering things like, what are my hobbies. So I’ll tell you. My hobbies are collecting magazines and dancing the jitterbug. I know what you’re saying. No one dances the jitterbug these days. But I do, just the same. One time, I entered a contest the radio station put on, and I won me a hundred dollars. I dance like a dream. And like I said, I collect magazines. Not for those banana nut brownie recipes or the stories about how to catch yourself a right nice man, on account of I already got one, but for the pictures of the girls.
Man, those girls. You look at the covers of those magazines, and you think, they can’t be real, with their big old bosoms and spidery little legs, and those faces. God above! Their faces are so pretty, they almost make you cry to look at them, staring out at you with those wide eyes, looking all lost and confused. They always look kinda dazed, don’t they, like someone just walked by with a gun and stole their money and their coat, which is why they’re standing there in half a dress with their peachy skin hanging out. Those pictures are so far away from my life, I can’t even imagine that there are people out there who really look like that. But they do, because once and while, one of those girls will come on the television and do an interview, and she looks just the same. Perfect.
There’s this girl that comes by the store some days, always to buy raspberry donuts, and she looks almost that pretty. Not though, because her thighs are a little lumpy under her jeans, and she gets a zit on her forehead every now and then. Plus, in the place where her pinky should be, she’s got a scarred nub that makes me wanna vomit every time I look at it. Still, my heart just pounds when she saunters right in through the front doors, and I watch her good, trying to find little signs that she ain’t as perfect as she seems. That’s how come I noticed about the cellulite on her thighs. It made me feel better when I seen that. I call her Medusa inside my head. That’s from that story about the ugly witch lady with snakes for hair, and calling the girl that is my way of getting back at her for being so pretty. When she comes to my register and puts the donuts on the scanner, I think, “Oh, way to go Medusa. You’ll be even uglier and fatter when you wake up tomorrow, you eat all of these.” She always smiles at me with those pearly teeth, never mind what I’m thinking. I don’t smile back though. Just ring up her stupid donuts and send her packing. Serves her right.
You want cellulite though, you oughta take a look at me. Man, I look like the cellulite fairy went after me with a baseball bat. I tried wrapping my legs in cellophane like they said in the magazines. But I just got hot and sweated a lot. Clement said I looked like cottage cheese in a baggie and laughed real hard. So that was the end of that.
I’m thinking about all this because right now, I’m stacking oranges high and mighty to the ceiling, and their bumpy skin reminds me of my thighs. I gotta say, I get some satisfaction from piling the oranges. You may think that it’s a mindless job, but really, it’s quite a bit of work, getting them to fit together just right. One false move, and the whole lot of them come tumbling down and go rolling away across the tile, tripping customers and making old ladies cry out with terror.
Once, when I was new at working in the supermarket, I mispiled the oranges, and down they fell. This old blue haired woman with bald patches saw one of the fruits coming for her, and she put up such a fuss, nearly popped my eardrums, screaming about oh, my god, I’m allergic to cats, someone get this animal away from me. I learned my lesson right then and there, and ever since that day, I done taken a certain pride and care in stacking the oranges perfect, knowing that I’m doing my part to keep the shopping public safe from terror.
See, I take my job at the grocery real serious. I know that in the big scheme of things, maybe I’m not making a huge splash, like, say, Jackie O. or one of those magazine glamour girls. But I’m doing my part to make sure that society has its belly filled, and when you think about it, that’s the most important thing in the whole world. Food. None of us could do much of anything else if we couldn’t eat. I’m one of the basic building blocks in the American system. Like that fancy food pyramid the government puts out to let us know how not to get fat and die of heart attacks. You know the one, and bread and cereal is at the bottom? It’s the most important thing, and it holds up everything else. Well, I’m the bread and cereal of our nation. Without me, the whole rest of the country would come tumbling down like a stack of mispiled oranges. So when I tie on my blue apron in the morning, I feel just as much pride as a policeman putting on his badge, or a schoolteacher sliding on her glasses. Because my job is maybe the most important job of all.
The people here in River’s Edge can count on me, and they know it. When they need their deli meat sliced perfect for a wedding shower, or they need to know if aspirin is on aisle ten or eleven, they come looking for me. They don’t waste their time with the other cashiers. They see I’m the one who knows my stuff. Also, I’m the one they ask if they need private stuff, like cream for hemorrhoids or birth control products. They know I won’t go blabbing about it to the other customers. I give them service with a smile, but I don’t waste their time with no chit-chat. I cut to the chase, grin friendly-like, but not over eager, say aspirin is in aisle ten. They appreciate my willingness to help and my respectfulness of their time. Time is money, people say, and I know that. I ain’t one to waste people’s precious minutes directing them to the wrong aisle, or asking them how their son’s soccer season is or isn’t going. That ain’t my business, far as I’m concerned.
Not all the cashiers are that way. Back in December, Ronny, one of them high school kids Mac hired, told some lady the aspirin was in aisle eleven. Boy, was that a big to-do. That’s what caused the grief and questioning about which aisle the aspirin might be in. Ever since Ronny done that, no one in River’s Edge has had any luck in finding the aspirin aisle without my help. I don’t mind though, ‘cause that’s what I’m here for anyways. I get paid over five dollars an hour to do this job, and I intend to do it to the best of my ability.
The only girl I cannot give service with a smile is the one I told you about, the big old green eyed, perfect girl that comes trouncing in here with her battered cowboy hat perched on head, flouncing around, looking all pretty for everyone to gape at. Medusa. Her I cannot stand.
Which ain’t a good thing at this moment, because she just walked through the door, and she’s sashaying for me now, right when I’m finishing the orange pile. I turn my back a little so she can’t see my face too good. Still, I watch her out of the corners of my eyes, to notice if she’s growing a zit today or not. She must have an oil gland problem in her forehead, because pretty often, she’ll get a pimple there. She pulls the cowboy hat low those days, but I still see it. Today, she does not have a pimple, which chaffs my hide.
“Excuse me,” she says. She is standing right behind me. I can feel her hot breath on my neck, and it smells like onion rings. I can hear her smiling. Have you ever heard someone smile? You know, their voice is all lilty and perky, and you just get a notion to ring their necks, it’s so irritating. That’s how I feel with little miss perfect smiling and panting her reeky onion breath down my neck.
“Yeah?” I say.
“Can you tell me where the granola bars are?” she asks. Right away, I get to wondering. Is she going on a diet now, no more donuts, granola bars instead? Is that it? But I don’t ask her those questions, because like I said, it ain’t my way to waste people’s time with chit chat, plus I just plain to don’t like Medusa, nor do I want to spend one more second smelling her bad breath.
“Aisle three,” I say, “right next to fruit roll ups.” I myself have a particular liking for fruit rollups, especially the kind with rainbow colors in them. But she don’t need to know that.
“Thanks,” she says, and off she goes. I can hear her flouncing the same way I heard her smiling before. Geez, she gets on my nerves. I keep pretending to stack the oranges, because I don’t want to go elsewhere while she’s in the store. If I do, chances are, I’ll see her again. I’ve got my fill of Medusa for one day, thank you very much. So I just jostle the oranges around a bit to look like I’m still working, not the ones on bottom, because that would send the whole stack rolling, but the two or three on top, because it’s pretty safe to mess with those ones without creating havoc. I’m just about to call it safe and go off and find some shelves to stock when she flounces up behind me again, only this time I don’t hear her flouncing. The first thing I hear is “EXCUSE ME!” loud like a sonic boom. I jump so high, I topple my whole stack of oranges, and down they go, rolling and dancing across the floor.
“Oh, that’s a pisser!” I say, wheeling around to face her. “See what you made me do!” She looks all wide-eyed and shocked, and I’m pretty rankled that she can look so forlorn and pretty at the same time. When I’m forlorn, my forehead wrinkles up like a deflated balloon, and my eyes just disappear, but her, she looks like she’s at some modeling shoot, and they camera guy is saying, “Ok, Medusa, now look forlorn and shocked for me.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she bends over to help me pick the oranges up, only when she does, her cowboy hat goes flying, and a-ha, I see it, she does have a zit after all, right up there along her hairline. So that’s why she wears that old Stetson. She reaches for the hat. But while she’s reaching, an orange rolls right up under her high heeled boot, and down she falls, flat on her butt. I gotta laugh at that.
“Serves you right,” I say.
And you may think that’s mean-spirited, or even downright nasty, for me to kick someone when they’re down like that. But that ain’t usually my nature. Just a while ago, I told this guy exactly where to find fresh honey, even though we don’t carry none in our store. I gave him directions to the Foster’s bee farm and everything. That’s the kind of person I usually am. But Medusa gets under my skin
“I didn’t mean to mess you up,” she’s saying now, and she’s got a little tear in her eye.
I feel like a first class heel when I see that. “It’s just I take some amount of pride in my orange stacking,” I say by way of explaining myself.
“Yeah, well, I’ll help you restack them,” she says, and she’s reaching for my hand.
I got no choice but to yank her to her feet. Her fingers are all soft and sweaty in mine, the way my goldfish feels when I catch him so I can wash his bowl. I try to discourage her from helping me with the oranges. I tells her its kinda an art form, and I’d just as soon do it myself as have an amateur help me out, but she don’t pay me any mind. Before I can tell her the part about me being sorta like that guy who painted the Sistine Chapel, and her being sorta like the pope who kept sticking his nose into the business and messing up the painting, she’s stacking one orange on top of the other. She’s stacking them crooked, but she’s quick. I gotta give her credit for her quickness.
And pretty soon, like it or not, me and Medusa are a team, chasing oranges around together and piling them up. I show her all my trade secrets, how to stack the fruits perfect so they won’t slip and ruin the whole project, how you got move slow, not fast. She asks questions that most new grocery store workers don’t think to ask, and I’m starting to suspect she has a natural talent.
She says, “What if there’s an extra big navel, which way should you face it, up or down?” And, “Should you wipe off the fly spots before you put the orange in the stack?”
When the stack is halfway done, I go on and ask her about the granola bars, if she’s gone and given up donuts for good, or if this is just a fluke. She says no it’s not a fluke, she’s put on ten pounds in six months, isn’t that unbelievable?
I say, “I put on ten pounds in a week once. That’s when I quit weighing myself.”
I haven’t had a conversation like this with a real grown up in years. After Daddy died, Momma moved off to a retirement resort in Arizona, without so much as a goodbye to her shameful, fatty daughter. Since then, Clement is mostly the only person I do any kind of talking with, besides, apples are over in the produce aisle, and feminine hygiene’s aisle twelve. And come to think of it, even Clement don’t like to talk much when he gets home from the factory, he’s so dead dog tired. Weekends, he goes out with the boys for beers. So that leaves me having conversations with our beagle Frosty, but Frosty don’t talk back, except to say, yip-yip, yap-yap, bark-bark-bark when he’s hungry.
So talking to Medusa, whose real name turns out to be Melina, is like going out to the ice cream parlor and getting a whole mountain of ice cream. It’s that big of a treat. I mean you should see us, stacking the oranges real precise, but laughing some too while we’re going. She tells me a joke that goes like this.
“What do you call a fish without eyes? Fsh.”
I laugh pretty hard at that, isn’t that a good one?
So I tell her this one, since we’re on the subject of critters missing important body parts. “What do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef.”
She giggles something awful, shrieks more to point, like a fire engine or something. She’s got a laugh so sharp, it cuts right into your brain. She snorts a lot too, like a big fat hog. Still, it feels nice having a good laugh with another human being.
I’m so busy having fun, I don’t even notice the pain in my belly until it gets deep and strong. Feels like my guts are twisting together.
“Oh God,” I sorta whisper.
I don’t have to check my panties. I know there’s blood in there without looking. I know that baby died right there inside me while I was laughing. I know that I’ll spend the afternoon in the hospital knocked out while they suck out my baby with that vacuum. When the first baby died, the doctor didn’t give me no anesthetic while he vacuumed me. I screamed like hellfire. One nurse I met says I shoulda sued him, it’s common practice to give anesthetic for the vacuuming, but I didn’t know that then. Anyways, every time since, they’ve given me some knock out medicine, so I know they will this time too.
When Melina sees that I stopped laughing, her peachy face gets all confused, and she says, “Something wrong?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m bleeding out my baby now. I gotta go to the hospital.”
She does something funny then, something that I think wraps chains around our hearts and ties us together forever. She starts to cry. Not big, you understand, just a few tears. But enough to make me feel like maybe someone else in this world thinks this baby inside me is worth crying over.
We walk out through the store hand in hand, both of us blubbering like little children. I don’t even stop to tell Mac where I’m going. When we get outside, tiny puffs of snow are flurrying all around us, and the sun is invisible behind a swirl of gray storm clouds. Semis are honking down on the freeway, and someone’s listening to heavy metal music in the apartments next door. But I only halfway notice all of that. Mostly, I’m seeing the face of this baby girl in my belly, maybe all wrapped around with pretty blond white curls, smiling up on some cloud in heaven with the angels, playing a harp with her piano fingers.
“I’m sick and tired of my babies running off to heaven,” I tell Melina. “I wanna hold one of them sometime. Change their diaper once. You know, everyone gripes about the mustardy smell of fresh baby poop, but I’d give my heart and soul to smell it just one time.”
Melina laughs and cries all at once. Her eyes are red and puffy, but those perfect teeth are wet with spit and smiling. As she walks along the slick pavement in those high heels of hers, I’m thinking she’s gonna fall, but she never does. And I’m saying inside my head, gosh darn, she’s prettier now than ever. I bet she’d dance a mean jitterbug.
Suddenly, I’m hot way down deep into the middle of my heart. This must be what love feels like, I think. I don’t suppose I ever knew ‘til just now what love was. I thought in my own way, I loved Clement, maybe in a quiet way, not like the Marty Robbins song, but still real. But this thing I feel for Melina right now is like nothing I ever knew. I want to reach out and grab her, hold her head to my chest, tell her all my secrets. I wanna study the wrinkles on her hands. I wanna know what are her hobbies, what makes her tick. It’s just pure and true what I’m feeling, looking at the way Melina’s soft brown curls falls down over her eyes. It’s like rainwater on a summer day. It takes away some of the pain of the baby dying inside me. My guts are all bunched up and twisted from Sashana dying, but they’re all twisted up with love too.
Melina leads me an old caramel colored Buick and helps me into the back seat. “His name is Pedro,” she says. “Lay down.”
“Whose name is Pedro?” I ask, clutching at my belly.
“The car. I just thought you might want to know his name.” She puts a checkered coat under my head for a pillow.
When she slides into the front seat, she reaches back and holds my dry, old, fat hand in one of her pretty ones, tells me it will all work out. She believes in fate, she says while we’re driving. She believes she was brought to the grocery today for a reason. She believes we were meant to meet, maybe so we could just say goodbye to this baby together. But maybe so we could save it too. Don’t give up just yet. She honks the horn real hard then, to make other cars get out of the way.
“Her name’s Shashana,” I say.
“Hang on, Shashana,” whispers Melina.
Outside, cars are whizzing by us on the freeway, and I’m thinking, what in the world is happening to me? This baby inside me is dying.
But, God forgive me, even with the pain in my gut and the sadness of losing Sashana, I feel more alive right now than I ever thought I could.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Holy Week Without You (Wholly Weak Without You)
The night is blue and cool in Mexico. Outside,
a naranja moon looms, sliced by the slats of my
shutters. It is Mary’s night. Ave Maria’s rang
in the stone streets just hours ago. Purple shrines
grew in dirty crannies like scabs over wounds.
This morning, I found myself
in a crooked church, staring
at a smiling statue. The candle
flame of my gaze licked at the light
in her eyes. I asked her for you.
She seemed like the kind of girl who would
understand this love, this hungry fire that will
not die, that feeds on everything, on stones
and steeples and candlesticks. Always, its blue
flames lick at the edges of the shrine of my mind.
The bells are ringing, even now, and there, a confused rooster
calls out the hour, a cackling town crier. Tonight, children laughed
late, slurping helados and blowing bubbles with orange wands. But
at last, they are asleep. I swing open my shutters, look down into
the window below me. I can see brown boys coiled in their beds.
Coiled white in my bed, a smooth
snake with a licking flame tongue,
I think of you, burning the blue night
with my Ave Maria’s. Her name
on my lips tastes like fire.
a naranja moon looms, sliced by the slats of my
shutters. It is Mary’s night. Ave Maria’s rang
in the stone streets just hours ago. Purple shrines
grew in dirty crannies like scabs over wounds.
This morning, I found myself
in a crooked church, staring
at a smiling statue. The candle
flame of my gaze licked at the light
in her eyes. I asked her for you.
She seemed like the kind of girl who would
understand this love, this hungry fire that will
not die, that feeds on everything, on stones
and steeples and candlesticks. Always, its blue
flames lick at the edges of the shrine of my mind.
The bells are ringing, even now, and there, a confused rooster
calls out the hour, a cackling town crier. Tonight, children laughed
late, slurping helados and blowing bubbles with orange wands. But
at last, they are asleep. I swing open my shutters, look down into
the window below me. I can see brown boys coiled in their beds.
Coiled white in my bed, a smooth
snake with a licking flame tongue,
I think of you, burning the blue night
with my Ave Maria’s. Her name
on my lips tastes like fire.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Sacrament
The Mexican rain rides bolts of blue lightning
dismounting on the hot, cracked ground that is so
like the sound of your voice. I am here,
in the land of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
riding bolts of this love, so thick it can only
be rendered in paint or blood. She said
painters paint, weavers weave, and Frida
Diegos, making him into The Verb. For me,
you are The Verb, my reason to breathe. Today,
in the jardin, when the swelling sun and the scent
of gardenias left me dizzy, the only thing I could think
was, I wish I could give this moment to you, wrap it up
in corn husks like a tamale and deliver
it to you on a silver plate. Here,
churches swallow saint's bones.
They tuck skulls away in their dark mouths, in the walls,
in the floors. Mary Magdalene's pitted tibia soaks up
the colors of the stained glass glinting in the setting sun.
My bones are buried in the church of you.
I wrote this poem. I have been thinking about love, about what I want. What I want is a man who is bigger than me. I want a man who walks into a room and takes up all the air. I want a man who walks into a damp, dank cave and sets it on fire. I want a man with wings who laughs while he is cart wheeling through the clouds. I want a man with the courage to cry. I want a man who will teach me. I want a man who is so smart, I have to whip open a dictionary and an encyclopedia and maybe keep my laptop handy so I can Google the things he says. I want a man who understands art, not necessarily because he has studied it, but because he is it.
I want a man brimming with fire, a fire that burn into his eyes and fingers and lips and scorches my skin, my soul. I am tired of settling. I want a big love. They kind they write about in all the books that matter. The kind of love great men sing about on their deathbeds. I want a great man who will sing my name on his deathbed. I have decided this world has more to offer than what they say. They say things, write bulleted lists of rules. Find your man here. He will look like this. He will do these things, and you must put up with them. He will not see you. That is the way these men creatures are. He will not want to discourse on the possibilities of the human soul, the possibilities of the infinite universe. He will be too busy with his thirteen fantasy football teams and the Spice Channel for such nonsense.
Nonsense, I say. Nonsense. I refuse to believe that all men are Neanderthals. This one man taught me that. He walked like he was walking on water, always, even over concrete and brick, he water walked. He made miracle into a verb, just by being. He miracled. I want a man who miracles. At this point, anything less than that is nonsense. Nonsense I say to these boys who saunter up to me with their panties throbbing and say silly things, looking for an angle, as if I am a fish they can lure onto their lines. To touch me, you do not need bait. You need truth.
I want a man who carries truth in his eyes. I want to look there and see that, though he may be a complicated knot I will never untie, he is not lying. I want a man who is satin soft and diamond hard. Who knows when to bend and when to break and when to stand his ground. I want a man who can say: sometimes, I am weak. When he is broken, I want him to bury his broken body in mine, rest his face on my breasts, burn me with his tears. I want a man who knows how to laugh when things are funny. I want a man who is prone to falling in love, not just with me, but with everything. I want a man who can thrill at the sight of the sun falling into the sea, or smile because a grass blade is so very green.
I want a man who knows how to dream. I want a man who still believes in possibilities. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of this life, this planet, this universe. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of his own soul. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of mine.
I want a man who sees me and says, “Holy shit. That’s it.” I want him to know. I don’t want him to always be looking over his shoulder, wondering if there is something better, something younger, something thinner, something more boobalicious, out there. I want him to look into my eyes and see the sea that crashes behind them. I want him to strip naked and dive into my ocean and never come up for air again. I want him to drown in me. I want to drown in him. I want a man who has a propensity for drowning in passion. I want big love.
I wrote this once, in a book. These paragraphs came to me the day I found out the thing that made me leave my husband. It was a life changing time. Hours before my life changed forever, I was riding along, and these words came so strong, I pulled over at the first coffee shop I saw and let them pour out of my fingertips. They felt like they came from somewhere else. They were the last words of a book called "Where the Dead Men Lost Their Bones," which took me three years to write. They were, looking back, a perfect description of what I want from love:
This is how modern love stories end. Happily ever after with no bruises is a fairy tale. There is no happily ever after. But there is this. There is love. Love that stretches on and on into forever, beyond the boundaries of time and space and society and religion and rules. Love that winds itself around two people like a python, like a living noose, and squeezes them together until they cannot ever be whole alone again. Modern love stories end this way, with two broken people who can never be whole again.
But they are still our favorite stories, these love stories. Because we know that when the days and nights and dawns and dusks bleed together into black, when the noise of expressways and supermarkets and laugh tracks blur together until they become an endless deafening hum, there is a deep magic, a deep music, that keeps its color, that beats in time to the pounding of our most sacred and ancient hearts, that no self-help guru, no talk show host, no priest, will ever be able to define or explain. This magic, this music has a name. That name is love. And it breaks and batters and binds and bleeds and bridges and burns. It conquers all. And leaves the conquered broken. And human in their brokenness.
This is the gift love leaves in its wake. It leaves us shattered, to be molded into something better more beautiful longer and stronger. Love breaks us, and in the end, if we could look that far forward and backward into forever, makes us pieces of something vast and whole, makes us pieces of the rocky, watery planets spinning in their orbits, and the infant stars exploding into fiery life and melting back down into nothing, and the asteroid belts and the atoms and the first breaths and the big bangs and the Genesises and the Revelations. Love breaks us and makes us part of forever.
That is the gift love leaves when it is gone.
dismounting on the hot, cracked ground that is so
like the sound of your voice. I am here,
in the land of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo
riding bolts of this love, so thick it can only
be rendered in paint or blood. She said
painters paint, weavers weave, and Frida
Diegos, making him into The Verb. For me,
you are The Verb, my reason to breathe. Today,
in the jardin, when the swelling sun and the scent
of gardenias left me dizzy, the only thing I could think
was, I wish I could give this moment to you, wrap it up
in corn husks like a tamale and deliver
it to you on a silver plate. Here,
churches swallow saint's bones.
They tuck skulls away in their dark mouths, in the walls,
in the floors. Mary Magdalene's pitted tibia soaks up
the colors of the stained glass glinting in the setting sun.
My bones are buried in the church of you.
I wrote this poem. I have been thinking about love, about what I want. What I want is a man who is bigger than me. I want a man who walks into a room and takes up all the air. I want a man who walks into a damp, dank cave and sets it on fire. I want a man with wings who laughs while he is cart wheeling through the clouds. I want a man with the courage to cry. I want a man who will teach me. I want a man who is so smart, I have to whip open a dictionary and an encyclopedia and maybe keep my laptop handy so I can Google the things he says. I want a man who understands art, not necessarily because he has studied it, but because he is it.
I want a man brimming with fire, a fire that burn into his eyes and fingers and lips and scorches my skin, my soul. I am tired of settling. I want a big love. They kind they write about in all the books that matter. The kind of love great men sing about on their deathbeds. I want a great man who will sing my name on his deathbed. I have decided this world has more to offer than what they say. They say things, write bulleted lists of rules. Find your man here. He will look like this. He will do these things, and you must put up with them. He will not see you. That is the way these men creatures are. He will not want to discourse on the possibilities of the human soul, the possibilities of the infinite universe. He will be too busy with his thirteen fantasy football teams and the Spice Channel for such nonsense.
Nonsense, I say. Nonsense. I refuse to believe that all men are Neanderthals. This one man taught me that. He walked like he was walking on water, always, even over concrete and brick, he water walked. He made miracle into a verb, just by being. He miracled. I want a man who miracles. At this point, anything less than that is nonsense. Nonsense I say to these boys who saunter up to me with their panties throbbing and say silly things, looking for an angle, as if I am a fish they can lure onto their lines. To touch me, you do not need bait. You need truth.
I want a man who carries truth in his eyes. I want to look there and see that, though he may be a complicated knot I will never untie, he is not lying. I want a man who is satin soft and diamond hard. Who knows when to bend and when to break and when to stand his ground. I want a man who can say: sometimes, I am weak. When he is broken, I want him to bury his broken body in mine, rest his face on my breasts, burn me with his tears. I want a man who knows how to laugh when things are funny. I want a man who is prone to falling in love, not just with me, but with everything. I want a man who can thrill at the sight of the sun falling into the sea, or smile because a grass blade is so very green.
I want a man who knows how to dream. I want a man who still believes in possibilities. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of this life, this planet, this universe. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of his own soul. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of mine.
I want a man who sees me and says, “Holy shit. That’s it.” I want him to know. I don’t want him to always be looking over his shoulder, wondering if there is something better, something younger, something thinner, something more boobalicious, out there. I want him to look into my eyes and see the sea that crashes behind them. I want him to strip naked and dive into my ocean and never come up for air again. I want him to drown in me. I want to drown in him. I want a man who has a propensity for drowning in passion. I want big love.
I wrote this once, in a book. These paragraphs came to me the day I found out the thing that made me leave my husband. It was a life changing time. Hours before my life changed forever, I was riding along, and these words came so strong, I pulled over at the first coffee shop I saw and let them pour out of my fingertips. They felt like they came from somewhere else. They were the last words of a book called "Where the Dead Men Lost Their Bones," which took me three years to write. They were, looking back, a perfect description of what I want from love:
This is how modern love stories end. Happily ever after with no bruises is a fairy tale. There is no happily ever after. But there is this. There is love. Love that stretches on and on into forever, beyond the boundaries of time and space and society and religion and rules. Love that winds itself around two people like a python, like a living noose, and squeezes them together until they cannot ever be whole alone again. Modern love stories end this way, with two broken people who can never be whole again.
But they are still our favorite stories, these love stories. Because we know that when the days and nights and dawns and dusks bleed together into black, when the noise of expressways and supermarkets and laugh tracks blur together until they become an endless deafening hum, there is a deep magic, a deep music, that keeps its color, that beats in time to the pounding of our most sacred and ancient hearts, that no self-help guru, no talk show host, no priest, will ever be able to define or explain. This magic, this music has a name. That name is love. And it breaks and batters and binds and bleeds and bridges and burns. It conquers all. And leaves the conquered broken. And human in their brokenness.
This is the gift love leaves in its wake. It leaves us shattered, to be molded into something better more beautiful longer and stronger. Love breaks us, and in the end, if we could look that far forward and backward into forever, makes us pieces of something vast and whole, makes us pieces of the rocky, watery planets spinning in their orbits, and the infant stars exploding into fiery life and melting back down into nothing, and the asteroid belts and the atoms and the first breaths and the big bangs and the Genesises and the Revelations. Love breaks us and makes us part of forever.
That is the gift love leaves when it is gone.
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