Bodies

After a local music show, my friends and I stand outside the club, crunching our shoulders in the cold and saying good-byes with high fives when a muscly meathead with a cigarette wedged within his mouth speedily swaggers by. Behind him, hobbling on high heels, a young woman hounds him. “Oh shit, you gonna do it?” She asks. “That’s my boy’s girl.” He says over his shoulder before descending upon two forty-something adults macking on one another. The meathead attacks, verbally, shouting, “Are you fuckin’ him? You fuckin’ him? You’re my boy’s girl and you’re fuckin’ him!” Yanked from the privacy of their plastered states, the man, a scrawny leather faced guy, backs away from the woman, a chub with black mascara smeared in circles beneath her eyes. Without waiting for any sort of response, for this performance was clearly all he wanted, the accuser turns and begins swaggering away. Then suddenly, behind him, his “boy’s girl” attacks the “oh shit, you gonna do it” girl, causing both sloshed sluts to crash clumsily to the cement. Then all four belligerent boneheads are rolling around on the sidewalk, bumping into parking meters and slurring nervous nonsense. Then the doors to the club open and three security guards rush out and pull apart the fight. My friends and I watch, stepping back slightly toward the curb. The security guards appear to know the man with the leather face and with the fury of fully extended arms, they scold him like a child. “Go home, Kenny! GO. HOME.” Once all four fighters are finally gone, the guards are blazing with the same self-importance that the swaggering meathead had.  Like somehow this all mattered: this drunken brawl outside a crappy club.

I currently cannot help but feel that life and the living of it is not much more than simply passing time surviving until our predestined deaths. It is a drab one-sided discussion, a temporary clarity that will soon fog with the fleeting distractions of laughter, trivial traffic aggravations and trips to the grocery store, but for now all I can see are bodies. Legs, livers, ears, eyes, mouths, genitalia and belly buttons, nipples, necks, toenails and knees, ankles and elbows. In one foreign city, there are protests, bodies screaming for citizen rights, cursing political leaders on cardboard and running from police brutality. In another foreign city, suicide bombers are blowing up the bodies of innocent bystanders. And in American cities, drive by gang shootings are terminating teenage bodies while heart disease murders everyone else. Rows of ribs, lined shoulders and hairlines, eyebrows and thumbs, cuticles and tongues. 

In the middle of my world, my body stands with the narrow end of a hollow cone up to my eye, pointing it up and out. Giraffish ankles stand atop the long crooked bones of my flat feet and toes and my reddened elephant skin knees swing my calves and shins forward and back while I walk and I run. Hidden beneath my underwear, I have my pink doughy thighs, a bristly black lap, a fleshy stomach and two little white wine water balloon breasts. A shallow shelf of shoulder bones is mounted below my rounded shoulder tops, while on my sides, long strong arms lead to fingers built for piano playing, but left, instead, to the typing of stories and thoughts onto computer keys. A slender neck with a pin-top freckle on its middle holds my head, which is covered with dark wavy hair and a pale pink face where my lips are like a peach colored pullout couch for my soft squishy tongue and pearly round teeth.  My body's skeleton of calcium and marrow matter is made like other bodies and my thin pale skin is freckled by the same sun, yet I am still myself unique. I may appear not much different from anyone else, but to me I am familiar and therefore complexly distinct.

My friends, Mark and Amy, my husband, Scott, and I recently moved into an apartment in a two-family house, taking the place of a quiet old woman and her cat. On our move-in day last week, the downstairs tenant, a single mother of a twelve-year old boy, meets us all in the back stairway to say, "Ahhh… so this is why he made me sign a four month lease." Referring to the landlord and his decision to allow us, four young adults, to move into the two-bedroom apartment above her. I’ve never felt so unwelcome. Even after she practically declares that our move into her territory will lead to the demise of her happiness, the four of us remain unrequitedly respectful. "I'd like the parking spot that Analee used because I'm the oldest." She says, dividing her from us like the big kid on the kickball field, spouting out made up rules and uneven team lineups. We, all still very excited to move into our new place, agree.

On our first trash day, two days after moving in, she comes up to our kitchen door. She doesn’t knock, but stares down at Penny, our dog, who barks at her scowling face through the door's glass. The barking brings me out of my bedroom, where I am dressing, and I grab Penny by the collar and tell her to be quiet. When I unlock and open the door, I say a friendly hello. "Do you live here now too?" She asks with a sharp smirk. "I met you the other day." I tell her. “I’m Rachel.” "Oh" she says, avoiding apologies, "I didn't recognize you." "I just took a shower." I explain, shuffling my bangs to convince her. The trash barrel needs to go out, she tells me. “We’ll take it out.” I tell her. “It needs to go out tonight and it's almost dark.” She says. Is the trash truck coming in the middle of the night? I wonder. Couldn’t this wait? We have to leave for rehearsal in ten minutes and my hair is still wet. Scott takes over, telling her we are going to do it later that night and that she can put her trash in the barrel and that we'd take it all out when we got home later. “But the trash needs to go out Monday night.” She repeats. Scott surrenders to their inability to communicate clearly and goes to the basement to fetch the woman her barrel.

On our drive up to Greenfield for dinner, I tell my roommates that this is what racism must feel like (on a supremely smaller scale). They laugh, but I mean it. We, young adults, move into this high-class neighborhood and instead of being welcomed with fruitcake and smiles, we are shunned, despised unnecessarily for our age. I feel like we're being blamed for this woman’s divorce. Like we’re the reason she has to pay rent instead of a monthly mortgage payment. 


The woman from downstairs is unfamiliar to me. A stranger leaving me contradictory sticky notes on the door to the basement. A stranger shutting her shades from the world around it, enclosing herself with blinds and cotton curtains so that no one can see that she knows vulnerability. Upstairs, Amy’s pretty positive Bill from across the street has already seen her boobs several times, but she just laughs about how awkward he was when she introduced herself to him at the end of our driveway. 

(click on the photo to read)

It is difficult to feel remorse or any sort of emotion toward crowds or individual persons with unfamiliar faces because, I think, the soul is only visible when it is inside some sort of familiarity, causing the real struggle to be not judging strangers, not assuming others are meatheads, sluts or young irresponsible tenants who will probably scream profanities at dawn; vomit cheap beer on the front porch; host techno dance parties on Monday nights and invite drunken hobos to live in the entryway on cold and rainy nights. It is difficult to look past unfamiliar flesh, fingernails, eyeballs, noses and ears, hairstyles, legs and feet to something closer to souls. 


Scott suggests we have the woman and her son over for dinner. Amy and I refuse. “I don’t want to make her dinner just so that she can criticize my or Rachel’s cooking.” Amy says. “And I don’t want to spend an awkward evening with the woman.”  I say. “Yeah and her son creeps me out. He'll probably try to kill us.” Yet Scott is probably right. Having the woman over for dinner could reduce her judgments by making us familiar to her. However, it might also ripen her discrimination, giving her more material to hate us. Why do they have an anchor on the wall, a deer skull in a pretty serving bowl and a Muhammad Ali poster over the stove that reads, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”? What weirdos they are with their action figures posed on secondhand spice racks, comic books stacked behind the toilet bowl and was that Darth Vader climbing up the back of the knife block? Yes. 

But must familiarity be present to feel compassion or connection? Is it necessary in order for one to look at tragedy and actually see it? To look at a pile of naked skin and see souls. To look at a woman’s body and see a mother of three with green glassy eyes, endearingly crooked teeth, and a remarkable talent for making the neighborhood children laugh. To look at a man’s body and see the local pub's storyteller, an expert builder and a lover of many. To look at the body of a child and see an eight-year-old girl with dirty blond hair, fantastic cursive writing and a fear of loud sounds. What if the world were as small as many say it is after accidental meetings with old friends in unexpected places? Oh my, what a small world. Would the lady downstairs have given us a chance to show her how responsible and respectful we are? Would I not have immediately hated those drunken sidewalk fighters? I doubt it.

I sometimes feel damaged by my inability to think of life in simple terms. To look at white bread and not see its artificial coloring and forty count ingredient list. I can only wonder what it might be like to live without unending observations and assumptions about the meaning or lack of meaning in people, life and reproduction. To see Earth differently from an ant farm in a universe of giants. 


I have recently given up caffeine. Beautiful black cups of coffee and steamy chai tea lattes are the prime suspects to the recent murder of my clear skin, it seems, and until I can prove otherwise, caffeine is locked up in a cupboard. I say this because I believe this withdrawal is partially to blame for my recent lack of hope in humanity. It is also the dead of February and the ice and snow are conspiring, convincing me that spring and summer are just figments of my busy imagination. Tired and frozen, my body is learning how to generate organic optimism and until I catch up with this fleeing feeling, I am pounding computer keys like the nose of a mouse in a maze. 




I am not heartless, just unfamiliar to and from it all.