He turns seven. He is not alone in this. The weekend is endless pinball flash and spinning light. Too many parties. Cookie dough ice cream. Pokemon legends raining down on a tumid Chima lego metropolis. Deforestation at the borders. A relentless hunger for more and more.
For three nights, sleep is drawn and quartered. Whole symphonies of yelling smash their percussive chords against each distended limit. Love is squeezed down in its most elemental form: the exigency of coexistence in the absence of affection.
Finally, Sunday carries night over and drops it at our feet. Everything is half-done but somehow complete. He falls away from me during the third book and I recall the shape of ease for the first time in days.
Now I must find my own way under perseveration’s cruel echo. In bed, I kick and kick against the spooling film, all blooper reel and captured sin, the worst lines caught on repeat in the projector’s teeth. Eventually the bulb burns through and cuts me loose. I dive with one last surge and I am under, finally confined to sleep if not by peace at least by the simple pressure of submersion.
Wailing wrenches me back to the surface. I choke on my own breath. He is silhouetted in the door, wracked with sobs.
“Oh, baby, what’s the matter?”
He careens over the carpet and plows into the bed. “My back. My back!” Then his voice shatters. I open my arms. He climbs up and folds fetal into me, quaking with a fear made corporal. He is no longer a baffling, windburnt stretch of leg and scar and huff. He sheds all seven of his years. He is the night following the day he was born, completely undone by something for which he has no name, completely trusting me to make him safe.
I touch his spine seeking warmth or blood or bumps. A stingray? A troll? There it is. A flat plate, stiff and certainly not skin. I lift his shirt and peel off the alien invader.
“Sweetie, look.” I hold it up in whatever line of sight the dim night allows.
“What is it?” he says.
“A Pokemon card.”
He reaches up for it. A soon as it is in his grip, he shivers down to stillness. “Oh.” He pulls the card in like a baby blanket and curls his arms around it.
“I think your back was a little sweaty and you rolled over on it.”
“No,” he says with a drooping sigh. “I wasn’t hot. He was the one who was sweaty.”
“He who?”
“The Pokemon,” he tells me. “From fighting all night long.”
“That could do it.” I nudge him up and we plod back to his room. He asks me to cuddle there. His mattress is a candy-floss cloud compared to mine and so I agree. “Yes, but just for a few minutes.”
“A few long minutes,” He says. “As many minutes as you can.” We pull up the tinkerbell blanket and he tucks my hand in under his side. I settle in close to him. I stay until he drifts off and then linger a few minutes more, at least until turning, turning the way he does, he turns back into his years and there is no room for me.
Category: Growing Up
Muscle Memory
Memory believes before knowing remembers.
– William Faulkner, Light in August
I could not finish the books. I couldn’t even really start them. Characters swam on the pages, darting away from coherence. Like minnows that scatter every time you step closer, the letters exploded away from any hint of meaning and reappeared further out and in a different configuration entirely.
It may have been the separation. My sister starting college. The hormones, the boys, the upending surges of adolescent depression. It could have been a misalignment in the stars or a bad batch of ink. In any event, Hemingway and Faulkner were not even nibbling on my line.
It was high school lit class and my mind could not penetrate the two assigned books for the second semester: The Sound and the Fury and The Sun Also Rises. Ambitious? Sure. But this was Montgomery County, Maryland where students were held to certain standards. If the professions of our 20-year reunion attendees were any indication, high expectations generally yielded the intended results.
By spring of our junior year, we had long since netted and dissected Baldwin, Bronte, and Shakespeare, so hooking these two should have been no great trial. Still, I could not make sense of them. Their language was barely identifiable as English. It was like trying to face Beowulf without Seamus Heaney in tow.
At sixteen, I was a poet already as well as a lifelong reader and writer. My amateur children’s stories were full-spectrum fantasies and my diaries oozing with odes to leaves and sky. Abandoning my bicycle at the break in the trees at the park, I’d walk alone into the woods with my ratty backpack flopping against my hips. As I crouched at the edge of the creek, the world would grow huge in its tiny pause. Whatever stained, curled journal I was filling at the time would open its pages to the sound of the gold-tipped ripple in the current. Sometimes a character would move from dormancy to gestation and maybe even to life. Like Wednesday, the girl who played a string of chimes made of spoons and had to find her way down from her mountaintop when her parents disappeared, leaving behind neither clue nor explanation.
When my hand was stiff from writing, I’d settle down there on the soft thigh of the water, open a battered copy of Sandburg or Gibran, and make my own self disappear.
It was misery not to be able to read those two books for class. Trigonometry and its indicipherable alphabet of tangents and arcs was bad but predictably so. Even having to re-take advanced algebra in summer school was tolerable compared to this strange illiteracy. Not to be able to read in my native tongue meant something worse than a few flitting minnows. I felt myself swimming towards them in steadily deepening water with lead weights strapped to my ankles. The further I plowed, the deeper I sank.
It was the season of sinking.
That spring, I left school for a few weeks. “Dropping out,” I called it, which it wasn’t. My world did not allow for disappearing. I was too suburban. Too amply resourced. Too loved. Absent parents reappaeared and began the frantic work scheduling appointments with teachers and school counselors. A nice child psychologist sat with me weekly in a cozy office as I stumbled around, dodging questions I didn’t know how to answer. The bewildering bureaucracy of the school figured out how to let me leave behind the toughest courses and only stay in the two I could manage — Latin and Social Studies — while still passing the whole of the year.
Then, my parents reconciled. We moved to Vermont. I cut loose my two millstones and swam for air. I never finished Trigonometry or William Faulkner.
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
– Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Now, Hemingway is another story entirely. It only took me about a decade to nurse that wound and then get the hell over it. Anyone who hasn’t read Old Man and the Sea by about 25 shouldn’t be considered literate. In my case, two visits to Key West to visit that bougainvillea-draped villa and those six-toed cats made the man more a man and less a monolith. I’ve skipped on through For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms, and it was almost a non-event when the car slowed and I felt Brett pressing into me.
As for Faulkner? Like one of those word-tangling, wave-making madmen upon whom I tended to glom my attention, he blew my mind before I saw it coming. He left me to flail at the riverbottom and then he swam off with the rope. I suppose I actually left him, but the net effect was the same. I couldn’t face his language without remembering the feel of both the ascent and the fall.
For two dozen years, his words have not been able to penetrate my protective resistance. Twice I’ve tried to let him back in. Something seized up in me both times. It was as if those full-grown fish were just an illusion, a school forming the shape of some coherent and sensible being. Each time, even as I’ve hooked and subdued Thackery and Austen and Whitman and Rushdie, Faulkner’s words split apart from their meaning at the exact moment I inched close enough to touch them. They scattered and left me blinking and grasping and kicking for the surface.
Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
Then I move into this new home. It is the first I’ve ever owned, the first I’ve ever understood I could claim. I bring in the few boxes of books that survived the purge brought on by the final contraction. In one is a yellowed copy of Light in August. It takes it place in familiar if diminished company against a new wall. A few weeks in, after the pictures are hung and the dishes stacked away, I have a quiet nothing night. It is August. The days are still long. Boredom, another long-forgotten friend, scratches at the door.
Faulkner couldn’t care less if I choose him or Ursuala LeGuin to the right, Edward Abbey to the left. The traffic swooshes along I-66 outside my window. The dog sighs in her curl by the door. The fan hums. A story lives and not, like Schrodinger’s cat, inside the pages.
And memory knows this; twenty years later, memory is still to believe On this day I became a man.
I walk to the edge and step in. The water is warmer than I remember. The bottom, not so far down. Fish swim in smooth, fat arcs just below the surface. They are the color of tar and rust. Streaks of dusk flash against them. One slips against my ankle and lets me bend low to feel with eyes and skin the shape of its pulse. It pushes folds of water up and up my calf, my shin, my thigh, its alien muscle calls me in.
Night comes eventually. I swim out to him. He still does not bother with the rope. I don’t bother reaching for it. The low light is plenty. My arms, enough.
Ready or Not
The net is tight across her middle. You can’t say belly. She has none. Copper helmet, slick to the scalp. Eyes rimmed in kohl shift to window glass, black flashing with staccato light. Does she want to go back?
Do I?
Into the cavern. A wheezing pause stories below light. The smell of popcorn steps in first. Hiding under its cloak, something else creeps aboard. Like sugar on the rancid spill. A not-right presence. No one looks straight at anyone else.
Everything is hidden here, even the sock puppets we pull out and put on in plain view. My hands speak! Listen, look! Yet another voice narrates the scene. Back there, under the chatter, another telling. The strings are never invisible, not completely. We are not alone. The sense of what can’t quite be seen lifts the hairs at the back of the neck.
Is there a chill in here?
Bike grease streaked in the shape of a chain splits the canvas of her calf. It was not an accident. No one would question it there. Anyway, he fumed out an apology. He called himself a jerk. He called her worse. The thread dripping from her ears should be filigree. Should be wisteria. Should be a path back to the hanging gardens of Babylon.
It is only a pipe for mainlining her tin of music. Whatever sound floods out thought, it lacks beat enough to tap hers. She looks all around. Darting. She looks at her hands. Folding. Is it daylight still out there? Who can tell?
One day, she will be his child again. It will be the first time she rides the train alone again. The bright beginning, the first step over the gap. She will be someone’s future. Like all of us, she was fetal once.
In her plastic seat, she sits erect but folds herself just enough to appear reluctant to be born.
Paradise Lapsed
Lilac cones fat dripping
cotton frill and sugar dust
are yellowing now and deflated
sag from a pucker of hulls
up near the splayed wires
and stripped bones
of a telephone pole.
Under a green awning
a man with a drooping white mustache
smokes a cigarette trailing
burnt remains through marble mounds
of strawberries in paperboard
flats softening in the early steam. Can it be
time already for blood-veined
chard and kale’s bitter ruche?
What happened to the white nub
folded inside a husk
where flavor was a milky promise
and if bitten, decanted only earth and lime?
No golden egg
nestles in the belly of a creature
prematurely cleaved. Already
honeysuckle fall heavy
at the roadside, dermis
curling back and dew sliding
ungathered
by any tongue
other than the blind proboscis
of a potato bug pushing
into a nameless season.
Day is a half-life,
here and also
gone.
Mr. Sandman
O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.– W. H. Auden
I do the worst harm to the one I love the most. The dreams crafted with crayon and glitter begin to crack. His flavor sours. His voice slips off key. I fidget under my sheets and try to sink back to the breathless place. I lift my eyes to the receding ceiling, carve a hole, and slip out without looking back.
Flight and stars. I careen over rooftops. This works until it doesn’t. Gravity always wins.
Nearing the middle of life, only now I am waking up?
In the half-place where I still squeeze my eyes shut and cling, I feel the grit against my shoulder, against my scuffed shin. I finally achieved flight, and yet I lay there with my wings limp on the earth and think, That’s it? That’s all it is?
He will never be better than the man he is right now. I am what I have become. It is this, not the next thing. Not the up there, out there, over there. Not door number two, three, or four.
This. Right here.
The moon does not bend to us. The night is not a swelling sea. He does not tuck jewels under my ribs. I do not hear the choir sing.
Does anyone else here hate the lover for this betrayal?
The abuse of disabuse. We are all battered. Notions no one ever named out loud (silver sprites and dappled light) reveal themselves as a worn felt hat. A trick deck. All face cards, an overabundance of Queens of Hearts.
Enchantment lingers, the coin tossed 100 times until the bets are off. Until the game is over. Forfeit? No, just bored with it. The aged ones are ready to move on. Their loves are pedestrian arrangements. We believed ourselves so much better. I will never speak so cruelly to my beloved. We will never sit in opposite corners of the house chasing down our solitary pleasures.
We believed ourselves truer.
At least I did.
Do I admit it now?
I hid the third dimension. He was satisfied with the point and line and didn’t lift the corner to feel around underneath. I tilted. He failed.
The angles were off. The roof gave way.
I re-wrote history. I razed the love I must (surely) have once occupied. I used a wrecking ball. Then an x-acto knife.
I claimed it was the wind and poor calculation.
How could I have possibly believed it would be easier without the lean-to we had erected? What did I think would be here outside our feeble shelter?
The fantasy fulfilled? Dreams in flesh at last?
Foolish girl. It is just exactly what was there before only without the micrometer of certainty to keep the storms at bay. Only with a lot more toil. Only truth (for what it’s worth).
And surely in time we will start to confront the failures of understanding and the disenchantment familiarity brings. In time we will face the knowledge of what we can never, never expect from one another.
– Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses
Waking up is not without pain. Nevertheless, raw skin and all, it beats the alternative.
Fill in the Blank
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
– Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Is silence, by definition, cowardice?
Impossible. There is no silence in silence, after all. Language is always there, elbowing and grunting its way through the heady determination shut up I’m trying to be quiet of quiet. Thought is all voice. But without throat and tongue to give it an address, where does it land? On the page, perhaps. In the letter she writes with the pen squeezed in her fist but never sends. In the steel echo of a John Lee Hooker song bouncing off the walls of his skull. In the clanging, fists-swinging noise of ideas backed against the ropes. One thought after another dripping sweat, conceived and voiced in some halfway-way.
Courage? Certainly not. But neither is the nascent thesis cowardice. It is something between. Suspension, perhaps. A pause in the action.
Truth needs a shape, though, yes? One can’t just hesitate forever.
She sits across from him, across and far and maybe nowhere near him. The silence is every possible word pushing against the roof of her mouth. Finally, she speaks. “I don’t understand you. You make no sense to me.”
He recoils from her and says, “There is something wrong with you.”
Every other thing, not spoken. Every other statement about everything also right exactly here, unchosen. Every other truth, from the draping leaves of the ceiling-high houseplant to the taste of sourdough still clinging to their fingers. Every other possible scaffolding on which they could build some structure to hold is left there in a heap. Rebar cascades away in waves. It washes offshore when the tide comes in. It drifts to the bottom of the sea.
She says, “I need to catch my breath.”
He says, “Goodbye.”
Language is multiple choice without an “all of the above.” Choosing a word, even if it is only one, is courage. Even if it is the wrong one. Maybe especially then.
Rapprochement
How far away can I go and still be connected?
What can I — and do I — want to do for myself?
And exactly how much of me am I willing to give up for love or simply for shelter?At several points in our lives, we may insist: I’ll do it myself. I’ll live by myself. I’ll solve it myself. I’ll make my own decisions. And having made that decision, we then may find ourselves scared to death of standing alone.
– Judit Viorst, Necessary Losses
Sometimes, we don’t even know this old push-pull is operating until our minds yank us into position and force us to see.
Or, in my case, the body does the yanking. At the start of the new year, it all comes rushing, this longed-for independence. No men are waiting in the wings. The ex has moved on to a new girlfriend. The condo is galloping towards me. What happens? I fall.
And fall again.
And end up in urgent care.
In a cast. On meds. Then in a splint. Unable to work for days on end.
Then wrench my back. And suffer mightily.
And retreat to the safe but suffocating confines of my family’s care.
Some part of me refuses to step forward into the open mouth of adulthood. A long-ago self insists that this is too much. It wobbles. I slip. My center of gravity tilts. I stumble. I need. I reach backwards and downwards for the kind of help that children demand.
Fear is a clever thing. I does an end-run around rationality. It kicks the legs out from under the boldest stance.
And so, I convalesce. I gather strength. Someday soon — Next week? Next month? — I will be able to come to a sitting position on the side of my bed without grasping for a handhold, without gasping for breath. And then I will make my way down the stairs. Out the door. Into the wide open day.
I just have to keep acting against the illusion of falling, the trickery of my fright. Alone is never alone, not really. All around, these kindnesses. These people. These approaches moving in the opposite direction of rapprochement. This mind more powerful than fear.
These ways forward I have not yet found. These secrets, waiting to reveal themselves.
—
Viorst, Judith. Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow. Fireside, New York: 1986
On Zero
In November, Bug had to visit the clinic for his flu shot. The kid was stone-faced, shivering, and mighty pissed off at me. I had failed to inform him of our destination until we were already buckled in and halfway down the street. When we finally made it into the exam room, the nurse rolled up his sleeve and said, “Okay, on three, I want you to yell out your name.”
“Why three?” Bug asked, twisting his body away from her.
“Because it’s over much quicker that way. Okay? So, on three, just . . .”
Cast Out
At the end of the first really, truly single week of my life since 2002 (that’s 11 years of men, my friends), lessons blow in gales. I can barely hear a thing. My eyes sting.
Somehow, I am still upright.
Honestly? It’s a little bit thrilling.
Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
– Anais Nin, February 1947
Twin Sighting
Then she realizes it is not man. It never has been man. The one whose gaze she has been seeking all this time, alert to it feeling its way up her spine, it is not one or another. It is only a gaze, an entity all its own taking on some kind of psychic presence in her orbit. It moves from eye to eye, brain to brain, sketching her into background or foreground depending on preference, on mood, on the light slanting across the edge of day.
The outsideness of it she never questions. She simply submits to it, as if only that exists: submission to the forever slipping away line of sight. Her form, laugh, posture, texture all move about like a bit player, an extra only. Just a hash-mark on the canvas, one of the legion, a soldier of oil drawn into nameless formation alongside interchangeable others down a mountainside waiting for the slaughter. She is one. She is all of them.
It is never a man at all, is it? The origin of the gaze, it never really is him placing her, taking her measure. No, it is not living tissue with intention, not even an actual eye in an actual skull.
Instead, it is the piece of her she left behind. The missing Y, the twin who was next in the queue and swam out against its will in the next tide, out into the sea, out to be lost to Marianas trench. Later, eons later, geyser force, thrust (again, unwillingly!) a briny and brimstone singed speck of what she lost back to the surface. Now this He (or, rather, her) watches, watches.
Not to take her measure, no. Not to judge or even manipulate. These are the assumptions of the simple mind. He (or is it She?) only comes to covet. For corporal life? Yes, for the depth of the bend, the unchained laugh, even – yes, even this – the pain. Deep in the bones, the age and accumulating disease, the sorrow – yes. He would take all of it. Give everything. His universal access, the boundless roaming, for one minute in her skin.
This twin, a houri, thunders in astride some winged steed made of nothing but smoke and the dried rinds of tangerines left on the riverbank. She loved him before she knew love but was gone before he ever knew her at all. Now she begins to wonder. Now, the dawning awareness.
The he is her He, and he is only just everything she traded for life. Is she wrong? Is it possible he is not the one who came after her? They lose their beginnings and endings, out there in the nothing of not-life. Maybe he was shed before? Did he, in fact, precede her by a fortnight, out into the gnashing maw of the world? Did he roll out the crimson carpet? Did he bury the landmines in his wake, just for her, just for spite?
Jealous thing, this unborn brother. No wonder he stares with such assessing frost. He hovers like an odor yet he refuses to resolve into view. Would that be his undoing? To let her see him? She dares to believe he can be undone, that she has some agency in the situation, but perhaps she is fooling herself (as is He). Surely, surely, no one would instill such power in a creature as weak and foolish as she. That would be a muck-up on a cosmic scale. She has no managerial skills, no executive privilege, no armaments (that she knows of).
He fears something. This much is slowly becoming clear. She can’t imagine what. How could it be? His everything, the whole of the skies, the diamond planet, all of Davy Jones’ locker and the soft thighs of the unclaimed farmer spinning wool in the wooden room by a window streaked with oil and light, all of this at his fingertips, and he stands there watching her? Is this the best he can do?
So finally, she turns on Him (who is her and who is surely there, even if only seeing but not seen) and speaks:
In this world you choose to crave this erratic pulse, this weak will, this drifting imagination and coarse flesh? You have nothing to constrain your wanderings – not body and its hungers, not child and the chains of toil, not the need and the clutching, relentless thirst of the ones to whom you belong. You are neither bound by gravity not checked by time. Yet still, ghost, gaze, you linger here in the doorway of my unremarkable boudoir?
And then he speaks in her voice from her own throat:
What shall we trade? One crumb each from the other plate?
They both consider.
The night is long.
Shannon E. Williams 