Breadcrumb #580

LISA FRIEDLANDER

Angry men say something has been taken:

Woman
Child
Job
Money
Health
Car
House
Homeland
Dignity
Respect
Self-worth
Freedom
Opportunity
Faith
Love

His story.

My new client has arrived on time. I know because from the parking lot two floors below my office I hear loud hacking and coughing and look out the long windows to see a large man, head bowed over the bushes vomiting. More coughing, hands on his hips, eyes closed as he rears his head back. More vomiting. His wife, whom he said on the phone he would bring, places her hands over her ears. That says a lot. But what? Her adaptation to his large everything, body, sounds, footsteps on the stairs? Is it practiced annoyance? Mere precaution? She arrives first. I open the door to the waiting room, and she says, “Bob is coming. He wanted me to tell you. I will tell you he’s nervous.”

She smiles at me sweetly, nodding as if we are coconspirators already. She’s involved involved. The kind of involved most therapists caution against—enabling, infantilizing, controlling. But I don’t know her story.  I don’t know how Carol got here with Bobby to this parking lot—to the parking lot of his life. I’ve agreed to see him because his psychiatrist referred him to me and I find it hard to refuse. 

His story begins with love, laughs, Christmas presents, soccer. A bit of class clown.  A soupcon of daring. A dollop of inattention. Bobby is playful and has friends. 

And then his well-meaning parents read him the book about adoption. Overnight a changeling insinuates himself under Bobby’s skin; peers out of his eyes as he brushes his teeth. He has always hated brushing his teeth, the foam gathering around his lips and coating his tongue. Even his teeth feel like changeling teeth. Someone didn’t want him. Every ounce of him, no matter how big he will grow. 

Why would someone give him away? In this second story, Bobby finds creative ways for girls, places of employment, high school cliques not to want him: he often refuses to show up, doesn’t finish homework, slams his way in and out of doors he perceives as hostile points of entry, can’t discern the poetic moment or even a graceful angle for a first kiss. Something always gets in the way.

Except for the one history teacher in high school, long remembered, who treated Bobby like he had something to say; talked with him as if he had in him a future adult; not as if he were condemned to continue forever as an unruly adolescent and utter failure. 

“I got the highest grade in that class, with or without a curve.” Exceptions to rules glisten, like diamonds spewed upward through volcanic pipes, having undergone the greatest of pressures. In Mr. Harry Harrison’s tenth grade history class Bobby wanted to shine. He mined the force of ambition. Here it is, the carbon bedrock that compelled him to succeed, now buried deeply again. And for over two decades. He must advance this long-ago success to present purpose. 

In my excitement I lean forward. I want to elevate and polish off this gem. To make him look at it like a guiding talisman. But I, like his wife Carol, would be involved-involved. And she has that right. His successes are hers. His failures hers. I sit back instead. I notice that even Carol has scooched a few inches from his side after giving his hand a squeeze. She makes room for him to expand. I need to let him tunnel his own way out of the mine.

At twenty he sought out his biological mother. In this peripheral story Bobby wondered if he had missed the fame and fortune his birth parents may have enjoyed. Trips to the Galapagos, vast libraries, and access to the worldly and wise. He knocked on the dented door of the trailer.

“Exceptions to rules glisten, like diamonds spewed upward through volcanic pipes, having undergone the greatest of pressures.”

And there she stood, graying split ends for hair, teeth missing, including one right in the front of her mouth, a cigarette hanging from her lip as if it will never go out, the room smoky behind her. 

“I have one question,” Bobby said he said. “Why did you get rid of me?” 

She tokes. He waits.

“You wouldn’t have made it to two.”  She blows smoke from the side of her mouth, so it misses his face. Bobby stands there speechless. Frozen. But then she goes on.

“I was a prostitute. An addict. I would have sold you for a forty-dollar bag.” She looks at his face. Bobby turns around. Across the dirt road, a door opens on another banged up trailer with “Crazi” spray painted on it.  He learns that the young woman with the baby is his half-sister. And there’s a half-brother, younger, who’s gone somewhere, and neither of them know where. “I planned on naming you Richard William Phayle.”

Bobby looks me right in the eyes. “Richard William Phayle! My sister laughed and laughed.”

 I am supposed to understand something but miss it completely until he shortens the name.

“Dick Will Fail.”

The name is cruel but clever. I compose my face as Bobby says he stood there speechless; his insides rearranging themselves, churning up a steaming hunk of failure which heralded the future and explained for him the recent adolescent past. Bobby turned ‘Failure’ into the title of his whole story. He even tried to get his sister and her baby to leave with him. Maybe he could rescue her? But she turned away, shutting the door of her trailer as if nothing, certainly not meeting him, could change anything for her. 

Failure has lasted a long time, like a curse. Chapters of inconsistent employment. Fuck-ups at jobs. Women who’ve cheated on him. Motorcycle accidents. Drinking his meals.

And guilt. For leaving behind the half-sister who refused to go with him. And his own son, just turning 18, with whom he hasn’t spoken since the kid was 3. 

Bobby stopped paying child support when the mother refused to let the boy go with him. In court, the judge said he had had options. He could have called the police. He could have taken her to court. He could have paid his support anyway. With a single slam of the gavel, Bobby lost all custody and the rights to visitation. 

Bobby worries about whether his slurry of DNA must dominate the nurturing, environmental mold into which the adoption cast him. And beyond his own person, will it seep further into the fibers of his son’s being. The son he does not know.

This, the snapshot version, moves me. The outline needs fleshing out. He hopes we will compose a reclamation story. His hope is another gem. That he is already loved and wanted by Carol. Not to mention his steadfast adoptive parents. But I hold back from writing the story for him. Or favorably reinterpreting the story of his drugged-up prostitute of a mother. She had a sense of humor after all, even in the curse, “Dick Will Fail.” She knew he’d have been sold and raped or left for dead or dropped off on a random doorstep if had she not given him up for adoption. She could have aborted in the first place. She didn’t even have to be honest. 

*********************

Dawn brought a brief, deep coral to the sky above the lake. By the time I’d washed my face and brushed my teeth and put on the coffee it had dissipated, the sky more matte, more gray-blue.  The charcoal mountains in the distance gently convex like leavening bread, rising.

Isn’t it our bodies’ vertical orientation in space that, having risen from sleep or dream, offers up those ambitious trajectories skyward and forward? And yet, stepping outside, I feel beneath the softness of my belly and barely shielded heart, such quaking.

Like Bobby, I want, but lack cohesion. Like Bobby, I am a motley collection of characters—angels, demons, fighters, dreamers, lost souls. Like Bobby, I worry about which ones win. And by what influence each character’s story gets scripted? The primordial soup of DNA, elusive memories, recycled emotions, introjects?

**************************

Here we are, in my office again, a tiny point in the universe, attempting new narratives that make walking upright just a little easier. That jostle the residents inside, those naysayers and overactive guilt glands, those that give up before trying, the ones with bright eyes that hold out hope. 

By the time Bobby walks out my door, we are characters in each other’s stories, scribbling together.  He, the author and me, the nosy editor, asking for more explanation here, and less amplification there, and how well does all of it fit? Who are the possible, future selves? And when will they appear?

As I write my session notes, I scream down one long page from birth to death. We are here and not here. Just a click. Delete. 

Bobby makes an appointment for next week.  

This work together will go on. He does not vomit in the parking lot now. We have begun to mean something to each other. 

• • • • • • • • •

Breadcrumb #579

LYNNE SCHMIDT

I want him to tell me
It’s okay to be a mess
That these scrapes on my palms
Will scab over soon
And not scar like the other messes I’ve made.

I want him to tell me
That he doesn’t need an apology,
That needs me as much as I need him,
And some how the magic of forgiveness
Will sprinkle its pixie dust all over us
And we’ll be found in the woods
Holding hands again.

I want him to tell me
He’s sorry for my loss,
And say maybe he wasn’t there last time,
But he’s here now
And somehow have it be enough
To reaffix the splinters
In my bone marrow.

But most of all,
I want him to come back.

• • •

Breadcrumb #578

ALIFAH OMAR

To be heard… 

You think the dead are really listening? Have you ever stood over a grave, which ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of grass, and talked to it? I’ve visited … thought something miraculous or celestial would happen but there was nothing. I remember the white light of the sun behind some clouds. I remember the cemetery caretaker on the grounds looking as creepy as what you’d expect someone in a horror film to look like. I spoke some words to the grass. The grass didn’t respond back. So, I left. 

Just send flowers next time.

• • •

Breadcrumb #577

VENUS DAVIS

today
I saw you
from behind the counter at work. 
Three years ago, I would’ve gone through 
your tumblr and sent you a message begging 
for attention, for love, for a reason as to why you left.
I would’ve taken ibuprofen and threatened to 
murder my stomach lining until you so much as looked at me.

today 
I saw you 
and was reminded of who I used to be:
Some little kid who needed a
therapist more than a lover. 
A child who needed to drop out of college 
and check into their emotions. 
Someone who needed to put down the bottle of 
ibuprofen and pick up a bottle of Wellbutrin. 

today 
I saw you 
and I was happy that you didn’t see me. 
I was happy that you didn’t look my way. 
When you left me, I thought that I had lost my 
only chance at being complete. 
A half forever in search of their unrequited whole. 
Someone who called you a monster from  
behind a foggy mirror. 

today 
I saw you 
and I am so glad that three years ago, 
you left me.

• • •

Breadcrumb #576

MARYANN AITA

My mother is a lightning storm. She is there without warning; a flash, a rupture. She fits herself into other people’s worlds, like a chameleon with only a palette of pinks. She spews details she doesn’t own as an entry-point to empathy—her son’s cancer a conversation-starter, her daughter’s NYU degree her own accolade. 

    She spent most of her time in the house. When she stepped out, it was like the bottle of her exploded, leaving glass shards and liquid in a pool on the ground. My mother chats with store clerks, gathers fatty details about wait staff, and stands up for what she deems just. She wrote letters to the city council asking for four-way stop signs along our block. The city installed them. A few weeks later she set out to remove them—stopping every few feet was a public inconvenience. 

**

    As a kid, I liked storms. They were time I could spend inside, alone in the dark. I’d count the seconds between the flash and the clap—one, one thousand—to determine how many miles the storm was away. My mother always felt thousands of seconds away from me, but only an instant would pass between her flash and clap. I lived in the gap between them, fighting my way out of her electricity. 

**

    I learned to yell in the woods. My Girl Scout leader stood me at the bottom of a hill and made me shout to her. The first call was meek, but with each prod I growled louder and louder until I was screaming. Until I cried myself into existence.

    Once I’d discovered my guttural agency, I exploded: a first line of defense against my mother’s expanding storm of extroversion. Word after word my tongue raced, my hands jogged in tandem, squeezing more and more of myself into every sentence. Every class, my arms launched themselves into the air. Pick me. I know the answer.

“Word after word my tongue raced, my hands jogged in tandem, squeezing more and more of myself into every sentence.”

Silence was like an oven: I couldn’t sit in it for more than a second. I acted in plays. I ran for Student Council Vice President. I sang in choir. I joined the speech team. I spat language and scribbled in gestures. 

    The small meek me was ash in the forest. I’d made myself outgoing.

**

    “You can make friends in a Starbucks,” my mother said, comparing me to her other daughter. “Valerie isn’t good at that.”

    My sister wants to be small. She tried for many years to make herself disappear. In her adolescence, she developed an eating disorder. By the time she was 24, she weighed 60 pounds. But like a light post uplifted in the wind, she hit the ground again somewhere. She landed—healthier—in Arizona, with a husband and baby, a thirty-minute drive from our mother. 

    I can make friends in a Starbucks. I learned from her: say something witty; complain about the wait; revel in your mutual confusion. It’s automatic now: pick me. 

**

    In line to get a book signed by a favorite author, I started chatting with the woman behind me. Out of habit, words spewed.

    Conversation is volcanic in me. I gave fire to man and like Prometheus I felt the violent pecking at my body that followed.

    At the table with the author, I melted into the small shy girl in the woods. He asked me a question—one I had an answer to—but I was nervous to respond. I needed a moment. I know the answer. The woman behind me was suddenly a magnetic friend, closer and closer, so near to me, a part of me, pecking at me.

    She answered for me.

    We had a banter, one I didn’t want, but initiated anyway, programmed from years of observing my mother.

**

    In Arizona, my mom’s friends call her “the mayor.” Everyone knows who she is. Everyone has a strong opinion about her. She teaches water aerobics, tempesting pool waves while she hovers above the water. She and my father throw parties and play trivia and go to karaoke. 

    I am terrified of Karaoke.

    I am afraid of my voice. I threw it out into the wilderness once and it wasn’t mine when it came back.

    I am not the extrovert, my mother thinks. I am not like her. She can’t see what isn’t like her.

    There is only an instant between the flash and the clap. I live between them. It’s not enough room to separate us. 

***

    I like it there, in the dark. I like it in the interior. I like the alone.

    But, like my mother, my culture does not value the introspective. We want the CEOs and salesmen. Workspace walls have fallen. We televise the awards for actors and directors—for the human interactors—but we stamp sound designers’ names in silent text.

    I want to be small.

    But if you walk into the wind, you must lean forward. I learned from my mother how to be assertive, how to monsoon a conversation. I know how to put on a face. She taught me to test lipstick on my skin and leave a gentle blot on a tissue. It always left an imprint, a little part of my body left behind, a piece of myself gone. I learned to cloak myself in the world of the extroverted.

    Pick me. Pick me.  I am the life of every party I don’t want to attend. 

    I prefer to live in the gap between thunder and clap, but I learned to inhabit the flash of lightning.

    I was such an astute performer; I believed I liked it there, on my mother’s stage. I liked the smiles and the shaking hands; I thought my electricity originated there.

    But I draw my power from solitude while staying inside during a storm. That is where I trace my thoughts, in the calm where the rain beats down on the rock outside and I am whole. Where fire belongs to the sky and thunder is my heartbeat.

• • •