Nothing Doing

I don't really want to go into the specifics online, but suffice it to say that, for this week and the following two weeks, I am effectively being paid $44 an hour to sit on my ass.

It sounds like a good thing, really it does.  Who wouldn't want to park themselves in front of a computer in a comfy chair and watch the dollars pile up?  Making money for doing nothing: isn't that the ultimate dream?

You'd think so, but then you'd actually do it.   You'd start off OK in hour one.  By hour two, you'd be cross-eyed.  By hour four, you'd be  cross-eyed, hunchbacked, and raving.  By hour seven, you'd be filling in small red dots every five minutes on the minute mark, just to feel as if you'd accomplished something.  

It crosses my mind that work, though a lot of... work, is also somehow essential.   Even once we've retired, we need to feel productive; we need to feel as if we're contributing something; we need to feel engaged.  I've been going on and on about how Americans work too much, but there's such a thing, it turns out, as working too little.

I would sign off with "back to work," but it looks like I won't be getting there anytime soon. 

Comma

In August, in my hometown, the world holds its breath.  Summer session is kaput.   Fall semester hasn't geared up. The streets are empty but sultry with it, beckoning you deep into the warm black to catch the last of the fireflies, the dribble of the creek, the microscopic erosion of stone after stone.

There's no one much around, in August.  You're down to a handful, the people you grew up with or threw up with, the folks you love and the folks you hate with a hate so comfortable it's the back of love's hand.  There's a spareness to August.   But an expansive spareness, a luxurious certainty that soon -very soon, even now gathering itself just beyond the horizon of your consciousness- will come the storm of Moving Day, the black and terrible thunder of Escalades and Hummers barreling the wrong way down one-way streets.

But not yet.  Not just yet.

It's the not yets that define this particular part of the year.  August, with its not-quites, it's almost-theres.  You may feel it even if you don't live here: the year pivoting on its fulcrum, the days folding themselves into smaller and smaller squares.  If you do live here, you can't help but feel it, and you can't help but feel, too, the secret sweetness of it, like honey deep in its combs.
 
But not right now, see, not at the moment.

I walk a lot, whenever I come home.   It's common sense.  From one side of town to the other is an hour on foot, so why go any faster?  Why bother to get your car out, only to miss the simmer of walking, the low heat, the secret pathways, the limping old woods?   There's never much to see: a mother and her son waiting for the bus, one loose dog, the road, like old thread, giving out.   Even the grafitti is quiet: a few tags, a delicate wall of flame, the words, in blue paint: I'm still here.

I wish I could the same for myself.  The truth is I don't live here anymore.  The truth is I can't live here anymore.  The truth is that here is, in any case, sorely, irrevocably changed.  Just a minute, though.  Sixty seconds, eighty: I'm still, here. 

The Black at the End of the Tunnel

When does an affliction become a way of life?  We've had fleas for 8 weeks now.  They've been fairly infrequent for the last 2 weeks, but nevertheless they are a daily office, appearing without fail in ones and twos and threes, lunging for us with every fiber of their tiny bodies.

My husband tried to engage my sympathies:  "Think about it.  There's the flea, just born, going about its business.  It's hungry!  It sees food!  It leaps!  Then, all of a sudden, pain and death  I mean, how wold you feel?"

I am unmoved.  I enjoy every thrashing of their tiny drowning bodies.  I'm tired, heartily, excruciatingly tired, of the vigilance, the white knee socks, the liturgy of vacuuming.  Nevertheless, three exterminator visits and eight weeks later, I've become...if not numb, then inured.  We've stumped the exterminator, who persists in telling me the fleas should already be dead.  I'm out of ideas, too.   I don't really have anything on my agenda except endurance.

There was definitely a grieving period.   A full-on, seven stages process.   I lived in denial.  I bargained with a God I don't believe in.   I got pissed.  I mourned my former lifestyle (bare feet!  Actually enjoying my home!  Unpacking! Having people over!  Mornings without vacuuming!  Yoga!  A sense of safety!).  I've come out the other end now: I can still feel the ache of my former life, the carefree, flea-free person that I was, but my life is what it is, and there's not much to be done but live it.

It occurs to me that I'm experiencing, on an infinitely smaller scale, what I've seen caregivers and parents and folks who are ill go through after receiving a diagnosis.  Autism, paraplegia, Parkinson's, aphasia, MS, dementia: you rage, you mourn, you wail, you keen.  You recalibrate your expectations, watch the world you believed in -goals, entitlements, priorities- crumple and fall away.  Then you get on with it, the whole dirty business of living.

128

My grandmother used to greet me by asking how much I weighed.  "I like a trim figure," she's say.  "How much do you weigh?"

I'd lie, of course.  Perversity, like the camera, adds ten pounds.

"One thirty-five," I'd venture.  "One thirty-two."  Or, once, daringly, "one forty."  Just to see the skin crumple around her eyes, her lipsticked mouth turn in on itself.  She wore too-bright lipstick, corals and roses.  Her eyes, small sharp and formerly brown, looked as if they'd been dipped in sugar.

"I can't see," she'd fret.  "Do you go to a lot of parties?"

"I never go to parties."  Like her, I used the same lines over and over, but I would try, every time, to twist them, find a way to make them sharper.  "No one invites me."

"I can't see," she'd repeat, folding and unfolding her hands.

This was, by and large, our only coversation. We repeated it, with subtle alterations, throughout the last years of my grandmother's life.  It was our chaconne, our theme and variations.  We fell into the conversation so naturally, so unpremeditatedly, that it was almost as if, walking along, we'd started to hum an old hymn tune or the ABCs.

It was cruel of me to lie.  I recognize that now and I recognized it then.  I did it anyway.  I was skinny enough, but I wished my body were different.  I went to parties, but I wanted to be invited to more.  I was not as pretty or as popular as my grandmother wanted me to be, but neither was I as gallumphing and dour as I claimed.  I was somewhere in the middle: just one more young woman slogging through the slow years of youth.

I was cruel, but I didn't care.  If she would just be stop asking what I looked like, I reasoned, I could return to my dogged cultivation of the belief that what you looked like didn't count.  And I wanted, desperately, to believe that what you looked like didn't count.

I took to wearing baggy pants and thermal t-shirts.  My grandmother's nurse took to applying her lipstick; she couldn't make out her own mouth in the mirror.  On nice days, my grandmother sat on the porch and had her nails done and I searched for the most shocking, most awful thing I could say about myself, the thing that would be so large, so round and dreadful, it would sit in her open mouth like an apple in the mouth of a pig, shut her up.

"Do boys ask you out?"

"No."  A lie, but not much of one.  It was only the sad or scary boys, and I didn't want any of them.

"Do you have a lot of friends?

"I don't have any friends."  A bigger lie, with a nice, raw edge.

My mother told me that my grandmother grew up with money and maids, but that her father, who owned orange grove after orange grove in Florida, had lost everything when the stock market crashed.   My grandmother was nineteen.  She'd had cooks, but now she had nothing.  Her father died.  They lost the house.  My grandmother went to work as a nurse.   She didn't like nursing.  She wanted to study English, get married, throw parties.   She did eventually marry, but her husband divorced her, so she had to go back to work.  She didn't go quietly.  She didn't forgive anyone, for anything, ever.

I told her my true weight, once, shortly before she died.  It was in a fit of remorse.   She was lying there semi-conscious, dessicated in her bed, her lips nude and cracked and her hair ragged.  She hadn't been to the hairdresser in weeks; someone had clipped her nails down close to the nail beds.  I told her I loved her, which was another lie, but only just.  Then I told her, silently, the three numbers I saw every morning on the scale.

After she retired from nursing, my grandmother threw parties.  Gourmet, dressed-up, best-china parties to which she invited all her friends, other southern widows (by this time, my grandmother was putting it about that her husband had died) who threw gourmet, dressed-up, best-china parties.  That's how I like to think of her, when I think of her.  Deep into those evenings, champagne or sherry, every woman sloe-eyed, with a tidy waist.

Dog Daze

There's languor in summer.  Yes, it's true that my summer has been, and continues to be, a whirlwind of upheaval, travel, toil, and insects.  I feel it anyway: the slow air, the overripe sun, the chubbiness of the days.  I'm not sure, after all, that one can can scrub summer of its summeriness.  Even when you work through it, try to shrug past it, it gets its grubby fingers on you, leaves a trail.

Skin Deep

I did a couple of shocking things this week.  One of them involved climbing a mountain, getting stark naked at the top, and hopping around like a lunatic.  The other involved enjoying superficial breakfast conversation with strangers.

The preceding may or may not be true .  But in any case, it’s #2 that’s most out of character.  Superficial conversation is just that: superficial, and we all know that beauty is more than skin deep, that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, that surfaces are deceiving, and on, and on.

Deep conversation is what you’re supposed to enjoy.  It’s what you yearn for as a nerdy high school student, what you savor in French movies, what’s supposed to draw you into Serious Relationships of the Soul.  And who the heck wants to talk to random nobodies when you could be sharing Deep Thoughts with the folks who already enliven or irritate you?

To which I say:  How’s the weather? 

We are who we are, but we also change.  At thirty, I am evidently both more likely to perpetrate mild criminal mischief and more likely to enjoy talking to your grandmother at length about her plans to visit the national sled dog museum.  In an odd way, the combination makes sense to me.   You shuck off the fear, keep your shoes on, hop.

Golden Heart

As a child, I was always drawn to those corners of the globe you cannot conceive of.  And I mean conceive literally: you can’t birth the places, can’t push them pink and distinct and squalling into your imagination.  You can’t people them, can’t detail the fauna or the flora, can’t do more than block in the vague outlines of an alien topography: Here there be…. nothing.

It’s seductive, that nothingness.  It’s the underside of your tongue, the backs of your knees, the space between your liver and your lungs.  It’s all the secrets you keep from yourself, the furthest assay into your darkest places.

Alaska was one of those corners, for me.  I’d trace the outlines on the globe.  I’d review certain facts.  There was more coastline than anywhere else in the world.  Its islands stole past the international dateline, wrapping around until today turned into tomorrow.  There were peaks and cold and long, white stretches of nowhere.  I imagined myself driving there, hopping into a car and cruising up the long, cold backbone of Canada until I spilled over into naught.

In real life, I boarded a plane.  I ate bad peanuts, drank tomato juice chilled to the temperature of cold feet. The cabin was close and stale and Canada stayed sunk in clouds.  Past midnight, I arrived.  It was hard to imagine but easy to walk into, the city of nothing, everything alight with sun.