by Trevor Dodge
I am aware of this only because as she continues spinning me around (she always leads) in her half-circle steps, the scene on the wall refreshes in my view every five seconds, and virtually without exception the figures and faces remain motionless and changeless, a fleshy mural interrupted only by the shift of an arm or the deep heave of a chest when its owner takes in a big breath to immediately push the air out, thin mouths with lips gapped into half-sneers as the pale rush of popcorn breath floods the room. See, she is left-handed—more like left-bodied—and is out and out militaristic about exercising her southpaw tendencies (see above). She not only writes left, bats left, throws left, but leads-on-the-dancefloor left (she always leads), so our combined orbit is always counter-clockwise, and about every 10th step I fumble my own left foot either too near inside or too far outside the narrow fulcrum we’ve created between our feet to pivot around, breaking the nervous rhythm nearly every time I do this. She shifts her leading arm (she always leads) to compensate for the break, to wit I respond with my own compensation with my trailing arm, so the total effect is something like an airplane’s propeller sputtering and wobbling immediately after ignition. And she always notices the sputterings, keeps mental count of them for each slow song, tabulating them at the end of the evening into some karmic algebra that will help her formulate her next move in our 36-minute old relationship which started beyond the double metal doors, taking me largely by surprise.
Like I said, I didn’t come here with her. Didn’t make plans to meet her by the pay phones or outside the bathroom. Didn’t write her a legal paper note in purple ink to slide between the chevron slits of her locker. Didn’t meet up with her in the lunch line to plan the whole evening out, in between the lunch ladies piling our molded brown trays with various shapes and thicknesses and smells of carbohydrates and fat.
I for reals and truly just didn’t.
I did, however, do all of those things with Natalie Boxnard, whose name does an adequate job of describing her, moreso really than I could do or want to. Natalie is pretty much the girl version of me, especially in the fact that she’s hopelessly right-handed, passive-passive aggressive, and considers any Friday night exciting in as much as it contains viewing either of the Patrick Swayze classics (namely, Dirty Dancing and Point Break) on videocassette. These are the evenings of her clad in her United Colors of Pajamaton, her father’s athletic socks scrunched down on her ankles, quite possibly the world’s largest bowl of unsalted/unbuttered popcorn strategically positioned on the couch between us to ensure it totally kills any potential for something even faintly resembling a romantic mood (Natalie’s flood insurance-selling father has used this tactic for a long long time, having perfected his libido-crippling concoctions on Natalie’s three older sisters; suffice to say, Mr. Boxnard knows his stuff when it comes to flatlining his daughters’ emerging sexual proclivities, and most definitely keeps better tabs on teen hormonal swings and the flavor-of-the-week androgynes adorning the covers of Tiger Beat, 16, etc. etc. etc. (bold pastel-colored blocks of lettering floating over naturally curly hair: “Justin Dreams of You!”, “Inside Kirk’s Dressing Room!”, “Taylor-Joey-Taylor Throws The Best Pool Party EVER!”, etc. etc. etc.) than he (Mr. Boxnard) does when it comes to whatever particulars flood insurance salesmen are supposed to keep track of (if any). I know the popcorn routine far too well, and have endured it far too many times than is reasonable for a completely harmless boy like myself).
The very fact I did this as long as I did reveals this simple, serious truth: girls completely own me.
Which made what happened 36 minutes ago fairly effortless, really, for her, because despite the fact Natalie and I had been Going Together for 3 months and 11 days, Natalie and I are quite easily the two most passive people in this room (note: the KMart brand polos we’re wearing, that stale unsalted/unbuttered shade of white) and our relationship is way more one of acquiescence than attraction. I have never thought Natalie is pretty. Far from it, actually. Her mouth is barbed with dental braces; she wears cat-eyed, pink-framed eyeglasses with thick, oblong lenses to correct what apparently is one of the longest ongoing cases of early onset astigmatism her opthamologist Dr. Schiel has ever seen; despite having just turned 14, she is already cursed with her mother’s gourd-shaped figure (more like a bowling pin come to think of it), her widening hips showing little sign that they will ever swing back in a graceful S-pattern; her short hair is the color of Cheerios left too long in the morning’s breakfast bowl, a bloated yellow fading into a more bloated yellow fading into an even more bloated yellow, like the hair of airline stewardesses who simply wait too long to do something else with their lives and so will pretty much always be thought of as airline stewardesses who have their runs down so pat they can literally do their eye makeup in their sleep (and most mornings, it’s near impossible to tell); Natalie’s eyelashes are so colorless as to appear clear upon first glance, their lack of hue only magnified by the huge honkin oblong lenses held perpendicular in front of them, the blink of her eye like a fly skittering quickly along the bottom of a wet drinking glass as its user tips the last drops of whatever into his/her mouth; and just past the lashes are vacant spheres of pale blue, irises constantly flared wide open, thin trickles of red blood vessels crisscrossing each other with no particular place to go.
And I have never thought Natalie is smart. Because if she is, she never would have dated me in the first place. Natalie and I started as payback for how Mindy Etters returned her half of the sterling silver Mizpah necklace when we broke up for the third time six months ago. Mindy took the right half and I took the left half and we swore to wear them even in the shower. Natalie has never seen it, but she knows I still have a green spot on my chest left from the chemical reaction. Natalie and Mindy aren’t currently best-best friends, but they were for a long time, and they will be again before the night’s over. Mindy has ruby-tinted contacts which she trades out for tangerine-tinted ones which she trades out for canary-tinted ones which she trades out for shamrock-tinted ones which she trades out for cornflower-tinted ones which she trades out for fuschia-tinted ones. My dating Natalie was Jake’s idea. Jake and I are currently best friends, and have been for a long time, but we won’t be forever. Mindy had Jake give me her half of the Mizpah, tucked inside a note she wrote on lined paper with the jags still hanging from where the spiral binding bit down, her vowels as big loops in blue ink. I don’t know whose idea that was. One thing I do know for certain: neither Mindy nor Jake are here tonight.
And in about 13 more minutes, Natalie won’t be either. Her mother is already en route, having received word of it all, the news already engorged by a game of telephone, the news of the shit she just pulled (she always leads) 36 minutes ago billowing with enough despaired distortion from each successive retelling of aforementioned word to get Natalie’s mother to remove her avocado green dishwashing gloves, pluck the communal keys to the mudstained Honda Accord off the pegboard, heave the vehicle into the street after a thick grind into reverse, and commence rescue operations inside her daughter’s chest cavity. It’s important to note that Natalie did not place the originating call into her parents’ keyhole-shaped neighborhood from the thin trio of pay-phones outside, nor did she relay, follow-up, prank, phreak, hack, jive, cajole, or in any possible way rebroadcast the sad sad news; furthermore, it is largely impossible to monitor the total number of pulls she will take from the Ipratropium Bromide inhaler vised between her index finger and thumb and scraping back and forth against her dental work during her mother’s crucial ETA, the seconds ticking silently away below the Accord’s digital speedometer, because Natalie’s new best-best friend Erline Sadler has never seen anything like this up close before, and certainly doesn’t know the drill when it comes to slowing Natalie down with her pulls, and—besides—is too busy plunking one quarter dollar after another after another into the three coin receptacles as fast as her fingers can handle.
At least that’s what Katrina Ailes’ report says from the hallwa
y where she can’t really see what’s happening too much past the steel-plated firedoors, and she’s pretty much considered a pathologic liar despite being confused all the time for her twin sister Katherine, who everyone always believes for no good reason whatsoever. But more than that, just about everyone feels the same contempt for Natalie that I do, so the hard brutal truth is that pretty much the only one who might be even remotely interested in Katrina’s report is right here in front of me (she always leads). And this isn’t the first time she has hijacked me like this, so I would be lying if I said that I am surprised right now. In fact, pretty much the last thing I am right now is surprised.
She is not looking towards the hallway or the double metal doors framing it or the chairs propping them open or the bleachers or the short-shorts or the floor. Because when she stepped between Natalie and I during Logan Tusow’s tinny spin of Sheriff’s “When I’m With You” 36 minutes ago, she has not looked anywhere but directly into my eyes and she simply will not stop.
And this is the part I can’t see coming. And the truth is I simply don’t want her to stop.
Tears are skimming the mascara from her big chocolate eyes, pooling and draining into the creases of her lipstick-less mouth frequently enough to probably say she has been crying this entire time, but only in the most technical sense of the word; the thick cotton of her crayon-purple Izod splotched and spattered with hollow, inky rings in the drop zones below the thin rivers of black staining her cheeks.
I am unlocking my hands from the small of her back and raising them to her face, my thumbs extended. We are stopping our feet in the last place where they stepped, spaced apart so we both have our balance. She is blocking my hands at my wrists, and her gaze burns through my optic nerves. Logan Tusow is mumbling into his rent-to-own PA system, and all the bleacher bums and wall warriors are already past the firedoors, spilling into the parking lot. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling are stumbling awake. We are swaying; she is digging her little fingernails into my wrists; I am following; we are stopping. Stopping.
She pulls her gaze away to bury her face into my shoulder. My shirt bruises instantly there, mascara and navy eye shadow.
This is how we’ve said it, Jon Bon Jovi be damned.
Esmerelda
(with Bonnie Dodge)
At first a silence looking skyward: three Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. Clouds bruised purple and gray float eastward, the sharp smell of pine perforating the sky. The air, the world around you. The aspen flutter dainty dances in the freeze following the morning rain. Soon a fire will throw flames high into the air like breathing dragons and we will roast our marshmallows and toast our hot dogs and drink our wine. And nearby you’ll hear the South Fork boiling over in its bed of smooth stones, the ones spat out by that wicked machine that came scraping through, looking for the real thing but finding only fool’s good, its skeleton stuck in the sandbar and quiet for nearly a century now. Listen. It still grumbles about the errand, the impossibility of its single purpose, like a lung refusing to inflate, leaving the body to gasp and heave and panic for any sign of attention.
But this isn’t that. This is entirely fueled from within, like the trees swaying along the banks like a church congregation: slow and electric. Sometimes when you’re walking over the river rock, feet slipping on the polished stone, you will find a button, a pin, a metal can, some hapless, hungry miner left behind or the broken shoe discarded like the stones in his search for glory. If you listen you can hear all their banter in the Abbot Ghost Town. Here is where they slept—a rusted wire bedspring, a coil of wire. They called this place Esmerelda, setting their machinery loose upon the valley, gobbling rock, tree, river.
That was in the daytime, and that was what they called work, and that was what they were paid for, and that was why they came in the first place. But in the night-time, with the sky pitch black and punctured with little white dots like a million pin-hole cameras, the oil and smoke and growl all quietly quiet, the men muddied and cut and bruised, their work finished and their loved ones always far far away, at night their minds couldn’t drown out the noise of their dreams, the aches and muscle memories of their lovers and children. At night—and this was every night—they had to convince themselves it was all worth it, and this was something required of them, and this is why some of them returned to find their families not families anymore. And yet they came back, spring after spring, leaving late in the fall sleep-deprived and horny and unable to calm themselves in the civil ways you and I can.
But here’s the secret: they didn’t return for the fool’s gold, or the smoke, the bars or the whores. They returned in search of their spirits. Because that’s what they found under the rock, the sand of the river, the echo of the wind in the trees. A force there is no name for. No maria. No mother or father. When they are still it creeps into their bedrolls and keeps them company on those sleepless nights when looking at the inky river they wonder why they can’t stay away. They taste it in their food along with the fine grit and charred meat. They taste it in the water, cold and sweet. They breathe in the air at dusk and think there is always another stretch of the river to dredge, another day to do it in, and another night to contemplate a routine that if contemplated too much will lead its contemplator to do little else but dream mediocre dreams into compromises, and we all know there’s no need to venture past our own doorsteps—let alone tackle the force of a young river—if all we ultimately do is settle on settling and dreaming the dreams others have told us to dream. And that is why I brought you here. Do you see?
Or, rather, can you feel it there, like a feather—a tickle just short of a laugh but more than a whisper? Can you see it, the way the sun splits the sky into a rainbow of color, a dewdrop on the head of a pin? The black squirrel chatters and we laugh thinking he is scolding us away from his dinner. What he is really saying is: Beware. Be careful of what you wish for because you can certainly find it here.
Always Driven to the End
This is the speed limit marked not out of ceremony but as a real and legit warning.
This is the skin of the asphalt. It does not forgive but it has no memory and thus does not forget.
This is the curve of her. Look closely now.
This is where they engraved his poem into the stone for her. It’s the one he wrote as a prayer because he was too broken to say anything else that might matter. It’s for this reason religion even exists: the beautiful lie.
This is the wind constantly blowing and it does not follow your rules or expectations, so just stop it.
This is the way her childhood friends are trying to remember. But they are incapable of knowing the past because they are persistently trapped in their own present tenses, just like everyone, and especially so many years later where memories are manufactured for the occasion. See how they are holding hands and embracing and breathing deep. That, too, will go away and become something else.
This is the dress she was wearing before she wasn’t wearing it. Pay attention, please. This is important.
This is a picture of her. And another. And another. And another. She was loved by exactly four people and she had a bigger family than that.
This is her favorite cassette tape. She put the music on it herself and at least half the songs make references to things you’d probably just assume about her anyway. But that’s because you’re a hypocrite. Shame on you.
This is her report card from 2nd grade, when she was a G & T kid and read at a 10th grade level and could work algebra and would have had perfect attendance if her father would have just let well enough alone.
This is where you park your car if you want to visit her. In the periphery you will see horses and hear the pasture sprinklers click-clack-clicking. It’s hard to know how she’d really feel about this, by the way. You should at least consider that before you show up unannounced. And make sure to watch where you’re walking.
This is regret and shame, is what it’s supposed to feel like. Maybe you understand.
Maybe you don’t.
This is a rumor about her. And another. And another. And another. They all outlived her. That’s the essence of what we mean when we say mean.
This is something she wrote for you but never sent it.
This is the very last thing she heard. Or so someone else said. Or maybe it was this thing. Or that. Or another someone else. It may not matter, but she definitely heard something.
This is something she did write and did send, but it wasn’t for you. How on earth did you get it?
This is the other dress she was wearing, the one she gave to the friend the day the friend got married. It was complicated, to say the least.
This is the end. It always was.
When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
Read your James Joyce and your Henry James and your James Franco and your James Brown. Anyone with the given or surname James. James Frey. Yes, even him. Maybe especially him. More than anyone, you should most definitely be reading James Frey. Right now. Drop everything. Because the veracity of things and people and events and memory is all behind you now. Don’t pass up this opportunity your recent death affords you in this regard. Smile, you mope, you miserable bastard.
Life ISN’T ABOUT WAITING FOR THE STORM TO PASS… IT’S ABOUT LEARNING TO dance in the rain.
Unsolicited Advice
Try your absolute hardest not to be swayed or comforted when Sig.Other says It’s Not A Competition. Because it is. And when this is said, keep in mind Sig.Other has already processed and maneuvered the thoughts around the obvious. That’s how Sig.Other ultimately feels confident saying something like this in the first place, don’t you know.