Love Woman

On the last night of my stay in St. Louis, I slept with my mom on an old twin mattress down in the basement where I used to live.  It's her bed now, they don't say how long she's been down there in that blue windowless room.  She worried if we'd fit.  But of course we fit, we're family.  And after we pulled the covers up around our ears, and after we closed our eyes, she told me about all of the boys in college, the other students she knew from China and Hong Kong, how they made a list of girls, how they ranked them, and how for no conceivable reason ("I don't know why!") they put her at the top of the list.  They really liked her! those boys in school.  They tried to kiss her and she'd duck away.  And under the covers of our little bed, under the darkness of our eyes, I heard her true surprise.

How did she find her man, the man she leaves each night to sleep alone in her daughter's cold bed?  How did he find her and pluck her from the top of so many lists?  How did they love each other before they stopped?  Why did they stop.  Why did it end.  

The Deer

You never know.

The body of night opens

like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke,

like so many wrappings of mist.

And on the hillside two deer are walking along

just as though this wasn't

the owned, tilled earth of today

but the past.

I didn not see them the next day, or the next,

but in my mind's eye-

there they are, in the long grass,

like two sisters.

This is the earnest work.  Each of us is given 

only so many mornings to do it-

to look around and love

the oily fur of our lives,

the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle,

Days I don't do this

I feel the terror of idleness,

like a red thirst.

Death isn't just an idea.

When we die the body breaks open 

like a river;

the old body goes on, climbing the hill.

-Mary Oliver

V-Day

This shall evermore be my day of victory.  

I punched and jabbed in a boxing ring, shoved my hands into damp and sour bag gloves, felt my quinoa dinner rising through my throat, but sashayed out at the end of the night, red-faced and laughing.  

I wrote a boy a note, my very first proposal, I said, Sir, I've been thinking.  We should pet kittens together.  We should attend snobbish literary events together, sir.  Listen here, sir, I believe this is what we should do.  

And in reply, he wrote, "Ma'am, I *completely* concur."  With stars around completely just like that.  We shall snuggle kittens together.

Home Again/Where It Lives

A week later, and I'm back in the same little room, in the same quiet.  

I've been to the Midwest and back, touched my old place for a moment, my old bed for a night, my old mother and her softening back, my old dog and his firm gray chin.  I took a seat by my father at dinner and watched his eyes go dark and bright as we took turns speaking around the table "out of concern," my sisters said, "for your health."  

But now I'm home, here I am at home again.  

  

K's parents are in town for the holidays.  I've tried to avoid them for as long as possible, until I accidentally walked in on them sitting together in the dark, watching their grown son sleep on the couch.  

"Oh, hello," they greeted me in quiet pleasant voices, "We're just letting this guy nap before his gig at the Moon tonight."   

I've never seen a family like this before.  He is their only one, their greatest adventure, their living hope, their best love.  From Mother and Son to Son and Father and Husband and Wife, there is no gap, no loose end, nothing forgotten.  They will sit together and speak with each other in the same language each time.  

"It smells good in here," I whispered back and shuffled into the kitchen to put my groceries away.  No small part of me lunges to resent them for the clarity of their relationships.  When he speaks well of "the folks," not even a stitch of irony sullies his tone.  This drives me insane.  Mock them! I want to howl, They are your parents.  Tell me you aren't for real!

But truth is a patient and ruthless thing.  I'm coming up on a year with this one and it turns out that this whole thing's for real.  He truly loves them, and they truly raised him as best they could.  So when the muscles in my back start coiling, and my mouth starts flooding, I have to run the tape of things I know to be true:

My family is fucked up.

Not every family is fucked up.

The un-fucked up families are not a threat to me.

I want love to live where it lives.

I want love to live where it lives.

The tape ran tonight as we made quiet conversation about the airports and the weather, a small cluster of flowers on the kitchen sill, New Year's Eve and the upcoming smoking ban.  As we talked, I stacked canned black beans and tins of sardines in the cupboard, cut into bags of cashews and dried cranberries and almonds, listened with one ear to the gentle drumming of the fruit and nuts as I stirred it all together.    

  

   

Photo credit: Alec Soth from "The Last Days of W."

Good For Me

I'm supposed to be in St. Louis tonight, sitting in the basement with my cold feet tucked under the butt of my old German Shepherd, listening to my saucy sisters yap at each other across the room, to my mother croon at the sound of all of her children home once more, listening to my father close a drawer upstairs, alone, listening to my brother tell it all to his girlfriend on the phone behind the door, he's lying in bed and has flung an arm over his eyes.

But the slick and the snow made it impossible for my airplane to take me there, so I'm here instead, in my own bed, my own room, listening to the wind shower ice against my window in the dark.  I'm not sad to be here and not there, but on Monday morning, when we try again, I want my plane to fly.  

This morning he left for his own Christmas with a back seat full of Cornish Game Hens and sleeping bags, just in case.  I got out of bed when I heard him shuffling around outside my room, and made myself a tuna sandwich for the road while he trotted stuff out to the car.  I focused on the tuna as he finally tucked his scarf into the collar of his coat, and as he stood still by the door, thinking, scanning the room for any one last thing.  

No, everything was ready.  Time to go.  He looked up at me and sheepishly waved. 

"Merry Christmas," he smiled.

  

"Merry Christmas," I waved back, laughing, "And, uh, Happy New Year!"  

I watched him stand there and fiddle with his keys, but I didn't step away from my sandwich.  I held onto the countertop with one hand and waved again.  He waited a moment longer, shook his head smiling, then went out.  

I stood fast.

What did I want to do?  Oh- you know.  Fly across the room.  Throw my arms around him like Christian the Lion.  Say Goodbye, I'll Miss You, Drive Safely, Come Back to Me, Think Of Me When You See Beautiful Things, all those kinds of words said into the collar of a giant overcoat.  Hold that thought for eighteen seconds.  Hold it until you start to breathe again, until you can really feel what it's like in there, in the space of someone else's breathing.  You know.  The things I wanted to do.

But I stood fast instead.

Good.  For.  Me.

Another Night

W. S. Merwin at the Newmark Theater was thinner than I expected.  He wore big beautiful brown leather moccasins and spoke slowly with deep authority, grace, and wit.  

He writes elegies to dogs.  He recited Hardy and Hadrian.  

I put up my feet, closed my eyes, nearly cried with relief.  Oh my goodness, a poet, alive, standing tall in this deep blue room.  Speaking about Listening and the loveliness of foxes.

Fancy

Mardi knew a woman who loved romantic comedies.  Everytime she saw one, she would break up with her boyfriend at the time.  She loved romantic comedies, but she couldn't reconcile her life to them.  Reality didn't live up to what she saw in the movies, the romance she could have, the whimsy she was missing.  I know people who get nervous about fiction, even more so about the movies.  They think you'll be like Mardi's woman, you'll fly high into the magic, then crash land back into the real world.  

I'm with those people sometimes.  I get an urge to go to the theater then rebuke the notion.  That's frippery, I'll tell myself, that's foolishness.  Don't get yourself whipped up into that nonsense, not when things are the way they are out here.  Don't convince yourself you can disappear into the make-believe. 

When I'm with those people, I don a black bonnet and thick, ugly socks.  I chop off my hair, crease it down the middle, and don't take care of my hands.  I'm a pragmatist.  PRAAAHHHHHHGGGG...

But I'm not really one of them.

I remembered that last night, when I slipped out of the movie theater having caught the 7:15 showing of Happy-Go-Lucky, the new film from Mike Leigh.

I'd been having a crummy day, got off of work and just slothed out on the couch all afternoon, and Kellam came home in the middle of it, witnessed my sloth.  I flared with shame, shocked by it.  I was ashamed and pissed off, at him and at myself, because Kellam would never sloth out on the couch in the afternoon, and that makes him a stand-up guy.  I'm not the stand-up guy that he is, and I don't have the balls to act like that's just fine with me.  Now I know that some people are just do-ers, they do, not because they're smarter or wiser or more mature or anything, they just DO stuff.  But so what that I'm not really a do-er, I know they're not better than me, I know this.

But, like I said, yesterday was a pretty crummy day, and at that moment, to get caught by a do-er not doing anything seemed like the most humiliating, damning thing in the world.  So, quickly and unconvincingly, I jetted, slipped away, mumbled something about needing to do something urgent downtown, something really important and intellectual.  Ha.

I went to see a movie called Happy-Go-Lucky, and into the movie, I didn't soar or disappear.  I just sat there, back-of-the-theater girl, and remained in myself, with myself, as I watched another story unfold.

Happy-Go-Lucky follows its heroine, Poppy Cross, through her mish-mash life, a life colored and sparkling with glitter, tempera paint, and leopard print boots.  She tromps around town, smiling into the gentle breeze, tipping her hat to strangers, teaching children how to fly and shout about in migration celebration.  I was, at first, appalled.  She's so cheery!  She's so flippant!  Her jokes are so lame!  I wondered, if I knew her, would I hate her.

But the film turned on my low expectations, that happiness is a frail shell, that a woman such as Poppy can't really be who she appears to be.  My poor imagination demands that a good story must steal away the trappings of happiness and reveal Truth.  (Truth, of course, being despair.) But to the credit of the filmmakers, things don't go my way.  Poppy is steadfast.  She remains steadfast, bright-colored and kind, not only in the nest of care and familiar love she has built for herself, a sort of Poppy-world, a world a lesser storyteller would never leave, but also into the world that I know, that you know, that is inhabited by angry people, little boy bullies, lonely homeless men, women fraught with worry, heavy with child.  Poppy remains steadfast into a world where the boundaries are sketchy, where you don't know what's what, where there is confusion, but maybe goodess, rage, but maybe hurt.

And so the trappings of happiness were not stolen away from Poppy, not the way I went in demanding.  Instead, in time, they wore off like a coat of paint, rubbed down, lived in.  And what was revealed was, indeed, truth, but not despair, not at all.  The truth revealed turned out to be Joy, a kind of joy I've seen before, a joy I recognize in my mother, cultivated and worked at day after day, chosen again and again in the face of angry people.  It is a joy worked for, a joy sought after, a joy decided upon.

I understand wariness of fiction.  If fiction was just flights of fancy, I'd eschew it, too.  But I see things sometimes that fly against fancy, bird against a bird, things that dig into a reality I recognize, things that say, Hold Up.  Wait a second.  Look- This is what you're for.  

photo: Robin Shwartz