2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) (10 page)

But now what? So many barriers between us
keeping me from understanding or helping or from just giving you
hand-holding hope behind that tree while you wait. Divisive
realities.

It's hard to be friends sometimes.

So now here we are together for a moment
behind our cottonwood trees, one on each side of the world, one on
each side of twenty years. And all I can offer, all I can give you,
is that I know what it feels like to be waiting there. Those
moments under the cottonwood tree where the leaves chop sunlight
into rain. And the wind having fought his way through the chatty
leaves reaches your skin simply as a sigh-puff.

To be there quiet. To be there alone.

I know that, young sir.

But I will not wish to share your anguish.
Ever. Or to be hiding in that bloody kind of soil. And I don't know
what to do, now. With these pictures on my late-night bed. You are
gone, now. I suppose. And the cottonwood leaves have fallen.

PAY DAY

She sat with her shoulders forward. Slumped
over her too-expensive food and listened to her fate sitting at a
table nearby.

She may never have noticed them. But when
you are eating alone, even in an expensive and luxurious
restaurant, people tend to steal your space. They know you have no
real reason to defend it: you without your anyone who wants to come
for dinner. And so they come up from behind your chair. They take
the space you cannot catch. The space you cannot see. And because
this is the place they are intent on taking, you shiver and recoil
from their proximity.

The girl sat rigid and the woman, deep in a
discussion with her friend, leaned into that most precious space.
Threw her coat on top of the girl with a curt meaningless apology.
And insisted throughout the night on causing the backs of their
chairs to click together but only once in a while. Like water
torture. Or the way clouds slow down when you are planning their
route across the sun.

The woman explained life to the girl.
Talking a little too loudly. Insisting that she hear. Jealous of
her thin wrists. Even more envious of her naked face and hands.
Their drifting voices told the girl: College would fade. She would
be fat. She would have kids who hated her. She would want to cry
for no reason on the most beautiful days. That's what they said,
but even so the girl sat alone, treating herself to a dinner too
big for her paycheck. It would have been nice: the thick old
carpet, the crystal, the soft thin beef. But instead she was alone
and unable to escape eavesdropping on the middle-aged women behind
her.

From across the table and faded blond,
"Well, wasn't it just the funniest. How we have changed since then.
I can't believe such a young life could possibly exist in anyone's
heart anymore. Can you?"

The first tilting her head and smiling
piteously with only a hairsbreadth between the back of the girl's
chair and her own, "Of course not." And with her neatly folded
peacock tail napkin she cleaned the sides of her smirk with
affected blots and dabs. She must have thought that rich people
would approve. She must have wanted to be rich. She must have hoped
someone was watching. After thinking too long and with no reason to
say it, "Crib sheets have taken on a completely different meaning,
haven't they?"

It was sort of funny. Funny to think of
women cheating the world with their over-and-over bassinet babies.
Soggy morals and too little time to think of something better to
say. But the other woman didn't understand. She had cheated too
much in school and done way too much baby doll laundry to hear a
connection so maddening.

It was inescapable. The regular women
dressed up in their going-out clothes. One with tacky lipstick. The
other a country girl from New Hampshire. Only because she kept
saying, with a condescending laugh packed between her cheeks like
cotton or a bite too big to taste, "You know me, dear, just a
simple country girl from New Hampshire."

And the other laughed the same cotton laugh
and pretended to relate. She did relate of course, she had to, but
never really admitted how similar they were. Never really allowed
herself to be the same. And so the laugh was pretend, even though
it shouldn't have been. (You know what I mean. They're
everywhere.)

And so the girl waited. Trying not to chew.
Sucking on her salad. Her fork elbow glued to her ribs. The
waitress was late to be somewhere else so the girl didn’t ask for
ice cream. And when she stood up her chair knocked against the
older woman's shoulder.

The woman spun on the girl and stared hard
into the young eyes silently with her scolding, "College will fade.
You will be fat. You will have kids who hate you. You will want to
cry for no reason on the most beautiful days. You will never learn
to paint or act or be able to get into the best places. You will
have to wash and feed the dog. You will never be thanked. You will
have to give away your beauty to someone more deserving." That's
what they said, those middle-aged eyes.

And the girls stared back, "Perhaps, but
maybe I am not as weak as you. Maybe I will be glad to do it. Maybe
I'll always enjoy eating alone and I won't have to meet friends I
don't care about. Maybe I'll be kind enough to appreciate a world
that gave me constant change."

Screaming eyes. Hateful and strong. Only for
a second though. The waitress at the next table over only had time
to pour half a glass of water and laugh with her, "No ice, please,"
customer.

And the girl, having bumped the woman's
shoulder, and insisting on overcoming whatever it was that made
them the same, smiled and touched the selfish woman's arm. "Excuse
me, ma'am. I didn't realize you were there." So close.

The woman looked away and hid her shoulders
in the hollow of her Sunday coat. The other woman sucked her salad.
No one can really afford a manicure. Careless spending. Needless
expense. It would have been nice though, thick old carpet, the
crystal, the soft thin beef.

Intellect is Imagination waking in adulthood.

THE SOUND’S
EDGE

Here they are again: baby clams with pink,
purple, and orange quarter-inch personalities. They're not all
alive. Piles of tiny clam shells extend down below your feet in a
cloud-colored shimmer given by some two-inch wash of the water. In
a handful most are still alive, going on with the work of tickling
skin. Some are newly crushed, learning a strange kind of dying,
bloodless and slippery, thrust between curious fingers not quite
wanting to help. But then those few. Past it all already. Tiny
death leaves. Pairs of angel wings. And the tiny deaths leave pairs
of angels' wings. No mamas laughing at memories and no reason to
follow the tide. But such a beautiful tossing tomb there, two
inches under the waves' own kiss goodbye.

RIVERHEAD

I know that a garden has died. Caught tight
by a country road someone insisted on paving so the chickens forgot
to come home for the ax and scald, the feathers plucked and then
that potato field covered in sod long after the fourth child (quiet
and chewing fast) knew she was the runt of their
not-enough-for-dinner fish porches.

I know that garden has died. Caught too fast
by hungry water eating its way through the cliff and up under the
house where a lemon yellow rowboat—named a dead sister—sleeps
upside-down in the sand under a little ark, by the red broken heart
wheelbarrow, handles sideways, and sandy cool.

Fishing line wind chimes hang dead-tired of
winter waiting for the doors to unlock.

But a garden has died. Forgotten in the sun,
like the blue-lidded bag of clothespins turned brittle (and the
horseshoe crab) with the mildew and must; and the flag does nothing
about screens lifting away from frames fraying, wire by wire, like
family.

A garden has died downed with the black
cherry corpse of the hurricane season. No one’s watching the Rose
of Sharon trying to hide in tall grass whispers left by an
inattentive scythe, rusting in a shed, which needs to be painted,
desperately.

I know that a garden has died.

LINGERIE
HANGERS

I found another flaw in our culture.
Hangers. Especially hangers in the lingerie section of any major
department store. Not hangers in lingerie stores, because they are
specialized enough to have nice ribbony hangers with brass knobs to
hold things in place. But in department stores, where everyone is
supposedly accommodated with one fashion or another all in one
place, there is simply not enough room for fancy, wide, ribbony
hangers. This leads to a sad state of affairs.

There is a very good reason why you
sometimes find bras along the side of the road. Take for instance
this afternoon. After shopping for some time I was in a state with
which you are all probably familiar. My hair was all staticky from
pulling my shirt over my head so many times. I was too hot. I was
hungry. I might have had to go to the bathroom. The fluorescent
lights were making me vaguely ill, and both of my hands were going
to sleep as a result of having so many heavy plastic bags hanging
from my wrists.

Then I remembered I needed a bra.

Fine.

So of course being a rather small person
with not much to offer in terms of business for the lingerie
department, my size was on the lowest rack, very near the floor. I
squatted down among my shopping bags and pushed my glasses up with
my shoulder.

Women are so enmeshed with retailers in a
wrangle for self-esteem that the sizes on underwear are nebulous to
the point of meaning nothing. God forbid a tag state the obvious.
The retailers stick up pictures of tan, elongated, windblown
underwear models and then try to appease every woman's wallet by
assuring her she is one of them. This is accomplished through the
use of this tag-code, which like any good tool of sabotage, is
constantly changing. And with all the crash diets, exercise
schemes, and preggers/postpartum expansion and contraction women's
bodies are changing equally as much.

The bra-tag code is based in a sort of
reality: chest measurement and cup size. But the thought that this
is in any way a determination of oneself and a tool used to quickly
move through the merchandise towards what is most adequate, to say
nothing of what may be desirable, is a farce. Then there are the
countless added variables, like cute heart-shaped clasp-in-front
rhinestone closures with bows glued on or racy tiger stripes
rendered in twelve shades of hot pink.

Whether or not the bow will probably come
off in the first wash or the hot pink tiger stripes will show
through even the most dowdy turtleneck and cardigan, let’s leave
out preference altogether. Let us focus on need.

A woman approaches a rack looking for a bra.
Not a bra for a date. A regular bra to wear to school, work, and
whatever community event to which she’s promised to devote much too
much of her time. She gets caught (by her coat, her kids' coats,
her purse, her shopping bags, and her child's hand, all of which
she is holding) on every rack of teddies and negligees, which
establishes the initial self-consciousness. Regardless of whether
she is a woman who wears complex and deviant underclothes or is a
woman so put off by the thought that she refuses to look at her
four-year-old son for three days after he pulled the crotch of a
black velvet hi-cut brief like a slingshot and flipped it into the
aisle, seeing teddies and being engulfed by their insinuations of
pleasure and one's inevitable lack of ability to live up to such
fantasies run totally counter to trying to replace a bra which has
begun to fray along the top, needs a safety pin to keep the strap
on, or has bent its hooks in the back making it dangerously subject
to springing off and discharging its contents at inopportune
times.

So after making it past the frilly sea-foam
green and black things into the actual realm of bras in a rainbow
of what are supposedly flesh tones, she must make another set of
decisions. Now I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the fact is,
women will never be liberated. Who has the time? Brand, color,
strapless, cutest, wide strap, demi-cup, mastectomy, skinny strap,
cheap and trashy, things that do a bra's job but aren't really
anything at all except hooker uniforms, lacy, racer-back, refined,
stretchy, front clasp, push-up, print, see-through, over-priced,
grandma industrial strength, elegant, padded, cartoon character,
cotton, synthetic, mesh, elegant, athletic, striped, underwire,
handmade, miracle, nursing, etc. You might think that some of these
decisions are not necessary to make.

Since I am without children you would laugh
at my mentioning the nursing bras, but it is absolutely essential
that a woman be on the lookout for the bras that she does not want.
These antagonists have a way of ending up on the counter with the
other bras and looking very normal until one gets home, loses the
receipt, has only dirty or wet laundry, and tries to put them on.
You can surely imagine how bizarre it might feel to be sitting in
an eighth grade history class trying not to draw any
testosterone-riddled attention as one tugs at the snaps and zippers
in the cups of an inappropriately-purchased brassiere. However, it
is my theory that it is because of such mistakes that women learn
to feel any level of comfort at all when wearing the teddies and
such with their zippers and snaps and inappropriately-placed
everything.