Someone I Love So Much...

Someone I love so much was destroyed by someone I’ve never been sure was worth tolerating.  I confess that when I was young I tried to love him, despite his anger so fierce and feral, his selfishness so childish and blind.  I watched her fall apart in my arms, releasing sobs that racked the both of us, like his temper that shook walls when he backed us into corners and screamed until his face turned pink and that ugly vein in his forehead seemed ready to burst – often, I wished it would.  That day, when my mother was destroyed by someone she loved, I refused to ever love him again.

"September" Response

I thought Lia Purpura’s “September” was very interesting with its unique look on death.  Her choice of adjectives was particularly intriguing.  The bones were positioned “perfectly” on “soft,” “welcoming” earth.  The cat’s bones were forever placed in a posture of sleep and decomposition of the flesh is described as a “return…to its simplest components.”  The earth is “a home receiving the body in, expecting it.”  All of this suggests that death does not have to be the dreaded stealer of time, or the scythe-wielding demon of pain.  Though Purpura does not deny these are indeed faces death can take on.  She recognizes the historical image of feared death, the monster it has been recorded to be:  “fear is the black cipher of an open mouth, the red oxide smudge on a flank.”  Purpura knows death can be ruthless, but she chooses to write about a death that was natural and understood.  Perhaps her story’s greatest achievement was showing the many masks of death instead of relying retelling a myth older than the cave walls it was painted upon.

Therapy

We met in a different building that day.  It took me fifteen minutes to find a parking spot.  I parked in a lot first, squeezed too close between two soccer-mom minivans.  Walking away, I saw the sign threatening to ticket me.  So I moved.  Parked on the street.  I turned the key and the engine shuttered to a halt.  My hand shook as I applied a fresh layer of lip gloss to my chapped mouth.  I made eye contact with my reflection in the mirror and realized I forgot to pluck my eyebrows.

Walking up to the building, I looked around.  I had never been in that part of town before.  Were the people in the restaurant across the street looking at me?  Through the tempered glass of the pizza shop?  What about the middle-aged man in the pick-up truck at the stoplight?  He had on a camouflage baseball cap and, if he was anything like every other man in this county, a wad of chewing tobacco tucked between his bottom lip and teeth.  Did he see me?

“Please use side door,” the sign said.  So I did.  The side door lead to a skinny staircase covered in blue carpet.  The fake wood paneling glued to the walls was breaking apart at the corners.  The encased hallway smelled of must.

A brunette woman, looking about thirty, sat at a reception desk at the top of the stairs.  She smiled warmly when she looked up at me.  She looked like a mother. But nothing like my mother.

“Can I help you, honey?”

She saw me.

“I have an appointment with Ms. Huggins.”

I gave her my name and took a seat on one of the faded upholstered chairs.  Another girl sat on the last chair in my row.  She looked down at the floor, her shoulder-length hair covering her face.  I wondered what she was afraid for people to see.  I looked away.

My name was called and I looked up.  Ms. Huggins was my therapist.  “Councilor,” actually.  She was in her early forties but dressed a decade younger, nothing too flashy but still out of sync with the wrinkles around her eyes.  I hadn’t been to an appointment in a month or more.  I was working a lot.  My two part-time jobs kept me busy.  That was good.

The office at the Women’s Clinic was different than her tiny, unfurnished cubicle at the university.  The walls were painted a deep rose pink, the carpet that same grey-blue from the staircase.  Lots of color from framed paintings and photographs added strokes of excitement to the room. From the window dangled a glass wind chime that collected all the light the sun would spare and converted it to rainbows that danced on the ceiling.

“So how have you been?”

I hated that question.  If I were doing well I wouldn’t be there, sat in front of a complete stranger I confessed to like a priest.  My family wasn’t Catholic.

“Fine.”  I nodded.

“You’ve been working a lot?”

“Yes.”

“But you’ve been going out? Letting off steam like we’ve talked about?”

I didn’t answer.

I heard my phone vibrate in the purse nestled by my feet.  I knew who it was without checking the screen.

“So what did you want to talk about today?” She was asking questions because I was quiet too long.

“Well…” I looked up from my bag, “there’s this girl.”

Ms. Huggins smiled.  With confirmation.  With acceptance.  With compassion.
                 That day, in the rose-colored confessional with dancing light, I let someone see me.  It didn’t hurt as much as I’d anticipated, but I cried anyway.

Response to "Those Who Stay and Those Who Go"

One very interesting choice Ann Daum made in “Those Who Stay and Those Who Go” was her utilization of lists.  This technique happens quickly, appearing as early as paragraph four, and continues throughout the piece.  These lists always include mundane, unglamorous facts or circumstances. 

Take, for instance the list of trivial jobs the high schoolers have access to: “Kids can work at the truck stop, waiting tables, pumping gas, or washing dishes, through high school and beyond.”  This list is boring, long, and monotonous, not unlike the quality of employment kids who select those jobs would experience.  In other words, this list imitates the way of life for the townsfolk of Murdo, South Dakota. 

Lists also come in a paragraph of small sentences, short and definite in composition, like a tyrant’s declaration:  “Loneliness is just another disease here.  Its symptoms are sicknesses, too.  Depression.  Alcoholism.  Parochialism.  Suicide.”  This list is boldly laid out, harshly punctuated, again, mimicking the tone those words are supposed to convey.

Perhaps the most interesting duty served by Daum’s lists is the way they perform as a sort of character in the midst of her story; their personality dark, weathered, and stubborn, their activities repetitious and wearisome, just like every other citizen of Murdo.  Her lists create a tone and atmosphere that allows the reader to understand the bleakness of the story’s setting, because in our reading we experience a repetition and exhaustion all our own.

Response to "Signs and Wonders"

In “Signs and Wonders,” Rebecca McClanahan successfully weaves together comedy and broken dreams, threading a sliver of silver threaded hope to fill any of the dark gaps, creating a warm, itchy blanket of words good enough for any homeless man in Central Park to cuddle up in.  I loved this piece.  It’s at once sarcastic and thoughtful, funny and heart breaking, conclusive and wondering.  As a whole, the work speaks of bloated expectations and the dreams that get crushed when those shimmery hopes turn out to be a smoggy nightmare.  NYC as a setting works perfectly; it’s the city everyone wants to know and love even if they’ve never been.  That instantly creates reliability.  Wonderful comedy speckles the piece in quips like, “the kind of children you want to touch but you can’t of course, especially in New York,” or “Maybe at my age I should take it as a compliment, that I should inspire such…peaks.”  This gritty, blunt humor works perfectly with the setting of a city like New York – both are rough and obnoxiously in your face, but totally worth the opportunity to say you had the experience.  The ending is great, too.  Inconclusive, a bit lost in a cycle of repetition: “Catch and release.”  Just like life in a fast-paced, unforgiving city like New York, you’ve got to take the missteps in life in stride, live in the good moments, peddle past the bad. In the famous and poetic words of Dory the blue tang, “Just keep swimming.” (Sorry, I don’t know any good duck quotes.)

Bake at 350 Degrees For One Hour or Until Crust is Golden Brown

A foolish peacefulness filled our house that day.  My mother brought life to the kitchen, dousing my childhood in the nostalgic perfumes of cinnamon, vanilla, and cake flour.  Spilled powdered sugar dusted the linoleum floor like the kind of candy snow children dream about when sugarplums and Santa Claus are wrapped up in shiny paper under a pine tree.  Twangy guitar filled the rooms of our humble, country home.  Our hips swayed to the rhythm and we mimicked the slightly strained voice on the radio.  We sang “Here I am, stuck in the middle with you, “ our hands stuck in the middle of balls of fresh dough.

My mother, with her tattered, strawberry patterned apron, and arthritic hands only soothed by the repetitive process of knead, fold, knead, fold, was my childhood best friend.  I admired every obstacle she had over come in the shadowed days of her childhood when stealing a candy bar from the corner store might be the only chance at food for the night, to grow into the calm and nurturing mother I held so close.

            “You’re getting very good at that,” she said, watching me crimp the crust of my pie.  I smiled, folding the excess dough around the tip of my finger and spinning the pan in a counter-clockwise circle, creating scallops not quite as uniform as my mother’s.  I wanted my crust to be as beautiful and accomplished as my mother’s because I wanted to be as beautiful and accomplished as my mother.

            She had her arm halfway in the mouth of the oven, placing our pies on the racks to bake when I heard a loud thud like someone had just kicked our front door.

            “What was that?”

            We walked out to our front porch and saw a white van across the road in the church’s gravel parking lot.

            “Someone probably hit another deer,” my mother said and sighed, taking a few steps forward to get a closer look. 

I watched her head tilt with the curve of a question mark and suddenly her eyes widened.  Without a word, she ran, seeing the pile of metal scraps mangled beneath the nose of the van.  As always, I followed my mother’s actions, hurrying across the grass without knowing what I was running to.  A man in a motorcycle jacket was sprawled out atop the gravel.  He wasn’t wearing a helmet. 

My eyes took in what happened before my mind was able to process it.  An elderly man, wrinkled and weathered, stepped out of the van’s driver’s seat.  He walked over to my mother, whose hands were steadying the neck of the motorcycle man, searching for a pulse.  I stood a few feet away, motionless and staring.  Blood, the color of thick red velvet cake batter, had already begun to stain the pores of some of the gravel stones surrounding the motorcycle man’s head.  He still hadn’t moved.

I guess my mother had been trying to get my attention for a while, but I was too focused on watching the man’s face grow paler.  “ANESSA,” she tried again.  This time, I looked up.

“Go to the house and get an old blanket from the basement and bring me the cordless phone.”

I stared at her for a few seconds, silently begging her to answer my questions.  Like she always had.  She just stared back with pitiful eyes and I realized, for the first time my mother didn’t have the answers I needed.

“Be careful crossing the road,” she said, breaking the silence and gently trying to coax me into functioning once again.

I returned with the items requested and watched as my mother draped the thick, itchy afghan over the motorcycle man’s body.  The old man was crying beside his van. 

Still silent, I watched my mother call for an ambulance.  At eleven years old, I was still too much of a child to handle the accident, yet I had never seen my mother be so adult.  I saw her act out that compartmentalized strength she depended upon as a poor downtown city kid.  With stoic grace and empathizing eyes, my mother took on everyone’s burdens.  She called the authorities, soothed the man too worn to be driving that white van, and then she approached me.  Kneeling down beside me, she wiped a cool hand across my cheek.  I hadn’t noticed I’d been crying.

“Go back to the house and check on the pies.  Make sure they don’t burn.”  She offered me a soft smile.

When I opened the screeching wooden door to our kitchen, the smell of half-baked pecan pies embraced me.  As I stared at our candy snow covered floor I started to realize that my mother didn’t possess some County Fair award-winning recipe for elegant adulthood.  Instead, she’d made mistakes along the way – crumbling, unbinding dough because she forgot to cream the butter first; cakey, dry cookies because she added too much flour; wimpy meringue incapable of peaking because a bit of egg yoke slipped in.  My mother couldn’t give me all the answers, but she’d teach me how to turn brittle dough into a great crumble topping.  She’d teach me how to live with my mistakes, how to correct my wrongs.  And she’d show me that sometimes life hurts you even when it’s not your fault. Still, there are few things a fresh baked pie can’t soothe.

            Knead, fold, knead, fold, knead, fold.