On those late afternoons and evenings when his mother repeated her unfortunate story, one he could almost recite in unison with her, he undertook the opposite direction. What for her was uncontrolled, U controlled. Replacing the old feeling of the world falling down on him and the unbearable responsibility to heave it back up was an uncommon world, unmoored and monumental. U-bodies stood with an uplift, torsos undaunted.
The Plunge of V
“I’m coming with you!” V cried to Adam and Eve, “I’m taking your plunge!”
And V leapt from the place she’d been born (in the crook of a branch of the Tree of Knowledge) onto the stunned couple. She planted her imprint in the animal skins they hugged around them, creating the first primitive couture, furry V-necked vestments they could fit over their heads. Then they left the verdure of the Garden to venture into the cold.
V had to go with them. How could she stay living in innocence? She was born to be fashionable.
Through the centuries her point became more precise (especially after the invention of scissors), yet V was not interested in making points, but in being them.
V always pointed down toward the vestibule of the vagina, but V’s pride was more than the vajayjay, it was the plunge, the valiant leap into the void.
She sprang to the wings on the helmets of the Visigoths, dove off ledges to the halls of Valhalla, folded herself into the inner elbows of the multiple arms of Vishnu.
V invested herself everywhere, from the V of the geese in fall to the In vino veritas signs above the wine bar.
Revelation was V’s position, even when she climbed inside the quavers of the voices of high school valedictorians. “I’m coming with you!” she always shouted, varooming into their visions.
She never wanted to be left behind. She always wanted to go forward, an arrow of a vibrant universal form—even on something as tame as the collar of a man without a tie or the blouse open to a woman’s cleavage by just one more button. Maintaining the adventure of flesh, she was voluptuous, but also a little vestal. She peeked from the necklines of Vermeer’s virgins and out from the crook of the seamstress’s thumb and index finger in paintings by Vuillard.
V had the memory of the long view. She never forgot how she vexed a vengeful deity as she leapt from innocence to become a veritable spiritual couturière. Her adventure is still a vestige of every journey. Even now V vaults onto travelers’ clothes as they revolve in suitcases turning in every baggage carousel from Venice to Vladivostok. V burrows into each traveler’s thought of liberty and frames the chest, the breast, the heart (even as it might reveal a scar), inserting her valor into their vast unknown.
Wacktastic!
Why be? To witness another’s existence, of course.
Wisteria was the ordinary daughter of a warlock, and Wittle was the normal son of a witch. They lived in neighboring skyscrapers across a wide West Side street. Luckily, their two windows were directly across from each other. Below, the street was busy with people and vehicles and dogs and deliveries, and all that goes on in city life.
Once wee Wittle realized there was another small being across the way, he waved, and with no hesitation little Wisteria waved right back. They made signs to one another through their high-up, firmly closed windows, and their gestures became a whole way of talking without words. Sometimes, though, they wrote big letters on the overheated steam of their windows in winter. But when the radiators clanked, the letters dripped away. In summer, when they opened the windows and tried to shout, their words wizzled off on the breeze. It turned out that signaling worked best.
The buildings they lived in were the old-fashioned kind with cast iron window frames with huge locks and comfortably wide ledges. Wisteria’s building had higher maintenance fees and a much more regular window washer, a whiskery, warty fellow. Wisteria would watch him rappel along her building with his ropes and bucket, sitting on his flat board. When he got to her window, she leaned out and had a chat. Then he sailed on down, down to the street, the world.
Wittle and Wisteria were classmates in the weird school of life that was framed by two windows of two children locked in their rooms by a mother witch and a daddy warlock. As Wittle sharpened his wits on reading, Wisteria wrote. And the warty window washer whizzed by.
One day Wittle saw that across the street the warlock was wrenching Wisteria’s elbow. He saw her wince. He saw her wilt.
Later that day he saw the cast on her arm.
That night he saw the warped warlock in remorse bring Wisteria a West Highland terrier puppy.
From her window Wisteria would often see the witch racking up yet another spell on Wittle, sure she could wrangle the normal boy into witchcraft. Wisteria saw Wittle drink each brew. She air-spelled WOOZY? She watched as he waggled, wobbled, and wove back and forth in the throes of the whopping potions. She signaled WHOA!
Years winnowed the two of them. Years whammed them. Years wrung Wittle and Wisteria up into a young man and a young woman. The West Highland terrier learned his tricks at a whistle. Wisteria could have become a waif, or worse, a wraith, but instead she became willowy and a little bit wild. Years of woe became years of woo.
They could have whined, and some times they did. But they wallowed in their Weltschmerz together. Well, as together as two individuals signaling from window to window can be. Watched by a dog. And a warty, whiskery window washer.
Wittle could have become a wimp, but instead he became a wrestler of thoughts, and, recently, a wrencher of wire. One of the witch’s failed attempts to whorl him into a wizard had yielded a long, thick many-plied wire. He hooked it up in his room and entertained himself by walking across it. Day after day he raised the wire, first from the heat registers, then to the doorknobs, and last to the plant hooks in the ceiling.
Wisteria signaled WISH.
Wittle signaled WANT. He hurled the wire across the street, and missed.
Wisteria shrugged WHOOPS.
Wittle waved WAIT. He hurled it again. And again.
The window washer watched. He waved to Wisteria. And began to position his board and ropes.
Wisteria gesticulated WHEN?
Wittle frowned WORRIED.
Wisteria motioned WASHER.
Wittle hurled the wire again, and this time the whiskery, warty fellow caught it and helped Wisteria secure it to the iron window lock. Wittle crept out over the traffic. By the time he thought, Don’t wuck everything up, he had whizzed across the wire!
The Westie jumped into the basket where Wisteria had packed her notebooks, and the window washer began to lower them all to the street.
“My worthy,” Wisteria whispered.
“My wonder,” Wittle whispered.
Once they got down, they donned the disguises the window washer had brought them: the big white aprons they’d wear at Waffle World where jobs awaited them. They’d have to learn to live by their wits. But, really, they had already been doing that. For them it was quite normal to outwit a witch and a warlock. But it wasn’t quite normal to say “love.” They wouldn’t say that for a long, long time, not till they left their jobs at Waffle World after Wisteria sold the film rights to her memoir.
But right now, balancing on the window washer’s board, shocked at the sound of each other’s voices, they became immediately shy and reverted to gestures until they reached the street.
Wisteria mouthed WHEEEE!
And Wittle pointed from himself to her, WE.
“Now watch that bucket!” warned the window washer.
Woof barked the Westie.
X Marks Her Spot (with Lipstick)
When X got home from her brush with mortality—just a little quadruple bypass—she decided that her new heroines would be exceedingly vigorous and mature despite pesky ailments like heart trouble. She chose two. One came from the afterlife: Diana Vreeland (who mounted a dozen costume exhibits extraordinaires before her heart failed at eighty-six). Among the still living, she took as a heroine the spirited Diana Athill, celebrated edito
r and memoirist, keeping up her elucidating correspondence at ninety-six. These exquisite women were not exempt from death, obviously, but they made the ends of their lives into excursions, in mind if not in body—artistic, fashionable, spiritual brief adventures.
Because both Diana A. and Diana V. advised the wearing of makeup in advanced age, X decided to make a short excursion of her own to an exclusive makeup counter, one of those exorbitant places that, to her, was both exhilarating and exhausting. She was determined to try to exhume a shade of lipstick she’d worn many years ago. Colors always come back from exile.
Now X didn’t want to exaggerate the momentousness of this adventure, but at the makeup counter she thought she might find the perfect spot between life and death, the place of x-ing out, the border crossing, so to speak.
A sparkling young man helped her explore all the different shades, but she could not find her old fave, Extravaganza, a honey hue. The best he could do was Xanadu. Just a particle different. Slightly more evolved. As anything reincarnated into the next level of life would be.
The end of existence, it’s just external, isn’t it? That’s what X now thought. When you expire, she believed, you just transform. You extricate yourself from human form and start to become something else. A nice cloud of ashes to scatter downwind, she hoped, and not in the face of whoever threw them. Or a nice bit of compost.
Long ago X began to explore the great traditions, the ones that attempt to explain life and death. As advised by her teachers, she started with Socrates. After she examined what Epicurus and Epictetus had to say (that took her college years), she expended her young woman’s energy on the exasperating truths of Buddha. It was only as she aged that they began to make excellent sense to her. Of course, she found ideas about the here and the hereafter in the Bible. And more in the Bhagavad Gita. But so many of the ideas overlapped. Where did they come from, anyway? How did they circulate? They weren’t ex nihilo. This persuaded her toward reincarnation.
There was a way, she slyly thought, that major ideas were just like minor lipstick colors. They kept circulating, going into exile, so to speak, each one an exemplar of a color for a season, and then slightly altered for the next season, and you just waited for them to come back, as if returning from a trip abroad. Ideas were never truly extinct. Take passive resistance, for example. Or even the rotten ones, like misogyny. They seemed to be extinguished, but then they came back! Some thoughts she wished would just exit permanently. (And some colors be extirpated, too.) Yet you couldn’t exorcise them. Even an execrable idea comes back and seems exotic to those who’ve never experimented with it. Ideas were like stars blinking on and off. Or moon phases.
The night sky excited X—and appalled her. The immensity. The vastness of it. She was so small. Smaller than a sequin. Than a dot. A minim. She was like a molecule. A nanosecond. How could an X mark her spot? What was she worth? Her insignificance used to terrify her. Yet here at the makeup counter, among the many mirrors and the choices of colors whose caps sparkled like the stars, reflecting and refracting, she was. X knew her spot. Right in that mirror. Even though she was a fleck, she was a world.
Perhaps, she reasoned, passing out of the mirrored world was like passing into the universe—being exported out there among all the other ideas.
She liked the fact that she was having notions that others had had centuries before, that they somehow were being passed on to her, as if through the air. Inspired by the exhalations of breath from centuries past, she felt strangely secure in a translucent chain of being, each link pale but evident, like shades of moonlight. Which do I prefer, the sun or the moon? X asked herself. Which one, the thing clearly seen—or the thing in mystery?
“Would you like the Xanadu to replace the Extravaganza?” asked the sparkling young man at the counter.
“I’ll try Xanadu,” she replied. “Let’s experiment.” With a mental wave to the living Diana A., she continued on her expedition, crossing the universe (eventually) toward her other heroine, Diana V., and well beyond.
yet, Yes
When ys are young, their leg hangs below the line, and curves, and they slalom around on it happily until the curve gradually straightens, and then, in a Herculean coming-of-age effort, they make a capital leap to live the rest of their lives on top of the line.
But somehow y’s leg had never straightened; it had never lost its curve. Even though he was quite grown up, he lived half below the line. He often felt guilty, and couldn’t always enjoy all that was yelicious and yonderful.
“I put my foot in everything—yech!” y said to his partner Y, a regular Capital, at breakfast.
Y was placing yolk-perfect eggs before y with his slender hands, black hairs curling enticingly over the knuckles. “Not in everything. You put your foot through one thing, and you’ve magnified it a yillion times.”
y hopped over to the cupboard to get the jelly, ruffling the darling heads of their two adopted girls with yogurt mushed about their faces. Then he returned to his place, setting before him a group of photographs he had gotten up to look at again in the middle of the night.
“Put those damn photographs away!” his incredulous partner insisted, “Tear them up. AND delete them. Whenever you can’t sleep, you get them out and you decide you’re solely responsible!”
“Yes, I am,” y sighed, “because if it’s somebody’s fault then there’s a reason for being.”
“What!” Y fumed. “Two reasons for being are playing with their yogurt right this minute! Not to mention yours truly.”
“You’re right,” y said, “Yet. I can never rectify it all … I left. I just left him there.” It was always Yet with y.
His father had simply ignored the fact that his son’s leg never straightened. “Belly up to the line!” he would say to y. And one day Y Senior said even worse, “Climb up onto the roof!”
Father had fixed that roof when Grandfather was too old to climb, and now, when Father was too old, young y was supposed to. But when y tried to balance, his foot slipped through the wood rot up to his groin. His nails and hammer flew. It took sheer adrenalin and many attempts to lift his torso up through the shingles and crawl to a safe beam to look down at Father, yowling out his disappointment, and worse, disgust, but certainly no concern.
And that was when y left home.
He climbed carefully down from the roof and, lucky he still had a leg to stand on, traveled to this faraway city where he found his new home and his job. He embraced his good fortune at sharing it all with a man with beautiful arms, and with little Yuki and Yukon, now both with yogurt in their hair and yodeling in the way that little ys yell, and with their Yorkie yapping, and the domestic yawp continuing.
“Every day isn’t as yawful as you’d have it be, you know,” Y said. (They were yin and yang in the glass-half-full or half-empty department.)
That roof never was fixed. Yahoos got in. With their yucky paw prints still on the walls and beds, y’s father, in an act of pure frustration at his son who failed to honor the Laws of Yesteryear and just use his willpower to get up on the damn line, tore it down. And in an unfortunate fluke of timing, y’s old high school friend had driven out yonder, past the house, seen the demolition, and e-mailed him the photos.
A year passed. y’s father refused his frantic calls.
More years. y took up yoga. His father refused his infrequent calls.
Eventually Y Senior died of Inability to Yield. y delivered the eulogy.
Now it was another yuletide. y wiped his daughters’ little chins and listened to their yakety-yak while Y watched him eat his yummy meal.
“You made your stand,” Y said. Y had said this to his beloved y twenty-five times. He said it buttercup soft and dandelion brash. He brayed it as if a tawny hound. But y never seemed to hear him fully.
Yet on this morning y absorbed the statement. Having run through nearly an alphabet of excuses, he heard at last what fit him to the letter and understood the why of what he’d done.
&
nbsp; “When my leg crashed through the roof, I thought I ran away from the damage, but, really, I stood up against it all.”
“Yes! So throw those pictures out,” his partner said.
A leg is a base, whether it’s on the line or below the line, or no longer exists except in the mind, y thought flexibly, before he deleted the photos, breaking the final yoke. Later, as their two little yodelers practiced their carols, y mixed the Yorkshire pudding, and Y gave him a little shoulder massage. Mmmmm, yes.
Z at the Satisfactory
Like a very slow zipper closing link by link, the box turtle left a track through the glade, passing old Z’s bungalow, heading toward the road. The long retired zoologist observed the tetrapod. Just my speed, Z thought. Z was still on call at the Herpetological Rescue Center and made his bungalow a stopgap resting place for abandoned or injured creatures. Until yesterday he’d harbored a Zanzibar gecko with a bright blue tail. But the gecko’s new host (Z never liked the term owner) had picked up the reptile, and now his bungalow was empty. Good, Z thought, I need a rest. He watched as the Terrapene carolina bauri headed straight onto the macadam.
But what about the cars? Z panicked. Out he hobbled into the road to stop traffic, but the animal seemed oblivious. It went on, not fretting that its life lay in the path of violence—it had its own bizness to do. Z waved his arms at the cars, “Ztop! Ztop!” and the traffic halted while the turtle safely crossed. Then Z stood at the side of the road watching the turtle make its way into the glade.
Ever the observer, Z just couldn’t resist following it.
The dome-backed reptile led him deeper and deeper into the moist green light. A zephyr zithered its musical breeze. He tracked the critter, slowly, zlowly … Z was past his zipping and zooming days.
After a long, long time a leafy ziggurat appeared.
So it does exist! thought the old man.
Alphabetique, 26 Characteristic Fictions Page 7