2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) (5 page)

Hollace looked at the pictures. They verged
on pornographic. He wondered why this girl married such a rather
ugly young man. She was very pretty and judging from these
photographs he was not an all up to her standard. His mind wandered
as he stared blankly at the pictures. How could she possibly ride a
motorcycle in that bizarre dress? Resolutely he informed her, "You
could do much better than this boy. I suggest getting an
annulment."

"A what?"

"An annulment. Void your marriage. Have it
taken away. Erased."

"But I love him."

Hollace said nothing. He held the strip of
pictures up for her to see.

Tears formed in her eyes and she took the
liberty of ripping Hollace's breast pocket handkerchief from his
suit and blowing her nose in it. "It's so cheap to just quit. I
want to work it out. What if that didn't mean anything to him? He
loves me, you know."

Not quite believing her, Hollace refrained
from pointing out that running from the situation might not be how
to work it out. "Some things are not worth fighting for. Sometimes,
on days like this, one must simply assess the situation and resolve
to walk away. Simply let the oppressive nature of the situation be
what it is and submit to it." Hollace finished his drink
resolutely. "Then, and it will no doubt be in short order, you will
rise above the thing to new heights. And you will be the better for
it."

"You're one of those people that think every
bad experience just builds character and crap like that, huh?"
"

"Possibly." He did not like feeling
cornered.

"I'm more of the ‘shit happens’ school
myself."

Nodding repeatedly in a mildly drunken
state, Hollace showed his understanding.

"Or maybe I should just go balls out and
fuck somebody raw. Don't you think? Then we'd be even. Then we
could just go on." She recanted when she saw he was shocked.
"Annulment. Yeah. I guess. How do you get it?"

Hollace explained what little he knew and
gave the names of service offices that should certainly be able to
give her assistance. He was a resourceful man.

They bought two more drinks and talked about
her options as the flight made headway through what breath we
share.

“
But it's so embarrassing.
God. It's so embarrassing."

Hollace pointed out that throwing tantrums
in hoop skirts on an airplane might be in a similar vein. The girl,
obviously drunk, laughed. They laughed together about their first
impressions of each other. Hollace explained how thoroughly she had
drawn the attention of every other passenger. The girl was uplifted
by the story and pleased that people had been paying attention to
her. She swore she had been unaware. Maybe twenty-four. The girl
apologized for making fun of his purple socks. They most certainly
were plum. And besides, she liked them.

The girl decided to change into something
more normal so her sister wouldn't freak out when she met her at
the gate. The plane began its descent.

He complimented her tattoo. They talked
easily as she unlaced her boots. He commented on the dexterity she
had with the laces and she reminded him how long she had been
wearing them. She showed him the blisters the boots caused and he
noticed the silver ring on her second toe. It had been a gift from
a friend. It was from Athens. The friend went to Greece every year
with her grandmother to visit her great aunt. Hollace listened and
stared at the toes that she wiggled over his lap. Ten toes with
rosy gold polish.

She stood up in the aisle organizing her bag
and digging to the bottom for a pair of jeans. She leaned over the
bag. Hollace watched her. Her springy curled hair danced around her
shoulders. Sitting against the seat had caused them to become
ridden with static electricity and more tangled. Hollace imagined
this might be what she should have looked like anyway, waking up
after her wedding night. He looked at the way her neck stopped and
spilled out over the collar bone and ran into two simple
reservoirs, her breasts, caught in the cups of that strange 19th
century bodice. Without thinking he reached out and ran his finger
from her chin down over them. She jerked her head up. They stared
at one another.

"So beautiful." His lower lip was caught by
his teeth.

The girl grabbed her clothes and went to the
bathroom to change.

Hollace was unsure what had just happened.
He did not meet the gaze of the older woman across the aisle and
instead turned his face to the window, to the back of the seat in
front of him, to the tray-table’s latch, then into the seat next to
him where the girl’s backpack sat agape. A bra hung out from the
bag. Hollace put the bra into the bag, touching it with deference,
and looked out the window. He felt the pressure change in his ears.
They were going down quickly.

When she returned the girl sat straight in
the chair, seat belt fastened, legs crossed away from him, flipping
through the onboard catalog without seeing the merchandise. Hollace
wished there was something he could say. His fingers ran up and
down along the crease of his pants. He pursed his lips repeatedly
and tried to breathe against the constraints of his collar around
his Adam's apple. The plane landed with a mild jolt.

Nothing was said.

Still seated, the girl was ready with her
backpack on as they taxied to the gate. Hollace waited to retrieve
his briefcase from under the seat. He did not wish to disturb her
again. After waiting for the door to open the girl pushed her way
to the front of the plane to retrieve her skirts. Hollace sighed
and picked up his dirty rumpled handkerchief from her seat where it
had been left, used and forgotten. He hoped she would not notice as
he passed behind her at the front of the cabin.

But she saw him coming. A flight attendant
was trying to make sense of the hoops and billows of material.
Thankful still, the girl smiled at Hollace as she gathered her
skirts from the flight attendant’s arms. “Well, be off to your
exploits then. And hand out a thousand of your Outstanding Balance
business cards."

Allowing the bustling business people to
rush past them Hollace looked at his clean black shoes. Then he
cleared his throat and directed his attention toward her. "Actually
no. I am afraid you will be the last to receive one. I was fired
over the phone at five-thirty this morning." He put his culprit
hand in his pocket and cleared his throat. “I found an error
somewhere in excess of a quarter million dollars on the company
books recently. Apparently the higher-ups did not appreciate my
accuracy. Or perhaps having fully realized the error, they needed
to downsize in order to cut costs." And he was past her, moving up
the corridor with dignity. "Good luck to you, though."

The girl stood tangled in pink taffeta
wishing and unwishing. She dumped the taffeta in the gate entrance
and called after him, "Hollace!" He was already quite far ahead and
she had to call many times. But he returned earnestly and granted
her request to wait in the bar while she made a phone call. In fact
made two.

"Hey, Larise. Yeah, I told Mom last night …
Of course she freaked. She gave me the whole
why-can’t-you-be-like-your-big-sister talk and then started crying
and all that routine … Yeah, I'm happy. Happy enough. I just didn't
want to bother with putting together all the invitations and shit …
I know … The boat thing wasn't what I had in mind either … Well you
can come out in June. We're going to have a reception and
everything then when his uncle's family visits.”

She looked toward Hollace. Travelers
streamed through the corridor reading gate information, hugging,
hurrying, showing their children the planes and the big windows,
and talking. There were everyone: Indians and Blacks and Asians and
Hispanics and Whites and Old People on Carts and Hollace waited for
her in the bar as though he might never leave. There was nothing on
the table and he seemed to be unaware of all those drinking around
him. Instead his head was cocked slightly and he stared contentedly
at an elevated television.

The phone conversation went on, “No, don’t
worry about it. That was a stupid idea. I'm at the hotel. He's
asleep. I just wanted to call and tell you that I'm not really
crazy enough to leave him. I just got pissed off when I found those
pictures. But he said it didn't mean anything. Kind of a last fling
before we got married I guess… Yeah, I'll call you in a few days."
And then she called Jake.

“
I know. I know. I'm sorry.
Don't cry. I'm coming home tonight and everything's going to be
great. Okay? I love you, too."

She smiled as she hung up the phone. Hollace
watched her pulling her wedding ring off and shoving it into the
pocket of her jeans and wondered for a moment what he was getting
into, but he didn't really care. He picked up her backpack and
carried it on his shoulder. It looked odd next to his conservative
suit. With his briefcase in the other hand, he walked upright and
gray. She danced around him with curving hips and bright raggedy
clothes. He paid for the taxi. She nudged him in the ribs. She
rearranged his hair. She said careful things that allowed him to
laugh, and easy vengeance was her consummation

MEANING-MAKING

I am beginning to find my way along the
border of life. Ducking between moments and shifting from one
person's shadow to the next: sketching. I am scared and am
lonely—wondering if it's a good idea. Sometimes people notice me
watching. I suppose I should care—should stop maybe. But I don’t. I
am trying to see how far I can pursue the rest of regular life
without losing these stories with their breath and heartbeats.

Writing is a careful wonder that is rarely
modulated in the way one would please. Inspiration can come when
production is impossible, and it can leave altogether—if
indefinitely. A writer must be conscious, listening, patient, and
always an invested gatherer of life. At the same time this writer
must rip life from reality and position it within his or her work
of art. A writer can communicate with an unknown number of
strangers but, perhaps more easily, can fail utterly the moment
awareness of the reader is lost.

A writer must know his or her own
limitations and be willing to believe they do not exist. So the
writer lives in a dream. Caught in creation’s space between sleep
and work, the writer seems lazy. Staying in bed for days. Leaning
on comfortable bars. Drinking coffee over immovably crossed legs.
But during all this time the writer is ready to give up tangible
life to pursue an improbable vision with total focus and control.
When the time comes to put words down, this writer must be strong
enough to survive the wrangle of self with perfection, art, and
isolation.

It is a bleak attitude, but a writer must be
able to invest every resource in a story which may never be read.
Worse than this a writer must be willing to begin with aggressive
conviction knowing that the work may not come out right and very
well end up abandoned, to say nothing of what else could have been
done with the many hours of frustration, diligence, and ideas
lost.

I am wishing all of it were better and not
so bulky. I am wishing I didn't have to start so small. I resent
the work no one will appreciate. And I am frightened of what I
might say. Yet my dreams of writing are stale. Action on any level
is preferable to regret.

And so it may be transient. It may fail. It
may rip me apart. But this is the beginning of what I will
write.

ON A
SWELTERING SUMMER EVENING

On a sweltering summer evening when the
campus at Purdue was swarming with conference attendees, Kathy
Bates stopped me for directions to the armory. She was a pug-nosed
woman with a peeling red face accompanied by a rotund gentleman
wearing BluBlockers. I knew she was Kathy Bates because a yellow
name tag hung awkwardly from her shirt.

It sucks to be lost. I said, "It's just the
other side of this one. That long brick building."

To which she quickly replied, "Like all
these other brick buildings?” It was acid but jovial, some mask for
being snide.

Shocked and nodding, I moved on. In a voice
too high-pitched to go unnoticed, the man in BluBlockers gave an
apologetic thank-you over his shoulder. I walked home reminded that
Purdue is one solid edifice of baked clay and wondered why a layer
of gasoline swirled dirty pink translucent disruption on top of the
hose-water running out from the petunia planters in front of
Krannert.

DATELINE ’99

The Midwest has been incredibly hot this
July; I suppose partly in anticipation of the millennium. In all of
this heat many people have resorted to the utilization of air
conditioners. I have never been a big fan of climate control. This
is not born of environmental awareness or of a fiscal nature to
save tax dollars on electrical resources that are sapped by all the
public offices. The fact of the matter is, and I'm rather
embarrassed to say, I just think air conditioning is creepy.

So in the sweltering heat of the past month,
I have not had air conditioning at home or in my workplace. No air
conditioning has allowed me to wallow in such a delirious state of
naked inactivity that I have never found myself happier.

And whether or not it’s related, I will make
an effort to lose what social graces I have acquired over
twenty-some years of wearing a breathtaking corset around my lips.
I feel that it is best to invite the world into my true self—a
crazed bitch with weird paranoia. In the words of A.D., "I'm
all about salvation … just not an army of it." So I’ve been saying
the wrong thing in social situations more and more often. Take last
night, for instance.

(Sorry for the interruption but I have just
found a patch of blue fur behind my cat's ear. It seems as though
she has gotten into some sort of writing utensil, possibly a broken
highlighter or one of those nice liquid ink pens.)