tablespoonful of pesto and a cherry tomato on top. She smiles. And I have to admit it’s hilarious. But thank God she understands.
Simplicity is a comfort. Familiarity is a friend. The food is a friend. The smell of the cigar is more than a friend, is family. The tourists taking it all in is a comfort. It’s good to be home.
Well. Back from home.
He comes through the side gate. “How was the flight?”
It’s funny to look at another individual—about whom you know everything, whom you know better than yourself—in public sometimes. Some intimate lives don’t translate easily into communal spaces. All that self-correction comes back: Don’t stare. It’s not polite. But instead of loving no person more and cleaving to this one man with a whole heart, sometimes it’s almost as if you don’t feel anything, don’t care, don’t even know the man at all. You sit there together without your tangible connection, like business associates or brothers if you’re lucky. But intellectually you know something real exists, even if it’s immaterial.
What, if anything, is love? There must be a reason he came and sat down with you, here, at your table. So your years are built on faith as much as anyone’s and without touching anything, not hands, not arms, not legs, not thighs, not lips, no part of the material you, he still reaches in and you remind yourself: This man is yours forever.
“Fine. The flight was fine.”
“Sorry I wasn’t there.”
“How’s work?”
“Please don’t do that.”
The waitress approaches him with a kiss on each cheek. His suit is navy and the lining opens up to her. She pours him water and a glass of the wine. They chatter. Then they remember that today shouldn’t really be a blue sky day in May. I wish they hadn’t remembered my dead-dad-grief shit. Just keep chattering.
And I can tell he doesn’t want to deal with the somber reality any more than I do. He invites her to sit down. He never was that intimate. Especially not with the big stuff.
Who is?
She is, that arctic goddess, not Norwegian but Icelandic. She’s got the whole thing down pat. She puts the pitcher down, puts her hand on my shoulder, squats in all those shifting shadows, and says to me, “How’s your mom holding up?”
I say something back that makes her stand up quickly and go away. A cocktail of finesse, tenuous anxiety, morbidity, and peevishness—she needs to be busy explaining the menu to the tourists anyway.
My lover’s not pleased with the way I treated his friend. With his eyes he says my behavior’s inexcusable even under the circumstances. But what he actually says is, “Do you want to go away this weekend?”
“I just got home.”
“I know. But do you want to go away this weekend?”
And so it is that faith is unnecessary again. There is real love. There is a true connection. And he does understand, completely. He knows everything that’s worth knowing about whatever it is that’s me. He cares. He shouldn’t but he does. And he is strong in the midst of all the impossibilities of it. He exhales suddenly and puts his hand on my thigh.
The tears affect my view of the tourists so I blink them away.
“How did he look?,” he asks.
It’s hard to say. “He looked—less.”
“Yeah.”
I bend over and put my forehead against the cool glass tabletop. The tears come quickly. I pick up a handful of the river pebbles and fend off the banged-up basement memories. The rocks slip through my fingers.
“What are you doing with those rocks?” He is laughing and a little uncomfortable. I wish he weren’t so uncomfortable. He has a lot of insecurities. He looks from side to side to see if anyone is bothered. But I know and trust the people at the other tables. They’re all right. They didn’t care when I did what I had to do to block out the penetrating joy of a May blue heaven.
He puts his hand in the middle of my back. I hate that. I like it on one side or the other but not the middle. Why do people do exactly what you hate and exactly what you wish they wouldn’t right when you need them to do the right, best thing? Strange. A distancing thing, I suppose.
Awareness. Come closer. Get closer. Or you will drift—safe, calm, away, and done (who cares?)—into some lone forever. Get closer. Do it now. Reach out. Don’t descend. Say it. Say to your lover—the man who asked you a thousand times to be truthful, to include your family in your life, to be proud of him, of yourself—say, “I’m sorry. I’m just so fucked up.”
He will never really forgive you. But he says, “It’s okay. He was your dad.”
There’s no other. There is a breeze and I don’t want anything from anyone under this happy full blue sky. I don’t want anyone to turn his love my way. So with one jolt of my thigh I jerk his hand off. I interlace my fingers behind my head like my dad used to do, lean all the way back in the chair, and look up. The pecan leaves dance wildly for just a moment in some small way, some impossible way. They are almost free but exist attached, like all of us bound to this life for as long as possible. They shake and tear at their foundation but never break free. Until it is time. It isn’t time now. And when it is time they won’t be ready and they will regret this violent shaking in the wind trying to rid themselves of exactly who they are, in some pecan-leaf way.
PORTRAIT OF A WHEEL SPOKE BLUR
An old woman made her yarn on useless beach house days.
Rhythm rain. Rhythm heartbeat. Rhythm breath and blinking. Her foot worked the pedal. Rhythm rain, breath, and wooden pressing rubber down. Inside on the porch during the rain her hand held a strand between two old purple-veined fingers, rolling, twisting, holding the newly-made thread out at a full arm’s length, and on a spool spun dandelion-dyed woolen-stretched rhythm and wooden pressing rubber down.
But. That’s later. First the old lady picks through the wool loosening the fibers, getting rid of any debris.
The waves and seasons and tides moved on. Spring tide. Neap tide. The sun and moon came to her porch painted gray. Under the privacy blinds sea treasure that little hands had run offering and wondrous for generations covered low bookshelves that somehow held up under the weight of so many lives lost. Among them a horseshoe crab, a ten-inch whelk, and an elegant, black, desiccated pouch of skates’ eggs. Sea glass rescued and reclaimed sat amidst this happy desolation that ocean-edge collectors find so soothing. No one walking on a beach—looking, searching, hoping—thinks much of dead droves of sea creatures or of the churning, sandy, blasting hell where sharp brokenness is pummeled to nothing. No. Beachcombers seek only perfection.
Children built her house. Such children had gone off and come back parents and grandparents. And on the smooth wooden painted floor this great-aunt/grandmother/mother/sister/daughter/wife’s pedal hit in quiet rhythm with wooden pressing rubber down, and rhythm afternoon slant light, and blackberry-stained ghosts spinning down the beach from Penny Rock and Briar Croft, with their headless chickens to scald, and their dead footstep rhythm pressing memories down from Mile Rock to Port Jeff.
Perfection. Uniformity. What nonsense and bother for a woman who raised five kids under the moon and sun’s tense constant dance of evasion. Why worry? Just make enough yarn for all the sweaters, all the hats, all the knitted winter days.
During her breaks she handed out sandwich cookies from special kitchen jars and was part of three hundred familial years on that land against water. She could laugh, joke, carry on, and tell stories until no one could breathe. Old ladies don’t smell like smoke anymore. But with that strand of wool held out at arm’s length and that pedal working over and over and over and over she focused on nothing but uniformity. The pedal hit the hollow wooden porch floor. And the waves hit the pummeled-nothing sand. And the heat hit the middle-of-nowhere house roof. And the steel flag clips hit the factory-made pole. And the bottom of the sailboat hit her gravelly stretch of beach, got pulled up above the endless tide line through innumerable presorted, shell-marked graves. And the rubber-edged garage door pressed down softly against moss a
nd evening as it ended her driveway.
She was caught spinning and was rhythm witness to summer migrations. Rolling the thread up with two fingers and dropping that spindle again she fed clouds into simple machines after all the required rhythm to tease and coax oily wool—full of seeds and twigs and leftover sheep curls—into something useful.
She lays some fiber on the bed of nails. It’s called carding. Have you seen it done? Imagine holding two pet-grooming brushes, one in each hand, used to pull hundreds of slight-bent wires across each other and across the wool. Over and over and over and over those wiry cards with handles got caught in each other’s grip as her wrists flicked, her hands flipped, and the wires yanked through a woolen puff until every tangled twist let go. A childhood friend might ask why. The old lady in her housecoat all zipped up modest and warm would answer, “So the little hairs all go in one direction.”
The kids never told.
On the deck, where flag shadows flapped on sunny days, the gray paint was hotter than such a light color should be and rhythm feet ran up from their swims, from their high-tide screaming cannonballs off barnacled jetties and their 9.5-rated Olympic swan dives off smooth-topped granite boulders into her jelly fish-strewn seaweed waves. She didn’t have to look up and look out to see all the cousins swarming Dragon Rock and racing to find Swim. She heard