Journals – May 2011
I
It felt like a dream, the oneiric murmur of voices cloaked in darkness, cascades of incomprehensible muted intonations floating through the halls, the hushed light at the edge of the doorway, a cloister of forlorn hopes and unmet wants. She had no memory of arriving, leaving or returning. Everything seemed new, nascent, disquietly ponderous, and oddly out of joint, as if life had been squeezed into existence by the arrhythmic contractions of the earth’s crust, as if all that appeared had been dredged up to the surface by the tectonic slipping of plates, one passing across the other, or pushing up and over, expelling life in a long morning stretch, a heaving yawn, a rumbling quake. She must have landed here by accident, as seeds do, adrift the wind. Or perhaps she had been invoked by a conjurer’s spell. But who would wish her here, she wondered.
II
The room is dark except for a few soft streams of light seeping through door jambs and brittle cracks in the vinyl shade. There are shadows on the ceiling. She watches them dance, sway and scatter, water pooling in her throat. She rolls the glossy bubble on her tongue, lets it fall gently back, collecting once more in a warm pool, then, pressing the base of her tongue against the soft, pink flesh of her palette, emits a gurgle, a watery glissade that playfully rises and falls to the shifting syncopation of her heartbeat. Her hands paw at the shadows, trying to grasp their silhouetted forms twirling in the moonlight like tangled marionettes. One, two, three…one, two, three…lub-dub-dub. She tries to pin them down, untangle them, but cannot. Her body won’t keep still. It comes in and out of focus, expands then contracts, eventually pushing her out above its corporeal henge with a forceful thrust. She sees herself lying below, two big brown eyes, hands waving, and smiles. She hovers, listening to the soft static of the stars pulsing in the night sky, then the cold spring of a handle turning followed by an electrifying snap. Here again, once more returned to her body, that itchy, cumbersome thing.
III
Over the rail the one called mother swoops down, an amorphous penumbra eclipsing the lamplight. Cold hands on cheeks, warm lips on forehead, curling, pitchy sounds abrading tender membranes newly formed.
“Don’t do that. You might choke,” it opines.
Intuitively she knows that these sounds are directed at her, are in response to her sounds, the surge of saliva she’d been tumbling over her tongue. Don’t do that! Chirp-chirp. You might slip! Chirp. Choke on a rock! Tick-tock, tick-tock. Cha-cha-choke! Catch a cold! Rock-a-bye, rock, and down will come baby…down will come baby. She tries to sing it. When the bow breaks… She remembers now, something about a rock, a cradle, and crashing, sonorous crashing. She tries to sing it, but all that will come out is one big wet coo.
IV
The sprawling subdivision was one of many built north of the city in anticipation of the Great White Exodus, a migration of bodies radiating out across hundreds of thousands of acres of prime farmland like a sea of locusts. The predatory movement of the upwardly mobile, white middle class evoked images of another Great White, the shark, which is said to die if it ever stops moving. Suburbia they called it. Whenever a new friend asked her where she lived, she proudly peeped, “I’m from Superbia,” transposing a puh for buh and overpronouncing the P, as little children are apt to do. To her it sounded regal, like the name of some far off enchanted land where a prince might find his princess, like the name of a civilization one might discover on the moon. Ms. Smith had just taught them about the moon last week. ‘That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind,’ she read aloud to the children. They’d been learning about the solar system. The Earth’s satellite was named moon; the Russian’s, Sputnik; and Jupiter had too many to count. Sometimes when she flew above P____ Street, as she often did during a waking dream, she thought Superbia looked a lot like a page from one of her popup storybooks. Hopefully no one would ever find its edges and turn the page down. How difficult it would be to live flattened like that. She shuddered at the thought.
V
Always the green grass, the blue sky, the cotton candy clouds, the yellow sun, the tarred street cracks curdling in the heat. This is what she remembers. Inside there was darkness. A little light fell in rectangular swatches through the sliding glass door as she sat atop the bar stool. Otherwise, the modest brick ranch was cool and dank, black, olive and gold, dull and drab just like the creepy painting that hung above the buffet. A curious portrait of her father, she presumed, painted against a dimly lit ground of the deepest sienna and umber. Only the glint of his golden mustache and helmet shimmered with life. He seemed serious and dour, sad even, a reflection of hard battles fought and won no doubt, a hint of the life he led before he married her mother. This was why he longed for solitude, she surmised. War tires people, makes them hunger for silence, for peace.
VI
Once a month the Avon lady dropped off books with lipsticks and perfumes and kids flitted and buzzed at the first sound of the ice cream truck’s tinny music box song, addressing their mothers in plaintive refrain, begging for a bomb pop, an ice cream sandwich or, if they were lucky, a Good Humor bar. You could even buy a long strip of paper with sugary, edible dots to which the paper stuck no matter how carefully you tried to peel it off. There were walks down the dirt path to the nearby 7-Eleven for a Slurpee. Underneath, tucked in a little pocket on the bottom of the paper cup, was a gumball and sometimes a sticker or tattoo. Bazooka Joe had cartoons and Cracker Jacks had the best prizes of all—a magnifying glass perfect for sleuthing and a compass for finding lost treasure. So many hours, gobs and gobs, spent swimming with her brothers in the pool or playing football out on the front lawn. She couldn’t throw yet, but she knew how to hold on, charge, take a hit and tumble without fumbling the ball, and she knew how to run. There was swinging with J____, her best friend, across the street. J____’s sister P____ was old enough to wear makeup. She taught them how to do the Hustle and sometimes painted their toenails all pretty like the big girls.
It’s long been known that the better off your family is, the better you tend to do in school.
"I take this picture of myself and with my sewing scissors cut out the face. Now it is more accurate; where my eyes were everything appears."
— Margaret Atwood (The Journals of Susanna Moodie)