It has been a bad day and she is tired. She feels wrung out as she pulls into the driveway and though it is clear outside, she presses the button on the remote attached to her visor. The garage door begins its ascent.
She pulls in, pushes the remote again and as the garage door comes slowly down, the light leaves the garage and she is sitting in complete darkness. The car is still running, the radio is on and there is a song she wants to hear.
As the song plays, she feels the sadness break inside her. Tears are falling down her face but she is not aware of them. She is only aware of the darkness around her and the darkness inside her and how perfectly merged they seem to be.
She rests her head back against the seat, sighs and turns up the radio. The tears are still coursing down her face, dripping off her chin and running down her jaw onto her neck. She wipes at them absently.
There is a loud thwack against the side of the garage and she jumps, becomes aware of herself again, of the darkness of the closed garage, of the sound of the motor of the running car. She pops the button on the remote, a thin line of bright mid-afternoon light floods the space and she sees her red-rimmed eyes in the review mirror.
She is shaking now. She puts the car in reverse, pulls it out of the garage and parks it in the yard. She turns off the motor and hears another thwack against the garage, sees a walnut from the neighbor’s tree go bouncing into the yard. It is followed by two more. Thwack. Thwack.
She looks up at the tree. Two squirrels are sitting up in the branches, each poised with a walnut, looking back down at her. They lob the little green stones down at her car, gibbering at her.
She laughs, wipes her face with the back of her hands and get out of the car and goes into the house.
I can smell it: pastrami and corned beef. Deli food that makes me think of my dad and my brother. Sunday mornings always filled with anticipation. My dad’s one day off and the day we either all went someplace as a family or the day he took my brother and me to town to give my mom a break.
The Manhattan Deli on Ingersoll Avenue at noon with people streaming in and out. The walls papered to look like newsprint had been slapped up all over. Bright yellow Formica tabletops attached to, red, yes, I think red, vinyl benches. The combination always made me think of ketchup and mustard. A row of lit coolers displaying slabs of all kinds of kosher meats and wheels of cheeses that I had never heard of lined one whole wall.
The place smelled of baking meats, pickles swimming in barrels, and people. The mish mash of smells you get from a lot of people moving around a confined area – sweet, musty, rancid – but somehow all the smells mixing together in such a way that they made you feel warm, safe, and even happy.
I remember my dad standing at the counter, the butcher behind it handing him over samples of different cheeses, winking at my brother and me. I learned at a young age, never trust a butcher with all his fingers. All the ones I knew who were nice and funny and made me feel like they were a long lost uncle were always missing at least a couple of digits. They would wave their hand carelessly about as they spoke, only to be surprised by my wide eyes and then they would grin a wicked a grin and wiggle what remained of their fingers, making me giggle rather than scaring me.
It was always a special treat to get to eat lunch there. We got to order for ourselves while my dad shopped. At the end of the row of coolers, there was an area that was partitioned off with paneling. Along one side of a window that when I was 6 or 7 seemed very high held a hand printed menu. I would stand there for a long time even though I knew what I was going to get. Tongue and chopped liver sandwich on an egg bagel.
I had no idea until later that tongue was tongue. I don’t know what I thought it was, but it never entered my mind that it was actually a cows tongue. Having never seen a liver before, chopped liver did not bother me and it was my favorite thing to get but I always looked up and down the menu just incase something else leapt out at me.
My brother and I would take our lunch to one of those booths and sit across from each other and bicker. It didn’t matter what, there was always something to fight about. His napkin was on my side of the table. He chewed with his mouth open and made a nasally sound when he swallowed. I blew bubbles in my drink until the liquid danced along the rim threatening to overflow. I clicked my tongue and rolled my eyes at everything he said and did.
Coming and going there was always something to fuss about. Who was in charge of the radio? I loved music and my brother was tone deaf so I wanted to able to change the stations to find things to listen to. He hated it when I sang along to songs he liked. We fought over who would sit in the middle and who would sit by the window in the old Ford truck we took sometimes.
I always wanted to be in both places. In the middle to be closest to our dad and by the window to be able to daydream and not feel so claustrophobic sitting between the two of them so, no matter which my brother yelled first, I would fight him.
I think of these things now and I think how sweet these memories are even with the fussing and fighting. I also wonder if all that I still grieve for in the loss of my brother is wishful thinking. Would we have had a relationship, the one I lament never having or would we have continued on into our adulthood as mortal enemies only coming together to fight outside forces but turning on each other as soon as the threat had passed?
I think of the last few months with him. We fought, screaming and yelling. I said some hateful things. Yet there seemed to be some sort of peace that was growing between us. Would it have continued or was this just a cease-fire? I don’t know. I never will. That is the point, I suppose. I miss both the brother that was and was not. I miss the annoying, mouth-breathing, smelly jackass that took way too much time in the bathroom, if you know what I mean.
I also miss the brother I wish I had. One who I looked forward to seeing, one who I would have spent countless hours on the phone with talking about our lives and whose letters I never got to send or receive. The brother who would have grown into a man and who would be here now – either a stranger who would have only come around when family need required or the one who would have been my closest friend.
Driving home from work today, the sky was cloudy. Thunderstorms tonight and I can feel them coming in my bones. I am thinking about how old I feel right now, how I am too young to feel this old when I notice a motorcycle beside my car.
I don’t know the make or model, only that it is the kind that the rider sits low, legs slayed apart wide so he looks like those plastic cowboys and Indians my brother had as a child with their legs formed just so to be set on a horse.
He looks at me and I see the man that was the boy. Steve. His face is not so smooth as it once was. He had such a pretty baby face and soft doe eyes.
To explain him, I have to explain a bit about myself. I was a wild child. I have lived many lives and they do not mesh together. I explored and was fearless which does translate in most cases to I was naive and stupid.
Steve was the brother of a guy I could say I dated, but dating is such a strong word for what we did. We slept together. A couple of times, it was awful and he was a rebound from a two year relationship. The ex, the rebound and I were all friends, it got ugly but Steve was the bright spot.
Around this time, I moved into my first apartment. I was 19 and living alone for the first time, of legal drinking age and working at the radio station and I ran the streets.
The night I moved into my apartment, he came over and slept there with me so I would not be alone. I had never been alone before and it felt strange to be contained in that apartment with nothing but the sounds of the street to keep me company.
He stayed a couple of nights with me until I got used to everything. There was never anything sexual between us. He felt protective of me. He was always trying to keep me out of trouble.
I am naturally nocturnal when left to my own devices. The best things happen and most interesting people come out when the sun goes down and I played with some of the best and worst there was to play with.
Drug dealers, whores, pimps, petty thieves, low-lifes of no discernible label – just trash – but I loved them. Steve dealt a little, stole a little, did a little of whatever he could to get over.
Steve would say something crude and even with his dark complexion, the blush burned and he would drop his eyes, his shoulders would roll forward and he would apologize. I never knew what to make of it because unbeknownst to him, I have one of the filthiest minds around.
But it was sweet. Sweet that he saw something delicate in me. Sweet that he wanted to maintain that in me. To keep me out of harms way. I adored him.
One night a bunch of us were hanging out on the bottoms and the guys had just seen Road Warrior and one of them had a sawed off shotgun and after a few pints of Rose’s Brick, they decided to see if they could fire it off one handed.
My ex was there. He and I had been sniping at each other for awhile and as the evening wore on, things got a little nasty verbally – but the guys were my friends too and they wanted me there so I stayed, baiting him.
When it came to my ex’s turn with the gun, Steve stepped in front of me. It made me think of slamming a door shut. Donnell would have never hurt me but Steve acted out of his desire to protect me.
I eventually moved on, started a different life, with a different tight knit group of male friends and Steve and I lost touch. I had last heard about him on the news. He was involved in a high speed chase with the police in which shots were exchanged.
He was in prison for quite awhile. I don’t know how long. I didn’t ask. I just looked at the man that was the boy and felt my eyes well. His smile is still the same, still childlike and innocent, but his eyes have gone hard. Still protecting me, he is not someone he thinks I should know.
I can only kiss his cheek, hug him close, touch his face and call him ‘Sampson’. At first he doesn’t understand but then he knew me when and knows it is just some connection in my head. He thinks about it for moment, then his smile goes sad and he understands.
The man that was the boy gets back on his bike, waves, blows me a kiss and goes off to whatever his world is now.
He captivates me. There is no other word to describe the feeling I have when I see him. I know nothing about him, not his name, where he lives, not even his age. He walks the same route every day. His long black hair curling in the humidity sways as he moves. His lithe body twisting, jerking to the music he is listening to. The cord of the headphones dances away and back again.
From the scratching motions he makes with his right hand, I imagine he is listening to some sort of rap, but sometimes I like to put his movements to opera – imagining him popping and locking his way down the street to Tosca or Rigoletto.
I imagine his hand motion to no longer be mimicking the scratching of a record, but accenting the sweeping vocals of some master as they run up and down the scales. It makes me giggle when he sways down low to the ground, crouching low and springing back up, all the while propelling forward.
He is lost in the music in his head. I know that feeling. I know that surrender but he is freer than I will ever be because while I experience that kind of immersion, it is a private thing. I have only been swept away a few times publicly and always bring myself back into check, aware of eyes on me and feeling awkward and exposed.
He makes me think of David and I smile. David, early in the morning, smiling at me with a sparkle in his eyes, his hands taking mine, drawing me forward. He wanted me to dance with him in the middle of the street. I feel the blush bloom crimson on my cheeks. I am mortified and dazzled at the same time. I want to dance with him, feel his arms around me, but I can’t.
He, he just moves. He is oblivious to the people watching, most of whom are laughing, some pointing at him. His eyes are fixed dead ahead, trans-like. His lips move to the words that fill his head in a silent mantra. His face is beautiful and serene. He is fully in the moment, from beat to beat, note to note and I fall a little bit more in love with him each time I see him.
I have never seen him with his shirt on, he is either without it or it is stuffed in his back pocket, flapping out behind him like a flag as he moves. I have watched him turn from pale to pink to bronze this summer and I wonder where he will go when the weather turns cool. If he will put his shirt on, wear a coat, continue his dance/walk or if he will hold up, wait for warm weather waiting to christen the change of seasons by stripping to the waist, putting his headset on and moving along the boulevard.
Will I be able to tell it is spring by his return as I do when the robins come back and start singing outside my window?
It is raining softly, it was when I came to the hospital in the dark and it is as I am leaving. They have valet parking at the emergency room entrance, so I hand my ticket over to the kid who is looking bored and annoyed behind the plexiglass.
There are two groups in front of me, and each has a small child – one a girl about 3, dressed head to toe in pink, huge blue eyes, and golden blonde hair that falls in sleepy tangles to her shoulders. The other a boy about the same age, coal black eyes and a buzz cut of bristly black hair. He wears jeans and a light weight jacket. As we stand outside under the partial cover of the overhang waiting on our cars, I watch the children discover the rain. They react in exactly the same fashion. Their faces flash confusion, shock, and delight.
The first drops that strike them are a surprise and each holds a hand out tentatively, jerking it back when the icy water droplets hit. They smile shyly as though they have a secret and look up at their adults who are lost in conversation. Then the children look at each other. Their eyes lock in an unspoken understanding, each tilts their head back, giving their full face to the sky, opening their mouths slightly and eyes wide open. The rain flecks their faces.
A drop hits the little girl directly in the eye. She blinks rapidly, shaking her head side to side and looks on the verge of tears, but finally giggles and stamps her foot.
The boy sticks out his tongue, he too shakes his head in surprise when the cold hits his mouth.
The little girl’s car arrives and as she walks across the pavement, she realizes there are shallow puddles that if she slides and stamps her foot just right, the water dances up over the tips of her pink sandals.
The little boy sees this, looks down at his own feet encased in blue sneakers, and his bottom lip comes out. He will miss getting his toes wet.
Home now, I think about the kids and I wonder when the last time it was I enjoyed being in the rain as much as I enjoy watching or listening to it. I sit down on my back steps, tilt my face to the sky and let the raindrops baptize me.
She is walking across the blacktop towards me. She is wearing a pale, baby-doll sundress. Her hair is parted in the center and hangs down over her shoulders. Her skin, the dress, her hair all seems to be subtle hues of the same color: creamy off white.Her face puts her somewhere in her 50s, maybe early 60s, but her eyes; the movement of her body puts me in mind of a child. There is a far away look in her pale blue eyes. She walks not in a straight, purposeful line, but a little this way, and a little that way. Not a stagger, a sway.
She is tall and gangly but there is a lovely elegance to her awkwardness. Spidery fingers play up and down thin cords that attach a child’s backpack to her. Her fingers pluck and worry the straps adding to the childlike illusion.
Hello Mary, I smile.
I don’t know her name, but “Mary” just seems to fit. Like Mary Jane’s, those patent leather shoes or like the candy with the little girl in the baby-doll dress and Mary Jane shoes on the wrapper.
There is something in the expression on her face, her eyes, in the tone on tone difference between her skin, her hair, her dress – she is ethereal as she moves across the parking lot past me.
Head throbbing, driving in grey drizzle. The thunder that rolled long after the lightening flashes last night bore into my skull, striking over and over again behind my left eye, keeping me from sleep.
Pass a cemetery and see a freshly dug grave. The clay filled soil turning to reddish yellow slop in the rain and in my minds eye, I see my hands buried in the mud, hollowing out a space for me, a place away from all that grieves me and throbs in my head. Someplace cool to rest and sleep dreamlessly.
Wonder if the din behind my eyes will ever quiet, if thoughts that spin and turn would fizzle and dwindle, leave me in peace. I want silence, the silence that never is. There is always noise, always something. I want to shut myself away, run away, curled up in some soft place.
Wonder if the deaf think words they have never heard or if they envision signs when they are lost in their own thoughts.
I have a scorpion on each shoulder for a friend lost. I look at them in the mirror and sometimes they make me smile, make me feel less alone, and sometimes, the black of the ink leers at me from my too white skin and reminds me why they are there.This is a small place I live in, six degrees of separation would be bliss compared to the near incestuous closeness that exists in a community this size. I am sitting in the chair, having had the first of the scorpions put on. I am looking around the studio and see the phone number for the other tattooist and I recognize the exchange. It is from the even smaller town I grew up in.
Ben comes in, checks the work being done on me, comments on how much he likes the design I brought in and how great Sheri is. I mention that I am from Earlham but that I doubt we have anyone in common as I am nearly 20 years older than him.
We talk more, and it turns out his mother and aunt were a grade ahead and behind me school. His aunt, Toni, sat with another girl, Marla, in study hall and carefully carved crosses in the webbing between their thumbs and forefingers with an exacto knife and poured India ink in it. They were the first tattoos I ever saw being done.
Ben also lives right next door to my parents, his girlfriend talks to my mother on a regular basis. I shake my head, tell him at 42 there are still things you may want to hide from your parents and I would appreciate it if he did not mention having seen me as I am not keen on explaining to my parents that I am getting more tattoos. They were not exactly thrilled with the two they already knew about, I was not sure what their reaction would be to finding out I got four more done in one day.
A few weeks later, I was on the phone with my mother and mentioned that I had met Ben, and fessed up to having gotten work done.
“Do you feel better?” my mom asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.” I told her, astonished that she got it, that she understood why I had done it, why I would probably continue to do it.
When I was a kid in school, watching Marla and Toni cut themselves with the exacto knife, there was no such thing as someone being a ‘cutter’. Well, there was, but there was not a name for it, it was not something anyone discussed. I knew several girls who did it, who cut on their arms or legs. I had even tried it myself, I still bear faint scars on my arms from it but it was not satisfying. It did not staunch the feelings I was having – that unnamable, indefinable pain that was so deep down, so incapable of healing.
I had read the book “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden” and the main character would cut herself with anything she could, at one point she used a can lid and I was disappointed when I drew the knife hard across my forearm, and found it painful but not comforting. The character in the book, the girls I knew, all gained comfort from cutting, it was like someone letting open the valve of a pressure cooker, some of the internal pressure escaped. That did not happen for me until I started writing.
When I first wrote about getting tattooed, one of the people who read the piece said they couldn’t relate, that for her it was abusing the body. I understood her perspective and respected her opinion but tattooing, piercing, all sorts of body modification has existed since people started wanting to adorn or change their bodies – either for beautification or for penance.
For me, tattooing gives me the kind of release that cutting did for the girls I knew. So, I guess it is a form of abuse. I am causing myself pain in order to staunch the other pain I am in. The difference is rather than being left with a scar, I am left with a design, one of my choosing that is pleasing to me.
Losing Jeff has left me hollow. I am empty except for the pain I feel at his loss. I push at the people who mean the most to me, trying to drive them away because I am lost in that pain. The tattoos I got in February helped to ease some of that pain. They gave a focus to it and left me marked with things that I can look at in a mirror rather than focusing on my eyes and the sorrow that has taken up residence there.
I feel the urge welling within me again, the need to put something else on my skin, the need to feel the sting of the needle, releasing some of the pressure that is inside me. It will give me peace to look at the healing tattoo, to know that it is a piece of uncontrollable grief that is being excised from me like a tumor and marked with something I can control – I choose the marker, the epitaph if you will. It is my pain, I will wear it as I choose.
I told him he was not supposed to spoil the magic with the truth, he was supposed to let me imagine that fairies like Tinkerbell from Peter Pan sprinkled their dust or flashed a wand and created it all.
He clucked his tongue, disgusted at me acting like a girl, no…a gurl, something I rarely did. I just wanted to hold on to the feeling of wonder and awe I had at something so simple for a little while longer. Somehow, I knew it was a fleeting moment and one I should hold on to for as long as I could.
My grandparents eloped, driving to a small town across the border in Missouri where my grandmother lied about her age in order to marry. My grandfather brought her home, dropped her off at her parent’s house and their marriage was a secret for several weeks.
They were found out when a co-worker of my great-grandfather just happened to be from the very town they eloped to got his local newspaper in the mail, saw the marriage license in the notices and congratulated my great-grandfather on gaining a son-in-law.
I have watched my grandparents and how they are together all of my life. It is their relationship that I use a ruler to measure my own interpersonal experiences to.
They sit side by side on my parent’s sofa, my grandfather’s hand resting softly on my grandmother’s knee. She reaches out and pats his thigh without looking at him. He takes great pleasure in still making her blush.
He teases her about all the old widow ladies coming around to see if he is available and she tells him to go ahead, she could use the break. He hangs his head, shaking it in mock self-pity, a spark in his eye when he looks up and asks if I hear how she speaks to him, asking me if I don’t see how abused he is. She sniffs and rolls her eyes. He chuckles.
My grandfather has a bad heart. A few years ago my grandmother took him in the middle of the night to the hospital. My mom and others chided her like a child for doing so. Telling her that she was to call one of them or call the ambulance in the future rather than go alone. They were afraid of what would happen if my grandfather died with my grandmother alone in the car.
I understood perfectly that neither of them wanted anyone else with them. If he were to die, neither one wanted to share that with some outsider that would get in between the two of them. They are a closed circle.
I long for what they have. I want it for myself. To love someone through everything, even through hating him. To understand without words, to hold hands with someone whose hands have held me through the worst and the best of times. To spend hours together not saying a word, each occupied in our own little world, just happy to share the space with another.
I know it is something I would have to work for, and I have never committed to anyone for very long at a time. They have been together 69 years.
