By way of conclusion—I need to say I had divided a pack of gems between Liz and myself. In doing this, I’d forgotten my brother. The nonpareils, I wear in my ears.
There was that tapping again—a repeated and demonic phrase—and the repellent sight of animals through the glass.
They are my very own public property.
Such bollixed and blank expressions.
These flocks and herds and creeping things! Don’t you think they all go to work so wretchedly for what then never amounts to a feast for the soul?
How to live: there are two factors to consider—my husband says there are five!—and one of them puts me into a rage.
My fingers are graceful when I lay the table. My voice is clear when I speak. For God’s sake! For the Lord’s got such style, such originality and boldness.
PERSONAL DETAILS
On the avenue, I was unavoidably stuck inside of an uproar when the wind locked itself in front of my face.
Nevertheless, I had a smeary view of a child in the whirlwind who was walking backward. He was carrying his jacket instead of wearing it. And he kicked up his feet with such aptitude.
In a luncheonette that I took cover in, I overheard, “Yes, I do mind…”—this, while I was raising and rearranging memories of many people’s personal details, tryst locales, endearments—faces, genitalia, like Jimmy T’s, or Lee’s, which I pine for.
This is regular work with regular work hours that I do.
Through the windowpane of the coffee shop, I could see clearly into a hair salon across the street where two men—both with hairbrushes and small, handheld dryers—together—downstroked the mane of a cloaked woman.
The men were performing feats of legerdemain. Streamers sprang up around her head, as if snakes or dragons were busy eating their own tails.
And then, weighing down her shoulders, there was the golden hoard—for future use—of bullshit.
FLYING THINGS
The Bucky’s waitress says she is happy to have back that amorous part of her life and that this makes her less of a Plainer Jane.
And, with an old man named Humphrey, she says she’s made a pretty bargain.
Today she said, “I’ll take some of this, too!” and she took a gulp of my water.
And we enjoy laughing about the poor hot beverages she serves and about our divorced husbands. Although my partner in marriage, Ray, was nobody to laugh about—Ellie always says she’ll clear the decks to ignore that.
The surrogate judge I work for, Maxine Joe, was also run over and she was really flattened, but she is doing so much better. She is the kind of gold you see in a museum and she is extremely dedicated and she works hard.
Maxine took papers out of my hands and she said, “Can you postpone?” She meant my trip to Hot Springs.
It was a warmish day—mild. There were flies in the office. I got down on my knees to chase one.
Does a fly reminisce about a good time?—thinking, I’ll do that again tomorrow. It had been sitting on my hand for a moment. Does it plan to go into a different room and sit on a sleeve, or a desk, or a wall? Is it thinking, I’ll hook onto something and get attached there long enough to get killed?
I had noticed today a man running in the park, no shirt, no socks. He did have shorts on. Maxine had brought in hyacinths and she said she had met a new man. It strikes me how, uh, how everyone is looking for a partner, wondering, What now?
It is remarkable—every person! This woman who is married—in our office—can now approach Hugh the office manager. Even this young Australian boy is starting to have an interest in Dyana.
But life isn’t quite like that.
HOW BLOWN UP
A server making noisy cascades was busy refilling their glasses with ice water from a tall pitcher.
That’s what it was like in there—all peppy! Wouldn’t you know it? It had not been a period of decline.
Having made up her mind, “Why—excuse me,” the woman said peremptorily. She left the café and stepped out into the rain. She was not scaled down or reversed in her views.
There was a car just outside that she stepped into. No daylight any longer.
She rode in the taxicab toward a higher order on account of the movement of her thought.
Here’s the spot!
We shall see!
Do you know how the animals got their tails? How the lesser gods came into the world?
The longer this goddess lives, the more she shakes her tail—or pulls on it with all her strength.
SIGH
Why would anyone be fearful that the man might become distressed or that he might lose his temper in their bedroom?
He is a calm man by nature and not liable to break anything really nice by accident.
He had decided to disrobe in there—where they keep their Polish woman statuette and the fish dish they use for loose coins.
To be civilized, this man had asked to meet with his wife’s new husband.
The three drank tea together, impromptu, from souvenir mugs and paid mind to one another’s questions and the uninformative replies. Next, the man had stepped into their bedroom, towing his roller board, after inquiring if he could change into more comfortable clothes in preparation for his travel.
He said he’d be leaving soon enough—flying into the northeast corridor that he’d heard was an absolute quagmire.
Hard rain had been falling freely and for several days. In addition, now they were suffering occasional sleet. The pressure, the moisture, and the black clouds were progressing.
This is a humid, continental climate in turmoil.
“You’re wearing that?” the wife said, when the man reemerged in Spandex fitness apparel.
“We found it in Two Dot! You don’t remember?” he said—fondly patting lightly his own chest. “It’s breathable. It’s stretchable.”
“I thought it was in Geraldine,” the wife said.
“But look here, maybe you should stay the night,” the new husband said. He offered seed cake and coffee—the mild and friendly kind—this time, to drink.
“What are you doing?” said the wife—for her husband’s hands were filled with the sugar bowl and the creamer and several cups were swinging from his fingers by their ears.
All so beautifully turned out, the dishes found the table’s surface safely. These were specimens of the most romantic china service. The gilding was very good—the glaze finely crazed. There were hand-painted sprays on an apple-green ground.
“I hope you are a comfort to her,” the man said, “and that you show good sense. Because this is what it is—doesn’t everybody have to take care of Tasha?” He did not refer to her sex behavior and instead spoke generally about the dell they had once lived in and lunged silently at his disappointment that he could no longer touch his former wife. He extolled the mountain town where the wife had often reflected that looking up and out, say, over at an elevated ridge—was to her advantage.
Now she resided in this flatter state in an apartment on the third floor across from the church—from where she could see its spire.
Her glance often ran recklessly toward it, as if spurting over a rim, or through a spout.
The chancel and the sanctuary had lately been under ugly scaffolding. A few years back, one of the two aisle rose windows had been carried away for restoration and had not been returned yet.
Fortunately, the inner-draw draperies of the couple’s window facing the church were made of cheerful chintz.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if I stayed,” the man said. “Well, sure, yes, absolutely, you bet!” he said. “I’m a little nervous.”
He prepared to eat by sitting down and stressing his jaws with a big smile.
His cheeks are elongated and hollow—his brow highly peaked. His face is not difficult to explain—it’s cathedral-like.
The new husband’s whole head has an unfinished look that promises to work out well. Whereas the wife’s furrowed face—some have said—shows heavy evide
nce of deception and is cause for alarm.
Right then, in front of them, the woman uncapped a tube of gel ointment and applied a dab of it under a long fingernail. Next she opened a cellophane packet from which she withdrew a cracker that produced plenty of crumbs.
The husband told the man, “Surely you’d be welcome to stay!”
As the wife mopped up her particles and the traces, she spoke somewhat rudely to the man and also to her husband.
“I went somewhere…” the man said, expanding on a point. Hadn’t he been molded to better express himself?
A small object’s overall smallness on a shelf caught his eye—a round-bodied jar of free-blown glass whose neck was straight, that had flat shoulders—a flask he would not get to smash! It was streaked with permanent crimson and cold black. It had about it the real suggestion of the softness of human flesh.
“Did you imagine me the way I am?” the man asked the new husband, who answered no.
“What do you mean?”
“But I am not against you,” the husband said.
“Say a little more.”
Sirens in the street produced a brief, headstrong fugue.
“Say a little more,” said the man.
The husband got up from his chair. Why should anyone be fearful of his certain combinations of words, narrowly spaced?
The husband gave himself ample time to speak.
No gross vices were explored. His is not the voice of a man in the pulpit. No personal impulses were defined or analyzed.
He did deliver a slovenly interrogatory.
He went uphill, downhill with—“Wah-aaaaaaaat waaahz it ligh-ike, with herrrrrrrrr-rah, for you-ooooooo—?”
That’s all that he was saying.
Nothing seemed to want to end it.
THERE IS ALWAYS A HESITATION BEFORE TURNING IN A FINISHED JOB
Beneath his coat, when I first met him, his shirt had seemed to have broken out into an inflammation—into a lavish plaid or a strong enough checkered pattern.
There was the stretch of time when my future materialized on account of Dan.
We fried things on the stove top and made coffee. Formerly, I had been disabled and chilled, the usual story—so then the hamburgers had become fun.
Dan was doing the job of keeping us together and he was creating a little garden at the back of the house and the garden was extending onto the beach and the garden didn’t have any grass to speak of, but we had this vision of growing things there. There was a daisy we were trying to grow. There was another flower that looked like an artichoke, but it was not only to be a garden of landscape plantings. It was supposed to be equal to our worth.
One day when we were out in the garden, a dog that had been chasing a rabbit came up to us. Dan said hello and we kept that dog. It was a tan dog and it was a mix of the best available species and the dog was trembling. He had that look in his eyes. He had the heart to do any work that was necessary, but we had nothing for him to do. And I was struck by how the dog was featuring so prominently. For instance, we might think to go someplace, but would the dog like it?
The dog had his leisure hours and Dan and I had been together longer than I expected and I was all tired out because we had indulged ourselves in every desire.
Although, occasionally, we still had a lustrous sunny day with lots of time in it, more than usual.
These days, when we tie up the dog in the yard we can barely bend to weed.
The weeds and the dead flowers—clumps—are like the stacks of our used dishes with the dribs of jelly and bite-marked bread crusts that are hardly ever put away.
So how much more describing is necessary to assess if we’re done expecting something even more fortunate to turn up?
I was stepping into a corridor. It was empty except for Dan. He moved backward awkwardly, but then his face rose toward me like a steel magnet and it landed on my face with a bump. He has an enormous head and pale-pigmented skin.
I ran into him again later.
And then there was a long, long time without my seeing another human being.
And after the last years were over, we were dead.
THE MERMAID POSE
The mother had fought a small cause to prevent the little girl from sticking her hand into the pond to try to catch a fish, but the child fell in and went under. Which of them did the wrong thing?
The father wrapped his hands around the crying child’s neck as he lifted her up and out and the mother shook droplets from the wetted front of her own skirt.
A rose of Sharon—like an old Chinese, hand-painted lacquer screen—obscured the sight of anything more of them, as the group left. But the mother, I could hear her saying—“The what? I will not!”
But to get back to the pond!—we were at the Burnett Fountain in the Conservatory Garden where a bronze boy toots on a flute at the feet of a bronze girl who holds her overflowing bowl high.
Legs together—the boy reclines in a mermaid pose—and people in other mermaid poses had been taking turns being photographed on the stone pavers at the edge of the reflecting pool that was filled with the blue lilies and the fish.
I also lowered myself so that I was elongated and bent at the waist.
I watched a creamy madcap one ploughing among the others that were, most of them, too good to be true.
I felt an unimaginable touch. Oh, to be sweetly signaled.
A hand pressed against my back. “Come along, Kitty. We’re late. You wanted a bath.”
He kissed his fingers in tribute to me as I turned. And I got up with slow progress, trying for a look of extreme gladness, brushing off the back of my clothing.
A dead or disabled raccoon on the sidewalk, near the hospital, en route home, was attracting several lookers-on—partially on its side—with its legs opened up like scissor blades.
We’ve heard these animals in the trees and guessed what they were doing up there that always sounds so beyond the pale.
This was just going to be a sponge bath, God willing.
“You’re clean enough already,” my husband said.
So that was dear of him and the lineaments of his face are stamped with his best intentions whether he has any of those or not.
I am teal and gray and added colors. I’ve done nothing to hide the ugliness of my elderly body. And let others regret that my character has no allure, because I am worn-out with that also.
We have a roll-top bathtub I had stepped into. I tried to sit. I was angled painfully and wedged on top of one foot—as if I am intent to prove the impossible—that I don’t fit in.
GREED
Each child had a claim to a pile of jewelry when my paternal grandmother died—and how did they determine who was to have which pile?
The heirs were sent into an adjacent room and a trustee called out loudly enough to be heard by all of them—“Who will have this pile?”
My father said he shouted—“August Wilhelm will have this pile!”
Thus, my mother eventually received two gem-set rings that she wore as a pair until she achieved an advanced age and then she amalgamated the two of them into one—so that the diamonds and the sapphires were impressively bulked together.
I had to have it. It was a phantasmagoria. I selected it after my mother’s death, not because I liked it, but because it offers the memory of my mother and of the awkward, temporarily placed cold comfort that she gave me.
It’s hard to believe that our affair was so long ago.
CLARINDA
This seemed to be my chance. He was obviously—I have tried not to focus on that quality. Although this was not Providence protruding into my life and sticking its big hand out in a hello.
He said, “This happens to me all of the time! Can you help me? You look just like the woman on the bus who was sitting across from me, except for the hair. I have to get something for my daughter. Should I buy TRESemmé?”
“Buy this one,” I said. “I am sure your daughter would like something fancy.”
Then the man said, “I smell a bakery.”
“You said, ‘I smell a bakery’?”
“Yes.”
“I smell it, too.”
“I hate it!” the man said.
“You said you hate it?”
We must have talked for many minutes more about his daughter, and after that I bought plain bond paper and a packet of rubber bands.
I wish he had seemed genuinely impressed by me.
As to the life he was leading, he said there was no wife.
I have always thought I was a careful person, but apparently I can surprise myself.
One aspect of the whole situation is that it would soon seem to be normal.
We now sleep in the same bed, drink one or two glasses of neat whiskey before dinner.
He’s remained with me in my house and so has Clarinda.
Clarinda’s a flower that’s growing that we cannot gather.
She’s not a child and she holds an important position here.
I have forgotten that the man is her father. That is sad to say and sad to hear. I consider her to be my husband’s much younger and his better partner—for the pair of them scorn very similar things.
Often when I make the beds before I start supper, I can forget my family troubles that are unfunny or enigmatic. But soon they come back to me, as if in secret I’d had a coughing fit.
Such misfortunes are like the common corn cockle flowers on the fabric of my wing chairs. Never delicate—the way they’ve lasted—and isn’t it my task to admire them? Didn’t I select it?—that chintz—with slight reluctance, but unguardedly.
THE SKOL
In the ocean, Mrs. Clavey decided to advance on foot at shoulder-high depth. A tiny swallow of the water coincided with her deliberation. It tasted like a cold, salted variety of her favorite payang congou tea. She didn’t intend to drink more, but she did drink—more.
THE THICKENING WISH
Typically, he walks far enough north so that he sees the bridge and he appears to be so casual as he passes objects, the people, rusticated arcades, and heavy keystones.
Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine Page 3