War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) Read online

  The world asks just a little too much of that pissed-off kid. He’s making no sacrifice. He's doing no duty. He is killing himself on behalf of the world. He is acting out, might only need Ritalin, if we didn't need an army.

  23 — Cold Open

  I jumped up, rushed to the front of the classroom, grabbed the green pen, and wrote on the whiteboard. "Nobody like me would go on a trip like that." It was all there: her whole story. But it only existed in her mind, not on the page.

  She felt it was all there but, for us, there was nothing. No desperadoes, no too-tender thrust-back expediency, no fortune-telling short haircut with a diet cream soda while spinning pottery, no embalmed twelve-year-old angels.

  So I asked, "Who is nobody?" She looked at me, dumbfounded, stunned, with a smirk that said silently, “Well, you know exactly who 'nobody' is."

  And yes, I suppose I’m judgmental enough and can make the right assumptions. I knew her so I saw him, her nobody. He was slouched, roaring, strange, original, expectant, with tendinous hands in his pockets, a beard full of late-night jazz, a ringleader on his way to Gooseberry Falls out on the North Shore leaving Duluth, and yet always there he was as a rapid inhospitable fan party rig at the flower market.

  What else could I do? I had to take a stand. I filled in no blanks with what was implied and insisted she tell me the specifics of the story in her head. “Who is nobody?" I didn’t want to force her to define, to describe, and explain. But she had to. She said, "Family, friends." Okay. I said, “What is ‘like me’?” Again, she didn't get it. Wasn’t it obvious? Didn’t I just know by looking at her? Beautifully, dramatically, she tossed arthritic liver-spotted hands around. Perhaps she’d been a dancer but I didn’t know, just waited, listening. And there it was, her answer: "Well, I was eighteen, in college, had just gotten married, and it was 1956."

  So. I was wrong. There was nobody at a flower market.

  I kept pushing. "What is a 'trip like that'?" She got frustrated, became irritated by my pressure. "There were no roads. It was just jungle. My mother must have been scared to death but never said a word. And there was a coup as soon as we crossed a border."

  Ah, yes! Beards full of jazz. Tremendous. Having written most of this on the board, I was able to show how a piece of nonfiction can be built by moving beyond the ego-based assumption of a person right in front of you and toward a shared understanding that can stand on its own, offering itself up from the page without any storyteller present.

  Give me a quilted flint and jaw. Some impossibility like harmless rooms. A leaking pipe. Let me touch that week-old beard by reaching for the sound of it.

  We coupled her initial generalization to a more detailed description that rooted her reader in the scene, the time, and did pretty well to really set the stakes for a trajectory in her piece. The first sentence of her nascent essay called out to readers: Nobody like me would go on a trip like that. The next sentence was straight from the vat of grapes I jumped into with my bloomers pulled up and my skirts tied high around my waist. It was a sentence built of her own frustration. When given to me all the words were offhand, dismissive, caustic, and explanatory. But when left for the reader, they were finally enough. Thank God for the words. Even if only offered at my insistence and extracted by my prodding, because there it was now and so easily it moved the reader on with, “My friends and family certainly hadn't expected an eighteen-year-old girl, in college, would do such a thing, would drive so far— all the way from New York City to Chile. Certainly not me after just getting married, before I ever had a real shot at medical school.”

  25 — So They Say

  Why introduce yourself as, “You know how it is.”? So push, push, push on generations. In whatever mirror presents itself, there is a surfacing from endless me-too Mom-comparison. Listen. “Yes. Yes, so they say.” Look. Aimless amidst the uniformity. Eyes adjust like they do in the night and linger on the variations: the tall girl’s insurmountable fear, the old woman’s impossibly hopeful laughter. Over there! Her eyes are blue and hers are sleepy from exhaustion and there! another pair haunted by muzzled memory. Isn’t it something how that one moves? Play by play and play by the rules, girl. Remember self-sacrificial things like, “No, please, you go ahead,” wearing blank name tags. Finally you see how it will be for you in this newest Woman, how you will terminate frustration long enough to wear the flattery, finery, and suffocation of cast-off hand-me-down corsets.

  26 — The Hypericum

  Come to my father’s funeral! Why? Why not? Come for the music, the hypericum, the pencil sketch of the young owl balanced on its easel, the crisp fall day, the friends, the family, and to see the borrowed pall over that cherry casket. Oh, come on. It’ll be wonderful. There’s so much to see, to do. So many people to meet, to know. Well. Except my father. You can’t meet him anymore, can’t know him anymore. But. Aside from him, you can meet almost anyone he really knew well.

  At the wake the night before look: at my mother standing near his corpse talking to some neighbors we’ve known for years. Mom, a biologist same as Dad, explains how my father studied the immunologic function of green-boned tree frogs. Listen! Do you hear her? She’s saying how they collected frogs in the swamps of Suriname. He needed them for his research, his doctoral dissertation all about pigmentation. So then hear her tell how pleased he would have been, how much he would have appreciated the shade of cantaloupe green he turned when he died.

  Listen with our old neighbors as Mom explains how red blood cells rupture when they are no longer oxygenated. She’ll tell you how it is, how constant the processes are. Rupture normally happens to red blood cells every few days—nothing lasts forever. When you’re living, alive, vibrant, vigorous, hungry, and tired, the cells never rupture all at once for that lack of O2. Day-to-day the liver tidies up, takes care of it, handles everything without being asked, clears out the goners. Mom keeps explaining it to our old neighbors: Only at the end of life does biliverdin really have a chance at pigmentation. “So he turned the most beautiful green.” Fascinating. To her. To us? You? Are you terrified with the neighbors? I think maybe you are. So I walk up very slowly, fingers intertwined, but loose. I separate my hands, place one on my mother’s shoulder, and one on the arm of our nearest old sweet neighbor. I say, “Thank you so much for coming.” And then I stand there with my mother. There is nothing left to do that night at the wake, except—Come with me! We’ll slip into the banner room the very next morning. We’ll wait, worried, scared, but knowing it is impossible to avoid this funeral at our familial home church! So. You have to come with me. It will help me be less terrified. Please. Hurry into the sanctuary in a rural town. And hide with me in that bright banner room.

  Cry for a moment if you want to, or just stand there stunned by familiarity, seeing a child’s landscape through an adult’s eyes: all the white candle cupboards, red carpet, and hymnals lit with temperate morning light undeterred by the windows’ old frosted glass. Don’t kneel. Not yet! Stand hidden, stroking the emblazoned, embroidered fabrics that hang so quietly in their unseasonal disuse. Reach out! Go on; go ahead. Touch the textile sheep, lamé wedding rings, felt triplet crosses, percale Pentecost flames, satin white doves with ribbons in their beaks, metallic threads escaping the Star of Bethlehem over a manger’s loosened stitching.

  Don’t worry about the funeral service. You’ve been to a hundred before. Oh. You haven’t? Well. They’re all the same. Someone says something. Not just something, always says the right thing, only not very well.

  Good. Now. It’s over. So. Come further. Come down those linoleum stairs that I ran up every Sunday in little patent leather shoes. Not the ones I wanted but the ones we could afford. Follow these few familiar men who carry Dad’s casket down, down, down, so incrementally, so slowly, and shove it with exhausted reverence into the back of a hearse. Don’t think about the suspension. The shocks are good enough. Just grieve with me. Hold a nearby hand when you just panic a little as a sound from twenty years ago returns. No?
You didn’t hear it? Let go, then, I guess, if you can’t hear Daddy’s intentional footsteps making their shined approach toward weekly grace.

  47 — Man/Woman

  It’s okay to be a man. It’s okay to be a woman. But what exactly happens if I tell you, “A friend of mine was raped on a balloon to the moon.”?

  When I tell you this, what else do you want to know to help form your opinion of the situation? Does it matter if my friend were a man or a woman? Does it matter if it were during the day or at night? Does it matter who was drunk or sober? What of risk-taking, beauty?

  Does it matter if a child were conceived? What if my friend makes a decision?

  Will there be a cordial reception?

  The balloon to the moon is right on the safest way back to a home with pine siskins at the feeder.

  28 — The End of Grief

  For a few years I sometimes got it and won,

  found a child’s game forgotten

  in my hand. But I no

  longer hold my father’s nose

  (my thumb)

  between two fingers,

  absentmindedly.

  29 — Cold Sunny Morning

  A pleasant-looking woman dressed for a Saturday jog—no work, no arrangement of hair—jerks the muzzled face of a dog so it will perennially, assuredly, absolutely attend to her and her Saturday morning perch on an abandoned bench chained to the ice cream parlor.

  30 — Inquiry

  What constitutes a globe?

  31 — Diary with Burning Ellipsis

  But no, wait, the word is too charged. Let me put this in such a way that you don’t just write the people off.

  27 — Ladies who Lunch on Disposable Plates

  My mother and I arrived, recently, at an impasse. Chicago, disturbed as ever, hurried and swirled around us. We sat, stalemated, at an outdoor table after eating cheap Chinese food off paper plates with black plastic forks. It was hot, easily ninety degrees and humid.

  If you have not ever been divorced you may not know its painful exposé of one’s familial underbelly. High-reactive heartbreak originates in the present and stretches back into history—indiscriminately implicating relatives and selves along the way. Mothers resent it, which daughters resent. So there we sat.

  Stilted and pissed off, we stood up and threw our paper plates away, moved out of the shady side of the street and crossed Adams to wait for the free tourist trolley.

  Musing to herself without compassionate consideration of my situation my mother said that recently at a wedding a woman from Mom’s office told the story of her own wedding.

  In the telling, my mother gradually became more and more enraged. She explained how appalling it was that this woman—who had since had the nerve to get divorced—had the audacity to sit there and tell this story to my mother, in a church. It was savage. How dare she! And! Not only did this woman tell her own story of her own wedding to my mother but, unthinkably, she did it in front of her daughter, too.

  My mother only believes in stable subjectivity.

  So maybe it was the heat. Or her careless lack of compassion. Or the fact that if this woman had been married in the very same church where she was later attending a wedding, of course it would remind her of the day and she would mention it, no matter what happened subsequently. I said, “Why can’t she tell the story of her wedding day just because she later got divorced?”

  My mother said, “You’re too hot."

  32 — Laissez-Faire

  I get up and rummage around on the coffee table digging through fifty unopened pieces of mail and discover a plastic bag from six months ago. In it? A well-designed box of Broncolin NF cough drops. Why? I don’t know. It was an impulse purchase.

  These are Hispanic cough drops and I am white.

  I am not sick. But I never miss the sensational opportunity to linger over a cellophane-wrapped cardboard box, having long been a smoker.

  I try not to drink Scotch in the morning. So, sitting down in the chair again, looking out over the water, I tease myself for a while, hesitating for a bit looking at the green human silhouette with the silver-rendered lungs and animated airway passages. These particular cough drops come "with echinacea and hedera helix." I finger the hologram and boldly weigh the net wt. 1.4 oz (40 g) of the 16 drops contents on the palm of my open hand.

  Then, with savagery, the cellophane comes off. I poke and prod at the box lid and rip the first sleeve of eight lozenges out of the package. With deft hands of experience I push against the bubble of plastic and push the dome down forcing the cough drop through the foil overlay.

  Into my mouth it goes. The first cough drop. The only cough drop. There’s a dizzying delight as the eucalyptus vapors enter my nasal passages. A rush of bliss. A torrent of salivation. A tongue numbed by pressure against the cough drop and the roof of my mouth.

  Even my eyes burn, for a while.

  43 — Conservative/Liberal

  An impartial administration will preserve our deep democracy. Oh well. Here we go again. Out of storage, begin life, over and over and over. Prevent death, over and over and over. Sit transient but cedar attic-ed wearing a musty-vow wow-gown drinking some heat-slanting sun. I don’t get it. Figure it out. Be a liberal/secular/democrat/scientific intellectual and a conservative/god-fearing/republican/evangelist. Hide the veil, silk-folded between pairs of underwear in a drawer you almost won’t use for its lurking presence. Give up. Sell meaningless rings with their unending circular implications and do not think about disposable forms of forever. Dust-cover baby clothes and bassinets and other barren garages waiting to be consumed, later. Extract your favorite hymns from some indelible memory. Unengrave dates and useless names. It’s okay not to take sides, to let the napkins be insignificant, disposable even, to tell the difference between branching photos of ancestors whose stories end in your breathing in and out, in and out, hyperventilating for no reason—for any reason. Go on. Get up. Unbox porcelain swans, lift silver wings away from crystal and tarnished little spoons for generations of salt and needing dusting. Don’t worry about MSNBCNNFOX boxes. Let tears dry over pity and fall in love with your own tightrope as if beached, cradled, and innocent. Let fingers reach through hairlines and find ears over and over and over. Let eyes enter rose beds mulched three inches thick with broken cocoa hulls. Come home between climate-controlled clotheslined sun-sheets holding onto horizontal summers where the people go. Taste frozen key limes on lip-skins as somehow enters each other’s swallow-the-kiss. Love—God damn it—reenter me after the musty gown finds a consensual way to mildew as a Goodwill costume. How are you new-able to look at me that way? Just shut up for this one fucking minute. Just help me prevent death, over and over and over, help me begin life, over and over and over, out of storage.

  33 — boy,

  No reason, no rhyme. No way, navy boy. Better off naked with the aftersun blind squint. On leave Momma used to say, “I’m glad you were born girls so your father doesn’t beatchu.” So why did she dress me as a boy? Momma’s momma always tattooed, “Wanted one, had one for a minute, ‘fore he died,” on the days on blue afternoons removed from 1940-what? Those holes in a wrong-made heart, that two-day blue baby, that boy. I ain’t apologizing. Momma never did. Did she? Didn’t have to. My daddy let me on his lap anyway—a Let’s read the Sunday funnies girl, despite Daddy’s too-bad-about-it. Was that the grief at the dinner table? Too bad about the reasons. Too bad about the blues. Too bad about the boys born boys and beaten for it. Too bad about the girls born girls to mothers bereft of sons. Droves of women pulsing with resentment have nowhere to put shorn anchors pulled through an unforgiving decade of ribbed necks and navy blues. White caps, historic, heave into the crashing scream-sky. Boy. What boy? Baby blue grows up, grows wild, and collapses. Forget all that. Stay little. What can you carry on your cotton chest? Battleships, bugs, puffy school buses flaking apart, and paleontology, boy? Little girls play dress-up too: inadequate biceps flexing pretend proud in the deadweight lift of eyes. />
  65 — Ego Confronting Mortality

  Dear Fake Advice Columnist,

  My wife just had a kid. In terms of personal stability, I’ve recently taken a nosedive off the deep end. Thoughts?

  Dear Ego Confronting Mortality,

  I'm all for security, for turtle toys that cast weak-lit stars on the ceiling, and I definitely support your completely-and-totally-unprecedented-I-mean-seriously-never-before-experienced transition into fatherhood. You’ll need a few traditions. Watch the role-playing. He doesn't deserve the backlash of resentment that's sure to follow if you abandon yourself. (And you don't deserve his reactionary rebellion that's sure to follow that.) Teach him about Shamrock Shake season. That’ll shut him up.

  34 — Lunch Alone

  My Server’s been a waiter at a little red-trimmed French restaurant as long as I've been going there. Today, he talked for an hour after I took his suggestion to order a glass of pinot blanc.

  The squash soup and the salade anchoiade were on the table. With total control over my domain I placed the butter so that it would melt a bit in the sun. Three times My Server came to the table, offering his services. I said I was fine, repeatedly. However, he was not about to be put off. He finally came over to the table a fourth time and said, "I'm here, you know."