2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) (8 page)

Sometimes love comes easily. And other times love comes so
hard there is nothing left of you.

NEWLYWEDS

"Listen to this."

"Oh God, come on. No more of that
bullshit.”

"Just one."

"I'm tired. Why are you always trying to get
better at everything? Just let it go." Electricity cost a lot. So
they tried not to use the dryer much. He sat next to the pile
of clean laundry on the couch. Faded colors were stacked on the
bottom and strewn around his head were light colored towels that
fought the humidity and pretended to dry. His boots were near the
door and his feet were buried in a bright pile of plastic.
Children's toys. "I swear that librarian must be damn sick of
looking at you every day."

She laughed and stood up. "No more than I am
of you." She looked at the dishes and bottles in the sink and then
turned her attention back to the television. Her hair was weak and
hid behind her ears sheepishly. She moved around the small room,
waiting.

He tried again. "So what do you think about
this weekend?"

She looked at cans of pasta. Her mother
never served pasta from a can. She looked at the vegetables and the
tiny jars of baby food. She held onto a little gold cross on a
necklace. She pulled it from one side of her neck to the other. She
held in her mouth and rubbed it over her lips absently.

Shutting the cabinet she said, "I can think
of better things to do than listen to your brothers talk about
their cars and sports and all their other bullshit.”

He flipped channels. Passed the news. Passed
the evangelists. Slowed at a cartoon and landed on a special about
Siamese twins.

DRESS
UP

The engineer (and his girlfriend)

walking head tilted away

self-conscious and a tube

of yellow plans in the left hand

(her glove in his right) rush down

a paved alley wasting

youth in a hurried game of

dress up.

But just another of the bubbles

she keeps up and can't wait

for twenty years of looking

out a kitchen window,

hoping the diamond won't

get washed down a drain.

But I can't deny

how happy he seems or that

she has him this morning

at 7:37 clenched in her own

plans with a left gloved

"Good morning, honey" hand.

I wish I had someone to watch me get undressed.

JUST SO

Sometimes as a child I was left in the
library of Saint Joseph's College. I never read much but I wandered
through the old, still stacks smelling the paper die. I climbed on
the radiators, sometimes burning the insides of skinny legs to sit
in a window and watch the trees let go their leaves.

On brave days I eased
myself down a steep flight of stairs and looked at art books in the
orange half-light, scared of the studying students. But almost
every time, after I had looked up my birth announcement from
The Republican
on
microfilm, I would go find Jodi or Mr. V. and ask to be let into
the record room.

A smile, and the librarian would finish with
the stamping or rubber bands around cards or checking out a student
or phone call question. Then the slowish figure would move back to
a desk or an office in order to find a set of keys that seemed too
loud for a library.

And I followed the swinging skirt or the
skinny pants, always watching the tile change in diamonds from
black to maroon and back again and again. Until the light swept up
an old wooden floor and crossed us over onto gray hard linoleum.
And the keys would come. "Maybe this one. No, let's try it with the
longer one." Or, "Maybe I grabbed the wrong set."

When the dark door opened past the groove in
the floor a room sat up drearily and welcomed us for a visit. (Even
though it would rather not have.) Two windows for light and wall
shelves made for display. "Pick anything you would like to listen
to, dear. We will find it." Patiently.

But I always chose the same thing. I never
wanted music. And I never wanted too much yesterday laughter. So we
found the place where I saw what I needed and used the chair to
reach it again.

Rudyard Kipling's
Just So Stories
. I guess,
now, I could blame him for his faults as a man or for teaching me
that very European empirical morality that determines so much of my
worldview. But at the time, the LP sat thin in its bright orange
package and always remembered me. Even when I had been out to play
every day for the summer or hadn't seen it for a winter of school.
The librarian's special walking away after the locked-up door.
Trusting me and confident I knew the players well.

I pulled at an edge of the wooden room and
sat down amidst the thick blond lacquer with my chest close enough
to the table. The record came out and went spinning away. The
headphones were turquoise and plastic and old. They fell sometimes.
Too big for me, but they could usually be conned into place.

And the voice began always the same with,
"On the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a
Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and
the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate
and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really
truly twirly-whirly eel."

That voice. Deep and buoyed by the daddies
of the world stretching strong arms between each rhyme. Laughing,
almost, all the time. And keeping you caught in that
almost-fallen-asleep-but-still-have-to-listen place. My legs gone
swinging under the table, and my elbows turning red from the weight
of my head in my growing up hands, leaning with the headphones
toward the voice. Pressing him closer into my world. Always divided
from the needle scratching on the record, around, and around, and
around.

The stories spun on. And the voice followed
suit. And I lay my head on the cool table—just to look out the
window for a while. “And the Parsee lived by the Red Sea with
nothing but his hat and his knife and a cooking-stove of the kind
that you must particularly never touch." The tree shadows reached
down and whispered their hushes to me from the ceiling, then the
walls, then the floor, and out again leaving behind their indigo
gossip. "The suspenders were left behind, you see, to tie the
grating with; and that is the end of that tale." My legs cold in
the dark blue evening curled against the hard arms of the chair
looking for somebody's lap.

"Once upon a most early time was a Neolithic
man. He was not a Jute or an Angle, or even a Dravidian, which he
might well have been, Best Beloved, but never mind why. He was a
Primitive, and he lived cavily in a Cave, and he wore very few
clothes, and he couldn't read and he couldn't write and he didn't
want to, and except when he was hungry he was quite happy. His name
was Tegumai Bobsulai, and that means,
‘Man-who-does-not-put-his-foot-forward-in-a-hurry;’ but we, O Best
Beloved, will call him Tegumai for short."

And then the sleep came until Mom was
finished with her music or Dad had cleaned up the lab.

NEW ORLEANS
SIDEWALK

I took the dog and walked down the street
toward Bob Dylan's house in order to see his flowers. I took my
camera I suppose as an afterthought, but nonetheless I did take my
camera. Standing there among the old oak roots, where the dog
seemed eager to stop, in front of the fence of security cameras
defining a great man’s perimeter, I wondered at the huge banks of
white azaleas. Six feet tall and more wide than that. Sun on each
but cool stone still on the porch. And I wondered what Bob Dylan
looks like or what songs he sings and could not fill my mind with
acceptable answers. The place was for sale apparently and my
friends couldn't be sure that Bob Dylan really ever lived
there.

The pictures aren't very good. If the
azaleas look good you can't see the house. If the house is included
it seems to converge at its roof. And none of these images show the
beauty of that endless green lawn, so rare in a city of that size.
And the quality of the photos was not improved by the simultaneous
facts that I was standing on broken slabs of the sidewalk, being
yanked by a dog leash, and wedging my camera through the cast iron
fence.

After that, I was glad not to worry with the
bother of Bob Dylan's house anymore. I walked on down to the
cemetery and let the dog jump at spiders in the tall grass. I
walked down to the river staging this or that version of Mark
Twain, Jeff Buckley, and the slow tankers' working men still.

I liked the lady in a bright white shirt walking too fast with
a piece of pizza smothered in grease.

HE PROPOSED AND
THEN

Him: Just tell me. I’m always supposed to
know what to do when you don’t tell me shit.

Her: Like you don’t know.

Him: I don’t.

Her: Then you’re blind.

Him: Don’t be condescending to me.

Her: Don’t be a martyr.

Him: Whatever.

Her: Do you know what women are?

Him: What? What kind of question is that?
You think I’m going to answer that?

Her: Do you know what women are?

Him: They’re people.

Her: But do you know what they are?

Him: Are you going to get all fucked up and
philosophical on me again? Because I’m sick of it. I don’t want to
hear all this bullshit.

Her: Exactly.

Him: Fuck you.

Her: Don’t you walk away from me.

Him: Fine.

Her: Fine.

Him: Tell me about women. Who are they? Get
on your feminist high horse. Shit, tell me you’re a lesbian. I
really don’t care at this point. I don’t give a fuck anymore
because this isn’t love. I don’t know what you do to me but it
isn’t love. It’s degenerate. You’re a fucking infection.

Her: Nice.

Him: No. No, I don’t care. I’m sick of being
nice just because I’m supposed to be. You can say whatever you want
and I’m just supposed to take it. But I am done. So go ahead. Tell
me all about what women are, because it’s as good a way to waste my
time with chaos.

She looks at him. He is red and shaking,
helpless with misunderstanding. She flinches and takes a deep
breath in spite of his pain.

Her: Chaos?

He looks at her and waits. 

Her: Chaos is okay. It’s more natural than
any of your world. It is the only natural irretrievable
progression. It’s okay. And we aren’t wasting our time. Or at least
I’m not wasting mine. This is just what Wall Street uses to control
the world and it is TV and it is classes and work. It is not rocks,
Babe. It’s not mountains or clouds.