Another Assignment

This assignment? To write a “pleasant” description of the outside of a house…

If a child looked at the house and was invited to come in, he might not run in with his hands in the air like he would at a water park. But he would come forward without reluctance – such was the feeling of the place. A medium sized square white house with light green shutters, it had a kind of perfect symmetry that could sometimes be called boring but would always be called comforting. Its promise of order was undeniable. The front yard was a garden of four perfectly spaced diamond-shaped green bushes planted amongst wood chips and small rocks. In front of the garden a large tree looked, despite its age, as though it had just now broken the sidewalk in a joyful ascent to the sky, causing a small ledge in the pavement where the roots pushed up from underneath. Neighborhood kids used the bump as a place to jump or ride over – a place to mark how far or close they were to home. The Y shaped drive way was made of smooth black pavement and children practiced cartwheels and dance routines there when the weather was nice and the cars gone. In the yard there lived a happy swing set with a slide attached. The iron bar that held the swings was weather worn but strong and the slide was full of shimmery promise. There was a pole near the basement door and from it wires stretched out to make a laundry tree, where yellow sheets and tiny t-shirts waved and shivered in the breeze, sending the scent of detergent lightly across the tops of the green grass. On any given day you could see a mother or father coming in and out of the house in a regular fashion. Children ran from the swings to the red picnic table, where they ate sliced watermelon and grapes and screamed at bees and tried to jump over bushes and chased each other with abandon. All the while the white house stood by in its simple way, opening and closing its mouth to say, “There you go. Here you come. There you go…” on and on forever.

Just Say Know

Jim, the guy who fixed the ceiling down in the dance room, surprised me when he offhandedly referred to his work as a “craniosacral therapist.” I originally thought he said “cranial psychotherapist” which left me with visions of  deep head massages and conversations about trauma and pill dispensing. I didn’t know how this man, who was a kind of environmental engineer meets handyman, found the time to be all of these things – cranial toucher and mold surveyor, expert on spores and childhood memories. An unforgettable business card. The more he talked about it the more I realized that there was no actual therapy session involved and for the third time this week I wondered both about the quality of my hearing and my ability to focus on someone else long enough to know what the hell they’re talking about. Jim asked me to sit down so he could go into more detail about his hobby…apparently he doesn’t get paid for the work but enjoys it so much that he regularly volunteers to go to people’s apartments and do “adjustments.” One woman was cured of her psoriasis, the other her insomnia. One of the women delivered a tearful embrace.

I don’t know when my skepticism crept in. If I was being honest maybe I would say it started in the third grade, when Jamie Plante told me he didn’t want to be my boyfriend because I only wanted two children. But in this particular case, I think it started when he asked me to sit down so we could talk. I was in the middle of my work day. I’m never too busy for a laugh or a story. But there was just that little bit of reluctance when I went to sit – like that time a friendly stranger asked me if she could walk with me for a minute and I paused before I said yes – and she later asked me to church. When he finally touched my hand – a quick, light, dry simple point on the top of my hand, to show me how he barely touches the heads of the people he works on: I signed off. The touch was no more than the kind of accidental contact that comes from getting your change at the grocery. But it came on the top of things like, “I offered a coworker friend but she opted out” and “at this one woman’s apartment” and “lots of people start to fall asleep” and “no one in your life is as important as you are – even your significant other…” and I decided to stop calling myself a prude and start listening to the funny little voice that was sitting up in my belly saying, “No. no. Ok. Away. Away. Go away. Stand up.” Hadn’t I heard that voice in San Fransisco when that man, eating half a sliced watermelon with his fingers and licking a seed off his wrist, had claimed to be a “tantric master,” told me that my birth year was his favorite year of all and then asked me if he could give me a hug?

Changes

These days I’m more likely to dream about war than babies – dodging bombs and bullets while pushing someone down the street in a wheelbarrel – hearing that someone is finally dead, that we’re going to have to cross the lake by swimming for days. But the babies will still come – now and then. Lately they are more peaceful, sleeping in white blankets and puffing small buds of air through soft lips. They are not shrinking, falling off changing tables, turning into kittens… but they come by, float up, less and less. More often I am jumping into helicopters, running through a wooden housing structure, driving a jeep with no brakes.

When did I…?

Here it comes again. The legs and torso held together by that middle – distinctly cut in half. Sitting like fat dull scissors. The trees out the window and sun glinting off the edge of the window.  Vaccum sealed. Voices searing my eyeballs. I can hear you about as well as your pencil can, eraser can, the seat of your chair – its flattened ears dulled up with stuffing and the pressure of your weight. One day I’ll get up and stay fixed in this sitting position – I’ll sleep in a folded up cot – I’ll strap a book to my knees with a belt and read about the ocean.

“The Assignment”

I was recently asked to write a “creepy description” of a room in my childhood home. So. Here it is.

The Attic

In the back corner of the oldest child’s room there was a door to the walk in closet – and in the back of the closet was a door to the attic. Up a wooden staircase like wood off a ship, still creaking, uneven, slightly swollen here or dried and splintering there – the walk up was narrow and the ascent caused arms to go out instinctively, reaching for walls for balance and guidance in the dim light. Fingers met with the crumbling surface of bricks and sticky cobwebs. Familiar was the attic’s ceiling which was at its highest point in the center, but lower and lower on either side. Unnatural and unfamiliar was the utter lack of ventilation, which started over the mouth and and nose like heated gauze and slowly grew more viscous and cloying with every step. The single unlabeled box and rusted gold Christmas ornament were quiet witnesses to the unchanging light and time that passed most rapidly in the daily life of a spider and most reliably in the unimaginably subtle changes in the wearing and eventual decay of the corners of the room. But the most singular, and even most alarming, (after a person became uneasily aware of the their labored breathing) was the worn child-sized rocking chair, seemingly made of the same wood as the floor. In fact, coming up from it almost organically – as though the room had created it out of some unknowable necessity – certainly not made for a visitor, as most anyone who approached it did so reluctantly and with a feeling so strong in their gut that they curled their toes in their shoes and clutched some part of themselves in an effort to remain upright. It was almost as though there was an odor surrounding the chair- the way a person would stop at the exact distance from it and a look would cloud up their face in a new and ugly way. Once the chair made its presence known in the soundless room – it was impossibly to turn away from it without being convinced of a click clicking on the floor – the chair rocking back and forth just enough, as though a child with tiny toes and tiny pointed shoes sat in it, pushing off with an unsettling regularity. A guest would look away from the chair and then turn back to it, sick with expectancy, certain it would be rocking just that tiny bit, despite the lack not only of a breeze – but of any real air at all. Nothing but a kind of permanent stillness – so still as to resemble a death. But with that chair there, threatening to move, there was almost a new whisper – one of hostility, the moment before violence, but with a control that made even the strongest observer feel small and undeniable human – a sudden awareness of blood and fragility of bones, thin connections to the heart and of soft places like the throat, the very bottom of the belly, even the arch of the foot…and anyone who had visited the attic began an instant move away and most certainly a descent down the stairs backward – hands again on the walls – reluctant to turn their backs on the little chair, the seat of which curled upward like a toothless smile and seemed to watch them go – down, down one simple step at a time – until they finally had to turn and take the last few stairs at a leap while holding their breath.