GUD Magazine Issue 1 :: Autumn 2007
Page 5
She strikes that teenage pose again. “Don't want to offer lots of explanations to prying boyfriends,” she says.
And I thought I had secrets.
"Nice, isn't she?” Nadia points to my reflection in the mirror.
"Weird, maybe."
"Is this some kind of sexual fetish?” I ask, afraid that I'm about to find myself in a compromising situation.
She laughs.
"No. I just believe the only way you get to know yourself is by knowing who you aren't, and who you are capable of being."
"So it's a spiritual thing?"
"If you want,” she says.
I stroke my satiny sides and wonder what Neil would think if he could see me now. And wonder what I want this to be ... me to be.
"Where are you from originally?” I ask. Some part of me wants a magical answer. That she's another of the strange and beautiful mysteries of the desert, that she's a dryad emerged from cactus, that I am in a dream and she is my guide.
She walks across the room and pulls the dead flowers from the vase, then opens the door and tosses them out into the night.
"Cincinnati,” she says.
The woman in my body in the mirror looks a bit like a princess. Maybe a princess-in-training.
"What do you think? You can't tell me it doesn't feel good to be someone else for a moment?” she asks.
"I'm in love with someone I shouldn't be.” I say this more to the girl in the reflection than to Nadia. I want someone to explain it to me, even though I can isolate out the parts for myself. Knowing all my life that we shared no blood, I never saw Neil as a part of the family, as my brother in the official sense of kin. I saw him as mine. As made for me.
Nadia takes out her pigtails. “Says who? His wife? His attorney?” It sounds as if the question comes from experience.
"Our parents."
I realize I have never admitted this to anyone. I wait for her to turn on me, call me disgusting, look horrified at me like my mother did. She stares at me for a moment, and then it is as if I never said a thing. She turns and vamps for the mirror again.
"Now try this one.” She passes me a different wig.
I slide the short red A-line bob onto my scalp. It feels dense and slick, like silicone. “Can I borrow this one?” I ask her. She nods her approval.
"He was adopted,” I say. “We're not related by blood."
Nadia smiles and shrugs. The night feels surreal, like I will wake up with a terrible hangover and find out that I finished that bottle of wine all by myself.
"I made out with my actual brother once,” she says. “We were both high; it was gross. Is yours in California?"
"Yeah."
Headlights flash outside the shack and I freeze, imagining that we are about to be caught at something, at pretending to be people we are not.
"I think I need to see him again. Clear up some things. I've been avoiding it."
Nadia laughs. “Avoidance is the number-one reason people come to Sedona. Not for the food, that's for sure.” She wrinkles her face.
"You hate the shit they serve at Tempe's as much as I do, don't you?"
Nadia smiles. “Now you're figuring me out."
I step up to the wardrobe and look for a wig that Neil would like, then settle for one that I like, a curtain of tawny ringlets beneath which I feel familiar to myself, if only for this moment.
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Not in the Yellow Pages by Lesley C. Weston
I stare into strangers’ apartments, especially at night when we walk the dog. I stop and steal glances while he tugs the leash, dragging the dog away from the flowers to the curb. The walls in those rooms look so perfect and white, the ceilings unblemished. I look away if there are people inside the rooms. I don't want to see the people, living their lives.
He asks, “Do you remember when you used to love me?"
"I remember,” I say. The roof of my mouth and my teeth ache, like they did when I was a kid wearing braces.
I want a room with a light that spills through a curtainless window at night. I want a room no one is in, a room with smooth ceilings, and walls without paintings or photographs, bookshelves, or bric-a-brac. One apartment above the park has a red room. I wonder how it would be to stand in its center, surrounded by those womb walls. Could a person live in such a room? Two people walk in, and then one of them leaves. Someone would have to leave, yes?
"And you?” I ask. “Can you remember that far back?"
At work, I lock my office door and read the yellow pages, especially in the morning after I have the sugar-thick coffee I'm not supposed to drink. The names of hotels line up in a column, tidy and oh-so-black on the page. The names like an invitation. I memorize them, and all day the names hide in my mouth. Sometimes I whisper them under my breath.
"Oh, so, it was that long ago?” He arches his eyebrow as if to laugh.
I want to rent a hotel room with a bed, a desk, and a small, clean bathroom with a big tub. I do not want a telephone. I want a hotel room that isn't listed anywhere. I would bring a suitcase I'd never unpack. I'd bring a small shopping bag, very small, from the grocery.
"Even feeble-minded as I am, I can remember one second ago,” I say, bringing the merry-go-round to a stop.
He yanks the leash, makes the dog sit, and roughly pats its head. “Good, boy,” he says. He takes my hand.
One hotel on my way to work has a very, very small marquee. It is not in the yellow pages. I wonder how it would be to take a taxi there one day, pick up a key at the desk, and hang a Do Not Disturb sign on my doorknob, to unbutton the collar of my blouse and sit on the bed or in the bathtub, melting sugar cubes on my tongue.
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The Intrigue of Being Watched by Rusty Barnes
Originally published in Story Garden
Slipping onto the jetty at midnight where our feet slip hard on the rocks and kelp just under water you say ‘I think those people are watching us.'
I'm thinking carnal thoughts—seawater you know, like the taste between your thighs. It's warm like a sex flush as we walk a little deeper, trying to reach just that point beyond which it will no longer be safe to go, where the tide takes over.
Tomorrow morning I might wake you with coffee or by nuzzling your tenderest parts while I listen to you trying to snore me away but right now it's just past soft midnight and with wet feet we're headed slightly NE
for that slight crack in the sky over Nahant, the big and dark-blue night where rising stars might meet fallen angels: your soul and mine.
You. Yeah you. The one watching from the near shore.
I bet from where you stand with your leashed animal, your strained eyes, you'd swear we were walking on water.
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The Prophet: eyes detail by Ilona Taube
* * * *
* * * *
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really nice on drugs by Timothy Gager
there's no squeaking
no squawking
no angry
pushing or shoving
all nice and smoooooooth
like a cat's,
relaxed eyes close
to Vivaldi
really nice on drugs
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Your personal ground zero (to franz wright) by Timothy Gager
there are no planes that crash
no one to call us
to where we pray
a sign of the cross
for the empty pews
of water-damaged wood
saying that the voices
are not god
and to get out
stay out
stay damaged, beaten, crusted
voiceless
as to believe
what you have left
is a huge undertaking
—
You see
it is only your
small plot of land
that is all
for the dedication
BUT,
it is all
that needs to be rebuilt
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Moving Boxes by Timothy Gager
They sit like office furniture,
like martyrs,
white cubes,
full of contained memories.
—
Things are in there.
Your things, My things
those things
that have
been here before—our important things,
labeled to new and different addresses
—
I'd like to create something out of them
Perhaps a sturdy bench.
One where I could dedicate
something to someone,
with a shiny gold marker
—
these boxes
become more
than strong white cardboard,
now loaded with books
and beauty products,
document the recent failure
of our once great relationship—
like my plants,
now recently withered
—
they were so full of life,
when you were around
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Spring by Magali Cadieux
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Natural History by Gini Hamilton
1.
Dead birds had a way of suddenly appearing in Sarah's path. After Parker had died, after she'd loaded most of his art into a truck bound for storage, a crow dropped out of the pear tree in her backyard. Just dropped, like something on Laugh-In, like when the little guy is riding his tricycle and bam! falls over.
Then, years later, after she had started painting again, Sarah found a yellow-breasted warbler lying on her front porch. Still warm, but lifeless. Bright yellow, but not for long. By the time she had photographed it, scanned it, drawn it, the blue and yellow feathers were becoming a single shade of light brown. She drew feathers, following the contours of muscle, and imagined its delicate skeleton. She drew feet as poetic as any dancer's. After her cataloguing, Sarah buried the songbird in her front garden, about a foot down; put a stone on the fresh dirt hoping to ward off scavengers.
They were like bookends, those birds. Margins. Boundaries. That crow was a heavy curtain that separated her from the life of thought and expression she had shared with Parker. But the little warbler's quiet arrival made a delicate opening, just enough for Sarah to see light, to feel a breeze soft as her son's sleeping breath. At night, it sang from its garden grave the softest reminder of ... something Sarah couldn't quite make out yet. Something about life after death, after sorrow, after loss.
2.
The first bone Sarah bought had been a prairie-dog skull found at a flea market for five dollars. The intricate shapes and soft shadows. She'd had no idea you could buy the remains of a dead animal at a street fair from the same table where you could pick up a Road Runner juice glass or a pair of black pearl earrings.
Years later, on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, where she had gone with the French photographer for a fashion shoot, she found dog bones. She had been walking through the dunes, the soles of her feet burning through inadequate shoes. Looking for shade among the wind-twisted small trees that grew in the gullies where sand began mixing with dirt. There, in a small oasis of brush and palm, a pile of bleached white bones. Vertebrae, jaws, teeth, the whole works in a neat little pile. She gathered them all in her long skirt and headed back to the hotel, hardly believing her luck. Talking to the hotel staff, she learned that there had been a dog blight on the island a few years before and that almost all the dogs had died. She imagined them dropping in their tracks, their fur, skin, muscle carried away by sea breezes and scavengers. Now only bones lay where their pink, thirsty tongues once wet the sand with drool and their sharp yelps once sang to the tide.
Over the next week, in the afternoons, when it was too hot to work, Sarah went off scavenging on her own. At the end of each day, she arranged her gatherings on the terrace of her room. Each square beige tile held a treasure: shell, tree root, flower, stick, or small grouping of bleached bones as white as her skin. When the photographer and models came for drinks before dinner, or when her assistant came to discuss the next day's schedule, they had to step around the items in her collection. She could have arranged them on a table or in a basket, but it pleased her to see the individual pieces in a grid, laid out like an anthropologist's findings. Arranging the artifacts was not unlike editing the photos back in the office, laying out beautiful elements, rearranging them until everything felt in the right place. On the terrace, Sarah took photos of the arrangement in the late-afternoon sun with the models’ thin feet straddling pink shells. She imagined being able to organize her world on an eternal grid, purposefully and carefully claiming small bits of beauty. It was true that she related more easily to a pile of dog bones than to the people she worked with all day. To have those people interact with these bones, even peripherally, wove her a vital, however tentative, connection to the world.
Before going to sleep each night, she would call Parker to report what she had added to the collection that day. She imagined him taking notes, cataloguing her finds the way he kept track of his own possessions. The first time Sarah had visited Parker's apartment, only months before this trip, she had been thrilled by his obsessive orderliness. Every tiny thing—every spoon, every piece of paper, his paints, paper, tapes, books, his comb—everything clearly had its own place. For weeks after that one visit, Sarah had been able to recall the placement of every single object she had seen. She could have walked back in there in the dead of night during a blackout and found a No. 3 pencil. It was a clue to what she herself needed.
When she called Parker from her island hotel and reported the placement of another dog jawbone, she told him precisely on which tile it had been placed and in relation to what other artifact. Sarah's whispered cataloguing and Parker's meditative breathing on the other end were the opposite of phone sex, designed to calm rather than excite. If that bone is there, and that shell is there, and Parker is there, then I must be here.
3.
When Sarah came across the dead frog lying in the street, flat and dry as leather in the desert, it stopped her in her tracks. She had been hiking alone through the dunes, heading back to the small house she had rented at Cape May.
Those were the early days. Sarah was still making art. She and Parker had married just months earlier at his mother's beach house in North Carolina and Sarah had had her first panicked thought that she had made a mistake. There on the porch, surrounded by her new family and looking out over the expanse of the ocean, damp from the salty air, Sarah had felt dried out. Pinned to the road she was taking. It would take many solitary excursions like this one to Cape May for Sarah to relax into her shared life with Parker. Over those first years, she would go off on her own and then return, to be surprised each time that he was still there, solid and steady, as if she had only run down to the deli for butter.
She knelt to look more closely at the frog. All four limbs intact and flailed to the four corners like a sleeping baby. How long did it take for all the fluid to dry out? A month in the sun? A few days? Discarded cardboard litter made a spatula for gently prying the frog from the asphalt. Light-headed, Sarah carried her find to the house. She was glad Parker was not there to wonder what kind of person would collect roadkill. In her studio back in the City, the frog later became part of a construction, one of several that Sarah exhibited in a group show.
Back at the house, she wrapped the frog in tissue paper and slipped it into a pocket of her suitcase. She drank glass after glass of cool water; ate plums, letting the juice drip down her chin. She took a shower, smoothed apricot lotion into her wet skin, air-dried her white limbs as she walked through the s
mall cottage. It was mid-afternoon, and though the sun beat down relentlessly outside, the rooms were dark and surprisingly cool. She imagined herself as a ghost, floating, light against dark, free of connection. She concentrated on being fluid. On moving fluidly and on an awareness of her bodily fluids. Blood filling her veins, rushing to muscles being used. The wetness of her eyes. Isolated drops of water still soaking into the roots of her hair. Pee building up in her bladder from all the water she had consumed.
If Parker had been with her, he would have watched her every naked move. He liked to look at her, turn her around. After a day in the sun, he needed to see whether her skin had changed color at all. It never did. Frog-belly white and just as smooth.
There had been a time when Sarah couldn't stand being observed by anyone. A time when she had been required to walk barefoot atop a hospital conference table wearing nothing but underpants. Six or eight pairs of curious medical eyes following her as she approached or retreated, her sweaty feet leaving tracks on polished mahogany. Doctors sat at the viewing table, nurses, physical therapists. Who else? Perhaps a friend of the doctor. Let me tell you what we had on the table today, she imagined the pock-skinned hood-eyed doctor telling his neighbor. You should come see sometime. The whitest girl you've ever seen. Too bad about her spine. At thirteen, she's crooked as an old man.
Whispered discussions around the table as Sarah passed, phrases floating up like needle-tipped whips. Compromised pelvis ... lateral curvature ... polio. Once a month for two years Sarah trod the table. In between displays, she was x-rayed, twisted, immersed in a hot-water tank with other children who were limp without their leg or back braces. During that time she started her period, had her first kiss, cut her waist-length hair to her scalp, stopped talking for three weeks, buried her rosary in a gully. Started wearing a bra, which had to be unfastened during her tabletop trek so that they could see her whole spine, as if missing the half-inch covered by elastic would alter their analysis of her progress. She had walked, then, holding the bra in front, its straps loose on her shoulders. Elbows tucked in to her ribcage, damp palms plastering the slim cotton shield to her chest. Often she closed her eyes. She had memorized the path. Three steps up the ladder they set up for her. Fourteen sweaty steps to the end of the table, turn, fourteen sweaty steps back. On the table, Sarah held herself as straight as her crooked little spine allowed and walked slowly, as instructed, with her chin up. Once down, she ran from the room, burning with humiliation.