woe is me: the lonely girl who is loved from a distance

**this is more a character sketch than a whole story. not sure yet where this is going.**

Sometimes, when I watch my favorite tv show, the act of watching all my fictional friends question everything in their lives makes me question everything in mine. There’s always the sex element and the relationship confusion in the show, so of course the sex in my own relationship must be carefully examined.

In tonight’s episode, there was a couple who was having marital problems because the wife thought the husband didn’t love her anymore because they hadn’t had sex in 18 months. She took up extreme exercising as a way to burn off the excess energy, but the wife was still going nuts over the idea that she was “stuck” with her libido-less husband, who she was certain was cheating on her. Turns out he had a tumor on his kidney which was causing a hormone imbalance. Turns out she cheated on him the night before the test results came in.

In this week’s episode of my life, my dear, beloved boyfriend was in town for four days. I spent the night with him every night. I hadn’t seen him face-to-face in six weeks. over the past few months, I had to teach myself how to get past the mental block against masturbation just so I could relax when he was abroad on a mission. I don’t care much for masturbating, but he says I’m beautiful when he gets to watch me pretend to do it on the webcam. I love watching him do it, so I figure it’s only fair.

But when he is in town, I need the real thing. I need the hot and steamy and desperate slam-you-up-against-a-bathroom-wall kind of sex, just as much as I need the sweet and sensual and mending hold-hands-while-a-tear-dribbles-off-your-chin kind of sex. I love to wake him up in the mornings with blow jobs, but he won’t even let me kiss all the way down his stomach without telling me, with a sigh, that every morning, like clockwork, he has to pee. And so I never get to wake my honey with a blow job. Instead, I lay there, next to him, and hold him while he falls back asleep. I lay there and tell myself not to get horny, over and over and over, unable go back to sleep.

I love going down on him because of how good it feels to make him happy. I know that there are lots of other things that I do that make him happy, but it’s not the same to me. He only makes those sounds while my tongue is gliding up and down his penis. He only makes those faces while I swallow every last drop. He only smiles like that when the convulsions stop, and he looks down at me and I smile up at him. I need that reassurance. I need to know that I am so loved, and empowered by that love. I need to know that there is one thing in the whole world that will always make him happy. And making him happy makes me happiest.

I have to remind myself how lucky I am when he apologizes in the mornings, and sometimes wraps his arms around me, saying, “I just want to hold you sometimes,” or “I don’t want our relationship to be based on sex.”

I know, for a fact, that our relationship is not based on sex, or else we wouldn’t have survived 20 months of long distance. If all we had between us was sex, we wouldn’t have been faithful for this long; we wouldn’t have fought to stay together this long. If all we had was sex, there wouldn’t be house blueprints in my journal that he drew the last time he was laying in my bed, and there wouldn’t be an email in his inbox about how much it costs to get married on the beach in belize.

My dad was the last person to bring up marriage. In fact, just last weekend, he gave us… no, he told us to elope. Granted, we all understood that this event would not take place for at least another year or two—or however long it takes me to graduate—but still, my dad told us to elope.

My boyfriend is a wonderful, beautiful, loving man. I respect him more than any other person on this planet, and I love him with all of my heart. He knows this, and as a result, tries to protect me. He has watched his friends and coworkers in the military go through terrible, damaging relationships. All I needed was to watch my parents go through it, and I knew, like him, that I don’t believe in divorce, but it’s not just about belief with my boyfriend: it’s about prevention. He is so busy being so careful with us that sometimes I just want to scream.

I don’t want to scream at him; I know that what he is doing is the best course of action to him. I know that he is doing what he thinks is right. But I also know that he has more impulse, gut instinct and spontaneity in him than he is letting on. He lets those facets of his personality shine when he rides his motorcycle out into the desert just to explore the topography of the land, but he is much more reserved with me.

I know that there are much worse things that a person can be upset about in their relationships, and I know that I should be nothing less than incredibly grateful for having such a wonderful man cherish me. Yet I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something. I can’t help but feel like we aren’t living up to our full potential. We don’t always have to be so careful, and we don’t always have to tiptoe around our sexual urges. I guess what I am most concerned about, though, is that I’m the one with all the urges, and the last thing I want, in the whole wide world, is to feel alone in it.

Insolent Teenagers, Cartoons and Coat Hangers

This is the coat hanger story told from the mom's perspective. The violence is still there, but not nearly as graphic.

I have three beautiful children. They are all brilliant in their own ways: Hart is a computer wiz, Claire is an accomplished horseman, and Brynn--she’s the smartest. That’s why it absolutely drives me up the wall when acts like such an insolent moron, which occurs just about every day.

Brynn and I have never seen eye-to-eye on things. Even the first day I touched her, when the nurse brought her in to feed, she was this perfect, although incredibly plump, little thing. She had gorgeous lips and the most delicate fingers. I wanted to hold her so badly, my first baby girl; but the moment I touched her, she screamed so loudly that the nurse actually hesitated before placing her in my arms. She literally thought twice about letting a mother hold her child, who was less than a day old. It was then that I knew we were going to have problems, and the Lord assured me that I would need patience with this one.

As she grew, her fearlessness and stubbornness astounded me. While I was pregnant with Claire, Brynn was barely 18 months old, but she wanted to go swimming in our pool. I had to play basketball guard on the top step, just to keep her from drowning herself. One day, the phone rang, and I told her brother to watch her. When I heard a little splash, I reminded him of his task, and he just pointed at the deep end. I suppose a six-year-old, even one as brilliant as my son, doesn’t quite grasp the concept of actively watching a child, which is not at all similar to the way one watches figure skaters on television.

I jumped in immediately, and found my daughter sinking like a rock. I pulled her up and held her head above the surface of the water while I swam to the shallow end. The whole way, her little blue face was coughing—and laughing! It didn’t take her more than five minutes of rest to try to get back into the water.

When she was two, she told me one morning, with her hair wild from a restless night and her hands in fists on her hips, that she was “not a child.” She then stormed out of the room before I could even react. When she was older, though, the stories stopped being cute or funny.

She constantly did things that reminded me of her father, who was aloof at his best. Just when I thought I had finally gotten rid of him, there he would be, staring out of my child's eyes. The most frustrating, and incomprehensible, facet of her personality was how insensitive she was. She could say the most hurtful thing, and then blankly stare out the car window as if nothing had happened. She was fiery and cold at the same time. I called her my pistol, but some days I just couldn’t take it; and when she was a teenager, there were times when I was glad we never kept a gun in the house.

One night, when she was about 15 or 16, it seemed like she was doing everything she could think of to upset me. I came home from a 12-hour day to find the kitchen a disaster, half-empty drink glasses all over the house, the laundry starting to mold in the washing machine, and of course, the homework untouched. Brynn was always a natural leader, and even though Claire was much more careful and conscientious, she couldn’t help but follow her older sister’s lead to the television.

The Lord had told me from early on that I was not allowed to break Brynn’s spirit, but on days like these I wanted nothing better than to do just that. She was too wild and unwilling to bend to authority. When I opened the front door, I found the girls sitting on the sofa staring up at the after-school cartoons. Claire saw me standing there, and jumped up and ran into the kitchen, but Brynn was still staring at the television.

“Brynn,” Claire called, stretching her sister’s name out in a slightly whiny tone. “Brynn, mom’s gonna kill you if you don’t come help me in here.”

“I told you I was gonna wash the pots once you unloaded the dish rack,” She called back, eyes still glued to the tube.

Furious, I stomped over to the thing and punched the power button. I stared my daughter down. I watched her, sluggishly, shuffle into the kitchen. She didn’t have a hurry bone in her body!

Needless to say, it took a few whippings to get all the chores done before I could even start cooking dinner. Claire sulked into the back to clean her room, but Brynn practically breathed smoke as she marched into the same room to hide out with her art supplies. She always wanted to work on projects, which were not part of her homework, at the worst times.

The first day of school was just around the corner and I wanted them to finish their summer reading and get organized for the new school year. It didn’t take long for the yelling to start flowing out of the back of the house. As usual, Brynn was doing everything she could think of to upset everyone in the house.

I couldn’t leave the chicken cooking in the pan to go see what the latest fight was about, so I just yelled threats from the kitchen, thinking that if the punishment sounded harsh enough, then maybe I wouldn’t have to perform it. Maybe, just once, they would finally snap into submission and do what I asked. I was so tired those days.

The threats went unheard. The yelling escalated. I was getting so mad; it seemed like they did things like this just to see how far they could push me. I imagined them scheming in the back about how to best get under my skin. “Let’s see if we can set a new record for how short we can make her fuse,” they said, in my head.

I ended up finishing the chicken, tossing it into a bowl, storming the back bedroom, and whipping them both. The only time I ever had power in my own house was that moment when I would swing my bedroom door so I could choose a belt off the rack. The clatter of the leather and metal on the hollow door always caused a sudden, though brief, quiet. I just wanted the fighting to stop so I could hum the hymnals in peace while I cooked dinner.

Brynn sluggishly started picking up all the junk on top of her dresser, but I knew she would plop back on the futon before long, so she could finish doodling. Her insolence infuriated me, and her stubbornness seemed boundless. Children must have boundaries; without rules and enforcement, they turn into wild animals. No boundary nor punishment ever seemed to tame my middle daughter in the slightest. All it did was ignite the flames burning in her eyes when she looked at me, usually with disdain. She hated me and I knew it; but I just chalked it up to a typical teenager-mother relationship. All 15-year-old girls hated their mothers, and all mothers of teenaged girls were tired and angry. But once the children go off to college, the hormones die down and everything is fine. I was sure of this.

That night, after dinner, things continued to escalate. I would find a half-empty basket of laundry and the girl who had been assigned to unload it, sitting on the floor flipping though an old journal. Whipping. I would find grease still gleaming from the stove, and the girl who had been assigned to clean it off, trouncing through the yard after the cat. Whipping. There were always excuses for why they weren’t focused on the task they had been given, but I wouldn’t hear them.

I knew, as a mother of three brilliant children, that they were just trying to manipulate me. They were just trying to distract me. It was my job to see through this charade, to be consistently firm, unyieldingly authoritative. It was my job to be in charge of these children the Lord had sent me. I had to prepare them for the real world, which would be even more unforgiving then their mother.

Finally, when I didn’t think my bones could support me for one minute longer, Brynn started talking back. No, she was yelling back. I told her to bend over for another well-earned beating and she said, “No.” They never cease to surprise you. Just when I thought I was grinding some submission into them, I get a “No.” This was the last straw. I picked up the closest thing I could use as a tool of enforcement, a wire coat hanger.

Looking back, I see how foolish a choice this was. Usually I had my brown leather belt slung over my neck, but for some reason, this night, had set it down somewhere. I stood up, easily six inches taller than the relentless girl and wielded my hanger over her hot little head. She glared at me, challenging me. I lunged at her, raising my voice, and she turned and ran.

It didn’t take long to corner her in the 1300 square-foot house. There weren’t many places she could go, and she would have had to go through me to get to a door going outside—not that she would have tried getting outside. If she had done that, she wouldn’t have had a bed to sleep in for the night, and I made sure she knew it.

When she turned around in her bedroom, the yelling coming out of her mouth was so loud and scratchy that I wondered if there might be a demon in her. That would certainly explain a lot of things. Mentally, I prayed in between my own screams, as I defended my position of authority. She would have to learn submission if she was going to ever be able to survive out in the world.

To my surprise, she picked up a small wooden chair and pointed the legs out at me. Foolish girl—I could knock it out of her hands easily, but I waited to see what she thought she could do with it. She hesitated. The moment of self-doubt was the perfect time to scare her into respecting me. I had a plan—

But then my son was there. Hart was in the doorway when he was supposed to be at Rice. I was caught completely off-guard, and was slightly embarrassed that he had to see me completely out of control like this. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Brynn start to lunge at me before her brother yelled out. Communication in a civil tongue was nearly impossible those days., no matter how hard I tried to beat the concept into them.

I was a stranger in my own house: My son was reprimanding me and my daughter actually thought she could cause me bodily harm. Where was their mother? How dare she leave them alone, to turn into wild beasts?

Dear, sweet Claire stood behind my son. She was sobbing. Had she seen her sister wield a chair at me? The fact that I was questioning myself infuriated me. How dare my 19-year-old tell me how to raise my demonic 15-year-old? I thought he was mocking me when he called me out into the hall and told me to take deep breaths.

I tried to assert my authority over him, but his eyes were so cool, calm, level-headed. He was not mocking me. He genuinely thought he could help the situation. The first couple of sentences out of his mouth offended me, but after a while, I just stopped listening. It was easier to pretend he was helping than to try to argue with those green-grey eyes.

He sent me back into the room and called out his sister. I was certain he would tell her that she had to respect me; she had to obey me. I was her Mother; I was always right. I was certain he would knock some sense into her, but I never saw him lay a finger on her. Claire’s sobbing against my shoulder made it difficult to make out their conversation, but I was certain I saw her smile. The audacity!

When my son permitted me to reenter my own hallway, I couldn’t even look at her. I was so angry about the “No,” the chair, the smile. I stared just past Hart’s left ear as he basically told us to kiss and make up. It was like a coach telling little boys to shake hands after a baseball game. Ridiculous. I practiced my acting skills as I pressed the words through my teeth. He was having us repeat the same damn catechism I had taught the children!

I hurried him out the door, assuring him he had saved us from eminent disaster, before I wanted to choke him. When I turned around, and saw that peaceful look on my daughter’s face, all I could do was storm past her into my bedroom. I prayed that night, while I lay in my bed, that the Lord give me patience. I prayed that he teach my daughter obedience. I prayed that he keep my son out of the middle of it.

all for the smell of books (pt 1)

February 2, 2000

I am sitting in a used bookshop on a chair that looks like the chair Mommy used to sit in when she paid the bills. I want a muffin but the woman selling them disturbs me. She's nice and all, but she's so intense that she makes my ears ring or my hands shake or... I think she's completely unaware that there are two kinds of people in this world: turtles and hares. She's a big colorful hare, and I'm a simple, unassuming turtle. I just want to be left alone. I should have gone straight home from work like I always do. What am I doing here?

Rebecca paused, her pencil hovering over the creamy page, and let her jade eyes glaze over as she stared down at the dingy carpet. She recalled how the image of the book cart outside had drawn her to this place. At the sight of the lonely cart, a gush of emotions had poured into her blood, and Rebecca tasted the honey on her lips. The temptation to finger every creaking spine, to inhale the musk of yellowed pages, to sink into the arms of old, forgotten lovers, flooded her. Her heart thumped heavier as she remembered being torn between her desire to be enveloped by the whirlwind of whispers and her fear of bumping into living, breathing, unpredictable people. She exhaled, relaxing her eyelids so that her eyes rolled forward in her head again. She imagined her eyelashes were marionette strings, slowly lifting her eyelids and returning her to action. “What am I doing here?” she reread the last sentence of her entry.

She started to get up, but as she grabbed her purse off the floor, she heard footsteps coming up the staircase. The stairs groaned and the steps were labored, as though the feet were carrying the load of a bison, but the tread was gentle, as though lifted by the wings of a swan.

Rebecca wasn’t sure how to prepare for this arrival, she could only hope her seat in the shadowy corner might shroud her with some semblance of invisibility. She prayed this person was coming up for a snack, and that when he or she passed, Rebecca would be able to slip down the stairs and out the door unseen. The last thing she needed was another chirpy squirrel offering unsolicited assistance, or worse, a noisy sow dishing up disgusting gossip. What she wanted most was a hot bath and a date with the new novel she knew would be in the parcel box at her apartment. If I can just get home, she thought.

Alert as a German shepherd, she watched for the intruder. She knew that if she made eye contact, her plan would be foiled, so she kept her gaze trained on the floor. As she saw a man’s honey-brown dress shoes round the corner, she did not dare flinch. Even her imaginary friends, the gnomes—manning the lashes that curled over tiny pulleys to heave her eyelids—froze. The shoes showed no sign of sniffing her out, as they paddled along the worn turf toward the back. A few more seconds, just a few more… almost there… she thought, biting her bottom lip.

She saw the heels pass and heard the thud of them stopping near the snack table, followed by the murmur of chit-chat. She promptly stood up, intending to trot the needlepoint chair back to what she thought of as its herd, when she winced at the faint tip-tap of her pencil hitting the floor, joined by the plunk and flutter of her journal landing in front of a vent. Her chest flopped over her knees as she scooped the book into her purse, deserting the pencil stump to what she was now certain was “the enemy”. She thought she felt the rubber band clinging for dear life to her wrist as she threw her arm over the back of the chair and grabbed a cross piece.

Heaving it up under her arm, she flew to return it into its original position; but in her rush, the chair escaped from her damp fingertips and a leg came down hard on the top of her foot—a move she took as mutinous. A small yelp escaped her lips as she involuntarily hopped in place, and now the eyes of “the enemy” fell upon her: She couldn’t help but feel like an innocent doe trapped in the hunter's headlights. Her knees quivered as she considered if it would attract further attention to run out of the shop under the bright-eyed woman's watchful gaze. Might she be accused her of stealing? Having hesitated, now she was trapped.

The honey shoes moved one in front of another, strolling toward her. Automatically, she started tearing at her fingernails. Her left eye suddenly developed a tic. She imagined the gnomes holding onto their ropes like sailors grappling with lines during a storm. The floor seemed like an automated airport walkway, carrying the man toward her; he was covering the distance in half the time she would need to prepare herself for his arrival. Now he was standing in front of her with a soft grin on his face. She focused on his mouth so that she would not make eye contact; else, her plan would be foiled. The mouth was too sensuous; she dropped her eyes to the tip of his chin, which sloped gracefully like an egg. He bent forward slightly, trying to align himself with the direction of her gaze. His bushy eyebrows rose, cinching up his brow. A dimple winked on his cheek as he tried to evoke her smile with a casual grin.

"Addy told me you seemed like a hot chocolate kind of girl. She said I should make sure you had some," his mouth said. Another dimple tucked itself into the opposite cheek at the formation of the last word.

The smell of the beverage filled her nostrils and calmed her nerves for a split second—just long enough for a fat tear to tumble down her cheek. Her face chose that moment, without permission from her brain, to meet his gaze. Keenly aware of her exposure, she made a disgusting sniffle and smashed her eyebrows together as her spindly fingers waved “the enemy’s accomplice” away in an attempted flippancy. "Actually I was just leaving," she managed.

"Oh no, don't do that. The best is yet to come. You're just a little early, that's all."

His words did not make sense. In fact, they sounded vaguely like something she would expect to hear in a different kind of dimly lit room—from a fat, gold-bracelet-festooned, handkerchiefed woman who was pressing a long fuchsia acrylic nail into her palm. Great, some guy who thinks he's a psychic. This place gets creepier every minute, she thought.

Quietly setting his own drink on the little coffee table, he retrieved her free hand at its wrist, asking softly, "Why don't you take this?" He deftly curled her long porcelain fingers around the warm cup with his palm. "The reading will start in about 15 minutes."

Her brain became a gumball machine then, with private thoughts bouncing out her open mouth. "What's in it?" she asked, and blushed at having accused him of trying to drug her.

He recovered with a chuckle as he bent to pick up the chair, which was still lying on the floor where it had fainted.

"Well, just warm milk and cocoa mix, I assume. I don't think she intended me to see when she sprinkled it with nutmeg... should we call the cops, or just the Better Business Bureau?"

Her chameleon skin morphed from a blush to a deep crimson. Rather than camouflage, she felt it had betrayed her, making her even more conspicuous. "I... I'm sorry," she stammered. "I just, I don't... who? — are you?" As she recovered a more conversational tone, her stone exterior crumbled and her heart sputtered to life again, returning some feeling to her toes. Looking down at the cup that she now held, she realized the back of her hand was nearly as warm as its palm. He had touched her. Someone had touched her. She had been touched. Caught up in the whirlwind of this revelation, she was unaware that she was being directed to the tapestry sofa. Her feet still tingled against the floor as she plodded across the circle of chairs.

“John Maisfield, but, Doctor John is what most people call me—especially my patients.” He removed his twill blazer, folded it in half, and draped it over the back of the chair. He then bent to sit down in a club chair next to the sofa, but paused in mid-stoop to reach into his hip pocket. Removing a small book of poetry, he tossed it onto the table and dropped back into the chair. At the mention of patients, his brow had softened; now a slow grin spread across his face.

Rebecca leaned forward and picked up the small book—a friend!—and then turned to him as she held it open to a random place in the middle. “Doctor John? Why do your patients call you by your first name?” She thought, Perhaps he is in oncology. She remembered how her mother had become so intimate with nurses and doctors as her body eroded away in those brief last months, years ago.

“Well, 'Maisefield' is a bit of a mouthful for some of them, and I think 'John' is just more comfortable. So while I'm pressing a cold stethoscope to their chest, or explaining a procedure or a drug their parents, they can think of me more as a family friend or an uncle, instead of this scary guy using big words.”

“So you treat children, then?” She wanted to hear his specialty, hoping that it did not involve small, innocent cherubs going through what her mother had endured.

“Yes, I'm in pediatrics. I love my kids; they bring me big drawings signed with backwards letters.” He glanced down at his hands and his face cracked into a broad smile momentarily.

“Ah, you just do the check-ups,” Rebecca decided. She thought more specialized doctors, who worked in hospitals, did not have a place to keep patients’ doodles.

“Just?” he asked, turning his head up toward her.

Rebecca explained how she was concerned he might have been in pediatric oncology, and then asked him what the drawings were like. He simply smiled and replied that she couldn’t imagine how perfect they were, which she thought was a silly idea, since she could probably describe in minute detail what her gnomes looked like: Her imagination was boundless. She knew better than to tell him about the wide variety of (imaginary) friends she had, and simply practiced her polite nod. She enjoyed listening to him tell stories about his “kids”.

They talked for several minutes, and while the hairs on the back of her neck raised as other people trickled in, dropped off various treats on the table, returned to the group and sat down, John’s voice soothed her. She was finally able to meet his eyes at one point, and was surprised at how relieved she felt at the thought of getting scooped up, like Dorothy, into those grey-green tornados. He also introduced her to a couple of the regulars, and explained to her that Friday nights were when the local book club met at the Quarter Price Kaleidoscope, but on the first Friday of every other month, they would have an author or poet come in to give a reading.

Just as the noise of the chit-chat seemed at its loudest, which caused Rebecca to have to lean in closer to John to hear him, his beeper went off. He pulled it off his belt and squinted at the tiny characters on the screen, then his eyes widened and he jumped to his feet.

“I’m sorry, it’s Danny… His surgery. I have to be there; something’s wrong,” he said at the group, patting his pockets and glancing around for his book.

“Surgery? I thought you said you were the check-up guy,” Rebecca said, standing to hand him the paperback.

“I said I was in pediatrics; I just left out the cardiology part. I do hearts— Thanks,” he said, snatching the book and turning to jog out of the store. Rebecca wanted to ask him if he would be back the next Friday, or if he was only there for the reading. She wanted to ask him if Danny was his son, if he had a wife. She wanted to ask a thousand questions, and then she saw it:

Over the back of the club chair lay the grey blazer, neatly folded with the shoulder seams kissing. Without another second to spare, Rebecca grabbed the blazer and threw it over her forearm. Her purse was still hooked in the crook of her elbow, so she hopped out of the circle of chairs and ran. She ran like she did at the last track meet her mother had attended—the last track meet Rebecca had attended, as well.

She raised her arm so that the purse would slide up to her shoulder, and then she hung onto the railing of the staircase as she sped down. The tight twist of the spiral kept her from going as fast as she wanted to, and she cursed it under her breath. When she reached the bottom, she pumped her legs like never before. When she reached the middle of the parking lot, though, she stopped.

“John, don’t forget--” she called, waving the jacket high over her head. She whipped around, frantically searching for movement, but saw none. Then she realized it was raining, and there was one open parking spot that had fewer freckles in it from the drops than the others: she had just missed him. As her arm dropped by her side, she meant to finish the sentence with “your blazer,” but what slipped softly between her lips was, “your ‘Becca.” She hung her head, and let the rain slip its icy fingers through her walnut hair. She folded the warm twill over her arm, and cradled it to herself. A raindrop slid down her nose, and she watched it fall onto John’s blazer; it dawned on her the rain might damage it. So she folded her other arm across her stomach—pressing the fabric into her, trying to shield it – and trudged to her car. She didn’t look back to see if anyone had chased her out of the store; and she didn’t look around for a police car coming to investigate a possible theft: she was oblivious to observation at the moment.

When Rebecca got to her apartment complex, she had to park quite far from her unit because she had gotten home after most of her neighbors. The rain soaked into her as she hurried back up the sidewalk, and she could feel the tip of her nose numbing as she ran up the stairs to her door. She remained hunched over the blazer, still trying to protect its fabric, as she fumbled for her keys. Pushing the door open, she stumbled into her living room, dropped her keys and purse on the entry table, and looked around for an empty chair back over which she could drape the coat.

John had so quickly and wholly consumed her thoughts, that she had not even remembered to check the parcel box for her new novel. Normally, after such an awkward evening, she would have been itching like an addict to slip into the ball gown of the latest heroine awaiting her friendship.

all for the smell of books (pt 2)

Instead, she kept mentally replaying alternate versions of the scene in the bookstore, trying to discover her misstep. The only script that maintained her previous footing was the possibility of never having gone into Kaleidoscope in the first place. Unable to get John’s graceful features out of her mind, though, she shook her head at the thought, and focused on how she would go about restored her equilibrium.

When she settled the lightly worn shoulders of the twill coat over one of her breakfast room chairs, it seemed at home there, so she left it. She walked through her quiet apartment, picking up two stray shoes from under the coffee table, a scrap of paper from under the desk, two socks next to the bed. She put the shoes back in the closet and undressed, dropping her soggy clothes and the socks into the hamper, the paper scrap into a trashcan. After she pulled on an oversized sweatshirt, her stomach reminded her with a noisy growl that it was time to make dinner.

She went about her usual nightly routine with the exception of reading in the tub before going to bed. Instead, she took a quick shower, and fell asleep, still wrapped up in a terry cloth robe, on top of her quilt. She woke around 2:30 a.m. and walked into the living room to check the thermostat. Shivering, she was confused to find it set at 79 degrees. After turning it up a couple of degrees, she turned to go back to bed; and then she noticed the jacket again. In her semi-lucid state, it appeared to have been hanging on her chair for years. It looked like it was waiting to meet an old friend; it implied John would be coming over in a day or two to pick it up. Rebecca shook her head, trying to dislodge the silly thought, and muttered “Friday” to herself as she wandered back to the bedroom.

When she awoke Saturday morning, she was coated in sweat, and wearing a heavy robe underneath her thick comforter gave her the feeling she imagined one would have of wearing a wet suit inside a sauna. She immediately threw back the covers, and fiddled, frustrated, with the knot on the robe until it too fell away, then dragged herself to the bathroom. She did not dare glance in the mirror on her way to the shower, as she already knew she would probably look even worse than she felt.

She swallowed, parched, and the taste in the back of her throat reminded her of something from childhood, but she could not remember what it was. Minutes later, when the thick steam from the shower sent her into a coughing fit, she knew: this was the taste of being sick, the taste of wishing her mother was still alive, the taste of pain. Tears slipped down her face while she leaned up against the tile and let the hot water pound the back of her head and shoulders. She hated being sick, and she hated being sick alone even more. When her feet looked sufficiently crimson, she turned off the water, wrapped up in the towel again, and marched out to the couch. It was time to rest.

Rebecca spent the remainder of the day like a cat: sleeping, rolling over, suspecting the blazer was staring at her, going back to sleep, waking up from a bizarre dream about the blazer growing into a huge monster who nursed her back to health; drifting back to sleep. It took her two hours of hearing her stomach’s strange gurgling noises before she could actually force herself out of bed and into the kitchen for some soup. Sunday passed in a similar way.

On Monday morning, she made a plan. It was time for drugs, good ones; but first, she had to call work. She spoke with Mr. Fennel’s secretary for only a couple of minutes, but it felt like hours. The woman asked too many questions, many of which had little or nothing to do with work:

“Are you drinking plenty of water, now, dear?” asked the secretary.

“Yes. Plenty,” groaned Rebecca, sniffling.

“And you have some hot soup to soothe your throat?”

“Yes.”

“Is there someone you can call to come check on you? A neighbor or relative?”

Rebecca paused. For the first time in her recent memory, Rebecca lied, blatantly: “Yes.”

On the other end of the line, the secretary also paused, scribbling a note. “OK— well, get better soon, dear.”

She hung up the phone and then wrapped herself in a heavy coat and scarf, and pulled on two pairs of socks under boots to go to the store. It wasn’t unusual attire for early February, but it did look a bit out of place for a sunny day that might warm up to the mid-sixties.

Still light-headed, Rebecca went on an all-out shopping spree at the drug store. She selected cough drops, antihistamines, a thermometer, two cartons of orange juice, and several cans of soup with pop-tops. The adrenaline rush of stocking up on ammunition was so invigorating, that she didn’t realize the basket probably not a reasonable weight for her to carry all the way to the car, especially in her weakened state. By the time she had stopped long enough to thumb through her purse, locate her credit card and pay, she barely had the strength to stand, much less carry groceries.

Nevertheless, she took hold of the handles and dragged the bags to the edge of the counter. She dropped the first one right on her foot. Fortunately, the checker hadn’t put both cartons of juice in one bag, but to Rebecca, it felt like it might as well have been a bag of cement. She yelped involuntarily, and feeling a bit defeated, she slowly crouched to collect her purchases. The shaggy-haired teenager behind her hastily paid for his gum and insisted upon helping her even though she tried, half-heartedly, to wave him away.

“Let me help you there… Looks like you got a little ahead of yourself,” he said, swooping down to scoop everything back into the plastic sacks, and helping her up from the floor. She was moving so slowly, and crouching so low, that she imagined she was starting to disappear into the groceries.

“I can do it,” she whimpered.

“Just let me get you back to your feet… there we go,” he said, lifting her by the arm. His other arm braced her back, and she suddenly felt like an old homeless woman. A pang of helplessness struck her at the thought of not being able to stand alone, and she started to cry. His gentle touch reminded her of John.

“I can do it, really,” she sobbed, as she allowed him to walk her out of the store. “I’m just sick, and tired… so tired…” she trailed off, wiping her eyes sloppily with the back of her hand. She tugged at her scarf, still wrapped across her face, to keep the snot from suffocating her. When she pulled the scarf down, the boy smiled. On a mission, he walked the groceries to her car and stood by while she folded herself into the driver’s seat. She thanked him before closing the door, but still couldn’t shake the thought of him having some ulterior motive behind the good deed.

Rebecca arrived back at her apartment complex and stared up at the seemingly endless flight of stairs before her. One of her neighbors was standing out on the landing smoking a cigarette, and seeing her barely moving while carrying one sack, the neighbor jogged down to the car to help. They exchanged greetings at the curb, and then the girl pulled the second bag from the car and ended up carrying them both for Rebecca, setting them on the kitchen counter after Rebecca fumbled at opening her door. The girl just smiled at her and before leaving, told her in a bubbly voice to feel better.

Rebecca knew in her gut that the tan girl had done her no wrong, but she was still relieved to lean against the closed door, and turn the deadbolt. Glancing at John’s blazer, she was startled to hear his voice say, You look like hell. The blazer was not talking to her; John was not talking to her. Rebecca knew this, and promptly marched into the kitchen to retrieve the drugs. She was intent upon stopping the virus before it took possession of her mind—unaware that, in her dehydrated state, she was already losing that battle.

Later that afternoon, Rebecca woke up on the couch, her face in a damp puddle. She moaned and rolled to her other side, with a string of spit tethering her mouth to the upholstery. Irritated, she furrowed her brow and grunted, pushing herself into an upright position as her labored heartbeats echoed in her ears. You should take some medicine, John’s voice announced from the blazer, which was still innocently hung lifelike on a chair’s back. She looked at her wristwatch on the coffee table and silently agreed, then promptly cut off any further mental discussions. She would not concede that she was incapable of managing a little cold on her own. She suddenly resented the blazer’s presence—and especially the good doctor’s voice—invading her formerly well-organized brain.

After washing down some pills with juice, Rebecca resolved to make soft-boiled eggs. She stood up and almost fell back onto the couch—having arisen too quickly—and had to catch herself and wait for the dizziness to pass. After some indeterminable amount of time, she made her way into the kitchen and pulled out the pot, the eggs and her favorite slotted spoon. She filled the pot with water and turned on the stove. While waiting for the boil, she wandered back to the bathroom to wash her face, but didn’t dare look in the mirror. She could tell by the way the inside of her cheeks had glued themselves to her teeth that she would probably look like the monster in Frankenstein.

She came back to the kitchen to find the water in a rage, splashing over the sides of the pot. “Shit,” she muttered, as she turned down the flames. She grabbed the eggs, cracked the shells on the edge of the pot and dropped their contents into the roiling water, before she realized what a mess she had made. “What the—oh my God.” Her hands fell to her sides as she stared at the wisps of egg white and little yellow sacks bobbing around in the foaming pot. They looked like baby jellyfish running a race. You probably shouldn’t be cooking in this state, the jacket’s voice gently reprimanded her.

“Shut up!” she barked, whipping around to face the headless form. There was no reply. Oh my God, I’m talking to a blazer. She wheeled back around to the stove and watched the jellyfish-eggs jostle around a bit more, then removed them with the slotted spoon and dropped them into a cereal bowl. She added a dab of butter, salt and pepper, and angrily mashed everything together. She would show that blazer who could cook.

Having exhausted herself in less than ten minutes, she lay back down on the couch and again drifted into delirium. She had another strange dream about the blazer: This time it grew so large that it filled her whole apartment, like a warped parody of Alice’s eating misadventures. When she awoke, she did her best to ignore the jacket’s looming presence for the rest of the afternoon.

She awoke in the dark, in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, again drenched in perspiration. She turned up the air conditioning and tried to go back to sleep, but the effort was fruitless. She tossed and turned, shivered and heaved. She tried to remember what she had been dreaming about, in an effort to coax herself back to sleep. She finally gave up, and instead got up and walked into the living room. The blazer was still perched beside the breakfast table, provoking a thought that John had left it there, and would be coming back soon.

Lightheaded, she flopped helplessly onto the couch and flicked on the television for the first time in weeks. A stocky man confronted her, yelling that the small box in his hand could change lives, commanding viewers to call in and order it. Rebecca tried to imagine what the people’s lives must be like, whom these salesmen were targeting. It did not take long for her to decide that they were probably lonely and bored, like her. She wondered how it might change her life to be able to have an erection for thirty-six hours. The men vouching for the tiny pills on the television looked young and virile and sociable. Rebecca thought they likely had horny women propositioning them wherever they went. Thirty-six hours, she imagined, was quite a long period of time to be walking around with Pinocchio in your pants. She cringed and then giggled at the mental image. Suddenly very aware that not even the blazer shared in her amusement, she grunted, “People are overrated,” and flipped the channel.

This time, ridiculously dramatic women in a Spanish soap opera alternately schemed, lamented, and raved. Her next click brought up re-runs of a prime-time drama featuring pregnant high schoolers with drug addictions. Finally she settled on a cartoon channel, and laughed out loud at the slapstick follies of the coyote and roadrunner. She caught herself wishing John were there to bring her a bowl of popcorn and a glass of orange juice, and to offer a soothing palm to press against her cheek.

I’ll see you soon, his voice said, and Rebecca believed it. She reflected that she would not be the kind of loud, mini-dressed girlfriend featured on the Spanish channel: she would never be stupid enough to get addicted to drugs (though she did wonder,when she was supposed to take the next cold capsule) or push John off of a cliff and throw dynamite parachutes after him.

Rebecca started to imagine dates with John in the park, reading interesting or amusing passages from books to each other on a picnic blanket. In her mind’s eye, they held hands at the mall while eating ice cream; they tried foreign cuisine at cheesy restaurants, like the one two doors down from the bookstore where they had met. They rented old movies and went window-shopping for a puppy. They embraced; they kissed; they made love.

Rebecca slipped easily back to sleep on the couch, with commercials and cartoons feeding her cavernous mind with the scripts that would drive her dreams of John. She awoke again, with the sun beaming into her eyes through the blinds. She rolled off the couch in search of the phone, as the wristwatch on the coffee table told her it was Tuesday, and she knew she was in no shape to return to work—she didn’t even need the blazer to tell her that.

She was glad she kept a little laminated list by the phone of important phone numbers—(as if anyone might visit her, and she be somehow knocked unconscious, and the visitor need to know who to notify). Regardless, Rebecca snatched up the list from the little table that held the phone, plopped onto her bottom on the floor with the receiver in hand, and found “work” on the third line from the top.

all for the smell of books (pt 3, the end!)

She dialed, reached Mr. Fennel’s secretary, was informed that she sounded “awful, honey,” assured the nosy woman that she would be returning tomorrow, was strongly encouraged to take Wednesday off to make sure she was well enough to come back (lest she get her coworkers sick), then thanked the woman, and hung up the phone.

Without food in her stomach to absorb the medicine, Rebecca felt more dizzy than healthy after she swallowed her morning dose. She daydreamed even more vividly about her imaginary relationship with John. The hypothetical dates in the fiction section of her mind started to implant themselves as memories in her non-fiction section. Fitful naps filled with dreams of televised images spliced with imagined scenes, fueled by her loopy mental state only deepened her certainty that John would be coming soon to check up on her. After all, he was a doctor.

Feb. something. A few days after the other day.

John is coming over soon to make me some food and check on me. He will probably set out my medicine and bring me flowers. Water is good. I remember when mom took me to the pool to teach me how to swim. I miss her smile. Her skin was always warm. I wonder if John will ask me to marry him. It seems like we’ve been together forever. We’ll teach the children to swim together. A girl for me and a boy for him. I love John. I love him. I love him and he loves me. He is going to take care of me. I am going to be safe. No more bullies, no more alone. No more sick.

As the hours ticked by and Rebecca received no call from John, she started to worry. With the television still muttering dramatic and slightly implausible stories in her ear, she worried about every Murphy’s Law-type of scenario she could dream up: A food allergy. A complicated surgery. A car wreck. A terrorist attack on the hospital. A forgetful lover. A “Dear John” letter from her dear, John. She remembered one of the last things he had said to her at their first meeting: “I do hearts.” He had certainly done a number on hers. As the worries built, and the tauntingly silent blazer seemed to stare her down, Rebecca’s mood grew from concerned to enraged, and she promptly picked up her journal again.

February again.

John hasn’t called all day. What an arrogant ass. How could he forget about me? I’ve done nothing but love him all this time. How could he be more invested in his patients than in me? I can draw him a picture. It will be of my middle finger sticking straight up. Bastard. I bet there’s some slut nurse distracting him. Whore. She should get a job that more aptly suits her skills than trying to keep up a charade of a woman who cares. Where is she? If I find her, I’ll… What would I do? How can I measure up if he cares about her more than me? I’ll throw a fucking encyclopedia at her pretty little Barbie head. Tell her to look up the entry for “Hell.”

Rebecca suddenly felt more alone than ever, and buried her face in her withered hands. Helpless, she let hot tears dribble through her fingers. She realized she probably never would have met John if it wasn’t for the smell of books that drew her up that spiral staircase. All this, just for the smell of books. She snorted a disgusting blob of snot and finally regained composure. She then noticed her stomach felt like it was caving in on itself, and that it was well past time for lunch. She made herself some soup in the microwave, but still couldn’t seem to get warm enough. She turned up the thermostat a couple of degrees, and then saw the blazer sitting by, watching her suffer. She stalked toward it, like an angry stepmother coming to punish an unwieldy Cinderella. She snatched up the blazer quickly, so as not to let it wriggle away, and then swung it around her back and slipped her arms into its silky sleeves.

The broad shoulder seams drooped well out past her own thin frame. As she pulled the button-holed edge around her tightly, she couldn’t help but be reminded of stealing her father’s clothes to wear to school after her mother died. It took her a few months to even be able to don a bright tank top she had purchased, thinking it would cheer up her ailing mother. Swamped in the twill blazer, Rebecca dragged her feet across the floor back to the kitchen. She made herself some hot cocoa, which never failed to soothe her, and then trudged back into the living room.

When she plopped down on the sofa, she noticed a corner of something graze her chest. She set down the steaming mug and patted the breast pocket of the blazer; there was something in there. She stuck her finger down in the handkerchief slot and found nothing, so she opened up the front of the jacket and slid her fingers into the inside pocket. There, she found a thin booklet, similar to her own journal, hovering over her heart.

The corners of the cover were worn, and the pages were yellowed with oily fingerprints and years of use. She opened it cautiously, as the thing was stiff and brittle. Inside the cover was a note scrawled in nearly indecipherable handwriting, which was reminiscent of the spikes of a heart monitor reading.

“To John, on your graduation. Congrats, --Dr. Williamson. This book always helped me with the small ones. 1989”

On the facing page was a faded print of a cartoon junebug, smiling. Rebecca turned the pages delicately; she imagined herself as an archaeologist who had just found an important scroll in the earth. She read the short story of a junebug named Janie who had been separated from her mother. She had been playing in the grass and suddenly looked up, to find herself alone. Rebecca swallowed hard.

She continued reading, taking in each word deliberately. Certainly the blazer intended for her to find this treasure. Surely it would help her get through this messy sickness, of her sinuses, and her heart. The story carried on with Janie the junebug wandering around the yard in search of her mother. She is helped along, although at first rather dubious of strangers, by other insects and small rodents who were able to climb up taller plants, or jump above the grass, in search of Janie’s missing mother. The two are finally reunited by a silly incident involving Janie being chased by a spider, who is running from a toad. When Janie smacks straight into her mother, who is in the middle of digging a new nest in the dirt for her family, her mother is happy to see her, and Janie recounts the adventure, highlighting all the new friends she made in the yard. The moral of the story read, “Your mother always tells you never to talk to strangers; but when you find yourself to be a stranger, new friends can help bring you home.” Rebecca reflected on the two instances in the last couple of days when she had allowed strangers to help her; she decided that isolating herself from humanity probably had been doing her more harm than good over the years.

As she finished her hot cocoa, and slipped the brittle book back into the blazer, Rebecca felt a new sense of motivation. She no longer wanted to wade in self-pity and perpetuate her illness with neglect. She no longer wanted to blame John for leaving her alone. She recognized that her mother did not desert her, and could very well be digging a little nest for Rebecca and her now-estranged father up in the clouds. It was time to make her existence on earth meaningful; it was time to be human. It was time to make new friends her home, instead of idealized settings inhabited by people who only lived in the minds of their authors.

Rebecca made a sandwich and mapped out a plan for the blazer. The new sustenance invigorated her, and Rebecca recognized that the smell of the blazer was one completely unfamiliar to her: John was not her lover. Instead of letting this small epiphany unravel her, Rebecca straightened her spine like the sturdy columns of Scarlett’s Tara, and decided it was time to seat her thoughts in reality. She snapped the journal open again and wrote:

Tuesday, February 6, 2000

Fact No. 1: This is not my blazer. It is John’s. It should be returned to him. Fact No. 2: John is little more than a stranger. While a nice stranger, and having the potential for being a friend, he is not my lover. I do not know him. Fact No. 3: The book club people seemed to be relatively familiar to him; he must be at least a semi-regular attendant. The club meets on Friday evenings and the meetings begin around six. Fact No. 4: I am strong. I am alive. I can cope. I must learn to relate with real people. Novels are for recreation, not replacement relationships. Fact No. 5: When one door closes, another opens. Maybe I should get a pet, so I can start to re-socialize myself. Fact No. 6: Everything is going to be OK.

Rebecca read over the short catechism she had just created, and decided parts of it needed to be integrated into her everyday life. She wrote facts four and six on a note card and taped it up next to her bathroom mirror, where she finally faced herself. While her pallid complexion was definitely startling, there was a new sparkle in her eyes. She smiled at how childish she looked in the droopy blazer, and removed it, returning it to the dining room chair.

She spent the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday drinking lots of fluids, taking the rest of the medicine every eight hours, and forced herself to eat regularly timed meals. She went down to her parcel box and retrieved her new novel and only allowed herself to read one chapter at a time, before going to bed at night. She wrote Fact Number Four on her bookmark, so that she would not allow the fiction world to lure her out of the real one for too long. “Novels are for recreation, not replacement relationships.”

On Thursday morning, she arrived early at work, as usual. She busied herself, trying not to think about the impending meeting at the bookstore. She went out of her way to try to engage in friendly conversation with her coworkers at lunch, and on coffee breaks. It was a difficult transition, but after some practice, she found it to be less awkward than she had expected. After all, she had listened attentively to thousands of normal conversations go on around her for years.

On Friday, her nerves were slightly more on edge, as she had brought the blazer with her to work. It laid across the back seat of her car, neatly folded in half, with the shoulder seams kissing, like she had found it. Rebecca started to worry about John’s reaction to her returning the blazer, which had been missing without a trace for an entire week. She was concerned that he might think she had stolen it—especially if he had called the bookstore looking for it, only to be informed that the strange girl had run out with it.

After work, Rebecca took the detour to the bookstore. She walked inside slowly, taking in the room and the smells filtered by her new attitude. While she was still skittish, she bolstered herself, repeating Fact Number Six under her breath. “Everything’s going to be OK. Everything’s going to be OK.” She made her way to the spiral staircase, with only about twenty minutes left until six o’clock struck.

When she reached the reading circle, she found the club chair in which John had sat seven days before. She wasn’t sure whether she should sit down on the sofa and wait for him, or if she should leave the blazer with the woman standing behind the snack table for safe-keeping. She would not allow herself to walk out of the store with the blazer still in hand. She forced herself to take deep breaths and think rationally.

As her heart thumped more heavily with the minutes slipping away, Rebecca perched on the arm of the sofa, going over alternate scenarios in her head of how the reunion with John would be. In one scene, he was relieved and thankful for her keeping the jacket, and the book, safe. In another, he was peeved, and took the blazer from her with a forced grin plastered across his face.

In a final moment of frustration and unease, Rebecca decided it best to just leave the blazer right where she had found it. She worried about the other group members coming up the stairs and asking her about it, which they might recognize. She decided she wasn’t quite ready to face all of those people. She needed to take baby steps. She placed the blazer over the back of the chair just as she had found it, and walked calmly out of the store. As she drove out of the parking lot, she thought she saw John in her rear-view mirror, entering the store. At the inkling of hope that the blazer would finally be reunited with its rightful owner, Rebecca let out a sigh of relief. She decided she would return the next Friday after work, and audit the book club meeting. She thought she might even bake muffins for the occasion.

Coat Hanger Wire Versus Wooden Chair: Nobody Wins.

*** warning*** more mother-daughter violence. the title pretty much gets the point across.***

It’s dark outside and there are little tornado warning red exclamation marks popping up in the corner of my screen as I write. My windows look like somebody pissed India ink all over them and the trees are flailing about like whiny little babies getting shaken up real good. That’s what you do with babies, right? –You shake them up till they quit wailing? Babies. Who needs them.

My mother had a baby once when she was nineteen. Well she didn’t have it, not like most women do—but the thing lived in side her for a while—that is until she got it taken out. Taken out, like a fucking swollen tonsil. On the one hand, if she’d kept the thing, I wouldn’t be here, the fabulous painter that I am; but on the other, maybe she wouldn’t have turned out to be such a bitch.

“Bitch” was one of my favorite words when I was in second grade. I muttered it under my breath probably 30 times a day, mostly while walking away from my stupid mother. Sometimes, I’d hide in the hall closet, (which was a reach-in) by standing on the bottom shelf, feet about two or three feet apart, back arched so my ass could tuck into the space between two shelves, and my head turned to the side so I could breathe with the door closed. Apparently the claustrophobia hadn’t set in yet. So anyways, I’d hide up the damn linen closet in the hall and pretend to be a sort of fly on the wall, wishing I could stay invisible forever.

Later, after the divorce, I taught myself to slither under the futon in the new house. The family computer was parked in my room, and even though we had very little privacy with the whole no-locking-doors rule, I had about as much privacy as a drug addict in rehab. So when “dragon lady,” (as I liked to call her when she was wound up real tight), when she started waltzing around the damn house screaming and hollering about my latest fuck-up, I’d just go play invisible for a bit till something else distracted her for long enough to turn her Bitch knob down a few notches.

She always had this stupid hang-up about knocking us kids down a rung or two so we would think she was better than us. How lame can a person get that she has to feel better than her fucking kids? She was always taller than either of us; a better dancer, more flexible, more smooth; had a better vocabulary; could type faster, write better, speak more languages, draw better, make better grades in school, score better on the SATs… You name it, she had a score six points higher than you, legs six inches longer… I don’t know, mind about six kilometers narrower.

Since she and I could never seem to communicate effectively in words, I used to leave art around the house trying to tell her what a bad mother she was. Well maybe not that she was a bad mom, but more that her daughters were fucking sad and lonely as hell. I mean, if she’s supposed to be so clever, certainly she could look at my latest brilliant collage (lying in the middle of the hall with a bottle of glue tipped over next to it) and see how screwed up I was… Maybe she’d even feel guilty and apologize for sucking at life. But that last one’s a Big Maybe. I still can’t find that little green journal. Maybe it’s in the stash with the clothes of mine she didn’t like so she stole them out of my closet when I wasn’t home. If I want to look like a whore, I should be able to dress myself however I damn well please. Especially at art school, where you don’t have friends if you don’t look like some asymmetrical whore. No, not an off-center pussy; silly home-made clothes, or masks, really.

So this one night, a dark one with shaken-baby trees outside, Dragon Lady’s ass is so tight you could have shoved a lump of coal up there and she’d pop a little diamond out for you. She starts screaming and hollering like usual, probably about something stupid like laundry that still hasn’t been put away. One thing leads to another, I start screaming back, stooping to her level, and the next thing I know she’s got a wire hanger in her hand. So now she’s screaming loud, and she’s waving the hanger around like the big flag in that painting, Liberty Leading the People, except she certainly isn’t leading, or saving, anybody.

My sister can’t stand to see us fight like this, of course. She’s been brain washed to side with dear ol’ Mommy for years. Me and Dad versus Mommy and Sissy. “Sissy” is right: Anyways, my sister is crying and crying and wandering around the house with her big huge eyes all puffed up. She does the only thing she knows how, and calls in for back up.

My brother is off at a fancy college across town. He deserves a good education, a way out. The only way we could pay for it, of course, was that my mom worked at the school—but her hell-jobs in academia are an entirely different story. So Sissy calls the Peacemaker, or Peacekeeper. Nope. He has to make peace, can’t keep something you don’t have.

So Dragon Lady is chasing me with the wire hanger, telling me to “come here,”

Like anybody in their right mind would stop running from a woman who is nearly six feet tall and running at you with a loud mouth and pointy object. How stupid does she think I am?

I’ve been having nightmares about fighting back and accidentally killing her for months now. It’s getting to the point where I can’t even have a normal fucking conversation in the middle of the day without axe blades swinging in my peripheral vision. So the Dragon Lady is licking her lips, and I’m looking around the room for a weapon, while still running and screaming, of course.

Just as she thinks she’s got me cornered, herded actually, into my room, I see a little wooden chair I’ve had for ages. We used to read picture books and replicate the princesses from them while sitting in those little chairs. So I see the chair and I remember the dream I had about it.

In the dream, we’re in my room, on my turf. She’s screaming and she has her back to my closet door. She’s waving her hands around, because we are very expressive people, and I pick up the chair by its back. I grab it with two hands, one on each side of the curved wood, and I swing that mother-fucker up at her throat. I pin her damn Michelin Man neck up against the closet door with the cross bar that supports two of the legs.

She’s still running her mouth, and she’s real mad now, but I’m madder, younger, stronger. I’ve been holding it in a lot longer than she’s been dishing it out, so I press that fucking chair into her stupid little turkey neck. Her arms are pinned, too, like she’s getting crucified. I’m in my knee-high combat boots with the four-inch platforms, so I’m almost at eye-level and my feet don’t slide back a bit while I lean my entire weight into that damn chair. I push, and she gets a little scared, and I push harder, and she goes kinda quiet. Then the legs of the chair break through the paper-thin door, which is hollow, and she chokes. She coughs and gags for a couple minutes, and then her head just pops right off, like in the cartoons.

That’s what I see when I look down at the chair when Dragon Lady thinks she’s got me cornered. I run over to that perfect little chair, and I step to the side so she has to turn her back to the closet door. I pick up that chair and hold it out in front of me, while I decide if I want to smash her skull with an overhead blow, or give her a nice puncture wound in the spleen. She’s so damn loud, she’s clueless. She doesn’t even acknowledge that I now am holding a weapon more dangerous than her puny little wire hanger.

In walks my brother, to the rescue. He stands in the door, with my sniffling little sister hiding behind him. He yells only as much as he has to, to get our attention. We, I’m sure, look like fucking apes, all hunched over and drooling over an impending kill. But my big brother is the family golden boy, and Dragon Lady has to listen to what he has to say. She also wouldn’t be caught dead brandishing a weapon over one of his little sisters. Well, besides the leather belt we were beaten with on a regular basis. Besides that.

So he commands her out into the hall first. He is stern and tough, but amazingly calm. He gets her to shut up and listen, a little, and then he sends her, scowling, back into the room and calls me out. I have to slide past her fat ass to get into the hall, and she glares hard at me like she’s trying to burn a hole in my head. Stupid bitch thinks she’s one of the X-Men.

I step into the hall, barefooted, puffy-eyed, and tired. But I’m sure as hell thankful he’s there, even though I feel bad that he couldn’t just stay in his little utopian ivy-league world. He’s smart; he doesn’t deserve this. So he talks to me. He tells me that Dragon Lady is, in fact, my mother, and I have to act respectful and obedient, even if I don’t respect her. I roll my eyes. He gets his stern mediator voice on, and tells me to listen up. I listen. I love him. He has done nothing, his whole life, but try to protect his baby sisters, and occasionally take us for joy rides in his car, which is older than me. He is a fabulous guy.

So he gives me a little pep talk about breathing and talking rationally with the beast that is my mother, and then he tells me that in this case, I was right. I was right! Someone, finally, recognizes that not everything is my fault! That’s all the affirmation I need, so I nod and smile through the rest of the speech.

He summons the hell-bitch out into the hall again and she’s kinda argumentative, and interrupts a lot; but he finally gets her to shut up and make nice. We apologize to each other, even though our acting skills are well-polished by this point, and we put on a little show for my brother, because we love him.

He leaves, my sister stops sniffling, and Mommy Dear and Rebel Moron part, and go our separate ways. For the rest of the night, we pretty much only communicate in grunts, or through my peace-loving sister, but at least nobody died—that night.

flashbacks

**WARNING** THIS STORY FEATURES A DETAILED LOOK AT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE FROM A MOTHER TO A CHILD. DO NOT READ THIS IF IT WILL UPSET YOU, OR TRIGGER A FLASHBACK OF YOUR OWN.**

One minute I'm sitting in sociology class taking notes on domestic violence, and the next I'm reliving it. I almost became a statistic. That's all I can think of, those are the only words my mind can form. I almost became a statistic.

Growing up, I knew that other kids got in trouble and that some of them got spanked, but it didn't take too long for me to realize that other kids' moms weren't like mine. When other moms came to school to drop off their forgotten lunches, my classmates didn't scatter like roaches when the lights come on. When other moms picked up my friends from school, they were usually right on time, or maybe a few minutes late, not an hour. When other moms had a bad day at work, they might be more prone to raising their voices, or they might take the dog for a run before facing all the housework, rather than screaming and beating their kids bloody over spilled cat food.

But my mom was a single mom; a single, working mom. My mom had a house note and a car note and a grocery list and a sticky floor and a stupid boss. Most of her bosses were stupid, or fat, or lazy. That's what she told us, anyway. If she had a boss she liked, though, that's when the trouble came home. If she had a good boss, she would work herself to the bone trying to please him (or her) and would be so stressed out and exhausted that she had to take it out on us. She had to yell about how the kitchen wasn't cleaned up or how we were (once again) watching a cartoon instead of working on our homework or how we had forgotten to defrost the chicken.

Yelling was only the beginning, though. Yelling was the tame part. Once, when my sister was in first grade, my mother got insanely angry that Claire was having trouble finding the first word of the last sentence in a paragraph on her homework. Claire was not only dyslexic, but she had also gotten used to getting help, or someone to do at least part of her work for her. When mom started yelling, Claire started crying, because she felt ashamed and guilty that she couldn't please my insatiable mother. The tears flooded her big blue eyes and blurred her vision. Claire was a beautiful child.

When her vision was blurred by the tears and the frantic feeling of needing to please my mother right away, Claire panicked. When she panicked, she hesitated, and when she hesitated, she was told to stand up, lean up against the table, and get a whipping. We didn't call them spankings in my house; that word wouldn't cover what we sometimes endured. Usually the beatings came in increments of ten, and since Claire had such an easy-flowing fountain of guilt in her, ten was usually all it took for her to straighten up and do right. All the beatings ever did for me was perpetuate my anger, my hate, my nightmares.

Claire got her first ten pops, and was sent back to the chair on the other side of the table, rubbing her little round behind, with her head hanging low. She sat down, ready to search for the first word of the last sentence, and my mother stood behind her waiting, with the thick leather belt slung around her neck like a towel on a boxer.

"Well? Where is it?" my mother prodded.
"I... I... I don't know," pleaded Claire, with a scared look on her face.
"You do know, and if you don't find it in ten seconds you're going to get another whipping."

Claire's breathing started to get a little more shallow and her eyes raced back and forth across the page, but she wasn't seeing the words, she was just seeing dancing shapes.
"Where is it? Seven... Six... Five..."

Claire panicked again and started reading, very slowly, with each word stretched out like the cat in the sun. She started reading the first sentence of the paragraph, instead of the last.
"Nope, that's not it. Go over there and get another whipping."
"No, let me try again. Let me try."
"You better hurry, Four... Three..."

Claire found the last word of the last sentence of the paragraph. The intonation in her voice spiked, like she knew it was the wrong answer, but if she said it fast enough, and high enough, it might pass, but it didn't.
"Damnit, Claire. You know damn well that's not it. Stand up. I'm not taking any more of this bullshit."

Claire immediately started whaling and did not get out of her chair immediately, as prompted. This was one of many tragic mistakes to come. My mother then grabbed Claire's pudgy little hand, yanked it up until my sister was forced into an upright position, and then with her other hand, my mother whipped the belt off her neck and started hitting Claire again. The strikes were more random now, landing on my sisters behind in criss-cross welts. My mother wasn't even counting out loud, as she had been before, but I always knew to keep count in my head. Sometimes, I could smell a 25-er coming at me and I would count in my head, just so I could keep track of the stats. It wasn't so much of a baseball-score obsession, as it was preparation, in case I'd ever need the numbers on hand; in case I ever thought she'd break the record, I'd need to know what the record was. Seven was all Claire got. I hated the number seven.

Seven was often the number my mother started counting from, when she said we had ten seconds to do something. Seven minutes was often the amount of time given for us to finish cleaning our rooms or the dishes, before the next beating. Seven was not just an annoying number, as I absolutely hated hearing my mother count backward, but it was also a number which usually indicated that something bad was going to happen. Seven was one of many things that triggered the anger.

Only 18 months older than my baby sister, I could do nothing but stand back and watch all this happening to her. I was frozen by the shock of seeing her hurt repeatedly, and also by the confusion at my mother's rage. I wanted so badly to tell my sister the answer, even though I couldn't even see the words on the paper from where I was standing. Every loud crack of the leather against my sister's tender skin made me flinch, like I was the one getting hit. I wanted so badly to take the hits for her. All I ever wanted was to be able to protect her. I failed.

The yelling and the crying and the whipping and the begging went on like this for what seemed like hours. I can't remember where my father was while this was going on, but since I remember sunlight coming over my shoulder while I watched my sister's porcelain behind be stripped of the cotton panties, and hit so many times on top of already pulsing welts, that the image still reminds me of raw liver, I have to assume my father was still at work. Had he been home, though, the situation wouldn't have been much different. My father didn't trust his parenting skills because he had had such distant and short relationships with his parents, who both died in their 50s. Because of my mother's intense domination of everything and everyone in that house, it is likely that my father would have been closed up in his office, far away in "computer land," as my mother often called it.

I think it took Claire about 30 minutes to finally find the first word of the last sentence of the paragraph that day, and when she did, my mother's congratulations were bitter and sarcastic. Now, nearly two decades have gone by since then, and I still sob like a helpless little girl thinking about it. I called my sister about an hour ago to tell her how sorry I am that I didn't protect her, or at least find something to do to distract my mother--like kicking her in the calf. Claire barely remembered the episode and told me not to worry about it because there was nothing I could have done. She also assured me that we had "turned out alright," though I beg to differ.

I still am extremely hesitant to trust women, especially ones in authority positions. I still occasionally have instant-replay nightmares where I try to alter the past by fighting back, and accidentally killing my mother, who is nearly six feet tall. I am still worried by the hate and the anger that boils up in my throat at least a couple of times a month, usually misdirected at just about anything. I am still terrified of turning into my mother. Thankfully, my professor didn't ask me why my sister had to lie to my cousin about why she had trouble sitting down for almost a week. Fortunately, I was allowed to cry silently, on the front row of class, and slip out to my car before bursting into tears. I hate crying, especially in front of female authority figures.

yellow morning (revised)

here's a tweaked version of the yellow morning story. let me know what you guys think.

The window over the kitchen sink always let in so much sunlight in the mornings that everything in the room glowed like I imagined the clouds in heaven did. The butter-colored tile on the counter reflected the bright morning light up to the ceiling, up into her face. My mother's face seemed illuminated from within, as she hung her head over the waffle iron. The creamy batter bubbled out from between the two iron plates, and the smell of summer Saturdays wafted into the other rooms of the house.

The Japanese tulip tree outside the window still had big blushing blossoms on it, because this was the summer we had built a tool shed in the back yard. The shade provided by the shed tricked the tree into thinking spring was nearly six months long. It was a surreal summer.

In the golden kitchen, my mother concentrated quietly on her work. It was a peaceful kind of quiet, a rare kind of quiet. Her movements from one task to another were fluid, and I realized that ten years of being a ballerina can never be taken out of a woman.

My father walked softly from the bedroom door on the other side of the refrigerator. My mother's back was to him, so she never even heard the door open. His bare feet were as quiet as a cat's on the vinyl floor, and he only had to take a couple of steps before throwing his brown arms around her waist.

Startled, she yelped loudly, and then threw her head back, laughing. She turned to see him and they kissed. Their heads eclipsed the light coming through the tulip tree branches, and she put a spot of waffle batter on the end of his nose. He smiled and released her, letting her white cotton t-shirt fall back into place. The light flooded the room again, and the butter-pad tiles bounced the warm light into their grinning faces.

At that moment, I loved them both, equally. I didn’t have to pick one over the other; I didn’t have to listen to the names they called each other when slamming the phone onto its cradle. At that moment, they were how parents are supposed to be, I couldn’t feel more lucky, or normal.

The Last Ben

What is it with Bens? Bens are always the guys that are so sweet and charming and maybe even a little on the innocent side, and you just want to hide in the corner all day and smile at them without them ever knowing. If you do manage to crawl out of your hobbit-hole and actually talk to a Ben and maybe befriend him or God-forbid, fall in love with one, that’s when the trouble starts. That’s when you start to get all ooey-gooey and little stars linger in your peripheral vision because all your oxygen (that should be being directed to your lungs, to then be transported to your blood cells, so your brain and other vital organs can function properly) is instead going into your mouth and right out your nose, in long, wistful sighs. “Ben this…” and “Ben that…” start to punctuate the beginnings of all your sentences, and pretty soon all your girlfriends are ready to smack you up-side the head with that perfectly beautiful steak on your plate that you are only drooling over, instead of salivating for.

If only food could be enough sustenance for our silly little pining hearts, so that they wouldn’t have to be ground to a powdery pulp by a Ben. If only, every time we feel the need for a brawny arm to be slipping around the smalls of our backs, we could just go eat some chocolate pudding instead, and feel perfectly fulfilled. Who the hell needs men anyways? Really? Who the hell needs them? Especially Bens.

This is how the pep talk starts. This is the speech that every best friend has to keep locked away in a private safe to only be used in case of emergencies. Not sirens-swirling-lights-flashing-pull-over-on-the-side-of-the-road-even-though-you-are-already-late emergencies. No. I’m talking about eat-icecream-till-the-snot-stops-bubbling-out-your-nostrils emergencies. I’m talking about buy-an-extra-box-of-kleenex-just-because-this-is-the-gas-station-where-you-first-met emergencies. Yes. Those.

Everybody wants to feel loved. Whether or not they are actually loved is an entirely different story, but we would all at least like to feel loved. It’s the illusion we are going for. Nobody has the time or the energy to actually try to be loved. Life just doesn’t work like that anymore. It’s like how you get so caught up in your extracurricular activities in school, so you forget to dedicate the proper amount of time to studying for that lame old chem test. So you flip through your notes and make up silly analogies and associations so that somehow you have the periodic table memorized- but it all has an expiration date. You started studying about an hour before the test, so it’s probably only going to stay locked in your brain for about an hour after you start the test. But the illusion you are going for is that perfectly filled-out Scantron. All the little graphite bubbles are glistening from just the right location and the machine that grades your test gives your teacher (and your transcript) the illusion that you have something great: a well-used brain. The longing for the illusion of love, the ignorance of bliss, works the same way:

You meet some guy at some inconsequential place where you normally would never ask someone out- like at the grocery store. He’s cute (of course); you are a mess (nobody was supposed to be shopping this late!) but he finds it endearing (what a prick); you exchange numbers (why?!); you get dolled up (way too much effort); he greets you with flowers (how sweet?); you go out (why not? -free dinner); you kiss (oh crap…); you close the door (finally); you let out one of those deadly sighs (you know the ones), and you’re hooked. Date 1 is the beginning of bubbling in the Scantron with the idea that you might miraculously ace the test, not realizing that you bubbled in the wrong test form number to start with. Bens are trouble.

*****

News flash, people: romantics are not always the diamond-sprinkled cupcakes they are made out to be. The worst thing about Romantics is the adjective that usually precedes their title: “hopeless”.

Sure, sure, idealism states that romantics are the best lovers; in fact, even Cosmo has it etched in stone. My problem with them, though, is that they are often more “dreamer” than “doer”. When you ask your Romeo to run to the store for some chicken and paper towels, he comes back home with toilet paper and animal crackers and says, “I was gonna buy you some flowers, but then I remembered the vase is dirty.” I haven’t always been this bitter; my face hasn’t always looked like Grandma-just-farted-and-tried-to-blame-it-on-the-dog-again in response to Sally-be-Swooned saying, “he’s sooo romaaaantic.” The cynicism started after my recent realization that it was time to get over the latest wood-chipper of my pining heart: Ben #3.

I first contracted the dopey-smiles and starry-eyes (simultaneously) when B3 shuffled into my coffee shop looking like he could have been Nicole Kidman’s brother. Bean pole tall, paper thin, and pale and flawless as a doily, he was like an anorexic angel. The first thing that really induced lockjaw though, was his perfectly aqua-colored eyes. I think I probably made him repeat his Dumbo-simple order of a Regular Chai Tea Latte With Skim Milk Whipped Cream and dash of Vanilla about four times before I could stop staring at those Bahama-blue eyes, (well, you know, judging by the scantily clad, bronzy babe commercials on TV). I wasn’t supposed to be working the register that morning, but my flaky new counter girl was sick at home with an infected nose piercing. Nobody wants to watch some puss-nostriled Rudolf hanging her head over their morning jolt of vitality. Besides, I needed some sunlight.

Usually I was stuck in the back office doing paperwork and begging for extensions on the electric bill till about 1 in the afternoon, when I would then poke my head out to make sure Hiroshima wasn’t happening in the front room because somebody let the milk steam too long again. Then I’d grab a sandwich out from under the sneeze guard, sip on a ridiculously chalky but oh-so-healthy vita-diet-smaller-waist-in-no-time shake until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and then head back into the bat cave till closing time. You’d think that with a business degree from Emerson College, I would be able to keep the books balanced a little better, but hey- I thought pulling off little Miss Independent Business Woman would be a little easier and a little more glamorous than it turned out to be while I was working on my double-major in English. Instead of arriving at work in a prim little pencil skirt with a briefcase at 8 A.M. 5 days a week, I schlop in around 6:30 A.M. 6 days a week in pin-striped jeans that I should have given away years ago with a neck pillow under one arm and a carton of orange juice under the other. My reading glasses (am I that old?) need a new prescription (and maybe younger looking frames) and as my mother would say, my stringy black-brown hair tangled into a loose braid probably makes me look something like a “street urchin” (and I thought they told us in school that urchins lived in the sea).

Anyway, I was tired and grumpy, but enjoying thawing out in the early morning sun, when B3 strolls in like he’s got all the time in the world. (This is something you take notice of at 7:30 in the morning when all the suits that pack the room are anxiously checking their watches and tapping their shiny shoes with every syllable that comes out of their cubicle-speak mouths grumbling all of their conference-table jargon.) So my Nicole Kidman lover boy wanders up to the counter after eyeing each individual pastry adoringly and orders a reg. CH SM +V as if he’s telling the movers where to put his grandmother’s sofa in his hot new bachelor pad. You know the tone- excited about the new location, but still living with the same old furniture. I could see, after returning from my momentary palm tree-framed mental vacation, that this cutie in the print-screened hoodie could use a little mocha spice in his life, (but I hadn’t decided yet if I just wanted to make his drink taste different… or his life).

In walks some blonde bombshell in 3-inch heels (that I’m positive can’t be work-safe) and the pencil skirt I promised myself after graduation. In a moment of panic, I scribble the order a little too fast onto the foam cup with my grease pencil, and the lead breaks off and smacks me square in the eye. I slip on something that I should have mopped up 10 minutes ago, and my sneakered feet fly straight up into the air right before I crack my skull on our recently polished cement floor. When I come to, shaggy-haired blue-eyed boy-wonder is bent over my face while Patrick the delivery boy and some suit who announces that everything is going to be okay because “I’m a Doctor” kneel beside me. For a moment I’m thinking, “No I’m not, I own a coffee shop,” and then all I can see is his cute little concerned face. Now my heart is starting to race because I realize what a fool I’ve made of myself and I recognize the Doctor from somewhere... Wait a second… Oh. I got it. It’s the blonde. Great.

So now I don’t know if I should act all damsel-in-distress so that He will cradle my head a little longer, or say that I’m fine so that the bitch who is sure to steal the love of my life, (just by smelling like the expensive vanilla extract I was about to put in his cup), will get the hell away from me...and him. I mumble some slur of all these thoughts starting to swirl in my now-aching skull like, “Stop… smelling… so blonde.” What the fuck. Now He’s looking at me like I’m either the cutest thing he’s ever seen, (or the most insane) and She is so busy checking my vitals in front of everybody (who just wants to get some coffee and then get the hell out), that Blondie (fortunately) doesn’t notice my latest fumble of the English Language. I am smitten and pissed at the same time—both emotions are making my cheeks hot.

I should have called my best friend Sam to come take me home. I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me in time, or maybe her phone number just flew out of my brain as my feet were in lift-off. If Sam had sped over from her teaching job at our dear old Emerson to save the day, I might have saved myself a little heartbreak months down the road. More on that later, though.

Presently, my head feels like the thing that’s broken, and Doctor Barbie thinks I may have a contusion or allusion or concussion something and thinks I should get rest or a hospital, I don’t know; I’m spinning. Groggily, I am trying to communicate the message on the billboard that just lit up in my brain, in the most polite tone humanly possible: HELL NO I AM NOT LEAVING YOU HERE IN MY COFFEE SHOP TO SWOON MY BOY WONDER. I SAW HIM FIRST. But what comes out is a little more along the lines of, “oh… I think… cement… fine…. mocha spice…?” Again, with the gibberish. You must look real sexy now. Good job, street urchin. For some God-forsaken, incomprehensible reason, delivery boy Patrick is already on the phone trying to get Rudolph to come in to cover for me, her boss. Apparently, the nose piercing has been ousted from its post as Latest Facial Decoration and she is lounging in her back yard “catching some rays”. Her mother, who answered the phone, assures Patrick, and thus everyone else behind the counter, that Mademoiselle Flakiness is going to be feeling generous today and will be here shortly with a smile, (and a Band-Aid) pasted to her face. Boy Wonder supposedly lives nearby and happens to have his new little eco-friendly midget of a car waiting outside. Not-so-work-safe Doctor Diva, and other faceless people who feel the need to pitch in, all attempt picking me up off the floor as if I was on a stretcher made of forearms. Now I am gurgling in a more forceful, (and obviously displeased), tone and they set me back down on the cold wet floor. I wearily wave one of my arms and somebody realizes that I would be slightly less humiliated if my stretcher friends helped me walk out of the building, instead of riding a magic people-carpet outside. Thank God. Sort of.

Somehow the shop staff think they can get through the entire day without me, and all my stretcher friends actually wave goodbye as Bahama-blue eyes pulls away from the curb. He has a couple of illegible written instructions from Blondie and her phone number in case “anything” happens with me that she may need to come check on, (as it turns out that her office is “just a couple” of subway stops away from his place). Frankly, I wouldn’t blame him for accepting the offer of a nooner from between those mile-long legs, but I also still stand by the very valid observation that I saw him first.

Now that my brain and mouth seem to have some semblance of construction of an information super-highway between them again, I manage to ask his name, sort of.

“So, uh… how do I know you aren’t some psycho killer with his latest victim in the passenger seat?” I ask, still unable to comprehend why that was the first thing I say to him.

“Well, same way I know that you didn’t fake that whole episode back there just to get in my pants, I guess” he says nonchalantly, but smirking.

Oh my god. Is it possible? Is my subconscious Really That Persistent? Am I Really That Desperate? Oh Crap, he’s looking over here. Oh God Oh God Oh God.

He must see the angst on my face because a small chuckle slips out from between his perfectly pink lips and a sliver of his adorable picket-fence smile peeks out from between them for a second. Meanwhile I’m trying desperately to stare out the window and look really indifferent as to anything he does or says. Maybe I haven’t fully snapped out of it yet. Maybe I shouldn’t talk for a while.

He looks over at me again, this time craning his neck a little, making it a little obvious that the midget-mobile doesn’t have very many good hiding places in it for something quite my size.

“I’m kidding,” he says.

Duh, I think, but trying not to come off too annoyed.

He clears his throat and says, “My name’s Ben?” like he is asking permission to start the conversation over.

I slowly start to turn my head back toward him, still embarrassed by the “whole episode back there” and by the fact that I have already accused him of potentially being a serial killer when really, I secretly have a crush on him, and have only just learned his first name. I guess now would be a good time to give him my name, at least the first part of it, anyways. But wait; what if he is a psycho who is only acting nice to get me to go home with him? Should I give him my real name? What if he goes through my purse and steals all my credit cards after I fall asleep? Where is my purse? Should I throw open the passenger-side door and pull a stop-drop-and-roll onto the blurred pavement and scream for someone to call 911? Oh God, what have I gotten myself into?

Just then, I get a text message from Patrick, letting me know that he stayed till Rudolph, (who calls herself is Sky or something equally pseudo-artsy) arrived at the shop to work the counter. He didn’t have to do that, but I appreciate it. He’s a sweet kid who has been delivering all our non-food supplies (like cups, filters and stir sticks), for the last year or so, saving up his earnings to go toward college. When I pull the beeping phone out of my pocket, a little confused to find it there, and see Pat’s name on the screen, I impulsively blurt out that my name is Pat, even though it’s definitely not. And even if I had pulled that whole damsel-in-distress act at the shop just to get into this Ben character’s pants, I definitely don’t have the energy, (or the naughty just-in-case lingerie stashed in my purse) to follow through on my evil plan now.

The short ride to Ben’s apartment seems like an eternity because I manage to keep this awkward talk-oh-wait-don’t-talk charade up the whole way. Ben seems to roll with it and not take it too personally, so I assume (fingers crossed) he just chalks it up to my head wound. He helps me up the 2 flights of stairs (very slowly), unlocks the door to apartment 212, and viola, I’m in. The place is quaint, but neat. The hardwoods are surprisingly shiny, the walls are a peaceful shade of robin’s egg blue, and Grandma’s gaudy tapestry couch has been traded in for a simple brown leather sofa and matching recliner. Ben pulls a blanket out of a cabinet under the TV and lays it on the sofa “so you don’t get too hot” and he gently lowers me onto it, cradling my head again like he was doing when I was laid out on the coffee shop floor maybe 30 minutes ago. Already, I am a sucker for this guy, and I don’t even know a thing about him, (except that he has pretty nice taste for a guy his age). (Well, the age his face looks, which I would guess is about 23 or 24). Almost instantly, I am asleep.

Some unknown amount of time has passed and I wake up to Ben sitting next to me with a huge glass of water in his hands. I sip some; I smile groggily and graciously; and I am asleep again. I wake up again and that golden hue of light is coming through one of those big bay windows that old Boston apartments are known for, turning the whole room into a beautiful glowing sanctuary. Ben is there, next to me on the couch again, and his shaggy locks are catching the light, creating a halo around his head like that of one of those guardian angels in medieval paintings. I can barely make out his facial features, as his head is eclipsing the bulk of the light that would be blinding me, but I think he is smiling. This time, he has brought me a huge glass of orange juice. My mouth feels like someone has fed me some of that goopy paste you use in kindergarten to adhere popsicle sticks together, so I gladly gulp the juice. He asks how I am feeling and I manage to utter, “better”.

I sit up and we chat for a while until we are both hungry. He orders Thai food and we eat stir fry out of the cartons, still sitting on the couch. You would think a guy like this would be a girl’s dream come true, and I did, too, for a while. You would think the rest would be “history” and it all had a happily-ever-after ending. Well, he was sweet and attentive and thoughtful, for a while. He wrote me letters and told me his deepest darkest thoughts and brought me foreign films for us to watch on the weekends, for a while. He was my best friend, for a while. All of it was perfectly cookie-cutter happy-go-lucky, for a while.

*****

When I was a little girl growing up in suburban Massachusetts, I remember my father had this poet friend named Gene. Whenever this bearded man, with smile lines around his eyes like the cracks in an otherwise perfect fallen soufflé, would stop in for a visit, he and my father would scurry into a back room following a noisy, belly-laughing, back-slapping greeting. They stayed up late into the night telling old stories and whispering about business in the dim lamp light; and after he left, my father would always remark with a twinkle in his soft brown eyes that “someday that man is going to be very rich.” I know now that they were old college buddies and that my father greatly admired and believed in Gene’s work and was giving him whatever we could afford to spare, in order to keep his friend’s art alive. One of the few times my father’s old friend ever looked me straight in the eye when he told me something, it turned out to be something that has stuck with me since then, and has grown more profound to me as I have seen more of the world. He said, “The best love is like fine wine, my dear; as it ages, it becomes more priceless, and harder to find.”

My whirlwind romance with B3 was not made of this kind of love. During the Romantic period of our relationship, I know I daydreamed about us possibly growing old together someday, although I have all but eradicated these images from my mind by now. Everything I did, everything I thought about, everything I worked for, became hard-earned stepping stones toward living out that postcard image of us in my head of two wrinkly, pudgy, happy people in rocking chairs, watching the sun set over the Atlantic from our front porch.

Whatever he did, or thought about, or worked for was, for him, a fear-planted stepping stone away from losing me. I know it sounds arrogant to say it so bluntly, or even preposterous to state it so simply, but as I came to find out much too late, it was painfully, honestly true. People have to have goals; they have to have dreams; they have to have reasons to live; but Ben, as it turns out, was one of the most sickeningly complacent people I had (or have) ever met.

In college he had never taken any challenging (or interesting) classes. He always sat in the back, from what I gather, and slid by with barely a C average. His parents, who had worked so hard all their lives to provide for their children, and who loved him so much that they were afraid to see him fail in life, cradled or rescued him whenever they could. When I met him, his father had just paid the down payment on his son’s new car as a graduation present, although B3 is still without possession of a diploma, as far as I know. The car was intended to serve as incentive to succeed, but instead was simply a reward for failure. The brown leather sofa and recliner in his living room was a gift from his uncle, who owns a furniture store in upstate New York, and his hair was shaggy because he was too lazy to look for a Super Cuts nearby. I’m not sure anything he earned in his life was ever of his own volition. Everyone else was always worrying about his life for him, paying his way for him, saving his ass for him. But, again, I didn’t realize the enormity of the disaster that was his life (and lack of will to live it himself) until much too late, when I saw that I couldn’t make him do any of this on his own, any better than anyone else who had ever tried.

The reason I say people only really want the illusion of love is because they only really want to love the illusion of their mates. Nobody wants to wake up one day and say, “Oh my God, he really is a fat, lazy, selfish asshole who cheats on his taxes and needs to wax his back!” –and that’s why I think people fear commitment so much these days, too. So they concoct this smoothie of a mate in their head that is half Mr. Right and half Mr. Reality. They throw in a dash of “but he’s so adooorable!” and sprinkle some “and look how sweet he is with kids…” and then when they get bored, they get the hell out. They get bored because they are tired. They get tired because it takes a lot of energy to keep that blender in their brains churning the two very different Mr. Rs together to keep him tasting just right. When a guy does come along that seems to actually be Mr. Right, and not just putting on a show for us, we say he’s “too good to be true” and sabotage it. Very rarely do people find what they want in a partner anymore, because they either tossed the baby out with the bathwater years ago, or they settled for Mr. Right Now and no longer agree on the decisions that the younger version of themselves made long ago.

Fast-forward to three months after the coffee shop incident. I am standing on the edge of quaint little ice skating rink just outside of town, near where my parents live. I am wearing a pea coat that is a little too big for me and a scarf my mother knitted for me when I went off to college. My feet are cold and clammy and my nose is running like a faucet. I’ve been standing like this, shivering just enough for it to be annoying, for 45 minutes, waiting for Ben to show up for his birthday date. I wait for another hour, sitting on the iced-over metal bench next to the entrance to the rink. I call Sam so that I don’t look so pitiful, like I actually have some semblance of life, and she distracts me from my combination of disappointment and genuine concern that something horrible has happened to him. When she jumps off the phone because she suddenly realizes she has to pee, I get a call from Ben shortly thereafter. He forgot we were meeting at the rink and has been waiting for me to call him to say I am ready to be picked up. Here’s the kicker though, while waiting for me to call, he forgot that’s what he was waiting on, and decided to go grab something to eat with a couple of his friends down the hall. So now he probably smells like burritos and has dripped something on his “date” shirt and is too tired (from digesting?) to drive out to the rink to meet me as planned. Sigh. I call Sam back, disgusted, and she hops into her teacher-mobile at lightning speed, and comes to my rescue, as usual. Sam-the-Super-Teacher comes complete with a cape, tights, and even a neat utility belt that holds Q-tips and Kleenex in case of emergencies.

Fast-forward to 6 weeks after the ice-skating flop. My mother, who is of the snootier breed of Bostonians, and I are having a snooty lunch at a snooty little café and Ben is supposed to be swinging by to meet her after he gets off work. Ben’s work is not a particularly interesting job: he makes smoothies; but when some shiny new fruit-squeezing machine or fancy little wheat grass-masher comes rolling through the doors he gets excited. Why the advancements in smoothie-making technology are more interesting than his adoring girlfriend, I have yet to figure out. So back to the lunch table with two chairs occupied by two mildly peeved women who are trying not to talk about the other unoccupied chair, I’m making excuses about the importance of Ben’s job and my mother is getting impatient. I find my gums flapping about how Ben might be thinking about applying for a higher position at Juice World and how some freak freezer incident could have occurred and he just hasn’t been able to tear himself away from saving his coworkers to call us yet. The reality is that some chrome-plated wonder has been installed today and Ben forgot he was taking off early to meet up with us. I know not to call his cell while he is up to his elbows in frozen strawberries, but you can’t get mad when a customer calls in on the business line, can you? Speed dial Juice World. Manager hands phone to starry-eyed idiot and words like “uuummm” and “sooorrryyy??” and “ooohhh…” start dripping out of his mouth like molasses. The snooty lunch taking place on the other side of town continues without him and my mother and I resolve not to talk much after I hang up the phone. She has an opinion about everything.

The day that I knew it was time to drop my once-beloved, now-be-loathsome, Ben was the day Sam got sick of watching me put up with all of his bullshit. I was miserable but was so engulfed in my love for him (and my dream for us) that I had somehow forgotten to first love (and dream for) myself. I guess I thought that was his job. Thus began my awareness of the Disillusionment period of the relationship:

I had slept over at Sam’s house and was woken that bright sunny morning by the buzz of my cell phone under my pillow. Normally, I would have been up already, (as I almost never see the sun rise from the warmth and comfort of my bed) but this was a much-needed day off. So the phone rang and I answered. I was a little groggy (from a girl’s-night-out that lasted a little later than I had planned), but coherent. B3 had barely said hello before the excuses started flowing mellifluously from his pitiful little pink mouth. I don’t even really remember now what it was specifically that he was stammering on about, mincing and stuttering his words as if it were physically possible for me to strangle him through the phone, but that’s beside the point. The point is this day’s excuse for canceling our plans to get together for a much-needed we-need-to-talk dinner. B3 was such a spineless worm of a guy that he couldn’t even come up with a plausible reason for canceling on me, yet again, and his fear of our eminent breakup stunk like you imagine the breath of an ogre or a homeless guy with a severe case of gingivitis might smell. B3 let fear make decisions for him the way alcoholics let their poison of choice run their respective lives.

The one thing I do remember from that ridiculous conversation, (which I spent most of the time rolling my eyes and saying “uh-huh” a lot) was what he said at the very end before I hung up on him: “…I ..I love… you?” He had to make it a question instead of a proclamation because it was not intended to be a declarative statement, but rather a spineless test to see if I would reply with the usual four-word answer. How can a person take a sentence that carries so much weight and trust and emotion in a relationship and twist it, no, deform it, into a spineless wormy way to find out if he is in trouble? By adding a question mark at the end of it and sounding like a scared puppy that just pissed the best rug in the house. That’s how. Instead of 4 words, he got a long sigh followed by a special little four letter word I had been saving just for him, just for right then: “fuck… you.” Okay seven letters, who cares.

After I tossed the phone into the crack between the sofa cushions, I shuffled into Sam’s room and threw myself onto her bed, burying my face in the pillows beside her. She was already starting to wake up as I’m sure she had heard the thick silence hanging over that repulsive conversation in the other room minutes earlier. It hung over me like smog that could be cut with a butter knife. She muttered from her pillow in a tone that was more exhausted than supportive, but was thinly veiled in consolation.

“Who was that?” she asked, knowing who it was, but knowing better than to utter his name too soon.

“Him.”

“And?”

“Worm.”

“He cancelled?”

“Duh.”

“You’re miserable.”

“No... I’m just…”

“No, you’re miserable. I haven’t seen you like this in ages.”

“He knows we need to talk.”

“He’s seen this coming long before you have.”

“Worm.”

“You know what you have to do, and you know that I’m not going to tell you what it is.”

“I know.”

Right as I was saying this last thing, it felt like I was lying on the cold ground and the world was closing in around me. Right as I said this last thing, it felt like I had been kicked in the stomach so hard that my spine might break. Just as I considered this feeling, I was determined that I would not allow it to break. I would not stoop to his level. My organs may have been disheveled, or even turning inside-out, but my spine is unshakeable. I did know what had to be done, and there seemed to be little point in wasting any time doing it; but first, I had to be peeled off of the bed.

Dear, sweet, relentless Sam is a little shorter than me but stronger than me in every sense of the word, especially in the Department of Emotions. No matter how shitty her family treats her, or what some scum of a boy might choose to love over her, or how her sometimes-delicate immune system might attempt to ravage her insides, she always comes out on top. I am amazed by her wisdom and strength and I treasure her patience and candor. So at such a fragile moment in my life, Sam was the most invaluable person to have on hand.

I had no appetite and wanted to spend the day prostrate on her bed, slowly growing dizzy from asphyxiation-by-pillow. Sam knew I needed food and sunshine—neither of which were going to be found anywhere near her headboard. She rolled out of bed and took a shower, giving me time to process and organize my emotions into safe little packets so that they wouldn’t accidentally meld together to create some extremely volatile mixture. When she came out of the bathroom and changed into fresh clothes, she stood at the foot of the bed with her hands on her hips and stared at me disapprovingly. I felt her stare and knew the face well, so I grunted something that was supposed to be understood as “not now; go away.”

Guttural Morse code seems to be easily misinterpreted, because Sam never responds to my grunts in the way in which I want. She immediately marched over to the side of the bed, wrapped her little white fingers around my limp wrist, braced one foot on the bed frame, and tugged with all her might. I budged. She huffed, dissatisfied with her results. She started to brace herself against the bed again when I turned my head toward her and moaned, “Nooo… stop… I’ll get up, I swear.” Her grip loosened but she knew better than to let go completely. She waited for movement that I initiated instead of endured; she counted to three; she tightened her grip; and I moaned again. “Okaaay, I heard youuu… I’m getting up, just hold on…” She dropped my wrist and stepped back from the bed and watched me like a hawk. I budged just enough for her to hesitate before swooping in again.

“You know you have to get up. This is getting ridiculous.”

“I know.”

“Are you going to let him ruin you this easily?”

“No.”

“Sure as hell looks like you are.”

“I’m not, I just need to lay here a bit longer.”

“No, you don’t. What you need is some soap, and then some coffee, and then some fresh air.”

“No, not the soap. Please not the soap. Anything but the soap.”

At this, drill sergeant Sam cracked a smile. Then I snorted a little. Then we both got so tickled that we just started laughing and snorting and honking for a good ten minutes before we could get our composure again. Finally I found enough strength to peel myself off the bed and meander into the bathroom. After a shower and some fresh clothes Sam threw at me from her closet, we went outside. We spent the day being ridiculous. She shot video of me hawking a huge loogie into a tree, and I mixed her a special concoction of chocolate milk, lemonade and fried rice, and dared her to eat (or drink?) it for a dollar. She took a sip and almost gagged and I bought her a new drink as a reward for her bravery. The whole day we behaved like we did in 8th grade when we first became friends. It was strange and exhilarating at the same time.

Later that night I wrote Ben a really long email about all the things he had done over the past months to disappoint himself and me and how my being in denial of it only let the relationship fester like rotting fruit. We had both let it go and I understood that now. I had chosen not to communicate my concerns about the choices he made and when those choices affected me I either made excuses for him, or was pissed until he bribed me with flowers or a new mix CD he had made. I let him down and I let him let me down. It took about a month to get him to understand that I had no intention of ever taking him back and that the relationship was completely unsalvageable. He cried like a baby and I hid from my feelings until I started journaling them. Between Sam and my journal, I survived something I had built up to be insurmountable. I don’t talk to Ben anymore because every once in a while something will remind me of how nauseatingly angry he made me, so I still need to work through that. Last I heard, he has no job, no diploma, and is day dreaming about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. God only knows where he got that great idea from, but kudos to him if he actually gets off his ass and does it some day.