War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (7 page)

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.