I found a puddle and I fell in it.

Cracked and Crashing

2012-01-21T18:00:00.000-05:00

One awaits the next triple shot cappuccino, cigarette break, fudge gorge, bulging blunt, bottle of wine, pint of beer, shot of scotch, line of coke. Awaits the next sexual encounter with a stranger in a barroom bathroom. The next purge into a potty. The next slit into soft forearm skin. The next theft of x-rated magazines from corner stores, bicycles from dimly lit front porches, unlocked cars from grocery store parking lots. One anticipates, participates and then is (sometimes) pummeled into pits of regret from these ritualized tactics that make life bearable. One contemplates quitting an addiction, but if there isn't a vacation planned, a raise in order or any sort of prospect for golden happiness, what then is to prevent this person from creating small joys out of harsh adrenaline rushes and chemical dependencies?

I believe a life without daily coffee consumption is a life without joy. Every obstacle, gloomy moment and irritating task can be overcome once I've prescribed myself an appropriate dose of caffeine. We, coffee and I, fix everything. We say witty things to people we're partying with for the first time. We tell old friends we're eating brunch with that we love them. We go grocery shopping. We write for five hours. We take enormous emergency poops in the park. We crash. We weep, shakily spouting that nothing is working, everything is stupid, and that I had to shit in the woods again.

The day my tongue turns tan and coarse as a cat's is the day I decide coffee and I are in an abusive relationship. I need to take a break to gather my thoughts, I tell her. She isn't happy. Sends aches to my temples and seductive cravings to my mouth to meet her in the kitchen to get completely cracked out on her silkily intoxicating caffeine. I crave her with a sick constancy. But I am determined, at this time, to not allow winter to suck me into coffee cups, wine tumblers and beer bottles. When I quit, I am rewarded with rest. My ticker slows to its proper pace and my brain exhales, its little thought projectionist whooping in delight, relieved I no longer require him to run seventeen images at once with an internal dialogue of lists, worries and wonders. I feel my age of twenty-eight now as I welcome a little pessimism, sleepiness and secluded silence back into my life.

Coffee has been unexpectedly quiet since those first days of my detox. I'm sure she'll make one or two final pleas for a pleasurable and then remorseful reunion. We'll see how I do. My track record proves me weak. I sucked my fingers until I was nine years old. Like many others, there's just something in me that yearns for the comfort of a reliably familiar ritual that can temporarily separate me from the commotion of life.

The Throw Up Towel

2012-01-05T21:38:00.000-05:00

Along the back wall of the pharmacy, I find what I'm looking for: that finger cuticle-cutting tool. I buy it. At home, I open the package, remove the curved blade from its sheath and start shaving off dead skin. I am negligent, though, and blinded by eagerness to feel the nerves above my nails. And just as I finish my pinkie, I realize my index and middle fingers are bleeding. A deluge, really, as if I'd plucked two sandbags from the center of my skin's flood wall. I tear off a paper towel and attempt to sop up the red, but the blood won't clot. I keep my movements inconspicuously nonchalant, leaning against the kitchen sink while I talk with Scott and our friend, Sheila. But Scott notices and points it out, the edges of his mouth curving like a frowning clown in disgust. I hold up my red and white paper towel like an unwanted trophy. If you can't hide it, flaunt it. That's the saying, right? I then turn to the faucet and become an abstract painter, splattering the sink's surface with a watery crimson. After several minutes, the blood won't stop. I excuse myself.

In the shower, a red river runs toward my feet. After ten minutes, I leave the steamy tiles. Still bleeding, I stretch over the white bath mats for the sink. There, I drip onto the fat angel babies who fly amongst golden clouds in the sink's somewhat silly scene. I hold my hand under rushing water, but still, I bleed. I pull open Band-Aid wrappers and press the sticky sections around and around the tips of my two sore fingers. Four bandages total.

Later that night, before climbing into bed, I decide to free my fingers and take off the bandages. My fingers have stopped bleeding, but my nails are stained red. I tongue them clean, which I immediately regret. Then I climb into bed where I start to feel a bit queasy. The boys I nanny for had had some kind of stomach bug while we were separated by vacation. This nausea, I tell myself, is probably just a slow festering infection of the mind. I pick up my book, but after a couple pages have been flipped and pressed, another chapter digested, I close it and place it onto the corner of my bedside table. Scott comes into our room then and strips down to his underwear, a nightly ritual. In the winter, he climbs into the covers, clinging to me in my soft cotton sweatpants and long-sleeved tee shirts, waiting for his body heat to soften the icy sheet that drapes around him. Sometimes, despite the cold's threats and my angry pleads, he'll flap the covers, fanning cold air over my goosebumping limbs to line the comforter with the sheet. He has some Obsessive Compulsive Disorder tendencies. Last night, he climbs in and does his flapping thing, then makes some comment about how much I love him, to be cute. "I don't feel well." I grumble, curling my knees into my chest. He picks up his huge hard cover fantasy book about dragons, violent kings, and mystical creature armies, and starts talking about something. I don't know what. I'm not listening. I'm concentrating on my insides. Then I'm flipping back the covers, feeling sure that this frightening feeling, this metallically mouthwatering, rumbling tummy feeling is in fact happening. I run for the door that leads to the backyard. I rip it open and run outside. It's cold out, somewhere near 9 degrees. I am running to save the rug and my pajamas from the vomit that is reverberating and rising from my belly to my esophagus.

Oh how I fear throw up.

I haven't vomited for twelve years. The fear I have of puking no doubt stems from my mother, an openly gaging "would somebody please take care of that kid" kind of woman. She's not ashamed, nor proud. Just the way she is. Worst than my fear of personal puking is the retching of my mother. The sound of her repetitive dry heaves always seemed worse than actual vomit because it was the anticipation of vomit. Only this was no boy who cried wolf type of story. I never doubted the possibility that dry heaves could lead to wet spew. With four kids and a dog, it happened somewhat often. Every time the dog pooped in the house, for instance, she'd call my father from the kitchen telephone. Dad worked an hour away in Boston. "Marrrrrk, The dog shit (heave heave) damn it! The dog shit in the house again. Would you do something please?" I'd hear those heaves from my bedroom and wait for a splat on the kitchen tiles. When Mom would return to her senses and hang up, she'd holler for my brother to help. "PATRICK!" The only boy. I don't think he ever actually had to clean it up because I'd always hear the paper towel roll rapidly unraveling, some plastic spray bottle squeaking, and my mother gagging. She once puked in the side yard after we got home from somewhere. It was dark and I could hear her heaving into the bushes. I felt helpless. But that was the only time I witnessed my mother's produce actual barf.

When I was a kid home with the flu, it meant a day of Sesame Street, Saltine Crackers, Ginger Ale, and laying on the couch with a towel stretched over my pillow. Not an empty paint bucket from the garage or an old cooking pot from beneath the kitchen sink. No, we were given a stiff cotton bath towel for if we "couldn't make it". And one sick day, I couldn't make it and threw up on my towel, cupping the sour sludge from beneath. My dry-heaving mother came running, leading me to the toilet where I could respectfully finish my virus's exit strategy.

"Brush your teeth!" She'd instruct afterwards. I did as I was told, jabbing my cheap bristly toothbrush along my slimy teeth and washing the spit up from my chin. I then turned and picked up the THROW UP TOWEL to wipe my face. In our mad rush to the potty, Mom had thrown the vomit rag onto the hamper across from the sink and when I picked it up, tepid orange vomit splashed down toward our feet, causing a squealing fit flecked with my mother's horrible heaves.

I think she feared the cleaning up of vomit, like the dog shit. I think the scariest thought going through her head was, WHAT IF IT GETS ON SOMETHING! This fear always turned into frenzy whenever anyone debilitated by sickness in my family suddenly stood from the couch and mumbled anything like, "I think I have to...."

"Bathroom! GET TO THE BATHROOM!" She'd shriek from where ever she was cleaning, napping or reading.

Last night, fearing I will not make it to the toilet, I run outside. I stand on the stones of the back garden, holding my hair back. I separate my feet, squat my legs and bend forward. I imagine the baby carrots I have just eaten splattering across the stone wall in front of me and I try to remember where the hose is hooked up so that a quick and thorough clean can happen post puke. Scott says something to me then. Something about the bathroom and whether I can make it. I look back. He is standing, shirtless, pants-less, behind the glass door to our bedroom. He is shivering. He then tells me it probably isn't good that I'm standing out in the cold. Fed up and afraid he might see me upchuck, I walk around the side of the house. The door behind me closes. Good, I think, let me do this ALONE! I can do this. IcandothisDAMNIT! But then I start to feel the puke pass, like a ship dodging a dock. I decide to go inside to do the deed properly, into the porcelain potty. Scott has run inside to get dressed into sweatpants and a sweatshirt. He meets me in the kitchen. He doesn't know quite what to do. He looks a bit lost. Behind him, I beeline for the bathroom, close the door and kneel on the floor. I lean over the seat and purposefully inhale the smell of the toilet water. I breathe it in to encourage my rumbling tummy into discharging its yuckiness. Look at that lonely bowl of water where people POOP and PEE all the time! Remember what diarrhea looks like? Smelllllls like? Doesn't that make you want to puke? COME ON! Do it, body. Do it. ... Nothing happens. I could never be a bulimic. I stand up, disappointed in myself for the drama I have caused. I leave the loo. Scott holds forth a glass of crushed ice and a glass of water and we walk back to bed.

Once between the covers, I tell him that I'm feeling better. But then I notice that one of my previously bleeding cuticles is leaking blood again. I ask Scott for a few tissues from his bedside table. He gives me two, murmuring something about how that won't be enough. Still visibly disgusted by my blood, I see. Well, this little blood is NOTHING compared to what comes next. We hear it first, a painfully long puttering. The dreadful farting has begun. You know the kind. Those warm "LEAVE ME ALONE MY STOMACH HURTS!" kind of farts. I flap the blankets and the hot air that escapes is like a rotting skunk covered in pooping maggots. He waves his hands. The stench won't leave his nose alone, he says. A few jokes about shitting my pants pass between us as I doze off to dreamland.

It appears I've left one gagging caretaker for another.

Solitude

2011-12-29T23:52:00.002-05:00

Penny whines to wake me. "Quiet." I mumble, muffled, my face smushed within the furrows of my mother's guest room pillows. With eyes still crumpled closed, I curl back the covers like a stiff salty wave. I unfold and press my glasses to my eyes and stand. Eyes open. I stumble into sweatpants. Turn the door handle and pull. With stubbornly straight legs, I rock down the stairs. I bend and break Beau free from his rocking crate. We roll to the front door, our feet hollow beer barrels tumbling downhill. "Wanna go outside?" Claws scramble and scratch the stone foyer floor. Socks scuffle solo to the kitchen. COFFEE! The brown drips into my mug while I sit nearby on the pot, draining yellow. Beau clobbers the front door. Wipe. Flush. Wash hands. Pour cream into cup, watch it swirl and sink into new color. Let the dogs in. Sit and settle into the leather recliner. Move my computer to beneath my fingertips. The dogs sprawl onto the couch for first nap of the day. I sit writing. At noon, I stand and raise my hands high as if on a mountaintop. Dogs fall off the couch, excited to the point of humping. It's time! They're thinking (as much as dogs can think). But I'm not quite ready. I turn and run up the stairs two at a time. They follow. A three-beast stampede. Bathroom. Contact lenses, toothpaste, spit. Bedroom. Bra, sweatshirt, gloves, sunglasses, vest. Jump down the stairs. Scoop up my sneakers and sit. The dogs circle under my knees, knotting tails before I can loop my laces. Tied. Winter hat. Leashes from the junk drawer. LEASHES! Beau is leaping now like a dolphin. Penny tries to remain calm. "Sit. SIT Beau!" He twirls. Sits. I reach for his collar, but he poorly anticipates the click and is leaping again. "SIT!" Sitting. Reaching. Grabbing. Clicking. Penny remains sitting, as if Showing Off were the command. Headphones playing my new favorite album: Metals by Feist. Loop the leashes around my left hand. Down the driveway. Up the street. Smelling mailboxes. Peeing on everything. We walk for two hours along the horse trails, which are adjacent to most of the nearby roads. I avoid the blue cement when I can because Beau, the Border Collie, tries to herd every passing car. As trucks rumble toward us, he crouches in the dry winter grass and just as they pass, he sprints toward their sides. I squeeze his unintentional near-suicide around my hand, scolding his stupid habit while the large metallic sheep slow before continuing on their way. We trek down to the reservoir. It's a particularly windy day and I want to watch them hunt waves on the small sand. Four days, I live alone. Leashes tug me through thick grassy paths, along back roads and through my loosened thoughts. Home now. My cheeks pinked, my nose wet like the dogs'. I flick on the lights and separate muddy sneakers from socks, remove my fleece hat from saluting static and gloves from my cold, yellow fingers. I fill a tall glass with water. Penny drinks from her bowl. Beau slurps from the toilet. I'm eating mostly Christmas leftovers this week. I went to the grocery store on Tuesday, but got only dog food and lettuce. I find half of a baked chicken in the fridge. Put it in a pot of water over medium heat and empty a bag of baby carrots, some chopped celery and minced garlic. I build a fire in the fireplace. Sticks, chopped wood and numerous wooden matches. Nothing catches. No more newspapers. We burned them all. I dig wrapping paper from the trash cans in the garage and used tissues from the bathrooms. The chicken simmers on the stove. I sit back down to writing, salty corn chips beside me. The dogs fall back into sleeping, their feet jerking through dream games of chase. My mind traps and maneuvers thoughts into words and eventual sentences. I eat supper around 4PM because there is no one else to consider and cook for. Except for the dogs, who get big bowls of kibble as the sun dunks behind the rows of lanky trees in the front yard. Later, I turn on the television when the wind startles the pups into barking. Old reruns from the 90s. I glance up often before submitting entirely to the blissful escape that is a good sitcom. When I tire of typing and laugh tracks, I stand and let the dogs out one last time. They refuse. I don't blame them. The cold air feels hard, but I won't have any accidents at 4am and so I shoo them out, pushing their behinds with my shin. I turn off most of the house lights, but plug in the Christmas tree. I then call to my companions. I escort Beau to his crate and lead Penny upstairs. It's windy again, which means she's going to push her furry face between my ear and shoulder. I don't mind. And in the morning, she'll wake me with whining and I will do this all again. Happily.

Solitude selects me, sucks me from the traffic of life and spits me out onto this simple schedule of dog walking and words.

Fitting to Float

2011-12-28T12:51:00.002-05:00

Women write on theircardboard signs that they are pregnant and hungry. Men write that they areveterans in need of cigarettes and coffee. Anything helps. God bless. The man with the redhandlebar mustache sits outside the pharmacy everyday on a black milk crate. Heused to nod at me, when I lived downtown and walked Penny early every morning.And because one time, Penny barked at him and I scolded her for it. I think heappreciated my taking his side.

So many stand atop railroad cars, sleep insuffocating automobile trunks and ride in rubber rafts to live here, tohave what I have. Here I sit at a beautiful Apple computer. Designed, I'm told,by a real American ass hole. I used to fear being hated. I don't so muchanymore. I see now why people in other places would hate me. I can see why theman with the red handlebar mustache would hate me, walking by with no money forhim. But then anger creeps in to replace my old fear of being disliked. Not forRed Handle Bar Mustache Man for he seems entirely down on his luck. I once sawhim at a creek a couple miles out of town, sitting beside a little blue tent, staring at the water. That was last spring. Hehas a limp now, a long walking stick and a full beard. When I see his baggedeyes and slow stagger, I want to save him with split pea soup and french bread,but I’m too shy to ask if he has any allergies. He doesn’t nod at me anymore. Inever saved him. One early morning, he was walking out of a coffee shop while Iwas walking in. He had a small paper cup of coffee and was thanking the barista quietly and yet profusely for it. My anger does not creep in for him, but forwhen the word, pregnant, is written onto flattened cardboard boxes. Perhaps it’s a desperate lie for moneyor the result of rape or cheap prostitution. Inthose instances, I have only sympathy. But to the homeless woman who chooses tohave unprotected sex and gets pregnant. To her, I want to yell that I’d ratherher malnourished fetus curl into eternal sleep rather than grow upsitting beside her handwritten signs and coffee cans of change.

Does this make me into another American ass hole? Does it classify me as a cruel conservative who's too advantaged to see thepoverty at my feet? Does that barbaric fetus talk label me a crude liberal who's too headstrong to sympathize with pro-life protesters? Why do we simplify ouropinions to fit them inside defined groups? Why do we want to label ourselveswith bumper stickers, politicians, dog breeds, television news channels andreligious affiliations? Is it to choose the right answers? As if our lives willone day be returned to us with a letter grade and corrections written in redink? Is it to organize our minds by filing away our metaphysical questions into perfectly alphabetized folders inorder to reserve all other brain space for nonsense? Because when we defineourselves through labels and affiliated groups, it lends some comradery, but it also alienate us from the views of others. I admit that this is a naturalhuman trait, declarations of belonging. I remember rattling “I’m Catholic," "my favorite sport is basketball" and "I'm a girl." I understand the importance ofsimplifying things for children. But once we become young adults, isn't it time westopped trying to fit our every thought into generic boxes? Can’t I just float, landing only occasionally? Be open to theperspectives of others? I'm tired of conservatives snootily sayingthat their way is the only right way. I'm sick of the liberalsassuming that those who do not rally beside them are apart of some separatespecies of the privileged heartless. I hate homophobic jokes and blatant fearsof Muslims. I don’t like bullies. I hate litterers. I believe in gay rights and racial equality.I believe in women's rights, but cannot wait to be a stay-at-homemom. So, try to label me. I believe in abortion for rape victims,but do not believe it should a means of birth control. I believe in sexualhealth education. I believe in teaching our children how to take care ofthemselves. Teach them the proper way to brush their teeth, wash their feet anddistinguish unsafe social situations.

I recently read a smallarticle about Purity Balls in The New York Times Magazine. Formal events whereyoung girls make yearly promises to their fathers to remain virgins until theyare married. Oh my. If my father ever said he wanted to give me a necklace in exchange for my public vow to reserve my virginity for my future husband, Iwould have shouted, "WHAaahT? No Dad. GROSS!" My mother tried giving my littlesister, Samantha, and I the Birds and the Bees talk while we sat in bathing suits in her big bathtub when I was somewhere near eleven yearsold. She pulled out a picture book and read, "When two people love eachother very much….” We wailed with embarrassed laughter. The picture on thepage was of a man and a woman lying side by side under bed covers. The next pageshowed the woman, man and a newborn baby. Samantha didn't understand. She keptthat book under her bed, confessing years later to flipping back and forthbetween these pages, bewildered. "How did they go from hugging to ababy?"

Now I love my awkwardchildhood of fumbling discussions, reddening cheeks and accusatory teasings. Iembrace it. However, I must admit that I didn't know what sex was until I wasnearly doing it. Though I suppose that’s probably most people. SURPRISE! That’sgoing into there! I also received no forewarning about the arrival of pubic hair,acne or armpit sweat. I’d try bringing up pubic hair in conversation. It tookyears to find out that others had it too and that that brillo bush of mine was forlife. (I had high hopes that it would fall out at the conclusion of puberty.) I was not anopenly curious child and I feared genitalia. I didn’t seek out pornography, Iran gawkily from it, mumbling unintelligible excuses to myself. It was asomewhat fierce fear, if I remember correctly, of the unknown penis. But I was a kid who embraced her naive youth, content to grow up at her own leisure pace.

You want your daughter to wait to have sex? Tell her why. And if she's too stubborn or embarrassed to listen, sneak those pictures of herpes warts into her magazines. Have a few laughs. Figureout how to make it something you can talk about. Don't just sit back blaming Hollywood’s boner-inducing music videos and movies aboutperfectly dramatic (never awkward) airbrushed teen romances. Just accept that you'll never be able to completely control what your children are exposed to and be available for translations. Then boost their self-confidences so that they are ready to face peerpressure. Praise them. Personal empowerment is the best instrument in preventing groups of self-conscious children from following a few power tripping kids into hazing, pregnancy pacts, blow job parties,schoolyard gangs and Internet bullying. Even by the tender age of 12 many are mature enough to see the flimsy construction paper foundations that hold classroom cliques where snotty monarchs willy-nillily order the lynchings of innocent reputations.

We all want so badly to build tribes around us, recruiting warriors to pick up the night shift every fortnight and help hunt buffalo. Except this is our new age survival. No longer are we forced to fight with bows and arrows to protect our tepees, caves and horses from strangers. All we have left are our words and when others try to fight us for them, we strike back with defensive insults and accumulating volume before retreating back to camp where we can safely criticize our enemy. I think we should all stop feeling so overprotective of our opinions. Just let them out (omitting, of course, anything offensive) and let others show you theirs. What’s the worst that can happen? You learn how to listen?

Imagine a world where it was understood that individuality was something to shine and not snuff or paint beige. We would have so much more color. But instead wegrow anxious when our sons do not marry their girlfriends or when our daughters arenot pregnant by the time they are thirty. Why these unsettling feelings for when others are not settled? When Scott was a schoolteacher, it was so nice to say because others would exhale inside his seemingly safe permanence. No one would ask about his stress-induced misery so we kept it mostly to ourselves and when we decided he would quit, we kept that to ourselves too. We all want to believe that everyone has everything sorted out. But don't you see the crackling in thiswhite picket fence mentality? Why not allow every life to be questioned andadjusted without judgment or fear? Why is it that as long as the women wear lipstick, snowman sweaters and bake a pie for Christmas and the men stand in circles, drinking scotch and talking about “the game,” everything is hunky-dory? Why ignore the elephants in the dining room? Whynot feed them some of those delicious peanut butter balls and really get toknow one another?

The Applicant

2011-12-12T14:42:00.000-05:00

October 5, 2011

This winter, I am secretly applying for graduate acting school. However, if you are reading this before March of 2012 then this secret has escaped my rattling mouth like a brown bear from a birdcage.

The reason for this uncharacteristic decision to not tell my family, for I tell them nearly everything (except for that terribly awkward queef I emitted a few months back)is because I cannot, during the early vulnerable stages of this venture, receive any critical commentary. For everything my family says about me marches directly to my heart and either guards it or guns it down. "Why?" Is all they'd have to ask before I forfeited all plans. Surely, they'll scorn me for sliding a queef into that parenthesis up there, but that's nothing to fret my feelings over. Just a little sneaky shocking prattle about an eighty-six second vagina fart that flew around the room like a birthday balloon before deflating me into a frenzy of silent cackles and a pile of crumpled bones and wrinkled repugnance. See how poorly I cradle my private matters between the snow white bunny slopes of my 34B-sized bosom?

Let's see how long I last with this secret stuck between my two front teeth.

*****

October 13, 2011

I am pursuing a career in the theater because, for me, theater is like a cup of coffee after a restless sleep. It bursts into my body and energizes me with an extraordinary injection of intellectualized passion. I am pursuing a career in the theater because not only does it nourish my soul with perpetual inspiration and exploration, theater then decorates my world with vibrant light and articulation. It is here, inside this figurative and focused stage light, where I hope to live a long life, articulating ideas, emotions and experiences.

I want to be prepared to join with other theater professionals in sustaining this beautiful, raw, traditional, challenging and essential human art.

*****

October 14, 2011

The M.F.A Acting Programs I plan to apply to.

University of San Diego/Old Globe
A.C.T. American Conservatory Theater
Yale University
University of California (San Diego)
Brown University
University of California, Irvine

*****

November 1, 2011

University of San Diego/Old Globe asks me why. Why have you chosen to seek further training at this time rather than pursue work as a professional actor?

My first attempt to be a professional actress, when I graduated college six years ago, was a bit of a flop. And that’s putting it kindly. I moved to New York City because that’s what actors did, I thought. But after one year, I found the theater scene to be much like a monster on a pedestal: big, ugly, mean and out of reach. I had an insufficient resume, bland looking headshots and absolutely no theater contacts in the city. After a few months, I mailed these aforementioned headshots and resumes to sixty-seven talent agencies and theater companies. I was clueless. After one year, I moved to Boston where I started taking improvisational classes, acting on an adventure boat in Boston Harbor and performing a little Shakespeare. However, after two years of the amateur theater community doing plays I wasn’t entirely interested in and the big professional theaters only hiring equity actors, I moved from Boston to Western Massachusetts to start The August Company. From an idea in a living room to six fully produced productions, I’ve gained a lot of experience helping build this company, both on and off stage. One major lesson I’ve learned is how to create theater relationships. How to meet, mingle and reach out to other theater, music and art makers/lovers for collaborations and bilateral audience support. As an actress with the company, I’ve learned that I possess the talent, confidence and drive necessary for a successful career in the theater, however, for my heart’s sake, my second venture into the professional theater scene must have a significantly higher potential for success than my first attempt six years ago. I am seeking admission to your thrilling, prestigious program because I want to be submerged in a constructively rigorous MFA Acting program where I can elevate my craft from raw and talented to honed and professional.

*****

November 18, 2011

Scott and I put together a one woman show of my writing for a local fringe festival. I perform it twice. We set up 45 mismatching chairs into our borrowed loft four stories above a quiet mill city's streetlights. For the first night, we have an audience of 60. The next night we have over 90. Those without seats sit on the floor at my feet or lean on the brick pillars and white plastered walls. By the end of both performances, nearly everyone is standing, applauding. And my little life feels forever changed.

The morning after my second performance, my sisters and mother press me for my plans. They think I should take my show to Boston. "I'm actually applying for graduate school too." I tell them, a mug of coffee pressed to the bottom lip of my careful words. They aren't surprised and the reveal of my secret is pleasantly anticlimactic. They are even encouraging, happy to hear I don't just plan to follow Scott.

*****

November 29, 2011

A suddenly strange snow storm on October 29th of this year sends a tree from the backyard to crack and crash onto the roof above our heads, piercing a two-inch branch through the white speckled ceiling like a fat needle. There had been booms all evening. Tree trunks and branches, soft still from summer, rocking when the wind blew and toppling from the weight of their dry leaves, flocks of fragile cradles. When the biggest boom hits, I am without a shirt. Ceiling dust drops like shrapnel onto us and Penny, our petrified pup, leaps onto my pillow. I tell Scott he really needs to stop kissing me and turn on the light. "I have ceiling on my skin." I say, stumbling to stand. With my glasses pushed to my face and a light on, I scan the ceiling for damage. At the site of the tree branch, I exclaim something and put on my underwear. Once dressed, we move to another bedroom like a pack of refuges, finding safety beneath clean bedcovers and the second floor. All night long, the dogs sleep close while outside, snow glitters the gutters, drapes the driveway and layers onto the roof of this house where we are so lucky to live. And yet, despite this suddenly strange snow storm two nights before Halloween, the weather has been warm. So warm they've sent the clipboard-carrying global warming interns back to the sidewalks. So warm I expect the smell of spring to surprise me. Say it snuck by winter somehow. Despite the weather's contrary behavior, most days I wear gloves and my new yellow coat. Yellow buttons and patterned polyester lining, I bought it primarily for the month of February, the time when I start to worry that sunshine is a myth. Besides these sixty-five degree days, firewood across the county has been split and piled into jagged jigsaw puzzles, wrapped with blue tarps and weighed by flat tires in preparation for this winter we await. My 6am mornings are dark blue and make me want to hide inside a hibernation. Make me want to wear fur lined snow boots, wool socks and fleece rimmed hats while I hunker down, slurping beef stew and poetry about pecan pie and adulterous nightmares. Makes me want to make a baby quietly in a hospital bed before excusing myself from myself. Because in this rhetorical recipe for my future, I left out a key ingredient. I let myself forget these words I write. These words that expose my tender soul, my rash sense of humor and my continuous curiosity. In the making of my courage and conviction, I then spilled the contents of my sweet marriage, which is my home of all homes, onto the dusty tiled floor as if it were just a box of quick bread mix and not eight years of delicious devotion.

The Friday after Thanksgiving, I stay at my parents' house while Scott leaves for his. I take Penny out on her leash. I walk five miles, bobbing on the foot train of my free thoughts, while tracks are torn and rebuilt to accommodate my quickly changing answer to "what if...?" After an hour and a half, I walk into the living room and collapse into a sitting slump. With white and yellow papers in one hand, a pen in the other, my mother looks up over her red rectangle reading glasses and asks, "What's going on? You alight?" I weep through a summary of my scattered worries. If Scott and I both get into schools in different cities... What would we do? "You can't live apart." She says. "You wouldn't stay together." Leaving Scott would require me to become a complete ignoramus, but I genuinely fear I'll put myself behind him instead of beside him if I do not pursue this. And that is the moment I discover that the biggest reason I wanted to apply for graduate school was for marital equally. The "if he gets to apply, why can't I?" conundrum.

Later on, I send my brother a text message. "If I want to have a career like Spalding Gray, I don't need, really, acting school....would you agree?" Gray was a renowned writer, actor, performance artist and monologuist.

"No, you need to live."

By Monday morning, I am ready to declare my new anti-decision. I write my friend who has agreed to write one of my letters of recommendation. I say, "After hours and hours of internal debate, I've come to the conclusion that graduate acting school is not really what I want after all. I know that I would love to attend, however I think the smartest thing for me to do is continue on my Puddle path."

Tuesday morning, I receive an email from another old professor who has offered to help me find some audition monologues. He emails me Tuesday, of all FLIPPING days, and says he's got some material for me to look at and would I like him to mail it to me. I email him back, thanking him, but also telling him that I will not be applying to graduate school after all. I have one application out already to the University of San Diego/Old Globe. It's a two year intensive program where if, for some insane chance, I am accepted, I would be one of seven students, receive free classical training and perform at The Old Globe Theatre. It is the only program, at this point, that I would really and truly want to attend. I tell my professor that I'll check back with him if I get an audition.

That afternoon, of all FREAKING days, I receive a voicemail from University of San Diego/Old Globe. I have an audition in New York City January 24, 2012. I email my professor back and ask if I can get those monologues. Then I call Scott and blab to his answering machine that I'm just going to see what happens. Just going to see!

From blog to stage....

2011-11-01T10:51:00.004-04:00

Surviving the Suicide of Skin

2011-10-12T21:36:00.000-04:00

In July, my doctor fails me three times. First, he fails to clearly communicate to me that he is treating me for MRSA, an incredibly contagious bacterial infection immune to most antibiotics. Second, he fails to perform the simple swab test to know for sure if the skin infection is MRSA. Third, he fails to inform me that he doesn't actually know the best way to treat it, but is going to try anyway, putting me on antibiotics, which ultimately prevents me from getting the swab test and seeking proper medical help. It's October now and still I have tiny erupting volcanic polka dots decorating my face.

Last month, my new dermatologist informs me that what I have just looks like acne to her. Like a "tendency to pick," she says, dumping cream samples into my purse and encouraging me to call when my new insurance goes through so that I won't have to pay full price for this new prescription she'd like me to try. I appreciate her help and tell her so, but doubt her diagnosis. "No, sorry," she says, she can't just assume I have MRSA, not without the swab test. I pay $50 and go on my way.

Morning and night, I coat my face with this new combination of chemical creams. But then last week, an army of British redcoat impersonators punch through my skin with MRSA in their muskets and though I have no effective weapons to fight them with, I force my enemy to shoot the first yellow discharge. In the aftermath of our battle, my new broken skin lays limp, red, ugly. Furiously, I mumble into the mirror that my dermatologist would have "a tendency to pick" too if across the scarred countryside of her once soft face, thickheaded bumps stood with sarcastic solutes while their previously dead comrades rise to join them
in a newly assembled squad of zombie zits. Once sanitized with rubbing alcohol, I drape sticky circular bandage tents over every casualty and hope that they sleep or, better yet, suffocate.

That night, my parents come for a visit. They see on my war torn face, expressions of hopelessness for health. The next day, my father emails me instructions for treating MRSA. He works with an infectious disease doctor. I am familiar with most of the information he sends me except for perhaps the most simple and important of steps: the right kind of soap. I research this suggested soap. It's an over-the-counter cleanser used primarily for cleaning wounds and scrubbing in and out of surgery. It's in a little blue bottle. $6 on sale at the pharmacy. It's been there this whole time, this whole confusing/frustrating/unbelievably embarrassing time. After the pharmacy, I rush home and try the soap. I want to weep. Already things start to dry up, close, heal. I could scream at how simple it is, but I'm too relieved, too happy that something finally resembles recovery.

For months, I cannot comprehend the sudden, utterly unequivocal ugliness that is my face. I cry into the pull down mirror of the passenger side's seat while Scott drives us to see friends or family. I want to see them. I just don't want them to see me and feel obligated to lie and say that my skin looks better than before, that I must be on my way to finally fixing the problem. Or for them to strain to keep eye contact with me, purposely preventing their instincts to stare at the red mounds on my cheeks, chin and forehead. Looking into the pull down mirror, I cover my skin with cream then powder. I try to resemble anything but a cherry pie, but the makeup makes it look like I've been baking cakes all day and so I wipe it off, slam the mirror into the ceiling and cry out, "I HATE MY FACE!" From wheat and dairy allergies to Lyme Disease to Rosacea to adult acne, I try treating everything, anything. Constantly I mention the state of my skin in conversations so that the person I am speaking with knows that I know that my face looks like a creature is trying to escape through its pores. "My skin's been really bad lately. I've been trying to figure out why." I say, shaking my head and wrinkling my eye brows and then looking for somewhere else to go so that this person won't say that they hadn't noticed. For me to deserve this supportive, patient, empathetic, continuously complimentary and still somehow attracted to me, husband. I must be one lucky girl. Or this world must be a much better place than I often give it credit for. I have a husband who says, when I need him to, that no one is paying attention to my skin and that it really isn't as bad as I think it is. That I am still beautiful. A husband who fumes at my lost, irretrievable confidence. "I hate that I care so much about what I look like." I say. "I just don't want to have open wounds on my face anymore." Sometimes I beg him, "Please don't look at my face." Because even his most familiar and gentlest of glances can make me want to hide inside the creases of my palms. I could accept that I am unattractive or that I'm just not very pretty. I could swallow that truth. I just don't want to look like a leper any more.

I cannot wait to look like me again. Not a better, prettier, skinner, sexier version of my old self. Just me, healthy me. Oh how incredible that will be!

Letter to a Long Arm

2011-09-22T20:52:00.001-04:00

Dear Police Officer,

I promise to tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me.

My husband and I do not host costume parties where plastic bags of crack cocaine are traded in dark kitchen corners for blow jobs and blow pops. Nor are we the type to attend shin digs where assault rifles are purchased from musty walk-in closets or the velvet-lined automobiles of actual mobsters. We have never been so obliterated by the consumption of cheap alcohol that we've agreed to assist an amateur tattoo artist in aborting twin fetuses from the loins of a passed out prostitute in some filthy basement dwelling.

With my right hand over my heart and the other saluting an American flag, I swear that we try to be the best law-abiding citizens possible. Therefore, I hope it was worth the $50 tip we were told you get for ordering a truck to tow our car with a recently expired registration ON A SUNDAY from the center of town to the outskirts of town so that we, the negligent car owners, could be charged $180 to retrieve it. I'm sure this punishment probably makes perfect sense to you, sir, but for Free Speech's sake, I'd like to break it down for you so that you can see why your actions are so unbelievably infuriating to me.

You're walking around town with your cocky straight backed swagger, I imagine, searching for license plates with orange "11" stickers. When you see our car, you excitedly plug the plate into your database. "Expired Registration," it reads. You call your favorite tow truck company and tell them to drive the five or so miles from their parking lot to the center of town. Pick up this car, you tell them, and move it to your lot. They do. A few hours later, my husband gets out of work. He's exhausted and sticky, covered in fresh coffee stains. He paces the sidewalk. Where the hell is his car? He wonders. A girl with a clipboard asks him if he cares about the environment. He tells her that he can't find his car. She walks away, wishing him luck. Has anyone with a clipboard asked you, officer, if you care about the environment? Scott walks to the police station. At the station, he is informed that because his registration is expired, his car was towed. Because I am in Boston, he takes a $12 taxi ride to the parking lot where our car is held hostage. It is nearly 6PM now. Inside the lot's office, Scott begs the tow truck guy to stay open for five more minutes so that he can update his registration online in order to pay his $180 fee and get his car back. The guy waits. Scott updates his registration, pays the guy the $180 plus the additional "after hours" fee and with empty pockets, he drives home.

Is this supposed to be a lesson on "the harshness of the real world"? Because if that's the case, you're a bit mixed up. You're supposed to be the good guy. Not the ski-mask-sporting gunman bashing a baseball bat onto the windshield of our bank account balance. I understand the importance of enforcing the law, but come on hall monitor, sometimes people just need to take a piss.

I hope one day you have an accident. Not an injury or death necessarily. Just some serious embarrassment. I hope you forget to put the toilet seat down and fall in. Scream out and cough to cover up your feminine yelp for help. Wipe your dripping backside with an entire roll of toilet paper. Throw the wads of TP into the toilet bowl. Drop your deuces onto the soggy paper pile. Flush. And as you are buckling your belt and adjusting your pistol, the water rises so alarmingly high that your face starts to sweat and you find yourself wiping your brow with a piss-covered shirt sleeve. Brown water reaches the seat despite your revolting last resort to scoop up the poop and paper. Men at the urinals and sinks turn to watch shit water cascade onto your black boots. They hear you cry out, "THIS ISN'T FAIR! I'M A GOOD PERSON!" Well, unfortunately, in this world where you wear a badge, uniform and gun, that doesn't matter. In your world, good citizens are fined heavily (on our budget's scale) for small mistakes. Here, shit can soak and crust the tops of your socks regardless of how quickly you shovel shit from the top of crap-puking potties. Because you know what you've proved to be? The police officer that rappers write rhymes about. Yes, I feel discriminated against. I feel discriminated against for being a genetically fallible human being. We all make mistakes. You, as a law enforcer of human beings need to remember that. The people who pay you to protect them are not angelic Ghandi creatures descended from virginal desert nuns. Besides, aren't there more important laws out there to enforce? Like drunk driving, domestic violence and library book thieving? Isn't there something more productive you could be doing than walking around town, ON A SUNDAY, plugging license plates into your little electronic device like an old lady at a nickel slot machine?

I believe in strict laws and most of the time, I believe in this country. I believe in the theory of police enforcement. I'm glad we have it. I'm grateful that I can dial 911 if I'm being chased, hounded, mauled, molested, murdered or badgered. I understand that the safety provided by the police force is crucial to my happiness and that I can generally trust police officers to not abuse the authority granted to them. I'm just saying, give me a little written warning. Wouldn't you rather protect the "police officer" title for a few more citizens? Isn't it hard enough with publicized racial profiling and viral video leaks of police brutality? Because this makes me want to write my own rap song or start my very own verbal riot. CHECK YOUR CAR'S REGISTRATION DATE OR YOU'RE TAMPERING WITH YOUR MONEY'S FATE. I wouldn't start this poorly written rap riot because I think it's dangerous for anyone to forget to check the date of their car's registration, but so that you, sir, might spend an entire shift failing to find one expired registration. So that you would see the negligence in spending an entire day NOT stopping that fat homeless guy from standing beside the ATM machine saying, "What you mean you don't have any money, I just saw you take out $40."

I mean, please tell me you didn't apply for the police academy to become a meter maid.

Sincerely,
This Citizen

The Nuisance

2011-09-03T11:04:00.001-04:00

I prefer to writewords that are like the legs of little ballerinas: secretly strong with vintagebeauty and emanative grace, but right now all I really want to write are clumsyrun-on sentences where my bottled up belligerence flies from my fingers likethe glistering yellow goop of burst blisters. A note has been taped to thefront door of our apartment. “I don't know if you know this,” the note reads, “butyour dog is a nuisance to the neighborhood. She barks the entire time you arenot home.” I crumple the snobby scrawl inside my fist like a vexeddetective trapped inside the grainy gray walls of his pipe-smoking genre beforestorming from the kitchen to collapse onto my bed for an old fashioned fit.

Forty-sevenseconds later, Scott leans on the doorframe, watching me wipe my onesummoned tear.

We will fix this,we declare, pumping our bicycle pedals to the pet store. With backs bent,we grasp our handlebars and side by side, discuss whether this neighborhas written condescending notes to all the houses on the street withbarking dogs, landline answering machines, surround sound televisions,continuous construction work and garbage disposals.

The ride soothesour hostile humiliation.

At the store,we choose a collar that will send a small startling shock to Penny’s neckwhenever she bellows out a bark.

When home, Scottclicks the collar around Penny's thick mane and sends her from our bedroom toscare Mark's sister, who's just arrived. As she bursts from our bedroom, fourfull woofs rush from my dog's muzzle, followed by immediate whimpers, whichthen fade to a soft silence as Penny adjusts to this sudden and seemingly cruelbark-free existence.

One drunken night,a few days after our pet store purchase, Scott sets out to test the bark collar'slevel of barbarism. Meticulously, he presses the collar's metal prongs tothe center of his naked neck and begins to bark. Mark, Amy and I stand by,gawking at this suspenseful and yet strange audacity. After three or fourdeep bona fide barks, my husband yelps and stumbles backwards. Severalseconds later, once our cackles have quieted, he reassures us that hisshrill scream was not from pain, but merely from surprise. We, therefore, deemthe experiment a success.

Both women,downstairs and next door, want to get us out of earshot and out of sight.They miss the old woman who lived in the apartment before us, we presume.

This past April,Amy builds an herb and vegetable garden to the left of the back door. Rustic withdark chocolate soil and yellowish green tomato sprouts, this tall wooden box offuture food pretties this previously plain piece of backyard. A couple weekslater, Scott and I push our grill to the other side of that same door.

The next day,Downstairs Lady's lowly flowerpot (from the front porch) sits suspiciouslybeside our grill. I suspect she's trying to claim back this space she neverthought to use before.

A few days afterher pot placement, Downstairs Lady asks Amy to move her garden. She's bought abasketball hoop for her son and wants to put it there, she says. Amy compliesand Mark moves the entire garden arrangement to the only other place available:a shady spot at the top of the driveway.

This strangewoman's unequivocal bossiness throws me into a repetitive rage that night whenAmy informs me of this most recent request. “A basketball hoop? There?Five feet from where we park our cars?... A basketball hoop.”

One week later,Mark sits alone in the basement playing with his Lego's while Amy, Scott and Isleep upstairs in our beds. At around 11 o’clock that night, Downstairs Ladynotices the music Mark is playing and it causes her to be so upset she callsthe landlord in Pennsylvania. Take note: we live in Massachusetts. “Callthem.” She demands, but Mr. Landlord asks that she speak with us herself. Sheshe doesn't feel comfortable doing that, she says and hangs up. Then shedecides that Mr. Landlord is "going to chicken out from calling” us andleaves her apartment to tell us to be quiet. When she discovers that the musicis not coming from our apartment upstairs but from the basement below hers, sheclomps down the dirty wooden stairs and the first thing out of her mouth is, “I’vealready called the landlord. Your music is too loud.” She then sort of snickersthe part about the landlord chickening out from calling us (as if Mark willside with her) and begins a new tirade on how inappropriate his music is.

Mark, ripped fromhis sublime solitude, looks up, and with utter befuddlement, slowly clarifies, “Youcalled the landlord?”

She doesn'tunderstand the concept of renting an apartment. Doesn’t understand thatwe don’t have to do the things she’s requested. That we've been the friendlycooperative neighbors she hasn't been. Sure we can turn down our music. Sureyou can sensor the sound waves and we'll avoid playing lyrics littered withmother fucking shitty ass damn swears. Sure I can take the back stairwell whenI walk Penny in the early morning because the front stairs creak. Sure we won'tuse our front porch light because it shines near your bedroom window. Sure youcan have the good parking spot because you’re “the oldest.” Sure Scott can helpthe delivery guy carry in your dresser. Sure we can take the trash out. Sure wecan move our garden. Sure you can take up more than half of the basementbecause you had to downsize from a house. Sure you can set up abasketball hoop on the hoods of our cars.

Downstairs Ladylikes to have someone to hate, something to complain about. We have been thatfor her, I think. "I just can't stand that I want to avoid someone wholives downstairs from me." I say to Scott loud enough so that she mighthear me through our open windows because I just don't care anymore. Scott saysthen that I can decide whether she bothers me. This stumps me so I go to thebathroom to rinse off the green facial mask I have applied to the pimples thathave formed due to this unnecessary domestic stress.

With pockets ofdog treats, a plastic bag for possible poop and music playing in my ears, Iwalk Penny to town. As we trot together, the sun shows itself for the firsttime today and it is warm and so are the faces of everyone we pass. That's whenI realize that maybe I also just needed something or someone to complain about.Maybe I've had Downstairs Lady just as she's had me, like secret Santa's atsome horribly crappy Christmas party. As this realization belly flops onto mybrain waves, thick tension in my shoulders and chest loosens. Scott is right. Ican choose to not complain about her and in doing so, I choose me.

Drawing from hisinterpretation of Downstairs Lady's inability to communicate clearly, Scottproposes a plan: we roommates will regard Downstairs Lady as a sociallydisabled person. (You need not be offended by the use of the word,"disabled," for this tactic is to prevent the flipping of tables, thescreaming of fighting words and from the throwing of things like rottentomatoes from Amy's garden.) Ultimately, the plan encourages us to not be frustratedby her frequently rude comments and requests, but to pity her for her writtenand verbal impotencies.

A few monthslater, we are awarded, it seems, for these efforts. However it is possible youwill think we are insensitive and even cruel for the satisfaction we feel forthe following events.

On the groundbelow, in the blue tint of twilight, two small dogs join by one obstinate jaw.

"Oh NO!"

"Stop!STOP!"

"OH NONONOOOOOO!" The woman next door wails from her wheelchair behind the railingsof her side porch. Her tiny gray lamb-like dog (her beloved best friend, who iswithout a leash because he is always) wines in submission to the dog that livesdownstairs from us, a characteristically insane canine who is also without aleash because he has, we learn later, bitten through his backyard dog run.

When the scufflestarted, a moment before, both dogs were growling and barking and as soon asWheelchair Lady started screaming and Downstairs Lady began yelling, both dogswent into a full-fledged furry ferociousness.

Penny stood on herhind legs, her front paws clinking a crowd of white votive candles on thewindowsill. A small bark escaped her muzzle, but her collar startled herto shush, and she retreated behind the couch to lay inside the cool shadow ofthe cornered coffee table.

Wheelchair Lady'spuppy is limp now, dead or playing the part. "Stop it! STOP IT!NOOOO!" Wheelchair Lady projectile weeps, wheeling in and out of herkitchen to hide. A middle aged man, a visiting friend of Wheelchair Lady's,works to pry the dogs apart, skittishly circling the attempting homicide,reaching for the lifeless pup.

"Shit! Shebit me." He says, pulling away his hand.

After threeawkwardly cacophonous minutes of violence, the man manages to freeWheelchair Lady's stiff pup and carry it to the wailing woman's lap.

"She won't behere tomorrow." Downstairs Lady's wobbly word falls out and forward ontothe cement walkway between the houses where there is now drying droplets ofred. Next door, the kitchen door has closed, leaving a swift sudden stillness.

With eyes andmouths stretched to the seams of our hairlines, Scott and I back away from thewindow of our second floor apartment.

"That dog isa maniac." I whisper.

"I'm so gladthat had nothing to do with us." Scott says.

A few minuteslater, we watch, again from our window, as the gray haired man, now withbloodied paper towels around his hand, carries the puppy on a pillow.

"Doesn't looklike it's moving." Scott says, while Wheelchair Lady gets into thecar and drives them away.

A few days later,Wheelchair Lady’s Puppy, cone-headed with stitches in its neck, returns home onits pillow throne. I haven't seen anyone walk Downstairs Dog in days, I say,starting apartment-wide rumors that Downstairs Dog has either been sent away,as promised, or been taught to use a litter box. A couple nights later, I getthe courage to ask Downstairs Lady to retrieve her cold dry laundry from thedryer (usually, I just wait). I knock on her back door. Downstairs Sonopens it and behind him, Downstairs Dog's claws scamper across the dusty woodenfloor for me. The door is slammed shut in my face, leaving me in the darkstairwell to listen while Downstairs Lady scolds Downstairs Son for opening thedoor before putting Downstairs Dog into its crate. She then opens the door twoinches and says something about needing to keep her dog in his crate, you know,she says, after what happened. I nod my head and say, "I was wondering ifyou, if you could get your laundry out of the dryer?..." Proof that Ishould also be regarded as socially inept.

Weeks later,Downstairs Dog is sent away to "a farm in New Hampshire." This isn'tthe first time he's done this, killed or attempted to kill a smaller animal.We're told the night of the near murder when we bump into Downstairs Lady andDownstairs Son at a play in town. I give our neighbor a surprised look. Notbecause I'm shocked her dog has killed or attempted to kill before, but becauseshe expects some sort of sympathy from me.

Now, at the end ofAugust, we must move. Six months we have shared this second floorapartment, all five of us: Mark, Amy, Scott, Penny the dog and I. Sharing thissmall kitchen with its tall dark wooden cabinets, large double porcelain sink,a short fat refrigerator that has the tendency to freeze fruit and a white gasstove with black metal burners. Six months of sitting at our blue tiled kitchenisland, drinking white wine, chopping vegetables, and making pots of coffee andsausage leek soup. Six months sharing our dining room table where Mark's pencilsketches of zombies, dinosaur monsters and sharks fight naked,heavily equipped mermaid Amy's. "He's gotten really good at drawing myboobs." She smirks. Six months of sharing one living room with atelevision designated almost exclusively for violent apocalyptic video games.Countless hours of Mark and Scott leaning into the amber glow, fiercelyclicking fingers to kill and steal the rations of fictional fortune tellergypsies, elfish hunters and starving rabid children. Months of Amy workingin the sweltering triangle-shaped attic, building her wedding dress offeathers, brass rings and clasps, white pleated cotton, a pale pink corset andcream-colored lace on a headless mannequin. Fraying antique lime fabrichangs from the rafters like a material mote meant to keep Mark from seeking outher slowly assembling gown. Six months lying in two separate beds in twoseparate bedrooms, split by walls and a bathroom. Nights where we'd all laylaughing at our dark ceilings while blunt dessert flatulences honk likesmothered ducks from beneath our cotton sheets and feather down comforters. Orlike the other night when Mark called me into his and Amy's room to watch himslap Amy's underweared ass. The point was to get Penny to do that cute thingwhere she stops domestic violence by pushing the aggressor's hand away with hermuzzle. However Penny wouldn't really do it and so it just turned into Markslapping Amy's bum while I stood in the doorway, laughing at this odd,unintentionally violent act. Six months walking home from dinners out intown like the time we ordered two pitches of red sangria at the pizzarestaurant and Mark climbed that metal fire escape ladder in an alley and Inearly peed myself on the cracked sidewalk in front of our apartment becauseAmy made me laugh. Six months sitting on the front porch drinkingcoffee. The porch Mark wanted badly to pee off of, but was prevented byAmy one early morning. Prevented because this "porch" is not really aporch, but a room of windows that faces a neighborhood of middle agedhomeowners. I had been on a walk with Penny before the sun had risen andas I walked into the kitchen I saw a blur go by. I thought it was Scott. Withmy headphones blocking all surrounding sound, I kicked the kitchen door closedand as I did Amy leapt from the hallway, scaring a full body spasm out of me.She wore a tank top and underwear, her usual pajama ensemble, and landed in thekitchen like a savage gorilla. "Did you see Mark?" Her coarse morningvoice demanded. "He might have gone that way." I said, pointing tothe living room. While I took Penny's leash off and my heart beat softened,Mark shuffled back through the kitchen. Amy followed. "He wanted to peeoff the porch." She said. Apparently he once expressed interest in peeingoff the porch and this morning, while she was half-asleep, she heard Markmumble that he had to pee. She then noticed that the shower was going. KnowingMark would not ask to pee while Scott was lathering up behind our transparentshower curtain, Amy drifted back to sleep. Seconds later, she woke to an emptybed. Still somewhat asleep, she stood and ran to the kitchen and then ran on tothe porch where she stopped Mark from peeing off the porch, which is again notreally a porch. "Just ask him." Amy told him in the kitchen."Scott, can I come in to pee? I won't look." Mark asked. A side noteto this story is that when Mark was a college student he had a plant in hisdorm room, a thriving plant. When Amy met Mark she thought it was strange thata boy who could barely take care of himself could care so well for anotherliving thing. It wasn't until later that she learned that this plant was"watered" solely by Mark's urine. Six months gathering rent frombetween couch cushions and savings accounts to mail to our landlord, a man whotook the second syllable of his title too literally for after several threatsto remove our kitchen sink disposal or shove our dog inside a travel crate, hascast us out by suddenly raising our rent by $200 a month and requiring a leasetoo far into all of our vagabond futures to be feasibly possible. Usually Scottis the speaker of our house, however he is in Israel when we receive this newsfrom our lord of this overpriced land.

After a week ofsilence, I write to him.

"We haveworked very hard to be good, quiet tenants here at 31. We are respectfulneighbors (once we fixed the barking problem) and we keep to ourselves. To bequite honest, the four of us really love living here and want to figure out away to make it work. We chose this apartment because of the flexibility of themonth-to-month lease and the affordability of sharing the $1150 rent. It feelslike you really just want us to move out and I'm not sure why. Raising the rentby $200 after we've only been here for six months is, well, kind ofludicrous."

While awaiting fora response to this, I eat an entire green bell pepper over the sink in the kitchen."I just ate an entire green pepper." I tell Amy and we laugh. Alittle while later, I receive this response,

"Rachel -More for me to do in transition..."

Now, despite thedog fighting frenzy, these women, Downstairs Lady and Wheelchair Lady, cling tothe concept that they can like one another. Downstairs Lady has sent offher old dog for a cuter quieter one and has already introduced the tiny pup toWheelchair Lady. When the women speak to one another now, their voices crank totheir highest pitches. This is how they'd like to live. That's fine with me. Iwon't have to be here to witness it much longer.

"MAAAAAOM!I'm going to take my shower now!" Downstairs Son yells every night around8PM.

Or, from the yardwith the new tiny copper colored pup, I no longer have to listen to thisroutine hollering.

"Mom?"

"Yeah?"Downstairs Lady responds from inside the apartment.

"Is shesupposed to poop?"

"What?"

"Is shesupposed to...Oh! She pooped! She pooped, Mom!"

"She pooped?!Yaaaay! What a good guuuuurl! Wanna come inside? Yay!" Downstairs Ladysqueals from the doorframe.

That poor puppy. Ican leave whenever I want to really, but not that little mill pup. No wonderthe last little guy went postal, probably figured pound prison or even death bya large needle would be better than his mundane existence with daily walksnever exceeding its itty bitty backyard.

"DownstairsLady?" I'd love to bellow from our moving truck.

"Yeah?"She'd yell back, her lips pressed to the plastic panels of her air conditioner.

"I'm gonna moveout now."

"What?"

"I'm gonnamove out!"

"You're gonnamove out? WHAT A GOOD GUUUUURL!"

"DownstairsLady, you are batshit crazy."

I'd also like towrite this little note and stick it to Wheelchair Lady's ugly front door.

Dear WheelchairLady,

I don't know ifyou know this, but your voice is a nuisance to the neighborhood. You cackle andholler like a banshee the entire time I am home. Maybe someone should putyou in a crate? Or, if you'd like, I can lend you this red choker necklace ofmy dog's. It clicks fashionably in the back and has shockingly beautiful metalprongs that must be precisely placed over the front of your throat.

Let me know andI'll drop it into your mailbox!

Sincerely,

TheGirl Next Door with the Bangs

Chocolate, Rum and Crocodiles

2011-08-25T14:30:00.003-04:00

I awake from a dream this morning that takes place at this big house with numerous bedrooms. The house is a distorted version of the Fitzgerald's, the family of an old elementary school friend of mine who was one of ten Irish Catholic children. I don't know why I have to stay here, but I do and it is apparently fine because there are weddings in town and many random people will also be staying in this house tonight. At least this is what I'm told by some blurry familiar someone. Also, I am with colleagues, two men I think, and we have some sort of mission to accomplish, business to tend to. We're serious about something. Not sure what. Anyway, this house is like a crooked boat with many ladders and triangle shaped roofs and while I explore it, I realize I have to pee. I stumble upon the room with the toilet. It is a large dark bedroom adorned with dirty laundry piles. The toilet is at the end of the room like a throne, centered along the back wall. But just as I walk into this bedroom bathroom, I realize I don't have a shirt on. I am completely topless. I cover my little boobies with my crossed arms and sit on the toilet to pee (trying not to wake the lump shifting in the sheets at the other end of the room). When finished and empty, I stand and that's when I see it. I have peed on the toilet with the white plastic lid still down and now there is a yellow puddle perched there as well as a small waterfall of my urine cascading down the porcelain john toward the surrounding piles of dirty laundry. I panic and begin picking up the wet crumpled clothing and carrying them, still topless, from this strange room to where I find a growing tropical forest fire down the hall. I watch the fire grow for a little while before realizing that no one has reported it. So, I report it and by reporting it, I mean, I run up and down the dirt road beside the forest fire yelling "FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!" This is when the crocodile starts attacking me. Luckily I have my cheap plastic umbrella in my hands to whack the creature over its bumpy biting face. After each clumsy blow, the thing backs up a bit and I return to my responsible screaming, but before I am positive I have truly informed the authorities, the snapping jaw comes back at me and I must try again to strike the mouth closed. For some reason, I know if I hit the enormous reptile square on the nose it will die or give up, but to no avail, the crocodile continues trying to eat me while, still half-naked, I scream "FIRE" beside a pile of pee drenched laundry.

It is 6:30AM when I roll out of bed and feel for the bathroom with my eyes half closed.

So in deciphering my dream, or rather, reasons why I probably had this strange unconscious experience would be as follows...

Last night, at 8:45PM, I drank half of a nip of spiced rum with a splash of ginger soda and pineapple juice.
At about 9:20PM, I ate a few forkfulls of peanut butter cup ice cream straight from the container.
At 10:30PM, I went to sleep.
Also, yesterday morning, I drove by an enormous black bear sitting and having a picnic of trash in somebody's driveway. This would explain my confusion about hitting the crocodile square on the nose.
Oh and I'm lazy and often sit on public toilet seats even though I know so many disgusting bare butts have done the same before mine and even though my friend, Amy, says I could catch something. Also, to me, nothing is quite as shocking as sitting on top of the toilet seat bare-assed, feeling the plastic or wood press up to my privates. It always feels like I've accidentally molested myself.
Finally, I posses an unnecessarily rash fear of exposing my boobies.

The Deluge

2011-08-03T14:20:00.120-04:00

Music cracklesthrough my crappy car speakers while rainwater pelts my windshield like a packof petty prizefighters, slapping and spitting at the station wagon's wide see-throughface where my wipers frantically fail to dry the glass. When the rainstops, I'll drive fast enough to make up time, I tell myself, but slow enoughto not be pulled over by idled patrol cars.

“Are you free nextWednesday night?“ I asked my father. "I want to take you out forFather's Day. See the Joe Purdy concert in Fall River. Just you and me."

(Here is where Iinsert an explanation for the love I have for my father. Like all love, it isdifficult to put into plain analogy-free phrases so I'll unabashedly define itby saying that whenever I am near him I have trouble not wrapping my armsaround his middle like a bulky high waste belt. Sometimes I worry that hehates me, his profoundly profane daughter, though I know he never could. A tallconservative man with a wayward disposition, he sits at his place at the end ofthe dinner table, quietly listening while I work to make my mother laugh withstories of pooping in poison ivy on the banks of a river or humping my dog,Penny, to achieve dominance. With the front legs of his chair suspended, heshakes his head, the start of a smile poised at the crooks of hismustached mouth like a stilled rocking chair. He speaks when spoken to or whenany mention of Jesus Christ, Mary the Mother of God, Catholic priests, thechurch choir director or God Himself graces the table. "Alright.Alright. That's enough." He'll say.)

This is why I liketo have him alone, for he will talk for hours on any number of subjects whenprompted with mindful ears.

Tonight, on mydrive to our date, the rain never stops rushing from the crowded clouds and Inever get above 55 miles an hour. "I don't think I'm going to gethome by six like I planned." I tell him over the phone.

When I am an exitfrom my father's house, I turn off the highway and creep down the curvedexit ramp, gripping my convulsing steering wheel with both hands. Please beengine trouble. I beginside my brain. I can ignore engine trouble. I cannot ignore a flattire. I turn left and pulloff the road. As I open my door, a pickup truck stops beside me. "You'vegot a flat in the back," a beefy white guy with tattoos stretched aroundhis biceps, tells me. "Do you need any help?"

"No thankyou. My father lives down the road."

I call my father.

Then I call for atow truck. "Yes, I have a spare." I tell the ditsy dispatcher whostumbles through our dialogue like a drunk. "I got off 495 South at Exit4, turned left and parked on the right side of the road." I sayexplicitly.

When my fatherarrives, I retrieve the spare tire from beneath my hatchback's floor flaps, butit's just a tire. There is no middle, no rim. I don't know why this is so, Itell my father, but I blame my frustratingly frequent flats.

A man arrives in asmall yellow tow truck. My father explains that we don't have a rim on thespare. Tow truck man shakes his head. His left ear is pierced with a goldPlayBoy bunny earring. He calls for a flatbed tow truck and offers to stay sothat we can get to our concert on time. We thank him.

There isn't timeto go to the Olive Garden at the mall.

"Want to geta sandwich at McDonald's?" Dad asks, driving from my sunken car.

"How 'boutSubway?" I ask.

At the nearbyshopping plaza with the grocery store and clustered row of small shops, we seethat the sandwich chain is no longer there. It's been replaced by a hotdogstand in a storefront. Coney Island Hotdogs, it's called. Dad assumes I don'twant a Brooklyn wiener and offers to drive us somewhere else, but we're nearlyout of time. "I eat hotdogs!" I cry out.

He stops the carin the fire lane. I unbuckle my seatbelt and get out. Inside, there are nophotographs of ferris wheels, red roller coasters, creepy city clowns or even aNew York City skyline. This place is nearly bare. A standing cooler of sodacans, a rack of chips and on the wall behind the counter there are glossyphotographs of hotdogs topped with chunky red chili, grilled onions, and zigzagging condiments. "Hi, can I get three hotdogs with sauerkraut andmustard?" I ask the girl behind the counter. She nods and grabs at thegreasy links rotating on the grill behind her.

"EXACTLY$11!" A fat thirty-something homeboy exclaims at the register. I hand overa $20 bill.

Dad balances hisdinner of dogs on his lap, while he pulls out of the parking lot.

“What a disaster!”I say.

My dad disagrees.

We find the musichall, an old converted mill on the waterfront in Fall River, Massachusetts. Weclimb a couple flights of dark wooden stairs and make our way to the tickettable. I give my name to a short middle-aged man who stamps the tops of ourhands with a big black music note. We find a wobbly table beside the stage andI walk across the room to another table named "Cafe" and buy two cupsof decaf coffee and a brownie with walnuts.

When the openingact, The Milk Carton Kids are introduced, I realize we're too far over to seethe fast moving fingers of guitarist, Kenneth Pattengale. And worst yet,the band's banter, which I had howled at two nights before when I saw the showin Northampton now seems forced in the presence of this inattentive crowd ofBYO Boozers.

This must be myfault, somehow. Like I brought these unsuspecting musicians my evening'sgodawful luck.

Later on, when themain act, Joe Purdy takes the stage in his dark suede hat, fitted white teeshirt, gray tweed pants and cowboy boots, a car alarm begins to wail in theparking lot two flights below. Purdy starts the first solo song of his set, butpauses after a few bars to smirk and say, "Someone's really gotta checktheir car alarm."

"Could thatbe you Dad?" I whisper.

"No."

After a few solosongs, the alarm is silenced and the Milk Carton Kids join Purdy back onstage.Dad looks over to me with gleeful surprise, his legs and feet jumping. They areplaying "Pioneer," a song he and I learned on the guitar together a fewweeks before. Unabashed, my father sings along. At the table beside ours,slumped beside a small cooler of beer, a stranger sits alone. Afraid this manmight say something mean to my father, I put my hand on the back of my daddy'sneck then slyly move it over his mouth to shush him. I know I will regret it,but I do it anyway. Luckily, he disregards my awkward gesture and sings on.

In the lobby afterthe show, we stop at the merchandise table. I tell my father that I'm going tobuy him two CDs. "That'll be $20." I'm told. Inside my wallet thereis $18. $18? I look over to Dad, my defeatist heart burning through the sleeveof my v-neck tee shirt. His money is already out of his pocket and between hisshort brown fingers.

"How much doyou need?" He asks me.

When we leave thehall, it's raining again, but it's gentle and I linger in the parking lot,looking over to the Braga Bridge, waiting for the water to cover and cool mycheeks, to wash away my blued expectations.

The next morning,I drive Dad's truck from the east side of the state to the western side. Nocruise control. No radio. I put put along, but before I leave my father'shouse, he gives me a folded up wad of singles. "Toll money." He says.I can't refuse. My wallet is empty still and again, I am nearly late.

I feel like an alien.

2011-07-26T22:07:00.003-04:00

This past February, I call my doctor’s office. “I think I have a gluten allergy.” I say.

A few days later, my doctor sees me. We talk. He doesn’t think I have a gluten allergy. I tell him that my skin has been unusually pimply, but had gotten better, I think, whenever I avoided wheat products.

“Any diarrhea?” He asks, looking up from his laptop screen, his fingers frozen from their otherwise flickering clicking state, suspended above his flat black keyboard. My face warms and I am quiet for a moment. I don’t want to tell lies, but I haven’t really had the trots, squirts or the runs, as they say. Yet I know that, at this crucial juncture, describing my digestive expressions as plain old poop and pee will get me nothing. So I fib.

“Yeah….a little bit, maybe. Yes.”

He types this. Then he types up the blood test form because of my complaint of diarrhea and diarrhea and diarrheadiarrheaanddiarrhea, expelling this private potty word several times as if it is some requirement. Maybe he’s wearing a wire from my insurance company or maybe he’s just waiting for me to cry out, “OK OK! I haven’t reeeeallly had diarrhea.” But I don’t and he sends me off for blood work.

“Don’t avoid wheat products before the blood test or it won’t work.” He tells me.

That weekend, the gluten gods rapture me into a heaven of burnt bagels, cheesy calzones, big bowls of honey glazed cereal and French bread sandwiches. After this glorious two-day wheat orgy, I feel physically fine, a little fat with a bloating doughy belly, but no diarrhea. On Monday, I go to the hospital for blood work.

A few days later, I get a call from my doctor’s office. I have no intolerance to wheat.

It’s something I’m eating that’s causing my skin to do this, I tell my doctor next. Maybe something really small like a spice or something. He sends me to an allergist.

In the allergist’s office, a nurse presses cold rounded needles across my back. After she completes this task, I am instructed not to move for fifteen minutes. I sit in stiffness, my back slowly rounding. After thirty minutes, the doctor knocks, enters, looks at my back, wipes away the wetness and tells me to get dressed as he closes the door behind him. Once dressed, the doctor reenters to tell me that I have no common food allergies. He doesn’t know what’s going on with my skin, but he feels bad for me and gives me a prescription for antibiotics. I thank him and go on my way, planning to never really take the pill for when I took it for acne as a teenager, it caused my face to sunburn all year round.

A few weeks later, I call the dermatologist’s office where I had made an appointment a few weeks before. My appointment isn’t until August. It is March now. “What if I think I have Rosacea?” I ask the receptionist over the phone. “Could you see me sooner then?”

“No. Sorry. But I can put you on our waiting list...”

“I think I have Rosacea.” I say to my doctor. He looks closely at my face. It doesn’t look like Rosacea to him. Looks like acne. “But this is on my cheeks!” I tell him. “I’ve never had acne on my cheeks. Ever. And this doesn’t really feel like acne. This burns.”

“Haven’t you made an appointment with the dermatologist yet?” he asks.

“It’s in August.”

“Well, this isn’t Rosacea.” He says, but he can prescribe me some acne cream. “Which pharmacy would you like me to send this to?”

You can send it to the pharmacy known as your ass because that shit isn’t going to help me.

“The CVS on Main Street is good. Thank you.”

Last week, I call my gynecologist’s office. “I think I have Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.” I say. The receptionist schedules me for an appointment for Thursday with Amy, the nurse practitioner.

Thursday morning, Amy the nurse practitioner tells me that it doesn’t look like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Have I noticed an increase in chest, pubic or facial hair? I show her my naked lap. She shakes her head and I cover myself. She then pulls out a little white card and instructs me to record my periods. Months of marking little Xs. That’s what this little card means. This makes me cry. “So you aren’t going to have me tested?” I ask. This crying of mine embarrasses us both. She leaves the room and brings back a yellow form. She’s going to give me the blood test anyway. I cannot take the test until the third “bleeding” day of my period. I thank the poor nurse, get dressed and walk out of the doctor’s office.

Inside the confines of my car, I finish my sobbing. This is my most preferred place to weep, the driver’s seat. Something about the dramatic clutching of the steering wheel or the several small mirrors or perhaps it’s the immediate privacy in any public parking lot that allures me so.

On Friday, my left eye begins to hurt like a bruise. Sunday morning, I awake with a full blown stye on my bottom left eyelid. Even my cheek is puffy. Sunday afternoon, I leave Brooklyn with my friend Claire and we drive home to Northampton, Massachsuetts, leaving Scott with Claire's fiancé, Jay. Scott departs from JFK Airport the following day for Israel on a free ten-day trip called Birthright. We had driven to Brooklyn Saturday morning to stay with our friends in Clinton Hill.

Extacy pills before a rave of rapists, creepers and undercover cops. After taking the drugs, I lay back down. Still my eye won’t close. I turn on my phone and search for the symptoms of Lyme Disease, for a tick had bit me in April and still I have an unhealed mark on my hip. As I read the common symptoms, I discover that this must be it. I must have Lyme Disease. (Even though my troubles started far before April). As I make my new diagnosis, anxiety begins to rupture from my stomach and heart palpitations swell through the small bone bars of my chest cavity. I’m having heart attack. At 3:30am, I nearly drive myself to the local hospital. Alone, for my first night alone, alone, all by my self in this queen sized bed while Scott sleeps on an air mattress in Brooklyn. The next day he is heading for his homeland with a group of twenty something strangers. I’ve never felt so desperate for companionship. How lucky I am to have him here most of the time to carry me from these bouts of insanity. If I die right now, I’m going to be really angry at myself. I should wake up my roommates, Amy and Mark and tell them that I might be having a heart attack. It’s probably not a heart attack, but what if it is? I don’t want them finding me dead from a drug overdose tomorrow morning. Should I call for an ambulance?

But I don’t go anywhere and I don’t call anyone or knock on anyone’s bedroom door. Instead I toss through twenty minutes of unnerving sleep before my alarm clock honks like a stupid goose at 5am. My left eyelids stick together with a thin layer of yellow-crusted junk. I roll out of bed and stand so that I won’t fall back asleep. My reflection in the bathroom mirror is unrecognizable. I have red sores across my cheeks, patches discolored brown and my left eye looks like a deflated red balloon, piled there atop my eye, beneath my brow.

At work, I call my doctor’s office. “I think I have Lyme Disease.” I tell the receptionist. The doctor can see me at 3:45pm. Despite that I nanny until 5pm, I make the appointment. I send my roommate, Amy, a message. She agrees to help me by watching the boys while I see my doctor. I pick her up before the appointment and while I am inside she sits with the boys in the car, drawing the toddlers sketches of fish and octopuses and making paper airplanes. While I wait in the waiting room, I stand at the window watching the car.

Once inside the doctor’s office, while I wait for the doctor to come in, I send Amy a message. “I’m sorry this is taking so long.” I send to her.

“They’re being good so far.” She says.

“Ok good. I’ll make this up to you.”

“No need. Get better! That’ll make me happy.”

As soon as my doctor walks into the room, I watch myself weep. I apologize and get through my words like a train on an overgrown track. “I feel like I’m falling apart.” I tell him. “My body isn’t healing. My skin isn’t healing like it’s supposed to.” And for the first time he agrees that this doesn’t look like acne. It doesn’t look like Lyme Disease either, but we can do the blood test to be sure. I tell him about the rash on my feet and he inspects my puffy eye. Then I show him this ingrown hair on my bikini line that blew up the night before into a bluish bubble. He tells me he thinks that it was wise to pop it, which surprises me as I remember sopping up the fluid with a handful of tissues. He tells me this all seems very similar to Scott’s abscess from the year before. Where could we have been exposed to such bacteria? Do we shower at a gym? "No. I do yoga." I tell him, but there are no showers there. Honestly, I’m a little angry he doesn’t think it’s Lyme Disease. He puts me on antibiotics and some nose ointment. He says if my eye isn't better or close to better by Thursday he's going to have an eye specialist drain it.

I feel like a fucking alien.

After the appointment, I drive Amy home. Then I drive the boys home.

Then it dawns on me that my yoga mat must be infested with years of bacteria for I never clean that thing. Scott’s cyst last year was on his back and he likes to do sit-ups on the yoga mat.

I call Scott. He’s in a loud airport shop. He steps out to a terminal to talk. I try not to cry, but his gentle voice opens the damn dam I usually keep guarded by a family of prosperous beavers, letting my dead sea to further flood from my eye and a half with such force I can barely breathe. Perhaps the beavers don’t work during illness. Anyway, I had planned to not tell him anything. I didn’t want him to know that I nearly called him in the middle of the night. That in my sleep deprived drugged up delirium, I actually considered driving back to Brooklyn for a hug. But as soon as I hear him say, “Ah Rachey”, my night and day eject out of me like a messy shit, yes diarrhea. As I wipe away my tears, I tell him how much I love him and he tells me the same and that he misses me already. Eventually I realize that saying good bye without a shaky voice isn’t possible at this time in my life so I say it the best I can, with “really don’t worry about mes” wrapping through my good and byes like hundred year old vines in the wind.

There I am, in my favorite weeping place, the driver’s seat. Parked in the center of town outside the pharmacy where I plan to purchase my new prescriptions. I haven’t put money in the meter yet. It’s a little before 6pm and I imagine a meter maid coming to write me a ticket and then I imagine killing the old maid right there on the sidewalk beside that line of multi-colored newspaper boxes. But no one comes along and after Scott and I say our final good bye, I put two nickels into the machine.

As I walk back to the car from the pharmacy, my father calls and again my tears begin falling and my voice begins rattling like a falling top. My father is on the case. He tells me. He’s going to help me figure out what’s wrong with me. I believe him because, luckily for me, I still secretly believe that he is Superman.

I go to the grocery store, the good grocery store, and buy three pieces of almond encrusted tilapia; a bunch of broccoli, a bag of whole wheat pasta and two big bunches of dinosaur kale. I will turn this around. This is the start of my skin recovery.

When I get home, I throw out all of my yoga stuff. It’s like the Velveteen Rabbit story, only I don’t have a bonfire in the woods, just a big green garbage can. Amy grills the fish on tin foil and I make pasta salad and sautéed broccoli. I thank them, my roommates for all their help, for watching Penny while I was in New York and for watching the boys while I was falling apart.

At around 9pm, I take my meds, which is one antibiotic pill, and then I take several alcohol swabs to my face.

“You seem exasperated.” My doctor tells me while I lay on the table and he inspects the black hole on my bikini line.

“It’s been a long year.”

I hold a hot washcloth to my eye for a half an hour or so and go to bed. Then I sleep. Really sleep.

“I think you might have MRSA,” My father tells me. I’m not going to search that. I tell myself. I can’t. And I’m definitely not going to do an image search for it. I’m going to wait and see how this two-week antibiotic trial goes. (This inner dialogue lasts as long as the walk from my kitchen to the computer.) Here I am sitting at the computer. MRSA is what made Michael Jackson lose part of his nose. I’m going to lose part of my nose. Suicide is happening pre-nose crumbling. If I can’t deal with pimples, I certainly can’t live with half a nose. I tell my father that this scares the desire to live out of me. “It isn’t life threatening. Its just uncomfortable. So let’s just wait and see what your dermatologist says.” He says, calming me.

The next morning, I go to my doctor’s office and speak with the front desk receptionist nurse. “My father thinks I have MRSA.” I tell her.

A couple hours later, she calls me back after speaking with my doctor. “He’s already treating you as if you had MRSA.”

At my last appointment, in my physically disfigured and mentally altered state of failure to operate my own body, I couldn't quite comprehend what he was explaining to me about this virus. So after a year of fluctuating levels of attractiveness, from days of heinous discoloration and blistery bumps across the tops of my cheeks and above my eyebrows, it is finally solved. The mystery is solved. Not yet cured, but at least understood.

Scott is still away. In an email, I tell him, “I’m going to look like the blushing bride you married when you get home.”

For two weeks I’ve been living without his body in bed with mine, so many days without even speaking with him. He’s sent me a couple emails entitled “international love”. Short emails I’ve read over and over. Every day, I scan the news headlines for any violence in Israel and Scott’s grandparents and parents call me to say hello. It’s just Penny and I in the quiet apartment tonight. Amy and Mark are away. They'll be back tomorrow. I swept the floors tonight and tossed the moldy leftovers from the back of the fridge. I haven’t cried since last Monday. I’m fine by myself. On my own schedule. Eating what I feel like. Going to bed early if I want, late if I feel the impulse. But it’s lonely here without him, and this fills me with both gratitude and sympathy for anyone who's every found herself sick and alone.

Douche Bags

2011-07-11T17:00:00.004-04:00

"Gut taken in at a checkpoint. Fuckin' six months without a license. But I gut a good lawya, so..." A redhead with rust freckled arms, says.

"That happened to me last summah, dude." His friend says.

"Where was the checkpoint?" Another guy asks.

"Ovah on Columbus Street in Springfield. Fuckin'...yeah but it's cool, I gut a good lawya."

There is a pause here as the three nod their heads and look around. I can't tell because I'm trying not to stare, but I think this is an awkward moment.

"You livin 'round here now?"

Last year, a fellow coworker at the grocery store refers to his D.U.I. with a carefully crafted nonchalance, calling it a "dooey."

"A what?" I ask.

"D.U.I." He says.

Ahhh...a dooey. Just a fuzzy little dooey for driving drunk. No big deal. Cop was an ass hole probably, right? Fuckin' pig pull you over in your low riding, bass bumping beige Camry while you and three other twenty something tormentors speed around town verbally violating every female you pass because it's funny and because it's "fuuuckin' summah dooood"?

One morning last week, while on his bicycle, Scott is confronted by a man in a white unmarked van. At the intersection on the edge of our small city center where one lane splits into two, Scott gives the signal to go left and steers his bicycle to the right side of the left lane. This infuriates the man in the white unmarked van behind him who slams on his gas pedal and speeds past Scott, nearly hitting the back tire of his bicycle. Blown away by this unwarranted belligerence, Scott raises his middle finger and shows it to the driver. Seconds later, forced to stop at the traffic light, the stranger begins molesting Scott's patience by calling him a "fucking faggot" repeatedly before eventually stringing together enough words to construct a somewhat coherent sentence, "Oh you're such a tough guy with that finger, how about I take it and shove it up your fucking ass, you fuckin' faggot." Of course, it isn't a particularly smart sentence and the mere mention of shoving Scott's finger up Scott's ass is, of course, a form of man-on-man rape and yet he's the one calling Scott the faggot, but all the same, Scott remains calm.

"What was I supposed to do?" My husband asks.

"You're supposed to be on the fuckin' sidewalk, ya fuckin' faggot." This man (who probably hasn't ridden a bicycle since he was a boy for only "faggots" ride bicycles) says.

"We're not supposed to ride on the sidewalk."

"You fuckin' registered, you fuckin' faggot?" The man shouts as his tires screech forward, leaving behind the echo of his rage to surround Scott where he sits simmering on his bicycle seat, waiting, still, for the light to turn green. Shaking off the last bit of loitering tension, he catches the eye of a young lady who stands on the sidewalk waiting for a walk signal.

"Nice." She says, raising her eyebrows.

What is this? This culture of men who live in these cloudy bubbles of douche baggery?

Yesterday afternoon, after going out to lunch, Scott and I spot a friend sitting on the stoop of a storefront. "Hey, come over here and listen to this guy." He says, waving toward a skinny kid about our age playing guitar. "He's amazing. I've never seen anyone play like him." He says and so we sit and tap our toes and listen to this young man play Bob Dylan songs and yodel between ballads. After a few songs, two bronzed guys with tight white tee shirts, flowery font leg tattoos and cell phones clipped to their black leather belts pass before the busker in a dramatic slow motion dance of mockery. Unfazed, the busking boy plays on and a young woman drops a dollar into his guitar case.

When these pompous gentlemen reach their buddies on the other side of the guitar, I watch while they give out elaborately casual handshakes before one of them spews,

"Yo I had a massage and it was wundaful. I had a massage today and it. was. wundaful." It is as if he is speaking for the sake of speaking. As if he has perfected the delivery of contrived chit chatter. I wonder if he ever says anything at all.

We leave soon after, but before we do I toss two dollar bills into the busking boy's case and smile him a thank you.

"Yo, you wanna go drinkin?"

Drinking has become an activity. Like hiking a mountain or going to the movie theater or playing video games. It's a thing to do now. I admit, I do it. I drink to relax and laugh away the worries I have congesting my brain waves, but I don't call it that. I don't tell everyone I'm drinking in order to get drunk in order to justify vomiting cheap beer on some girl who looks slutty enough, drunk enough, to give me a blow job in the dirty bar bathroom (not because I want her to but because it'll be a funny story later and because blow jobs by strange girls in bathrooms are supposed to be something I desire and not something that terrifies me.)

This is why there is nothing like a good man. A man who is secure enough to buy his son dolls, tea sets and dress up clothes. A man who is grown up enough to cross his legs and wear bow ties, cuff links and matching argyle socks. A man who is comfortable enough to embrace the awkwardness of acquaintances, allowing humor and honesty to collide with eye contact and fumbling handshakes. A man who says things like "I can't wait to see you as a mother." And, "When you smile, my heart opens. Some days I spend hours just trying to make you laugh." A man who admits to a real fear of spiders, crabs, lobsters and dead Asian girls with crooked spines, bluish white faces and long stringy hair. A man who is an individual and not a copy of a music video or advertisement or the copy of the copy of either of these things. A man with a scar on his back, not from a knife fight or gang brawl, but from an infected sack of pus he had surgically removed last Spring.

Sure I don't really know these dudes I call douche bags (a phrase stemmed from my own horrid slang), but that's because I have no desire to know them. I wish I could tell them that. That their two-dimensional portrayals of the people they think they should be are extremely dull compared to the unique men they are on the inside.

Nana Poopy!

2011-06-19T16:00:00.102-04:00

Two-year-old toe head, Noah holds the back of his yellow toy dump truck at the top of the driveway. He has plans to push it down the hill, crashing the metal and plastic into the bumper of my car or flipping over the ridge between the cement and grass, but the boy accidently lets the truck go and it rolls out of his reach. Blimpy baby legs become a peach-colored blur as the boy goes into a full fledged high speed chase. With the hill's momentum and the help of four wheels, the truck manages to escape the clomping froggy rain boots of the proportionally enormous toddler (juxtaposed against the truck's size) for the entire journey down the hill until the truck suddenly hits the rough terrain of the grass and slows down. When he reaches it, Noah grabs the cab of the toy truck with both dimpled hands and shoves his face into the driver’s side window and scolds, “Nana poopy guy in there!”

"Nana poopy" is the choice curse of the children I nanny for. It is a phrase taken from a sing songy tease that would be written phonetically as "naaanah poooopeee". The twin two year olds, Noah and Willy, learned it from their six-year-old brother, Johnny. The phrase appeared a few months ago and despite my attempts to ignore it or punish them for it, I could not and still cannot rid them of this cuss.

“Nana Poopy Rachel!” Noah yells from the confines of his crib after I return him to behind the white wooden bars. Seconds before, when their broken chatter had turned to commotion, I walked into their bedroom to discover that Noah and Willy are no longer in their cribs. Noah is in the closet and Willy is jumping inside Noah's crib. Both boys are laughing when I walk in, but the shrill shocked voice flying from my mouth silences them.

"What are you doiiiing?!"

The words nearly echo. This makes Willy cry, but Noah just scowls, angry that I have ruined their ruckus time. Once I place both boys in their designated beds, I close their bedroom door. As I do, Noah yells,

"NANA POOPY RACHEL!" Then there is a slight pause before Willy whispers,

“Nanna poopy, Rachel.”

Every muscle in my body tenses with incredible rigidity. My morning’s caffeine has now completely evaporated from my bloodstream and, having been watching these two busy boys since 6:45 in the morning, by 2:30pm, I am utterly exhausted. As I land in the middle of the red cushy couch of the living room, Willy's muffled words reach my ears and I can’t stop myself from wailing,

“NANA POOPY TO YOU, WILLY! NANA POOOPY TO YOU, NOAH!” The phrase had been itching to leave my vocal chords all day. It doesn't feel as good as I had envisioned. Instead I feel mildly humiliated. I cover my eyes with my hands and crash myself into the pile of pillows beside me. There is a short moment of quiet before giggles and mattress creaking returns to the warm sound waves that separate us, and then,

"Rachey mad."

"I know."

I feel horrible, but then I hear Noah say, "Willy, Willy look at me."

Giggles.

"Look at me, Noah!"

They have already forgotten that Rachey is mad. Slightly relieved, I decide that all I can do now is wait for them to tire themselves out and fall asleep.

I must have history with nana poopy for it tickles my nerves so furiously. One day, Noah will not stop saying it. He says it to his toys, his brothers, to me, his bicycle, to nearly everything and everyone he comes into contact with. Before we leave for town that morning, he sits in his car seat, saying it again and again and again and again while I buckle Willy in. At this point, after two and a half -nana poopy- hours, I have reached the fraying end of my wits. I try to tell him nicely not to say it. When that doesn't work, I explain simply that it is not a nice thing to say. By this time, I have already tried ignoring the nanas and the poopies. I have tried time outs for every mention of nana or poopy, but to no avail, NOTHING WORKS. Hunched halfway into the car, I decide on a new approach, but as soon as I start spewing my explanation to the little boy, I know that what I am saying is far more than he can completely comprehend. I say it anyway.

“Noah, if you say nana poopy one more time, I am going to tell momma when she gets home from work and she is not going to be happy with you and if everyone gets ice cream after supper tonight, you are not going to get ice cream. So don’t say it, Noah. Don’t say—“

“Nana poopy ice cream.” He whines with intuitive rebellion.

I nearly laugh I am so angry, but instead I growl slightly and the boys repeat my sound as I close the car door. I do a little dance in the driveway to let off steam. After a few heavy breaths and some counting, I climb into the car and drive the three of us to town for some fresh air, playground play and an enormously potent cup of coffee.

Reaching for the stars and shit...

2011-05-20T23:53:00.004-04:00

There is a generation here of broken down artists, of barristas and bartenders, babysitters and bachelors of the fine arts and I feel like its fat, flamboyant ringleader.

The daughter of middle class baby boomers, I have no real fear of homelessness, bread lines or the depletion of Medicare. Instead, I run screaming from confining cardboard cubicles, menial labor, micromanaging managers and long term financial commitments. Like an arrogant protester who's really only on the picket line because he prefers his barbecue grill to the community copy machine, I am still (somewhat secretly) sitting on sidewalks striving for what I want: the life as a full time artist. This is a frightening fact because I am twenty-seven years old and can no longer, really, use my age as an excuse for drifting. Even my mother has begun giving me the "you can't do this forever" look... this stalling, fighting, falling.

It reminds me of an afternoon from when I was a young teenager. I dressed to go running and announced my plans to my parents. "Have fun." They told me. "Be safe!" But this response was not what I had expected nor hoped. They were supposed to tell me I was too small to be thinking of exercise that wasn't backyard play.

It's scary when we grow up without noticing.

Last spring, my friend Kelsey told me, "Do it now. Don't wait. It gets harder and harder to conceive as soon as you hit thirty." I imagined a thirtieth birthday party where my uterus falls out, my fallopian tubes retire and move to Florida and my little peach-colored utters start smelling of sour milk. Kelsey was right, I decided that day in the ice cream parlor, it was time I made myself a baby.

I am very impressionable.

Usually after visiting with my grandparents, who take pleasure in pontificating such phrases as "What are you waiting for?" and "You kids think you can plan everything!," I'll turn to my husband, Scott and say that it is time. Baby time. He has yet to accommodate such spontaneous suggestions.

I didn't always accept myself as this self-involved idealist. Sure when I was a kid I believed in the cliches of dreams, rainbow slides and stars, but so did everybody. In the fourth grade, I wrote the words, "When I grow up I want to play basketball for the big leagues." Beside this carefully penned pipe dream, there was my school picture of florescent lasers, a wave of brown bangs and a turtleneck sweater ensemble. Once I got to high school I began seeing the common classroom posters of Michael Jordan, Bugs Bunny, Steve McQueen and Flipper the Dolphin as faded fanciful propaganda from the early 90s. The only one that really inspired me was the poster of the black smoker's lung beside the pink non-smoker's lung. The caption read "IMAGINE" or something and probably still hangs on the inside of the athletic director's door.

Toward the end of high school, I started seriously searching for my future career. Retreating to the computer lab often, I'd take several surveys. I was desperate to find any sort of personal passion that did not involve the arts. I thought about law, government, psychology, but I couldn't imagine myself spending an entire adulthood pursuing any of these. I felt cursed. Years later, now perpetually stuck inside this realm rightly named "the real world", I still cannot enroll in any class or school to further myself as a professional business lady, nurse or landscaper. I hop jobs like bums board trains and I do not really see myself settling down to work forever anywhere. To be quite honest, I cannot completely comprehend how anyone can. How a young adult can say that he/she hopes to have the same job until retirement. To me, that job security looks more like a tediously tiring train ride in a warm windowless wagon.

My mother is a principal for an elementary school. The union is meeting, she tells me. They're getting ready for a grievance. Of course they are, I think to myself. How could they possibly go day by day, year by year, working in the same building, sometimes the same classroom and be completely content? They're just looking for someone to blame for their boredom, their personal unhappiness, I tell her, don't take it personally, but she can't help it. When I see her Sunday, she drinks three cups of coffee before switching to white wine in the afternoon. My mother is a mover, but she can also commit when it is the right thing to do and, despite the conceived complaints of her employees, she knows that she is very good for her school. This is when I tell her that Scott is probably taking next year off teaching to see if teaching high school is really as horrible as it seems now. I want my health insurance and his bi-weekly pay checks, I tell her, but I am supporting his decision to choose his sanity over the security his job provides. Besides, despite my few semi-serious attempts to get pregnant, we still do not have children. This grants us a little more time for bad decisions. We think. And while Scott is searching his soul, I will be striving to still myself, linger longer in moments and apartments, towns and jobs. Maybe I'll wake up one day with a serious determination to sell tiny knick knack cat statues from a sidewalk cart or go back to school to be something other than an aging vagabond.

Perhaps my problem is a lack of fear. Maybe a night dumpster diving; busking with my broken guitar; begging pedestrians for pennies and sleeping on a cot in a church basement is what I need to set up a future with reality in mind. I do sincerely wonder what it must be like to want to do something or be someone attainable.

A guilded tour through my somewhat self-deprecating thoughts.

2011-05-17T13:50:00.001-04:00

In our teens, my two sisters and I discovered the comforting glory of food. "Anorexia starts tomorrow." We'd grumble, grasping our swollen stomachs after family feasts and $20 brunch buffets. My family doesn't do buffets, I tell people smiling, after their restaurant suggestions. We can't handle the pressure.

photo by Patrick Cummings

Do I feel the faintest glimmer of hunger? I should get a coffee. Anybody wanna grab a beer? WHO THE F ATE THE REST OF MY COOKIES? Is my stomach hollow enough to justify filling it with hardly chewed food and gulped down drink? I am going to eat only vegetables. No more processed foods EVER. I need to cool it on the dairy. I should fill my grocery cart with only pickles, parsley and celery. No more corn. No sugar. No more wheat! Maybe I should do one of those lemon turmeric cleanses and send several interior inches out my back door. I know what to do: chew my food. Chew and chew until it is complete mush and slithers down my throat like a slug on a slip 'n slide. Or, simply, eat more like a bird and less like a dinosaur. I am the middle child of a mother who rarely made enough for everyone to have seconds. I was always first to the stove with an empty plate (except for frozen stir fry dinner nights where terribly bland teriyaki sauce drenched rubbery vegetables and wrinkly brown beef strips). To this day, I am still always the first to be finished. If I were a little bird, I would pick at my plate, daintily taking in a few crumbs at a time and sometimes, SOMETIMES I would even be that person who pushes her plate away with an expression that reads, I've lost interest in this laborious act of eating. I will sip my drink. I won't open my mouth like a curved bridge over a river, flooding my throat and insides as though I haven't drunk in days. I will sip, sifting the liquid through my teeth and bathing my tongue. I will stop looking at food as my drug. I will start doing real drugs. That will distract me. I won't be thinking about those avocados or bananas softening in the fruit bowl if all my brain power is used to figure out when I can pay my dealer for more drugs. I don't think cocaine addicts eat much. Actually, I'm pretty positive they're usually waif thin. I could be waif thin and sickly! Get a couple duffel bags under my eyes and frequent, unannounced bloody noses. Have my ribs show through my winter coat and watch as my skin stretches over my bones like a sheet on an old springy cot. I know, I know! I'll stop sitting entirely. Stand all the time. Wear one of those step counters and walk several miles every day. I'll lose those ten pounds and when I do, when those ten pounds are gone, I will be completely happy. I will be enormously successful and confident. Life will be grand, perfect even. No, of course that isn't true. It isn't that simple. My life will be perfect when I lose those ten pounds and when my skin clears up and when I can convince the skin below my neck that it is more Italian than Irish and English and should, therefore, turn golden in the sun rather than this blotchy pink. Yes. When those ten pounds are gone, when my face is blemish free and the rest of my skin is more gold than silver, then, then I will be perfectly happy. No, I suppose that's not completely true. Really it's all that in addition to when I can get this toe nail fungus figured out and when some nerdy lab rat somewhere invents a pill to shrink my feet to an adorable size seven and my sausage fingers to the size they were when I was six. When I am thinner and prettier and when I'm wealthy and can afford a new wardrobe and earrings that don't turn my earlobes green then, then I will be happy. I will be incessantly hungry with a stomach full of diet pills and a strangely stiff airbrushed face full of botulism, but I will perfect and happy, just like those fucking magazines and movie screens.

If I survive to an ancient age, will I, by then, just be wishing for this fleshy figure back, for this moist oily skin again? For this flexibility to paint my own toenails? When I am old and retired to rocking chairs and crochet classes, will I read this and cry out, "Damn you! You were your own kind of beautiful and all you saw were what society classified as flaws." I remember when I was thirteen, writing very similar sentences in diaries and along the mirrors of my conscious thoughts. "When I have contact lenses, when my skin clears up, when my braces are off, when I have boobs, when my body doesn't resemble a baby giraffe...then I will be beautiful." These days, I eat like a hungry hungry hippo whenever I am anxious, bored, feeling awkward around acquaintances or when I am home alone with corn chips wedged into the back corner of the cupboard, but besides this habit to pack my mouth like the tiny suitcase of a queen, I am extremely healthy. I am alive. I am happy. I am loved. I am my own kind of beautiful.

Osama

2011-05-04T15:30:00.062-04:00

This morning, Monday, May 2, 2011, at around 5:45 a.m., while walking my dog, Penny through the quiet beginning of another week here in Northampton, Massachusetts, I passed a collection of colorful newspaper stands. My eyes caught sight of the headlines like an ignorantly eager fish might bite bait and a hook. "Osama bin Laden Killed by U.S." I read.

I was a senior in high school when the country was attacked by al Qaida's traveling terrorists. That fall, my class's senior trip to Florida was cancelled, but not without a fight. We had an evening assembly. Passionate parents fought to keep the school trip. "We can't let the terrorist win!" I remember one mother saying in a sudden soliloquy. My mother and I sat in the back of the auditorium, leaning into one another, listening and keeping our comments to ourselves. "This is what they want! They want us to be afraid!" A father declared and a few people clapped in support, nodding their heads and saying things like, "He's right, you know, he's exactly right." It was an awkward assembly (for no seventeen-year-old wants to be present when his/her parent is anything but silent and invisible). I remember my mother mumbling, "I'm not about to sacrifice my child to make a point." Logan International Airport had not yet regained her trust. That Spring, this same group of proactive parents organized and chaperoned the trip to Florida and I went. By then, my mother and father had decided that a quick trip to Disney World wouldn't, most likely, kill me.

On September 11, 2001, I sat in the lunch room listening to incomplete and unintelligible stories as they spread around me like haze. Everyone leaned over their uneaten sandwiches. "Twin Towers," I heard. "Flew out of Logan," "New York City," "Pentagon" and "it was terrorists, terrorists hijacked the planes." I was nervous, uninformed. I didn't know where the Twin Towers were and I feared they might be in Boston. My father worked in Boston at the time. I didn't know where his office was in Boston, but I assumed it could be within the walls of one of these burning buildings everyone was whispering about.

After lunch, in classrooms throughout the school, televisions and computers were turned on and tuned in. In smokey New York City streets, debris fell from the sky like dirty snow. Firefighters ran hoses. Police ran for survivors. Business men and woman ran around in heels and dark suits with faces distorted by horror and muddied by soot. Bodies fell from the sky. We watched bodies fall from the sky and planes crash into the New York City skyline.

That night, President George W. Bush spoke on national television. "That poor bastard," I remember my mother murmuring when his sullen face appeared on the screen. For the following months, we watched the nightly news, wincing and choking up at the personal stories that began to play. Strangers stood before camera crews showing pictures of lost loved ones and crumpled tissues between their fingers as they rose them to their wet eyes. We watched footage of plastered walls of Missing Person papers in New York City bus stops and downtown subway stations. I remember when they stopped calling the work at Ground Zero, a rescue mission. I watched people in foreign city streets celebrate the attacks of September 11th. Dancing, parading and howling, these people publicly hailed the mass murdering martyrs. America, I learned in that moment, was like the rich, perfect, popular kid who one day got ambushed, defecated on, shoved into a locker and left over night to weep within darkness.

I must admit that I do believe the murder of Osama bin Laden was extremely justified, however it is a peculiar, guilty joy or satisfaction that stems from the death of this person, even someone as corrupt and blatantly evil as he. Sunday night, after President Barack Obama announced the news, there were celebratory riots and prayer vigils across the country, particularly outside the White House and in New York City. Across America, many people are smiling and sighing that justice has finally been served, but there are also many Americans shaking their heads and fingers, saying, an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind! and quotes by the renowned American pacifist, Martin Luther King Jr. I can't say what I believe is right. My husband, Scott is disgusted by the excitement. This morning, while I made my bagged lunch, I compared Osama bin Laden to Adolph Hitler. He can't be alive, I said simply. He just shouldn't be alive. Of course, really, I don't know. Perhaps a formal trial would be interesting and just, but what possible sentence does one deserve for the massacre of thousands of innocent people? I know what my friend, Mark would say without even asking him. As I have written before, here, in an entry titled "Eye for an Eye", Mark would say that Osama bin Laden deserves to get what he did to others. He deserves to be raised high above a cement city street, to the height of the 110th floor of the Twin Towers, and thrown onto a burning ledge. He should be forced to choose between fire and a fall, a death by burning or a death by plummeting into the windy expanse of a fourteen hundred foot drop.

Lucky for him, the Eighth Amendment of The United States Constitution would prevent such cruel and unusual punishment. However, no matter how he died, he is dead and whether you speculate, criticize or commend the actions of the United States in the raid and killing of this extremely powerful terrorist, all we can really do now is hope that Osama bin Laden does not escape Hell and hide in some hidden compound in Heaven.

Street Shock

2011-04-30T15:00:00.021-04:00

As we approach the small intersection where we will turn right, Scott and I pass a tall skinny white man with a long dark ponytail. From the sidewalk, the sullen stranger looks at me; lifts his right hand and adjusts his long fingers into the shape of a pistol. As we pass him, rolling toward the red light, he pulls the trigger of his middle finger and says, "yeah, ya freak." The yeah stretches between us as if he expects me to agree with him. Ya is plain and painfully general. Freak sticks into the air like a real bullet might. I stare at the man from inside a voiceless shock. I want to yell out my window that he is the freak. That he needs a haircut. That he can go fuck himself. But I can't. I am nauseous, numb and dumb. I look to Scott. He laughs. He probably mistook us for someone else, he says, but the gunman looked right at me for four or five full seconds, I tell him. Later, Scott retells the story to our roommates. "The guy was clearly crazy." He says and I laugh along while sharp shrapnel sinks into my flimsy skin. I am free of physical harm, but this particular brand of verbal violence lingers like a wet scab.

It reminds me of a day in the year we lived in New York City. I went to cross a street in midtown. I didn't have the walk signal, but there were no cars coming so I did what I always did and began to cross. When I reached a quarter of the way to the other side of this massive street, I noticed a yellow taxi driving toward me. It'll slow down, I thought to myself, but it didn't and after two more timid steps, I began to retreat, turning and running back to the curb. Once safely on the sidewalk, I watched the cab speed by. There was no time to give the driver my favorite finger gesture, only fleeting eye contact. As he passed by, the driver glared at me, grimaced even. He wanted to strike me dead in the middle of the street, I knew. He wanted hit me and drive away, aiming his wheels to squish my skin and crunch my bones into the hot mid-afternoon city cement. As my body laid flat and bloodied, my guts torn out by black rubber tires and plastic windshield wipers, the driver would successfully flee the scene (for a yellow taxi in New York City is like a blond in Los Angeles: they are everywhere and they all look the same.) Shame on me. Such unessessary judgement against a particularly pretty demographic. But my shallow aggression toward blonds derives entirely from dull, imature insecurities where big boobied blond Barbies stand on the tip toes of my childhood bedrooms anxiously waiting for their next costume change, haircut, or private make-out session with Ken. It is nothing compared to the contageous hatred that festers in the puckered eyes of these grown men.

Was the driver's day so bad, filled with so many mindless jaywalkers that he just wanted to hit one of them to revenge himself against every person who had ever caused him to tap his break pedal since the day he started driving the New York City's streets for tips? Was he caught inside the enchanting thrill of a death threat? At the time, I couldn't help but think the dark skinned taxi driver wanted to hit me because he saw me as a self-entitled white girl tramping across the street like a glutonous Goldilocks, trespassing and stealing the property of strangers, but that's racist to think and embarrassing to admit. Besides, my locks, as I have previously implied, are not gold. Was the man with the imaginary gun angry because we were driving an old beige Toyota Camry? Was he jealous of how openly we flaunt our fortune? I knew we never should have gotten those spinning diamond rims, gold leafed license plates or that slammin' sound system.

Perhaps the problem is that most of us fill our bellies with 20 ounce bottles of carbonated anger and any one little thing can tip them over, causing enormous amounts of emotion to spew out of us in unexpecteded explosions. I think that probably was the case of the cab driver. Yet when it comes to the man on the side of the road, I am still somewhat speechless. I have decided that he is crazy. Yet the real scary thing is that this man might be eligible to purchase a real weapon one day. Actually, he might already own one. The cab driver had a weapon, his yellow taxi. When his bottles tipped and broke, he tried to kill me with his car, or at least that's what it felt like. What if the man with the ponytail is packing a real pistol one day and I pass him again and for some reason my eye contact causes some kind of chemical reaction in his body and he draws a real gun on me and all I can do is stare back at him in a silent shock?

Corned Beef, Cabbage and The Apocalypse

2011-04-06T20:00:00.058-04:00

Corned beef and cabbage sits simmering on the stove. The smell wraps us in warm beefy blankets as we set the table and talk. Around 8:00 p.m., Amy's two friends, Tyler and Katie, arrive with beer and a garden salad. By 9:30, six of us sit for a late night Irish feast.

By midnight, our bellies brim over our buckled belts. I sit slightly slumped as the dining room spins from the beer I've drunk. In the kitchen, Mark mixes, bakes, and slices brownies. I stay seated, picking out chunks of cold soft carrots to eat with my fingers from the nearly naked serving bowl before me. Then the conversation turns from light cordial chatter to a discussion about current international news. Japan's earthquake shakes and sinks onto the chests of our newly leaden bodies and our voices shift into new tones. We trade what we know about the tsunami damage and ongoing fires at the nuclear power plant. Radiation levels are rising, I learn, spreading like the cancer it will cause.  Tyler says she's read about world wide radiation levels taken during different times of nuclear testing. It spreads, she tells us. It cannot truly be contained. She then tells us about a memoir she's read about a tragic town where nearly every citizen, except for the lactose intolerant author, is diagnosed with cancer. Radiation from a nearby nuclear plant seeped into the water and into the grass that the local dairy cows ate. Because nearly everyone in the town drank the milk, they all, cows included, digested radiation regularly.

"Why would anyone want to have children these days?" I ask.  "The world is probably going to end soon, right? Isn't it really only a matter of time?" Katie needs another drink. I feel doll size and lifeless. Scott says he thinks it'd be cool to have kids who are among the last humans. I suppose there were probably pregnancies during the Cuban Missile Crisis, World War I and II, The Great Depression, The American Civil War and even during the times of Small Pox and the Plague. I must remember perspective. There is, has always been and will always be threat.

This is when we all notice how visibly exhilarated Mark is by the prospect of living in a world much like his post-apocalyptic video games where every moment stands on a wobbly balance beam between life and death. Where every character carries massive machetes and stolen rations, stalking the barren wastelands of Earth, killing to survive.

Katie says she'd rather everyone died at once, like in a flash. Taken by surprise, she says. It would be much too terrifying to hear about different parts of the world blowing up or melting or evaporating, she says. She doesn't want to sit around waiting for death. Scott disagrees. He would prefer a heads up. To know he only had a week, day, or hour to live. It'd give him time to tie up loose ends, he explains, say good bye to people, eat some really good food. 

I can't decide what I'd prefer. I guess if everything went dark, if the electricity we so depend on suddenly went dead one day and we heard rumors that throughout the world communities were being targeted and eaten up by radiation, cannibalistic terrorists or a vengeful God's wrath, I'd want to see how long I could survive. Perhaps I would go find my family. Bike the hundred miles of back roads between my apartment and my parents' front door. Along the way, I could stay out of sight, hoping, praying and wishing that the authorities I have voted for and the armed forces I have hid behind will step up and save me. I could paint my face with green and brown stage makeup and sleep under leaves in the woods. Hunt down abandoned grocery marts and liquor stores. Stitch blankets out of found roadkill fur. Get really good at climbing trees. Finally lose those stubborn seven pounds. Really, it does sound like quite the adventure, certainly something to write about, but it does not give me the glee that it gives Mark. The end of the world and/or the end of humanity would devastate me. For as much as I criticize people's ways, I do agree with what Anne Frank wrote. "Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."

We, civilized humans, have done an incredible amount of development. This history we have made and the relics we use to preserve the old: books, films, newspapers, libraries and museums. When stretched before you in an organized fashion, it's inspiring to see our progression. From candles to light bulbs. Caves to huts to houses. From feather pens to letter presses to typewriters and to laptop computers. From airplanes to rocket ships. From corn to pop corn to corn syrup. It is the result of uninhibited determination for the development of science, societal progression, and individual betterment. 

This celebratory boiled feast we have just enjoyed in a warm, furnished apartment is all thanks to history, to years of infamous potato famines, long boat rides across the Atlantic Ocean, oppression. And the preservation of this history is thanks to years of corn beef and cabbage dinners and drunken parades of Irish pride, hand waving girl scouts, leprechauns and tacky paper mache

Maybe we will have the opportunity to join as humans and fight for the future of people on this planet. If that's the case, I wonder how humans will do.  It has been a very long time since we developed our instincts for fight or flight. We aren't cavemen anymore, most of us. Back then, the weak died quickly. Today we have them hooked up to heart monitors, feeding tubes and on prescriptions of permanent bed rest. We no longer need to be healthy to survive. We just need to sign the right waver and have decent health insurance. We no longer need to run from dinosaurs, cheetahs or woolly mammoths. We don't need to hunt buffalo or farm fields. We can sit in wide rolly chairs all day every day, typing numbers, sending emails, and talking our way through meetings. We have a new way of hunting. Instead of spears, fishing poles or guns, we have credit cards to gather food from grocery stores, restaurants, donut shops and pizza parlors. We've developed so far intellectually that we no longer need to have bodies that are physically strong. As long as we're breathing and drugged up enough to not feel the pain of our neglect, everything is fine. Perhaps this is the downfall of our development.

Currently fighting the war on fat is a widespread revolution in fitness and health. Folks everywhere are joining gyms; running on sidewalks; hiking mountain trails; taking yoga classes and seeking out organic produce and meat. Quite conceivably the fitness gurus and healthy eaters will be the ones to survive, starting the human race over again with the fittest men and women alive. My brother works in fitness now and is big. Muscly, I mean. He and his workout buddies pick up tires and put them back down again. They run with parachutes and friends strapped to their backs. They jump over wooden boxes and can clap between push ups. It is an intense club of muscled meat eaters. One day I asked my big big brother what he and his friends were all doing with their muscles. What good were they? One can be healthy without bulging biceps and thick necks, I told him. He didn't really have an answer, but now I do. If the day comes that the human race has been threatened with extinction, these buff babes will stop lifting tires and start ripping trees from their roots to rebuild houses and bridges. They will tackle deer, ducks and cows when they are hungry. They will dive into oceans, gathering lobsters and salmon to eat and whales to turn into peppermint scented candles for the newly built toilet huts. And while they are grunting, swearing and sweating through their labor, my yoga friends and I will be meditating in the nearest meadow. When we're done with our sun salutations, gentle back bends and peaceful warrior poses, we'll gather wild berries, nuts and edible leaves for the evening's salad. Then I'd ask my brother to pass the bear meat.

Tonight, when we all decide we're too tired to go on discussing such sad and enormous matters, Katie and Tyler say goodnight. After they leave, my roommates and I go into the kitchen. There we see that the sink is clogged. We'll fix it in the morning, we say, leaving plates in piles and pots in stacks. It can all wait until morning.

My God

2011-02-25T20:30:00.035-05:00

I was raised by smart, strong-minded folks who took me to a Roman Catholic Church with baggies of Cheerios when I was a girl. Told me to sit tight and listen. I would. I remember watching my father charismatically project the Old and New Testaments from the lectern, his slight Boston accent peeking through his diction. I remember the veteran in the parking lot who sold Tootsie Rolls for $1 after mass. I remember running across the parking lot to the parish hall for free fruit punch and glazed doughnuts. When the public schools went to shit in my town, I remember my parents gathering all the money they could to enroll my three siblings and I in a small Catholic grade School. Twenty years later, I cannot help but believe that God is out there or in here or everywhere and I just need to look a little harder.

This past Christmas Eve, I went to church with my family. It was the first mass I had attended since the previous Christmas Eve. I went for tradition and I went in hope of finding peace and/or truth. Within the privacy of my pressed palms, I did find peace, but never much truth. Instead I felt like an impostor, an outsider, silently refusing to accept the common Catholic vows extended and reminded to me by the robed priest on his decorated altar. At the last minute, I even decided to stay seated beside my Jewish husband during Communion, which caused my sister to cast strange looks upon me as she climbed over my knees to reach the aisle.

The little truth I did find was in the brief moment of Peace (the part of mass when everyone in the congregation is instructed to turn toward one another with extended hands and say, "Peace be with you.") When this happened on Christmas Eve, everyone in the church suddenly awoke from their nearly sleeping states and began to look around them. Fathers began kissing the foreheads and cheeks of their daughters, children sillily shook the hands of other children, and elders gently clasped hands with other elders. But then, as quickly as the energy entered the church, it escaped. The entire congregation returned their bodies to stiff solitude, looking to the man on the altar for his next instruction to sit, stand, kneel or pray.

That spark is all I care to study and experience. My God is that fading spark, those invisible strings, that human connection that ties us all together. For what, if not human connection, is more invasive and more vital to humans than air? I fear I live in a world of belligerently selfish zombies where fried food, hallucinogenic drugs and cheap alcohol are taking the place of real relationships. Glazed eyes, drowning livers, and hardening hearts are steering the barely living into ditches of dazed existences leaving me surrounded by holes. My moments pile and topple around me, filling my heart with memories of emotions that feel more real than buildings, armies and screaming teapots. And I know that if everyone could clearly see the moments that become their lives, which in turn become their human contribution to the atmosphere's emotional layer (which is perhaps the most holey of all layers), everyone would all feel an incredible obligation to wake up and contribute to the human race rather than continue to separate themselves from it.

For thousands of years people have been classifying themselves through religion, occupation, family name, nationality, race and/or political stance. With our intelligent feelings, we want to understand our life and we often start by trying to understand and organize our personal traits. I believe this is all quite natural. Or at least, I hope it is, for as you can see I write memoir essays and would classify myself as a continuously curious self-classifier. In fact, I've attempted to know myself so much that I can no longer attempt classification because I know that it is all irrelevant unless I know the context, who my company is. For instance, in some company, I can be a boisterous comedian while in other company, I am a shy, shifty-eyed social diver. I don’t know where this urge comes from to simplify everything. To say who I am, how I am, or what I am. To put my poor personality quirks into categorized boxes like medical records or doughnuts. But I know that it is part of what makes me human. I went to church as a kid. That information goes in the box labeled FAITH. Many people had folks who took them to a Catholic Church as well, while many others were brought to a Mosque, Temple or to Grandmas for a weekly Sunday brunch. Everyone is on their own quest to know who their god is, if they want to believe in the presence of a higher power, and it is no one's place to convert anyone who is not looking to be converted. Besides your God is not my God and my God is most certainly not your God. This discussion isn't even something to be right about. It’s all so subjective. My God is made up of invisible ribbons. You can't tell me that isn't true. It's what I believe. And anyone’s accusations that someone is worshiping the "wrong" god is in need of a deep exploration of his or her own prejudices.

These days, I am rarely inside Roman Catholic Churches and yet I feel beholden to my parents for dressing me in those precious girly dresses and patent leather shoes, giving me bags of cereal and telling me to sit tight and listen. I did. I won’t forget. Maybe one day I’ll regret these hippy dippy religious bullshit words from my twenties, but for now and in this company, a hippy dippy bullshitter is how I want to classify myself.

Peace be with you.

Bodies

2011-02-19T22:00:00.009-05:00

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.

Hungry for Help

2011-02-01T13:38:00.005-05:00

Tonight I tripped into the most horrifically devastating, pitiful and yet self-empowering conclusion: the complimentary encouragement of others, while incredibly wonderful and, in my case, needed like breath and water, is deviously disguised inside a coating of doubtlessness, as if compliments were laws and facts that could somehow mold my future.

Searching for gold with an ax and six dwarf brothers and later for the affections of Snow White in the creased curve of her red lips, Dopey and I are self-consciously the same. For so long, I see I, consciously as well as unconsciously, have wiggled my words into situations and conversations with the secret desperate hope that compliments would cover me in return. Mostly, I have clung to a twisted optimism that those I know and respect in the theater world would somehow steer me like a gang of tug boats, pulling my fat barge of an ass to the right dock. I'd send emails looking for advice, hoping compliments would be sprinkled into their returning messages like salt in a pot of spinach soup. Waiting for someone to outright say that my present employment bagging the groceries of strangers in a big scary city would one day be rewarded with something redeeming or at least something resembling promise.

I should have listened to my mother. "We are born alone and we die alone." She's said. Within the thin skin walls of our different bodies, we humans are all working toward our own self-pride and worth in this world. ...This entirely obvious realization has thrown me into a hole that literally feels six feet deep. Like I'm buried and layers of heavy sorrow stand on my skin, flattening the bones of my chest cavity, pushing my heart so deeply down that I feel it between the steps of my spine, and like maggots are crawling through the cracks beneath my fingernails, into my nostrils and over my earlobes to infest and ingest my intestines. I am lifeless, too stuck inside this stillness to move or scream.

An actress, a writer, a person, I've grown dependent on the glances, castings, compliments and general commentary of others when it pertains to me, most particularly when it is by those I admire. And now, just now, I understand how unpredictable and even trivial it can all be later, or in this instance, now. This is the most vomit inducing life lesson I have ever attempted to swallow. We all want to be good at something. Most of us want to be damn near the best at our something and when our stars do not align, but spread into messy supernovas, we become discouraged and compliments become as necessary as practice.

"If you can't remember if you wore that outfit two days ago, what makes you think anyone else will remember?" My mother's way of telling me that the world does not revolve around me and my button down cardigans. Those whom I respect and wait for compliments from are not thinking about me. They have their own lives and careers to think about. Their own outfits to contemplate and coordinate. They are busy compiling the thoughts they think others have of them, others they respect, to wonder what little old me, a former student from years ago, is up to. And if they happened to be wondering about the progress of my life, their thoughts probably would not stray far from whether I am still hopelessly infatuated with their solidified confidences.

Many people have heroes, but we all cannot expect to be saved in a dramatically cinematic flying sequence where we are plucked from a tumultuous train on a dead end career track, carried into the sky past swaying city skyscrapers and confused flocks of fat pigeons to a studio where we are starring in our own sitcoms where Diane Keaton is playing our aforementioned mothers. Teachers and theater directors wear the tights and capes in my vocation fantasies where my inexhaustible imagination plays me weeping, thanking them all for their email responses full of flatteries and job offers in a Best-Actress Oscar speech. But tonight, I write this to remember how many of me there are. That these teachers have their own heroes to chase, children to support, tenure to obtain, their own careers to plan. They have hundreds of papers to grade, shows to direct, syllabi to type. They have their own imagined award speeches to write.

This is like a hunk of steak that is too big and tough for me to chew through, but because it is already wedged between my teeth and cheeks, I must now spit it all out onto this white cloth napkin page. The celebrities of my life will not, can not and should not pave me a path to success. They have already given me the water, the shovel and the stones. The rest is up to me. It is time to be confident. There is no more room for awkward apologies and creepy shifting eyes. I must grab my whimsical life by its ear cartilage and pull myself to where I want to be. "Help is not on the way" my yoga teacher told my class last night while in a pose that stretched my hamstrings like gummy bacon. Compliments will not pay my wages. Sure they seem more valuable than my little sister's engagement ring, but they are mostly as intangible and as worthless as sympathy. Graciously receive them all, compliments, and store them for the days of hail storms and snake bites, but do not rely on them to hold your head up. The strength of your neck comes not from others but from the good nourishment you feed it. Do not wait for compliments and helping hands like scheduled buses and teeth cleaning appointments. They are as delicious as lemon frosting and my aunt's peanut butter balls, but compliments are not medicine. They are vitamins and they have brought me far enough. They have kept me writing, sincerely they have kept the keyboard under my fingertips. They have kept me auditioning when rejections for roles seem more plentiful than fruit flies on a bowl of peaches and blackened bananas in summertime. But now it is time to break from this self-induced confinement of uncertainty. It's time for me to stand tall and alone like a single birch tree in a field.

I fear these previous pages are all just further attempts of my mind to manipulate my fingers into pressing for the compliments I still dreadfully crave. I would tell you that this was all unintentional, but I just don't know if it is.

Freedom

2011-01-15T18:00:00.054-05:00

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, The Right to Bear Arms was passed on December 15, 1791. Passed before the Wild West was explored and exploited; before film cameras were invented, before the Titanic was built. Before women were given ballots to vote and children books to read. At a time when the white man still feared Native American tribes, still enslaved Africans and still hung homosexuals.

Now, in the year 2011 when we, Americans, are not given the justice we think we deserve, we walk to Washington; we refuse to work and carry picket lines; we sue for millions and we holler for lawyers from the backseat of police cruisers.

Before zippers, telephones and modern automobiles, before revolvers evolved into semiautomatic machine guns, our wig wearing Caucasian forefathers drafted The Constitution of the United States. These men, who fought off the red-coats and tossed their taxed tea into the Boston Harbor, declared that freedom was obtained through a strong defense. Only when we are safe can we be free. With muskets in hand, these men defended their farmland, cattle, children, wives and mothers. But today are we expecting to find that same freedom wedged beside the bullets of .50 caliber machine guns? Sure, when the American Revolutionary War decorated the colonies with pillaging soldiers and years later when cowboys road throughout the countryside, picking off banks and pirating railroads, would packing one's pockets with pistols be imperative to survival. But today? In a time of well trained police forces where detectives with plaid vests, tobacco pipes and monocles crack cases? I don't know. Honestly, I don't really know what the amendment or amendment to the amendment should be. I know I fear people who trade their souls in dark alleyways and at the open trunks of Grand Marquis for weapons of brash destruction. I know that this black market will exist until man shoots himself dead. I know that strangers with erratic violent histories can obtain these death certificate distributors legally. I know this makes me feel less free.

I mean this out of no disrespect to my forefathers, for it was they who gave me this free speech I am so fond of, but out of fear that I will one day live in a country where I am expected to strap knives to my thighs and sling semiautomatic uzies over my shoulders for survival. Have we learned nothing from our dirt kicking westerns where paces were counted and men with handlebar mustaches and leather rimmed hats were mercilessly murdered by merciless murderers? Just imagine if these men of the wild west had machine guns, fast cars, crowded shopping malls and interstate highways? Oh. I suppose that would just be today's action movie. I am one for wanting the olden days of simplicity, of the plague, pennies and long cotton skirts, but times have changed. We live with minds and technologies that are far more advanced than those of the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries, yet still ingrained in our inherited skin follicles and stomach linings are the same human instincts of our forefathers and forecowboys: to fight for self importance, freedom and survival. Almost everything has advanced faster than man. Sure, our baby toes are disappearing, but not our commonality to use violence as a means for settling disagreements. Between the killing machines we mass manufacture and our correlation between freedom and fighting, I fear our country will soon metamorphose into the video games we still allow our children to play.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people (including the crack abusers, the undiagnosed mentally ill, the desperate, hopeless, the vengeful and the tragic) to keep and bear Arms (revolvers, assault rifles, and semiautomatic machine guns), shall not be infringed (unless the whole country goes to shit)."

Can we at least add this last bit? As a backup?

A Wife with a Life

2011-01-09T15:48:00.012-05:00

  
photo by Christina Watka 

I want to run my long flat feet through that grass over there where it is not only greener, but plush like body pillows, bunny rabbit stuffed animals and ball pits brimming with partially melted marshmallows. Here, my lower back bellows from walking barefoot on this harsh bald earth. I didn't get the part in that play. I can't spend every day in cafes writing about baristas and biscotti. I can't entertain every evening with stimulating theater rehearsals or inspiring yoga classes. I can't wait in anxious excitement for first kisses and timid touches of new lovers. My unfortunate self, surrounded by love and safety, secrets and intimacy, of promises that propose to stretch to the end of lifetimes. 

My written woes are abundantly self-involved, but are not unaccompanied by perspective. When these temptations and complaints creep into my mouth, I squint through twisting kaleidoscopes to see. My brain deciphers the colors and shapes into ever altering images where my soft cover romance fantasies are as two dimensional and as thin as my skin. My heart sees that were it to leap for these painted lives, these mirages of mortal distraction, the aforementioned plushness would tip and fall flat and my old life (where a smart, sensitive, splendid husband holds me and kisses my cheeks; where I can audition ambitiously and write freely) suddenly expands like bathtub sponges. Blue, red and yellow squishy dinosaurs, sailboats and duckies grow up and out of the capsules I once mistook for gravel. My home, my old abandoned life, turns into a beautiful bay, a still Jurassic Park where ripples of soapy bath water rock my raft of stapled watercolor papers, anchoring me to a newly furnished swamp of black flies and incredible stench. Today, the kaleidoscope's colors and shapes evolved into white clarity when my heart and head collided into synchronicity and I saw myself searching for self esteem in the shallow flirtations of strangers and in the flowered flattery of friends and family. 

I am not yet a successful actress. I tried, but stuck inside self-deprecation, decided I was not pretty enough and far too awkward for even my customer service jobs, let alone auditions for intimidating strangers in small black box theaters and atop massive proscenium stages. I have done nothing tremendous. I've discovered a slight knack for organizing words into selective soulful sentences and I've gotten married, but I still have not been cast in any enormous show nor written any sort of seller. This is not to say I've given up. I store hope, ambition and confidence in a safe place for every delicate day downed by rejections and flat broke failures. Then I swallow my misery like coarse vomit and remind myself that there is still time for me. That I don't need to write or say these types of things. I found love and married it, I can find success and bed it. I can draw my pictures on blank pages, rather than outlined coloring books, without fracturing my or my husband's heart.

Days are short, particularly these winter days when the sun rises at 6 and falls back down at 5 p.m. We stay up later, rebellious to the Earth's spinning threats, but this only makes the dark mornings ever more sudden when the alarm clock mheep, mheep, mheeps. Most mornings, my clock alarms me at 5 a.m. This is to get as many minutes as I can before this day is taken down below to a secretary who sits in my body's basement, surrounded by dusty filing cabinets, categorizing my days with all the ages I will never be again.

Today, I am ready to confront the dreams I once wedged and pushed into pipes. One can be a wife and pursue her own life. I don't know why I am only now understanding this concept. Next January,  I will audition for one of the most prestigious Masters of Fine Arts acting programs in the country. For the next 365 days, I will prepare to stand onstage at the Yale School of Drama.

Wander and Witness

2010-12-31T11:00:00.004-05:00

Don't tangle me with birthday balloon ribbons, ignored ivies and monthly mortgage payments to rounded rusty-bolted mailboxes where stenciled pink flowers fade from rain and the baseball bats of teenagers. Don't buy me pretty pointy shoes that press and pinch my baby toes into crumpled grumpy elders. Don't send me notarized fifty-year plans, life insurance applications or your old baby clothes. I don't need a parachute or several firemen grasping a bed sheet. I need to be free. Free from cell phone bills, arranged appointments and broken down cars. Free from calculated outings where time lines are drawn, erased and rewritten while feet shift in street lamp lit parking lots and restaurant lobbies. Free from decided disappointments and formulaic expectations of me. Free.

I recently read the book, "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakaurer. It is the story of a young man who couldn't stay still in society. Abandoning his wealthy parents, Christopher McCandless donated his savings account balance to a charity dedicated to ending world hunger and took to the open road in his used car. When the car refused to start on the side of a flooding river, he abandoned his wheels along with most of his possessions and began his travels by foot. For the next couple years, he squatted, hitchhiked, and camped, pausing occasionally to work for enough loot to buy necessary supplies and food for his final and most ambitious adventure, Alaska, where he lived for several weeks, sleeping in an abandoned bus, forging for berries and hunting squirrel before falling tragically ill and dying. Alone in the bus and brush, his already skeletal body became crippled by poisonous wild potato seeds, which were never recorded as poisonous in the boy's books. Severely weak, the young man was unable to hike for help and after days of suffering, he died from starvation and the poison.

McCandless and a few others have dedicated their lives to surviving, or not surviving, in the solitude of nature. In the woods of Alaska or in a dessert in Nevada, on an abandoned island in the Pacific, they hike, hunt, fish, think, read and write. These men, mostly men, discover their lives within the creaking trees of the unharmed wind; find God in the kindling of camp fires and joy within the land's voicelessness.

At this point in my little book report, my mother is calling me to plead that I continue shaving my armpits. It is her biggest fear for me. A fear, I've learned, that stems from the summer her sister briefly stopped shaving her underarms. "Rachey, whatever you do, please do not stop shaving your armpits!" With which I always reply, "MUM! I'm not GUNNA!" I will shear my armpits forevermore. I promise. And I will never move to the woods to live in an abandoned bus. The thought of that life frightens me more than running from cowboy bank robbers down steep slippery cement steps in high healed shoes and ankle weights. I don't know that I'll ever want to camp alone, let alone in a place considered an "outback," "wilderness," "the side of Rt.66" or "the woods." I have no plans to abandon society with a ten pound bag of rice, hunting rifle and crinkled copy of War and Peace. I tried making summer dresses and failed, as my immediate family enjoys recalling. I thought I was being crafty and savvy, buying discount fabric with my internship stipend, cutting and sewing pieces of material into makeshift skirts and dresses. Without a sewing machine or patterns, I'd lay on the fabric, wrapping it around myself, pinning it into place and attaching ribbon straps and bodice belts to keep the cheap cotton from falling down my nineteen-year-old frame. I was in Vermont at the time, interning at a community theater. When I called home to boast about my self-taught sewing skills, my mother mailed me a box of skirts. c/o Rachel Cummings.

I can respect the deeply dug desire to be alone. To never know what your day will entail and if you'll even survive it. To never receive insurance bills, angry letters or newspapers of sad suicide stories where little boys hold up classrooms at gunpoint before turning their guns toward their troubled heads. To have a life of leaving. Leaving acquaintances, possessions, gossip, caffeine addictions and the noise of the planet deteriorating. 

Still I choose to be here amongst the chaos of humanity than at the mercy of the dark woods. I choose traffic and elevators, shopping malls and family reunions, music and conversations, company and confrontations. Homemade pie crust and citrus scented dish soap. Nights of sitting on stools in my favorite bar, chattering over the crackling of peanut shells and the sipping of hard apple cider. I choose yoga class, salad dressing, fat orange carrots and doughy brie cheese. I choose late nights at the movies, watching bad action movies with scoffing friends who, still tipsy from dinner at Chili's, chuckle with me until the credits roll and the cinema's staff waits with broomsticks, flashlights and trash bins. I choose burritos, tucked and swaddled, a baby of beans and salsa that steams when the flour skin is bit and torn. I choose my family of competitive comedians where everyone yells to be the heard by our mother, the Supreme Court judge of all that is funny. I choose to lay on the couch, listening to my father's impromptu acoustic guitar concerts. I choose to fight my brother's urgings to eat like a cavewoman. I choose to be here, amongst teasing matches with my sisters where my little sister punctuates every fight by yelling, "Well, Rachel pooooped in the closet!" Which, when this happened last week over Christmas' roast beef dinner, I exclaimed, "I was two years old!" And for the first time, my mother made a weird, inclining sound, as if to say, well not really. I looked to her to finish and after some questioning, I learned that the pooping in my mother's pumps incident happened not when I was two years old, but when I was four. ... I choose to be surrounded by strangers. To be alone in my body, in warm cafes and city sidewalks, wrapped between my headphones and in cold weather, my scarf strung around and around my neck like a maypole streamer. I hide in plain site.

But every few months, anxiety from ties, responsibility, and commitment rises in me like dead fish and I wonder my fate to become another one of these young vagrant men, these pioneers of loneliness. I think it might be natural: this vagabond in me. This need for flight. For we, humans, started as nomads, traveling behind buffalo herds, toward berries and better climates. My husband disagrees. "Humans have been settling for hundreds and hundreds of years." He tells me. But this just makes me wonder the historical correlation between symptoms of depression and systems of settlement.

I am starting a new full time job, leaving a perfectly fine job for another perfectly fine job. Two-week notices, I see, keep me sane, keep me sleeping in the same state with the same man. For something needs to change, progress, move. Otherwise, I collapse inside the gray lines of happiness, of happenstance. I know I am lucky to have love that loves me back, warm shelter and good food, lucky to be laughing against my lover's rhythmic ribcage like a cackling crow calling alarms to the corpses of cold roadkill, but all this while I wait for muses to appear in the windows of passing passenger side windows. For if mediocrity appears, it is as morose as the murder of child laborers and newly wed grooms. And boredom exposes time as a pile of mud that must be consumed with a spoon through one's gagging gullet until all that is left is a white flag in a puddle of yellow bile. I have no real tragedy. No grit scratching my skin. No oppression holding my head under water. Nothing to run from but my own uneasiness. So I'm moving. We're moving. Packing our things in boxes once again. Renting another moving truck and driving across town to unload and reorganize our possessions onto our old book shelves and into newly rented kitchen cabinets. By definition, I am happy. In this little marriage we have sweet safe sex where groaning grins and pointed public bones hit, pelvises dual and legs twine like vines and hundred year old wines. We are living a life of content companionship where our country's currency is laughter, debate, camaraderie and kisses. "You're in your happy place. Aren't you Rachey?" My mother asks me. "I didn't get to my happy place until my thirties." Oh but to stand at an altar and not feel so small. To grasp something more than my paper paycheck, the evening's plans or the inside stitch of my pockets. To walk through New York City in winter and not feel like a huddled hunched mass of humiliated bone, flesh and fat. To be a home owning hermit and hitchhiking vagrant with a cabin as my suitcase. To make coffee; buy groceries and drag the vacuum cleaner up the stairs without feeling like feminist fairies everywhere are dying because of me. To sleep on a train as it chug-a-chugs through town centers, cities and farmland. To be rushing everywhere. Wanted everywhere. To run in and out of society like a sprinkler in September.

I walk my dog early every morning. She in her fur. Me, inside mittens, a hat, long johns, jeans and my lime green coat, I wear headphones and watch neighborhoods as they pass by like a movie montage, gazing into glowing yellow windows to bath-robed strangers who pour water into tea kettles and click remote controls to weather channels. Slippers shuffle down sidewalks and driveways to crouch over rubber banded newspapers. Dogs run toward us before springing back to porch banisters, their leashes taut while they bark and wag their tails hello. I like this world.  I like its scabbed knees and elbow patched coats, its cracked sidewalks and bold bicyclists.   I like its cold quarrels in New Hampshire Walmarts where frizzy haired women in faded Levi jeans and turtle neck sweaters sneer at one another. "I hope you're happy." Donna says, her eyes darting. "Fuuck you Donna." Debbie shoots over her shoulder. "Fuck you Debbie." My friend, Amy and I walk by, witnessing. In our hands, we have a road map, a bag of candy and wide eyed grins.

We

2010-12-14T19:12:00.013-05:00

I drink green tea to pink my yellow fingers while outside the first snowflakes fall like sky scraping suicides, cold and wet with water. They’ll regret it once they hit the crowded cement, I think, strolling through my thoughts, squinting at surrounding violence.

Flower bouquets are pulled from dirt and slashed from their rooted feet by metal knives and shiny scissors before wrapped in plastic and stood in water. In the meat and fish departments of grocery stores, delicatessens and butcheries, hollowed corpses lay open on beds of ice to prolong their destined decay while customers lean over looking and ordering. There is violence in driving past that middle-aged man on Route 5. Thin and sullen, he points his thumb at me while his other wraps around a walking stick. Clean shaven except for his auburn handlebar mustache, he tries to look innocent and clean, but I dismiss him with a look that translates to Sorry but I’m alone and a girl. And girls who are alone are not supposed to pick up middle-aged men in their cars. At the newsstands, black inked papers are reddened with violent pictures, adjectives, casualty counts, tragic automobile accidents and priest pedophiliac convictions. When the headlines do not directly or inappropriately touch us, we tilt our heads and crunch our lips in sympathy for our fellow strangers, blocking potential pain and cold winds by raising our armored elbows and fur-rimmed coats. Then we recycle these newspapers and interactions in guiltless blue bins in the backs of our brains. In the privacy of our cars and kitchens, we consumers consume like we are all dying of imminent starvation. We drink as if face first in the dry dirt of a drought. And when our pants are too tight and our blood pressures warningly high, we blame Clean Plate Clubs, the current economy and diets that start tomorrow, but what is the real benefit of blame? There is violence in blame and in how we fight for excuses like frostbitten, ragged paupers fight for boxes under bridges. Today there are food banks and $1 menus instead of soup kitchens and mom and pop diners. Diet soda and doughnuts have replaced bread and water. Wine and whiskey have been replaced by margaritas and energy drinks. Salty potato soup has been replaced by canned chicken, noodle, bacon stew. Our grocery lists are typed they are so long, yet while we push our deep carts of corn, cows, pigs, chickens, sugar and white flower, there is a Santa Clause impersonator outside ringing a bell for pennies and pocket lint. Where there were once apartment buildings full of extended families swapping books and sharing breakfasts, there are now blocks and blocks and blocks of two bedroom ranch houses, all separated by painted picket fences and drawn blinds. We fight for what we think we want: linear careers, quiet marriages, well-dressed children and yearly vacations to Disney World. We want to kill zombies and animated criminals in bombed out video game cities. We want to watch films where fast car chases leave muscled main characters unbelievably unscathed. We want to play at amusement parks of painted cement and dried vomit, spinning in large teacups and bobbing on plastic pink horses. We want to sit at picnic tables, licking the bottoms of fried chicken buckets and gulping gallons of liquid sugar. We need our eight-passenger sport utility vehicles and nightly pot roast dinners, just as we deserve that hunk of cheesecake for walking to the end of the driveway to retrieve the mail. We deserve to have several spoiled spawns on food stamps, live-in nannies, and free health insurance. We deserve the price of oil to go down even as we press our gas pedals to eighty-four miles an hour and our thermostats to seventy-two degrees before slipping into our thousand-count cotton sheets and duck down comforters.

My sister told me I am too hard on everyone.

This makes me cry on a toilet seat with such a silence, my ribs hurt from pressing out breath. I pull a bloodied tampon out of my insides like the dressing of a wound and squeeze several squares of toilet paper between my fingers before trapping my nose and blowing out mustard yellow flem.

I was sort of sober before this sentence was sent out via email. With only occasional cravings for cups of coffee and red wine, I barely even wanted beer. A cleanse I stumbled upon while in the downward dog yoga position in a steamy studio downtown. After my first class, while my endorphins ran rapidly through the mazes of my veins, browned beverages suddenly looked dirty, not nearly as deliriously delicious as water. Apples, peanut butter, lettuce, broccoli, brussels sprouts, carrots and peppers were all I wanted until the day my sister typed these words to conclude our tediously troubling email chain.

After my tears on the toilet, I sat on the red and blue rug before the fireplace, sipping stout. I watched the froth, the color of old lace, float on my nearly black beer, occasionally adding kindling and pages of the day’s newspaper to the fire. My family has been in a civil war of sorts. We are all right and rightly insulted, if you are curious, but that’s as much as I feel like explaining. Except to say that it has caused me to cry, drink myself drunk by eight o’clock and wish we lived in a village during the Colonial Age when excuses weren’t worth more than the cow shit on the bottom of your boots. A time before computer communication, hydrogenated oils and Genetically Modified Organisms, before Nazis, the KKK and the Columbine School shootings. Unfortunately, before Antibiotics, equality, democracy and cappuccinos, but before the obesity epidemic, chemical pesticides and atomic warfare. Before airports, celebrity gossip and state highway tolls. If we lived back then, our struggles would be avoiding Smallpox and Yellow Fever, growing food on our family farm, cutting firewood and gathering water before the river freezes, not debates over facial expressions, semi-colons and exclamation points.

Life is tangled with violence, with screaming picket lines, credit card fraud, Internet bullies, national debt, atomic bomb scares, artificial food, deforestation and sexually active eighth graders. I fear this country is run by bulimic teenage billionaires, petty politicians and greedy big businessmen. I fear farms, clean air, quiet and trees are nearly extinct. I fear the world will either implode with all the holes we drill into it or explode in an ultimate sacrifice to some religious extremist's God. I fear every grocery store will soon only carry corn, sugar and Tyson chicken products. I fear everything will get so bad, I won't be so hard on everyone, as my sister accuses, because I will have given up on everyone in a submission to blissful ignorance. Worst of all these fears, I fear God, if He hasn't committed suicide yet, will give up on everyone too and while I retreat back to bottles of beer, He will be flooding the world with frogs, blood, boils and rain, starting fresh with ten new commandments, dinosaurs, apes, Adam and Eve.

Jesus at the Laundromat

2010-12-04T10:00:00.008-05:00

Scotch tape crosses the corners of handwritten paper signs. Please remove your clothes as soon as machine finishes...REMEMBER customers are waiting for machines to use. ..thank you for your support. Thumb tacks stab several store bought signs on rectangle cuts of cardboard. NO SMOKING NO SMOKING NO SMOKING THIS IS A NON-SMOKING ESTABLISHMENT

A homeless man sits slumped at the front of this local lousy laundromat. Leaning his hairy chin into a crooked wooden cane, he attempts sleep. A large instrument case lays to his left. A suitcase now, I presume. Outside, a raw rain jumps into the storefront windows, floods this man's spot on the sidewalk, and drenches the rotting benches in the park. The downtown church must be out of cots tonight. Above the man's greasy head is a large black and white sketch of Jesus holding forth a chalice of blessed blood red wine.  Perhaps this man mistook this place for a church.

Toward the back of the  laundromat, high up on the wall, Jesus, Mary and Joseph stand glowing together in a painted print. An EMPLOYEES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT sign hangs on the center of the door beneath the picture. To the right of the haloed family is a small poster of a lighthouse with these words in blue italics: Dreams. When you find a dream inside your heart don't ever let it go...for dreams are the tiny seeds from which tomorrows grow. A corny quote written, I think, by some decrepit, yellow toed greeting card writer.

A Latina in turquoise velour sweat pants and a black zip up sweatshirt asks me if I have change for two dollars.  I check my wallet. "I only have seventy-five cents." I tell her. She scrunches her eyebrows as if to say she doesn't believe me. "I have a lot of pennies." I say, tipping my change purse toward her. "Did you try the machine?" I ask, having used it myself a few minutes before. "It won't take. I dunno." She says. "Want me to to try?" I ask. She nods her head and hands me two curled, damp dollars. A moment later, I return to where she is dumping wet baby clothes into a barrel sized dryer. I hand her her eight quarters. 

Please gently close doors to washers and dryers. Do not slam doors!

The back glass door opens and a middle-aged Asian man walks in. Smiling slightly, he begins conversing with the Latina in Spanish. With the help of his hand gestures, I  roughly translate what he is saying. He would like her to not slam the dryer doors, but to close them gently. He then points to the sign on the machine's submarine window and then points to the paneled ceiling. He could hear her from his upstairs apartment, he says.

He catches my eyes as they flick frequently around the room before landing again and again on my notebook's page. I love laundromats. I write. The handwritten signs in broken English. The once white, now stained gray tile floors. The metal baskets on bum black wheels. The coin machines with marker instructions besides the manufacturer's explanatory pictures. The mixed clientele of homeless heat hijackers, filthy rich college students and chubby wives on welfare. 

Every laundromat has its owner. Someone who takes sincere pride in his/her coin-operated shop. And this Spanish-speaking Asian man is no doubt this mat's owner, its sign sketcher, cleaning crew, fix-it man and its security guard. He is the one with the dreams made of tomorrows. 

If Jesus is the one to thank. Thank you Jesus for laundromat owners. Thank you for middle-aged Colombian busboys, septic tank sluggers, snow plow drivers and trash truck operators. Thank you for the mail men who deliver paper letters and cards. Thank you for middle aged maintenance women who sweep the sticky cement floors of cinemas so that corn kernels and cherry flavored sucker candies do not stick to the rubber soles of my shoes.  Thank you Jesus for dreams that may never happen. Thank you Jesus for hope. For scratch tickets and miraculous images that appear in tree trunks, sludge puddles and in the white bread of grape jam sandwiches.

I wonder if this laundromat owner still trusts Jesus as he did when he first taped that church brochure to the inside of his office/broom closet door. Jesus, I trust in YOU! It reads in faded gold letters. I wonder if he regretfully remembers the seeds of his dreams (the ones that were supposed to bloom into tomorrows). I wonder if his dreams grew into tremendously tangled weeds that now strangle his blue collar under the florescent lights of his rented shop where he decorates rusty machines with sloppy OUT ORDER scribble. I hope not. I hope this was his dream: to be a laundromat owner. To run a small business. To make the rules and then tape them to the walls beside his savior, Jesus Christ.

Foie Gras

2010-11-16T11:47:00.017-05:00

Hovering around the computer, we improvise a spontaneous symphony of baritone groans, soprano whines and the distinct rumblings of a booming bass. Our lips curl and twitch behind this cacophony, and the beer in our bellies bubbles and curdles with our dinners, threatening to make a regurgitated reappearance. Showing the video is Amy's idea. A graduate student of Fisheries and Wildlife, she wants the rest of us (Mark, Scott and I) to have trouble sleeping tonight too, she says as the images burn our brains like horseshoes. Through a scientist's focused, unflinching camera lens, we witness a flock of male ducks surround and rape one black female duck. The footage is from the seminar she took this afternoon: The Sex Lives of Ducks and Waterfowl.

Not only are male ducks rapists, we learn, but they are also known to have -proportionally- the longest penises of all creatures. Whales do not compare, neither do horses, Amy tells us when we ask. And to prove this particular fact, she clicks a second video, filling the screen now with footage of a duck having intercourse with a glass female duck on a metal laboratory table. The purpose of this is to document the male duck's full erectile potential, she says as we watch gloved hands hold the male atop the glass female. Like a swirly straw of sperm, the duck's penis shoots out of his body and into the narrow, glass vaginal canal. Male ducks, Amy explains, use their long penises to gang rape the female ducks (as we witnessed from the first video). The males surround one and trap, rape and sometimes even drown her (if they catch her in the water).

The most fascinating duck fact of all, I think, is that their violent sexual history has caused the anatomy of female ducks to adapt their bodies to reject all unwanted duck penises. Only when a female chooses her mate by assisting his penis in can true duck intercourse occur. She can help, Amy explains. Otherwise, a duck vagina is entirely the wrong shape and without her nudging and expanding, a male duck forcing procreation is like pushing a square block into a circle hole. It just doesn't fit.

Laying in bed at night, while the ducks waddle through my mind, I cannot help but think. What if the bodies of women in certain parts of the world, where violence and rape is commonplace, adapted as the female ducks have adapted? What if their bodies could close up shop to sexual thieves and predators?

It is truly frightening to think how these men, bred into barbarians by their violent societies and its forefathers would react to this change. What these men, with their opposable thumbs and evolved intelligences, would do then.

Light Light!

2010-11-06T22:07:00.021-04:00

I am invited by my friend and her wife to discuss the possibility of my becoming their new part time nanny. At their house, I explain my experience and show how well I can carry conversations with their three young children. Hey guess what? The six-year-old son asks. What? I comply with a smile and the boy answers by pointing to his missing top teeth. Over the summer, the boy snuck away from the dance floor of a wedding the family was attending on a golf course. He was gone only a moment, but in that moment this courageous, curious boy found a golf cart and accidentally drove it over a five foot cliff. It was an extremely traumatic time for the family. Hey guess what? He asks next. What? ... I'm in kindergarten. He says. Cool!

Not in a hurry to be anywhere on this particular Saturday night, I accept their invitation to stay for supper. There's plenty of food, they say as my friend moves throughout the kitchen smashing boiled squash, de-tinfoiling a golden brown chicken, and sliding potato wedges from a baking pan into a serving bowl. I lean against the other side of the counter, chit chattering about my experience with children growing up in a large family and babysitting neighbors sporadically throughout high school. I talk about my willingness to wake up early every morning and how I enjoy entertaining kids with tiresome play, games and story times.

During dinner, one of the twins, a two-year-old yellow haired boy, sits at my left dropping his spoon. He smirks at me at when he does this. It's some kind of test. I pick up the spoon five or six times before moving it to the center of the table where he can no longer reach it with his short toddler arms. A new game is then initiated. The boy grabs and clenches my shirt sleeve. I smile and detach his fingers by tickling his little pink palm. Despite this and other expected distractions, dinner goes well. After the three boys eat what they will, my friend and I clear the table while in the living room, her wife and her wife's mother read a story. In the kitchen, I lean again on the counter and the boy who was once sitting to my left at the dinner table now makes a game of running into my legs. He likes to be picked up and lifted high. (I know this from already spending a day with the boys and their current nanny.) So I lift the boy, accompanying the pick up with a high pitched weeee noise. I'm such a fun, safe babysitter. I think to myself, acknowledging the door frame and avoiding bumping the boy's head into it.

After a few minutes, we move into the living room where the other twin boy is sliding from the arm of one purple velvet chair to the arm of the matching chair beside it. I guide his back as he does. So safe. Such a safe and fun babysitter I am. Then the one who likes to be picked up with wee noises is at my knees again and without thinking or scanning my surroundings, I pick the boy up beneath his little arms and lift him up, straight up, but then suddenly our upward motion is interrupted by a crash and a cry. One second I am looking at his smiling face as I raise him above me and the other half of that second, I am hearing his head smash into the large star-shaped light fixture that hangs from the living room ceiling. A light fixture I had spotted earlier. Why didn't I compliment it then? I had thought about it. If I had verbally acknowledged it, I would have stared at it longer and more likely remembered it's precise placement on the ceiling. I would have remembered that particular pointy-ness! More regrets spin through my hazy head. I should have left immediately after dinner. I should have left before dinner. Oh no! Oh no! I hear myself repeat. I have thrown this child into a metal light fixture in front of the women who want to hire me as their nanny.

Immediately, my friend's wife is there beside me, taking the child from my arms. She's a doctor, I think, handing over the sobbing child. During this chaos, I consider running out of the house, but stay because the boy's mother, who has just taken the screaming child into her arms appears to be... laughing. Laughing? Yes, she's definitely laughing and laughing so hard that it is the soundless, stomach-gripping laughter where she can't even get her breath to say why she's so crippled with giggles. Unsure how to regard this reaction, I apologize to the boy, to his mothers and to the other two boys who are now staring at me in an alert way, trying to decipher if I am a threat. I cover my eyes with my hand as the child covers his in the cradle of his mother's laughing bosom, unsure what else I can possibly say. I'm sorry. She says to her other son who is now reprimanding her for laughing. She then explains why she finds this all so humorous by gesturing to me and shaking her head. I fill in what I think she's thinking. It's because this is the worst possible thing I could do during a nanny interview. She agrees, nodding her head. The absolute worst. I say. I have thrown their small child into a pointy light fixture. A triangle of glass is cracked. The boy's head has been smacked and already graced with a small bump. Yet she laughs because of my unfortunate comic timing. They have three children, three young boys, and boys slip on socks, drive golf carts off cliffs, flip over couches and fall from kitchen chairs. These mothers are expert at making boo boos better.

And they know, I think, that were this to happen to me while home alone with their children, everything would be fine. An ice pack would be applied, as it is now, and the boy would be hugged better. Of course, to happen here on the night I am trying to make a good impression, well that is just the most unfortunate thing.

Light. Light. The boy says pointing to Buzz Lightyear's head. Light. Light! He says pointing to the broken light fixture across the room. Pulling the soft ice pack from his round blond head, he covers Buzz's head. Soon the boy is smiling again and once enough time has passed, I excuse myself. Bye bye. Bye bye. I say, pulling the front door closed behind me, waving my gloved hand. Say to Rachel: see you soooon! The mothers tell the kids, which I take to mean they still want me to come back to babysit their boys.

In the driveway, I squint through wet eyes, scrambling for the right car key. As I back out of the dark driveway, my cheeks are already streaked shiny wet.

Driving down the dark curvy rural roads, the projector in my head spins the scene over and over, tripping like a scratched record. Every muscle in me cringes with humiliation at every brain branded viewing. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot! I call myself, flipping on the radio and adjusting the heat. Such an idiot!

A Date

2010-10-28T07:41:00.030-04:00

She's been hiding her solitary life inside wedding reception hall bathroom stalls. While young husbands and wives slow dance under the blinking, rigged lights of jaded, middle-aged disc jockeys, she sits on shiny toilet seats, sobbing silently. 

All she wants is a date. Someone to drive to her door, ring the bell, hand her flowers, hug her and keep her from falling into the warm suffocating covers of loneliness. And she's found him, she thinks. He loves her, he says. You're like no other girl I've ever been with. He tells her, along with stories of his neglected childhood and despairing adulthood. When it's her turn to talk, she tiptoes, afraid she'll say something that will upset or disagree with him because he will argue with her for hours if she has the stamina and he will, if he feels like it, break up with her for the second, third, forth and fifteenth time. Yet she stays there, wobbling on the tips of her toes because he has to be right for her, she's almost thirty. 

Toilet paper tissue tears in the bathroom stall of her little sister's wedding reception hall will not come if she has a date, she thinks, she hopes, but they do come and it is her date who drunkenly invites them at the last minute.

While we, the wedding party, pose for pictures on a stone bridge and in a white flowered room, he, her date, orders his seventh drink at the open bar. My husband is there in the lobby. As is my brother’s girlfriend. Yet my sister’s date will later say that she left him all alone. That she abandoned him.

After the cocktail hour, the wedding party is announced into the reception hall. Family and friends stand, cheering and whipping their white napkins over their heads like helicopter propellers. All rise except he, my sister's date, who sits slumped in his wicker chair. Only when the bride and groom stroll in does he stand. The first dance is declared and everyone watches, smiling and swaying in a semi-circle. At the end of the song, everyone claps and woos when the disc jockey tells us to pleeeeease giveitup for the bride and grooooooom!

My sister’s date orders another drink, his eighth, a yellow liquid with ice and a skinny red stirrer. Once back at the table, he begins mumbling under his presumably putrid breath to my scowling sister. Then suddenly, he stands and walks out of the hall, leaving behind his drink and date. 

When his date, my sister, catches up with him in the parking lot, he yells You’re a fake! An insulting accusation that refers to her earlier smile, which he has since banished with his biting, selfish mood. 

I thought he was going to hit me. My sweet sister says when she returns to the table, her eyes pink as her bridesmaid dress. This makes me want to kill him and if he hadn't had that bowl of organic granola, strawberries and fat free yogurt this morning at my mother's kitchen table or if he hadn't worked out at the gym for two and half hours with my amiable father that afternoon, I probably could kill him. 

Over plates of stuffed chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans, the Best Man confesses that he has forgotten his speech. We all chuckle at this classic Best Man joke as he pats his pockets. But then, to everyone's surprise and horror, he hands off the microphone and sits down. To fill this awkward void in the evening's order of events, we all gulp from our raised glasses and murmur cheers! The Maid of Honor stands next and tells everyone how much she loves her best friend, my sister. She doesn’t mean to cry, she says, smiling. She's just so happy for them both.  We aww at her sweetness and whoop CHEERS! to her heartfelt words.

Our table of ten, beside the bride and groom, is now a table of nine. The date's empty seat looks like a canker sore, hollow and noticeable. I hope my sister, the bride doesn’t notice. He’s in the bathroom. Doesn’t feel well. Got the poops. I prepare to fib. For while we pick at our dinners, he stands out in the parking lot. Angry, because he doesn't understand the importance of family. Drunk, because he cannot handle being near strangers. Stranded, because he is supposed to stay and dance at the wedding, not flee from it. But then my brother, dashingly handsome in his groomsmen tuxedo and stiff shiny shoes, volunteers to drive the date to a nearby motel. The date agrees and watches while my brother pays for his room. 

Back in the reception hall's bathroom stall, my sister sits, swallowing enormous half-chewed lumps of disappointment. Crouching beside her, my brother’s girlfriend, sympathetic and strong, rubs her back and hands her toilet paper bunches. I sit at the table, buttering my dinner bun. The love and gratitude I feel for my brother and his girlfriend at this moment is unimaginable.

My mother checks my little sister's sparkling wedding dress, making sure the train is bustled correctly for the father-daughter dance. When it is announced, my father, gushingly proud, takes his daughter and spins his baby girl around the dance floor while we all watch and sing along to the Beatles tune. From the edge of the dance floor, I take pictures. Across the room, my other sister stands, watching. 

Inside the glow of the reception hall, the dinner plates are cleared, coffee and cake served, lights dimmed and the music volume turned up. My brother returns alone and alive. And my sister leaves the bathroom stall for the final time. Smiling, dancing, and laughing, she convinces everyone that she is fine when she is not. 

Later in the evening, a slow song begins to play. Near my husband and I, my father wraps his arms around my older sister and they begin to dance. When I see this, my chest caves in and I push my face into my husband's collar. Trying not to weep, I weep. When the song finally fades into the upbeat tempo of a Pop song, I step outside for a quick sob. I just feel so bad. I say, breathing the cool air into my stomach. After a moment, we walk back inside. There we dance until the lights are brightened and the waiters have stolen our water glasses and smudged cake plates.

We give our bride and her groom good-bye hugs and kisses in the parking lot. We have filled their car with paper-covered gifts and envelopes of sequent cards. They are exhausted but happy and so satisfied with their wedding day. Refusing to ruin this, we do not give them details about the drunken date debacle. We shouldn't ever tell them. Mother suggests on the car ride hone. 

The next morning, my brother drives back to the motel, picks up his sister’s hung-over date and takes him far away to the man’s apartment in New Hampshire. Our mother tells me she is happy, in a way, that this happened at the wedding. We were all there to witness it. She can’t deny that it happened. She says. And I agree, until a few days later when on the phone with my sister, I hear her blaming herself. He, a burly young man, has been crying to her, begging her, and blaming her over the phone. I kept hoping you would come to the hotel. He tells her. He stayed up all night vomiting. He drank so much, he tells her, because she left him all alone. He wasn't ready to meet everyone. She says. I shouldn't have brought him to the wedding. 

From his sparse apartment in New Hampshire, he lingers in my sister’s life for months. My mother practically stops sleeping and is irritable when we suggest ways to break our sister from this man’s grip. We need to be careful. Mother says. If we push too hard, we will lose her entirely. 

Secretively, my sister drives North, while the rest of the family trades information of her whereabouts and I wait to see her dimpled smile in the box above the newscaster’s head with the words Missing Person beneath her chin.

At my great uncle’s funeral, my mother tells her brother about the situation. Yeah he didn’t seem right at the wedding. He says. I could get somebody to go to the guy's apartment and scare him? I could even do it. He offers. Maybe, but not yet. Mother says. Not yet because this boyfriend has proven to be a lunatic, an unpredictably troubled man. 

He thinks he’s killed people. We are told during a brief breakup. He was in gangs as a kid. Beat up people real bad before. He moved from New Jersey to escape it. He’s never told any of this to anyone. But he tells her and she tells me and I want to tell the police. He blames his mother, a whore who ruined his and his father's lives. He says one day as if to excuse his brutally blunt accusations that my innocent, devoted sister is flirtatious and loose. She isn’t like that. She tells him. But he never believes her.

One night, my brother asks my sister if she has chosen this man over her family. We never see her anymore. Never hear from her. His words are upsetting, but she doesn’t admit that she has already accepted her departure from the family. Her role as sister and daughter, niece and granddaughter, is over now, she has decided. Those times were for her childhood. Her adulthood is for this man. For she knows her family cannot really be in her life if he is. 

The weekend after the wedding, he threatens to kill himself if she doesn't go to him. So she goes to him, breaking plans with me, and breaking my trust with her. He would drive to her in Boston, but his license was revoked after he was arrested for drunk driving, which he explains was not his fault. He had just left a bar, completely sober, when he was pulled over. It just so happened that before he left the bar, he downed the rest of his drink, a tiny bit. The second breathalyzer was much better than the first. He tells her. 

When she makes plans with anyone else, he accuses her of not caring for him. She just wants to see her estranging family, she says. If she does go anywhere but to his apartment, her cell phone is flipped open the entire time, responding to his messages. Compulsively, he sends her text messages. The morning after the wedding, while my parents and sister take a nap, he sends her thirty messages. Messages that he loves her, misses her, that he messed up, that it wasn't his fault. Messages asking why she isn't responding. He has too much time on his hands, unemployed and alone, stranded in his apartment without a driver's license. His only plans are to get high and go to the gym. He has no one, he tells her. He has pushed everyone else away. 

He is sentenced to spend several weekends in jail due to his D.U.I arrest. Ohhhh, he's a repeat offender. Many people say when I tell them this concerning fact.  My sister drives him to the jailhouse Friday afternoons and picks him up two days later. She cleans his apartment and buys them dinner, but when they arrive home, he doesn't notice and yells at her until she leaves for Boston. 

I write this so that she remembers that he is the one who caused her to cry in the bathroom stall of our little sister's wedding reception hall. That isn't love and if it is some distorted disturbed love, it isn't the love that is right for her. Love needs to be tender and respectful always, not just some of the time, not just when he's having a good day. 

Now, nearly six months after my little sister's wedding, I can proudly say that my sister has completely extracted herself from this vacuum of abuse. This past weekend, we tell her how worried we were about her. This makes her smile, bashful for the attention she’s caused. She had no idea. She tells us. No idea her family has fretted and wept for her.

Yesterday, we throw her a thirtieth birthday party. Two dozen friends and family members surprise her, showing her that she is anything but alone. I no longer think of thirty as old. She says to me. Good! I say back. Because it’s not!

"Nobody Knows Me At All"

2010-10-25T14:19:00.032-04:00

Strolling through intertwining neighborhoods, I wear my brown plastic spectacles. They feel like a submarine spyglass, my vision narrowed to two tear-shaped prescription lenses. Outside the frames, the world is fuzzy like a child's watercolor painting where puddles on paper blur trees into orange and yellow blobs, houses into fuzzy shapes and shadows, squirrels into gray smears and my dog, Penny, into a brown and yellow smudge. Inside my pocket, a portable music player spews sound waves of banjos, pianos, guitars and tambourines.

Through cigarette-smoking, whiskey-slugging voices, my male musicians serenade me stories. Brash bands of travelers, they meet and make lovers amidst drunkenness, train cars and gigs in music halls, pubs and apartment living rooms. They have no secrets. They sing rhymes about regrets and hopes. They sing songs about gregarious girlfriends, rebellious antics and impoverished childhoods. My female musicians sing, with piercingly precise pitches, lyrics about late night loneliness, babies and forgiveness. They sing songs about men in their beds, elephants and love. And they all, from the baritones to the sopranos, trill their poetry into microphones, recording their harmonies to be played and replayed and replayed.

One cold afternoon in New York City, a few years ago, while feeling particularly alone, I walked through the city wearing my long, puffy, lime colored coat (a down jacket my mother mailed to me for my birthday that November). When the dark sky let rain fall down, I pulled my hood over my headphones and amidst shiny umbrellas and the rubber boots of strangers, I walked in my hooded tunnel, listening to Deb Talan sing me her sad song, Comfort.

...In days to come when your heart feels undone may you always find an open hand and take comfort wherever you can. And oh, it's a strange place. And oh, everyone with a different face, but just like you thought when you stopped here to linger we're only as separate as your little fingers. So cry, why not? We all do, then turn to one you love and smile a smile that lights up all the room....

Comfort: Deb Talan: A Bird Flies Out

In New York City, Deb Talan was my buddy, a pen pal who never expected letters. Living inside my headphones, she sang me her secrets about a lost love affair and her determination to be happy. When I moved from New York to Boston, my brother introduced me to Joe Purdy. A gruff, sincere musician, he sings stories about youth in the South, ladyloves and his travels to Holland, California and Paris. Later, I saw The Swell Season in the film, Once, a modern day musical about an Irish busker (Glen Hansard) and a Czech pianist (Marketa Irglova) who meet in Dublin and make an album together. The list goes on.

I attach myself to artists who build anthologies of music from their lives, enhancing their stories with singing and strings and bells and drumsticks. Many, it appears, flee from lovers, love and hometowns, writing their lives into lyrics within the safety of moving tour buses and foreign cities. Yet I would not call them cowards, but proactive people. Boldly and openly made up of flaws and fears, they strip on stages and in recording studios with only scribbled notebooks and microphones to hide behind. Here they are, they sing. This is them.

Someone I was arguing with through email recently, for I was too timid to speak with her in person or by telephone, told me that she was surprised and sad that I didn't really know her. This was true, I didn’t. But I don’t really know most people. I am too shy to poke for potentially private information. This is why I like hiding inside jacket hoods, while musicians sing me their stories. I do not expect everyone in my life to pick up a banjo and play me songs about their childhood woes, but admittedly would love it if they did. For I prefer the clear simplicity of a written raw reality to the indecipherable blur of real life.

A few years ago, Deb Talan met Steve Tannen, another folk musician. They married, made babies and now make the band, The Weepies. Talan sings it better than I.

When I was a child everybody smiled. Nobody knows me at all. Very late at night and in the morning light, nobody knows me at all. I got lots of friends, yes, but then again, nobody knows me at all. Kids and a wife, it's a beautiful life, nobody knows me at all. And oh when the lights are low, oh with someone I don't know. I don't give a damn, I'm happy as a clam, nobody knows me at all. Ah, what can you do? There's nobody like you. Nobody knows me at all. I know how you feel, no secrets to reveal, nobody knows me at all. Very late at night and in the morning light, nobody knows me at all.

No Body Knows Me At All: The Weepies: Say I Am You

more than anyone.

2010-10-14T18:05:00.015-04:00

Her mother is sad, she tells us in the privacy of our friendships and in the quiet of the living room. Her brown sweater is in accordion ruffles as she lays on the off-white sofa like a tipped beach chair. Folded stiff are her bones of aluminum tubing, her skin thick as florescent stripes of nylon fabric. As she pets my dozing dog, her eyes depart from mine like express trains, stopping at her lap to stretch her fingers. The subject of her mother's sadness no longer makes her cry, she says.

Behind her, in a backdrop of brown bookcases, pressed pages stand in leaning lines, waiting to be drawn, read or referenced. The cardboard covers wear paper jackets with printed patches of titles, authors, critical acclamations and famous book club stickers. The soft covered books wear their words on their sleeves like tattoos. It is a perfect place for my friend, the poet, to sit in silhouette. At the top of the bookshelf, a golden brown antique globe stands like a cathedral spire, reaching for the heavens, acknowledging our smallness.

I sit beneath her on the oriental rug, picking at my cruddy socks. My hiking boots stand empty against the wall. Still warm.

Neglected cat vomit will be stained in circles on the carpet and unwashed dishes will be stuck in cereal crusted stacks in the kitchen sink, she fears. Her mother's house, which she cleaned two months before, back to its old state of dirt and disarray. A sure sign of sorrow. Evidence she will not have time to remove. Not before she leaves in three days. Of course if her mother needed her to, she would stay to dust an entire field of white dandelion seeds, for she loves her mother more than anyone.

Tonight, she will curl between the cushions of her mother's couch, hunkering within throw blankets and accent pillows, and squeezing her eyes into raisins, begging for unbroken sleep. Yet, if her mother wakes her with the sounds of weeping, she will take a toolbox of tissues and climb the stairs to her mother's eyes. And she will fix what she can.

Many a Man

2010-10-06T08:08:00.009-04:00

The mingling complexities of What if I don't love you tomorrows? catch and stick to the rusty grates before tumbling into the hole he's cut in the center of his sifter. Lonesome, he sits with an emptied tray, drafting charts of erratic heart rate patterns, squinting at short grocery lists for milk, scanning his sweaty slumbered dreams like word searches, holding magnifying glasses to photographs of drunken dinner party discourses and crumpling into the creases of long distanced letters. Years of these solitary reckonings and temporary lovers pass by like trains. If he had a scalpel, he would dislodge his heart and study it like a textbook, organize it into facts, dates, battles, monarchs and mathematical equations. For only then would he see that his veins do not draw ink. That there will never be a Table of Contents pointing to the right woman.

Alarms

2010-10-01T15:45:00.011-04:00

As if we are kids on a Brooklyn block in summertime (when the chances of spontaneous water fights are most prevalent), my husband, Scott fills a red balloon of pus on his shoulder, pinching it over his armpit's nozzle until he decides it's big enough to call a doctor.

The night before his appointment, I awake to mattress jostling as he sits straight up. In his dream, he had turned into a boxer on a self-destructive rampage, swinging and accidentally slugging his swollen back-sack. "I punched it!" He says, groaning like Frankenstein. I stumble downstairs to the freezer for an ice pack.

"It's an infection." The doctor tells him. One he needs to get removed tonight. "Shit. I just thought they were gonna pop that sucker and send you home." I say over the phone while he drives from one doctor to the next.

Yesterday is our one-year wedding anniversary. When I get home from work, Scott points to the dining room table where wild flowers stand in a vase. He has picked them along the highway for me. Delicate weeds of yellow, pink and green. I giggle, imagining his flashers blinking as he runs around the hood of his car to pull handfuls of blurry colors from beside Rt. 5’s sidewalk. "I thought it would be nicer than spending the money on flowers." He says and I wonder if he’ll call the card I bought him at the grocery store a poor financial decision. "Ready?" He asks. "Ready." I say and we leave his picked free flowers for a fancy dinner out.

At a small square table of dark brown wood, a candle sits by lightly, floral silver lies by my fingers heftily and our water glasses sweat. He smiles as he reads the card. I glance from his mouth to over his shoulder where a young girlfriend and boyfriend are dumping a bottle of red wine into their glasses and drenching their livers and tongues. While they hold the dessert menus, the boyfriend whispers through his small purple teeth about masturbation and his preferred sexual position. "Boys cannot whisper," I say to myself, whispering with my lips barely moving so that no one else can hear. I include Scott in this gender generalization. He thinks when he uses this soft, particularly monotone voice it is inaudible to everyone on the quiet crowded train or hotel lobby line but me. I have to shove him to shut up because I know that these people can hear his top-secret sentences and are just being politely nosy by pretending not to hear, just as I am now.

We sit in the back of the warm orange restaurant, while in the front a fire alarm holds a high operatic note. We deserve a fire alarm discount, I decide, looking at the full price on our handwritten bill. There is, of course, no fire in the restaurant, just a defected alarm, we are assured. I suppose this must be quite the peculiar sight. Eight adults sitting, smiling and slicing through various plated appetizers, dinners and deserts while a fire alarm screams for all to please exit the building. No one is leaving a passing pedestrian would see, cupping her hands on the thick glass windows that reflect a glow from street lamps. She’d see small dramatically dim rooms where two waitresses pour glasses of water and wine and lean on the bar tallying tips while funky music plays out the speakers. She would see the owner, a slight middle aged gentlemen of European grace, sitting at the reservation desk by the door, wearing his eye glasses low on his nose, reading the newspaper and sipping his yellow tea. The passerby wonders for a moment if everyone inside is deaf. Then she remembers the loud music that is playing and walks away.

As we leave the restaurant, full of fancy food, I smile to the owner. "Good night." He says. "Good night." I say, flicking my eyes to his empty fingers for a gift card or written note of thanks for staying through dinner despite the piercing alarm.

In the morning, the dog and I run in the fog and mist and my imagination plays sad scenes for me to donate my tears to, but when I crunch my face to let them out, there are none. Just a sheet of sweat and rain covering my cheeks. In the afternoon, while chopping broccoli and sweet potatoes for soup, I wait for Scott to call me from the doctor's office, crying, "The foreign lump thing on my shoulder is a deathly tumor threatening to strangle my strong neck and end my life at any moment." But he doesn't and these ugly thoughts stay inside me, wandering my conscious mind until he does call and says that he is driving to a local surgeon to get the infected bump removed. He doesn't need me to come. He says. And I apologize for the inconvenience of this abscess because I have already forgotten the fear I had been carrying around with me all day. "I’ll be home soon." He says before hanging up.

After a few hours, he drops his briefcase and keys by the front door and walks into the kitchen. I ladle him soup, sprinkle it with cheese and hand him bread and a spoon. Hunched over his bowl at the table, he gives me the gross details of his minor surgery. I squint my nose and eyes appropriately, making the sounds that best infuse sympathy.

Later on, while I lay on my bed reading, my leg crossed over like a fence, the thought of false alarms crosses my mind. I fold the corner of my page and grab my notebook and pen.

The fire alarm is loud and irritating, but it isn’t setting my hair on fire, melting my rubber boots or giving me smoke inhalation. Just as Scott’s surgery and daily wound cleanings are not much more than painful nuisances. He doesn’t need to undergo a blood transfusion, microscopic surgery or chemotherapy. Next year, he may not even have a scar.

We need to appreciate health, I think, before it turns into illness just to spite us.