tuckova

the only thing that shines

A deep sadness that I have examined EXHAUSTIVELY over some 23 years and which would not go away and so instead became a story I am tired of telling; tired of telling myself, tired of telling others. Do you get tired of telling the story of how you met, your first death, your first birth, a funny mistake you made in a foreign language? I have told this story until I could tell it to anyone, until I had nobody to tell it to anymore, until I could tell it in my sleep, until it had no power over me. Yet it still exists, the sadness that made the story. Still a thing that happens, a tide that pulls up with some regularity. And I have to say, ah, there it is, that again. But I just don't feel like telling the story anymore and so instead there is a silence to observe it, like some sad anniversary. Maybe some day we will have picnics and fireworks and completely forget the meaning, though I don't think so, not in my lifetime.

Another story I promised to be done with already in 2009 that keeps telling itself while I curl away, ears plugged, wishing for some lizard-skin spine to keep it off of me, yet it settles on my shoulders again and again, this disappointment, this anger, black wings that are incapable of flight.

Heard the title of a song I once loved, a madeleine, so I went and dug out the tape. This is a tape he made for me before he left and so it belongs with him in my mind but it is also entirely mine. The plastic stretched and warped beyond repair, I can't even play it anymore, but now I can download the song in a heartbeat and listen to it again, remember curling around a speaker so that the sound reverberated through my body, how much I felt music then, literally. Listening to a song over and over; how it was to believe that if I listened enough it would be more than an echo of my feelings, that it might explain how to get out, because there is always that next song. 

 

I keep forgetting your name while I'm writing this.

This happened after I ate all my teeth, maybe even the same night. Running my tongue across the new smoothness, salt and blood. How quickly I could destroy things simply by not paying attention. Driving around all night, coming at the sunrise from that side. This was the summer everything was on the other side of the glass from me, not a bell jar but more often a car windshield, cracked, covered in dead bugs and the half moon smears of windshield wipers and the last few desperate drops of blue fluid. Everything hurt me and nothing touched me. This was the year you came through the door and sang children's songs to me and I fell in love and rubbed ice into my hands until they were raw and senseless. I practiced not reacting, though I would blink to show I could understand. And so that night, or that morning with the sun coming up and my teeth gone and you ran your hand over the scar on my leg and said you'd like to know me. I don't think anybody knew me before that. I'm not sure anybody's known me since. You came close. Anyway that's what I remember, that moment nestled in a night, in a summer, in a year when I thought somebody might really want to know. 

oh, Sylvia

Sometime in my early teens for a mercifully brief period of time I had the absolute delusion that my ability to take somewhat decent care of my sister totally qualified me as a babysitter and I went to work. I babysat regularly for the people across the street, who were California Jewish and that was pretty interesting, all that art and strange half-held ritual. There was another woman whose children I don't remember beyond the smell of their bedroom, sleep and urine, but I remember she called me Sarah Bernhardt. I liked it after the kids would go to sleep, wandering the rooms of the house, reading the spines of the books or flipping through the record collections, imagining I lived there.

One time I watched two children whose mother was, I think, recently divorced. She was going to a party. This was the saddest house I remember being in, not a home at all. There was a hole in the living room wall and someone had penciled above it "Sue did this when she was mad." Sue being the mother. Things went along okay until bedtime, when the boy completely snapped and decided he was going to kill me and his sister with a baseball bat. Let me tell you, you do not want a 15 year old in charge in this situation, because we are perfectly capable of making enough drama on our own and do not need help from genuine dramaticians. I tried to take the bat away a few times, got cracked on the arm pretty hard, and gave up. Using I guess hurricane logic, I locked myself and the sister in the bathroom and she fell asleep against me while he banged against the door with the bat. Eventually the boy fell asleep on the floor. I tucked the girl in bed and proceeded to think of ways to stay awake. There was a book with a black cover, with a hand seeming to rip through paper, holding or dropping a flower, which looked like it might do the trick. And it did; I stayed up all night reading.

The mother didn't come home til the next morning. The man who had driven her home drove me home, which was my first ride in an semi, which was interesting. I have absolutely no memory of what happened with the children that morning, but for 50 cents an hour I'm pretty sure that that night was the end of my babysitting relationship with that family. And that is the story of how I read "The Bell Jar".

you don't remember me do you

For this story you will require a shoe, a thimble, and a top hat, though you can also use beer coasters in a pinch. It would be great if you could tell the story with food ala Spaulding Gray, in which case you could be the lobster, because we're all the center of our own true stories, but beer coasters will do or whatever other game pieces you have around the house. It's not like anybody can follow the story to the end, even with elaborate props and a third hand.

You say it started HERE and that's as arbitrary as anything. Nobody is going to land on free parking, or get a quiet night, or pass on the next round, which it is your turn to pay for anyway. It started with a kiss, you might say. Never thought it would come to this. The person who breaks the rules first is interestingly involved in the cure later, though you haven't revealed that card yet.

What happened? Not just then but now, right now. Then was back when you weren't interested in forgiveness, remember. And you still aren't, remember. The stories are put into small ziploc bags to prevent mold and pests, like the person who wanted to know what happened was a pest and the person who didn't want to know ate through your carpets when you were distracted. Boy are we off topic now. But everything I tell you is true, except the part about the carpets.

All I mean to say is that Shelley and Byron had nothing on you in the day, not least because you knew how to pronounce a J in the periodic European language, which European languages are cool to know. All I mean to say is just because the world was shown to you in a handful of dust, recently stirred, it shouldn't confuse you: that particular housecleaning can never be done. A red velvet rope was placed across the door for a reason. Take pictures and post them on Facebook if you must, but nobody wants to go there, except some tour group of Japanese schoolchildren maybe, with their fingers in a peace sign because they don't remember the war.

it's not your vault

We were walking home from school, Tracy and I, along the Maryland highway, really just a four lane road. It was faster to walk than take the bus because the bus went all the way through town first, and we lived in the other direction. Some girls drove by and screamed out the window at us. What did they scream? I don't remember, in fact so much of this memory is like a dream in how parts of it are so intense and others strung together by cobwebs of logic. I remember that my bookbag had colorful dancers' feet painted on it and ketchup stains on the bottom (from my habit of collecting ketchup packets for their satisfying spray when they burst, but then I'd forget and leave them in the bottom of my bag and ketchup would ooze through my bag and over my books), but I don't remember what those girls yelled. I yelled back "shut your mouth" and the car screeched around across the median and back towards us.

And we ran. Tracy threw her books down and ran unencumbered; that girl could run like the wind. Sometimes I can't imagine how we were friends. I know living next door was quite a factor but you look at me, with my awful teeth and pasty skin, living in books, huddling against the brick wall during recess and hating when the teachers would notice me and tell me to go out and run with the others. Ballet made it so I could grab my foot behind my head, but I couldn't catch a ball if my life depended on it and I didn't want to. Meanwhile Tracy was summer brown and beautiful, blessed with an older sister's guidance and a younger brother's rough-and-tumble fighting and her hair flew behind her as she ran down the hill, away from the car barreling towards us, me thumping along behind with my bag slamming against me.

And then what? I think we hid behind some trees, or maybe in the shadow of somebody's porch, and then came out when we thought it was safe, but the girls were still there, and "There they are! Get them!" and we ran more, we ran to the mechanic's shop that Tracy's father owned and he turned to the car with the fury of a father, and the fearless fists that winning most fights gives you. I really think he was ready to beat the hell out of that car. They were bullies, sure, to be old enough to drive and chasing down eleven-year-olds, but he was a grown man, and angry, and they drove away quickly.

Then what? Cobwebs. We went back and got Tracy's books, me still clutching my heavy bag and realizing I could have run faster if I'd had the sense to do what she did. Then I guess her father took us home, and I think police were called, as they would be in a small town. I don't know what I had thought would happen: Did I think they were going to run us down with the car? Get out of the car and beat us up? In my memory they are giants but they must have been 18 at the most, because the next day in high school one of them apologized to Tracy's popular sister, which was politically savvy. Denise said it shouldn't have mattered whose kid sister it was: chasing little kids in a car is uncool. Denise was wise. She once told me that sooner or later I would have to figure out my own merits and stand on my own apart from Tracy, which at the time hurt about as much as you expect it would. No dork likes to be noticed while standing in a pretty girl's shadow.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to me if we'd stayed there; how long Tracy would have stood for me; whether we would have fallen into a cliche or an awkward next-door silence as soon as puberty really hit. I had a host of general hurts when I was a teenager, and losing my first best friend to distance was one of them, but it's nothing compared to if I'd suddenly been too much baggage to carry, if I'd been thrown to the side of the road. Not least because I would have understood that it was the right choice.

summer 1984

That summer I had a job at an elementary school helping out with organizing books and cleaning classrooms for the coming year. I put things by subject and then alphabetically by author like any good librarian's daughter. I hated that you knew I worked there, that you might show up with your stupid car, with the engine throbbing and some idea of where we might go. And I would go; I went because it was easier than making up reasons why not to.

And I hated you enough to be honest. I told you I didn't like you and that I wouldn't like you and still you came around, puppy eyes and hopeful. What were you doing, panting after a teenage girl who already preferred to be alone. I hadn't had my heart broken yet but I knew what it would feel like and I wanted none of it. I went to Simon and Garfunkel to express myself and wrote the lyrics for I Am A Rock on the back of a receipt I found in your glove compartment and still you wouldn't go away. At work, I put tape around broken bindings, swept out the cobwebs, and thought everything was a metaphor.

You were polite to my parents and they liked you which didn't work the way I planned and I tore away in my anger to get into that car of yours and drive and drive, listen to the radio. You weren't even interesting enough to like music. One day I went to your house (who lives with his parents when he's over twenty?) to meet your parents. I thought I was going to meet them, I even prepared my face. And the dog stood outside the door and barked and howled. You thought I knew what I was doing. People thought I was running from something but in fact I'd been backing away ever since I learned to walk. You told me it wasn't like it was something I hadn't done before. In fact it was like nothing I'd done before. Afterwards you let me go, past the dog and its dripping saliva, and back to your damn car and back to my house where I couldn't tell them anything. Don't call me again, I said. Don't come here again ever. I said "go away" and I finally meant it.

I think it's shortly after that that I cut off all my hair, but this may be poetic license. I know there was the scene where you pulled up in front of the school and I told you to go away and the principal came out and I made like I didn't know you. You peeled out of the parking lot and the principal looked at me and I shrugged. How could I explain the things that seemed so out of my control that I couldn't even name them.

So I was back to taking the bus and walking. And then school started again, and my new job was grading papers, and some teacher told me "Go away" was a fragment, and I told her it was a complete sentence. Complete because YOU was implied. I got fired. I was right, though.