Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
The magnifying lamp on its swiveling neck,
bent glass thick as thumbs
guide her fingers to find the warp
and weft.
Putting off the inevitable.
Pretty much the whole story
from the moment we begin.
Don’t tell the kids this.
Let them lose their grip on immortality
the old fashioned way.
To outlive the sharp focus of adolescence.
We should all be so lucky.
Ignore if you must what bends in the flat beds along the stretch of highway spooling out ahead,
those crepe-skinned crones in sun hats you could almost mistake for scarecrows.
Do you pause to wonder how old ladies always end up in the garden?
Do you notice us at all?
There is no end to pleasure. Our flesh, how its tastes change.
You barely pause to wonder how we end up in the garden. Crepe-skinned crones in sun hats, we busy ourselves with one of the few benign industries left to us in our diminished worlds. We cannot captain the ships, you reason. Cannot write the laws. We must see life backward now as our children and their children take the keys and set the route.
In your haste to cover the stretch of highway still spooling out ahead, you don’t waste attention on what occupies the roadside. We bend there, indistinguishable from scarecrows. From garden gnomes. It stands to reason (if anyone were to ask) that we surrender to these tiny corners of the world. Our puttering a last gasp at creation. Bygone artists, barren makers. Do you see us deflating into bodies long past their use-by date? Do you see us at all?
Invisibility is a curse for certain, though one we have a hand in casting.
Bright smile and thick glasses. He slips the frames into a pocket while striding over to claim proximity.
Bigger than I’ve been since pregnancy. Stripped of makeup, wrinkled and pimpled and rank with sweat.
Side planks face to face.
I’ve known his name exactly three days.
Here we are grinning like teenagers and losing count.
Not done yet.
Dedication to each small climb, each tiny triumph. Here an apex.
A falling away.
Even on Skyline Drive, you’ve got to pull over and step out. Otherwise it’s just another commute.
What young self didn’t know was that cool is a lid that screws down tight on the swelling delight of yes. From the edge of her ancient eye, older self notices women in the dark corners of the bar bouncing in their seats. Girls titter near a post trying not to sway — girls who are surely women but seem so far from their fullness.
The dude in an oversized plaid suit and orange ponytail hollers into a microphone while the bassist ducks his eyes under his fedora and yanks on steel strings. Two spaghetti-armed boys blow brass right through the back wall.
Older self stands and strips off her sweater. She steps toward the unnamed sister, the one in a cherry red tank top and spiked gray hair. She touches her arm and draws her onto the space in the center of the room. The worn Persian rug there is a far cry from a welcome mat, but carpet is no great challenge. Years earlier, she sent her young selves scurrying off to road-test every surface. Concrete, rooftop, mountaintop, pier. Boardroom, waiting room, snowfall, bed. Every floor is a dance floor when it’s time to dance.
It’s always time to dance.
She pops her hip and snaps her hand, beckoning to the one across the room who’s been having trouble sitting still. They are three now. Soon they are five. Soon nine.
Low ceilings press in on the battered cafe. Amateur pencil sketches hang crooked the walls. Light shifts and a gleam slices across the bowl of the saxophone. Soon it’s a glittering ballroom. Soon the pulse of the Cotton Club on a Saturday night.
The wall of dudes collectively holds confines itself to straight faces and non-committal postures until one man, pushing 70 easy, steps into and sheds 10 years. The young women form a ring of cool, turning their taut backs out for protection. The rest shimmy and grin knowing there is no outside and no in. Guarding one’s soft parts is a survival skill for certain, but the older ones have learned the taxonomy of danger. They can differentiate battlefield from playground now. It wasn’t always so clear.
Here, the belly is free to roll towards the snare’s smash and crack. That’s lightning for sure, but older self unfurls anyway inside the grounded body of her scars. She twists the lid loose and drinks the song’s bright rain. She is growing older still. Time is running out, so she runs out into it. She fills her bones until they spill over with dance.
In the neighboring lanes, retirees walk the slow churn. Sinew writhes under mottled hips, hearts chug in their loose cages of hollowing bone. We turn the creaking millstones of our musculature and send low ripples along the surface.
Mid-afternoon is a world apart from evening here. During the late rush, fierce middle-aged racers tear a wake between ropes. Teen divers knife skyward before the plunge.
Now, the most animated bodies in the water are a half-dozen preschoolers gripping swim bars and kicking with all their might. The rest of us sway. We are seaweed, we are prey. Continue reading “Lapping at Edges”
Follow me here: your brain will begin to change as you do.
– Alexandra Horowitz, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes
The gait is an oddity. You scoop now, or maybe swoop. To walk forward, you have to cover distances along the vertical, an axis you’ve rarely considered. It is as if one torn hinge down below popped a hasp hidden along an adjoining edge. The door swings upward now. You must believe in this way of opening. You must be willing to shift the fulcrum and lean against places you thought were solid.
Adaptation reconfigures the concept of self-reliance.
You are unable to chase down your wild one. You find people who can. The children of the neighbors whose names you vaguely remember, they invite you because you invite yourself. Their friends come, chatter and thump, with chocolate glass and athletes’ names stitched onto their backs. Meat hisses and blackens over a grill. Your little man plucks a fallen tree from the ground and hurls it across a blossoming acre of sky. The other one rips a PVC frame from a soccer goal and turns on him. They tear around the side where ropes and fence posts swallow them up. Inside, girls scream. Grease pops, a baby reaches with his crystal mouth for a slice of fruit left on raw wood.
You scale concrete steps and marvel at mechanics which you thought your birthright. Undeserved, as is every blithe entitlement. Fleeting, as is every aspect of the truth you trusted enough to ignore.
Pain is a flavor like coffee gone cold. Good coffee, though. Oil gleaming on jeweled beans. Smoke at the edges.
Your joint is a broken tongue slipping around the memory of speed. This is a small inconvenience. You are grateful in a wholly unexpected way to those who have tripped over this earth in imperfect bodies. All the ones who have scrabbled with impossible latches that bar the way to gardens too narrow anyway, or too terraced. You thank them for every smooth paving stone, every ramp, every handrail. You are ashamed of your earlier blindness, that disability of of the unimpaired.
The lips of those who see your hitch at first pucker with scars. Then they chuckle them loose. “This is just the beginning, you know.” They are your comrades in arms. In hips, ankles, in sciatic nerves. Together with these allies in mortal combat, you watch an enemy front advancing over the horizon. It moves fast. It swells in on your flank.
Defeat is inevitable, a foregone conclusion. You resist nonetheless. You hold it off and clutch at your inch of territory even as it shrinks in your grip.
You lift your arm and ride its arc. It will go too, soon enough. It is here now, though, that crescendo, that cascade. You lift your ears to the buzz (engine, wasp, feathered wings dipping then gone) and let heat squirm against your bare face. This wash and flurry grates awake sinew that in its younger, uncracked state felt barely anything all.
You may return to ignorance. Luck, they say. This could heal without blade, just a dimming of pain, a steady return to familiar physics. You welcome the liberation of your attention.
But you know better now. You know that luck never holds out. Bones will hollow. Fluid will vanish from the eyes and reappear in lungs, in ankles, in tiny bubbles scurrying through veins. Forward motion is a fleeting state. As is independence. As is hubris. Soon you will need bodies stronger than yours to escort you across your days. The same will happen to your children and neighbors, to your heroes, to everyone you’ve ever loved.
Like the shattering of childbirth, this crack and shift will fade. Like childbirth, its footsteps will echo. Its ghosts will walk your body’s locked corridors.
Keep all the hinges oiled.
Hold the keys close.
Image: Crouching Aphrodite (Venus) at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme (National Roman Museum)
My mother was in a severe car crash yesterday. I say “crash” because of course it was an accident. Also, two drivers slammed their vehicles into each other. Damage and injury ensued. Crash it is.
I learned about this crash from a text. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to walk Noodle today. I’m at the ER waiting for a cat scan.” This is my mom. The request for help is ever-so-gently implied and braces itself for disappointment. Also, she cares always that others are okay. Concern for everyone else gets top billing even when she’s just wobbled out of an ambulance.
I called and texted to dead air. I was already en route (though it was anyone’s guess which hospital), having left a garbled message for my supervisor about missing our afternoon meeting. Then my mother called back.
“I’m mostly okay.
“Is Dad there with you?”
“He’s at a lunch meeting. He said he’ll come when they release me. I just got out of X-ray and now I’m waiting for the scan.”
“So you’re there alone?” I’m already turning off campus and heading north. I have to press because I know she’ll cover for him. It’s a ridiculous charade. Hell, Bug and I were their housemates for three years. She knows and I know that my father puts work first, so I ask again and she half apologizes for him even while pinching her lips at his absence.
“Oh, it’s fine. I was worried my teeth were broken, but it turns out I only had a mouthful of glass.”
We hang up and a few minutes later she pings me back to let me know my dad is out of the meeting and on his way. Sure enough, he arrives before I do, so I turn back and land at my office in time for my boss.
After a diagnosis of bruised ribs, a goose-egg, and random surface havoc, they send her home. When we talk later, Vicodin drags her speech out and she assures me she’s fine. “The shower stung a little.”
“What do you need?”
“Your dad’s here. I had a can of soup. Really. I’m fine.”
I’m sure she is, though I’m less than certain of his capacity to keep her so. She takes very good care of my father. Even around the edges of her own career, she always stocked the fridge and made the vacation plans and supported my sister and me well into our respective adulthoods. She tends to her chaotic extended family, schedules the carpet cleaning and window replacement, and feeds the cat. She keeps everything humming along.
My dad has his own ways of contributing, and I see this a little more clearly now that the fog of my adolescent daddy issues has (mostly) lifted. When my mother’s frustration with her husband’s obliviousness makes her want to explode — she was in Scotland for 2-1/2 weeks and returned to a fridge full of rotten food — she repeats her mantra: “He is a good provider.” Indeed, he is better than anyone I’ve ever known in this regard. He would have made his own daddy proud.
True to the gendered roles of his generation, my father takes care of all the outside chores and most of the structural/mechanical/HVAC aspects of the house. True to the equality rebellion of that generation, my parents work towards their financial and retirement goals together.
It is as surprising as it is obvious that my father would leave off work halfway through the day to care for my mom. In his way, he is her warm (if itchy) blanket. As she convalesces, she’ll have to give him a grocery list and remind him to take out the garbage, and he may forget to follow through on both. Even so, behind her voice on the phone, I hear his. He’s there next to her on the sofa, cracking jokes and laughing with her at Bill Maher.
For most of my life I have run in the opposite direction of my parents’ relationship. I’ve sought out intimacies that were so dissimilar, they may have been a different species altogether. Certainly my marriage was an odd imitation. It outgrew its costume in less than a decade.
The friction my parents generated in the first half of their marriage led to a separation and almost-divorce when I was in my teens. The concessions they both made to repair that rift seemed far too pricey. I have been determined to be more communicative, less gendered, more adaptable, less childish. Along the way, I’ve build expansive and byzantine and ornate and enchanted romances with people who were wildly unsuited to me.
But I have yet to build a home.
And this, I hear through the phone, is where my parents live.
My father is there for her. Sure, this comes after a pause to complete the work which occupies at least 75% of his attention. Nevertheless, he comes. And she asks now for only a smidge more than she ever hopes to receive. Sure, the longing for a more complete union is forever pressing from beneath, stretching taut the skin of her diplomacy. Nevertheless, she accepts what he has to give.
He stayed and worked from the house today. They took a break and he ferried her to the lot where the tow truck stashed her totaled Honda. After emptying the glove box and trunk, they headed back, stopping at the supermarket together to stock up. He will be with her when she starts test-driving new cars. She will be with him when they review their bank accounts to decide what they can afford. He’ll go back to work. She’ll return to her book clubs and volunteer ESL classes and (fingers crossed) walks with Noodle.
For as long as this chapter of their lives together lasts — and we all see with more sharpness today how instantly the book can close — they will be the ones who take care of each other.
Here I sit, quiet and a little stunned in the solitary place that contains the whole of me. It is night here. My son is at his father’s. The dog dozes by screen door. A retreating rain and the thrum of the interstate are the only voices that pass by. They dance at the windows then slip away.
It’s a marvel. Somehow, for all their mistakes and failings, my parents have fashioned a partnership, a love, a home. I pick up some of the discarded garments and turn them over in my hands. Split seams, yes. Stiff stays and rough hems and oversized buttons. Still, they could fit. If I arrange them to my form, if I piece them together with my own tattered wardrobe, I might find they suit me after all.
The girl who drove the Volkswagen bus plastered in Dead stickers fell off the face of the earth after graduation. West is what I heard. Community bordering on cult, new name. I pictured her in a homespun dress drawing water from the well for backwoods apostles.
She popped up on Facebook — as we all do — 25 years later. No bonnet, no copper kettle. Her profile shot is blazing female Gumby, bronzed flesh arched in a yoga bridge against the setting sun. The other photos are strappy heels, flashing sequins, rhumba beats and a man in a fedora testing the limits of her psoas muscle by pressing her stretched leg flat against his chest before dropping her into a dip.
Way up there, a tiny plane skates across the early spring blue. Here, the bus wheezes up to a stop sign, waits its turn, then groans on. The sun has hours yet to make its languid descent into rooftops and half-clothed branches.
Scuffs streak the plexiglass. The eyes are trained to peer right through.
What would it be like to see only this in here? Only what’s behind? I still have hopes of Corsica. Each year another scar cuts across the frame. The edges blur. It’s clear enough, though, for today: Maybe almond trees, maybe the Pillars of Hercules. Or Galapagos. The Badlands at the very least.
It was just now, or near enough to now, that I pressed through a scouring wind to summit Mt. Snowdon in Wales and cooled my blistered feet in Llyn Ffynnon-y-gwas. Such a thing could happen again. Those engines up there could carry me to the source of the next pool where my toes touch bottom as fish nibble down to live skin.
Another renewal.
It’s not impossible.
Or if I choose to walk lightly, I could use my own traction. Starting on this very bus, I could cast off on a winding route to the borderlands where the last of the wildcats hush their flanks against night.
The sky is a door. I am 41 and just came from the gym where I pulled 70 pounds and crunched 100 times on an incline bench.
Now my pooch who narrowly missed her date with a Chinese abbatoir flies like a formula one race car across the dog park that backs against the freeway. She turns fast enough to send mulch and dirt blasting into the sound wall. I shed my jacket and hurl the ball, my arm getting looser now with each lengthening day.
Now I sit in solitude at a dim table at the Indian restaurant. I taste it all: the whang of the cilantro leaf, the spring of my jaw against cubes of cheese, the smoke that lingers in papered boils on the flatbread. Tabla music patters against the sizzle and clank of the kitchen.
Now I bend to this page and rub the dull lamp until it glows.
Everything here is here. Everything here is forward.
What luxury, this illusion.
How fleeting.
The texts ping in, one, then six or seven more. All day in bursts, each sounding a claxon. She is in the ER. She is prepping for surgery. She’s in the OR. She’s in recovery. Her hip is fractured. Her hip is mending.
If she makes it through the next three months, she’ll turn 95 in July.
What must it be to come up out of the fog of anesthesia into the even more stifling smog of dementia? To see only through scuffed glass, to see only the scars? No forward. Not even a here, really. The machines that didn’t exist in your lifetime then did, now they buzz across a silent blue you can’t see. Now they carry other people away into pockets of the world you’ll never know.
If you’ve even lost the comfort of memory, what then? Where do your eyes alight?
I am 41 and grip hard to delusion. This blank page is an open window. That sunlit frame holds no pane. I can step right through and cast my line up against gravity, snag that jet and let it ferry me into another fable, one waiting just for me.
I ignore the microscopic particles, the wind and all it carries, strafing the body of this vehicle. I pretend the light falls through unimpeded. Against the mounting evidence, I claim this day and this endless tomorrow.
Shannon E. Williams 