It had been weeks since the old man had left. He didn't leave a note, but that was never his style. Folks said he was unreliable, but I knew he was as reliable as John Deere. He was just operating on his schedule. If you knew him, really knew him, his inclinations, then he was as dependable as a Casio.
And sure enough, I was just climbing into the truck when he pulled up. He was already dressed for fishing. As was I. I had been planning on this for months.
We didn't talk much on the way to the stream. That wasn't our way. Talk was cheap was the way I felt about it, and I think he felt the same way. I listened to the rubber go from asphalt to rocks to mud. And then we were there. Drinking tea. Pretending we had come to fish.
The sun was high in the sky by the time we approached the water.
Sit back, relax, and I'll tell you a tale as old as time. Like many stories, it has a bit of heartbreak in it. That's just life. That's living. There is joy, too. It's a story about a woman. It's a story about destruction and rebirth.
ReplyDeleteDon't worry, it's just a story.
It started the way these things usually start. Shy glances, awkward silences. There were dialogues happening, but they were all internal. I know mine were feverish in their urgency. On the surface, however, I was calm. A placed lake on a windless day.
We're years in now, and the time has passed quickly. That's how those things go. Maybe love triumphs after all. That's what I was thinking.
I was wrong, but it was still a nice thought.
-JD
I love the emotional subtext of the first piece. The unexpressed love and admiration. This one gets to me for different reasons. It's an entire life together in just a few sentence.
DeleteThe boy stood in front of the counter, eyes wide open. He’d been standing that way for almost an hour. Just looking. Eating every piece of candy in his mind. You could see him imagining the tartness of the sour patch kids. Working his jaw on chewing gum. I knew he wasn’t going to buy anything. This was the usual routine. Every Friday, rain or shine, the boy was there, staring.
ReplyDeleteYou probably think I’m a jerk and never offered the kid any candy for free. I did. A bunch of times, but he looked at me like he was offended and didn’t say a word.
There are lots of different candies, and I guess they’re fun to look at. They come in brightly colored packages, and there are fun characters. They’re good at selling candy, those candy companies. They know what will make the kids crazy. It always striked me as weird that there are adults having meetings about how to make something irresistible to children.
It doesn’t seem right.
After a few more minutes, I told the kids I had to close up. But I decided to try something new. While he was distracted and staring, I slipped some Nerds into the pocket of his coat. All that night, I wondered what would happen when he found the candy.
Come Monday, I had my answer. The store was burned clean to the ground.
- JD
Whoa. I was not expecting that. But it makes sense, though.
DeleteHe always said that I couldn’t find my way out of a wet paper bag, and there was some truth to that. Still, it didn’t have to be said. It wasn’t like some grand moral failing. I considered it almost noble. I refused to let the world become two dimensional, flat. I got anxious just looking at them. He’d try to explain how to use the key, and I’d get mad for no reason. Just mad. At the map.
ReplyDeleteI guess I was mad at him, too, if I’m being honest. He had a way of making me feel about two inches tall, and I always wondered why. Why would you want your son to feel two inches tall? That’s some weird psychology. I guess I’m lucky I have two daughters.
Now, my phone makes maps unnecessary. The lady with the British accent will take me anyplace I need to go. I just drive, turn when she says to turn.
I wonder sometimes if she will ever lead me astray. She could strand me in the middle of nowhere. I wouldn’t be able to find my way home. One time, I was in San Francisco and my phone died. I almost gave up, joined the other homeless people.
It’s too much like math. That’s what I always say, but there is claustrophobia in it, too. I don’t want to see the whole country on one piece of paper. I’ve driven across it. It’s gigantic. Shoving it into a square you can put in your pocket doesn’t seem fair.
Maybe it’s a lost art, reading a map. That’s fine with me. There are other opportunities for art. I’d rather just get where I’m going. British lady or no British lady.
- JD
Ha. I've often wondered about the rapidly vanishing art of reading maps or remembering how to get to a place. Like it's causing the atrophy of some part of our brains. Will the alien overlord sound like the British lady?
DeleteAt first you chalk it up to the time-whiplash of being back in a once-familiar place that has become unfamiliar. A meal, a good night’s sleep should take care of that, you think. But then you wake. And it doesn’t. It’s as if the world has been magicked out of one of its dimensions. All looks flatter, stiffer, the colors not as bright as you remember. You feel like an animated figure walking through a sketch of a background. It takes a moment to recognize the people in the photographs, the knickknacks on the shelves, those standing in front of you with hopeful, too-wide smiles. You want to grab them by the shoulders and give them a shake. Don’t you understand, you want to scream. Don’t you understand what happened?
ReplyDeleteThey back away. Their smiles grow more timid, their approaches more tentative, the way they interacted with that messed-up cat they used to have. The cat understood. You know that now. You wish you could apologize to the cat, long dead. But you heap it onto the growing pile of things you can’t change.
You stay in bed until you hear the last of them close the front door and drive away. Then you troll through what remains, trying to make sense of it all, but it’s too hard, and television is boring, and you know far too well the slippery slope of that first drink.
You are lucid enough to know you need to make a change. But not enough to know what that change ought to be. All you feel is…nothing. You fall onto the couch, let your gaze melt into the change of patterns through the windows as the sun tiptoes across the sky. The moving squares of light. The metaphor hits you like a big stupid hit on the head from a cartoon mallet: time marches on, but you, my friend, it has left you behind.
Two telephone numbers do battle in your head. Always, the way things battle: the one you want and the one you should. The digits swirl and dance and taunt. Your chest tightens with the ramifications of both. Finally you choose. You get a recording. Your message after the beep stumbles, preambles, then finds a scintilla of adulthood. “So what I’m saying is yes. I’ll sign the divorce papers. At least that way one of us will be free.” You end the call, drop the phone onto the carpet a few inches from one of the moving sunlit squares, watch time engulf it with light.
Wow JD! Quite prolific this week. And damn near cheery. Thank you for the lovely words. I have none this week, the bitter cold has stilled my tongue.
ReplyDeleteI aim to please 😉
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ReplyDeletePart 1
ReplyDeleteCelia’s husband has hired a new driver, a charmless young man named Moishe who shows up to their house in Brooklyn Heights wearing a suit that looks borrowed from two different people. The slacks puddle around his ankles. The jacket barely conceals his holster. Had their last driver carried a gun? She doesn’t think so. Then again, that man was large and could look intimidating, so maybe he didn’t have to.
Moishe opens Celia’s door, and she slips into the back of the sedan next to Abe. She’d redone her makeup twice, reconsidered her ensemble many more times than that. Black would look smart in court but was too funereal considering the circumstances. A bright color would lift her spirits but stand out like a sore thumb. And now more than ever, she sought to disappear into the crowd. In the end she settled for a cunning suit in dove gray with a matching hat. Her white gloves cover the hives that march up the backs of her hands and over her wrists. The rash had calmed since its first appearance, the day the FBI men came for her husband, but it was flaring up again. Abe looks her up and down and gives her a nod of approval. I’m not wearing this for you, she snarls to herself, but holds her face as firm as concrete.
She remembers the set of that face and goes to it often that day. When he puts his hand on the small of her back and guides her through a phalanx of reporters to climb the stairs to the courthouse, trying to look like the ever-protective and solicitous husband that he never was in private. In fact she recoiled at first from his touch, because it had been so long since he had approached her with anything resembling affection that it felt like the hand of a stranger.
She keeps that expression frozen tight when he peels off with his lawyer and she is escorted to her seat in the gallery, next to…absolutely nobody she knew. Still, she nods politely to the people on either side of her, for the sake of the press, then goes someplace else in her head. They can’t touch her there.
In this place she is a young mother in Greenpoint with barely a penny in her pocket, making fun for her five-year-old daughter wherever she can find it. Each shopping trip an adventure, walking home along Church Street with their precious bargains instead of taking the streetcar because it was such a beautiful day, why not? In this place she has a mother and a sister to help her while her young husband worked such long hours.
In this place she drifts back further, to the little girl who collects eggs from the hens and stomps through mud puddles in her village in Poland. Before there is any talk of matches, before…everything.
“All rise,” a voice drones. As it continues, switching to that of the judge and then to various attorneys, Celia lets the words flow over her, around her, through her. When Abe’s name is mentioned, and they review the charges of racketeering and murder and present their evidence and grill their witnesses, Celia labors to keep her expression rigid, to look all at once alert and interested and supportive yet untouchable. It makes her jaw ache. He never looks back at her.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeletePart 1
ReplyDeleteCelia’s husband has hired a new driver, a charmless young man named Moishe who shows up to their house in Brooklyn Heights wearing a suit that looks borrowed from two different people. The slacks puddle around his ankles. The jacket barely conceals his holster. Had their last driver carried a gun? She doesn’t think so. Then again, that man was large and could look intimidating, so maybe he didn’t have to.
Moishe opens Celia’s door, and she slips into the back of the sedan next to Abe. She’d redone her makeup twice, reconsidered her ensemble many more times than that. Black would look smart in court but was too funereal considering the circumstances. A bright color would lift her spirits but stand out like a sore thumb. And now more than ever, she sought to disappear into the crowd. In the end she settled for a cunning suit in dove gray with a matching hat. Her white gloves cover the hives that march up the backs of her hands and over her wrists. The rash had calmed since its first appearance, the day the FBI men came for her husband, but it was flaring up again. Abe looks her up and down and gives her a nod of approval. I’m not wearing this for you, she snarls to herself, but holds her face as firm as concrete.
She remembers the set of that face and goes to it often that day. When he puts his hand on the small of her back and guides her through a phalanx of reporters to climb the stairs to the courthouse, trying to look like the ever-protective and solicitous husband that he never was in private. In fact she recoiled at first from his touch, because it had been so long since he had approached her with anything resembling affection that it felt like the hand of a stranger.
She keeps that expression frozen tight when he peels off with his lawyer and she is escorted to her seat in the gallery, next to…absolutely nobody she knew. Still, she nods politely to the people on either side of her, for the sake of the press, then goes someplace else in her head. They can’t touch her there.
In this place she is a young mother in Greenpoint with barely a penny in her pocket, making fun for her five-year-old daughter wherever she can find it. Each shopping trip an adventure, walking home along Church Street with their precious bargains instead of taking the streetcar because it was such a beautiful day, why not? In this place she has a mother and a sister to help her while her young husband worked such long hours.
In this place she drifts back further, to the little girl who collects eggs from the hens and stomps through mud puddles in her village in Poland. Before there is any talk of matches, before…everything.
“All rise,” a voice drones. As it continues, switching to that of the judge and then to various attorneys, Celia lets the words flow over her, around her, through her. When Abe’s name is mentioned, and they review the charges of racketeering and murder and present their evidence and grill their witnesses, Celia labors to keep her expression rigid, to look all at once alert and interested and supportive yet untouchable. It makes her jaw ache. He never looks back at her.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete