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 Posted: Mon Mar 30, 2009 9:31 pm
Once I sat in the car and waited and thought about my mother, who was angry, and how I would describe her one day and it would serve her right. With her frog-mouth and her waistline pulled up too high on her stomach. Also how it was cold in the car, and dark. There was frost on the windshield, at least I thought it was frost then.
But: this is not written to avenge myself. Or to anything.
- and I had friends, yes, but they changed every year. The one: a fat brown girl I didn't like. She told me once that when she'd heard my name she'd expected me to be blonde and blue-eyed and wearing a dress. I never knew how to answer her, except once, because she got angry then and I knew how to deal with anger. She told me how lucky I was, and I said, relieved to have a response, my mother killed someone and has your mother ever killed someone? are you the daughter of a murderer? and she said no.
I didn't tell her that the someone my mother had killed was a cat. And the year after that we were no longer friends.
- My father carrying me, wrapped in a pale knit blanket that was maybe green and maybe not. The quiet empty night-time streets. Unrelated: it was in that old house we came back to that he got drunk and punched holes in the wall because my mother, she was punching holes in him.
I'm not making metaphors. He had a red mark on his fish-pale chest, I saw it as he was coming downstairs from the shower in his robe. He said, a bear, and smiled at me. We hadn't been camping in months.
- I didn't like playing outdoors exactly but I did it. There was a creek, and mudbanks, and ferns, and later dogshit which made me happy even though it stunk and invited weeds to grow down over the water because I knew the dog. But first, bare mudbanks, wet stones. Someone gave me a trowel, I don't know when exactly or for what. I used to dig and pretend I was making believe. Really I just liked to see water fill up the holes and the slick earth collapse in. And I walked barefoot in the stream, with my jeans rolled up tight and uncomfortable over my knobbly knees. I didn't like it but I did it and now I don't and maybe I should. But it's late and I'm tired and I did say about the dogshit, didn't I?
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Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:08 pm
The boy, somewhere between one or two years older than me, had ears that stuck out and a name that I have never seen since. He liked to try on my princess costumes, and once ruined my dresser looking for tights that didn't fit his longer legs. We were very young. I used to wait outside his window when his mother made him take a nap, straddling my bike with a kink in my neck from looking up. He said that he would marry me, or maybe his rich cousin Zoe. Privately I suspected that what he needed was a prince, and even then I knew my limitations.
We acted out so many stories and they don't even linger in my dreams.
- The last time we met we were older but we played as if we were small and ended up in a tangle on his parents' bed. And I looked at him and couldn't understand what he was trying to tell me.
His mother fed us tofu, we giggled nervously, I went.
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Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:49 pm
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Posted: Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:54 pm
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Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2009 2:02 pm
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Posted: Fri Jul 10, 2009 12:46 pm
On the Inadvisability of Long-Distance Relationships
I went camping in the valley with my father and my father's friend and my father's friend's nephews and the smell of fine dirt rising up from my pores and the folds of my clothing when I moved. I buried my nose in the cracks formed by bark, searching for tell-tale vanilla whiffs that would pin those spreading faceless branches down to a word I could pronounce. When I thought I'd found it my father sniffed too, and shrugged.
The nephews: seventeen and ten to my eleven. The last time I had met the elder he'd been fifteen and terrified of the mountain. He was taller now and his face longer and blander and browner. He had a separate tent, orange and black and sagging in the graceful shadows of needles like hands. He liked me. I would sit on his lap and play quiet games that required paper and colored pencils and win over and over. It must be nice being smart, he said. I said no, not if you're also lazy. He told me he'd just been dumped by his girlfriend. She was Catholic. He was atheist.
In the car, we sat in the back and shared my laptop, filling page after page of a Word document. He didn't use capital letters and I hated him a little. He said I was pretty and would be prettier and I hated him a little more. I was also flattered.
The other nephew dropped a tent on me.
At home, my parents asked if I knew what had been going on and I said yes. She told me it wasn't my fault but I should not to encourage him. I said of course not. I didn't mention that we still had halting midnight conversations, the glow of my cell phone cupped under my pillow, and I sent him smiles and proper punctuation and blank answers like small stars.
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