smoke & mirrors

Day Sixteen, January 22nd: Sunday brunch at the Homestead means...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 08:50:59 -1000

Day Sixteen, January 22nd: Sunday brunch at the Homestead means making paper frogs and aiming them at hot cocoa and coffee cups.

Day Fifteen, January 21st: Snowflakes are like magic. I could...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:31:26 -1000

Day Fifteen, January 21st: Snowflakes are like magic. I could watch them fall, trace their microscopic shapes with my eyes when they land for hours.

Day Thirteen, January 19th: This may not look like much, but I...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:25:45 -1000

Day Thirteen, January 19th: This may not look like much, but I cleaned my office and found the name wheel my BFF made me when I told her I had the worst time coming up with character names.

Day Twelve, January 18th: Trees icy and glistening in the...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:19:17 -1000

Day Twelve, January 18th: Trees icy and glistening in the sunlight.

Day Eleven, January 17th: One of the things I love about the...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 09:58:12 -1000

Day Eleven, January 17th: One of the things I love about the kids’ staggered school schedule is the time I get alone with them - mornings with Ro, and afternoons with Mak, here at Soup for You.

Day Ten, January 16th: Temple Stream in East Wilton. Every time...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:07:51 -1000

Day Ten, January 16th: Temple Stream in East Wilton. Every time I see it, I think it can’t be more beautiful than right now…until the next time I see it.

Day Six, January 12th: Snow days make perfect snuggle days.

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 05:03:37 -1000

Day Six, January 12th: Snow days make perfect snuggle days.

Day Four, January 10, 2012: Hey, look! It’s the moon! And...

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:33:58 -1000

Day Four, January 10, 2012: Hey, look! It’s the moon! And you can’t tell from this crappy picture, but it was huge and orange and so close it seemed you could take a bite out of it. Lovely.

Day Three, January 9, 2012: Me: “It’s a Japanese...

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:30:50 -1000

Day Three, January 9, 2012: Me: “It’s a Japanese Anime heart!” Andy: “Give me that #%$&*% coffee back.” #javajoes

Day One, January 7: Being back in Maine means lots of blankets....

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 07:38:58 -1000

Day One, January 7: Being back in Maine means lots of blankets. I love the way the sunlight looks on my quilt in the morning.

Explaining Earmuffs

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 22:30:00 -1000

I wrote this piece nearly three years ago for a Creative Non-Fiction class I took with a woman who would become one of my favorite professors, Gretchen Legler. For those of you wondering why on earth I would leave paradise for F-town, Maine, I think the answer lay here in this essay all along.

_____________________________

I took the kids for a walk today, bundled up in hoodies and corduroy jackets. The leaves on the sugar-maple precariously perched over my side lawn and stretching its old, frail arms toward the blue slate mansard roof of my home are a bright crimson-y orange, and the kids and I wanted to collect leaves for pressing. A few minutes of frantic running around, seeking and finding socks, sneakers, a bug collector (in case any interesting grasshoppers were still about), and Bananagrams – a Scrabble-like game without the board, so-called because of its yellow banana-shaped soft case (in case we stopped in at the Homestead for dinner), and we were on our way down the street, stopping for a moment to listen to the impromptu acoustic jam session my neighbors in the apartment house next door were holding on their front step.

I live in Farmington, Maine, a place whose charms I have found nearly impossible to describe to my more urban friends from Ashburn, Virginia, a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. In fact, once I made the decision to move here, I found myself hearing the same repetitive questions on endless loop:

“You’ll be how far from the nearest mall?”

“How do you think you’ll fit in there?”

“It seems like a great place to visit, but why on earth would you move there?”

“Why Maine? You know it’s cold there, right?”

“Maine…Isn’t that in Canada?”

In the beginning, I would try to explain how tired I was of the Northern Virginia traffic, of the frustration planning to leave 30 minutes early to arrive at a destination just three miles from my home, how depressing I found the devastation new construction had wrought on every open field and friendly wood for miles and miles, how sad I felt each time another poorly-aging mansion was torn down to build a new townhouse complex, how disturbing I found the increasing materialism, so evident in the Hummers, Mercedes, Porsches and Ferraris clogging my local streets. I would eagerly talk about the appeal of Farmington, the way my breathing would slow and even out as I drove miles and miles and miles away from what many would feel comfortable referring to as civilization, passing corn fields, and fill piles, and turkey farms, until the buildings started to thicken again, and I arrived in a lovely, bustling old college town. I would try to paint for them a picture of a town that always seems busy, but never frantic, a place where people walk more often than they drive, where in the fall you can see fire-tipped trees lining the streets, but if you wait ‘til July, you’ll smell the French lilacs lining Main Street spilling their fragrance into the air.

After awhile, the look of pity in their uncomprehending eyes discouraged me from trying to explain my choice beyond the pat answer. “My grandmother needs someone closer now that Grandpa passed. And I got into the Creative Writing program at the University there, so there’s that.”

I realized that I am incapable of communicating to them the feeling I have on a cool autumn morning, the sky an enormous blue bowl above me, the sun blinding in its clear brightness, as I walk past the old cemetery on Church Street – the one where small American flags mark the deaths of Revolutionary War veterans, and the engraving on granite gravestones has been rendered almost incomprehensible by a century or two of rain and snow-melt – toward Java Joe’s, the local coffeehouse. Offering that feeling to them, attempting to, was like offering a gift – only to have it received with the up-turned nose and two-fingered grip of someone handling a dirty towel.

I realize now that I would probably sound silly to my urban friends who prefer the sleek and shine of one of the four Starbucks Coffeehouses located in a two-mile radius from my old home, if I tried to communicate the simple pleasure of being able to curl my legs under me in the corner booth of Java Joe’s, with its thin-as-pancakes cushions and its sticky oak tables. I pretend to read whatever book I’m carrying in my big green sack of a purse while I eavesdrop unnoticed on the plea-bargain discussion the two men at the table next to me are having (“One year, Cultivation and $1000 fine.” “Come on! Cultivation? Six months, Possession and $500 – I have the bank records that prove the cash you found wasn’t even his!”). Nursing one of the two Carrabassett Valley coffees (regular, extra caffeine, please) that I pay for up-front, cash only, I watch locals and tourists plow in and out of the entrance door.

There are two signs taped to the entrance door over the large “Obama/Biden ‘08” poster: One yells, “No, we DON’T take credit cards!” The other crankily informs the new customer that they don’t serve people who think Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is better (it’s not – though I do think Starbucks still gives them a run for their money in this regard), or Yankees fans. There is a third dingy, laminated sign strung to the wind chime hanging near the counter that proclaims, “Ring this bell and someone will appear as if by magic.” I have often been tempted to try it, but a strong suspicion that the bell has never been rung, and the belief that should someone actually ring it he would be better off to immediately turn and flee the shop than wait for someone to appear, has prevented my following through. The woman who runs the place, whose name I still don’t know, is dark-haired and round-faced, loud and intimidating, but her black eyes twinkle and she calls me “sweetheart” when I bicker back good-naturedly after she reprimands me for forgetting to say what size coffee I want.

It may also sound ridiculously unimportant to my old friends were I to admit that often the highlight of my day is enthusiastically downing a hot bacon-egg-and-cheese on sourdough bagel, while I listen to that same woman wrangle with Andy, he of the piercings and gruff nature, the guy who, although I’ve known his name for months, I’m still afraid to call by that name to his face. (I almost hesitate to put that phrase “work for her” down on paper for two reasons; one, “work” is a phrase that she would say – in a loud voice for all of us to hear and agree with – is best used loosely with him, and two, he would, I’m sure, argue in an equally loud voice that he doesn’t work for her at all.)

I’ve learned that I don’t know how to begin explaining to my old friends the warmth I feel all over as I exit into sunshine, having carefully separated trash from returnables. One summer morning a few months ago, as I pulled open the door to Java Joe’s, the kids and I heard live music coming from the gazebo just at the edge of what I think of as “town”. We took a late breakfast to go, wending our way over to a picnic bench in the shady park surrounding the gazebo, enjoying the sound of a live folk-trio that played every Tuesday morning for the first eight weeks or so of summer. A crowd, mostly elderly folks toting their own cheap lawn-chairs, slowly gathered to listen as the trio warmed up, practiced, bickered good-naturedly, and finally sang, their lilting voices somehow sweeter because of the green-leaved canopy overhead and the warm caress of the June breeze.

Days like that usually end up being river days, and the kids and I load nets, buckets, towels, collapsible camp chairs, drinks, snacks, and a book for me in the trunk of our mini-SUV, driving five minutes out of town to swim in the Sandy River where it passes under the Fairbanks Bridge. I set up my camp chair right in the water, turning it back and forth to settle it evenly over the pebbles making up the river bed, set my huge cup of icy-water in the built-in cup-holder, and settle in with whatever summer read I’m slogging through at the moment (it has been – at different times – Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning work by Steve Coll, or Twilight by Stephanie Myer, depending on my mood). I relish the balmy kiss of the sun on my neck, the small tickle of a bead of sweat curving its way over my spine, and the chill of the river-water against my calves. My son searches for small boulders that he piles in his flimsy purple bucket with the hopes of lugging them home, while my daughter does her best to catch minnows darting in and out between my feet. I am relaxed, happy, calm.

As I sit there, the water moving like satin over my toes as I wiggle them in the water, a distant stereo spinning ethereal folk rock into the shimmering air, I can picture my friend Vanessa giving a delicate shudder of revulsion at the idea of spending the day swimming in a river – where God only knows what might be swimming with you, or under you, or around you – looking askance at the sight of so many families swimming in their shorts and t-shirts rather than the latest fashionable bathing suit purchased from Nordstrom or the Land’s End catalog. I can’t help it; I close my eyes and smile a little at the thought.

Back home, we hose off the sand and silt from our river shoes, hanging wet towels over the old plumbing pipe that forms a railing to our side-stairway and plan for the evening. Sometimes, even with the heat of the July sun on my neck, I look down my long driveway and shudder, thinking of winter and long mornings of snow-blowing, coating myself in snow and sweat, muscles aching from pushing the 500-pound monster up and down my driveway, trying not to fall as my boots slide over slick snow and ice. I take a moment now and feel my pores open, pulling in the humid heat and summer air, storing it away, knowing I’ll need it to get through the following February.

In the summer, you pack all the living you can into each day, even if it just means lazing that day away on your back porch drinking in the heat and sunlight. We walk everywhere in the summer, the kids and I. One Monday night a friend suggested she meet us at our house and we would walk over to listen to the Old Crow Indian Band play in the gazebo.

“What is the Old Crow Indian Band anyway?” I asked, having already been told by several locals that I had to take the kids to catch their weekly performance.

“Hmm…What’s the Old Crow Indian Band?” I could see her mulling the question over in her mind. “There really is no explaining it. You’ll just have to come see for yourself.” I was intrigued, imagining a classic rock tribute band, or even tribal music.

My friend and I and the kids set off down Court Street and up Church to Main Street at dusk, passing beautifully refurbished hot-rods parked here and there on the street. (A sure sign of summer in Maine is the reappearance of classically detailed old cars, their lovingly restored paint gleaming in the sun after a winter spent safely in barns or under tarpaulins.) Old men sat on the granite wall of the Franklin County Courthouse, their polished hardwood canes resting between their widespread legs against the girth of their rounded bellies, straw hats perched jauntily on their heads. For a moment, I was transported to another time, another era, and felt my heart fill happily at the sight.

The Old Crow Indian Band is, as it turns out, neither a rock band, nor a folk band, nor is it even vaguely related to anything Native American. It is a marching band that does not march. And while they have a conductor, I have yet to determine his purpose. As we sprawled on the cool grass watching toddlers weave their way around their parents’ blankets it seemed that he was more a figurehead than anything else as the band members argued with him and amongst themselves for several minutes at a time between songs about their next song selection. We listened for an hour or so (during which time the conductor announced loudly after each of the three songs they actually played, that this time they would be performing Song #36) and decided the experience would be improved with ice cream, so we set off down Exchange Street towards Gifford’s, the best ice cream shop in town. Later, walking back down Main Street, licking our cones as the Courthouse clock hands neared the nine-o’clock hour, we could hear the conductor announce that the band wsa now going to play Song #36, which as it turned out, sounded very similar to “Goodnight, Ladies”.

A few weeks ago, the Farmington Fair came to town. Makena, Ronan and I stood in line at the sagging entrance’s admission window with my friend Amber and her children, paid our admission, and rushed in to gorge ourselves on fair food: hot dogs and shoestring fries slathered in vinegar, doughboys sprinkled with a liberal dose of cinnamon sugar. We stuffed ourselves and wandered behind the vender trailers to where an old man sang about the burning ring of fire, while his wife sang haunting harmony next to him. And as I listened, transfixed, to the music, I looked at all of the people around me, mostly the elderly and the infirm parked on picnic benches or in wheelchairs while their more agile family explored the rest of the fair. I laughed as Amber’s youngest, the impudent and sassy six-year-old Olivia, who the week before had cut her own bangs and when confronted by her mother answered, “My bangs have always been like this, Mom!”, ran right up on stage to hand the guitarist a note with her request – Willy Nelson’s “You Were Always On My Mind”. I licked powdered sugar from my fingers as the still-warm September breeze lightly tossed the ends of my hair, and I realized that in that moment of time, my children by my side, my friends around me, that I was content. It was a rare perfect moment.

It is moments like this that I think of as the kids and I walk past the historic brick and wooden buildings that now make up the University of Farmington. Soon, too soon, it will be winter. I think about the split cords of birch and ash neatly stacked in my barn. I’m feeling the need to bake cookies and muffins, and while I largely dread the coming winter – the short gray days and long frigid nights, the endless white covering every outdoor surface from January through March, the way my mucus membranes freeze and my down-jacket crackles in the below-zero temps – a part of me is anticipating the cozy smell of wood burning and the radiant heat of the woodstove in the kitchen that I’m no longer afraid of, the scent of blueberry scones baking in the oven, and the soft touch of my cornflower blue, double-fleece robe from L.L. Bean (an indulgence I treated myself to during my first winter here) against my shoulders. I watch my kids carefully pick delicate fallen leaves from piles of saffron, ginger and paprika along the sidewalk, and I look down Maine Street toward UMF’s Robertson building. In my mind’s eye, I can already see the street transformed with cheering crowds of people lining either side, stomping feet and clapping mittened hands in the cold, already feel the air icy and thin as flurries fall, already hear the sound of blaring sirens and honking horns as the Chester Greenwood parade lumbers past – a day we celebrate ear muffs and the man who made them. I’m suddenly overcome with the need to giggle at the thought. There simply is no easy way to explain a town that celebrates ear muffs.

Velocity

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:28:00 -1000

This is by far the most personal thing (but why write if you’re not willing to be open to a little exposure?) I’ve ever written. A friend of mine recently made me remember it…and how I read it aloud to a room packed with students, parents, professors and friends. Reading it now…I realize this is why I’m a writer.

Velocity

I skip this stone,

flat-bottomed and

smooth as pāhoehoe, to

where you wait,

5,029 miles away, treacherous a’a

all around. I count its layovers,

One, two, three, and I am in the

belly of the white whale

awaiting the desperate glide

across miles of ocean water

boiling over ceaselessly

shifting sand and grit.

The velocity of the plane

permeates my pores, the

soft meaty tissue of

my brain, and I am rushing

forward, fast and faster. I

close my eyes, and

breathe the rush.

And you and I are

on the water, night’s

curtain falling fast. Your

hand feels hot traversing

my bare shoulder, my

knee. “Eskimo kisses” you

whisper, and we giggle at

the sweetness of it. I was late

picking the kids up that night. I want

my father, Makena sobs.

Oh, she saw us, your thick fingers

sliding through my hair,

your lips moving over mine

My stomach turning heavy with

guilt, I stroke her neck and

make sympathetic sounds, but

I have the secret, badly kept:

A world away, Ed has forgotten the

word “father” as he stirs his morning cup of

disillusionment and sorrow. Yes,

sigh, “Sorrow” – it’s easy to

forget he’s a person. His

plain wife pours disappointment into

her cereal, and I can see them at their

secondhand table, eyes

darting away from each other

as they bend over their bowls

sinking spoons in

the silence.

When I was 17, I woke

gasping, startled from sleep, Ed’s

hand cold on my shoulder –

(Separate beds had been

decreed by my grandparents

– God, were we ever that young?)

— his face was close over mine and

damp with — of all things — tears!

I love you, I love you, I love you,

I love – and my hand stroked his

5 a.m. shadow, and my fingers shushed

him. I’m here, I whispered into the

dark. Yes, it was dark – I remember now –

and the chair I’d so carefully

propped had toppled

away from the door, and

I felt his naked body curling

against mine, his hands seeking me,

until my feet — made powerful with

my disgust and his violation —

met something soft and

now abhorrent to me, and

Ed howled in pain and

rage. Our daughter’s eyes –

I can see them as she

stands in her doorway. She

was awakened by

the commotion, seeing,

but not really, as he

flees the room we once shared.

Where my mother lived

was a La-Z-boy recliner:

Ugly brown and

spotted with old food. It

stank of her sweat

and foulness. Three, then

four, then 500 pounds of

fat flesh pulled

her down, down, down, her

her stomach reaching

for her knees and her

breasts draping her belly button.

I used to wonder if I could

sink my whole small hand

into it when she would

sit naked on her bed

in the afternoon. I’m drying off, she’d

declare after her bath, as she

watched with rapt devotion

while Luke raped Laura. She

ate Philly’s cream cheese

and Welch’s grape jelly

from a white plastic bowl, its

lip curdled by the

heat of the dishwasher. I

would run my finger over that

strange brown curl as I dug

my own spoon in deeper. Later,

I am fifteen, and when

the movers take the couches

away, I am shocked to

discover our dirt-brown living room

carpet was once white. Cockroaches

underneath, skittering over

blinding white patches of shag

shaped into a map of our lives. I

pour Borax into packing

boxes, and I

see my father crying

over there, where

Antarctica should

be, throttling a bottle of

O’Doul’s. My mother left

me there, feverish and weak, on

our hideous tweed couch in

South America while

she tended a neighbor’s headache.

And there, right there, when I

was four, I spilled the Atlantic Ocean

in grape juice off the coast of

Africa, and my mother’s

hand smacked Europe

into the back

of my thighs.

The amazing girth of

my mother’s body

could have been

borne, but it was what

lurked beneath the folds of

flesh, fetid and rotten

that terrified me. Most

women marry their

fathers. I married

my mother. Ed surely

had her insides. There was

death in his eyes – there was – and

his touch was frozen

as the ice on the Potomac under

the 14^th Street Bridge, where

Air Florida Flight 90 crashed

I am trudging home through

a foot of snow, toes numb, fingers

red and stiff in my mittens

(it still snowed in Virginia then),

nearly blind in the rapid

fall of white. News Channel

Four is on at home, and I

watch rescuers struggle to

pluck passengers from the icy water;

one woman, hysterical in

her grief (she was clutching her

infant daughter when

the plane went down), unable to

hold the line the helicopter

drops; one attempt, two, until

finally a city watches

her sink below the

river’s surface,

lost

forever. My father believed that

was the duration

of a marriage vow. And

my mother, sensing this,

tormented him freely. I once

saw her heave a shopping

cart at him in the frozen foods

aisle of the Giant Food on Fox Mill

Road when he dared to question

her selection of ice cream. Later,

she would consume it

straight from the

carton, spoonful

after relentless spoonful

while my father watched

silent and – what is that

word? That word that

stands for someone

who is a pale imitation of

authority, but with

no real

power.

But I, I would fly to

my father at night,

and mornings were

magical, the kitchen door

shut tight, pots steaming

and oven door open, keeping

the cold outside of us

while my mother snored

upstairs. We would listen to

the “Morning Drum” on

Howard University Radio and

my small voice

would rap along

with Grandmaster Flash and

The Furious Five:

Don’t push me cuz

I’m close to the edge

I’m tryin’

not to lose my head

It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder

How I keep from goin’ under

huh huh-huh huh huh huh

I thought, by the end

of mine, that marriage was

a kind of drowning. And

when my time with Ed

finally ended, I rose up

triumphant, gasping for

air and life, gulping deep

lungfuls of atmosphere

and freedom. Liberated from

the cement blocks

with which I had been

weighted: deception

and guilt; I swam

free of him, dried

my wings and

breathed the rush

of finally, finally

flying free

with the ease of a stone

skipping over water. “Can I hold you?” you

whispered, and a poet couldn’t have

written the full moon shining

over us, silver and clean like

the smell of your black

cotton t-shirt as

I rubbed my cheek against

it, feeling your heat,

humid and welcome as

Hawaii itself. I had

never been kissed

the way you kissed

me, so carefully and with

so much love. Remember

this, remember this, I told myself

I would not be like her, so instead

I would be opposite. Not right;

just opposite

Where she was needy, I would

need no one, though I

did, and desperately. But

where she was

raging river, I was

smooth as glassy

pond, sunshine smiling

overhead, blinding

observers to the dark depths

boiling beneath.

Inside, though…

O, inside, my anger curled, black and

hot as latent lahar

I could feel it blazing beneath

my breast bone, and I

dreaded that final

expulsion of rage, the

torrent of extruded

disambiguation, certain I would be

buried beneath its weight

like the people who refused

to leave Mount St. Helens, which

in my confused

eight-year-old mind had

suddenly formed near the

Lincoln Memorial in

Washington, D.C. I feared

the cinder cone’s

proximity, and

I think now I must have

mentioned this to my mother, who

never bothered to correct me

as, grunting, she heaved her

enormous heft from her recliner to

load our daily dishes into

the dishwasher, never

noticing the grimy counters and

sticky floors.

Quiet Evasions and Casual Cheer (Non-Fiction)

Mon, 16 May 2011 20:41:00 -1000

I had a rough day today…so I dug this essay I wrote two years ago out to remind me that I am sane, I am a good mom, and yeah, it’s time to get my daughter help. For all the moms out there that might be feeling exactly the same way, this is for you:

Quiet Evasions and Casual Cheer

Bad days come without warning. One moment, my daughter is a happy, smiling child with the disposition and temperament of an angel. She is compassionate, kind and loving, funny and intelligent, concerned about others. She is a patient older sister, respectful and warm when she speaks with me. She is easy to love.

Those times are valuable, especially given their alternative, but I often find myself edgy, waiting for the next explosion to strike, and it invariably does – whether the explosions are days, weeks or even months apart, I’ve learned never to hope that the battle is over for good. Makena’s screams of rage (rage at being corrected for a job left undone or a slip of attitude in her tone, or rage at something more ineffable, unknown to everyone but her) echo down our street, Court Street, into the neighbors’ homes, down the main thoroughfares of town. Her face twists, her eyebrows pull low, her mouth sneers.

There is no getting away from her – since the tantrums started years ago, she has followed me from room to room screaming until finally I either take refuge by locking myself in a room (with her pounding and kicking at the closed door until I think it might break under the tremendous force of her kicking), or I end up holding her down on the floor, trying to wrap myself around her flailing limbs as she bucks and screams beneath me, giving The Exorcist’s Linda Blair a run for her money.

Tantrums can last for a few minutes or what seems like hours – in either case, time seems to stand still, and I am left physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted by the process. When they are over, my daughter is despondent, heartbroken over the way she has behaved, and it is then my job to become counselor, spending hours with her, crafting strategies to help her deal with her anger more effectively; my job to be her sounding-board, spending hours listening to whatever is upsetting her in the moment (her father’s abandonment taking top billing here).

It is my job to be her mother.

I have never suffered for a lack of well-meant advice in dealing with these tantrums:

“You know what I did with my son when he tried that with me?” my Bolivian-born hair stylist Tanya said to me one day, when I explained that I was late for my appointment because of one of my daughter’s tantrums. “I stuck Andre in a cold shower, clothes on and all. Two or three times of that, and he never dared to scream at me again.”

“The problem,” my step-mother says, “is that she wants to be in charge, and you haven’t been consistent enough in your discipline with her. She just needs to learn she can’t be running the show.”

“Have you thought about counseling?” my best friend, Tami, asks. “These are supposed to be the easy years before puberty. All these issues should be fixed by now.”

“What she needs is a good spanking,” my mother’s mother tells me. “I chased your mother around the house with a ruler when she screamed like that. And boy, this one can almost out-scream even your mother.”

“Well, these are the pre-teen years, those hormones are working overtime right now,” her pediatrican explains. “Just be patient, Mom, you’ll get through this.”

“You just need to hug her. Even when you don’t want to. Especially when you don’t want to,” another friend says.

Columnist and author, Anna Quindlen, wrote possibly the finest analysis of the dark underbelly of motherhood in her July 2, 2006 Newsweek column, “Playing God On No Sleep.” Written the week the horrifying news of Andrea Yates’ drowning her five children in the family bathtub broke, it spoke to something all mothers know, but few talk about: that in some deeply concealed crevasse within that we would prefer to leave unacknowledged, we all understand what could have driven Andrea Yates to do such a horrific thing. Quindlen writes, “The insidious cult of motherhood [insists]…we are meant to be all things to small people, surrounded by bromides and soppy verse and smiling strangers who talk about how lucky we are…There is no leave to talk about the dark side of being a surrogate deity, omniscient and out of milk all at the same time.”

Quindlen is right; as mothers, we are lucky. I cannot imagine my life without my children, even after having become fully acquainted with the less shiny-happy flip side of motherhood. I have become a fuller person with them in my lives, and they provide light, and life and happiness in abundant amounts.

Still, what resonated with me when I first read her editorial, freshly immersed in the disbelief of what Andrea Yates had been driven to do, was the deeper truth that the dark side is never spoken of, never acknowledged. Or if it is, before one makes the headlong death-defying dive into the seemingly tranquil waters of motherhood, it is never believed.

Once, when Makena was four, during the last few weeks of my marriage, Tami, my oldest and best friend since high school, dragged me out of my home. We drove 45 minutes to the mega-sized Ikea store in Potomac Mills, Virginia, leaving Makena and my nearly two-year-old son, Ronan, with their father for the day.

It was a welcome relief from the tension I’d been feeling for the past several months. My marriage was coming to an end, and my home had become the site of a sort of Cold War stand-off between my husband and me. Tami and I chatted lightly while we shopped. I laughed for what seemed like the first time in a decade.

At some point, I became aware of the familiar sound of a child screaming in rage, and I looked around for Makena before I remembered she was safely away at home. Instead, I saw a woman, a frazzled and distressed mother, trying to control her tantrum-ing child outside the entrance to the women’s rest room. The child, a girl of about four, screaming her lungs out, went limp when the mother attempted to pick her up. She continued to scream from her position splayed flat on the dirty linolium. The mother, though obviously near tears, continued to speak to the little girl calmly. Without any warning, I felt my own nose stop up as I experienced the familiar tingling behind my eyes, too.

I approached her and touched her arm. “Can I do something?”

Her eyes were red, and her face was flushed. “She just has these fits. I can’t make her stop. I. Can’t. Make. Her. Stop. I just need to get my husband so we can go, but I can’t get him to answer his phone.” She waved her own cell in the air. “And everyone’s staring. A woman just walked by me and told me I should just spank her.” I looked around and noticed that people were indeed staring as they streamed steadily in and out of the restroom doors, cutting a neat path around our small tableau. I watched as one middle-aged woman in an ugly knit sweater shook her head in disgust and murmured something to her companion as she passed.

Even now, writing this, I can feel the tears close in, exactly as they did that day. I said, “But spanking won’t help. Nothing helps when they’re like this.” And her eyes locked on mine in the instant bond that mothers of children like ours have. I bent down to her daughter. “Hey, what’s going on?” And as I instinctively knew she would, she immediately stopped screaming. Because here’s the thing about most tantrum-ing children that defies the need for “counseling” – it’s not about the tantrum; it’s about their relationship with us, their mother. I don’t know why this is. It’s not that they don’t love us, or that they want to hurt us. It might be because they feel safest with us to let their scariest emotions go unchecked. Whatever the case, faced with the realization that they have an audience, they immediately clam-up. This particular little girl curled up on the floor and scooted until she was hiding behind her mother’s legs, silent.

“I know what you’re going through. I have one just like her at home.” I said the one thing I thought she probably needed to hear most. “You’re doing a good job.” Because she was. She didn’t scream back, and she hadn’t left the child behind, though the thought might have danced tantalizingly in the back of her subconscious. No, this mother was doing the best job she could under the most trying of circumstances while literally dozens of people walked past, shaking their heads and tsking at what they saw as her inadequacy, her failure as a mother.

She didn’t say anything else, and neither did I. We just stood there together quietly, absorbing support from each other without a word, until her husband appeared, apologetic and harried, to herd them both away.

“Are you okay?” Tami asked me when I walked back to our cart. My eyes were wet, and I rubbed at them and laughed self-consciously.

“Yeah, it’s just – no one was helping her. And she…her little girl is just like…Like…” I couldn’t speak.

Tami grabbed my hand and squeezed. “I know, love. I know.” And she linked her arm to mine, and we pushed the cart forward together, silent.

The loneliest part of being the mother of a child who still, at ten-years-old, tantrums, is the isolating feeling of failure as a mother. Logically, this feeling of failure isn’t rational. Objectively, I can tell you that I have, virtually alone, raised two beautiful, highly intelligent children, able to speak their mind eloquently and with good manners, hard workers in school who never get in trouble; empathetic friends. They behave flawlessly when apart from me. They do not squabble or complain, they never speak rudely to adults in authority, and they are quick to find ways to be helpful to people in need. It is only with me that Makena feels safe enough to display the dark side of her personality, never dreaming to try throwing a tantrum with my step-mother, or her teacher, aghast and silent at the thought of someone else bearing eye-witness to her behavior.

When I had been married for seven years, Tami found out that she was pregnant with her first daughter, Rachel, after a year and a half of futile attempts. The months of trying and failing to get pregnant had been the one dark spot in what was (and still is), for her and her husband Chris, a nearly flawlessly happy marriage. The overwhelming force of her desire to be a mother (“It’s what I was born to do,” she had always told me, and it has proven true) set off a similar desire in me. Tami and I had been best friends since high school, and though we had gone our separate ways in our careers, our religious beliefs, even in the kind of men we chose to marry, we’d manage to withstand those divergences and nurture a beautiful friendship – the kind of friendship most people never experience in a lifetime. Perhaps, some part of me was deeply afraid that if she became a mother first, some vital part of that friendship would be lost. In any case, it felt unbearable that we wouldn’t tackle motherhood together.

I was a career woman by that time, the bread-winner, thanks to my high-paying job with AOL and my husband’s complete lack of ambition after graduating college – he had quit his own well-paid job with the Social Security Administration to work for his father’s failing carpet cleaning business within six months of marching across the Patriot Center stage at George Mason University. But I was sure that I could handle motherhood, my marriage, and my job – I would be Everywoman. The baby would finally make us a family in a way we never had been, and perhaps fulfill some unrecognized desire to have the story-book family I’d never had.

Having a baby was the one thing I asked Ed for and wouldn’t let go of until I talked him around. So, when Tami called to tell me in June, 1998, that she was finally pregnant – tears, disbelief and happiness choking her voice – I didn’t cry with her, offer congratulations, revel in the word finally. Instead I said, “Tam. I think I am, too.” Four days and nine pregnancy tests later, the increasingly dark pink lines on the EPT stick confirmed what I knew already. I was pregnant.

The life of the first-time expectant mother (and here, I’m referring to the ones who didn’t wake up after a one-night stand with the sinking realization that the condom broke, or the ones who, in a last desperate act to feel something for her soon-to-be-ex-husband engaged in passionate-but-ultimately-unfulfilling-and-unfortunately-unprotected-in-the-heat-of-the-moment-sex) is a charmed one. Watching her body soften and swell, she is smiled upon by friends and strangers alike. She reads constantly about the development of the baby growing inside her, marvels at the roundness of her belly and the flutters of life she feels deep inside. There are whole sections of the bookstore devoted to her, parking spaces set aside for her at shopping malls and grocery stores. She can eat virtually whatever she wants without comment. She no longer worries about being fat because she is fat, gloriously so, and she and her partner revel in it.

I spent the months leading up to Makena’s birth lovingly painting the small bedroom next to ours a tranquil sky blue. I stenciled rainbow-colored fish on the walls and painted silver-lined clouds on the ceiling. I folded soft baby-blankets, tiny footed-jammies, and velveteen sweaters into her drawers. When her room was completed, waiting only for her tiny presence to inhabit it, I rocked in the Dutelier glider-rocker I’d bought to sway her to sleep in, rubbed my tummy and dreamed. In my mind, I can see myself, dark blue cotton maternity top spread over my belly as I massaged circles around what I imagined was a tiny foot, or even her butt, pushed against the side of my belly. I sang to her, and talked to her, and the room, the memory itself, in fact, is bathed in a soft pink glow.

Quindlen writes, “All of us are caught up in a conspiracy in which we are both the conspirators and the victims of the plot. In the face of all this “M is for the million things she gave me” mythology, it becomes difficult to admit that occasionally you lock yourself in the bathroom just to be alone.”

No one can prepare you for the reality of motherhood. Within hours of arriving home from the hospital, Makena refused to nurse. That night as I sat on our Pottery Barn couch with its soft brown chenille slip covers that soon would be stained with spit-up, rocking Makena in her car-carrier on the floor while she screamed with angry hunger, I literally saw the next 20 years of my life flash behind my closed eyelids, a sort of movie of my future on fast-forward. I remember praying for God to take her back, please, please, I didn’t mean it, just take her back.

The lactation consultant came the next day. As she got more intimate with my breasts than I ever envisioned another woman getting, Makena grew angrier. No matter what holding position we tried, no matter what bizarre torture devices she attached to me, Makena would not latch on and nurse. I spent that day pumping milk from my breasts with the Medela breast pump (“It’s the best on the market!” she chirped) Lori-the-cheerful-lactationist had left behind with the words, “Don’t worry, she’ll get the hang of it by tomorrow,” and fielding calls from my step-mother who was in the hospital, on what she felt sure was her deathbed after a hysterectomy gone wrong. “Don’t give up, Dor. She’s just stubborn. Don’t give her that bottle. She won’t starve. Just keep trying to nurse her, she’ll get it.” She would keep talking until the nurse shuffled in, offering more meds to reverse the post-surgery infection she’d contracted. But Makena didn’t, wouldn’t, “get it.”

Lori was back again the next day, and after another frustrating hour, she finally stood up, sighed and said, “Well, Momma, you have a stubborn one there. I never say this to clients, but you should think about bottle-feeding.” To my further humiliation (the woman had within a space of an hour, positioned my breasts, squeezed my nipples, and was now pronouncing me a failure at breastfeeding), tears were rolling down my face. Somehow this didn’t silence Lori. “This probably isn’t a good sign of things to come. That is one stubborn little girl!”

Within a week, Makena’s beautiful nursery was a mess of soiled burp-clothes and dirty one-sies; the Diaper Genie was filled to overflowing; and my dreamy pink-hued haze? Gone.

Still, the most surprising find within the madness was the steady flow of an emotion I had never felt so fully until the moment Makena slid from the protective shelter of my body. My heart filled with a complete and terrifying love for her.

According to Quinlan, the “great motherhood friendships” are the ones in which we can admit quietly to one another that at times it feels like we’re failing. “But,” she writes, “Most of the time we keep quiet and smile. So that when someone is depressed after having a baby, when everyone is telling her that it’s the happiest damn time of her life, there’s no space to admit what she’s really feeling.”

Tami gave birth to Rachel nine days after Makena was born. Where I had no assistance (other than a half-day spent with a hovering mother-in-law who was more nuisance than help), Tami’s mother came to live with her for the first two weeks after Rachel came home from the hospital. I visited on her second day home, carefully fixing my makeup and feeling fat in my cotton leggings and maternity blouse. Already in the back of my mind was the knowledge that I was expected to return to my job as Project Manager for Operations Security in less than five weeks, while Tami would be staying home with Rachel, having finished her tour as a Registered Nurse, B.S.N., for the United States Navy.

I arrived at Tami’s house trying to look like a coolly experienced mom (I had been one, after all, exactly nine days longer than her). So, I was dumbfounded when Tami opened the door to her spotless house, holding a beaming Rachel – “Can you believe it?” she asked, turning sideways. “I’m already wearing my pre-pregnancy jeans!” I swiped at the sweat beading my forehead and melting my makeup and pretended to be happy for her. It felt as if my smile had frozen permanently on my face as I babbled happily about how excited I was to be returning to work, how great the daycare I had lined up was, while she yammered on about how easily Rachel had latched on, and yes, those damn pre-pregnancy jeans.

This would become the pattern for our friendship over the coming months: we became silent competitors in a game to which neither of us would admit we hadn’t been supplied the rules, a game that we at the best of times tolerated, and at the worst, despised.

Makena had her first tantrum when she was eleven months old. I had left my job behind eight months before, unable in the end to leave her care to strangers at an impersonal daycare. We were getting ready to leave for playgroup – a group of women and their babies that I had met through a new mother’s support group at the hospital where we gave birth. I remember laying her on our living room floor, getting her dressed. The months since she had stopped nursing had been mostly tranquil ones: she slept well, ate well, smiled and laughed. By now, she could walk, and had been signing basic wants (“milk”, “juice”, “eat”) to me for at least a month. I called Tami frequently to tell her about every milestone and compared my baby to her baby, her baby to my baby, trying to prove to myself that Makena was “normal” even “special”. When she was fussy, I told everyone she was teething, though her first tooth didn’t come until around her first birthday.

I never knew what set off Makena’s screaming fit that morning, but by the time I walked into the backroom of the Rust Library in Leesburg where playgroup met, I was shaking, dripping in sweat. In my time at AOL, I had dealt with company executives from around the world without ever losing my cool, and in the span of an hour, my eleven month-old child had reduced me to a near-hysterical mess.

The child who had been a source of endless joy and entertainment from the moment I let go of the idea of nursing, was changing.

Interesting that I say now, nearly ten years later, endless joy, and yet typing the phrase here gives me pause. I wonder for a moment about the truthfulness of those words. The writing stops, and I call Tami, happening to actually catch her in a rare mutually free moment as she walks the dog.

I explain what I’m working on. “And if I sound teary, it’s because every time I write or even revise that Ikea scene, I start crying, and I don’t know why.”

“It’s funny that you focus so much on that scene. I barely remember that. I vaguely remember the little girl and Ikea, I probably would have walked by, too, and barely registered their presence, but what I really remember is your voice after you went over to the mother. It had this hollow, haunted sound, if that makes any sense.” She pauses, and I can picture her on her quiet little side street in Gaithersburg, Maryland, her little dog, Zeke, pulling happily at his leash. “I think if I didn’t know you so well, I wouldn’t have picked up on it. But that tone…When you’re unhappy, I can hear it and it’s in-your-face emotion, and I feel like…like it’s reachable. But when you talked with that woman, after that, it was like you weren’t with me anymore. There have been few times in our friendship that I’ve heard that in your voice. But when you get like that, it’s like the hurt is too big for you, too scary, so you leave, mentally. In that moment, you were untouchable.” She finished vehemently, “I hate that voice. It terrifies me.”

I think about that, and yes, I can see in my mind’s eye what she saw that day. I remember that after meeting the woman outside the Ikea restroom, I felt shell-shocked, and it took me awhile to regain my equilibrium.

“The thing about you and motherhood, D., was that you had this sort of fairy-tale view of it, this giddy happiness, and no one, not even me could talk you out of it. And then when Makena didn’t latch on, when your marriage fell apart, I watched you struggle with the idea that if it wasn’t ‘my perfect picture, then how is any of it going to work?’ And I could see this fear, that same kind of numbing fear that it wasn’t working the way you wanted it to, and you took it as a very personal sort of failure. I think for you, it played out in her tantrums. You celebrated being a mom, you were like Martha Stewart extreme mom – bath every night with soft music and dim lights, loads of brand new clothes and toys – you celebrated this child like you’d never been celebrated by your own mother, and when that child started to scream in anger – and because you were the safest person – screamed at you in anger, it really hit you in your weakest spot.”

I feel like I have just been sucker-punched. After nearly twenty years of friendship, ten years of that spent as mothers, Tami has managed to arrow in on something that had never once occurred to me. That I resent Makena for not realizing how good she has it.

Because I know the alternative. I’ve lived the alternative. I grew up with the alternative.

Tami and I finally sat down to a rare dinner out together when the girls were about six months old. Lately, I’d been feeling as if maybe I was growing out of the friendship we’d somehow kept alive for ten years. As we settled into our table at the Macaroni Grill in Reston, Virginia, simultaneously reveling in an evening out that didn’t involve a rushed meal between feedings and naps, and at the same time feeling guilty for enjoying it, we finally started to talk.

Tami confessed that she felt every bit as alone and overwhelmed as I did. It turned out that while I was doing my best to hide that I was fully in the throes of post-partum depression almost from the day we brought Makena home, Tami’s had just been delayed by the two weeks her mother stayed with her. “I looked around after she left and thought, Huh, there’s a lot of laundry piling up, and the baby’s crying. Someone needs to get her. And who’s going to take care of all those dishes in the sink? And dinner! I’m hungry. Then I realized, Oh, Chris is at work, and, Oh, Mom’s gone. I was the only one in the house left to do it.” She took a sip of the one glass of white wine she’d allotted herself. “And you…you were so together. Everything always seemed so perfect for you. Heading back to work, handling everything alone, no help. I started to think, Well, that’s not my reality, so does that mean I’m doing a bad job? Am I failing at this? I realized I wasn’t even sure if I liked Rachel. Some days, I’m still not.” I was floored. “There are nights, when Rachel won’t sleep, that I sit outside her bedroom door crying.”

I wondered. Could it be that finally admitting our weaknesses to each other opened the possibility that we could be strong together? Could we be the moms that finally told the truth?

Tami called me the day she got her Newsweek with Quindlen’s article. “Did you read Quindlen’s column yet? About Andrea Yates?” Yes, I had, and I had felt the quiet relief of knowing someone else understood the motherhood-experience. Tami and I talked for a long time, and when I hung up I marveled: despite the drastic differences between my life as a mother and Tami’s, we still had the same essential feelings about the experience. We loved being mothers, but this job was hard, heartbreaking, and for some rare desperate few of us, it was murder.

On Makena’s good days – and being honest, we have far more good days than bad – we laugh together, giggling like children at the funny sights we see in town, like the little old lady with fuscia hair that pushes her shopping cart everywhere, or while teasing Andy at Java Joe’s about his t-shirt selection for the day. We chase and wrestle and swim and walk and tickle and blow raspberries and play. Sometimes, late at night, she climbs into my giant bed, and we whisper secrets until I fall asleep, holding her hand close to my heart. Those are the days I want to remember. Those are the best days.

Those are the days that I feel my heart swell with love for her. Those are the days that get me through the bad days. Like the days when my neighbors come knocking hesitantly at the door to make sure everyone’s alright because they’ve been listening to her scream for an hour straight. The days when I look into her face, twisted with fury, demonic in her rage, and I wonder if I’m seeing my mother brought back to life in her. The days when I have to remind myself over and over that I do love her, I do, but, as Anna Quindlen concludes, “Just because you love people doesn’t mean that taking care of them day in and day out isn’t often hard, and sometimes even horrible.”

So I will, in my darkest times, wonder if I’m failing Makena, or at the very least, wonder at the end of the day what parts of it she’ll be telling a therapist about in the future, but mostly, I’ll keep loving her, keep hugging her, even when it seems impossible to do so.

But I will do so knowing that, in the interest of preserving my dignity, my sense of success, my need to keep up appearances, I am carefully preserving the veneer of casual cheer with the quiet evasions and silent isolation that make up motherhood.

Rain Down on Me

Sat, 07 May 2011 21:45:00 -1000

It’s not what it will be (and thank you to my two faithful readers, Luka and Mason)…but it’s getting there:

“But plant your hope with good seeds / Don’t cover yourself with thistle and weeds / Rain down / Rain down on me” ~ Mumford & Sons, “Thistle and Weeds”

Summer in Central Maine is a capricious and fearsome thing of beauty. She will lovingly warm the hills and mountains a week or two at a time, causing trees to burst forth with a shade of vivid green you’ll swear you’ve never seen before in the woods and forests. Elsewhere, in kitchen gardens, new life will push its leafy way out of the earth to bask in the sun for a bit before it is time to do the hard work of producing its fruit for fall’s chilly harvest. Then suddenly, with little warning, Summer may bring cold and rain, a 40-degree day in the middle of July, causing even hardened Mainers to pause in their wood-splitting—June, July and August are, after all, a time of planning for the inevitable return of Winter in all her icy, frigid glory—to turtle their necks into their jackets and light their wood stoves.

Storms rumble in quickly and rage fiercely, trees moaning in protest at the wind’s hard abuse, rain sheeting down, swelling creeks and rivers and flooding the Front Streets of small towns with names like Mexico, Kingfield, Farmington, and New Vineyard. Old timers will tell you about the flood of ‘09, when the water nearly washed away the railway station in Brookdale, and did wash away old Big Jim McClure, who just the week before had been proudly flaunting his Portland-made Knox Runabout as he honked his way down Main Street. According to town legend, he floated away down the Kennebec River in that same car, still clutching the wheel, a helpless sort of surprise in his eyes and the gape of his mouth, as if unable to believe he could do nothing to prevent his inevitable fate.

On this particular summer day, several decades later, at the beginning of June, Alice Hopsham, who happens to be, in the way of Mainers with gnarled and twisted family trees that all connect somewhere, a distant relation of Old Big Jim’s, sits on a park bench next to the Brookdale bandstand, in a quiet treed corner of the town square. The bells of the North Church are ringing out the noontime hour as a light breath of air twitches the hem of Alice’s skirt. She is carefully unfolding the corners of the wax paper-wrapped sandwich in her lap, bologna and tomato today, though bologna is not her favorite as a rule.

But Alice had been too distracted to market the day before, so bologna and tomato is the best she can do this particular afternoon. She sighs a little as the soft white bread with its perfect, thin, brown crust is revealed, thinking she’s been distracted more often than not these days. Or maybe distracted is not the right word. Alice thinks for a minute and remembers a word she encountered on a vocabulary list when she was in grammar school: Ennui: a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom. Yes, that’s it. She is weary and discontent, and has been for so long now that she never noticed when it began.

Even when Stan rung up the evening before to see if she might like to take a run out to Auburn with him in his spanking new red convertible, she had gently demurred, replying she wasn’t feeling quite the thing, and to go on and enjoy the drive without her, guilt twisting slightly in her stomach at his disappointed tone as she returned the phone to its cradle. She thought she should want to run her fingers over the soft white leather seats, feel the deep, low thrum of the Stingray’s engine as it shot them through the dark and twisty turns of Highway 4, but no, the thought held no appeal after all.

She thinks now, as she holds her bologna sandwich and takes a slow bite—the spongy white bread giving way to the vaguely unpleasant resistant texture of the bologna, the mush of the tomato, about how she would have tied her hair back in the white scarf she’d bought week before at Mervin’s. She imagines the way the wind would have rushed by as they bulleted through the darkness, the shine of the painted hood under the occasional street lamp as they passed through Livermore Falls, the breathless sort of pang in her chest she always felt when she happened to turn and catch a glimpse of Stan’s handsome profile, with his dimpled chin and wonderfully-shaped Grecian nose, and she realized she, Alice Hopsham was with him, and he with her.

Or that’s the way it had been.

The breeze circling Alice’s stocking-covered calves is cooler now, and she shivers slightly. A shadow falls over her lap as the sky grows darker, and far off, Alice can hear the soft rumbles of thunder, maybe away out toward Rumford. Too far away to worry about yet. She folds the wax paper a little farther down and takes another slow bite, though the sandwich tastes dull and metallic in her mouth.

Stan is a dear man, Alice thinks. He brings her flowers every Friday night—little bunches of peonies, or lilies of the valley, or whatever is ripe for the cutting in his mother’s garden. And he always calls by the Wednesday prior to arrange their dates, never taking for granted Alice will just be there waiting and available. He is a true gentleman, just like her father had been, hurrying ahead to open doors for her, holding her hand softly in his on their evening drives, dropping a kiss or two or three on her lips when he walks her to her door at the end of those evenings, his hands never wandering farther than the nape of her neck, his stroking fingers sending shivers over Alice’s skin before he presses her fingers once more in his in farewell and strolls whistling down the sidewalk, usually doing a silly two-step as he walks, making her laugh ring out in the darkness.

Stan is a steady sort of man. And if his job is…unconventional, at least it, too, is steady, working as an undertaker for his family’s funeral home, the only funeral home in Brookdale. “Two things you can count on in this world, Alice: Death and taxes. Death and taxes,” Stan remarks jovially whenever she asks him about his day.

Yes, Stan is…steady. But there are times, she thinks.

Alice holds the sandwich at her chest for a moment. See her now, on her bench, ancient maples and oaks largely shielding her from all but our view, storms gathering around her, though she is so sheltered within her own mind that she never notices. She is a pretty woman, glossy brown hair gathered in soft curls at her crown, skin unlined and milky white. If she glances up at us, you will be surprised at the unusual shade of her eyes, a dark blue that at once speaks of innocence and conversely, secrets, shielded by thick, dark lashes. Stan might tell you it was Alice’s eyes that drew him in; as with all the men Alice had encountered in her twenty-eight years, he wanted to be the one man to both claim that innocence and plunder those secrets. He has not as yet done either, but it is that promise, that tantalizing promise that keeps him attached to her even as he feels the inexorable slide of Alice slipping away.

Alice can hear the soft whisper of leaves brushing against each other in the growing breeze, the low moan of branches bending toward one another as they accommodate the strain of the wind. Farther down the small hill from where she sits, she watches a mother and her children finishing their picnic, the mother shaking rubbish off her blanket onto the green grass, grabbing up a baby toddling away on shaky legs, while the other children, a boy and a girl, play tag. She watches the mother snuggle the toddler under her chin, notes the way the baby squirms away, bare, chubby thighs kicking in a fury to get down.

Alice turns her gaze away, setting the sandwich down in her lap, carefully restoring the wax paper over it, her appetite gone. Clouds are racing over the sky now, towering cumulous, heavy and gray, but still she does not take note. Instead she flattens her hand over her stomach, feeling the bitter swell of nausea roiling.

She thinks back over the last few months to February. February, the worst month of a Maine winter, when the endless drifts of white covering fields, and the exhaust blackened grime of four-and-five-foot-high roadside snow piles, and the biting thirty-below-zero temperatures made all Mainers despair winter would ever end, when the smell of wood-smoke was no longer associated with warmth and coziness, but was suffocating as it burned in your lungs and eyes, when one day after the next after the next after the next dawned gray and cold and lonely, and the whole world felt old and tired. It was February when Jack had first wandered into the Brookdale Public Library.

Alice knows that had Jack walked in today, in the cheerful sunshine of early June, she would have given him the directions he was looking for—to the Post Office to arrange a postal box—and sent him on his way. Instead, weighed down under the crushing tedium of stuffing late notices and filing returns, she welcomed the diversion he brought as he explained he was in town for the coming season to work at the Fillmore Shoe plant, and she allowed him to linger on, encouraging the kind of small talk men usually manufactured for her.

He was a rough man, strictly blue collar, of the sort that was normally beneath her notice. His boots were worn and scuffed, and he wore no hat. His hands were red and raw with the cold, and as he planted his elbows on the counter and leaned toward her, she could smell the unpleasant odor of a heavy smoker and could see a long, puckered scar snaking up from his collar to the bottom of his right ear. She wondered what could have happened to cause such a scar, even felt a thin shiver run cold fingers up her spine, a small warning. But then he smiled at her, one side of his mouth crooking up, a dimple flashing mysteriously to one corner, his dark eyes watching her in a way not even Stan had watched her before, and she casually let drop that she lived in the only blue house on Front Street, holding his gaze just a shade longer than was necessary.

Well, she thinks now, as the clouds close in above her, smoothing her hands over her skirt, her gaze following the path of her fingers, the shape of the bones beneath the thin skin, things might have been different had it not been February.

But it had been February, and the awful, desolate end of it at that. The time of year when she lay in her bed in the drear dawn and let her eyes trace the pattern of the watermark leaching through the plaster ceiling above, dreading the moment she needed to swing her legs over the side of her mother’s old spool bed and feel the cold air whisking through the cracks of the pumpkin-pine floorboards and make her way to the even chillier washroom, where the water pouring from the old two-faucet sink would be icy cold on one side and boiling hot on the other. There was no middle ground in February.

Alice felt in February as if she dragged herself through each gray day, forcing smiles and counting the minutes until she could pull her clothes off slowly in the privacy of the bedroom she’d made her own after her mother passed away the year before, in the large Victorian that had been in their family for a century, stripping each layer off slowly, savoring some small satisfaction in the slow unbuttoning and unzipping, laying her suit jacket, then her blouse, her skirt, her seamed stockings, and finally, her silk slip over the bench perched in front of her vanity until she was standing in her underwear before the mirror, examining her body critically for any signs of her age: a slight sag in the pale skin of her upper arms, or, reaching behind her to unclasp the lacy bra she wore, searching for any small drop in her adequate upturned breasts, turning this way and that until she was sure that, no, she was still beautiful, young, desirable.

Because, oh, Alice did enjoy being desired. She enjoyed the glances she could feel when she passed men tipping their hats to her on the street. She enjoyed the few careful trysts she had allowed herself over the years. She was very aware of Stan’s yearning, though he was always so careful not to do anything untoward. She could hear it in the way his breath came quicker each time he kissed her goodbye; she knew it was the reason he held himself slightly away from her even as she pressed herself closer. She enjoyed the power of knowing he wanted her, enjoyed knowing he held himself back because of her innocence, and she enjoyed doing small things—stroking her finger lightly over the center of his palm and wrist in the dark of his car, or allowing the softest sound of pleasure to escape her when he kissed her goodnight—to make his holding back more difficult.

But when Jack walked into the library that frigid February day, snow dotting the shoulders of his plaid wool coat, stomping snow off his boots, his dark too-long hair damp and spiked upward from the wind and wet, Alice felt something that had lain dormant for far too long awaken low and deep within her, a small flame kindling to life. Desire.

In spite of that, she would have let it die any other time of the year, she was sure. But in February, when it seemed she would never be warm again, when it seemed as if her days passed in one bleak, blank hour after another, she was helpless before the promise of the warmth he offered.

And so that evening, when he knocked lightly at her back door, she opened it without surprise. He followed her slowly through the mud room into the kitchen, where her enormous black

Jøtul woodstove was pumping heat in waves, and he said nothing as she slowly pushed the toggles of his jacket from their leather fasteners and pushed it from his body, running her hands over the firm shoulders and arms made strong from years of factory work beneath.

He let her touch him, watching her eyes as she did until she started to trace a finger over the scar on his neck, and finally he grabbed her slender arms in his hands (she would find imprints of the shape of his fingers bruising the delicate skin the next morning) and pulled her close, yanking at her blouse, scattering buttons on the warped kitchen floor that seemed to tilt crazily in every direction, or was the tilting her imagination, or the heat of him? And if she felt any alarm in that moment, even a small revulsion at the taste of Scotch and cigarettes when he crushed his mouth to hers, the wanting, oh God, the wanting tamped it down again until she wasn’t thinking, only feeling, feeling, feeling, finally warm again under his gaze, his hands, as he moved over her, moved in her, pressing her into the warped kitchen floor under his heavy weight.

They’d barely spoken a word. Later, Jack quietly buttoned his dungarees and pulled his coat back on, letting himself back out into the night while Alice, wrapped in a blanket she’d pulled from the linen closet in the guest bedroom, kept her eyes slightly averted from his as she perched against the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in her hand. She felt no remorse as she sipped slowly, her body warmed from the inside-out with a heat she felt sure would not fade quickly.

Watch now as Alice looks up suddenly, a blast of air pulling a pin or two from her hair and sending curls dancing haphazardly in the wind. She hastily tucks them behind her ear. She is not afraid of the storm, though she should be. Instead, see how she throws her head and shoulders back, breathing in deeply the smell of damp earth rising around her as the rain moves over the mountains and hills just north of town, and the wind gusts the scent of it toward Brookdale, toward where Alice sits on her bench, beneath trees that have been there since long before Old Big Jim was born, before his grandfather’s grandfather was born before him.

She has not seen Jack since that night, though she is aware—gossip, after all, moves quickly when a single man moves into a small town—that he let a room for the summer at Brookdale House. She knows it is probably just as well. She thinks she may love Stan, believes she will certainly spend her life with him when he asks her, as she suspects he is planning to very shortly. There is no future to be had with an itinerant factory worker with an unknown history, just a temporary warmth provided at a moment she dearly needed it. She knows she should regret taking in that warmth, had been raised to never allow such a thing to happen, and yet…no, she can’t regret it, won’t.

And if it means another visit to the doctor in Boston, her second, well, yes, that is terribly unfortunate, regrettable even, but until today, the appointment set for tomorrow, she hasn’t allowed herself to think of the implications of the small life forming and stretching inside her. She refuses even to think of it as such; it is pointless to contemplate, easier to think of it as a complication that needs to be attended to. And it must be attended to. Whenever, in a flight of brief fancy, she allows herself to imagine not attending to it, allowing it to grow within her, to become a product and a tangible proof of that February night—well, no, it simply cannot be, and her mind purposefully turns away again.

The mother and her children are gone now, chased away by the threat of the approaching storm. Alice knows she should go, too, can smell ozone in the air from lightning firing somewhere nearby, but still she lingers there on her bench. She is still looking inward, and at the same time resolutely looking away from the small intruder, no more than a lump of nearly nothing still, crowding its way into her body. To look at it, to acknowledge it, is a dangerous thing she realizes she must never do if she wishes the life she has now, the future she wants to have with Stan, steady Stan, to continue as it is, mostly free of responsibility or care.

A loud boom sounds close by, too close, and Alice looks up in time to see one of the huge old maples on the green split in half, not more than fifty yards from where she sits. The noise of the heavy boughs falling to the ground is incredible, and Alice can smell the wood smoldering from her seat on the bench. A surreality slides over the park now, the world awash in a sickly gray-brown, reflecting the odd color of the sky overhead. Her hands feeling leaden, her fingers unwieldy, Alice gathers her things and rises quickly from her bench, but before she can take more than a few steps down the path toward the library, her vision is caught by the fallen tree—a flash of something…yellow linen? caught beneath the branches. She steps forward again on the path even as she registers this, but then she hears—just barely, as the roar of the wind pushing the oncoming storm forward is tremendous—a low moan.

Alice pauses for a moment again, both wanting to take flight for the safety of the heavy stone walls of the library, and at the same time some small voice within her imploring her not to ignore what she thinks she hears. Finally, she rushes off the path toward the tree, the heels of her patent pumps sinking into the grass and nearly tripping her. Is it…? It is: the linen belongs to a dress, an old rag of a dress, dirty and torn, and inside the dress, an ancient woman, tiny and skeletal, flesh poured over small bones, crushed beneath the tree. What in heaven’s name the poor woman is doing out here, Alice cannot begin to guess. She throws her handbag and the remnants of her lunch aside and kneels down beside the crumpled figure, making a motion to move the branches, brush them aside, the branches rough against her palms, but there are too many, the old woman too far for her to reach beneath them. Finally Alice grabs the woman’s hand, the only part of her she can reach through the mass of branches and debris.

“Ma’am? Ma’am? Are you—?” Alice pauses, realizing she is about to ask if the woman is alright, a ridiculous question as she can plainly see the old woman is most decidedly not alright. She takes a heavy breath. “I need to get help. Just—” Alice pauses and looks around, realizes the park is deserted, and they are positioned far from the view of any happenstance passerby. “I need you to hang on. Just hang on. I’ll be back.”

But the woman turns her face toward Alice, one watery blue eye half-closed, cuts and scratches on her brow and cheeks already swelling with blood. She moves her mouth, but Alice cannot hear more than a few garbled syllables as the woman tightens her grip on Alice’s hand.

An image of the sturdy black rotary phone on the library’s desk just a few hundred yards from where she kneels washes across Alice’s mind. So close, and yet, not nearly close enough—useless. A sort of desperate aggravation creeps over Alice’s neck and shoulders, clenching her hands into fists as she realizes she cannot leave the woman alone, but she must leave the woman alone; she cannot possibly move the woman from under the tree by herself. She looks around wildly again. The whole world has gone dark with an otherworldly kind of darkness, the sky crushingly close, the wind blowing in shrill circles around the two of them. Any minute it will begin pouring. Finally Alice turns to the old woman again who is watching her and mouthing words Alice cannot hear. She uses her librarian voice, speaking firmly, though she has never felt less authoritative, “Ma’am, I have to leave you for a minute, just for a minute. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And when her voice breaks, Alice realizes now she is crying, tears pouring down her face, choking her voice. She swipes at her cheeks with her free hand, and squeezes the woman’s hand again in her other. “I’ll be back.” She looks hard into the other woman’s eyes. “I’ll be back. Hold on. Just hold on.”

And then she is running, kicking off without a second thought the lovely patent pumps she’d paid a small fortune for just last week, pulling her skirt up over her thighs and running as she did when she was a young girl playing chase with Scotty McClure and Dode Farsham along the Kennebec River, her legs stretching, lungs burning. She runs toward the library, on the far corner of the square, yelling as she runs, the wind swallowing up her words. After what feels like hours, but in fact is only three short minutes later, she throws open the heavy carved oak doors and dives for the black receiver of the phone, her muddy feet slipping in her torn stockings on the polished pine floor.

It takes two attempts to fit her finger into the “0” and dial, but finally she makes it, jabbing her finger into the hole and pulling hard. “Lois, it’s Alice,” she pauses for a moment to catch her breath, “I was…in the park…by the bandstand…and a tree…a huge tree came down, I don’t know…wind or lightning…but there’s an old woman…God, please, just send an ambulance. Hurry!”

Alice slams the phone down on Lois’ questions, and runs into the storm again. Rain spits from the sky now, and by the time she reaches the old woman again, it is pouring. Alice grabs up the old woman’s hand again, groaning out her frustration as she watches the old woman fruitlessly trying to avert her face from the rain sheeting down. She yanks off her suit jacket awkwardly, switching hands with the old woman as she yanks off first one arm of the garment, then the other, unwilling to break contact with this stranger whose life has suddenly become so dear to her, and she drapes the jacket on the branches over the woman’s head, hoping to shield her from the worst of the torrent, unheeding that she herself is now soaked to the bone and covered in dark, black mud. “Hold on, you hear me? Hold on! You have a family that loves you. You must, and you need to hold on. Just hold on. God, please, hold on!” It becomes a litany, a chant, a plea, a prayer. The old woman watches Alice, who is crying again, and her eyes seem to fill volumes with words Alice cannot begin to comprehend.

See storm’s fury grow unabated around the two small figures waiting for their redemption at the fallen tree, and elsewhere: lightning strikes the steeple of the North Church a few blocks away, setting it briefly afire before the rain sluicing down extinguishes the flames, a small tornado bounces off the roof of the Brookdale Normal School, sending students and teachers alike screaming to the dark, damp cellar, the waters of the Kennebec rise quickly, flooding homes along Front Street, including the barn of Alice’s own house, leaving a flood mark on the dark hardwood planks that will never fade, even sixty years later when Alice will finally sell her home to a professor and his wife just up from teaching in New Hampshire and move into the new Green Hills Retirement Home over on Route 2.

And still Alice clings to the old woman’s hand, her eyes locked on the old woman’s, begging her to just hold on, hold on, hold on, and in the ancient eyes, sees not the inevitability of death, but life. And as finally, finally! the ambulance arrives, men in white uniforms making their way through the rain, towards where Alice and the old woman wait, Alice is aware that she is not holding the old woman’s hand, but the old woman is grasping her, tightly, desperately, unwilling to give up her last tight grip on life. Oh, how fleeting, how precious, how tenuous our grasp on it is!

Dandelions - Revised

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:21:00 -1000

The other Mary makes a brief appearance in this story:

“I will never marry. There, I’ve said it. Oh, it feels so freeing saying it out loud finally!” June Fairholm’s hand hovered for a moment, fingers curled around the delicate handle of the china cup. Violets circled the rim, occasionally dipping petals into the coffee within. The china had been her grandmother’s, and for a time it had sat unused, gathering dust in June’s china closet, preserved in the hopes of passing it on to a daughter of her own someday. June shook her head and set the cup decisively down in its saucer with a little shrug, smiling airily at her companion.

“That’s nonsense, June. Of course you will. You just need time is all,” but the other woman, Mary Smithson, didn’t meet June’s eyes. “By the way, did you hear what Peggy’s son said at the Ladies’—“

“No.” June cut her off, shaking her head. “No, Mary. I’m done, but that’s okay. I had my chance, and…Well, I chose badly. You warned me.” June smiled sadly down at where her left hand lay on the tablecloth, nails bitten to an unladylike quick, fingers bare.

“Oh, June. No, it wasn’t your mistake. It was Don’s.” Mary rested her hand over June’s.

“Perhaps. Perhaps. Though you warned me not to give my heart so easily. And now it’s too late. He’s taken it. Stolen it away, and I’ll never get it back again.” She squared her shoulders and repeated, “No, I’ll never marry,” testing the flavor of the words for the sour of regret. But no, there was only the sawdust of accepted fact.

Silence filled the air between the women for a moment, but it was the comfortable silence of long friendship.

June could feel Mary’s appraising gaze. Most wouldn’t notice the changes in June, but June knew Mary would: June was paler now beneath her makeup, her clothes hung a little looser on her frame. A few strands of silver showed through the part in her carefully arranged dark curls.

More worrisome, her light was gone. She felt that with every breath now. Sadness had enveloped it as surely as a dense fog dims a street lamp on a spring evening. Oh, June still smiled her smiles, and her laugh was as loud and long as it had ever been, but she knew there was almost a hysterical undertone to her laughter now. As if she were compelling herself to be happy. And she was.

As winter ebbed to spring and spring blossomed into summer, other friends praised June for her strength and courage in moving on, moving ahead. Only Mary saw how much these last months had cost her.

June said very softly, in the voice of one afraid of confession, “I see him everywhere you know.” It was true. She saw him in the most unexpected places. In the curve of the gentleman’s stomach gently pushing against a table at the diner where she ate lunch every Friday, in the raised eyebrows of the visiting pastor at Sunday services.

The worst of these encounters was just yesterday, when the gardener, explaining how he had routed the latest invasion of Japanese beetles on her Bradford Pears, suddenly smiled at her, and it was his smile, and June was lost, drowning, with no rescue line in sight. She’d had to excuse herself and dart for the house, where she locked the door behind her and curled up, right there on the travertine, silently keening with loss.

She dreaded the day Don himself might actually come back to town. Dreaded seeing him. Dreaded not seeing him.

Mary said, “I want more than anything for you to forget him.”

June gave a rueful, mirthless sort of half-laugh. “I want more than anything to forget him.”

“Well,” Mary’s hand paused in the act of lifting her cup, and she gave June a direct look. “Those damn postcards aren’t helping matters.”

Ah, yes. The postcards. They would pop up in the mail, sometimes once a month, sometimes more often. He was a salesman, moving frequently from town to town, state to state. He’d taken to writing her from whatever temporary home he had settled. In Miami now. Hope you’re well! or It’s chilly today in Portland. Just wanted to let you know I’m okay. Never: How are you? Never: Wish you were here. Always signed: God bless! Never: Love. She imagined his postcards were a way for him to assuage a guilty conscience, that he felt sorry for her loving him, and she hated him a little.

Though Mary had advised against it time and again, June wrote back with carelessly casual postcards of her own. She wrote, Doing great…glad you’re well! Never: I miss you. Never, ever: I love you, though she felt those words so strongly she wondered that the ink wasn’t infused with her longing. Just: Take care! June was always careful to keep a cheery tone to these notes, but underneath she felt her heart clench each time she licked another postage stamp, each time she heard the clang of the blue mailbox door slam shut.

It didn’t matter in the least that she understood he hadn’t been deserving of her love, had never wanted it. She understood she had chosen badly, and this was her penance.

He had even called just a week ago, months now since he left her. She’d been out in the garden, kneeling on the edge of one of her beds propagating her daylilies, when the phone rang, and she ran into the kitchen just in time to hear his voice, husky and familiar, on the Ansafone, an enormous automatic answering device on her Formica countertop. “Hello…Hi. June. This is…Well, this is Donald. Don.” A nervous laugh. “I just thought I’d…call and say hello. I’m in California now. Los Angeles. It’s sunny and warm, and you should see the palm trees!” Silence for a moment, then, “Thought you might want to hear my voice.” A pause, then more quietly: “I don’t know, maybe you don’t.” Another of those odd nervous laughs then. June stood with her hand on the black telephone receiver ready to pick up, wanting to pick up, but he hadn’t said he wanted to hear her voice. “Anyway, God, I never know what to say on these damn machines…I just thought you might want to talk. But…well, you can call me,” and he rattled off a number in an area code she didn’t recognize. Then the click of the connection being broken, the whirr of the answering machine cueing the tape for the next call. A few moments passed, and June realized her hand was still clenched around the receiver, knuckles white.

She didn’t call back.

She felt certain she was broken. That he had broken her. That she had let herself be broken. (For she couldn’t blame him; why should she?) Why she still loved him, this man who had proven himself unreliable, undependable, and undoubtedly had no interest really in any part of her love, was a mystery, but that she did still love him she accepted without question as proof that it was love. After years of chasing it, thinking time and again she’d held its promise of permanence only to realize what she’d thought was wheat, strong and hardy, was merely a weed, suitable for burning, she’d found it. This was love, this knowing you’ve given some part of yourself away irretrievably, without hope of return or repayment. And how could she regret knowing, finally, what it was to love? Even if, in the knowing, some vital piece of herself had floated away on an unappreciative wind, never to return. Like a dandelion seed, blown from its solid home by a careless child, a tiny white umbrella carried away, away, away from the place it calls home, until, even when it finally rests on warm, solid earth, even as it stretches its cells to connect with the soil, to grow, to become a new, stronger flower with thick stems and soft bloom, those stems flow with the bitterness of knowing it will never again be rooted as firmly as it once was.

A week after her lunch with Mary, as June sat at her desk on a gray, misty day pouring over seed catalogs, trying to decide what she would put in for the coming fall, she heard the familiar swing of her mail slot as her post was pushed through by Bill, the mailman. Shining out from among the bills from her grocer and the local department store, June caught the familiar gloss of a postcard, this one depicting a girl in a grass skirt set against a tropical background, emblazoned with the words, Greetings from the Aloha State! in brilliant blue along the bottom. Forget, Mary had told her. And she was right. He hadn’t wanted her, had led her on, had taken her heart knowing he didn’t really want it, and she, she had let him. And yet here she was, clutching another one of his damned regular reminders of his absence in her hand as if it were a lifeline.

June wasn’t sure how long she stood there staring at the card. If you asked her later, she could tell you that the girl pictured on it was wearing a fuchsia hibiscus tucked just above her right ear to match the floral top she wore, that the palm tree behind her was waving to the left, and that the sun was setting just over her shoulder, though June wasn’t really seeing the card. She was remembering.

They were lying on a blanket she’d stretched wide over the spongy grass in her garden. Bees buzzed lazily over the lupines nearby, and the sun was warm on her calves where they peeped out from beneath her skirt. Her chin was propped on the hand resting on his chest, and she could feel his voice rumbling beneath her. “Someday, I’ll take you there, June. I’ll learn to play the ukulele, and you’ll learn to do the hula. We won’t have a care in the world then, June. You’ll see.”

She didn’t turn the card over. Instead she thought, Forget.

Finally she tore the card in half, careful to preserve the side where his return address would be written, tucked the other half into a manila envelope she pulled from a desk drawer, and addressed it to him. She paused before sealing it and, after a second’s hesitation, stepped to the kitchen to remove the tape from her answering machine, slipped that into the envelope as well. She wasn’t sure how much postage it would require, so she used an entire book of stamps, carefully licking each one, making sure it was stuck firm. She didn’t want the envelope to return, and in the returning cause her to have second thoughts.

As she walked to the blue mailbox at the end of her street, her mind tried to conjure Don’s face out of old habit. Each time, though, before she had half-formed his image, she repeated Mary’s words, I want more than anything for you to forget him.

And as the mailbox clanged shut behind her, she thought only, Forget, and knew it was time.

She made her way home in the spring sunshine, newly emerged after the rain, smelling the scent of warm earth rising up around her, opening itself to the sun, life’s cycle there in the soil waiting to begin again, and again, and again.

The Other Mary - Revised

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:14:16 -1000

Still tinkering with this one, but it’s almost in its final state:

The buzz of voices—“Thank you for calling VitaMix Customer Service our hours are Monday through Friday 8am to 4pm and you can also get us on Saturday from 9am to 8pm though you won’t get me on Saturday that’s my day off that’s right my name is Joan have a nice evening!”—and the tat-tat-tat of Smith-Corona typewriters hovered over the third-floor of the Vitamix Household Division Customer Contact Center. Some “associates,” as the employees who spent their days fielding one call after another were referred to lolled at their desks, feet up as long as the boss wasn’t lurking nearby; others stood while they talked, peering over the field of desks laid out before them, seeing, but not seeing; still others sat upright at their computers, tapping away at keyboards, complaining in murmured tones to the voice in their headset about stuck typewriter keys.

Finished with her call—My blender isn’t crushing ice anymore—Mary replaced the heavy black receiver on its cradle. She checked the small black watch she wore on her right wrist. The tiny tin hands pointed to 7:57 p.m. Her phone began to ring again. Her shift was over in three more minutes, but now she heard, Bob, her boss, call from his office, “You going to answer that, Mary, or shall we just let it ring til they hang up?” Soon he would pop his shiny bald head out of his doorway, smile with his fleshy cheeks (but never his eyes, no, never with his eyes) and ask so-sweetly, ”Oh, are we leaving early today, Mary?”

Oh, how Mary loathed Bob.

It was Wednesday, the worst day of the week usually because she was only halfway through. But now it was almost over, and Thursday tomorrow, then Friday, her least-detested day of the week, and she was done. For this week, anyway.

She hated her job, too, though it wasn’t Vitamix per se that she hated. The blenders seemed to work well enough (she’d received a 35% discount off of her own reconditioned Vitamix 3600 model, and she liked it just fine). It was the endless ringing of that ugly black phone, the desk, the sameness of one call after another. And Bob.

7:58 p.m. now. “Mary…?” She heard from Bob’s office. Damnit.

She sighed and grabbed for the receiver.

She’d taken the job right out of high school with the idea that she’d earn some money for college. Six years later, though, and she was still here, spending day after day at the faux-oak desk, surrounded by the same slate blue (“Blue is calming!” She could hear Bob chirp) walls, taking call after call while Bob listened in and offered passive-aggressive assistance. “Now, that last call was clocked in at three minutes, fifty-seven seconds, Mary. I think we could have shaved twenty seconds off that call by leaving off the personal niceties, don’t you? They don’t need us to ask them about their lives, they just need us to fix their blenders. So let’s work on that, shall we?” Always we, with that fleshy smile, as if he were holding her hand on every call. It disgusted her.

Mary scowled at her typewriter as she spoke into the receiver—a no-no according to Bob: “Smile! And let them hear the smile in your voice!” came his voice. “Thank you for calling Vitamix Customer Service. This is Mary speaking. How can I assist you today?” She wondered if Bob was monitoring the call.

“Yes, hello. I seem to be having some trouble with my blender. It’s making a terrible sound when I try to use it.” The woman’s voice was high and sweet. Mary pictured a woman in her late twenties, early thirties. Probably with hair in the shade of blonde only children and women who visited a pricey professional hairdresser could wear.

“And may I ask your name?”

“Mary. My name is Mary, too.”

“Well, hello, Mary Two. Okay, are you near your blender? Could you run it for me, so I can hear the noise?” Mary could hear the woman moving, pictured her kitchen: shiny new Kitchen-Aid appliances, terrazzo tile floor. Wall oven with a built-in timer. In her mind’s eye, Mary saw real oak cabinets, custom fitted over Formica countertops, probably filled with shiny kitchen gadgets, delicate glassware and porcelain from Tiffany. In this Other Mary, Mary pictured the life she may have had, were she not stuck here at this hideous desk taking call after call after call, two-hundred seventy-two days a year, even working Christmas Day because she made double-time-and-a-half then, all so she could pay for her pitiful one-bedroom studio, with its sad second-hand Sears-catalog couch, lawn-sale dishes, and ancient countertops, on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, the arm-pit of the Midwest.

“Okay, sorry. I’m in front of the blender now. You just want me to turn it on?” The woman’s voice had almost a nervous quality to it, eager to please. Did she have a husband who belittled her? Small children nagging at her? Mary searched for some flaw in what she imagined as this woman’s otherwise perfect life.

“No worries at all. Yes, if you could turn it on, please.”

The other Mary acknowledged her, and then the line was clogged with the sound of the blender. Mary could hear the tell-tale sound of bearings rubbing together unnaturally. She waited for the woman to turn it off.

“Okay, it sounds like I need to get a new blender canister out to you. The motor is fine—it sounds like maybe the bearing on the bottom of your canister has worn down, and that’s the awful noise you’re hearing.”

“Oh. Oh, okay.” Now the woman’s voice had a chastened tone, as if she had done something wrong. Mary imagined the phone crooked between the woman’s shoulder and her ear. Maybe she was too thin, her Chanel blouse and slacks hanging on her frame. Her hands were probably thin, cuticles gnawed down, fingernails bitten to the quick. Or maybe not. Maybe she played tennis with a personal instructor five mornings out of seven, and her body was toned in ways Mary only dreamed hers could be. Maybe the other Mary had a perfect French manicure, hands smooth and soft, nails shaped by a her very own manicurist each week.

Mary had never had a manicure in her life.

Mary’s watch now read 8:05. Bob would be popping over any minute now, tapping his watch impatiently. God forbid she should take herself out of Available early, but God more-forbid she stay long enough to claim overtime.

“Let me just get some information from you, and I’ll see if we can get that canister right out to you. Can you get me the model number from the back of the blender?” More shuffling on the other end of the phone line, and now she could hear another voice, a child.

“Just one minute, honey, Mommy’s on the phone. Here. Sit at the table and I’ll cut some apple for you.” This said to the child, then, “I’m sorry, I missed that. What do you need again?”

“The model number. It’s on the back of the blender. Can you read it off to me?” From the child’s voice, Mary gathered it was a boy, maybe four or five years old. She saw blond curls in the same shade as his mother’s, china-blue eyes. Small, chubby legs swinging under the kitchen table.

Mary almost missed catching the model number as the other Mary, the other her read it off.

“Okay, there we go. Oh, a Vitamix 3600 Deluxe. Very nice. And your name and address, please?”

The Other Mary dutifully replied, “Mary Smithson, 21465 Muirfield Place, Portland, Maine 04937.”

Portland, Maine. Mary saw a large Victorian, white with dark green shutters framing mullioned windows, perched over surf-wet black boulders. The summers would be cool and dry, winters cozy in front of a wood-stove as the ocean pounded the snow-frosted coastline. Nothing like the roasting hot summers and bleak, gray winters of Ohio.

Mary could hear the child’s voice again in the background, this time more insistent. “Listen, I’m so sorry. I really need to get going. Do you need anything else?”

Mary felt the urge to manufacture something, anything, to keep this other Mary on the line. She could almost feel the late spring sunshine of the May afternoon pouring through the kitchen window over the sink, smell the vanilla scent of chocolate chip cookies baking in the Jenn-Air oven, hear the deep rumble of the other Mary’s husband as he walked in the back door. He would wrap his arms around Mary, nuzzle her neck while she leaned back into his warmth, using her free hand to trace her fingers through the thick hair at the crown of his head. Their son would smile at them, and it would be perfect just perfect all so perfect. Longing was clawing up Mary’s throat.

“Hello? Are you there?”

Mary cleared her throat. “Yes, yes, sorry. Just finishing up.” And Mary typed finished typing the form and pulled it from her typewriter. “Okay, I’ll get this right over to our Warranty Verification Department. They should be in touch within the next couple of days. Thank—”

But the other Mary cut her off, “Okay, will do. Thank you!” and click. Mary was still for a moment before she, too, hung up the phone, smoothing her lackluster brown hair. She kept telling herself she would get her hair colored, cut by a real beautician, instead of doing a walk-in at Penny’s, add some shiny highlights maybe, those would be smart, but she never had time, much less money. She rubbed a knuckle at the headache suddenly throbbing in her temple

Mary noted her watch again as she filled out her timesheet. 8:15 p.m. Where had the time gone?

She looked up to find Bob standing over her, leering at the way her breasts pushed against her blouse. Mary felt her cheeks heat. “Do you need something, Bob?”

She could see uncertainty furrow Bob’s shiny brow at her pointed question. Then it was gone again, as if he had never had an uncertain day in his life. “You were thirty seconds over the average call time on that one, Mary. That’s four times today.”

Mary felt the pain in her head circle again, thought again about the other Mary, with her shiny appliances, her shiny life. “You know what, Bob? Just shut it. Shut it hard.” And ignoring his snorted intake of breath (Sounds like the pig he is, she thought), she turned off her desk lamp, tucked the timesheet into the top drawer of her desk, slung her purse (a five-year old Bergdorf Goodman bag she’d found at the Goodwill store on East 55^th) over her shoulder, and walked out of the office, leaving Bob standing by her desk, mouth open, as she rode the elevator down into the night.

A Little of My Mom s Voice

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:09:00 -1000

I was not born from my mother. Instead, when I was 25, she made me her own when she married my father in 1997. She sat me down the day after they became engaged and told me that I didn’t have to call her “Mom,” but from that moment I was going to be her daughter whether I liked it or not. I liked it just fine, and soon, she became the only mother I’d ever really had. She loved me and she was my mom, the only mom that I had ever really known, the only mom that mattered. And when my children were born, she was the only grandmom they ever really knew and loved.

My mother never allowed me to use the word “Step.” “If people need us to explain how we’re related, they don’t need to know,” she’d say. “Enough said.”

We became very close over the thirteen years she was in my life. We laughed together, we cried together, and in the way of women who love each other so much, we fought our fair share, too. But mostly, we just were there for each other, the kind of there that sits with you quietly when you’re having your worst day. My mom has been with me during the lowest points of my life and the highest, even when, as her mobility decreased, she had to be there over the phone and in spirit.

My mom was the real reason I decided, at the age of 31, to go to college and get my degree. She never stopped supporting me, watching the kids when I still lived in Virginia, reading my work, listening while I vented about a particular professor or assignment. In 2006, I wrote a first person narrative in one of my first classes, based on a conversation (and later a more in-depth interview) with my mom about her memories of Glen Echo Park, a small amusement park that had its heyday in the 40s and 50s, in Glen Echo, Maryland. My mom, of course, lived under segregation for most of her childhood. Here are both the narrative, and my mom’s corrections. I can hear her voice so clearly as I read her response.

My writing:

Have I ever been to Glen Echo Park? Sure, I’ve been there. I’ve been there and watched the white families streaming in. I’ve been there and heard the music from that big, antique carousel they’ve got. I’ve been there and gotten the barest whiff of fresh-popped popcorn on the stale air at the back of a bus on a summer’s day.

Back then, black people were free, but not really. We weren’t slaves anymore, but we weren’t free to live. Not like other Americans.

My grandmother, she used to take us girls out somewhere every weekend. For entertainment, of course, but really, she always told us, for education. It was really important to her that we were educated. Sometimes we went to museums. Sometimes we went to the monuments and memorials. I remember that we went to General Pershing’s funeral at the Capital Building once.

We were poor, and there wasn’t usually a lot of money for anything. So we walked a lot. Sometimes we’d walk all the way from U Street down by the zoo, downtown to meet my mother at the Hamilton Hotel. She worked as an elevator-operator there for $35 a week. It felt like forever-long a walk on those hot afternoons, and then we had to forever-long walk back together, the soles of our shoes sticking to the burning cement, my brothers shoving at each other until my grandmother smacked them with the back of her hand and told them to behave like civilized men.

The day we went to Glen Echo, we had to ride the bus. It was a long trip sitting in the back, bumping along in the heat. I didn’t realize when I got on the bus that only the white people sat up front. I guess I was too young to notice.

Anyway, when we got there, and all the people up front got off and made their way to the ticket lines, my grandmother told us to stay put. My sister Bebe whined about it. “Why are we here, Grandma? I want to go! It’s hot in here!” I could see through the window the flashing lights of the bumper car arena, and a white man carrying big, bright balloons just inside the fence.

“We can’t go in, Bebe. We’re not allowed.” My grandmother’s voice was deep and strange.

“But why did you make us come all the way out here then?” My sister was sassy and spoiled. She was pouting. I don’t think she really got it, but suddenly I did, and what had started out as an adventure was abruptly humiliating, beyond humiliating, that we were all still sitting there, sticky and sweating on an empty bus.

“I know you can’t go in there, but I want you to know it’s there.” My grandmother looked each of us girls in the eye, one after another. Even Bebe swallowed her tongue. “I want you to know it’s there.”

I don’t know that I realized before that moment, and though I was ten, and that was a long time ago now – I’ll never forget it – that I was different, that we were different. Maybe it still took awhile after that for it to really sink in. Maybe it was lots of little moments, like my daddy having to go into the back of restaurants to bring food out for us when we were on vacation, or the time my mother, with her silky hair and green eyes was gently told by police officers who mistook her for white to “move aside, ma’am” while my uncle was arrested for being black. Maybe it was when I watched a cashier throw my daddy’s dollar bill away when he accidentally touched the white woman’s hand as he handed the money over the counter.

But I do know I’ve been to Glen Echo Park.

And I’ll never forget it.

Her response:

Hi Dor,

This is pretty good. One difference, no, two. We never got to go on vacation. Whenever we were traveling it was because there was some tragedy in my Dad’s family all the way down in Florida. We couldn’t afford vacations. There was only one exception, once we drove to Canada to see Niagara Falls. We couldn’t stay overnight but we did get to see Niagara Falls. My paternal grandmother died while we were away so we had to make the long trip back home and down to Florida. With the exception of this one trip, we could only afford old, beat up cars that held out no promise any one of them would make the trip without an expensive breakdown and an unexpected overnight stay in it. We did travel to Virginia, to the farm of a family friend on one occasion or two. It was there that I was kicked in the shin by a cow. Being an urban girl and not knowing any better, I stood too close to it and the cow didn’t know that I was behind it. So, I guess that’s educational enough. Don’t stand behind big animals.

The other difference was when we walked downtown, we walked double file (all five of us) with my grandmother holding the hand of the smallest one, my brother Craig. The eldest two of us, Hazetta and I led the line. We didn‘t dare turn around or step out of place unless we were spoken to. No smacks on the back of the head. We were sternly warned not to “cut up” for fear of the threat of death when we got home if we were anything less than perfectly well behaved. I remember that all of us were dressed to the nines. All of our shoes perfectly polished and clothes neatly pressed. Perfect to the last detail including the big, fat bows in our hair so that anyone passing us could admire the sweet, well behaved and well dressed children. (My mother always prided herself on her very well behaved and perfectly groomed children.)

We really enjoyed these walks in spite of the rigid discipline and the hot evening air. We didn’t know any better. Usually my mother was able to buy a Popsicle for each of us by the time we got home on these hot summer nights. That was worth waiting for. We enjoyed each other and the scenery of the excursion. We were together. We were well and we were loved. Very much loved.

You embellished the story well. I could only add these two details for you to include if you so desired.

LUV Mom

My mom, Heloise Poitier Gies May 22, 1942 - December 3, 2010

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:05:09 -1000

My mom, Heloise Poitier Gies

May 22, 1942 - December 3, 2010

Green Orchid Lei … Part of the opening piece for my final...

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 22:02:18 -1000

Green Orchid Lei … Part of the opening piece for my final ENG625 project.

Photo

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:15:01 -1000