Strings attached,
Sally, if I could leave
many waist-long strands
of dark hair behind beneath and
over their gentle comforters, after
taking good invisible
midnight naps, in beds
of strangers who’d
hurt girls and boys.
My student is protesting biology class today, sitting out the cow heart dissection. She is ethically opposed, she tells me. She is against murder.
“Me, too,” I nod. “Against murder, I mean, not science.” I smile.
She means well, this girl. In her black lipstick and studded dog-collar choker, she means well, and I remember what it is to be a girl. I remember all too clearly what it is to be a girl who means well and who thinks meaning matters to anyone. I remember and so I say, “Why don’t you just sit this one out?”
She is glad to be released. She thanks me. (See? Polite.)
*
Later, after school, I buy myself dinner out. I am old enough to afford this kind of luxury now. I am old enough not to care that I’m a woman dining alone. I order bourbon and a steak. No—that’s not true. I order wine and a steak salad. (I’m not as carefree as I wish. I’m working on it. I’m a work in progress, as my students would say. YOLO, they’d say. Right, I’d add, but, you know, within reason.)
The restaurant is in the town beside the town where I live. Sometimes I tell people I’m from this town instead, because it’s nicer, more beautiful and more gentrified than where I actually live. I’m not supposed to like this gentrification, but I do. I like the clean sidewalks and the baskets of petunias hanging from the streetlamps. I like the restaurant’s big windows looking out onto the bay, and I like the faux-industrial lighting over my table-for-one. I like the arugula and baby greens salad I’m served. I like the wide-mouthed glass of Malbec that the tidy young waiter serves and that I drink too quickly. And I really like the slim strips of medium rare arranged in a lovely, bloody splay atop my greens.
As I eat, I think of my student. What I should have said to her was this: Someday, daughter, you will be hungrier than you are polite. Someday you’ll see a heart in a tin tray and think, “I knew it. Nothing but a blob of rubber muscle. Bloodless as a stone on a float of formaldehyde.” Someday, darling, you’ll choose the scalpel and won’t think twice.
“Someday, daughter, you will be hungrier than you are polite.”
As I eat my steak, I think Beauty. I think Grass-fed days of August under a bluebell sky and fly buzz at the center-thrum of summer’s warm heart. I think: You only live once, whether bovine or human, so make the living good.
I say to myself: LOVE, GRIEF, MELANCHOLY, DOUBT, naming those four pumping, hungry chambers of my mid-life heart.
When the waiter returns to clear my plate, he asks after my meal. “It was delicious,” I say, smiling, polite. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow, and I notice the trace of veins at his bare wrist, blue as atlas rivers, blue as the bay beyond the window. I think: bluebell, blueblood, true blue, my blue heaven. On the receipt, I write out a generous tip and sign my name.
*
Outside, after my dinner, the sky is just darkening. The sky is just sinking from one blue into another. Here by the bay, the wind smells like salt, like mud. Mineral and marrow. Breath and blood. I think of the heart and the waiter’s veins. I think: I just want someone to know me like a map.
But, no, that’s not true. I’m just making connections to please myself. I’m just looking for a way to pull it all together. Isn’t everybody?
Really, the night is just like most nights at that time of year. Really, there is a bit of wind, and I pull my sweater closer as I walk back to my car to drive home to the house where I live by myself in the town not as beautiful as this one. Still, I’m not unhappy. Please don’t misinterpret me. I want my meaning to be clear.
*
What I should have said to my student is this: Who doesn’t love the knife every now and then?
What I should have said is that it can be difficult to tell your principles from your fear, your manners from your uncertainty.
What I should have said was that when I say, I want my meaning to be clear, what I mean is, Can you see me?
What I mean is, Aren’t you at least a little curious about what goes on inside us?
The plants you have given me have all died.
It began at the tips of the leaves
Which faded from verdant green to sallow to bister.
Jaundiced,
And curled back on themselves.
Pulling away from the sun that shone too bright
Too strong
Too vibrant
Like the love I tried to give you.
I tried to coax them back
With gentle breath, which once gave life to flowers,
And now falls on withered roots.
I kept them on my windowsill for longer
Than was appropriate
Watering futilely every few days
And hoping to see new growth.
But sometimes,
No matter how much you try
And how much you will it so
Plants just don’t survive.
The teacher said we were going to have a talent show and I didn’t have any talent. I thought of what I could do but it wasn’t much. The students who were going to perform were singers and dancers, the type of kids where snow wouldn’t fall on them during blizzards. I stepped out from underneath a snow bank and said I wanted to do something. The teacher said I missed auditions but they needed judges. But the judges also had to have a talent that they’d demonstrate during the show. I thought being a judge would be even better, but I couldn’t sing or dance or anything. I had a ventriloquist dummy at home that I never used. I tried to make it talk but it was impossible without moving my lips. I said that I could do ventriloquism and she said congratulations, I would be a judge. Apparently she was overloaded with singing and dancing and needed something, anything different.
“I said that I could do ventriloquism and she said congratulations, I would be a judge.”
On the day of the show, they set all the judges up at a table and then all the parents started filing in. I didn’t know parents were going to be there. I hadn’t invited mine. I got real nervous, like I’d started a kitchen fire and they were all coming to blame me. With the classroom packed, they introduced all of the judges and I just bowed my head. Then we had the singing and the dancing and it all crashed in front of my eyeballs with me watching students who couldn’t really sing and who could kind of dance and the applause was small and kind and we graded them and I just constantly gave a good average unforgettable score by holding up a card and saying nothing.
After it was all over, a girl in the class came up and said, “How come you never said anything?” I asked what she meant and she said, “I’m not asking why you didn’t say anything. I’m asking why you brought a ventriloquist dummy and just held it in your lap. It frightened everyone.” The teacher turned off the lights and everyone left and I went back to the classroom and stood in its dark, a limp ventriloquist dummy clutched dead in my hand.
my daddy told me
to keep an eye on you
take me to the blue beach
on yr motorcycle
where the dead live
under the boardwalk
tell my words to spiral
tell me everything you know
about sequence stars
or just bad men
i'm not the other woman
but i don't know a thing
about yr tattoos
how they twist
when you kneel + pray
we all have crosses
to bear - i am full moons
wide hips lingering
beside you
my daddy told me
to stay away from men
like him, like you
i'd listen
but that's so foolish.