Hedges (in progress)

When she’s mad, she sits on the front porch with a pack of cigarettes, coffee, and a collection of short stories. She doesn’t read through all of them, just the ones she can skew to her situation. She turns the pages sometimes becoming the female main character who’s been cheated on. She sees the infidelity as a symbol. When I concede and bring her another cup of coffee, she’s already decided my mistresses name. Jane or Jen or Jess. She forgets why she’s really mad, fueled by stories of actual importance. I could say I’m sorry I forgot, that it won’t happen again, but as she’s knocking the coffee cup from my hands and into our overgrown hedges, I realize I’ve forgotten those too.

“It’s so easy for you.”

She means the forgetting. The slips of mind. If I rolled all the things she thinks I’ve forgotten into a ball of memories, she’d be crushed under it’s weight. Wait.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

“That’s what they all say.”

The ones in her stories that cheat on their wives. I’ve cheated on her with the forgotten bag of trash in the kitchen, the leaky faucet, and the hedges. They give us privacy so the neighbors can’t see her arms flailing. As soon as I point out it’s not so important, it becomes historic, and I’m alone. They’ve never said that before. They walk off with their heads bowed and get the clippers and trim the hedges.

Still Untitled, but UPDATED!

“Hey, Doll,” Mark yelled over the heated roar of the pizza ovens. “Be out in a sec. My keys are on the hook under my jacket.”

Dolly grabbed Mark’s oversized jacket and keys. Although she’d only walked half a mile from his apartment, she’d been the victim of a scattered shower. She unlocked the passenger door and threw the jacket on before settling into the seat. The arms of the jacket were too long, and she reached out her arms to pull back the sleeves and her hands emerged, outstretched, gasping for air.

That night was her and Mark’s three month anniversary. He’d told her, “Tonight, we’re doing it up right.”

She waited for him in the car with her feet on the dash, texting her best friend, Amanda. Amanda didn’t like Mark and had advised Dolly if he didn't show her the time of her life for their anniversary that she should dump him. Dolly had just received a text that said, “He’s making you wait?!?” when Mark emerged from the employee’s door.

“Hey, Babe. It’s going to be a little longer. Want a pie?” Mark asked from the passenger window.

Dolly giggled, “Sure,” and Mark disappeared back into the building.

“He’s going to get me pie to make up for it,” Dolly texted back to Amanda. She turned on the radio and tapped her toes on the dash.

Mark’s new job had afforded him the luxury of a 1991 Civic CR-X. Dolly loved cruising around in his new car with the windows down and the wind blowing through her long hair. Although she didn’t have her license, once he’d let her drive down an old, dirt road during a cruise. The windows were hard to roll up and down, the child-lock was stuck on the passenger door, and the rearview mirror was collecting dust under the passenger seat, but the radio was brand new. Mark had installed it himself along with an auxiliary switch to power it when the keys weren’t in the ignition. Dolly would frequently get off the bus and walk up to Mark’s apartment only to find him and some buddies hanging out in the parking lot and listening to the radio. Dolly was proud to call him her boyfriend.

In the middle of the fourth song, “This Love” one of Dolly’s favorites, Mark yelled from the employee door, “Hey, did you take my jacket?”

“Yeah, I got it for you.”

By the time Mark was at the passenger door, Dolly had set his jacket on the driver’s seat. Mark opened the door and a gust of cool air rushed over Dolly. “Here,” he said and set a warm, vinyl bag down on her lap, damp with drizzle. She wiped off the bottom and quickly put her hands underneath the bag to keep them warm.

Mark got in the driver’s seat and hit the preset button on the radio to his favorite heavy metal station. “Yours is on top.”

“Huh?”

“In the bag,” Mark rolled his eyes back as he reversed.

Inside the bag were two pizza boxes. Dolly threw her head back and stamped her feet on the dash laughing.

“Feet,” Mark snapped.

Dolly took her feet off the dash and her laughter subsided.

“You’re such a kid. What’s so funny?”

“You said pie,” Dolly snickered, “I thought you meant pie not pizza. Who calls pizza pie?”

“Lots of people. Everyone I work with for one.” Mark pulled onto the highway and headed south.

“I thought, he sure must love me to feed me a whole pie.”

“Baby, I’ll love you even if you get too fat for anyone else to.”

Dolly bit into a piece of pizza and grease ran down her chin. That’s what Mama meant, she thought. Dolly’s mother had once told her a real man is one who, “Loves you in spite of it all.” Dolly knew Mark did.

“You’re lucky, you know,” Mark would often say, “I love you because your right tit is bigger than the left,” or, “because of that huge scar under your eye. Your imperfections don’t matter to me, not at all.”

Some particularly loud song came on the radio and Dolly jokingly banged her head back and forth to the high tempo crunch of the guitar. “How far away’s this place?”

“ ‘bout an hour there.”

“Why we going so far? Why don’t we just get some from Reuben?”

“Reuben ain’t got the good stuff. The stuff we’re going to get makes Reuben’s shit look like your mom’s oregano.”

“Well, I guess we got some time to talk then,” Dolly said. “What’s good with you?”

“Your mom’s pussy.” Mark laughed and turned up the radio, “This is a great song.”

Dolly sat back in her seat and sent a text to Amanda telling her what they were doing. “He’s taking you on a drug run?!?” Dolly had recently gotten used to Amanda only communicating in questions. She was a year younger than Dolly. There was a lot about relationships that Amanda didn’t yet understand.

“God, it’s just weed,” Dolly replied. She tapped her long paint-chipped nails on the arm rest. When Amanda didn’t reply, she added, “Anyways the sex will be worth it.” The next song came on, one with a melody, one that Dolly had heard before. She started to bob her head again.

“Ok, little girl,” Mark said turning down the radio, “Let’s talk. What’s your plan after graduation?”

“Um.” Dolly had thought it through many times. When she graduated in a month, she’d move in with Mark and promise to take care of the dishes and wash his clothes if he’d pay the rent and only ask her to pay half of the bills. He was already paying it on his own. She thought she’d be a lot of help to have around. And she could get a part-time job. “Mama says the Starbucks’s opening soon, and I’ve made coffee for Mama every morning since I was a little girl. I bet they’d take someone like me. I’m a quick learner.”

“Pressing ‘on’ ain’t the same.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Dolly paused as if waiting for an answer. “I’m not stupid. I’m just saying, I like to serve people.”

“Yeah, sure, then some businessman’s going to come in there and sweep you off your little feet, not knowing how obnoxious they can be, and you’ll run off and serve him and leave me.”

“No, I won’t.”

“You don’t know, but I know you never seen money like he has.”

“Yeah, but does he have your nose that I love or your hands that I love? Will he kiss me with his eyes open like you do?”

“No, he won’t. He’ll always close his eyes to kiss you so he don’t see your scar, but you won’t care that he thinks it’s ugly ‘cause he’ll of bought you not to.”

Her hand grazed the scar under her eye. Dolly could tell Mark was upset. She hated to see him that way. Her hand flew to his shoulder, “Mark, I ain’t got the job yet. Can’t we talk about something else? Besides, the walk from Mama’s house would be too far. I’d have to live somewhere near you for it to work.”

[“You couldn’t handle a nine to five anyway,” Mark said and the conversation ended.

They turned off the highway onto County Road 203. About a mile out, there were no more street lights and rarely any headlights. It started to drizzle again. Dolly listened to the rhythmic squeak of rotten rubber against the not quite wet enough windshield, and the dim headlights barely illuminated twenty feet in front of them. Mark cracked his window and unplugged the Domino’s roof sign from the outlet and pushed in the cigarette lighter. The rush of wind chilled Dolly’s damp hair. She pulled her knees up to her chest, balancing the pizza bag against her knees and the dash, and gazed out the window wondering what kind of people actually lived out there. They passed a yellow warning sign with a deer leaping through a constellation of bullet holes. Mark lit his cigarette and plugged the roof sign back in.

“Why you still got that thing on the roof?” Dolly asked. “I thought you’re supposed to leave it at work.”

“I don’t know this guy. I figured I’d show up with a pie, my Domino’s jacket, and roof topper and it’d be like I was just making a delivery.”

Dolly giggled at pie again. “Ok, Baby, when I’m working at Starbucks and talking about expresso and cupochino, you don’t get to make fun. Deal?”

“I don’t think anything will happen, but better safe. You know? Grab those directions, they’re in the glove box.”

Dolly set the pizzas in the backseat.

“Careful,” Mark cautioned.

She riffled through the glove box, through a lot of crumpled papers that attempted a mad dash for the open window. “Could you turn on the light for a sec?” She pinned down the disorderly stack of papers in her lap, looking for one with Mark’s familiar scratchy writing. “Why d’you think it’s called a glove box? There’s nothing to keep my fingers warm in here.” She found the directions and neatly put the rest of the papers back.

“Here,” Mark said and grabbed the page from her hand.

Before he’d taken it, Dolly saw “Dick’s house” written at the top. She quickly pulled out her phone to text Amanda, “The guy’s name is Dick. Hehe.” When she hit send, a warning message came up “Out of Network Area”.

Mark was busy trying to decipher the directions, so Dolly rolled the seat back and fantasized about what they’d do when they got back to his apartment. Because it was their anniversary, she’d tell him to sit back while she picked the seeds out of the pot, he always said she was good at it. She’d load a bowl for him, and while he was partaking, she’d sneak down and unzip his pants, like she had once before. She’d go down on him while he was getting high, and he’d occasionally pull her up to kiss her and blow smoke into her mouth, then push her back down. But this time will be different, she thought, I won’t do it as good and he won’t be so much in ecstasy. Before when she’d gone down on him while he was smoking, he’d passed out from the sheer pleasure of it. “You just made me so relaxed,” he had said. She was the best he’d ever had, he said, and she liked knowing she had that power over him.

The car pulled to a stop in the entrance to an empty field. Dolly came out of her trance and looked around for the house. There was nothing in every direction except for open fields on one side of the road and dense trees on the other.

“We passed the house about a quarter mile back while you were sleeping,” Mark said.

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

“Yeah,” Mark laughed. “Well, I don’t want you getting mixed up in any trouble, so stay here. I’ll be in and out in a few minutes.”

“Why are we parked so far away?”

“I told you. I don’t want you getting mixed up in any trouble, and I don’t want anyone seeing my car parked outside this guy’s house. Could be trouble for the both of us.”

“Okay,” Dolly said.

“Listen to the radio or something,” Mark said and opened the door stealing the fading warmth of the pizza bag and trading Dolly cold, musty air.

“I love you,” Dolly said.

“Be back shortly.”

“And then what?” She asked too late. Mark’s key clicked in the lock and he walked off.

Dolly turned the radio back to her favorite station, but it was barely audible. She pressed the scan button, searching for another. When she hit a classical station, she stopped there. I bet this is what plays all day at Starbucks, she thought. She wondered about the businessman that Mark had talked about. Would he only listen to classical or would he be cool and listen to good music? She came to the conclusion that, in his BMW, he’d probably have satellite radio and whenever she was with him, he’d let her listen to whatever her little heart desired. Then she laughed at herself. She loved Mark too much to leave him for any man, no matter how much money he had or how nice he was.

Dolly continued to search through the stations, there were few that came in clearly. She found one that was just coming out of a commercial break. An old man’s voice cracked, “Up next is Johnny Cash’s ‘Give My Love To Rose’.” Dolly recognized the lyric from a song her father used to sing and play for her on guitar before he’d left. She’d laugh and laugh at the chorus when he father would bob his head and tap his toe singing, “Venus de Milo can have my arms. Look out! I've got your nose. Sell my heart to the junkman, and give my love to Rose.” She listened intently to the song trying to remember her father. It was somewhat different than she remembered, sadder. When the chorus came, she didn’t laugh.

Rose is a pretty name though, she thought. Maybe her and Mark would have a girl they could name Rose. She thought her daddy would like that. He’d come back just to see the little girl, Rose, with the glowing cheeks and her mommy’s eyes and daddy’s nose.

Just then, she heard a sound outside the car, not like the slow saunter of Mark, but something quick. She looked up through the rain studded window just in time to make out a deer running across the road and into the trees. Dolly exhaled and put her hand up to her heart. It was racing. She hadn’t realized until then that the moon was the only light. She looked at the time on the radio and started to feel a little worried. Mark had been gone for a little over twenty minutes. In and out, she thought. She calmed down, reminding herself that Mark could be slow and sometimes lose track of time. He’ll be back any minute, she thought.

She turned on the dome light and grabbed a slice of cold pizza from the back. When she looked out the windows, she realized she couldn’t see very far with the light on, so she turned it off. There wasn’t much to look at in front of her, just the open field. She turned around to look back at the woods, but felt uneasy not having her back up against something. Before she knew it, she’d eaten through the rest of the pizza. The pie, she thought, but didn’t laugh.

The announcer came back on the radio and gave a little background about the next song. His voice was sinuous and low, it seemed to come from every direction around her. She turned it off, and sat there in silence. She rolled the seat all the way back and started to count, a trick she’d learned not to fall asleep. She sat up not once, but twice to check that the doors were locked, and after making it past a thousand, she fell asleep.

A heavy knock on the window jarred her awake. Her eyes were immediately abraded by the bright light of the morning sun. In terror, she lifted her head to look out the window.

“Ma’am,” the man said.

She recoiled into the seat, still not able to see clearly.

“Ma’am, I’m Officer Parker.”

Dolly rolled the seat back upright and reached for the window handle.

“What’s your name, Ma’am? Are you alright?”

She rolled down the window and gasped from the cold. Tears traced down her face.

Eggshell - Final

Eggshell

Jacob’s face lay stark against the rich brown pillow, like a slick pink scar on a tanned arm. He’d lain there for nearly an hour without speaking. “There’s no wrong way to feel,” I finally said.

His soft eyes once loquacious and expressive had turned to hard boiled orbs quieted with grief. Lassitude crept into his pores. No more upset than a man should have been over the loss of his mother, but hungry for validation. “This is how I should feel,” he said defending an emotion he kept concealed from me.

“Yes,” I said and left the es suspended high as if to say Sweetie or Honey, but not.

“She wouldn’t want an open casket, you know.” He didn’t ask, but stated. I didn’t know. In our year of marriage, his mother had eluded me. She lived a thousand miles away and was in the hospital with a broken hip on our wedding day. Jacob used the same reason that he had then, “She wouldn’t want people to see her like that. Broken.” He exhaled, “I hope they know that.” They are his brother and sister who never left his hometown. Separated not only by location, but a span of fifteen years. He, the youngest, never quite felt a part of them.

“I’m sure they know.” I found it oddly simple to say the right thing, and he was docile, receptive to sweetness of which he normally would have been suspect. I took advantage of it and found myself vacuously repeating, “Everything will be okay,” the mantra of the wounded.

He rolled onto his side in our bed, away from me. His arms stacked on top of one another with back, neck and shoulders slack, dead weight. I stroked his hair. “Everything will be okay.”

As I lay beside him, I tried to envision his mother. Everything I knew of her lifted from a black and white photo and culled from his peculiar habits and mannerisms. He never told me much about her, but she looked like someone you could know. In the photo, she stood in the middle of a garden; her curly dark hair framed her bright face. Despite the photo’s obvious failure to emit scent, there was an apparent void where her scent wasn’t. I imagined standing beside her in the garden and being unsure whether the sweet smell arose from the flowers or her.

Jacob kept the photo in his wallet; a tribute to a young woman he never knew, part of a family I never knew or would ever know with father and now mother gone, there was no more connecting tissue, only common marrow.

“Why do you do that?” he asked but didn’t pull away.

“Do what?”

He motioned toward my stack of books on the nightstand. Four, all at different stages of completion, bookmarks peeking out, whispering secrets to one another. “How can you read more than one book at a time?” He sounded indignant as if I was betraying one book with another.

Resting my hand on his shoulder, I said, “Sometimes I want to read something happy. Sometimes I want to read something sad.” I squeezed his shoulder lightly, “I contain multitudes.” That was our inside joke, our excuse for everything.

When I met Jacob two years ago, he told me the Whitman quote while we sat in the park. We’d been dining with a group of friends at a nearby restaurant. Jacob and I had grown tired of their vapid obsessions with work and money signified by clandestine glances. I excused myself to the restroom, and when I came out, Jacob was standing there.

“Let’s run away,” he said.

“What?”

“Let’s run away. Just the two of us. We can live off the land, at least for a couple hours.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me outside, down an alley, across a street, and to a park. “See?” He dropped down onto the ground and pulled me with him. His fingers danced on my ribs. We laughed. “Isn’t this nice?”

“I love it,” I said, “but we’re not really living off the land.”

He immediately sprung up, “Just a second, my dear.” He searched for a moment, and came back with a yellow flower. As he handed it to me, he said, “You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, there are millions of suns left.”

I tucked the bulb behind my ear and said, “It seems against your character to steal cheap lines from dead poets.”

With a laugh, he continued, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” He shot his arms to the sky in an overdramatic display and shouted, “I’m large. I contain multitudes.” He’d said it with an air of lightness. He’d laughed as if that uncomplicated the most intricate problems.

“And does that atone for your contradiction?” I’d joked.

“Yes. I contain multitudes. That pretty much covers everything.” It was a simple idea in simple terms, but in that moment, it was wholly ours.

Now at my squeeze, he flinched and rolled onto his back looking at me through slit eyes. He sighed, “You’re a civil war of emotions.” The statement that pretty much covered everything uncovered by him. His lightness gone. With his mother newly dead, I should have known he wouldn’t want to be drawn back into our world. “Maybe I should get her daffodils,” he said.

“Perhaps.”

“We had them lining our walkway growing up. I doubt they remember.” He seemed calmed by this idea.

“Daffodils would be nice.” This detail added appropriate color to the photo in his wallet. I wondered when it had been taken. I imagined his father standing there, taking the picture of his mother moments before asking her to marry him. Or maybe it was older than that. At that thought, I stopped myself. I felt as if I was stealing memories he’d so closely guarded. “What was she like?”

He turned toward me expressionless, a face I confused to mean, are you sure?

“I want to know,” I said.

“She once told me that I had a savior complex, but I thought I just liked to hear people laugh.”

I smiled, a smile urging him to go on, wanting to hear about a time when he’d saved her, made her smile, spread the lightness and laughter he’d given to me so many times.

“She was right about me though. I didn’t know it then. I learned it from her, who martyred herself daily for her family, closed herself off afraid of splitting the fragile shell of her marriage. Her codependence kept her with my father long enough for me to be born. If my mother was well adjusted and healthy, I wouldn’t exist. I exist because of fear and weakness. I exist because an abused and frightened woman couldn’t leave a man.”

In a way, I reveled in his sudden openness with the sublimity of a train wreck, not knowing its exact cause.

“Frailty made flesh,” he said and his instincts took over with a fractured laugh recoiled by the gaze of a deeply sad man. I didn’t know, I wanted to say, you never told me.

“I learned to hide in laugher at an early age. It made everything go away. It made me forget. It made me feel happy and loved. I crave it so much that I taught myself to laugh at everything. I laughed at my dad passing out in his truck in the driveway. I laughed at mom, so frantic and scared. I laughed at flunking out of college. I laughed at myself most of all. Haha, everything’s okay. Can’t you tell? I’m laughing.” Again he paused for a long time, and I recognized that the piece of him I loved was farce. “It’s not so funny anymore.”

Initially overtaken with a conglomeration of sympathy and pity, I couldn’t react. The ugliness of his story enunciated by his callus expression, as if he was reciting a story he’d told many times before. Like an addict going through the first step for a second time. Like a published love letter debased by the eyes of others. A potentially shocking manifesto that failed by revealing nothing but his own endeavor to keep himself secluded and safe, verifying everything I already knew. So pathetic, I hated him.

I thought back to the phone call he’d received an hour earlier. In our Sunday evening tradition, we’d been eating popcorn and watching a movie, Miller’s Crossing, his favorite movie. He threw kernels up in the air and caught them in his mouth only pausing for key quotes. “Nah, it stayed a hat and no, I didn’t chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat.” He liked the nonchalance of the characters.

“Open up,” he said with his hand aiming for my mouth.

“No, I know you better than that,” I joked turning my head and contorting my face.

“Come on.”

Feigning reluctance, I tilted my head back and opened my mouth like a baby bird awaiting regurgitated worm from its mother, trusting. He threw the kernel at my chest. “Hey!” I lunged forward and tackled him on the couch. My fingers dug into his sides, half tickling half scratching.

He laughed. “Oh, Baby, Nobody knows anybody. Not that well,” he said quoting a previous scene. I moved back over to my side of the couch, eyes on the movie. His phone rang. He picked it up and hit ignore. “My sister,” he said and set it back down.

A second later, she called again. “Hello?” He listened for a second, “Oh.”

Oh punctuated with a period, solemn and static. An oh understood universally. An oh always followed by what’s wrong? He hung up the phone, and before I could ask, he said, “My mother just had a heart attack and is dead.”

“Oh.”

For a long time, we just lay there. The soft spin of the ceiling fan was the only sound. Like turning gears, it approached with subtlety, but resonated inexorably. “Our whole life is nothing but preparation for death,” he said regaining himself.

“That seems reasonable.”

“No,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. There is far more revelry for leaving than solemnity. Birthdays, graduations, vacations, marriages, anniversaries. All these celebrations indicate the end of one thing for another. Divorce and death being the obvious two not celebrated, but softened by our aptitude for leaving. Some people say those moments change a person. New beginnings. But that’s not what affects us. It’s the leaving. We’re forced to revert to the person we know we are. The one that’s been with us thus far.”

Although I tried, I couldn’t help thinking of Song of Myself again, “All goes onward and upward, nothing collapses,” I quoted, “And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” The memory lives on, I thought. Or does it? Constantly mangled and revised, and worst of all rationalized. Maybe we truly die when our diluted memory does. Whitman’s luck.

For the first time, I realized how similar the photo of his mother was to our moment in the park. The flower he’d picked for me, a daffodil. I’d first read Song of Myself my sophomore year in college, perhaps he had too. Or a former girlfriend had read it to him while they were lying in bed together, as we were, and in her mind, that moment, wholly theirs.

All of our memories were stolen. They were his memories I’d captured for us. Stretched and contorted, pried from his mind in the name of us. I hung onto them like a blanket; wrapped myself in them to ward off the cold. Marriage should not be the leaving of one’s self, but of singularity. My multitudes, layers of soft warm blankets, have cushioned his thin eggshell but kept us separate, singular. Even if I could release these stolen memories and hold him in my naked hand, he’d remain unbroken.

It wasn’t his sentiment I disagreed with. It wasn’t his mother I wanted to know. It was him. A death stole his laughter and revealed a seamless blank shell whose contents I’d never know. I pulled him close to me, “You’re right. Our whole life has been preparation for this.” Just as I’d thought, he was stiff in my arms. “Everything’s okay.”

Universe - a short

The thing I remember most vividly about her was a setting, her back porch. We spend many nights out there talking and filling our lungs with smoke. I wasn't that she was afraid of being wrong; she'd make up what she called "new theories on the fly" and always ask at the end, "Does that make sense?" At first I felt like she thought my puny brain couldn't handle the profoundness that easily slipped from her lips, but when I asked her if that was why, she said, "Oh, no! I've only just thought of this idea and am still piecing it together in my mind. I just wasn't sure if it was ready for the outside world yet." So she wasn't afraid of being wrong, but being misunderstood. But it went deeper than that.

Her back porch was desolate with nothing but a love seat that was deteriorating in the weather. "Watch out. The black hold will eat you," she said referring to the couch as we sat down.

"I like living furniture," I said with a laugh. And this was the thing, she wasn't afraid of being wrong but she never wanted to be out of step, to be thrown out of orbit.

"The whole universe is alive," she said.

We sat and talked and smoked with one blue light scarcely shining down on us. She finished her cigarette and threw it down on the ground. The concrete floor, illuminated with a faint blue tint, was speckled with her white cigarette butts. "You're killing the earth," I said joking about her "everything's alive" statement.

"No," she said and paused for so long I thought she had no explanation. If she wasn't afraid of being wrong, she was afraid of doing anything without purpose and reason. "I'm creating my own universe. See my constellations?" She pointed to a group of white cigarette butts on a blue background. "That there, that's Orion. And there, the big dipper."

"All your stars have died out," I said.

"Yes, in that way, it's a projection of what's to come. But there's always new stars being added."

"The universe is expanding."

"My universe is expanding. And we're just flying through trying to understand it."

Always right.

Remember when we used to play that game of who was right?

I'm glad I never won.

I thank you for that.

Tomorrow, when I think of you, it will only be with fondness.

How are you now?

Are you still always right?

It'd be wrong to play the game of what could have been.

Imagine if we loved each other now.

Yeah, I don't see much difference either.

You always thought things would play out how they were supposed to.

I always said we'd be together in the end.

You win.

Asking whether you're happy now, too, would not be right?

Out of Context

“I’m much more exciting in print,” she said, “Much more exotic and interesting.” “And beautiful,” she said as if an implicit afterthought.

I shifted my weight to my elbow and pushed the phone closer to my ear waiting for her to continue. For a while, she didn’t. I didn’t know if she’d be more of less beautiful outside of print. I hadn’t met her.

“I’m just saying,” she continued, “I’m obnoxiously normal. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Ok,” I said.

I met her at a bar that night and felt incredibly comfortable. She did too. It was less like a first meeting and more like the first showing of a well rehearsed play. I said something to that effect to her.

“Yeah,” she said, “almost like buying a car – well if you’re a good buyer. You’ve already done the research and are familiar with the car. All that’s left is to sign the title.”

Which wasn’t exactly what I meant; I wasn’t ready to buy the car. But I was pretty sure by act three, she’d be on her back with her knees in the air.

“See. I’m not so fancy in real life. I’m the no frills base model,” she said continuing her car analogy.

But she was lying. She kept asking me, “What?” and “Huh?” and said I spoke too quickly. She spoke with careful consideration. I couldn’t tell if she was trying or if it was just who she was.

When she talked about herself, she told me arbitrary details that only a writer would find significant.

“I lost my virginity to a prostitute,” I said. I wasn’t drunk enough to be that loose lipped. I’d said it intentionally, perhaps only to get a response.

“Interesting,” was all she said. I could tell she’d purposely remained unreactive. She must have thought I said it to scare her off. Maybe I did.

“You know, I’ll end up writing about you,” she said almost defensively.

“So you do this often –”

“More than I’d like,” she mumbled over me.

“—Meet poor defenseless old men and use them as character studies.”

“More than I’d like,” she repeated, “But there’s nothing defenseless about them. Your age is dangerous. Anyway, I end up writing about everyone.”

I knew she was lying.

“And besides, I like you old guys; you know everything. Do you think in fifteen years I’ll know everything too?” she asked with a certain intended bite.

“When I was your age,” I said biting back, “I thought I knew everything. Now, I realize I know very little. Do you want another beer?” She had half a glass left but nodded anyway. I kind of liked that.

When I came back, her glass was empty.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t think we’re so different, knowing or knowing that you don’t know. Are you happy?”

“Mostly,” I said knowing she had more in mind.

“More happy than him?” she pointed to a man we’d been making fun of earlier for stupid drunken comments.

“Probably not because he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.”

“So our story is tragic from the start. We have no chance for that blissful ignorance.”

This, I thought, is where our age difference shines. When you’re my age, I laughed to myself, you grow out of the tragedy.
“What?” she asked

“What?”

“Why did you laugh?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said.

“That’s it isn’t it?” she said, “You learn to laugh and the tragedy subsides.”

“Fuck.”

“What?”

“You had me going.”

“You didn’t think I was serious about this drunken pretentious conversation did you?”

“No,” I said.

“Sure.” She reached across the table to touch my arm. That’s when I noticed she was actually drunk. “See?” she said, “I’m not so fancy in real life.”

“Do you want to get out of here?”

“Yes.”

I don’t think she took her eyes off me once on the ride to her house. I wasn’t sure she was actually looking at me, or could. She’d plopped down in the seat knowing, expecting. She probably knew that concealing her eyes was pointless. She was drunk. But maybe not as much as she seemed. The three beers she’d downed were as good an excuse as any to shut down her brain.

As I drove, she riffled through my ipod. “Maybe you can find something you like in my old man music.”

She turned on Billie Holiday. “Don’t think this says anything about you. This was way before your time. That and music taste is fairly arbitrary.”

That made me feel slightly insignificant, but I’m past an age where I worry about whether people like me or not. I took her home and fucked her. I feel asleep almost immediately after. In the morning, I took her to pick up her car. On the way, we saw another guy dropping of a girl at her car.

“Sluts,” she said.

I parked beside her car. “So how does this work? Do we still write or are we exclusively phone conversationalist now?” I asked sounding awkwardly meek; it must have been my 7 am hangover and knowing I had to be at work in two hours.

“I don’t think there’s rules,” she said, “Whatever moves you.”

She kissed me before she got out but it seemed forced. Closed mouth, morning breath, sticky day-old beer residue.

“Thank you for drinks,” she said sounding polite by obligation.

They Feed, They Pay, They Ride

based on They Feed, They Lion by Philip Lavine.

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/levine/they_feed_they_lion.php

A little girl, a little hand,

a little fear squeezes a big palm tighter,

a little sticky, but mostly sweet,

Popcorn, Candy Apples, Funnel Cake,

They pay and ride.

A little boy, a little stubborn,

a little roller coaster, one big fear,

impermanent construction, a little squeak, a little rust,

laughs of happiness to screams of excitement, "just a little longer!",

Mothers growing fat from one more bite, a little bite,

a little delay while repairs are made and tested,

They pay and ride.

A little person feeling small, bearded lady

fun house mirrors, a man calling the strong,

“One Dollar! One Dollar!” for stuffed bears and lions,

from full jowl come for furred ear

from The World’s Largest Snake behind glass walls

The repose of suspended bellies, from the purpose,

They pay and ride.

From the sweat soaked air come the sweet kinks,

of mortified mothers and frowning fathers

from cheap thrills in a dark corner

from “Sit down” to “Buckle up”

They pay and ride.

from the six toed man and all his nails

from dirty hands forgiven, they feed,

from inches closer to the passing stars, they ride,

from now to next Friday,

from the old abandoned lot, they ride,

from their eyes to their bellies opened

and all that was hidden now burns, in spite.

They feed they pay they ride.