2006-07-25

fingertips: chp 3-6

Chapter 3

Leslie is calling for Bernie, but her brother is too concerned with sitting on the couch to be interested in what she has to say.

“Bernie !” Do you remember that girl from the bar?” She sits on front of him, so that he has no choice but to acknowledge her.

“The hooker?” He asks.

“She’s not a hooker! I’ve already told you that. Will you stop it?”

“All women are hookers, really, in one way or another. You give men sex, men give you shit.”

Bernie looks at him, angered. She slaps him on the head on her way out of the living room.

Bernie tells himself to remember to do something nice for her later. Right now he doesn’t care. He hears her shout that she’s on the way to work. She cleans a house for a, “really sad couple,” as she describes them, every now and then. She always goes on about how they have no children. She talks about everybody, and she rambles at him.

Neither of them were ever very social people growing up. Leslie was a few years younger, and she didn’t make friends easily. So she talked, and talked. And she talked and talked to him. Always to him, or at him, because one can’t talk with someone if the other person doesn’t listen.

Bernie had taken on smoking cigars. Leslie said they stank. She opened all the windows when she came home to air the house, and burned incense to cover the embedded scent. Bernie himself hated the smell, but he kept smoking.

Bernie had very little anyway.
…………………..

Red and gold flowers are littered across the vast expanse of road that we travel. The trees are bearing their full nudity of leaves, of which we receive but glimpses from the windows and doors that enclose us in the car.

The outside becomes scenery, like the moving picture shows from before cinematic progression. The road bends, the same Interstate, snakelike and yet motherly. The road is like creation, like a marriage of interspecies.

The human-forged concrete snake penetrates the hills and forests, the bursting woods respectfully never spill onto the roads. Or perhaps it is not respect, but disgust. Perhaps the trees are more guarded than they seem in their stillness, and what right has anyone contained by a car to use the word stillness? It may be that they are beings of such passion that they must be constrained by roots as they moan and rustle, rapturous with breezy lovers, and gyrate, dripping sweet dew; while inside, a force beyond our comprehension swallows, disperses, and spreads across itself its wet life.

We too have our roots. In this vehicle we think we are moving, but we are passive here. It is they that are living most in these moments.

Ana is amused by how I marvel. They’re just trees, she chuckles. But I’ve lived most my life in dusty plains, and to me, these are not just trees, and no flowers have ever been so simultaneously windswept and luscious.

I scratched our names into the bark of a tree with fat, wide leaves. I don’t know what the tree is called, neither does Ana. But somewhere on the coast of Delaware a tree reads large and bold, “Maira loves Ana always.” with the word ‘always’ outside the lopsided attempt at a heart. Ana squealed that we would offend the poor Protestants, but she took a picture of us under it nonetheless.

I am ridiculously in love with her, and I see my own emotions in her gaze. Our trip is full of laughter.

“We’ve driven all this time in all this sun, and you don’t have a single tan line you know.” I laugh at Ana’s pale skin, running my hand along her arm.

“Yeah, it’s magic.”

I throw my head back, because I’ve always liked that saying, and because I am jubilant enough to sit in the passenger side of a car with the windows open and my arms up behind my head, the sun gleaming on me, and to throw my head back thoughtlessly and laugh.

Ana revels in my mood, usually so much more serious, and continues, “Yes! The sun avoids my skin! It travels all the space along the galaxy to reach the soil of the earth, and penetrates all surfaces, but it does not touch me. I am not a surface.”

Is it possible to smile and frown simultaneously? I did. Sometimes I wondered if she thought deeply or if the things she said, like this, were all a joke. Something like that could mean a lot, or it could be her spewing out a bit she’d heard or read somewhere. I couldn’t tell because she always laughed in such a way that no one could have know the difference.

“Oh come on!” She yells. “Stop thinking so much! Just keep laughing.”

So I do.

“Hey, you, stinky!” She looks over. She usually stares directly at the road before her. I think she has a phobia of driving, but she wont admit to it, and she’s too paranoid to let me drive.

“I am not stinky!” I say, though I’m not offended.

“Hah!” She laughs. “Well, no you’re not, but we’re not spring fresh either. Neither of us has showered in the last two days. But that’s not the point.”

“Um…ok, what’s the point?”

“I’m hungry!” She squeals.

“You think that voice is cute?”

“Everything I do is cute! Or it should be, to you anyway missy.”

“Oh, well.” I’m still smiling as I say everything. So is she. “Yes master.”

“That’s right!” She is so smug. I do find it rather cute. “Ok!” she yells, “so let’s eat! Where do you want to go? What are you in the mood for?”

“At this point I don’t really care.” I think. “There are plenty of waffle houses everywhere, or we could stop at any of the stations. All the big signs say what restaurants they have.” I say in reference to the advertising bulletins on the side of the interstate reading GAS, REST ROOMS, FOOD and the exit number to reach them.

“Waffles?”

I consent, “Waffles!” we both yell, and I just smile at the red of her hair, tangled and messed in the wind.

…….

Chapter 4

Nina Simone is playing in the background. Mother named me after her. I was the last of her children, of four boys, and she had wanted a girl. But there I was, boy number four. She would have named me Simone or Nina, whichever I first chose. So out I came, and Simon Grey it was. Simple.

It was just mother with us. The old man had died some years after I was born. He was a miner, and had gotten trapped in a mine, or so mother says. I don’t remember his face, but I get fuzzy sensation when I see the pictures of him holding my tiny self on his lap.

My brothers say I’m too sensitive. I tried to explain it to them once, but it was too unusual, I suppose. I can’t expect them to understand things about the inside of me, things they cannot see, and can never feel as I do.

It’s so sad isn’t it, and so odd as well. The millions of things people will never see the way that you do. So disappointing. Like offering a favorite meal to a beloved friend, with the most carefully picked out spices, done as beautifully and as deliciously as you believe it is humanly possible for a meal to be prepared, and then the moment of disappointment when you can see that he just doesn’t feel it. The delight, the ecstasy, all the more present through their absence. So sad, the millions of things people will never experience the way that anyone else does.

I felt that way about mother’s jazz. It soothes yes, it is lovely yes, and maybe what I don’t understand are the horrors she must have endured to require a lifetime of constant soothing, but I just wish for her to move! To feel! To want. Comfort is due where it has need, but since I have known my mother she has had need of comfort, and I can no longer understand its due.

She played the silkiest and most sorrowful jazz, in a house where the curtains were always closed and heavy as armament against the outside light, and where voices must always be maintained at a whisper. We lived all my life in that house. Her room door, normally locked, was across the gloomy expanse of hallway, living room, family room, dining room, and more hallway, so as not to disturb her.

And now, we were selling it. Mother was too old to care for such a large house, and the housekeepers were now too expensive, even on the combined salaries of the four of us, we simply worried. She had refused an elderly home, and so we had found her an apartment, convenient and within close emergency driving range to two of our homes.

She seemed to like it, though she was sad to see the house go. She had begged one of us to at least move in, to keep the house in the family. But my brother’s wives had hated the old, creaking house. I could have stayed, alone, but it would have been suffocation. I wanted to make sure mother was somewhere safe, content, and then I wanted to leave.

I hadn’t told mother this, but I would when I felt the time to be right. For now I sit in front of her, in her rocking chair and feed her yarn as she knits along to Nina Simone. The movers looked at us strangely at first, but now they just walk by picking up the packed boxes and furniture. The boxes labeled “fragile” they leave for last.
…………….

We said that word so often when we were together. When you pressed yourself to me, and moans and sweat accompanied us over the blankets.

But did I really love you, do I? I never thought of you and thought, “I love you,” when you were not with me. I may have thought of you and said, “I love him.” but the feeling was different entirely from when you were before me and your hands were so delightful, and your body more so.

But that’s the peculiarity of life, the absurdity, isn’t it? That no one exists until we can see them and that three seconds after we do, they can stop existing. That this girl or that entire family passing by us now can disappear into the nothingness from which we come. That we are nothingness.

Since you have been gone, I have been unable to stop these manias. I chew my hair, I bite my nails, I tap, and tap, and tap on every surface, my foot, my hand, my fingers. I can’t think of what to do with my body. I can’t think of how I should be moving, how I should be reacting. And I see you in the backs of places. A man walking by with your color hair, with those dreadful shades of brown you so adore to wear. I look up, I double-take everything, everyone, every flash of movement is you.

My back aches since you left, from all I do to keep you from entering my mind. I take pills, drink teas, drink coffee, eat sugar to keep going, to stop thinking. I work extra hours.

I don’t want to know what you are doing, I can’t bear it, I just can’t imagine you… you… you …

I know this will be soothed eventually, but right now it is awful. I tell myself that the sorrow will eventually quit me, but for now, it is unbearable. And this is how I bear it. I never think, I never sit. I sleep only when exhaustion forces me down. I never stop.

And yet, I do not know if it is because I love you, or because I am so accustomed to you.
…………………….

Francis is about to leave his wife Rachel, a fact he does not yet know. He only knows that he can’t seem to keep his eyes from straying towards the legs of girls in short shorts and those teeny skirts. It drives his hormones into frenzy. The images of petting those soft hairless legs, too young yet for veins or cellulite, but plump and, as some of those shorts very truly advertise, juicy. Deliciously juicy.

He has to shift to make the growing bulge in his pants more tolerable, he opens his legs a little wider so that the stretched denim of his pants better conceals.

That girl is just what he dreams of having. Baby curls at the nape of her ponytail make him wonder what other gentle curls he could discover if given the chance. He rubs his face, tells himself to settle down. How old could she possibly be, not more than thirteen, really.

God, he was a piece of shit, his brain was fucked up. He rubbed his face some more, but she stood there, crossing and uncrossing her legs and pulling her shorts down from between the inside of her thighs, madly infuriating his imagination. He imagines the smell of her skin, the taste of her tight unexplored crevices.

He shifts some more, wills himself to look away, but the images in his brain are still running like a film. She’ll squeal, because it will hurt pretty badly at first he imagines, maybe she’ll cry a little, he would like that, but then she’d get into it. He’d do her hard.

Fuck. He hits his temple with the flat of his palm, and walks into the bathroom, hoping to have created enough of a distraction in walking fast and moving around the upper part of his body so as not to offend the more decent society. He walks into the restroom of the restaurant looking almost-fast food place. He walks into the stall, and looks down at himself. Should he?

He thinks of his parents and for the life of him cannot imagine how they could have lasted all the years they did. He is certain his father must not have been faithful, it would just have been impossible. His mother was a fantastic mother, but not the sort of woman to keep a man fully content in other ways.

That was Rachel. He’d made the same mistake.

And, unlike his father, on top of the mistake, he was fucking messed up.

He shakes his head, but he smiles, because this is nothing new.
……………….
Chapter 5

Camille Grey hates television. She doesn’t like to be so typical, but she tells herself, she’s old, she hasn’t got much life to waste watching light particles (or whatever they might actually be) flash inside a box.

Still, she’s unsure of what to do with herself. It is precisely this feeling of age and the urgency which accompanies it, that has her rushed, and in her rush she is so exhausted that she can only sit and wonder. She’s dying, soon now. This idea plays on in her mind, and she has to do something, she has to make something, she has to leave something. But what? What can she do? She could write, but she was never too good at that. Though she’d like to leave each of her sons something about her life, something to let them know what their mother thought, how she had been in her youth and in her inner life. A memoir. But again, she was never too good with words.

Though she had always liked to voice it to them, time had been too fast, age had come too soon. Really, it had been such a surprise to look at the mirror and see that makeup no longer covered all the little lines. That she hadn’t minded so much, only to see her boys so big now, so manly, and to think that these creatures with minds and muscles had once been inside of her, and that all the teeny strands of genetic material that had repeated itself countless times had begun with microscopic donations from her beloved husband, may he rest in peace, and the inside of her body.

Camille knew she had always been a timid woman, and she may have regretted that if she had seen any way of changing it. However, since she had never understood another way of being, she regretted only that her timidity had extended into her own family, and that the loudness and roughness of four well-fed and contented boys had kept her from connecting to her children. So now she felt she owed them something, something that told them, here I am, your mother, and I am more than the woman who bathed you and washed your dishes and made your beds. I am more than the woman who covered your wounds and sang you to sleep, ad who cried whenever I saw you achieve something while you rolled your eyes and said I was ridiculous. I am more, much more than the woman who hugged you every morning and sent your bellies out to school with warm food to fill them.

They were selling her house now. They said she couldn’t take care of it herself, and though she had pleaded with them to take it for themselves, not leave it to strangers, they hadn’t understood.

It wasn’t their house after all. They hadn’t prayed to God years ago, with so many tears, that the bank would accept them. It hadn’t been the first real thing they had ever owned. Their first grounding, the foundation for their life. It hadn’t been their hope. They hadn’t scrubbed floors on their knees, and grime out of other people’s toilets when they had found themselves with four young children and an injured husband laid off of work, to keep the house, to keep stability, to raise the children right.

No, she didn’t bother trying to explain to them, how her heart had floated, how the comically childish smile on her face had lasted a full year whenever she thought, I am in my kitchen, I am on my driveway, this is my garden and I am planting my roses! This is my house and my family, and I have a ground. She didn’t try to explain that joy, that air of optimism for her future that had vibrated and glowed around her, in her home.

It had been a good life, quiet, and simple, with it’s sufficient sprinklings of joy. And now here she was. Alone, without even her house and its memories to keep her company, and with children who now saw her as the remnants of that great mother, something of their past that stayed to remind them. So Camille wondered how much different she was from a picture. And she wondered why they and she seemed to think that life was somehow over for her, and she should await its end passively. She was more than a picture she thought, more than a mother, more than dying.

She was old, her mind repeated, life was ending. But it wasn’t over yet, was it? Something else responded.

She wanted to move, she wanted to speak, she had so many things to say, and they were good things she knew. Helpful things. But who was there to hear her? She had lived a timid life thus far, who was she to change that now?

Tired out by her thoughts, Camille takes up the remote, and the small television her son Francis bought for her kitchen comes alive with the click of a rubber nub, and the active voice in Camille hushes itself a little better.

She watches some programs for a while, and leaves the setting on an infomercial solely for the background noise that it provides. She sets a kettle on level seven on the stove, to boil water for tea.

Outside, she hears footsteps, and wonders if they belong to her young neighbor, who reminds her so much of her sons, and with whom she compensates a bit. She had thought a few months ago, when she had first moved in, on how to introduce herself to him without seeming an un-interesting and senile ancient. Her plan may not have been magnificent, but he had been kind enough to give her some morning sugar, and she had gratefully invited him to sit in for coffee. They had quietly and amicably breakfasted, and continued to do so on occasion.

She decides to investigate and steps outside with a habitual ready and gentle smile to arm her face, but it dissuades immediately upon catching sight of her young neighbor. She wonders if she should speak, and does not know if this is the kind of sorrow that is best left unmolested. He is standing against his door, as though in emotional exhaustion, an exhaustion she understands too well, because she lives it everyday. She thinks how lonely she is, and how lonely he must be, so young and virile and self encaged. He must be suffering a great deal, and so she decides to make herself known. Maybe there is someone who needs her after all, someone who can benefit from listening to her experience.

She clears her throat, but he seems not to hear her.

She speaks, but her voice is too low, or maybe he is ignoring her. Reluctant now, and self-doubting she looks into her house, but it is so lonely there. So empty, and there is nothing but the sound of the infomercial on the television and the nothingness that she will inevitably do.

So Camille straightens her back, and calls his name more loudly. She watches him jerk and his eyes dart around. This makes her smile more comfortably, she sees that he was not ignoring her deliberately.

She asks what he is doing, and if he is feeling ill, and listens to his accented voice, now a symbol of comfort to her, the way he enunciates so carefully for her. Her sons speak far too quickly, not considering her failing ears.

She offers him tea, the kettle will sound any minute now. But then she sees his expression, and it is also one she recognizes all too well. Her sons and their wives wear it at every holiday dinner to which they force each other to attend, none truly wanting. Her sons wear it when she asks them to bring her grandchildren to play. They wear it when she first requests, when their brains are momentarily alarmed and they are thinking of how to reject and exit without being overtly cruel and without compromising themselves.

Camille lowers her eyes. She can’t win over this expression with her own flesh and blood, why then try to fight this young man, who is really a stranger and who has been nothing but kind to her. She nods, not looking in his normally heartening eyes, the way she tends to, and she walks inside her apartment at the same time as he. She hears him continue to walk, and she imagines him taking off his street clothes, settling for a while, maybe calling a lady friend to soothe his worried body.

With her empty time she decides to tidy the kitchen. In the quiet solitude of scrubbing the sink she sees that the reflection of her face, now wrinkled beyond her recognition, is covered in tears.
……………..

The heat is impossible. The ceiling fan spins wildly and creaks. When I had been younger, I remember, another fan that had spun in such a way had frightening me. I had always believed it would fall atop me in my sleep, or as I read, or even just walked across my room.

The telephone rings. Nicola’s voice says, “Hey baby. How are you?”

“Not too good.” I answer. An awful day has been happening to me, pushing itself on me. I can’t think the depression has come to inundate me this time. I should be happy shouldn’t I? With Nicolas, who is spectacular.

“What’s wrong, Lina baby?” he asks

That he says, ‘Lina baby’ annoys me a bit. I look around. Nothing is wrong, nothing has happened. I just hurt. I just always hurt. I swallow. What to say? I clear my throat. Still nothing. “Darling, can I call you back please?”

“Yeah, sure, what happened?” he seems so concerned. It is so unfair of me.

“I’ll tell you in just a while. Promise. Be right back.”

I imagine that I am breathing in the dust that the fan picks up and swirls around. The air is nothing but dust. The tears falling out of my eyes, also, are nothing but dust. I am so tired, but I have done nothing today. He’s already agreed and hung up. I hold the phone on my lap, immobile.

I remember a smaller, newer me suffocated by the dust of our dirty and overcrowded house. I would wash a glass, and fill it two thirds of the way with fresh water so that I could breath in that freshness. I spent long days with my little nose in a cup, trying to get the oxygen out of the water, and some part of me believed it worked.

I walk up to the rooftop. There are cables strewn everywhere. The owners have been neglectful. I don’t know what I am doing up here. I need air, or something.

My arm is bleeding still, worse this time. I hadn’t cut in so long this time. I had hoped that this stretch I would be able to stand it. That I wouldn’t relapse. But even in between all my stretches of time, I had still cut. Not as badly as the first few years when I had begun, those years I would slice daily, at least weekly. When I gave in again after the stretches, which usually lasted some months, something awful would happen, and I would cut then for some weeks, and stop again. This time had been much better. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so contemptuous of therapy. Maybe I should have tried harder to speak.

I can breathe much more easily up here. My face stings, and feels tight from crying. But the air is smoother outside than in, and enters my lungs much more forgivingly.

I think of my mother. As I had entered adolescence and progressed into adulthood I had found more and more of my mother, in my movements, in my features, in my reactions.

I have begun to wonder if there really is no God, and all that I have depended on is a lie. So if there is no God, would that mean that life is not worth living. I have begun to wonder if there is nothing, what the point of it all could be, and if there is no point, why bother living in the misery of it?

Mother, I think, if I were to die at this very moment, the earth would still keep spinning. The sun would still shine, and everything under its light would still be as beautiful and horrible as it is meant to be. I have faith that all things are as they should be, mother. You should have faith too, I think. But why am I thinking these things? Am I planning on jumping? I do not know, it could be. It’s not as thought one controls these things.

Mother I give you my soul. I cannot carry it, myself.

So I suppose I am about to die. I amuse the idea. I suppose I wouldn’t be keeping that promise to return Nicolas’ call. It wasn’t an important promise, but then again, there is no such a thing as an important promise.

At this point, I can think of nothing else to say to myself. I peer below me, and it is a long way down. My body inches itself closer to the edge. The air really is much fresher here. It is good to have a sweet zephyr of breath before dying isn’t it? A good death, a good sign. And isn’t that a ridiculous thing to think? A good death? How could that be possible. It is an end, and are any ends good? Or any beginnings? I don’t know, it seems to make more sense though that it should be what lies between them that is the good thing, and not in the sense of good and wrong, but good in that it is the useful thing.

I see the extremities, I see the in-betweens, and I cannot move.

I fall. I sit crossed-legged on the edge of the roof, because I can’t move. I can only think. I remember being sixteen. I remember living on a beautiful coast, and watching the sun rise on the soft shell hues of the shores, and create nimbly radiant petals of light on the icy-warm tones of the water. I remember hating the summer months, when the tourists infested my beach. It was my beach. We loved each other. I was used to the notion that I somehow communicated with her, that we could somehow love each other. I would call to her in the night times, and greet her like a dearest friend or lover. She came to me at the wave of a hand, waving with it, following my motion. She frightened me with her secrets, and thrilled me with her mysteries. One night, a sixteen, I had cried with such devastation and found myself so alone. I did not know why I cried, I did not know why I hurt the way I did. My tears brought no relief, as they normally might, and hours of them had left me exhausted. I slapped at my face, but the idea of me hurting myself from the confused agony I experienced, frightened me and the tears kept flowing. It was strange that I did not go for my razor, or think to. But nothing would calm me, and it may be that I was too afraid to go too far this time if I did pick it up and begin to cut. I have never wanted to kill myself. On the contrary, I have wanted to live. It is the inability to live that brings me such pain. I ran from the house that night, I ran to my beach, I ran to my ocean. I ran into her, I slid within her until the amount of water forbid me from running, and then I swam. And I stopped, and there I floated, and above me were the stars, shielded by the lights along the strip, but still glorious. And above me was a half moon, and I laughed at a joke I had made up with myself. “Someone has chopped the moon in half,” I whispered. But then came the tears, uncontrollable. It is not so simple to stay afloat as one’s body is trembling with sorrow. I saw myself drenched in sorrow, in an ocean of it, and not water. There were the stars, there was the moon, and I was sinking and stoking my legs and not stroking my legs, and the tears were coming, and I was swallowing and spitting water, breathing and holding breath, wanting to die and wanting furiously to live, and that’s when it happened. That is the exact moment I saw it. The moment I learned how bizarre it all was, how bizarre everything and all of us are.

There I lay atop the ocean and I could count the number of people who would be deeply hurt by the announcement of my drowning on my two hands. And that was not a bad thing. It just was. I might know of the existence of six billion, but they can never be anything but numbers to me, nor I to them. There I lay atop the ocean, crying salt water into salt water, and it could never care for me as I cared for it, it would wash me up, its creatures would eat out my eyes, its liquid would bloat and wrinkle my skin, its tide would release me or not, and it would feel nothing. There I lay atop the ocean, and I had seen the stars, and so had the six billion, and if a shooting star came by and I wished upon it, I would be one of thousands, and it would not grant my wishes, it would keep burning.

That is what I saw, and so, I swam back to shore.

I swam back because it didn’t matter if I lived or died, I could not change the bizarre, I was part of it.

It didn’t matter, but I wanted to die loved. That was all.

I swam back, and I went to bed. I slept fifteen hours that night and morning without dreams or interruptions.

And here on this rooftop I see it again. Life is full of so much misery as it is, and I think I have no right to add to it. I allow the thought to briefly enter me that it could truly be as Nicolas says, that I choose to be so wretched. I conclude that it could be, but that still doesn’t teach me how to chose to unlearn to make myself so. Yes, it could be, though it is so overwhelming sometimes that it chokes at me, that it devours me, and I do not know how to control it.

Yet what right have I to not learn? I have that choice, but not that right. What right have I to increase my misery so manifold right now, even if it is minutes or seconds before my death. Aren’t I still alive, right now? What right have I to hurt those who love me, though they be few. I have the right to that choice, but not that right. But most of all, what right have I to take away my right, if I do truly believe that we are all of equal valor.

I don’t know what I believe, what I am thinking, but I am still looking down, and it is still a long way. A very long way.

This is senseless. I think of Nicolas, waiting for my call. Sweet Nicolas, with his dulcet voice and his patient hands. I’ll call to check if he would like to come over, I’ll turn on the air conditioning unit and wear a light sweater so that he will be comfortable and also, so that he wont see my arm, marked this time from the inside of the elbow joint to the wrist in a series of graceful slashes. I do not want him to see. I do not want to see the disgust and bewilderment on his face. I remember Vera’s face, my dearest friend in high school. I thought she had headed out to class, so I dug in my pocket for my razor and tried to re-open a few older scabs. She had walked in. She was the first person to ever catch me. I begged her, I cried and pleaded with her not to tell anyone. I screamed that I would never forgive her, that I would hate her. But she told anyway. I suppose she must have loved me. But I had hated her then. I had been forced into a psych ward in the regional hospital, and then into therapy for almost two years until I got away to college, and my parents had never treated me as before.

No, I did not want that from Nicolas. My Nicolas, who thinks I am beautiful, and who wants me, truly wants me.

Yes, I will call him. I will make him pancakes. He’ll think I am endearing and kiss my forehead, the way he does. He will call me ‘Darling’ and tell me how he loves me, and that all things will turn out well. I’ll even wear socks in bed tonight so that my cold feet wont bother him. I take another deep breath, and I smile because that thought makes something giggle inside of me.

There is hope still. And I keep smiling. As long as I stick it through.

Maybe I do love him, maybe this is love. Maybe I can begin to see things differently if I allow myself.

And I see him, and myself, and things are better. In his patience there is hope. In his sweet voice, and the way he tells me I am exquisite, there is hope.

I make my way up, sliding a little further back for the sake of caution, and supporting my weight on my hands, a smile still on my face, and thinking of pancake mix.

The wind is refreshing, but a bit too cool the way it blows so hard now, and my arms are covered in goose bumps. The back of my slipper catches on a cable cord, and I stumble. I reach down to untie it, and I get it out, but the other is also entwined and I lose my balance too close to the edge.

It is not so a long way down.
……………….
Chapter 6

How am I going to get around this? Damn it. I rub my head. It seems these days I’m always rubbing at something. I can’t just disappear, I don’t want to leave my job, and even if I did she’d have the police looking for me, people would get all hot and bothered. This issue isn’t that serious though, to be running around like some sort of convict. People leave their wives all the time.

I could be blunt, I could say, “I’m fucking sick of you, I’m not coming back.”

That wouldn’t work. It’d be a whole show. How the hell to do it in a way that would make it as brief and unproblematic as possible.

I could be gentle, talk it out, hear her cry and explain why it has to be over. Work out arrangements, blah, blah. She would feel like she’d deserved that.

I could be poetic, help her live out a Lifetime© channel fantasy. Tell her, “Rachel, your love is a snow blizzard in the dead regions of the Sahara. Not necessary, not helpful, not destructive. It is a waste of a singularity. It is a useless miracle. Thank you for everything, good bye. Keep it all.” I could say that, and that would be the truth. I have no desire for arrangements. I don’t want her, I don’t want the kids. I just want it over.

Having Rachel all these years has helped me keep some sense of sanity, that I have to admit. It has allowed me a chance of normalcy, and now that I see that normalcy will murder me, I can release it, and know at least what and why I make that choice. But I am not coming back, as I walk out, I doubt I will even look back.

But I care, I do. Her love is simultaneously amazing to me, and still nothing. It means that there is magic, it means there is hope, and wonder, but that none of it affects anything important. I have no reason to love her, and she, certainly has no reason to love me. I am nothing she wants, and she is a played out illusion.
……………….

While Michael is in the shower, Vera leaves the window closed and rises to dress. The white gown she will wear tonight has been freshly laundered, and she has worn it only once before. She will wear it again only because she has insisted on it, as opposed to a newly bought one.

Vera had been feeling ill, and did not wish to alter her slightly better state with the annoyances of shopping. She had so said, the truth may not be so far. She does not care much for the dress, but she cares even less for shopping.

Vera looks into the mirror. She stands. It’s disgusting, but Vera looks at her face and sees that there is not even a reaction. Everything is disgusting now, so nothing matters. But the dress itches at her, it bothers her, she stands there, trying to bear it, until she sees it’s not the dress. It’s just her. Anything will bother her at this point.

She removes the dress, tugs at it in rage, and ripping a piece of the golden trim that stays stuck to the zipper she throws it away from her. Anywhere away. It lands unattractively off the bed, the neckline spilling onto the floor. She takes off the white bra in the same way, and then finds herself too tired to move. Her body is fat with lethargy. She sits roughly on the bed with her legs close together, and her elbows on her thighs. Michael comes out of the bathroom, and it only frustrates her further to see him, so she crawls onto the bed. At least he wont see her cry, what must he think of her ridiculous mood swings. He must think she needs therapy. He approaches to rub at her back through the covers without saying anything.

“Can you get me a glass of iced water please?”

He nods, and rushes off. Even the way he walks frustrates her. The thinness of his frame, his scent, his voice, his aura, Michael, Michael makes her ill.

She remembers when they first met, how it bothered her that he had tried to impress her with his wealth by taking her on unrestricted shopping sprees. She had bought and bought, things she hadn’t needed or wanted in an attempt to annoy him. He had only smiled, indulgent.

Perhaps when she had been younger, she had dreamt of becoming one of those perfumed women, beautiful, elegantly made-up, beloved by generations, and wrapped in exotically colored shawls. Now, however, she wanted only gentle breezes, and to neatly arrange her memories in ornate chests and coffers found only within her mind.

Michael returns with the glass in his hand, a napkin wrapped around it to prevent condensation from wetting his hand, and a small tray. When he hands it to her, all of her will goes into holding back from throwing it all in his face.

“I only wanted the water.”

He looks confused. “ It is water.” He replies in that moribund voice.

She drinks it all in gulps, which she knows bothers him. And hands it back. He looks at it for a moment. “Are we still going or would you prefer to stay?”

“We’re still going. Give me a moment.”

Vera is a striking woman, the kind people immediately adore or despise. She gathers gazes. Men who are already next to other women, women who also either want her or want some part of her for themselves. She was one of those people to whom nature had been munificent, she had not one scar, not one deep or noticeable wrinkle, and one sole beauty mark located on her right buttock which still made her husband’s heart race even after nine years of marriage. She was nearing thirty, now, and people no longer commented so often that she should run off to Hollywood or become a model. But she still gathered gazes.

When she had agreed to date Michael nearly a decade past, she had not wanted to. She had called him hoping something would happen, she had wanted to be jarred, to have something move inside her. But her inside was infinitely still. She had turned twenty years old some days before. She had left college, left home, left her dearest friends, and her lover. Had disappeared, with just under a thousand dollars and little else. Vera found herself in a motel, with a job in a flower shop that she had gotten mainly because the owner was an elderly lady who had taken pity on her, and who spoke often about her four sons.

Vera’s heart hurt from loneliness. It wanted to dig deep into the soil and bury itself. Save itself from the pressure of sorrow upon it. So her heart became a worm and it wriggled its way down, down into the heart of the earth and became part of it.

She stayed, tending to a heart which had once been hers, but which now belonged to the buds she nursed, and the plants they became.

A man had walked in one day, and he had looked at her in that same old way that so many other men had used. She hadn’t thought much of it, and had kept putting up her flowers, making arrangements, watering the potted ones. Almost an hour later, when she had been taking the fresh deliveries out of packages she had realized that he was still there, still looking at her. It would have frightened her if he had stayed, acknowledged her realization and not acted upon it, but he had walked up to her. He had a timorous voice that had frustrated her, but his smile had been kind, and so she ha smiled back.

He had given her his number. Two days after that she had called him. There was no reason. No reason she kept laughing with him, seeing him. She simply did.

They went to the beach on their first date, and he had bought her a swim suit and beach dress, and taken her to a café and tried to make her talk about her life. He had liked some boats on the windowsill, and though the owner insisted they were decorations not for sale, he had upped the price and said that the lady must have them, so the owner had conceded.

“So, may I ask where you are from?” Vera had listened to his moribund depiction of speech throughout the date, and spilled some of her own words when appropriate, but never really talked. She tried to seem excited, wanted him to think her eager. It had gone on like this some months, because though he asked her questions, he was never too interested in the responses, and it was more comfortable to allow him to pay for her room, food, and clothes.

Until the night when he got up from the restaurant table without excusing himself, took a deep breath, and knelt down. “Vera, will you marry me?”

She had nearly choked. Under her brown skin the blood had rushed to her face, and she had felt horribly hot, stuttering, “ I…I…I need a moment please.” and knocked down her chair in a rush for the bathroom.

Back in the flowery, the old woman had asked her how she liked her “new handsome friend.”

“I like him.” She had said.

“Very much?” The woman had such a glow in her eye, perhaps remembering a fresh lover of her own.

Vera had looked at her squarely, and something had made her say, “No, not really. In fact, I don‘t care about him at all.”

The old woman had looked at her confused.“ If you don’t care at all, I wonder then dear, why do you lie? That young man is certainly very interested in you. The way he brings you to work every morning and picks you up, and waits for you. My, just the way he looks at as you get your things together. Why not just be honest and spare yourself and him?” She said this as a mother would, concerned and wanting a careless child to feel remorse.

She might not have if she had known that Vera had no heart to which to appeal, that she had planted it in rich soil and left it there.

“I’m not a liar, ma’am, but I might be an actress. A splendid actress. And I’m practicing for the role of a lifetime.”

“And what role is that?”

“That of caring lover and mother, I suppose. And what a magnificent role, I’ll make a masterpiece of it.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Not at all. Is the new delivery here?”

The old woman stopped, just looked at her. “Yes, I put them in the back room.”

“Ok, I’ll go get them out.”

“Thank you.” She stammered as Vera walked to the back.

That night, Michael had picked her up from work, and begun to ask her the questions again, to ones to which he didn’t necessarily want to know the answers. She was about to scream when he suddenly laughed and nodded his head toward the car in front of them. Bubbles, by the dozens and dozens, were blowing from behind it and into the trees and houses, and onto the windshield of the car. Vera had felt her hear pound, and had felt the renowned knot of nostalgia. She thought of children in the back of the car, a mother a father looking back to them and laughing. Maybe they were vacationing. It was summer. They were on the interstate. The knot made it’s way up her body and Vera smiled, and kept smiling. She hadn’t noticed how Michael noticed. But had she looked to him, and she had thought of bubbles and lightness.

“Yes.” she had said.

His eyes had grown. The car had swerved. “You’ll marry me?”

“Yes.”
…………….

We received news of her death through the telephone.

She had connected that phone line. Lina had always been the technical one of the family. Any electronics we bought were for her. She needed typed reports for school, so we bought a computer, printer, scanner, and fax. She loved films, so we bought VHSs, and DVDs, and their players. She loved pictures, so we bought cameras with names I can’t remember. Utensils; paints, canvases, paper, chalks, pastels, pencils, all for her art classes. Trips to the library, and money on books and books, and more books now hidden in the recesses of all the closets and bookshelves in the house. She must have read hundreds of them, if not thousands.

When Lina had been in the tenth grade, the phone had also rung with grave news of our daughter. The school counselor had been on the other end. Lina was in the hospital. A student had reported seeing her cutting into her wrists in the bathroom, and afraid that she’d badly hurt herself, the student had told on her. I was so grateful to that student. I kept thinking, what if no one had ever found out, and I had just walked in one morning to wake my Lina, and there she was in bed, covered in blood and lifeless… I had thanked God for that sensible young person. Lina had gotten help, I thought. Lina had gotten better, I thought, I had been certain. She was working, she was seeing a boy, she was happy, I thought. I could have sworn. It was what I had prayed for, my daughter’s happiness.

But the policewoman on the phone says there were open self-inflicted wounds all over her forearms. The boyfriend had found her body. She had jumped. They called it suicide.

I could have sworn she wouldn’t have done it. But then it might be my fault, our fault, bad parenting. After all, we hadn’t even known, before the first grave phone call, that she had been in such trouble.
……………………

“My ends are splitting.”

“Are they?”

Ana grabs a chunk of Maira’s hair and examines it. “Hmm, maybe you need a different shampoo or conditioner or something.” She squints her eyes, and plucks one of Maira’s hairs.

“Oww! Why did you do that?” Maira pushes her.

“Your hair is a lot thicker than mine. Is that what makes it curly, do you think?”

Maira looks at her in a physical ellipses. “Uh, sure. I guess.” and rolls her eyes.

Ana knows Maira thinks she is dense sometimes. Ana doesn’t disagree with the sentiment. She tries excessively hard to keep her lover impressed and wondering. She knows that people love puzzles, discovering mysteries, being kept simultaneously out and in. She thinks of things to say to Maira that will intrigue, and actions that will awe. She feels herself inferior. She is not interesting.

“Is there any more Red Bull?” Maira is driving now, Ana is tired, and the road is one long stretch. Maira had slept some, but being in a car so long is in itself exhausting. She twists to look at the mess in the back seat and pulls at the top of the cooler. There is some Caprisun, and bottled water, but no Red Bull. “Nope.”

“Damn.” Maira bites her full lips. “Let’s get some. Tell me when you see the next gas station.”

Ana hates for Maira - or anyone else- to speak to her in that way, though she knows she means nothing by it. But Ana despises being told. “Can you please, tell me when you see the next gas station.” Ana corrects, and she watches Maira both literally and figuratively bite her tongue. But Maira says, “please,” in a low voice resembling a hiss.

When they reach a gas station Ana gets off the passenger seat and tells Maira she’s got it. She buys the drinks, and across from them, she sees a bottle of bubbles and grabs them along with bran muffins.

The girl at the counter has long blue nails, and blue streaks in her black-dyed hair. She looks up at Ana and squeals, “Oh my God! I love your hair! Is it natural?”

Ana laughs and tells her it is. She hates her red hair, but because of the matching eyebrows, lashes and freckles there is little she could do about it, since dyeing would be absurd.

She thinks that if she can convince herself that she is in reality whimsical and unusual, then she will be. ‘You can be anything you want to be’ and all that kind of thought.

So she hands the tired conductor a bran muffin, which she knows she loves, and a cold bottle of Red Bull. As Maira gets into driving speed, Ana opens the bottle of bubbles and leaves a trail of dancing evanescent beings behind their car. Maira looks over at her and smiles, relieving and redeeming a little of Ana’s soul.
……………….

anyelle at 12:57 p.m.

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