War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) Page 3

  40 — Action/Reaction

  Catfight: Rosie the Riveter and June Cleaver. More and more it is a woman-world I cannot grasp. Where would the wind even be? Where should I listen to clotheslined bedsheets flap-snapping dry? I run into every kind of day looking for this most-me to be, inviting implemented ideals, setting humane traps for what’s best. But wherever I am, there are no catalog photos of terra-cotta tiles nor any gorgeous bare feet on warm radiant-heated kitchen floors, no little voices to overhear when it’s highly inconvenient to be interrupted, no green things to fiddle with in their season.

  I'm somehow crowded out. More and more the ‘Merican 21st century feminine ideal relinquishes its hold—the grief of never finding her is like trying to remember eyes. Why can I not walk into her skin? How can that most domestic be most wild?

  The trap is empty every time I check it. Why go looking for pelts? We are the children of the political correction. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, is it possible to live ethically in action? It’s too easy to say women still live in fear. If I win that means you lose, and so then I won’t play. We are worried that our actions will have fallout and consequences, not results and fulfillment.

  Light may penetrate, but we don’t.

  Why kill and stuff something just to have it look lifelike? The way these worlds open up it does not seem to be tragic. And yet, knowing somehow, it begins drifting slowly away. If I see a woman, fabulous woman, somewhere in my mind, and she is happy and industrious, presentations about the new economy are everywhere with cookies on three-tiered trays but I cannot see her face or walk right into her skin. .

  Why even catch and release? I look out a kind of window toward her, suspended by the impossibility of accessing that perfected taxidermy life.

  10 — Just your usual woman

  There were thirteen pens in her purse; other than that, nothing worth mention, just your usual woman where rooted hydras thrash.

  91 — Wasting Your Time

  Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

  I think about my mother sometimes. It’s difficult. She’s someone who has done a lot for me, but, for some reason, she is always trying to get more credit than I am willing to give. You know?

  I’m in this weird maternal economy. I don’t quite want to call it emotional extortion. That’s extreme. But. Like. I give a little credit and she wants more. So then I let a couple weeks go by and don’t give her any. Run out on the rent, sort of, sometimes, too. Frankly, I’m not exactly sure what she wants credit for. I’m thinking about giving it to her anyway, just to get her crazy ass off my back. I mean, when I give a shit, I try to give her credit, but, honestly, I feel like I did most of everything myself, even if I wasn’t paying for it for twenty-five years. But really, Mom didn’t have much to do with the finances.

  I do have some memories of her that are great. Like I remember having water tossed from a jug in the front seat onto me and my sister in the backseat at random points of family trips since there was no air-conditioning in our car. I remember three generations of our family going into high-tide water together for a silent loose-skinned dip at sunrise. And she played these sea chanteys on the harmonica. So that’s all really great. Not quaint. Not paper dolls and Cabbage Patch kids. Nothing girly. But stuff like laughing at bats that drop somnolent from gas-station-lawn trees and wake startled in the hundred degree dust.

  We tend to laugh our asses off despite the tragic realities. And so anyway, I was thinking about calling her up and telling her about these memories that I have in some sort of verbal communication. Maybe like a story, or a conversation that includes gratitude or something. Even like do it on Mother’s Day or explain the import to more people than just Mom. You know, really make her feel commended and special. Is that a good idea?

  Dear Wasting Your Time,

  Never mind.

  13 — Trop Gaté

  I rent a space in a garage a block from my building where familiar men, emigrants, take my car every night and tuck it with care into subterranean slot B-46. After the meeting but still pissed off at a colleague I thought, “What does it matter?” The garage door opened and I pulled up to the line where cars should stop. I got out and handed a tip to this new valet with the slight smile and too-young-to-have gray hair.

  Women are part orchid, no matter how much we disown ourselves. I can’t abide it. But, true enough, almost as if to keep my heart supple with femininity this new parking guy told me a story about him, his mother, and his ego.

  Names are important. Men who park cars are in no hierarchy. David’s lost weight. Fakhry is getting older and older, and I really don't know how he manages the stairs. Ribhi and I understand each other. He’s a playwright, Arabic. We share cologne-drenched hugs in the middle of the night, green almonds from Jordan, classical music, and a solidarity of laughing and crying together through so many stories of his thirteen-year-old son, who slipped up and threw a brick through school windows, enraged.

  It was a one-time thing. Fathers must act. But, how?

  Anyway, the guys I knew weren’t there that night. Weren’t there to witness how incensed I was about what had happened at the meeting. I had to rein it in, be cordial to the new valet who has that gray-white hair, is smiley and pudgy, and wears those roundy-black glasses.

  I didn’t know this pudgy man's name. I should have.

  I got out of the car, listened to the reminder chime ringing out repetitively, not for an instant letting either of us forget those keys in the ignition. The new guy said, "Is your mother still in town?" He met her on Friday. I said, "Yes. We're having breakfast in the morning."

  His name tag depended from a uniform-issue band of nylon around his neck: Salman. What to do? Lately, I've felt less inclined to cross boundaries with the guys at the garage, to learn names. Being me, polite enough, and endlessly curious, somewhat resistant to discussing my mother freely, boundaries be damned, I deflected his question with one of my own. Near the open door of my silver car, I said to Salman, "How 'bout your mother?"

  He said, "Oh, no. She passed away a few months ago."

  Did I want to know? The ignition chime kept ringing out. I made my decision, leaned into the car, pulled out the key. Sound stopped resonating against concrete walls. So he said, "Let's see. It was 31st, August."

  He revealed how everything had happened. I heard about the emergency call, the quick trip home, the sister that sat at the mother's bedside twenty-four hours a day. The coma. The tube that went into his mother's mouth and how her chest heaved on the ventilator. He said, "My sister asked her to move her foot if she understood." The foot moved.

  But that was all a few days before Salman arrived at her bedside. By the time he was there, she was non-responsive. The foot could not move anymore, or didn't, or something. He doesn't know, for sure. Has to speculate.

  Except. Except! Then he paused, pulled a finger across his temple, said, "I don't know the word."

  I said, "Tear."

  “Yes. Tear.” After he had caressed his mother's hair, and held her hand, and talked to her for hours, his sister said a tear fell away from his mother's eye as he was leaving.

  He said, "This is why our parents are so important to us. Especially me. Because I was trop gaté."

  Fils a sa maman. I didn't understand. He explained in broken English, laughing at his own admission. I finally got it. "Oh. A mama's boy!"

  “Yes. Trop gaté.”

  Trop gaté. I have to say, I thought of the man I love. He’s not a man with a waxed chest popping hundreds of disco-ball cherries into drinks. Not one with wolf nipples against any of my smoky smudged luminizing eyes. He’s a regular guy and with him, I didn’t dare turn my synchronized-swimmer limbs into vaginal flowers. I just wandered away and wondered later if he might be a bit of a mama's boy, too, somewhere in his own lithographed cityscape. But I don’t think he’d ever tell me a story standing in some garage, the way Salman stood next to my car so easily talking about his mother.

  Witho
ut really wanting my mind to wander, I imagined me and the man I love leaning together against harlequin jester pillars during a charity balloon release: him with his linen newsboy cap, me with my adhesive eyelashes peeled off and temporarily stuck on a pincushion. There I was: thigh-high patent leather boots for him under Canis Major still staring down the barrel of a slosh-steaming iron that lost its UPC code and haughty purpose.

  Doesn’t matter. Can't. I slowed the treadle, let the pink thread run off the bobbin, zip animated through the sewing machine needle’s eye, and out of my life forever. With sewing skills atrophied pieces of the material separated, slipped. The story sketchers lost their nerve.

  After all that seemed wrong about perspective drawings that widen away from their closing-in focal points by putting interminable train tracks on casters—ones that just let everything splay open, regardless of any concrete sleepers—back in the reality night garage I asked the new valet, Salman, “And where did you have to go to be with her?”

  I listened so hard to get my fear-rage-release wish in his answer:

  He smiled a positive ribbon charge, nothing coy or inappropriate, just an electric fence in a lightning storm with subliminal flying buttresses and plenty of cleavage, not quite completely repressed with all those bedtime-lap gargoyles who surely deserved their happily-ever-afters, and their curses. Oh, sweet trop gaté. Where was your mother 31st August?

  "Algiers."

  8 — Debriefing

  Every Friday before they released us to go buck wild after being oppressed all week they debriefed us. I stood at parade rest with the other soldiers. We sweated through our BDUs in the Texas heat and endured a suicide lecture.

  Imagine a little, tiny, drowned-rat-looking-mustached, bourbon-skinned drill sergeant standing at the front of the company. He kicks the cement, shakes his head, paces. The rant ends with, “There’s always a solution. You might not like the solution. But there's a solution."

  Then, after the week’s recap, he screams at all of us. "Do not trucking kill yourselves this weekend! I do not want to have to call your momma. No motel maid needs to deal with finding your head exploded in the bedsheets. And I'm not going to do the dang-blasted paperwork. So if you get any trucking ideas about breaking into the ammunition shed, or hanging yourself in a hotel room, or slitting your wrists in the shower bays, think again!

  “You will be here Monday morning. You will stand up. You will be counted."

  That’s what he said.

  14 — Blue Butterfly Falling-Out Barrette

  The organ music from a tape recorder on a banged-up, cherry-veneer folding chair in the funeral parlor skips sometimes. People pretend not to notice. They don’t want to upset Elise, the young wife of a man who died in a motorcycle accident six days ago. He was too young to die, too old not to know any better, etc. At the wake she stands guard by his casket, for a few last loyal hours.

  Honey, we’re all so sorry.

  Sometimes, Elise, a mourner, or someone else obliged to be in the space to witness the effects of no real cause, looks over at the baby girl, almost a toddler now, but still with a white-ruffled diaper butt. She plays on the floor near a long-stored row of more cherry-wood-veneer folding chairs. Silken hair curls, continually escaping from a blue plastic barrette shaped like a butterfly. She doesn’t have enough hair to hold it in place for long. The thing just hangs onto those few fine strands of baby hair that almost always need to be brushed again.

  Her mother’s pewter pin stay-twists, holds too much wool inside its clasp.

  Their eyes meet.

  She can stand the shock of sudden death. But not her daughter’s big baby eyes. Elise begins to cry, feeling too much nothing and too much all.

  Dressed-up people keep coming. Elise gets it together, holds in her emotions, does her duty. In the middle of another hug, the special pewter pin escapes from its clasp and stabs her near a clavicle. She jumps back from the unintended consequence of the embrace and manages to reclose the pin with blind fingers below a strained bent-to-see-something-so-close neck. She does her best. The pin hangs then, slanted, on a pinched lapel. That’s lovely, someone says, not quite to point out the pin’s haphazard arrangement, worse than before.

  Elise thinks of stolen future days, begins to cry, again. The person who hugged her, who made the pin stab her, leaves, the obligation having been met. Elise cannot get it together this time. Tears flow. Friends shuffle, look away, disperse.

  An older man stares at her from a far corner, then catches himself in the fixation, goes out the side door to have a cigarette, even though he shouldn’t. He should want to quit.

  Inside still the white-ruffled diaper butt, patent leather shoes, and blue butterfly falling-out barrette come crawling out with their toddler curls from under a wooden folding chair missing some veneer. A nearby ancient matron’s voice says, Why. There you are!

  Not wanting to understand quite so very much from that tone of voice the white-ruffled diaper butt moves back under the row of wooden folding chairs. Back away from the Why. There you are! ancient lady, who—after a despairing minute after accosting such a shy child—falls asleep, doesn’t notice three little fingers working their slow, curious way into the brass-hinged pinch point.

  Elise stops shuddering convulsively when her mother takes her elbow and whispers. The sequence repeats. The pewter pin on Elise’s lapel pops open again. Instead of allowing it to stab her this time, having adapted, Elise hears the little rotating clasp click over, feels the pin loosen, steps back from the three-hundredth hug. She lets the pin fall, lost.

  Instinctively Elise’s eyes travel to the floor, demanding to find the pewter gift with all its significance among the weeds in the ornate carpet garden. Unnecessarily, several men—old and young, all hovering, useless—leap to action: leaning over, each hoping to be the one to pick up the precious pin, to offer it back, to be helpful, to do something other than flirt with the floor.

  Still snoozing, the Why. There you are! ancient lady amply shifts in her seat.

  Three fingers, baby girl almost-a-toddler-now fingers, twist and pop. Soft bloody broken bones get crushed somewhere inside the chair.

  Why. There you are! dozing wakes startled, reacts haphazardly to the wailing scream of the child underneath her in agony and so changes instantly to, Oh my dear Lord in Heaven. I didn’t know you were down there, Sweet Pea. Dear Heavens. Oh no. Oh God. Don’t cry, precious girl. I didn’t mean to. I am so sorry.

  Hugging no one in that moment, unwilling really, Elise moves away from her post near the casket, walks over to her child in another slow-motion refusal to panic, picks the little girl up ruffled behind and all, and lets her bleed onto the best white silk blouse she’s ever owned for two days.

  Red face screams over a shoulder as the pace picks up and the young mother hurries down the aisle of chairs, through the door, across the patchy August grass to her car, and all the way to the county’s emergency room.

  What can anyone do?

  At the funeral home people disperse as quickly as is appropriate, which is unclear. The old woman who was in the chair is a wreck. She gets comforted by Elise’s mother, who hates her, always has. Even they go, individually, after a while.

  The flowers stay.

  The last person, an older man, not a great-uncle, but someone who would have probably stopped over to the house anyway, picks up the blue butterfly barrette. He thumbs it open, feels its tiny open-hinged plastic bed of nails, clasps the thing tight again, and drops it, already forgotten, into his pocket.

  16 — Mothers of War

  An anarchist sat on my lap screaming, "Why?"

  I said, “Hush, little baby, don't say a word. Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird."

  The anarchist threw the very thought on the floor saying, "I don't care. I don't want it."

  I said, "Fine. Have it your way,” and watched her throw my refusal against the table leg with her own. Without caring, without wanting anything, we both let willingness break into three
irreconcilable pieces.

  And then she blamed me, for everything. Began with her agony. Wretched momentary girl.

  I said nothing. Could not bear the responsibility bouncing on my knee, but a patrolling Marine lit a sleep-deprivation cigarette between us. Her crying stopped. I felt less infringed upon for a moment but then, remembering that he was really trying to quit smoking, the Marine put the burning thing down after drawing one long last breath. The anarchist went to her crib for a nap and the Marine extinguished that single cigarette—more fragile than most gods—somewhere not that important near the bounds of freedom.

  18 — In Medias Res

  For instance, there is a child crying in the back of a classroom. This is not the child of any Madonna. This is a regular kid, kind of a stupid one without a lot of opportunity. He does not raise his hand. And he might not even be a boy.

  Regardless, he is unseen.

  Don’t get all freaked out. I’m not hallucinating. He’s not a ghost, goblin, or angel. He’s just an idea. He’s that theoretical conception of unfulfilled potential. He is no real human fruition—a pedagogical apparition of twining potential and incapacity, unteachable.

  This child though—this idea crying in the back of the room—really is an unbearable nuisance. He seems to alight, and finds himself on the ceiling tile, near the computerized projector, bumps up against that 2,000 ANSI Lumen beam of tricolor light—blue, green, red—and then sweeps down, screeching as loudly as any silence ever can.