On the Weekend

I wore my poison lipgloss so he would cry when we kissed.

Sing, Goddess

"She said 'Cassie is a total dicktease in those shorts' "

Daphne looks over at me sideways to gauge my reaction as she takes a long drag on the cigarette -- her third since we've been down here.

I look down at what I'm wearing to the second day of ninth grade.  T-shirt, tights and boots: all black.  And the rolled up jean shorts that offended Diana so much.  They're leftovers from junior high.  The rule is, no new clothes the first week of school.  You look like you're trying too hard.

"Why?  Why would she say that?" I make it come out like I'm mildly irritated, but inside, a prickly Oh FUCK is rising up my throat.  I try to tamp it down with another fake-inhale of the Camel Light I've mostly been holding and flicking against the soles of my Docs.  I know enough to hold it in for at least 15 seconds and make sure to exhale a little out my nose, so it looks like I'm really smoking. 

She shrugs and scratches her flaking eyeliner with a chipped pinky nail.  "Who knows?  Maybe because of your dad?"

"My dad?"

"Well, yeah."

"He's just the mayor -- he's not a king or anything."  Now my hands are really shaking, not just with nicotine and Mountain Dew.  I haven't been here long enough to cross Diana and Leah -- senior girls who would punch me in the locker room just to make a point.   

"Yeah, but he's all over TV and stuff.  I don't know.  They were just saying that you seem a little stuck up." she takes another long, dramatic drag before flicking the butt off onto the tracks.  She looks over at me "They're probably just acting like that because they want to fuck your brother."

"Then they should quit being such bitches behind my back.  They don't even know me."  I'm too wound up to concentrate on my cigarette anymore.  I grind it out on the cement ledge.

In July

I pierced my own side.  And now I can only watch as it flows out furiously into pail after pail.

"Oh, but you shouldn't have put the hole there." she says.  "It shouldn't hurt so much.  You must be doing something wrong."  She smiles at me from her perch on the cushioned sofa and reaches down to pet the dog.

"If it wants to be told, the story will find a way.  It won't let you rest."

I'm not resting now!  I want to rage and throw coffee mugs at her as I rush to replace another bucket, full of gristle and horns and little tumors with sand burr hands.

I am leaking on the sidewalk.  I am staining your couch.  Making barnyard puddles all over the floor while my cat calls the paramedics.  The bathtub teems with swimming blood-guppies.  With warring Viking ships and 1980s child molesters.

"Yeah, I guess you're right." I say.  She nods smugly and turns her head as I spit shark teeth one right after the other into my tea.

September Blog Challenge

"Are you afraid? Don't be afraid."  -- Joan Jett, August 2010

A few weeks ago, I was crowded into a 7-11 parking lot with hot and sticky strangers to watch Joan Jett and the Blackhearts cap off this year's Market Days.  She was tiny, muscled and dressed in a black bikini top with jeans.  Stalking over to her guitar and slinging its strap over her shoulder, she led off the show with that question, "Are you afraid?  Don't be afraid."  and then the opening notes of "Bad Reputation" got everyone into a rocking badass frenzy.

Buzzed off vodka lemonade, standing under the stars, I was cut by her admonition.  Am I afraid?  Of course I'm afraid.  Fear is the motivating force in my life.

I work because I'm afraid I won't have any money and will have to go home and live in the small town I deliberately left behind.  I put off work and personal deadlines until it's almost too late, and then in a flash of fear and guilt, I churn out the press release or the fact sheet that could have been written weeks ago.  I pay the $4 processing fee to pay the RCN bill by phone the day before they shut it off.

When I worked on the Hill, I was terrified of fucking up.  I lived in fear of one of my catastrophic failures playing out on CNN and NPR for the whole world to cackle at.  It drew up knots in my back so deep that once a massage therapist said she wanted to guess what my job was at the end of the session.  Her two guesses were Department of Homeland Security or the FBI.  I was angry and brittle and prone to teary outbursts.

I'm still afraid.  Afraid that my writing sucks, that I won't ever do anything important or interesting.  That I'll make a wrong decision that can't be undone, like invest in a relationship that flames out spectacularly.  Or have a baby only to realize that I'm a terrible mother, suffocating myself and ruining that child's life forever.

The beginning of the school year has always, for me, felt like the true New Year.  Maybe it's because I had teachers for parents or the fact that the summer-to-fall transition in the Midwest seems so dramatic.  Summer requires attendance at outdoor events, weddings, barbecues and rooftops.  Wasting it feels morally wrong.  Why sit and write when you could be running on the lakeshore or out on a camping trip?  (Even when I'm not actually doing these things -- it feels like I should be)  The mandatory recreation of summer makes it easy for me to let everything slide. 

So, in the spirit of the new year and all things turning, I'm starting the September Blog Challenge.  I will post here every day.  It may just be a couple of lines, but I will write something new today through the 30th.

Feel free to harass me to keep my word.

ETA:
JP over at Buttered Noodles is also taking part in the September Blog Challenge.  She's kicking my butt already with her September 2 post.  (just remember, I am nocturnal...most posts won't go up until it's dark out)   

Midwest Living

Scene:  Home, preparing for Angelica's sister Ariel's high school graduation party.

Frenzied, pre-party activity.  It is 12:45 pm, 15 minutes prior to the beginning of the Sunday afternoon open house.  Subway sandwiches have been ordered and set up in the kitchen.  Cake from the Blue Ribbon Bakery proclaims "Congratulations Ariel!  2010"  in white and yellow frosting on the dessert table in the dining room.  

Angelica is transferring two sheet cakes -- peanut butter and Texas chocolate -- to the remaining space on the dessert table.  On the opposite side, pushed against the wall with the stereo that's blasting Michael Buble tunes, is a separate table loaded with cheese trays, deli meats, veggies and dip, potato salad and pasta salad.  Angelica's hair is puffy with the humidity of the June day and 30+ years of exasperation with her upbringing.  

Ariel and her best friend Chelika have put together a bowl of "Oreo Fluff"  for the event. Oreo Fluff consists of two extra-large packages of Oreos crushed up and mixed into four tubs of Cool Whip.   

Mom:  Why did you put the Oreo Fluff on the dessert table?

Angelica:  Because...it's a dessert?

Mom:  Some people consider it a salad.

Angelica:  It's Oreos.  And...Cool Whip.

Mom:  I know.  But some people consider that to be a salad.

Angelica gives a long stare

Angelica:  Well, then I feel sorry for those people.   

-fin-

Winter Tale

When did it start?  January, I guess.  When I discovered the ice creeping up the inside of the second floor windows.  That’s when I began hearing it like a quiet whine.  When I started looking for ghosts in the hallway and somehow expected to run into one sipping tea or swishing skirts, but just generally going about its business like she knew all along.

It never was a ghost.  I cursed my way through another session of scraping the windshield of my pickup.  Shivering violently, I waited ages, ages for the fucking engine to warm up.  How could the sky be so grey but the snow shine bright enough to sting my eyes?  Somewhere past the backyard the river was still flowing.  I would get these elaborate ideas in my head that I would walk down there in boots and coat and mittens to watch the icy current.  Maybe they would see me from the street and think how tortured I must be, how picturesquely tragic.  But it was too cold for anyone else to be walking around near the park anyway, so I just got into my truck and drove to Meijer. 

We had started out that winter watching Hitchcock movies in the front room.  Vertigo.  Rear Window.  Rope.  I used to think I hated old movies.  Assumed they were yet another affectation of the people I knew who prided themselves in being moderately counter-culture. 

Then one day, I was paging through my roommate’s art appreciation book and I settled on a street scene.  It was an early photograph of a street I know I had been on when my parents took us to the City in the 8^th grade.  All those men wearing hats.  The fruit stands and the dogs sniffing around for discards.  They never thought they were going to be art or history or anything to be appreciated.  Not like that.  They were just living their lives.  I got the dizzy pit in my throat I used to get when I would think about outer space and I had to slam the book shut and walk around the library. Digging nails into palms and biting the insides of my cheeks, pain reminding me I’m still inside of my flesh.

I started noticing them as much as I could. Not the storyline or the dresses.  But the eyelids.  The individual teeth.  Things these long-dead actors didn’t give a passing thought, but that proved to me they were once as alive as I am.  And how someday I’d be equally dead.

Those weeks of hot panic have passed.  Now I’m just moving through the house, watching the street through the curtains.  Perking up when the heater clicks on from the ancient basement.  Not thinking of the wet boots I pull on and off throughout the day. 

Image:  Lake George Window, Georgia O'Keefe 1929

Evie Jo

Evie Jo Becker ate glue.  Not paste, which I could almost understand.  My mother bought me some once for preschool.  It came in a little bucket with a smiling cow’s face on it and the lid held a little white paste spatula for spreading.  It smelled fresh and heavenly.  But I didn’t taste it and it eventually dried up into flakes.

No.  Evie Jo ate glue.  Right there at our work tables.  Mrs. Shea would come to each one and dump a blob of Elmer’s on a piece of paper in the center for us all to share.  There were popsicle sticks that we were supposed to use to spread the glue onto our first grade craft project.  Some of us used our fingers.  But Evie Jo  – every single time –  would take a finger full of glue and pop it right into her mouth.  Some at our table would squeal, tattling to the teacher that Evie Jo is eating glue!  She’s eating it!  And Evie Jo would smile and say, “It’s good.” 

The whole thing was almost overwhelmingly undignified to me.  On top of the shared – and now contaminated by Evie Jo – glue blobs there were the shiny square wax crayons that came in boxes.  I hated that we were expected to use these oily, subpar crayons with corners that hurt our fingers and didn’t grip the paper the same way Crayolas did.  I couldn’t wait until second grade when you could bring your own box of crayons from home and store them in your very own desk with a lid, instead of sharing these impotent sticks that some of the boys would brace between their ring and pointer fingers, middle finger over the top and then *snap* down on their knee, breaking them in two.  They got in trouble for that, but the rest of us still had to use the greasy leftover nubs. 

Evie Jo was one of the gross kids.  Not just because she ate glue, but that was part of it.  She also had round, very thick glasses with pinkish brown plastic frames.  Dirty blonde pigtails tied with yarn ribbons.  She smelled like some of the farm kids, some combination of distant manure, wood smoke and vagina.  And she couldn’t speak very well.  She had to be broken of “ain’t” and “gots” and “them colors.”  She would address you loudly, embarrassingly. 

I don’t know what happened to Evie Jo.  She disappeared sometime around third or fourth grade.  What’s most likely is that her family moved.  Some of the gross kids stayed on through high school.  Looking back at them now, I can see that poverty and developmental delays and neglect were their real problems.  But who knows what drove Evie Jo to eat glue?