I thought we would only go for a short drive, and be right back.
In a few years, I would be a sophomore in college, and a girl I’d had a crush on for a year would come stumbling down the hallway of our dorm with a bottle of Wild Turkey in her hand.
Her long, dark hair was a mess, and her lips looked engorged, so red they looked like a wound more than an orifice.
She’d stumble and fall to her knees right in front of the open door of my room, look up, and slur, “I know you always want to fuck me. It’s okay to fuck me.”
I would stand up.
I would go to her.
I would lift her up and carry her, as light as my grandmother, but less alive, and put her down on my roommate’s lower bunk.
With one hand, she would bring the Wild Turkey to her lips and slug hard from it, and with the other, she would unbutton her blouse. I would sit at the edge of the bed, and as she rubbed her hand on my crotch, I would close my eyes, and what I would see was the way the wind blowing through the open roof of my father’s car had lifted my grandmother’s white hair, and placed it down again carefully on her shoulders. How she’d tilted her head back and opened her mouth to the sky.
The Foreclosure
T his happened during one of those terrible months when my life was purely about jealousy. Jealousy, envy, resentment, spite. I woke up every morning tangled in them like barbed wire. I lay down to sleep in a prickling gown of them every night. I woke up angry and tired.
I hadn’t always been that way. There’d been a time in my life when I would never have believed you if you’d told me how consumed a person might become with the desire for a thing, and that I might become such a person. Men , I’d wanted. A sense of accomplishment. Recognition for the talents I’d imagined I had. I’d even occasionally longed to feel the solid perfumed weight of a baby against my chest. During the dead months of winter, I’d craved the sun. During the long hot months of summer and pavement I’d dreamed of ocean breezes. But I’d never pined, as I was pining in those months, for a thing .
I had been raised by frugal parents who never spoke about money. We never had much, but there was always enough. I never heard my parents argue about how to pay a bill or if one of them had spent too much on something. They never mentioned how I might make money myself someday. When I said I wanted to be a poet, that I was marrying a painter, they gave us their blessing, and then theydied. My mother’s cancer followed my father’s heart attack. There was no inheritance, but there was no debt. It was as if they’d taken care to sweep the floor behind them, moving backward out the door so as to leave not a trace of themselves when they left.
Before we married, my husband and I used to say that we would be happy in a shoebox together. A shoebox next to some railroad tracks. A damp shoebox. Some newspaper for our bed. We would lie beside one another in the sweaty rumpled twin bed in my apartment and describe the awful squalor in which we knew we could find complete contentment. A shoebox shared with a shoeboxful of mice.
But then we lived for five years together in an apartment with thin walls, patchy carpet, neighbors above and below us who stomped and shouted at one another and played music only they could appreciate so loudly we could recite the lyrics to their grating songs. The pets they were not supposed to have in their apartments would yowl and bark and whine through the nights when they weren’t home, and then yap and meow with pitiful relief when they returned, slamming the doors behind them, cracking open the tabs on their beer and soda cans. When a truck drove through the street, it shook the whole building so completely you could really understand that the building was made of plywood, sawdust, nothing, and a few slaps of diluted off-white paint over it all. The water in the shower smelled like moldy cheese if you didn’t run it long
In a few years, I would be a sophomore in college, and a girl I’d had a crush on for a year would come stumbling down the hallway of our dorm with a bottle of Wild Turkey in her hand.
Her long, dark hair was a mess, and her lips looked engorged, so red they looked like a wound more than an orifice.
She’d stumble and fall to her knees right in front of the open door of my room, look up, and slur, “I know you always want to fuck me. It’s okay to fuck me.”
I would stand up.
I would go to her.
I would lift her up and carry her, as light as my grandmother, but less alive, and put her down on my roommate’s lower bunk.
With one hand, she would bring the Wild Turkey to her lips and slug hard from it, and with the other, she would unbutton her blouse. I would sit at the edge of the bed, and as she rubbed her hand on my crotch, I would close my eyes, and what I would see was the way the wind blowing through the open roof of my father’s car had lifted my grandmother’s white hair, and placed it down again carefully on her shoulders. How she’d tilted her head back and opened her mouth to the sky.
The Foreclosure
T his happened during one of those terrible months when my life was purely about jealousy. Jealousy, envy, resentment, spite. I woke up every morning tangled in them like barbed wire. I lay down to sleep in a prickling gown of them every night. I woke up angry and tired.
I hadn’t always been that way. There’d been a time in my life when I would never have believed you if you’d told me how consumed a person might become with the desire for a thing, and that I might become such a person. Men , I’d wanted. A sense of accomplishment. Recognition for the talents I’d imagined I had. I’d even occasionally longed to feel the solid perfumed weight of a baby against my chest. During the dead months of winter, I’d craved the sun. During the long hot months of summer and pavement I’d dreamed of ocean breezes. But I’d never pined, as I was pining in those months, for a thing .
I had been raised by frugal parents who never spoke about money. We never had much, but there was always enough. I never heard my parents argue about how to pay a bill or if one of them had spent too much on something. They never mentioned how I might make money myself someday. When I said I wanted to be a poet, that I was marrying a painter, they gave us their blessing, and then theydied. My mother’s cancer followed my father’s heart attack. There was no inheritance, but there was no debt. It was as if they’d taken care to sweep the floor behind them, moving backward out the door so as to leave not a trace of themselves when they left.
Before we married, my husband and I used to say that we would be happy in a shoebox together. A shoebox next to some railroad tracks. A damp shoebox. Some newspaper for our bed. We would lie beside one another in the sweaty rumpled twin bed in my apartment and describe the awful squalor in which we knew we could find complete contentment. A shoebox shared with a shoeboxful of mice.
But then we lived for five years together in an apartment with thin walls, patchy carpet, neighbors above and below us who stomped and shouted at one another and played music only they could appreciate so loudly we could recite the lyrics to their grating songs. The pets they were not supposed to have in their apartments would yowl and bark and whine through the nights when they weren’t home, and then yap and meow with pitiful relief when they returned, slamming the doors behind them, cracking open the tabs on their beer and soda cans. When a truck drove through the street, it shook the whole building so completely you could really understand that the building was made of plywood, sawdust, nothing, and a few slaps of diluted off-white paint over it all. The water in the shower smelled like moldy cheese if you didn’t run it long
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