The nurses who are taking care of Andrea now are pretty nice. Some of them, like Juliet who has read hair and wears pink scrubs a lot which always seems strange to me, bring me things like plastic cups of apple juice with foil tops that you peel off just a little to make for smallish sips. Juliet calls me Jules and I think that’s how she remembers me, because our names are almost the same. Most of the other nurses talk to me about Andrea. They say things like, She’s looking good today. Or, the baby is doing fine. But Juliet asks what I’ve been up to and how I’m handling school. I tell her fine. She asks me how the people I am staying with are and I tell her fine too because I haven’t told anybody that I’m staying by myself.
*
Andrea’s known Loren since they were in high school. He transferred in from Antonio High halfway through their sophomore year. He’s never been quiet and he’s never been mean until he came home this last time. I think that’s why Andrea liked him. Because he’s always let life slide off his back and he showed her how to do that too.
*
I stayed home from school on the day we found out Andie was pregnant. Loren had been around for two weeks a month before but had to ship out and back to Iraq so it was just us at Rite Aid, looking for the yellow sale tags in the pregnancy test aisle and then dancing around in the kitchen when the plus sign came up and Andie got over the shock of it all. She always wanted a little baby girl, she said and I told her she’d make the best mom because look how good I turned out and we laughed and later spent fourteen dollars on two steak dinners with pie and ice cream at Applebee’s because she was eating for two now.
*
We hadn’t come up with a name that Andie liked yet so I’ve just started to call her baby Annabelle.
Annabelle looks like a pink bread loaf when she’s all bundled up in the basenette. And when they have her splayed out under heat lamps, she looks a little like the fermaldahide soaked frogs we cut up last year in science class.
*
At night, after I visit Andrea, I catch the bus home and sit at the kitchen table with the light on overhead and do my homework. Then I go to the freezer and pull out on one of the pot pie dinners that Andie got for me to eat on the nights she worked late.
I punch fork holes in the plastic wrap and watch it turn circles in the microwave until pockets of gravy bubble up under the plastic.
Some nights, after all that I go up on the roof. It’s quiet and the stars come out and the milky way smears itself over them like somebody just ran by and dragged it along behind their outstretched fingertips.
The dogs at the McAllister’s house trot by sometimes, collars jingling. And sometimes one of the Lucky brothers comes home, so there’s the snapping sound of studded tires on the road and the whine of breaks before the crunch of gravel when the truck pulls into the driveway and the engine cuts off.
But mostly, it’s just the breeze moving tree branches and the vibrations of the house, ticking and whining and falling still again, underneath me.
I am teaching eighth grade English to four students at a local summer school. They are all boys. Every day I come in with my books and my attendance sheet and my red pen and tell them to sit down, to be quiet, to hand in their homework.
They make fun of each other often. A lot of their jokes center around the bathroom, their respective mothers. At first I worried they’d make fun of me too. So I tried to be cool, to win them over.
We went around the room on the first day and introduced ourselves. We said our names, our grades and something we liked. When it was my turn I said I liked horses and that I was in graduate school. One of the boys said, What do you do in graduate school? And I told him, Learn to write books.
He has, each day since then, asked me what my book will be about.
I have, each day since then, successfully avoided the question.
***
Mondays are vocabulary days and on this one the boys sit down and pull out their workbooks and open them up to lesson four, An Apple a Day, which is all about medical words. Do these pages on your own, I say, and then we’ll review them together. They all look down. Pick up their pencils. Drop them. Pick them up again. Settle.
It is quiet for two minutes. What is tumor? Someone asks. It’s cancer, someone answers. What is malignancy? It means you’re going to die, the same boy says. What is consolation? It’s what people say to you when they feel sorry for you but can’t do anything to help.
A little while later the boy with all the questions raises his hand and tells me he is finished. Why don’t you start to read tonight’s homework? I say and he says Ok then asks me if the section from Huck Finn he has opened to is a short story and I tell him no, it is an excerpt. Like from a book? He asks and I nod yes. Like your book? He asks and I tell him, longer, better. What’s your book about, anyways, he asks . I ignore him as I always do, but this time without the pretense of listening to another student, or reprimanding him for speaking when he should be reading, or asking him to focus on the work at hand.
So what’s it about? He asks again. Consolation, I say.
***
In between classes I go to Starbucks for a green tea and a pee break. I am standing in line for the lu. The woman ahead of me walks with a cane and one hand on her lower back and lurches slowly into the single stall bathroom. I sigh, prepare myself for a wait, and turn to a nearby bulletin board, covered with colored flyers. Bake sales, babysitting, real estate and such.
Emily’s Take, A Texas Hold’em and Bingo Tournament Event catches my eye because the shottily drawn pair of dice and playing cards that line its edges contrasts considerably with a small photograph of a bald girl wearing glasses and a tentative smile. I lean in closer.
Emily was a typical college student, it says, before the pain started. Doctors were at a loss and a laparoscopic surgery was scheduled for late summer. But by May the pain was excruciating and immediate surgery was performed. When Emily awoke from that surgery she was given the diagnosis of PNET or Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare cancer. With an overwhelming chemotherapy regimen every three weeks, Emily and her family are doing everything they can to fight and get her life back. Please help us help them during this unimaginable, difficult time.
The door to the bathroom opens. The woman hobbles out and I enter, thinking about Emily, about who she might be behind the flyer.
An hour later, climbing the stairs to my yoga studio, I see the flyer again. And at the end of practice, the teacher makes an announcement. There are raffle tickets for sale at the front desk, she says, To benefit one of the staff member’s sisters who is sick with cancer.
***
Emily’s sister is blonde and tan and always behind the Yogaworks desk. She checks people in. She smiles. She says, Enjoy your practice and Namaste. She is seventeen at the most. When I approach the front desk after class she is talking to a woman who has come to candle flow every Monday night for six months. When this woman started, in December, she was bald and wore a patterned scarf knotted over her head. She sometimes wears it now, but over dull patches of short brown hair. Emily’s sister is nodding to what this woman says about having cancer and getting chemo and how hard it is and how strong her sister is and I am standing behind them with my wallet out, ready to buy a ticket and thinking I might pipe in and say Yes it is so hard and this is how I know, but decide against it, slip a ten dollar bill in the donation box and leave.
***
For weeks after that I will think about walking up to Emily’s sister, placing a hand on her arm and conveying, with a sort of holy delicacy, the depth of my understanding.
I will build up this saintly act of esprit de corps in my mind, oscillating between thinking it self indulgent – the symptom of some cancer victim closeness complex – and supportive. I will wander out of class and eye Emily’s sister and then leave, over and again until I finally find the courage to approach the front desk and linger after class. When I do, I will feel awkward. Everyone else will have left and I will be standing there, pretending to read a flyer on intensive teacher training before breaking the silence and saying, how is your sister doing? She will look up like she didn’t know I was there. She will tell me that Emily is good, thanks for asking. That she came down with a slight cold after her last chemo treatment. I will nod and say, that sometimes happens and I will then ask, how are you doing? And she will look surprised because maybe nobody asks her that. But she will recover quickly and rattle off a series of well rehearsed lines about how supportive her family has been and the community of course and I will nod along with a compassionate look on my face. I will say I understand and I’ll place a hand on her arm and add, if you ever need anything. I will do this despite the fact that in so doing I am making Emily’s sister different somehow. Turning a spotlight on her suffering. Still, and maybe because I need to for some egocentric reason, I will offer consolation.
It is Saturday night in Valencia California.
Al green is on in Starbucks, singing about how She Used to Be My Girl.
I am writing this on an outdoor patio, typing to his words and the hum of female voices at the table behind me.
Teenagers wander out of the Starbs holding whipping topped pink drinks and talking over each other through braces and straws. Plates and forks collide at the hollow form restaurant next door. A gauche water fountain in the shape of a little girl and a puppy, gurgles. The women behind me talk about their hair, other women’s hair, the Bible.
I came here to write. To work on my book. Because I haven’t worked on my book for weeks. Because when I do, I find some sort of calm that’s been missing lately.
Lately, I have been all ahumm with a sense of loss, of foreboding I’ve not felt in a while.
Driving home from Los Angeles earlier, hung over and in the kind of dulled and nasty mood that gin and tonic and too little sleep affect upon a pillowy mind, I listened a while to a podcast on peace from samsara through mindfulness and meditation. The teacher, an ordained Buddhist nun to whom I oftentimes listen, lectured on the nature of suffering, and the importance of RAIN – Recognize, Allow, Investigate and Name – to alleviating anxiety. Cessation of suffering comes from accepting your feelings, she said, From turning towards your fears, not running from them.
Sometimes I get this frightened feeling, this humm, and forget that there’s nothing to tack it to. Nothing in my life has gone missing, of late. I’ve looked around. Searched under stacks of paper. The space between the couch cushions. The drawers into which I sometimes shove unpaid bills, unpalatable mail. There’s nothing there. Everything’s in order. So why now? Why this familiar sense of fear, of mourning? Perhaps it’s only ever the potential for things to be lost that sends us into sadness.
The Buddhist nun I listen to talks about the importance of presence. Of compassion. For oneself and others. Place the fearful mind, she says, In the cradle of loving kindness. Sometimes she says this and I think, Oh yea, and breathe deep and feel myself again.
I remember buying a box of fluorescent washable markers that winter I lived on Water Street. I remember dancing with Richa and drawing all over the wall length window panes that looked out on an endless mess of office buildings and their rows of darkened rooms. TRUST TRUST I wrote. TRUST LOVE she wrote. And we danced and laughed and the wind blew off the seaport and up against our windows.
The sun went down by five each night that year. Maybe it did every winter in the city but it all seems darker on Fulton street, where the lights of Chinatown wane and businesses are sparse. I remember never being warm enough there. I remember never wearing the kind of jacket that might keep me warm enough there.
Instead, and looking for some heat, I curled into the cradle of an insistence upon positivity. Held myself, shivering, inside a hull of heart hardened numbness in the name of it. I wrote TRUST all over the place and refused to allow myself a single doubtful thought. Still, thinking back on my little self, floundering so earnestly in the cold, fighting so sincerely to keep her fear at bay, I cannot help but love her for her effort, however misguided. And so this evening I pause and pull out my pen and write TRUST in black ink on the thin strip of skin between my thumb and pointer finger.
When I go into Starbucks for a refill on my tea, the server touches my tattoo when he reaches for my money and asks me what I have planned for tonight. Work, I say and he raises his eyebrows and asks if I’d like my tea extra sweet. I can’t tell if he is making fun of me for being the nerd with the Macbook on a Saturday night, or hitting on me so I say No thank you and smile but refuse to meet his eyes when he says, Have a beautiful night.
And later, once I’ve sat back down by the fountain and started to stare blankly at pages of my writing illuminated by the laptop screen, a waiter from Wolf Creek Grill will approach, sit down and say What’s up, and ask me what I have going on tonight and I will tell him Work also and he will say Really? Are you sure? And I’ll nod yes, adding, Work and recovery, but thank you for asking and he’ll say Alright and walk away, leaving me wondering if I look lost or sick or have This One’s Off Her Game plastered on my forehead, a beacon of vulnerability blinking there for all the hungry boys.
Their hunger is the sort of stuff I used to take something from. The kind I used to use to keep me company on those nights I walked into an empty apartment and thought isn’t it better this way and took off my eyeliner and pulled on my sweatpants and ate ramen in front of this month’s Vogue or a flashing TV screen. It’s the kind that used to warm the beds of boys whose whispers and words I took in and took for true after two shots and four flutes of champagne with their drink tickets at the bar. It is the sort of attention that used to make me feel special and now only makes me feel all the more disposable, all the more alone.
I haven’t yet decided what to do about this.
Sometimes I think the pain of actual loss – breakup, divorce, death – is significantly less biting than the anticipation of it. Sometimes I wonder when I became so damaged as to expect it at every turn. To walk around with walls up, battements raised in anticipation of disappointment and loss. I have learned to create the very outcome I am in constant fear of.
I haven’t yet discovered how to turn this trend around. I am learning. It is a poky process.
After that winter on Water Street, with the wind and the snow storms and the rows of lightless buildings, Richa and I moved. Replaced the darkness of the Seaport with the unending movement of Union Square. It’s so much easier to go out here, I remember saying, twirling around in our new apartment, which was roughly a sixth of the size of our previous, palatial place. Everything will be lighter here, I said and strapped on my heels and strode out and into darkness again. Into strangers and strands of pulsating color. Into white lines and the way we waved vodka cranberries at each other across the haze of it all.
I do not do that anymore. It was not easy to stop.
And I am proud of myself. For the unshakable sense of self I found when I slipped off the stilettos and stopped pretending to be somebody I knew I never was. There remains, however, some body of fear that slides itself inside me and turns itself on beneath my skin. It is at once a shell of the past - old stories, patterns, repetitions, I cannot forget – and the figure I fought against years ago. That vulnerable body I blocked out with white lights and lines and strangers and skin, then forced myself to see, to surrender to.
And I have, for the most part, surrendered. Have learned to love her, my vulnerable self. To tolerate her imperfections. To fold arms around them, to hold her little body, in silence, for however long it takes her to become still. To become the words that fold, curiously, into these questions.
A Room with a View~
“I want so to see the Arno. The rooms the Signora promised us in her letter would have looked over the Arno. The Signora had no business to do it at all. Oh, it is a shame!”
“Any nook does for me,” Miss Bartlett continued; “but it does seem hard that you shouldn’t have a view.”
~E.M. Forester
The day Loren came home and put a baseball bat into the middle of my sister’s back was my first day of ninth grade so I wasn’t home to help her.
It didn’t surprise anybody, what Loren did. That sort of thing happens a lot around here and he’d already gone three tours so it was almost expected.
*
It’s not his fault, Loren’s mom, Mrs. Tate told me when we bumped into each other in the waiting area at Madison General. I said, oh I know and I guess she might be right but Andrea was six months pregnant and who does that to a pregnant lady let alone someone they’re supposed to love?
The doctor says Loren won’t talk anymore and that means he’s untreatable.
Andrea won’t talk either, because she’s in a coma.
*
Sometimes, I sit on the roof. Nobody knows I am up there except me. I bring a bag of pretzels or chips with me and just hang out, looking down at the front yard with its big truck tires full of dirt and weeds.
Dad dragged those tires out into the lawn when I was littler and packed them with sod from a pile out back and mom and I kneeled on the warm black rubber and sprinkled marigold seeds into tiny holes she scooped in the dirt then covered over, tenderly with soil and water.
*
My mom calls to tell me she is trying to get the money to fly out here. My mom works at a Laundromat six states away. I ask her why she doesn’t just drive and she says Frank has the car and he’s working a job in Affton and won’t be back for a bit.
*
When I was littler and in 4-H we learned about how to get on a horse without pulling too hard on one side of the saddle and throwing the horse’s back out. It’s about pressure and weight and how too much of it on one side throws everything off. Well, Andrea had all this extra weight on the front side of her body, because of the baby. So when Loren came in and while she stood at the sink rinsing dishes and whacked her in the back, her spine just snapped.
I have been thinking about animals lately. Mine, in particular. I have been thinking of them in part because I see them all the time and also due to their enviable capacity for presence. To be fair, their respective abilities to think ahead encompass only the time between meals, arguably giving them a better shot at happiness than a human being, but maybe that’s the key, maybe that’s the reason I love them so much.
And love them I do. I have oftentimes said that Hampton and Calvin Rowbottom are the loves of my life. Which is not to say I don’t have others so, you know dear reader, there is hope for you yet. Still, Ham’s number one. He’s the E.T. to my Elliot. The Wild Thing to my Mad Max. And Calvin, well Calvin’s pretty good too. Calvin is the Calvin to my Hobbes. Duh.
So what is it about these two characters that makes our relationships so easy, so enduring? I mean, Ham and I are going on ten years now and I am more in love with him than ever, which is certainly not something I’ve seen mirrored by the multitude of human relationships I’ve witnessed thus far. I was thinking about this tonight, out at the barn, riding under the stars. I was talking to Ham while we trotted around and realizing that it’s taken me this long to really figure out the importance of encouraging him, constantly, during our practices. I was thinking about how pertinent this lesson is to the rest of my life – that of talking and communicating and expressing encouragement, affection.
And then I was thinking about impermanence. Because things change. Pick up any Buddhism 101 book and that’s what it will tell you. It will say that the nature of life is impermanence and that your misunderstanding of this point is what keeps you suffering.
I get it.
Sort of. In theory.
I am, at the very least, comforted by the knowledge of life’s transience…which is not to say that I don’t cling, like anybody else, to whatever it is I want to keep the same. Which is not to say that I don’t suffer. But it is to say, somewhat to my detriment, that I have often jumped the gun. I have anticipated or created change perhaps before my life does. Because hell, it’s going to happen anyways right? Right. But these days I’m trying to pay tender attention anyways. To sit with discomfort and to act out of bravery and self-knowledge rather than blindness or fear. And I’m getting better at this, embracing the unknown, in part because going with the flow has always been my nature. Still, sometimes I go with it and am caught off guard when conditions cycle away and the rug feels swept out from underneath me. Still, such is life.
Yet despite all this, despite impermanence, there’s an enduring quality to my relationships with other species that seems to be a bit of an exception to the rule. At first, I wondered if maybe such is because Calvin and Ham are enlightened beings. Maybe they have reached Nirvana because don’t they seem so free, so goddamned pure in their emotions? And wouldn’t that do away with so much of the running around, manipulation and misinformation that makes up our lives? But then I thought about how habitually they both wait for their dinners and how their respective fear based reactions cause them temporary, albeit real discomfort and pain.
So they aren’t enlightened. Perhaps they are little Buddha’s though. Perhaps we all are. Calvin can be Siddhartha Buddha, pre-divinity when he was all fat and indulgent and full of gusto and greed. And Ham can be the Buddha after that, when he’s trying to do the right thing, figure out the middle way, and find the path out of anxious attachment. That I (somewhat big-headedly perhaps) think of myself as at a similar stage, may be the reason for the particularly potent connection I feel with my horse. Or maybe it’s because we’ve known each other, been their for one another, for so long now.
When we first met, Ham and I, he was a grump and I was a petrified, post-divorce adolescent. And we spent the first five years of our partnership hashing out our collective angst (he refused to walk, I refused to take care of myself, talk to my mom, etc)
When I went to college, and took a break from the pattern of perfection I’d demanded of both of us for years in the show ring, Ham and I spent time apart. We each had a tricky time of it (one of us did drugs, boys, NYC nightlife and one of us ditched lesson kids and developed a habit of “running away”) But when we finally found each other again, after all that, we picked right up where we’d left off. In fluid, baggage-free friendship.
Indeed, there was, and I suspect always will be, an effortlessness to our relationship. It’s the question of why this is the case that perplexes me. Or comforts me. I say this because everywhere I look I see people striving to “make it work,” to make it last, to make each other do whatever it is they want. Rarely is there an ease to interpersonal dealings and if there is, it’s a gift worth cradling (not clutching) in the arms of grateful attention. I haven’t always cradled Ham and still he stays around, stays loving me. Ok, not having cradled is an understatement. I have tried, on numerous occasions (albeit broken heartedly and against my will) to get rid of him. To sell him. To donate him. To lease him out. To leave. And yet, for whatever reason (thank you Universe) here we are, still a team after all these years.
So why. Why does it work? Is ours a relational exception to the impermanence rule?
Doubtful, especially because our friendship has certainly changed over time. It has changed in that it has grown, always fuller. Maybe this is because I spent so many years trying to let him go, and dancing around the discomfort of doing so in all areas of my life. Maybe it’s because he stayed on regardless. Maybe that is why he feels so constant to me. Or maybe it’s because I can be laughing or crying or obsessing or rejoicing and he will still pin his ears at me if it’s 4 p.m. and he’s eating his hay. He will still curl his lip when I wash out his nose. Or poop in the wash stall. Or badger me for a treat at the end of a ride.
Maybe it’s because, for all his fears of bogeymen in the bushes outside the arena, or giant snakes in the wash stall (the hose) he is not afraid to let me lead him past all that. He’s not afraid that I might someday be unable to do so. Maybe all this. And maybe it’s because he knows what I’m still striving to figure out. That now is all that matters anyways.
I finally got my porch light fixed. It took ten minutes, if that. A man named Max came over and twisted off one of the screws that held the burnt out bulb in place, pulled a fresh one from a cardboard sleeve and bing!
Illumination.
I have been talking about getting maintenance over here to do this very simple thing for months now. For over six months. During those six months, I stumbled around after dark on the porch, watering plants, collecting laundry, and thinking how nice it would be to set out here at my card table with a cup of tea and my laptop and do some writing.
This is what I am doing right now. I am sitting here, sipping tea and blissfully typing away in a garden irradiated by soft globe lighting. My plants are sprouting around me. My little dog is staring up at me, bringing me his tennis ball, and settling in beside the basil for a snooze. And I am watching him, the basil, the tendrils of the nocturnally blooming jasmine plant that climbs the plaster beside this writing table. I am watching life as it stretches into being all around me and I am thinking how grateful I am and then, how nice it feels to be grateful.
Tonight, after I tucked Ham in and turned off all the barn lights, I looked into the sky and saw the moon again. She’s just a sliver in the darkness. A waxing crescent. But close to us, so close that I can trace lines around the shadow of her fullness, the roundness she’ll grow into. The stars are out too, farther away and spaced at a distance, making this moon appear singular in the sky.
It’s been over a week since she last showed her face. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when the moon disappears, things get weird. I never know exactly how, all I can say is that I settle into a subtle funk. Begin to sense, like a sneaking suspicion, an obscuration of an otherwise balanced bond with myself. It’s like, without the moon to hold me down, to light my way, I’m perpetually fumbling around at eleven p.m. on a lightless porch, looking for my laundry without any real clue as to where it’s hanging or what I’m dropping when I try to gather it up.
And yet, for all the funkiness the moon affects, she never looks uncomfortable up there, in her solitude, in the darkness. She is perpetually poised, never in need, ever self suspended.
I’m partial to this sort of space myself. At times, I’ve opted for it entirely. In doing so I have sometimes forgotten that I am not the moon. I have sometimes passed whole years trying to hold myself up without help. I have flailed, floundered, fallen down and found myself. And it’s been good that way. It’s been nice and navy blue. I must say, though, a little light, a little moonshine, never hurt anybody.
As a means of distracting myself from the loneliness wrought by the semester’s end and a current state of unemployment, I have begun to shop.
I don’t buy much, but I do while away the hours trolling aisles and pillaging clearance racks. I check tags, feel fabrics and pick up items I do not need just to fondle their curves, set them back down and move on.
Tonight I wandered around the Wal-Mart supercenter with several vague projects in mind.
My apartment is a mess. The stacks of books and manuscript submissions have grown to towering heights. I haven’t seen my end tables, or kitchen counter in months. So I need cheap bookcases, filing cabinets or drawers. And also, I need finger paints and paper so I can sit at my newly cleared kitchen table and get my creative juices flowing.
I check out the bookcases but don’t see a color I like. I flirt briefly with a set of teal blue throw pillows for 12.99 before coming to my senses and walking away, having learned long ago that there are some things you’ll regret foregoing and others you’ll not remember in five minute’s time.
I also long ago learned that my artistic sensibilities require little more than a child’s brush set, plastic palette and bowl of water, so I make next for the toy department. I wheel my cart down each aisle, past dart guns and video games, action figures and Lego play sets but can’t find the Crayolas. When I ask Sherese, a Wal-Mart employee with heavily gelled bangs and fake eyelashes, where I can find the crayons and paint sets she tells me they no longer exist. “We used to stock them at the end of the Barbie aisle,” she says, “But the store stopped carrying art supplies about six months back.” She pauses, “nobody was buying them.” I do my best to look appalled and she tells me to check amongst the Barbie’s for stray materials so I u-turn and head for the neon pink glow.
There’s not much in the way of art supplies in Barbie’s world, but the opportunity to peruse her latest incarnations is never lost on this consumer. I used to love the girl. Perhaps I even need a new model to place on the mantle as a reminder of simpler times. When I arrive in Barbara’s midst however, I find her markedly changed. She is automated, implanted with voice chips, or permanently affixed to zip drive sized plastic cell phones. Her body, if this can be fathomed, is now trimmer, less buxom but with hip and torso measurements as tiny as ever.
I pick up a pink box and press gently on the transparent plastic cover, just to hear it bend in upon it self and bounce back. It’s an unmistakable noise, this, impossible to miss even when obscured slightly by wrapping paper and bows. There was a time that I excitedly scampered to the foot of the Christmas tree checking for this noise, for Barbie’s presence in my yearly stash. Now she only depresses me. Cultural standards have shifted to make normative a female figure akin to that of this plastic doll. Boob jobs, ass jobs, tummy tucks and so on have made it possible to match her measurements and now that that’s happened, she’s changing again.
Perhaps ironically, the only item I leave Wal-Mart with this evening is a fifteen dollar full length mirror because, I reason, it’ll help widen the room and create illusions of space. And besides, despite Barbie’s patriarchal plot to dampen my self-image and by extension, my empowerment, I like looking at myself. In other words, I am completely narcissistic.
I suppose the fact that the sight of my own reflection is pleasing to me belies a childhood spent brushing Barbie’s hair and picking out risqué outfits for her to wear. Or maybe not. Maybe, despite what many mothers might say, playing with Barbie dolls is an empowering practice for girls growing up in an increasingly materialistic, image driven environment. Or was. Or is despite the impossibility of her plastic body. Or maybe we can’t say just yet. Maybe we’ve yet to see the full results of generations of girls who grew up with the doll.
True, Barb was always tiny wasted and pointy toed, but it wasn’t until the 70s that she expanded her wardrobe, moving away from poodle skirts and sweater sets and towards disco pants and bikinis. This was the era in which Malibu beach Barbie replaced the “Fashion Luncheon” and “Saturday Matinee” models of years past, thus catapulting the doll’s coolness factor and markedly expanding her popularity.
In 2006 the U.S. census reported that the average age of patients receiving invasive and non invasive plastic surgery is 42.6 years old. The girls coming of age in the 70s then, are the same girls who are now turning forty, prime plastic surgery age. So maybe there’s a correlation between Barbara’s budding popularity in the disco days and the onslaught of image based body modification that’s subsumed our culture over the last ten years. And if this is so, and if Barbie’s waist and cup sizes have only shifted more in the direction of impossible since then, what can we expect from generations to come? In many parts of the country, breast augmentation has become a standard gift to young women graduating from high school. An ABC news article I recently perused titled, “Why Are Parents Buying Their Girls the Gift of Surgery?” follows Lulu Diaz, an eighteen year old who receives a Jaguar upon graduation eve but wanted breast implants instead. Her parents dutifully swapped Jag for boobs. “This is a gift of love from us,” Lulu’s mother tells the interviewer, “And we see a difference in her.”
Just as cultural norms have shifted to allow Barbie a cell phone and an even smaller waist, the gifting of silicone implants upon a young woman’s eighteenth birthday or high school graduation has apparently become a standard rite of passage, replacing the tired new car or trip to Europe tropes. Indeed, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, where the number of breast enlargements among all age groups has increased by 300% in the past decade, the number of breast enlargements within the eighteen and under age group has risen nearly 500%.
When I get home I prop my new mirror up against the door and set about hanging it up. I place it first where I think it most needed, facing the sofa, up against the front door. The effect is a living room that seems nearly twice its actual size. Later though, when I settle onto the sofa with a container of takeout and the book I’m reading, I find I can’t focus. My own reflection is so relentlessly there and it’s not that she’s displeasing per sea, but I get up and take the mirror down anyways.
Later, after I’ve hung it in the bathroom instead, I strip down and stand butt naked in front of it, surveying my body. I rarely see myself in one piece, the only mirror I frequent being the one above my sink which cuts me off at the waist. I look at this new streamlined reflection, the one I paid fifteen dollars to gaze at regularly, and am surprised by the chorus of critical voices that start subtly to hum in the back of my mind.
Knobby knees.
Scrawny arms.
Scraggly.
Boyish.
Boobless.
I squint, trying to transition from the segmenting perspective gifted to me by the media, by the “male gaze,” to seeing myself as a whole, my body as a unique and precious gift. The disconnection persists.
One year ago today, I woke up at five a.m. pulled on sweatpants and tied back my hair and walked into the kitchen of my mom’s house. It was dark outside. The lights were on and she was there. So were Judy and Unkie, he at the coffee maker, she at the counter, reading over admission instructions. The tea water was on. Judy’s patterned purse was set up on the counter, overflowing with books and bills, papers and eyeglass cases, and the mason jars of iced tea she’d made the night before. Next to it was a duffle bag with Mom’s stuff in it.
Judy drove. We checked in at six. Unkie sat outside the pink curtain of a partitioned room while Judy and I watched mom peel her clothes off and don the blue paper Johnny in what was to be her last independent act of dressing and redressing for months to come. We waited then. I rifled through the magazine rack and found there, to my amazement, a children’s story she’d read to me over and again when I was a little girl. Ms. Nelson and the Mysterious Case of Viola Swamp. In it, mild mannered Ms. Nelson cannot handle her unruly class and devises a plan. She disappears, pretending to be off sick and returns disguised as her own replacement, one Viola Swamp, an ugly, putrid and stentorian substitute teacher who is so vile that the class learns to appreciate Ms. Nelson who returns in two weeks time as herself. The uncanny parallel between this story and the painkiller induced transformation my mother would make in the months that followed her surgery was, of course, unknowable to us then, so I handed the book to her where she lay, stretched out lengthwise on the gurney, awaiting anesthesia and operation, and she read it aloud to all of us.
Two hours later, they took her off. It was just me and her and the white walls and fluorescent lights and we’d been there before but this time, we cried and I remember that so clearly, watching her be wheeled away with tears rolling down her cheeks.
Judy, Unkie and I went to the cafeteria. Nobody ate. Later, while they walked around, I tried to sleep on a sofa near the oversized fountain that ornaments the Yale lobby but a security guard came and told me to sit up. After seven hours of waiting and wandering, Judy went home to walk the dogs. Four hours after that, after mom had been under anesthesia and lamplight and knife for eleven hours the phone rang in the empty waiting room where Unkie and I sat and they said that she had made it through.
And I am grateful for that. I am grateful for everything, truly I am.
I am grateful for the surgeon who came to see us after that and said I did the best I could and then, They will come back. I am grateful that when we were finally let into the ICU to see her she smiled through her haze and mouthed the words I love you. I am grateful that, weeks later, when her stitched up stomach split with the pressure of hematoma and blood spurted out onto Judy and I and infection was feared and drains were implanted and fistulas were forecasted and food was forbidden, she fought on. I am grateful, truly I am.
But she is 3,000 miles away from me now, standing here in front of a mirror so separate and segmented. And it was six months ago that she drove me to the airport- even though I was supposed to drive myself - because we couldn’t bear to lose the hours together before I boarded a plane and was gone again.
She’s shrunk since then though I can barely imagine her being any smaller.
She tells me she is one hundred and three pounds to my one hundred and twenty something and still skinny body. Her doctor’s say that she is so thin that her body is eating away at the delicate musculature that lines the space between her skull and her skin. So she is plugged in every night to a machine that channels, through a silver dollar sized hole above her left breast, nutritional supplements straight into her heart. This is different from the TPN we hooked her into last summer night after night at eight p.m, sharp, which fed milky food up through a blue capped line in her arm that dangled there unused during the daytime, clicking against its red capped twin every time she moved.
She tells me, It’s tricky, this body stuff and I press the phone hard against my ear because she sounds so far away and ask her, How so?
Well, you know, she says, It’s hard to believe it’s a big deal. I’m just being vain, I suppose, but when I was your age and biking with JR or jogging every day, I could eat anything I wanted and never gain a pound and who wouldn’t want that body back again?
That is not, I say, the body you have now. I say this and maybe I am looking in the mirror when I do.
A week ago, I turned twenty-four. I went to Disneyland with a friend and laughed and pointed and jumped up and down in anticipation of Buzz Lightyear and felt like a child, though perhaps I always do. Perhaps this is my saving grace, perpetual childishness. If so it will serve me, I am told by a girlfriend who jokingly reminds me that where men only grow increasingly attractive with age, women begin to lose their looks after twenty seven. You’re in your peak years, she tells me, It’s all down hill from here. At least I’ll still have my superior wit and cunning, I say and she agrees halfheartedly.
At first, my mother’s doctors tried all sorts of rag tag experiments to figure out why she can’t gain weight. She ate butter by the stick to see what would happen. Sundaes and splits and whatever else might pack on pounds. None of it worked. They then suggested TPN, the same permanent intravenous nutrition she had last summer, albeit through a different type of port. A Hickman port.
Using the Hickman, she has learned to hook herself up, which means that she will be able to carry on this way, feed herself this way, for however long she needs to. My priority now is the hip, she tells me, Got to get my strength up for that.
She is referring to the hip surgery she wants to have this July and I cannot fathom the idea of it. Perhaps because it seems a physical impossibility, her little body sent out and sliced open once again. Perhaps because the idea of this scares me so much that for a moment my breath catches in that sweet spot between my sternum and my heart and whispers there, of possible problems, posing all the questions she can’t afford to.
Because Wal Mart did not carry the Crayolas I wanted, I go to a special crafts store instead. There I buy a plastic palette, a pad of watercolor paper and three rows of brightly colored paint. I then sit at the kitchen table with these items for hours, dabbling and dabbing and using up reams, producing only images of winding roads and women’s bodies. I return to the mirror and stand there, holding up my paintings and comparing the bodies I’ve rendered to my own reflection. Everything is curvy in my work, soft where the angles of my own anatomy are not.
Clear and concentric and comforting in ways that real life cannot be.
Dear Blue,
Driving across America. Alone. Writing you letters from empty gas stations. Rest stops. Roadside lodges.
Watch for their coming. Or don’t. Or pull them from your metal mailbox and throw them in the trash. Slip them under your bed sheets. Hang them on your fridge.
There will be more than one so make space. In your trash can. In between box spring and bed sheets.
There will be more than one because there will be more than one occasion on which I think of you.
____________
Dear Blue,
It was afternoon when I left Virginia. I drove into the night. The hours rolled off my car wheels. The layers of busywork I built up to keep from noticing your absence peeled away too. So when I stood under the shower head in room 207 at the Red Roof Inn in Pigeon Ford Tennessee and let the hot water drum onto my scalp and let the fluorescent light buzz in the background and let the sound of the TV rise and fall from the next room and let all of it get behind these thoughts of you…when I did that and you were still there I knew I had to write you.
I remember reading once, in a book called “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most” that my mother left on my bed in high school with a note that said, Maybe this will help this get out what neither of us want to talk about, that one way to broach a conflictual subject or one that you are afraid of, is to write it first. Sometimes, the book told me in its sing songy prose, it’s best to write to the person you need to speak to. That way you can clearly lay out what you mean to say without the heat of the moment, which oftentimes makes one forgetful or flustered! So next time, try an email in place of a phone call. And always remember, you don’t have to press the send button!
I am licking a stamp, I am slipping this letter through a slot at the Gatlinburg Post Office. I am pressing the send button.
And I am 205.17 miles and seven months away from the heat of the moment but still have not clearly laid out what I mean to say to you.
________________
Dear Blue,
Do you remember. We hiked to the top of that mountain last year.
I do. Remember, I mean.
There was a furrowed mark on the ridge of your nose where eyeglasses had pressed into sweaty skin. You’d taken them off to rub at the mark with your thumb and pointer finger and I watched you and thought how different you looked without the windows of thickly rimmed bifocals blocking your eyes.
They are grey, your eyes, greenish sometimes.
Mine are blue. Boringly so because I am blonde and pale skinned and I wonder if you know that. That they are blue, I mean.
We’d been walking all morning. The sun had just starting to slide past noon and it seemed like a good time to break so we sat on a log where you cleaned sweat and sunscreen off your glasses and I unwrapped sandwiches.
A bird called, one drawn out hoot followed by three caws repeating. I think that’ s my favorite summer sound, I said and you looked up, still wiping your glasses, but said nothing.
My eyes are blue but there’s this speck of brown in one iris that shows up golden on sunny days and makes them a different shade, I guess. A special shade.
Did you know that?
It was your idea, the epic hike. I agreed to go amiably as I always did, being in love with you like I was then.
I’d have gone halfway down the gullet of Mount Vesuvius if you thought it might be fun.
But it was the view from Cold Mountain that you figured would be worth our time. You bought a map and marked in careful detail the path we might take to the summit.
The sandwiches were home made. Chick pea, olive oil and eggplant I carefully cuisinarted into hummus. It’d been sopped up by wheat bread and sprouts and turned soggy, but in a creamy way that still tasted good.
Juice box? I said, holding out a carton.
You took it and I watched you slide off the plastic wrapping, fold it into the pocket of your jeans and stab the straw into the box and sip.
I said something about the grape being good and took a pull at my own straw and you nodded like you do and when you aren’t going to say anything.
________________
Dear Blue,
I am driving the Talimena Byway through Arkansas and into Oklahoma. I am in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart superstore where I just bought a watch. I also bought the book on tape of some shadowy detective story read aloud by a man named D.W. Moffett, a box of granola bars and a three pack of plastic wrapped panties. The kind I never wore - would never wear, even now - when I thought that you might see them. I held out hope for you. A perpetually outstretched palm.
I will eat the eight granola bars in this box one after the next. I will crinkle their wrappers, ball them up and chuck them to the floor. I will do this because there is no vegetarian food to be found in this state and I am hungry and I am tired of feeling alone on this drive and somehow chewing substitutes talking the way listening to D.W. Moffett’s gravely Southern accent makes the absence of your silence less real.
_______________
Dear Blue,
I can admit to being purely happy
That night I met
Your niece
Who was five then and older now but wore a blue taffeta dress with puffed sleeves and a full skirt that rustled when we danced – her tiny hands holding my cold ones – and sounded like corn husks unzipped too early from still green ears.
It was thrilling
They way she slipped her little fingers into
The spaces between my long ones.
The way she wanted them there
Returned them there
Each time we pulled apart.
___________________
Blue,
In New Mexico the sunrises are blue too. It’s not just the night here. Orange rises in the east, casts shadows over red rock, and blue falls in triangular shapes where these colors collide.
Blue, Joni says songs are like tattoos. I have pounded them into my skin this drive. Pounded my fist on the steering wheel and tried to be moved to tears by lyrics and lines.
Case of You comes on and it’s always the song I have been waiting for.
And it’s always about you.
So I cry, or try to, and the mesas pass by, flat and sunburned and relentless.
It should be sunset but it’s just dust and dry earth.
__________________
Dear Blue,
Sometimes I think about myself as a baby, a newborn.
Sometimes I think about you.
And I wonder how we are possibly the same person as the infant we grew up from.
We aren’t of course and then,
Who else would we be?
When we sat on the wicker sofa on your front porch lined with ash trays and potted succulents and you showed me your baby pictures, I smiled and pointed and said, I know this face but I never showed you mine because that naked person stood with her knees touching and her fingers in her mouth and her belly sticking out like a baby chimp and that little person couldn’t possibly be me.
________________
Dear Blue,
I am driving through the Dakotas now.
In Buffalo Girls, the Larry McMurtry novel I read and loved and read again ages ago as a prepubescent cowgirl, there is a character called Blue for his indigo eyes.
He is quiet, a rancher and in love with Dora Dufran so fiercely that he builds her a ranch and a barn full of beef on the most beautiful piece of land outside Deadwood.
But Dora’s damaged goods, afraid to live outside town. She’d been born a rancher’s daughter until her daddy died of smallpox when she was five and her mother and sisters too.
So Dora walked mile after mile on her own through the wild till she found the nearest town but never got over the fear of being left.
She didn’t tell Blue this.
Because she knew he’d move to town to marry her and that’d break his wild heart.
Teddy Blue needed the sun and the sky and the rocky mountains the way the mountains need the sun, the sky. The way the air needs the mountains.
So she refuses him over and again until they part in the saddest scene I’ve ever read and Blue marries Granville Stuart’s half Indian daughter and Dora marries Ogden Purdue because Blue got married and moved on so she has to as well.
But neither love their spouses and can’t keep apart and Dora dies giving birth to a baby with eyes of brilliant indigo.
________________
Dear Blue,
The arches in Utah are unmerciless.
The sunsets are explosive.
My toenails are unpainted.
I have taken to buying coconut popsicles from jiffy marts each time I stop for gas. I must eat five or more a day. These popsicles come in clear, crinkly wrappers and are made too sweet but have little chunks of white meat frozen into their centers and drool coconut milk down my wrists that I lick off, let drip down my chin, let stick to my cheeks and think how nice it is, not having someone here to see me make such a mess. How nice it is not to care.
Still, there have been so many moments in which I’ve wanted you here, to watch me. I’ve wanted you to see me when I think I’m looking particularly pretty. Or when I’m driving along with the radio on and some song you love comes on and I sing to it especially well. Or that night at the Quality Inn in Charleston that I checked in, stripped down to my undies and floated on my back in the outdoor pool looking up at the stars spread across the wide Missouri sky and thinking how that very moment could be a movie scene or a snippet from the abstract of my life.
In moments such as these - those times when I’m alone and so alive, so alive inside the world -I used to think of you and how if you could only see me, could peer from a private window into my world, you’d fall in love. And I’d want you more then, propelled into desire by the frustrated feeling that you’d never know, never see me singing freely or floating under stars.
My next thought might be how in love with you I was and by then, of course, I’d have stopped singing, stopped floating, I think I may be realizing now the degree to which I displaced my love. Maybe it was me I was falling for all along.
