Morowa Yejidé

 

Agnes

Published by The Adirondack Review 

August  2009

 

On the very last day of Agnes Atkins’ sixty-ninth year, she was standing at the kitchen sink, arm deep in a bucket of string beans, her arthritic fingers already raw from peeling potatoes and whipping heavy muffin batter.  Her hair, which had been growing unfettered since birth, fell around her in long white tangles, the frazzled tendrils dipping into the dishwater. 
And as she hurried to wash the remaining string beans at the bottom of the pail before Billy Atkins returned home for dinner, she cut her finger on the jagged aluminum, a distraction from the pain in her hip.  On damp days it bothered her, the bones angry and grating against each other through paper-thin cartilage.  The hip throbbed still, though not quite as sharply as on the morning after Billy knocked her down the stairs all those years ago. 
An accident, Billy had called it, and Agnes remembered waking to him staring at her from the bedroom chair by the window, the sun rising behind him, gilded beams crowning his head.  His grin spread in the deepening goldenrod, chilling her blood.  That was the last time Agnes witnessed those first rays, the last time that she could bear to look the sunrise in the face. 
In later years, she had tried to lift her eyes when dawn was just washing away, when she stood in front of the oval window at the stair landing, or when she was sweeping the front porch before breakfast.  But she had not been able to do it.  Not when every spun ray of gold in those primordial moments reminded Agnes of the beginning of her darkness. 
Agnes stood at the sink year after year as her insides putrefied, and there were moments when the stench of her life overpowered her and seized her chest.  Nowadays, the smell bothered her more than the fear. 
Her thoughts swirled with the blood ribbon spiraling down the drain, until a horse whinnying across the little dirt quad where the drab barn stood caught her attention.  She peered through the smoky pane at the white yearling, Cotton they called her.  Unlike the others, the little horse had always managed to get out, and stood among the ashy dirt, her coat flecked with soot.  The yearling looked about nervously, unable to grasp the nature of her captivity or why her spirit fluttered against it. 
And as Cotton stood trembling on unsure legs, Agnes was reminded of how she had shook on her wedding night, her father having handed her over to Billy Atkins as he would have traded a Tennessee Walking Horse.  Billy had sweated over her in the sweltering heat, grimacing in the lamplight as she quaked. 
And she remembered something more than her virginity slipping away, before she had gotten the chance to look at it.  She had never been able to identify what it was, the thing that had made the breeze on her bare chest feel cold and damp every night since.  And she could no longer remember her favorite doll or what the nectar of honeysuckle tasted like.  And when she looked in the mirror, her eyes gazed at her from universes too far away to comprehend. 
Cotton whinnied again, and Agnes looked at the Appalachians, a wall of gloom in the dying sunlight.  They stared back at her, along with the souls of dead Apalachee hovering above their crests.  Dark powder spewed from the last remaining coal factory nestled in the scarred valley up river.  The stuff fell everywhere, an eternal winter of black snow that rode the back of every breeze, coating blades of grass and the leaves of brittle trees.
“You through yet?” said Billy Atkins from the frame of the back door, startling Agnes.  It troubled her that he could still make her jump.  Anyone about to turn seventy ought to have seen enough not to startle at anything, Agnes thought.  And she had seen more than she thought was possible.
Agnes turned to Billy, nauseated.  He brought death in the house, and she could see and smell it on him every day: his rotting teeth, the atrophy of muscle, the decay of flesh, the slugs and worms smashed under his soles.  Strands of his towhead were plastered on his speckled scalp, his angular face slashed by a crooked mouth.  Billy addressed her in the way his ancestors, once wealthy landowners, spoke to the miners of her father’s forefathers: smoldering contempt.  It was something Agnes had always noticed, the way his voice turned rancid at the end of everything he said to her. 
“Should eat early,” Billy said, spitting into a tin by the door, looking at Agnes sourly.  Marrying Agnes had been a compromise, settlement rather than full payment on his manhood.  More than that, she was a constant reminder that he could have had more.  Sighing, Billy went to a chair in the corner to whittle wood, to once again cope with his loathing and ruined prospects.  In the endless hours of his life, he raged and grieved over basswood and butternut, carving his thoughts with a blade.
“Gotta see about the Wilson deal tomorrow morning,” Billy said, picking up a piece of pine.  The Wilson deal was a band of speculators that came around.  Billy looked to them for deliverance, recalling the heady days when his grandfather brokered family lands with tycoons from the Rust Belt.  Those treasures had long since been spoiled, the promise of wealth dead and buried.  And in spite of the blur of dust that choked his land, Billy forced himself to believe that the booty lay just over the gouged hills and under the soil of dying dogwood and hemlock forests. 
The sugar in the muffins began to burn and smoke in the oven, reminding Agnes to take them out.  There would be no mention of her birthday tomorrow, as had been the case with the last forty.  Which was just as well, she thought, since it was on her birthday that she had last seen their daughter, Lily.  And it was several years after that before Agnes could bring herself to think about why. 
“Dinner’s nearly ready,” Agnes said, wiping her bloody finger on her apron.  “Chaw is on the table.”
Billy glanced at the box of tobacco.  “I’ll take it atter while,” he said, putting down his chiseled Mourning Dove.  His heavy boots, which he did not bother to wipe on the tattered welcome rug or remove when he came into the house, were covered in the thick mud that had collected from heavy rain in the night.  “Gotta handle Cotton first,” he said on his way out, slamming the screen door.  
Agnes turned back to the sink, picking up a knife to finish the green beans, its mahogany handle now worn down to leathery skin.  Her mother had given Agnes the knife as a housewarming gift, her eyes saying Come what may, when she handed it to her.  All of the women in Agnes’ family had spent their lives apologizing to the world on behalf of Eve, who began the whole bloody mess, and on behalf of Delilah and the other sirens that had brought everyone to their knees. 
And they were remorseful on behalf of beauty, which they had always been told was the true original sin, for it had led to devilry, and brought the lust and wrath of men upon the earth.  With deep lines carved into their faces and wrinkled, bleached hands, these women renounced comeliness and were penitent for its ravages.  They drenched themselves in alpine air, sank tired hips into worn rocking chairs, and were relieved when, at last, men, childbirth and hard times carried desire and want away. 
And when, through some force of nature a fresh rose sprouted among them, the women were ready to cut her down.  Certain in their duty, they assured her that the future was weight gain and cold beds.  Their breasts pressed thin by righteousness, these women descended on the young blossom; reminding her to close her legs, to close her mouth, to remember her manners, to forget her dreams, and to open The Book to Corinthians. 
Not that any of that mattered now, Agnes thought as she set the table and placed the rump roast in the center.  What good was all that to her now?  What was left after everything dear to her lay in a grave of limestone, the chafing of her bones against themselves the only reminder that she was still among the living?  Just as she lowered herself uneasily into the chair, she heard the screen door slam again.
“Damned Cotton,” Billy muttered as he hung his work gloves on the rusty nail on the wall.  He seated himself quickly at the table and stabbed into the beef, spooning out a heap of mashed potatoes with his other hand.
“Made green beans and muffins too,” said Agnes.
“Don’t want none,” said Billy without looking up from his plate.
Agnes sat listening to him snort and hiss through the meal, his lips smacking as he oscillated from meat to starch.  Why should he want anything else?  He’s bloated, Agnes thought.  He had swallowed her days whole and drained contentment from her nights.  She had learned to live through the loudness of his malice, and his relentless thrashing on her nerves.  But lately, there were moments when she came to the edges of her anxiety and stepped into a bewildering quiet that she could not explain.
A gentle breeze blew the frayed lace curtains, reminding Agnes of Lily in her nightgown in the upstairs hallway when she was fifteen.  Billy had been standing there in the dimness too, a Cyclops with one glassy eye gleaming through the slit of the cracked bedroom door.  There were other things Agnes told herself she hadn’t seen or known about.  Like the way Billy used to get up in the middle of the night.  The bathroom, she had said to herself as she clutched her pillow, his footsteps moving the other way down the hall.  He’s just looking in on her, she had said to the hooting owls. 
And Agnes convinced herself that she hadn’t seen how Lily’s brown eyes had bulged and turned green that summer.  How her cheeks had sunken, almost able to hold rainwater, and her skin had become webbed with veins.  How she fluttered about the house, haunting the windows.  And when Agnes walked into Lily’s empty room that morning to find her gone, she could only stare at the dragonflies circling the puddles in the yard and wonder if Lily was among them.
In the perfume of lit candles and oak church pews, the women held Agnes’ forearm firmly during mass over the years, reminding her that the devil whispered in the ears of many of their youth from Babylons far away, and that some had fallen victim to his malevolent serenades.  Lily would return when He was finished with her, they said, and they would wash away the blood of her sins with their tears.
All these things Agnes boxed up and shelved in the crypts of her mind, until an old question that had been sitting in the back of her throat since the beginning filled her mouth.  “What happened to Lily?” she asked, more of herself than of Billy, who dropped his fork.
Billy gave Agnes a look.  Lily was white noise to him now; traces of her ever having been there evidenced only by the sighs he thought he heard between thunderclaps in rainstorms.   “Don’t matter.  She’s gone,” he said, picking up his fork again.
Gravy dripped from the corner of Billy’s mouth, and Agnes wondered if that was what animals looked like after devouring their young.  She felt the pain in her hip getting worse, her heart quickening.  The evening chill that gripped her most evenings vanished, and she began to feel hot. 
“I know what you did,” she said at last. 
Billy leaned back in his chair, picking his teeth.  He had lost the war with everything else, and had only the strength to lord over this last fiefdom and all that was within it.  “Weren’t nothing done,” he said.
Silence rolled into the room like fog, and was finally dispersed by the yearling whining and kicking against her stall.  “She’s a stubborn something,” said Billy.  He looked at her carefully, fingering some tobacco.  “Might end up putting her down,” he said.
That last bit that Billy said stayed with Agnes for the rest of the evening.  It lodged itself inside of her as she emptied the slop tin and threw out the muffins and string beans.  The thing grew, crystallizing and catching fire, burning through the pages of the Sunday school lessons of her youth and the bed sheets of her wedding night.  Agnes stood at the screen door and listened to Billy labor with the horses, cursing intermittently and slamming things made of metal.  Cotton’s sharp cry cut through the thick air, and she began a song of pitiful mewing.  The young mare yielded at length, and joined in the silence of the other horses. 
Agnes turned back to the kitchen.  After the dishes and the floors, she set about collecting ash from various places in the house: the frames of pictures, the tops of dishes, the headboard upstairs, and the shelves of Lily’s closet.  She dusted and scraped up all the ash she could find, opening a window and dumping it in a pile outside.  A small mound had accumulated on the lip of the sill.  Agnes stared at the ash, and it seemed as if it held all of the bitterness and acrimony of her life. 
And for reasons she was certain she would be able to explain to herself later, Agnes went to the cupboard to retrieve Billy’s half-empty whiskey bottle and sat it on the table.  He’ll be ready for it when he’s satisfied with the horses, she thought.  She went down to the cellar- with some difficulty because the steps were narrow and there was no light- to get the barium crystals.  They’ve kept the rodents out for years, thought Agnes, thankful.  Now they could be used for something else.
She assembled the collected ash, the bottle, and the barium on the kitchen table.  She thought of Lily’s white gown riding the wind, and the sunrise that had seared her eyes and scorched her heart.  She poured the ash and the crystals into the bottle, watching them fall in rifts to the bottom.  She shook up the whiskey and placed Billy’s favorite cup next to it.
“Agnes!” shouted Billy from the stalls.  “Get my taste!”
Agnes sat at the table and waited.
“Agnes!” he shouted again.  His voice was full of ire, turning her name into a curse.
 
Agnes folded her hands and the throbbing in her hip began to subside.
Billy blew into the kitchen, irritated.  “Damn it,” he said, snatching the bottle from the table and hastily pouring himself a cup.
Come what may, thought Agnes as she watched him drink. 
Billy’s breathing became labored.  His face and neck muscles stiffened, hardening into stone. 
“Thought about it every day,” he stammered, gawking at Agnes, mumbling other unintelligible things full of outrage and disgust.  He staggered outside and collapsed in the barn, Agnes following behind with the lightening bugs and the Apalachee looking on.  And as she watched him writhing in the dirt and clutching his neck, his face washing over in colors she had never seen before, Agnes felt herself an apothecary salving a troubled spirit with absinthe and nightshade, putting a damned creature down to rest. 

                                    *     *      *

Agnes hadn’t been able to bring herself to look at it in forty years.  And now that she was alone, profoundly singular in the way she had been on the very first day of her life, she was ready to gaze upon daybreak.  As she eased her tired bones into the sunken chair by the window, dawn spilled through the pane like water.  Periwinkle, she thought, pulling a lace shawl over her shoulders.  She hadn’t seen that color in a long time, and she waited for the world to reveal itself to her again.
The land was sapphire, the sun just beyond the turn of the earth’s axis, wisps of cobalt running alongside the shadows of tall indigo pines.  Silhouetted creatures scurried, stopping to feast on dark treasures scattering the dirt.  The old barn was royal purple in the disappearing gloom, regal even as its tired slats leaned somberly to the ground.  The rising dawn filled things like seawater: corrugated pails, cracked flower pots, the cab of a broken pick-up truck, the roofless doghouse; bathing, baptizing, and washing away the ash. 
The black Appalachians corralled them all, and last night Agnes had released the horses from the barn to run toward the hulking darkness or roam at will.  Only Cotton remained in the morning twilight.  She stood out by the empty steel feed bins, her startled eyes flashing amethyst.  She’ll see that she’s free, thought Agnes, a thin smile spreading across her face.  Light descended on the jagged heads of the mountains, rimming the horizon in obsidian and gold, and Agnes greeted the new day.

 

Precious

Published by The Istanbul Literary Review 2007

 Lunch is tuna fish and milk.  Not for my brothers and me.  For Precious.  Nana is folding money tightly, pressing it into my big brother Poke’s hand.  She gives an order she’s given a thousand times before.  "Poke, go on down to the store and get Precious’ lunch," she says. 

This morning, breakfast was a slice of bread and water at dawn.  That’s not enough for me.  I know it’s not enough for Poke, him being bigger and all, but he never says a word about it.  Now we will have to wait for supper leftovers for sure; greasy string beans from last Saturday with pork fat jiggling on top or salty six-month-old beans pulled from the freezer.  Nothing as fresh and eat-it-now as tuna fish and milk.

I am dying to go to the store with Poke.  Maybe along the way we’ll find some money.  Maybe even enough to get a couple of Mary Jane candies or a bag of lemon drops.  I can taste the peanut butter and feel the sugar rush as I follow Poke out the door. 

"Where you think you going?" Nana barks.

"To the store with Poke," I say.

"No you ain’t.  Poke’s the oldest.  Poke’ll go.  You don’t need to go nowhere."  She points to the white gardenias painted on the sofa.  "Sit," she says.

The flavors of delight sour in my mouth and give way to cardboard-flavored spit.  I sit down on the plastic-covered sofa, it sizzles my legs like a griddle.  The room is stifling.  I can’t breathe anymore than the gardenias beneath me, the white petals stretching wide into exhausted yawns, hollow as my stomach.  A layer of sweat coats my skin as the cracks in the hard plastic slice into my thigh.

Nana won’t open any windows.  She says she’ll be damned if she lets her "good air" out.  That raggedy machine, shoved into the weary window of her bedroom in the back, pushes out nothing but hot breath.  Nana swears the air from that thing is as cool and crisp as the morning breeze.  So did the junkyard man who sold it to her with a sly smile.  But you can’t tell Nana anything.

I look at the plants in the corner next to the sofa that climb halfway up the wall and spread over the glass end table.  The thick philodendron leaves bury the heads of little white ceramic angels sitting on the tabletop.  Nana’s stories are on the television, and she sits in the easy chair without looking away from the screen.  My little brother haunts the other end of the sofa, his thumb a part of his mouth.  Together we float on the barge in silence. 

When I shift to give my slashed flesh relief, I accidentally knock the lace coverlet to the floor.  Nana hears the swish and jerks her head, looking at me.  Her big bumper curls, freshly done by Ms. Jackson down the street, bob back and forth in the thick air like buoys on water.  Just a minute ago, her eyes were light and bubbly from the latest twist in who is having an affair.  Now they are glowing charcoals at the bottom of a grill.  "Damn it, boy," she snarls.

"Sorry, Nana," I say.

Nana sucks her teeth.  She loves to suck her teeth.  "Yeah, you always sorry.  You ain’t got nothing else in your cup but that.  Your mother didn’t leave me nothing but you kids and a sorry."

And then I feel it again.  I can’t even hear her words anymore or feel the heat burning at me from her eyes, because there it is again.  Suddenly, there is coolness on the back of my neck.  It vanishes and the chill turns again into hot sweat.

Nana gets up from her blue easy chair, huffing and puffing.  She fans the lace into the air and carefully places it on the sofa’s back.  The leaves of all the plants quiver.  My little brother sucks his thumb harder.  I take the chance to escape.  "I have to go to the bathroom," I announce, and move away quickly.

Normally, Nana makes me hold it.  My brothers too.  She says she doesn’t know one man who can control himself.  ‘You damn well better hold it,’ she likes to say.  And we hold it until our bladders churn bile to butter.  We clutch our privates until our stomachs do somersaults and sirens in our heads bang and clang us deaf.  When our eyes bulge out like a full moon, and we walk like old men, she is satisfied.  Precious is let outside anytime she paws the front door.

But my timing is good, and I know it.  Between messing up the sofa and interrupting her stories, I know she can’t focus much on how much urine I’m holding. She rolls her eyes and sits back down.  The pleading man on the TV has already told his wife that he is sleeping with her sister.  Nana throws her head back and yells, "Lord, you made me miss it, boy!"

But by then, I am already halfway down the hallway to the bathroom.  My brothers and I share a room.  First door on the left.  There is nothing much in there: one bed for the three of us, a closet, and a seven-drawer chest with a green desk lamp on it.  The lamp is just for show.  Nana never puts a bulb in it.  She says that whatever we need to do, we can do before dark.  Our shoes line a bed that takes a day to dry out from us sweating through it all night.  The windows are nailed shut.  Nana says a fan would run up her light bill.  Some nights I lay on the floor along the wall.  The rats living behind the crumbling plaster crawl in and out of the tunnels they make, and I can feel the air moving through their tiny halls.

Nana’s room is the second door on the left.  She always leaves the door open halfway; half open to remind us that it is her house, and half closed to remind us that we are forbidden to enter.  There is a yellow cotton quilt spread over her bed, a matching runner on the floor.  All day long, the preacher shouts from the clock radio sitting on the crowded nightstand, the air conditioner gasping and heaving in the background.

And there in the middle of the bed, turned toward the muggy breeze, is Precious. Nana says that Precious is a special bred cat, but I know she’s a mongrel.  In the first place, the thing is cock-eyed and her one good eye has a river of muck running from it all of the time.  Second, she looks Siamese from the back and Calico from the front, an explosion of fur and patterns.  Always, she is looking over her empire, perched on the bed like a queen on a throne.  God, how I hate that cat.

I reach the bathroom at the very end of the hallway.  At the toilet, I decide this time I’ll hold it.  Not because I have to, but because I can.  In the hidden spaces of my body, I have the kind of dick control Nana never thought possible.  Now I prepare for a delicious thing.  I turn on the cold water full blast and dunk my head in the sink.

And I let the cold hold me, caress my brow.  Mama is coming back.  Soon.  After while.  One day.  She just has a lot of things to take care of first.  Business to tend.  That’s why she kissed each of us on the forehead at three o’clock in the morning in Nana’s living room that one time.  ‘We don’t want to wake Nana,’ Mama whispered. ‘Grandma works hard, and it wouldn’t be right to wake her up in the middle of the night.  Ain’t that right, my little men?’  We little men nodded.  Mama held up a bright, shiny gold key.  ‘See babies?  Mama’s got a key to the front door, so I can come right on in any old time.  Don’t you worry.  Mama’s got some things to take care of.  Got some business now.  But I’ll be back before you know it.’

The cold nestles me.  She’ll be back before I know it.  Soon.  After while.  One day.  I blow air bubbles from my nose and they tickle my cheeks on the way to the surface.  I listen to the silence underwater.  I wonder about the place that cold comes from.  Must be a fantastic place.

There were a few times before, when I have felt the frost from that special land outside of the sink.  Like when Nana slapped my cheek for eating her apple.  It fell out of the sack she keeps in the locked cabinet and rolled under the kitchen table.  I watched it sit there for three days.  On the fourth day I ate it, and she slapped me.  She belts me plenty so the slap wasn’t really nothing to care about.  My face always flames when her fat paw hits it.  But that time my cheek went icy.  Chilled like a body on a slab.  Nana went to hit me again, but when her hand touched my face, she drew back.  That’s when I knew that the other world was real.

I raise my head from the water.  Can’t take too long in the bathroom or Nana will be at the door, checking if I’m running up her water bill or using her good towels.  The ones with the three red tulips burned on the front.  I take one out, dab it on my face, then brush and rub the cotton this way and that.  I fold it exactly the way it was and put it on top of the linen stack.  Nana never checks for wetness, only for the neatness of the tulips.  She doesn’t use the towels, but likes to open the closet and look at the order of the pile.  I flush the toilet for show and click out the light.

Poke is back.  He is standing at the kitchen table clutching a brown paper bag and thrusting his fingers into the bottom of his pant pocket to get Nana’s change.

"You get the chunk tuna in vegetable oil?" Nana yells from the easy chair.

"Yes, Nana."

"You get the pint of whole milk? Not that two percent mess, right?"

"No, Ma’am.  I got the regular kind."

Nana comes in the kitchen humming.  She reaches up to the top cabinet above the refrigerator and pulls out two delicate glass bowls.  She takes the bag from Poke’s hand and opens the can of tuna fish.  After carefully forking out the flakes of tuna into the bowl, she grabs the pint of milk and shakes it vigorously.  The foam fans out in fluffy splendor when she pours it into the crystal.  Perfection.

Lunch is a wonderful thing.  The whole world stops whatever it is doing at some point in the day for it.  People wait on it all morning, and feel funny when they haven’t had it.  That’s just how special it is.  Bet the President stops for lunch too.  You can tell how certified a guy is by his lunch.  A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is okay, but shows haste and a lack of style.  Baloney or ham is something to respect.  But the kind of lunch that requires a napkin, the kind that is better hot but still dynamite cold, well, that is something out of this world.

Nana sits the dishes on the floor.  "Precious!" she chimes at the top of her lungs.  She never has to call Precious twice.  The cat arrives in the kitchen on cue for a two-course meal, moving from one bowl to the other.  Nana stands over the thing smiling and cooing, "That’s it baby. Enjoy your lunch.  You know Mama wouldn’t forget about her Precious."

We watch Precious eat.  A violent cough breaks Poke’s stare.  Bet he has asthma.  Probably from the fur floating through all this good air.  The cough snatches Nana’s attention away from the feast.  Her eyes go from Saturday night bliss to Monday morning piss.  "You little bastards always sick,” she says.  “Poke, go in there and get the cough syrup.  Take a little and give some to your brothers.  Can’t have all of you sick in here.  There’s crackers on the table."  Nana pets Precious on the head and goes back into the living room to see if someone else is laying his soul bare.

So that’s lunch.  Soda crackers and a swallow of cough syrup.  Precious turns her tail up in the air.  Her purring rings loud in my head.  Milk dangles on the ends of her whiskers, hitting the floor in little raindrops.  And then the coldness from that place rushes all over me.  I don’t know how it found me through all that time and space it must have taken to get to me, but it did.  The chill stays with me all day and into the night.  I even stop sweating.  In the late evening darkness, everything feels cool to the touch, and the spot in the bed where I lay stays frigid long after I sink into the dents.

Maybe it’s the cold that makes me think about it. 

I walk down the hallway and into the living room after everyone is asleep.  Oh, how fresh the air all around me feels.  The floor is a frozen lake.  The street light pouring in from the window is an October moon. 

I see the fiend on the sofa.  She is luxuriating in the silver beam.  The thing purrs briefly, a careless greeting.  Me, who was left in favor of tending business.  Me, whose cup is full of sorry.  I snatch the lace coverlet and wrap the little beast in it tight.  She struggles, but her clawless paws are no help and her hiss cannot be heard.  And I am not surprised when I feel my hands strangling the fur, my nails digging, because I have felt this feeling in the cold before.  Long before I got to the end of the hallway.

The headless angels on the end table wait for me.  I pick one up and smash it into the creature’s skull.  I remember reading in Webster’s Dictionary that precious means something held dear.  Am I held dear?  Am I precious?  I look down at the purple in the moonlight, dripping from my hands.  Right then, I know I am more precious than business tending.  More precious than soda crackers and rat tunnels.  More precious than confessing husbands and choking gardenias.  More precious than this damned cat.  Yes.  I know because the cold told me so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                   To Do List

Published by Jersey Devil Press 

March  2010

                                                                       sunflowers.co.nz

I’ve got to drive up to Ypsilanti this weekend, and it’s got to be this Saturday because the Fourth of July weekend is when they run the specials on the grave plots.  I want to get a good one.  I want one with a tree, a maple: No, an oak.  Rodman has the nerve to tell me this morning, after thirty-three years of marriage, that he doesn’t approve of me going—which is 100% insane because I don’t need his approval to pick out my own burial plot. 

He’ll be standing there, arguing with the funeral home director about what’s best for his wife, cramming his feelings into long condescending discussions with the notary public and the attorney.  I know him.  He’ll be stretching his fury and fears into taunt, pronounce-each-syllable words to the insurance representative and the social security benefits clerk.  And he’ll do it all without looking me in the eye.

I don’t want to see all of that.           

I’ll rent a car myself, and I’ll drive up to Michigan tomorrow morning and I’ll buy my spot at the Ypsilanti Groves of Peace.  Done.  Then I’m going to dump these damned horse choking pills in the toilet because for one thing, they’re placebos anyway.  They didn’t work six months ago, they don’t work now, and they won’t work tomorrow. 

So I’m going to flush them and tell that ridiculous nurse that she can stop tattling on me to the oncologist about his nuclear-research-waste-away medications.  If I’ve got to throw up, let it be from an Atlantic City frankfurter drowning in mustard and sauerkraut, or too much Ben & Jerry’s, or motion sickness on the boat Rodman and I used to sail on late Sunday afternoons.

We used to float together on the lake when the water was crystal in the dimming light, when the sun was melting like a great candle. 

I’ve got to get stamps and send my sister Karen a card.  I’ll write a little note of apology on it too.  Because I’m sure I hurt her feelings when she said that I should stop smoking, now that I’ve been diagnosed, and I said: “What the fuck does it matter now?”  That was a low blow, because for one thing Karen likes to hunt and gather all those natural things like mammals used to do in Jurassic times, except she goes to the organic store instead of the Amazon Rain Forest.  She’s big on the tofu and nuts and berries, and who am I to judge?

That’s just her bag, and she’s never said an unkind thing to me.  Not since we were girls, when I wanted to go out with her and her friends, and she would tell me no.  And I blew up at her for commenting about the Virginia Slims and offering me a chewable Vitamin C.  I lost my cool.  But it wasn’t as if I didn’t know what was happening to me.

I just knew too much.

I’ll write a note on Karen’s card and think only of when she was sixteen and I was fourteen, and she had miscarried in the bathroom.  I had offered my shoulder for her to cry on, and she had said:  Let’s run away.  I’ll think only of us riding in the blueness of twilight on the open road, in the station wagon she had stolen from our parents:  I had twelve dollars in my pocket and she had a driver’s permit in her purse. 

We had been free of everything in existence for thirty-five minutes on the New Jersey Turnpike before the police caught up with us.  But I’ll think only of the two of us tracing those white lines, with the smoke stacks signaling our exodus, and the grey air burning our eyes and our souls.  I’ll think of the fate we thought we controlled for thirty-five minutes when I lick the envelope, when I pin it under the windshield of Karen’s car without ringing the doorbell.

I’ll leave an informed message on the graduate student’s answering machine, Rodman’s mistress.  She’ll want to know that after two years of being aware of her existence, I never once feared her taking my place; that years from now, after she’s finished graduate school and started her own family and sat alone with her thoughts by the window, she’ll understand that there are many ways to win and there are many ways to lose.  She’ll erase my message after listening to it, but she’ll file it in the archives of her mind.  She’ll reference it when the time comes and know that even if Rodman had never happened, I was right. 

I’ve got to stop at the post office to send my novel to the United States Copyright Office, with a check for the filing fee.  I don’t even care anymore that “One Day” was never published because for one thing, I know that there will come a day when all that constitutional white marble will be chipped away.  All that monument stone will just be chalky silt, and somebody will go down in that mile-deep basement and open up my yellow-paged unbound book.  They’ll open up the singular edition of “One Day,” and it’ll be just as good a read then as it is now.  All about the woman, the heroine, that chose career first, that chose a man first, that chose to have pets instead of children.  I’m not going to make a copy of it.  I’ll mail the original.  

It’ll be the only real proof that I was here.

I’ve got to get that dress I saw at Neiman Marcus: the red one with the A-line.  I am not going to be put down in one of those ugly-ass granny dresses with the lace trim and the darts in the front; the kind of dress that you look at and right away you think of tired, muddy women in the Mississippi Delta.  They buried Mama in one of those wrecks and I was never able to shake the sight of it.  Mama in that sickening paisley sack, surrounded by bouquets of flowers that should have been given to her when she was living.  Not me. 

That’s why I’ve got to pick up some long stems today.  And I’m not going to the little florist by the house that I’ve been going to for ten years, just because I’ve known Margaret for ten years.  I’m going to the market out in the country.  They’ve got the biggest, prettiest flowers out there.  All the way past the traffic and the downtown shops and the golf courses and the freeway, to the road that has only two lanes, where the world is small and quiet. 

Where I can forget about all of the things I’ve been meaning to do. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

 

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