In an attempt to separate my blog from the 59 Stories, I've created this: http://www.hollyselph.com/59/ so that the stories can be read in their intended order, backwards.
I have written the first one, but I won't put it up until I write all the ones left in the middle. Hopefully, I'll have 47 up soon.
Also, I'm back.
The
49th story was about buttercups and how freely a young girl might
hand them out to strangers were buttercups to grow freely in her front yard. It
was about how much it cost once they were severed from the grass and let go by
the hands of strangers to spoil, like untold secrets, on the sidewalk.
Buttercups are metaphorically irrelevant since their arithmetic is both as
forward-moving as clock ticks and as cowardly as political strategy. Meaning,
their petals are not conducive to counting loves and loves not. All buttercups
are good for is making chins glow and divining tastes for butter.
This
story is no longer about buttercups.
This
story is about being thirsty, and not even knowing it. It is about someone else
knowing it before you do and making a left turn into a gas station with the
announcement that he will be buying you a Coca-Cola there. Mostly, it is about
him getting as close to the door as he is to the car and then turning around
and asking if you’d prefer your Coca-Cola in a bottle or from the fountain.
Upon
first inspection, this seems like an ordinary moment in the life of someone who
has just learned that she is thirsty. But, really, the moment is measured
thusly:
There is a movement driven by pseudo-scientists who have had their birth certificates legally altered to be born again, having changed their names to honor celestial events and vegetation indigenous to South America. They believe that inside flowers are spirals of cosmic geometry that, if deciphered, could prove that chaos is actually a perfectly ordered series of numbers that correspond to universal events like bangs--big and small, supernovas, and geographical vortices. All they can talk about is their ikebana-like arithmetic, carefully sparse in order to portray authenticity. What they have overlooked is the patterns hidden in plucked moments, how they are measured by the consistency of a metronome, counting both forward and back but leaving an imperceptible pause in between for the elusive, but permanent, present. The present is difficult to observe because by observing it, one is denying its existence, unless you catch a glimpse of it as it comet-tails around the corner and spoils on the sidewalk. One such pause was the mathematical love story in his question. It was an equation of bubbles, a ratio of gases and liquids, an infinite series of bangs--big and small, that make counting flower petals one-by-one a division, and not that thing you want: the right answer given the right question, the solution, the unity of proof when it tangos with an equal sign, the certainty that numbers can be translated into a language that forbids maybe, and perhaps, and has only a thousand multiplications of yes.
Yesterday, he sent these words to me:
How are you feeling right now?
I said:
I am a little bored. Why?
He said:
It's really windy here. I wanted to make sure you were OK.
This is because he is the one person who believes that I still control
the wind. Or, rather, that I no longer control it. I affect it. This is
magical thinking at its most narcissistic, and certainly indicative of
a number of things cataloged in the DSM-IV. It's also a mythology that
allows me to believe that the space between us is filled with something
common, an air that we exchange as if there is a secret tunnel that
breathes from Atlanta to Phoenix and back, the hollow of a seashell
that holds the tide.
It's this distance that reminds me I've done nothing I said I was
going to. I have had moments. But, so far, my life has looked like this:
When I was five we lived near the train station. Atlanta's station is a little brick house, a soda machine, and trains. We drove by at least once a day. On the other side of 25th Street is an ordinary concrete wall. Once I stared at this wall from the window of my mother's car and thought, "I will always remember this moment." There was no reason other than that I insisted upon it. I have memorized many walls since.
Once
my best friend and I rode in a car that wasn't a convertible to the
shore. I remember it as a convertible because the sunroof was open and
the
windows were open and it was the first warm day of the year. I will
remember driving through Alabama and down into Mississippi into the
sliver of Florida where the water lets you in on earth's greatest
secret: the ocean is empty.I cried all the way
because we jumped in a car with nowhere to stay and drove six hours to
the beach with pale skin and no sunscreen, with a car full of cassette
tapes and grape sodas and a toothbrush between us. The
water was cold, but we jumped in anyway.
I ate a bowl of lentil soup in a villa in
Chichen Itza, Mexico. Outside there was a pool where a man was
carefully pulling leaves from the water which was thick with algae.
There
are these things: the smell of pumpkin guts, and the smell of the seeds
baking in salt. My grandmother's hands. Running down the sand, my arms
outstretched, my head
tilted toward the sky. A meteor shower there, sitting in a hole in the
sand staring into
the eyes of someone I spent too many years waiting for. My mother's
voice, off-key, singing 60s antiwar songs as lullabies. My father's
soft voice reciting, "fern hill" and
"chansons innocentes."
There is Lake Sequoyah where I never caught a catfish.
There
is a porch, a circle of chairs, the floor littered with packs of
Marlboro cigarettes, and a time when nothing but friendship mattered.
I was married on the coldest night in the year
two-thousand. When we left for our hotel, there were men in the street
fighting, one
pulled out a knife. The other reached deep into a pocket, and our
driver reversed and ran through a red light, the tires screeching
on Peachtree Road at midnight.
In my early twenties, I was doing lines
of cocaine on makeup mirrors in
the bathrooms of clubs while my husband's band was on stage. I drank
vodka with cranberry juice. I had two dogs, two cats, and a turtle. I
was
still working on finishing my degree, but had changed majors four times
and settled for the one that guaranteed no career. We sang Sonny
& Cher karaoke at a dive bar on Saturday nights. I didn't own a
couch. We had a bathtub that wouldn't drain for two months, so after
each shower I filled buckets with cloudy water and dumped them out the
window until the tub was empty. There was always a little puddle of
water that clung to the drain. I caught a stingray off a dock on the
salt marshes of South Carolina. I gave myself a black eye.
It's
all been an exercise in almost doing something. I almost moved to
Olympia, Washington. I almost moved to Colorado. I wanted nothing more
than to move to New York City to write a novel that would win a
Pulitzer Prize. I almost was a violinist. I almost loved someone enough
to be miserable. I almost died, and I almost lived.
So, the fiftieth story is this:
Three days ago, I agreed to
pack up nothing but my clothes and only the books I will need for one
year and move to Arizona. Two days ago, I quit my job. Yesterday, I
drove through my city while the sun was still rising, and I missed it
already. It would be good time to control the wind, but even if I
could,
I'd probably still be commanding the wind to blow and then running
underground
to safety, adjusting a radio antennae for warnings in between the static. I am not sure if it was faith I had then, the certainty that I decided when and where the wind moved, or if real faith is what I have now: tossing my life to the wind and watching it land, scattered like tiny flecks of gold, none of which is worth a dime nor builds a road.
When you read fairy tales upside down, they go like this: the princesses all had days when they didn't shave their legs, and the princes preferred to be single anyway. White horses ran through mud. Rapunzel's hair broke off halfway up. Snow White shared an apple pie with the dwarfs, and they all are still sleeping. The princess still felt the pea. Alice fell down the rabbit hole and was beheaded by the Jack of Hearts. Hansel and Gretel were eaten in a pie with carrots and potatoes, and Cinderella missed the coach and rolled home on a pumpkin.
The new shoes were a half size too small, and they won't match anything I own, but in every other way they fit. I wore them that night to a place where girls rode away on a mechanical bull while boys cheered them on, knowing that they weren't going anywhere near the sunset. I wore them the next day when we sat in the sun for the last time together before I had an appointment with a seat, in coach, on an airplane that was scheduled to take off just before midnight.
He kept telling me that we were late, and I turned up the music. I ordered another glass of wine. I tried to make green lights go red. I had work the next morning. I had no other way home. I had a cat at home with only two bowls of food. But these shoes fit in a way fairy tales don't explain. They transformed me from a girl who used to be so poor that she ate wishes into one who throws her slippers away and whose ride home left without her. It's upside down, but it bought me more time, which is the currency of space, the promise of happy endings, the pretend of everything. There is always more of it. There is never enough.
Arizona is not brown, but this is the first word that came to mind as my plane descended toward a landscape that looked like the earth had undressed, and I had caught it naked, and by surprise. It's a place with everywhere to run and nowhere to hide. It looks deprived, like an alcoholic's skin or the circumference of a smoker's lips. It has worked too hard for too little, but would never admit it. The mountains are not covered in trees, but by vermicular trails that are a color that is not brown, but a shade which can't distinguish the difference between being somewhere and being nowhere at all.
This is the best reason I can give for throwing away my shoes: they were dirty after a night out, and my feet hurt from standing in heels, and I'd like to think some part of me, after too many beers, knew that the only creatures who can survive the desert are the ones that have several layers of skin and know when it's time to shed them. So, I took of my camel-colored pumps and threw them in a trashcan on the street. I expected him to tell me that I'm crazy and to put them back on, or for him to dig in the trash and carry them back, so that in the morning I could have, along with a headache, the relief of my shoes. Instead, he laughed and took my hand and walked me back, barefoot.
The real reason I threw away my shoes is this: I wanted to see if he would let me. Some boys would carry a girl with no shoes. Some would dig them out of the trash, rolling their eyes at her histrionics. Some boys would just ignore her. But he is the sort of boy who howls at the moon, who drinks from fountains and never from bottles, who will dance with a girl to a song and change the words so that it's about her. He will let her throw away her shoes because freedom is never really owning anything. It's all borrowed, shedding and leaving behind previous incarnations. Sometimes caught naked, sometimes still dancing.
You've had conversations in which you've expressed distrust for those who speak in second person. "It's a means by which people distance themselves from their own experience," you say.
He gives an example: people who are being interviewed on the news after witnessing an explosion. They might say, "I was standing right over here when sparks started flying. You realize if you had just stood a few inches closer, you'd be nothing but ashes."
He can't get stars tattooed on his back because his shoulders are burned by the sun. So, you go back and sit in a chair and offer your palm to a man who says you have "crazy motherfucking eyes," and he tattoos the inside of your wrist because it is empty now. You keep looking behind you to make sure the boy is still there, that your eyes aren't crazy, just more blue than all the reasons he gives for not saying the magic words.
It's been two weeks since you've seen him, and three to go.He calls you and says that he is about to get the stars on his back. He tells you next he will get a mermaid on his arm. She will have black hair and blue eyes and pink scales. You have black hair and crazymotherfucking blue eyes, but you don't want to act like this might mean something like the people on the news who spend all their time wondering why they are always witnesses to their own lives, so you say, "why not green scales?"
He says, "because you weren't wearing green tights."
And you realize that if you had just picked another color that night, you would have been a witness talking to a reporter in the rain. She would be holding her umbrella over your head because you hate the water. You would be telling her that you almost--but didn't--get to explode with the stars.
It was over lobster enchiladas and cucumber mojitos that he said something that made me mad enough to almost tell him that I was in love with him. My arms raised up on either side and in exasperation, I said, "I am in luh--" and his eyes got really wide, and I said quietly, "rescue me." He stared at me for a moment and then laughed and said, "Lexington! You're in Lexington." If this moment were awkward, it would have been remedied by the drag queen show we watched afterwards, but it wasn't awkward. When you're not lost, sometimes that's when you most need directions. So, Lexington became the space between, the geography of a girl and a boy, chips and salsa, and a room full of queens in a restaurant that was at such an angle that glasses could slide right off the table without provocation and by the same force that hit Newton on the head.
It might seem a simple assumption to equate Lexington with love, but it's a place for those who have not yet decided if love is worth the high property taxes, and if the insurance adequately covers the risk. Lexington is a suburb of love. Everyone there has a porch, and nobody uses artificial sweetener. People there believe that music should be played outside, in playing poker, and in having breakfast. It's lovely, but you can't stay there. Everything slides off the table.
I was five years old when I got a Fisher Price record player for Christmas. This introduced a whole world in which I could close my door, put on a record, and be my own imaginary playmate. My music collection was limited to the Mary Poppins soundtrack, Sesame Street, and Frosty the Snowman. It was Frosty who taught me the true nature of impermanence. I would listen again and again, knowing the exact groove on the vinyl that would start the song over again, before he melts, before he promises to come back again someday. As far as I knew, that song had never been written. I would lie on the carpet of my bedroom floor and cry. It was the saddest song in the world.
This is why I first called him the snowman. It was easy for him to march through my town, disappear, and promise to return. I, on the other hand, had established a mythology based on the physics of climate. When things warm up, everything must melt.
It was only hours before he had an appointment with the desert, his home. We had breakfast and then champagne, and then a long walk down a broken sidewalk back to the car to take him to the sky.
It was cold and raining when he arrived and now the sun was out. It was warm, and I held his hand as I walked in my high heels in a direction I didn't want to go. We stopped when we came to a puddle so large that I knew something had to have melted there. He lifted me and carried me to the other side--maybe because I was in heels, or because I pretended I could jump all by myself, or because he knew that I believed that the puddle could resurrect somewhere in the desert into a promise bound by more than an old silk hat, a corn cob pipe, and two rings made out of foil.
In Belize, there is a saying: Breeze blows pelican the same place he wants to go. Pelicans, you see, are birds who don’t fight the wind. So, the day after the napkins blew off the table, he took of his watch and left it on my dresser and told me that it would stop keeping time because it winds when he moves (and he moves with the wind.) And then he flew to the same place he wanted to go.
When I was a little girl, I believed that I controlled the wind. This was a huge and overwhelming task, but no one had ever trusted me to keep time. The alternative was to allow time to stop, which was out of the question. We had missed each other too many times. Once he walked by me sleeping on a mattress in a hallway. I was seventeen and wore too much black eyeliner. He had a blue Mohawk. For three days we shared air, and not once did we feel the breeze. Nine years later, we shook hands in Denver where the air was thin and the music too loud. Five years after that, I cut off my long hair and sat with him at a table while another girl kissed his face. It was only now that we were, at the same time, wanting the same place the breeze blows.
The watch slid on my arm for twelve days, eleven hours, and thirty-three minutes. I slept with my arm under my pillow so I would not feel its weight. It got tangled in my hair. Sometimes it was upside down, and I would confuse night with day. Mostly, though, I just trusted that it would count numbers until he landed back here. He was only staying for two days, but in two days, two people can become like kites—more things of the wind than strings to the ground.
The bloody marys had onions the size of fingertips, pepperoncinis, olives, and cucumbers. He was taking a sip from his when he looked up and let the straw go from his lips and said: I like when the rain starts, but not when it stops.
At any moment before this one, I could have let him go. I could have walked away with only a wound the shape of the keyhole to the room on the 59th floor. When he said this, I understood it intuitively, like the moment you grasp an e e cummings poem. It is gone by the time it arrives, but there is an almost imperceptible shift during which something irreversible occurs. Parenthetical phrases are let out of their ovens and are allowed to burn in the sun and the breaks between the lines are a counter-clockwise code. If things are backwards and down is up and up is down and the world is a Seussian orb, then I knew I was going the right way when I understood that his sentence meant that he, too, would have once had a friend that was a tree and would know that when the rain stops, the oceans land, and we're all right side, growing up and moving forward--the only direction we can't navigate while facing each other, a straw between our lips.
The only other fact about that morning I recall is that there were no clouds in the sky, but the wind blew paper napkins off our table, and they unfolded like white flags in the air.
