Don't You Leave Me Here

“Heh heh,” he says to the naked woman. She smiles up at him from satin sheets, a wind through the open window ruffling white lace on black skin, and Scott turns the page. He’s sitting in the tattered green chair with a glass of Jack Daniels, the ice cubes rattling softly, the Penthouse on his lap, saying “Heh heh” over his red beard. His thick arms rest on the arms of the chair and white stuffing seeps through the upholstery. He says to me, “Hey little girl, you seen Joey? He back from work yet?”

Joe and Scott on Saturday afternoons watching Kung Fu movies on TV, talking about Friday night, Joe says, “That new club Stage West, they got these moving stairs going up to the second floor.”

“Oh they got moving stairs, do they Joey?”

“Yeah, there’s one set going up and one going down.”

A stream of grunts comes from the television set, hands and feet flying, flesh hits flesh. Scott leans back looking at Joe, his eyebrows raised in mock admiration, his knuckles tufted with red hair.

“Well ho-de-do, they got moving stairs, going up and going down!”

Joe nods with dignity but Scott slaps his knee, eyes sparkling. “How about that, eh little girl, moving stairs, that’s a real first-class joint, I’ll have to go and check it out.”

Joe pushes his glasses up his nose and rolls his eyes at me. Scott says, after consideration, “Moving stairs, ho-de-do!”

Joe gets up slowly and shuffles over to the coffee table. He brings out the white HI-FLYER frisbee upturned with a quarter ounce of shake in it, sits back on the couch and runs the front flap of a Zig-Zag pack through brown leaves, holding the frisbee slanted. Round shiny seeds roll to the curved bottom. “‘Only one paper can be pulled at a time,’” he reads off the pack, “‘Qualitie Superieur,’ hmmm.” On the front flap a man who looks like a pirate is smoking a rolled cigarette. His eyes disappear in black ink.

My mattress is in the attic, by a small window at the base of the roof. Through the window I watch the street, the yellow school bus stops outside, I watch the wind in the tops of the trees. The roof slopes upward in a pyramid; its sides come down to crouching-height and its point is higher than my fingertips can reach. The brown wood beams smell dry and dusty in the heat. I sleep surrounded by boxes that say Welch’s Apple Juice, Sanyo Receiver, Markel Quartz Heater, Ellington Farms Produce. There are boxes of clothing (some mine) and a box with DC painted on it in day-glo orange which is for my dirty clothes. I watch black leaping spiders drop lines of silk from the rafter to the window sill, and one afternoon I saw an egg sack bloom into baby spiders, almost too tiny to see, colorless and many-legged, spilling out into the endless air.

In the evening Joe quietly gets drunk (sometimes when Joe is drunk he lowers his head and nudges my shoulder saying “baaaaa, baaaaa” tenderly) and we watch television. Scott isn’t home yet, the midnight movie comes on, and then Scott’s old Plymouth chugs into the driveway, I can hear the rust rattling in the fenders. Scott comes in with his girlfriend, a tall black-haired woman who chain-smokes Camel straights, blowing the smoke upward, her lower jaw extended, teeth bared, the smoke spreading angrily from her. She sits down on the couch, Scott sits next to her and she tries to pull her skirt free from under him.

“Hey Joey guess what, Marla here can’t find her car.”

“She can’t find her car?” He looks at her. “You can’t find your car. Where’d you leave it?”

Marla yanks the skirt out. “If I knew that I wouldn’t a lost it right?” she says petulantly.

“She parked it somewhere around here, we was at the Bridge Street Pub and we walked around looking for it, couldn’t find it, it’s really hid good. Marla here, we had a pitcher of that iced tea at Carry Nations, that Long Island Iced Tea they got there, and Marla’s really wasted, heh heh,” he elbows her side, “aren’t you, Marla. You can’t hold your liquor, you know that girl? Hey, are you feeling a little sick, you gonna throw up? You want me to show you where the bathroom is? Heh heh heh.”

“Scott, you’re a bastard.”

“Mmmm, I know that, Marla.”

“I could drink you under the table.”

“One pitcher of Ice Tea, ...” Scott says and Marla taps an emphatic finger on his knee, “under, the, table!”

Joe pushes his glasses up his nose. “Well Martha, ah Marla, you must be pretty drunk if you lost your car.” He nods to himself in agreement.

Scott chuckles. “You know what else?” Marla is staring at him. “She left her keys in it too.”

We all laugh, we can’t help it, except Marla who stands up, bumping the lamp. It wobbles back and forth.

“I don’t have to take this tinda, kinda shit from you.”

“Ah, settle down Marla.”

“And I don’t have to listen to that from you Scott, don’t you order me around, you asshole, I’m not hanging around here. I’m leaving.”

She grabs for her pocketbook strap and misses, grabs again and gets to the door.

“At least I’m not a fucking junkie like you Scott,” she yells. “At least I’m not a fucking alcoholic like you, Joe.”

She slams it behind her and the doorbell which never works when you push the button, now rings in sympathy with the door.

Joe rolls his watery brown eyes and Scott shrugs. “What d’they got on the movies tonight little girl?”

In sweet autumn Indian Summer, Scott and I sit on the porch in broken down chairs, the paint peels and I scrape at it with my toe. The neighbor’s calico cat wanders up the steps and rubs her arched back on the railing. It’s China White all afternoon, slow and sleepy, I look through a gap under my eyelids and the maple trees are leaping out of their own souls in red and orange, the birches swing and lift loose yellow leaves. The old man next door rakes leaves into piles and his wife watches from her front steps. She smiles and I smile back. Inside the house Joe is banging pans, running water, boiling spaghetti noodles. I hear his heavy feet cross into the front room, hear him slip a record on the turntable and scratchy Hot Tuna drifts out through the screen door; don’t you leave me here, pretty baby if you go give me a dime for beer... Scott chuckles. “Heh heh.” He sings softly, barely moving his lips. “Well I never had one woman at a time, now if you see me, tell I’ll always have six-seven, eight or nine... don’t you leave me here, don’t you leave me here... pretty baby if you go, leave me a dime for beer... don’t you leave me here.”

We live on Flower Street. Two blocks down and across Main is Jack’s Grocery, a tiny shop with bald-headed Jack behind the counter. Farther up Main is the park, then the white church and Friendly’s Ice Cream on the other side, then Harvest Beads and Silver where you can buy carved pipes, Afghanistan socks, tiger-eye necklaces and concert tickets. Up at the corner is the Antique Store and from there you can look all the way down Main Street. There’s the Coin Exchange and the Prayer Tower with its yellow cross saying Jesus horizontally and Saves vertically, and the Adult Bookstore (movies 25 cents) its windows covered in grey paper and three black Xs painted just above the window sill.

On Sundays we go to the Prayer Tower for the free cheese they give away. It comes in one-pound blocks, bright yellow, wrapped in thick plastic and put in long cardboard boxes, coffin-like, saying Pasteurized Process Cheese Food in humorless black letters.

“What is this Cheese Food stuff?” Joe says contemptuously.

Down past the bookstore is Mary Lewis Youth Shop which sells Indian print skirts and pre-faded jeans, and then the Goodwill and the pawn shop and the Woolworth’s and the plasma center on the corner where the highway goes past, into East Hartford.

There are five traffic lights on Main Street between the Antique Store and the highway. During the day the street is blue and dusty between cars; at night the store windows are dark, reflecting the white streetlight and the white of your face. The yellow cross glows all night. Crazy George wanders by, headed for the park. Sometimes we see the Christian, which is what we call him, not knowing his name. He stands quietly under a light, rapt and raising his hands, palms outward in wonder. Sometimes we hear him blessing the glistening cars as they pass.

Warm afternoons I count filthy jean-pocket change and go to Friendly’s for an ice cream cone. Crazy George is there in a green army coat and knit cap pulled to his earlobes, mumbling to no-one but himself and then, white eyed he suddenly slaps the counter, looking up. “Hey, can I have a refill?”

Sometimes I see the Christian sitting at the counter on one of the revolving stools, a five-scoop sundae in front of him, a maraschino cherry sliding slowly down the whipped cream, leaving a trail of red syrup. He folds his hands in front of him and humbly lowers his head, saying grace.

Joe brings home boxes of free tomatoes; we have tomato sauce, tomato salad and tomato sandwiches. Scott slices the tomatoes and places them mushy, full of seeds, between brown bread; no butter, no mayonnaise, just bread and tomato. “Heh heh,” he says to me, raising his red, thick eyebrows. I buy bags of frozen peas at Jack’s Grocery, we live on frozen peas, tomatoes and brown sugar.

Once I found a cornfield and filled my shirt with ears of corn but back at the house, Joe shakes his head, looking out over the frames of his glasses with amused sorrow. “Cow corn.”

“I can’t eat it?”

“Naw, it’s cow corn.”

I shuck it anyway, peeling down the threads of translucent silk and dumping the ears in the double-handled aluminum pot.

But it’s mealy and tasteless, I take one bite and give up, and the precious butter melts down into the puckered kernels.

* * *

Joe wrote to me last week; he’s stopped drinking and found Jesus. He says how’s California. He says he thinks of me and what am I doing? The other night I dreamed I put my foot through a pane of glass and drew it back, glass slivers stuck in my shoe. But I saw Scott, who is dead now and free, walk through the web of cracked glass as if through air, chuckling in his beard. I would like to say that I sang to him, maybe about leaving a dime for beer, but I never could carry a tune, even in my dreams.

On Her Writing

From a handwritten journal entry; probably responses to interview questions. Age 14 years.

1. I'm very interested in rollerskating and am on a speed skating team that meets once a week.

I spend a lot of time listening to music, either on the radio or on my record player, and I love hard and soft rock. I dislike disco and popular "top 40" songs.

I've been working on identifying wildflowers and edible plants for the last few years. I enjoy going on walks in different areas and trying to name as many plants as I can.

My mother and I "collect" animals. Over the summer we have visitors like snakes, turtles, baby rabbits, birds, mice, and bats. Either we find them injured and try to save them, or we catch them and then let them go.

2. As far as poetry goes, Robert Frost, Longfellow, and Edna St. Vincent Millay were my favorites when I was younger, but lately I'm much more fond of Edna St. Vincent Millay than the other two. All three have interesting meter and rhyme but Millay uses interesting blank verse and expresses many of the things that I've felt at different times.

I found the book Shardik by Richard Adams and all of Stephen King's books exciting. The characters were made to seem very real.

Ray Bradbury also has had a special impact on my writing. I love his images, his imagination, and the way he builds suspense. I would like to write poetry the way Bradbury writes prose.

3. I don't admire any contemporary or historical "figures". I admire a lot of friends of the family and friends of mine.

4. I went to a wilderness camp in Georgia last summer and that gave me ideas for Almost Enough. I thouht of Wilderness Vision while I was out weeding in our flower garden and rushed in to write it down. I got out of my 1 hour of weeding for that day!

I read it to myself and copied it over a couple times until I was satisfied with it and then showed it to my mother. She suggested I change "wild, laughing confetti" to "wildly laughing confetti" which both of us liked much better. (That's the only word change my parents, or anyone, suggested in the three poems.)

I wrote Almost Enough while at school. It's about my feelings when remembering standing on top of a rock, getting ready to rappel down it. The poem is also about my view of how God, if he exists, must feel about earth. If He created this planet, I'm certain he's unable to change it now.

Maybe the earth was too complicated a project and after God finished it, set it in motion, and men mutliplied, His project got out of hand. The rock seems too great to have been placed there by anyone but a supernatural being, but it also seems too great, too full of past and past and past to be altered, even by God. God flies away from the cliff, in awe of what he's done, and remembers, longingly, a time when He still could change the earth, a dream of dinosaur bones. (The dinosaur may also be a part of the cliff.) The grey hawk is God. "To look off the edge is to be a bird" hints that the "we" in the poem are somehow birdlike, created in His image. "It was almost enough ... and all you've done is try for perfection" is about the imperfections in the world, that God has almost enough power to set right. And when I refer to Him as "my God", I mean the God that I can imagine. Certainly not many people would agree with my view of God, and I don't think I believe in Him either. I thought it was an interesting idea. It took about three drafts to get it just the way I wanted it.

"Quest" was inspired by "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle. I wasn't at all interested in unicorns until I read that book, but after I had, and let it set in my mind, I was able to write "Quest" one day in school. It's not only about a search for a unicorn but the quest for anything one wants. A person can search years for one thing and have to settle in the end for only a glimpse of the dream. Sometimes that's enough.

Iridescence

Iridescence is in the feathers of a starling, is on an old penny, on the frosting of a lightbulb, soap bubbles, puddles of rain on black tar, fingerprints on a crystal vase, powder on moth wings. Rare occurrence in a dramatic world, the subtlety of shifting blues and greens, a swirl that changes with your breath across a dome of water stretched through air. The eyes of a fly, fractured into geometric specks, like atoms of a molecule, are iridescent, and never close. Ringed snake scales become green and red above the black, iridescent. The back of a flea, the humped brown shell around a universe of hairy mouths and legs, the oily smooth body designed for flight through air, head down, across furless space ...

***

A day and a night outside of Why, Arizona, on a somewhat hilltop, the top of the world as truly everywhere is. In the glittering noon the yellow earth curves its cracked body over the edge. All around the yellow curves; the sky curves into the moving curve of the earth.

A cloud of sagebrush, a pair of jackrabbit ears, the eye-corner lizards darting for cooler inches of afternoon.

I wet a bandanna and it dries as I put it around my neck.

A clump of prickly pear cactus lifts a single spiny violet bloom, a flower as large as my palm. Slowly the sticky purple fingers close and night drifts into a curve of sky. The stars lean down near the horizon. One bent shack in the distance, incredible and unexplained, is lit inside by yellow light; I watch black forms pass the kitchen window, a door opens. Out leaps a dog, bounding away through clumps of sage. Before him is the random, sideways shadow of a rabbit; I can feel the tremors their feet make in the cooling sand.

***

In the dream I walk through the ruins of a city in my brown skin. I find tin cans, bottle caps, pieces of colored plastic, orange peels, nails, broken dishes, metal wire. I find a tool with a sharp point and make holes in the pieces, string them together with wire, wrap the wire around the nails; these baubles shine in the sun. I hang them on my body, through my hair, and walk across the sand of the desert, going toward the oasis. Everything is very still.

Perhaps I can fashion a camel out of dead animals, the head of a dog, the legs of a horse, sew fur together across several cat bodies to make the back, open the dead mouth and breathe into the rotting cavern, the black spotty tongue, decaying withered gums, dried blood, breathe life into my camel and watch him rise on shaky legs. I will ride him across the Mojave, the desert shimmering, my bangles rattling heavy on my neck, shining in the sun. I will make a spear from a rusty tin can, with a rock I will pound the metal sharp. Sway of the camel, slight give of the sand, turn of the earth. Out to the oasis where my camel, under atree, in the shade, dips his head to the water and drinks long, long.

***

At the kitchen table my mother says, "I would hate to regret the things I didn't do. I'd hate to be old, sitting and thinking of everything I wish I'd done. I'd much rather regret the things I did do than the things I didn't."

Three years later I visit her at the hospital's mental ward; I cannot wake her. She is lying in her clothes on the bed, mouth drawn apart and crooked, eyes open in sleep. The nurse leads me to a white and grey room with cafeteria tables of shiny formica. The other patients sit playing Gin, smoking, staring with fearful eyes. One woman is bent double, her head almost to her knees, twisting her eyebrows with both hands.

I wait and at last the nurse brings my mother in. Fuzzy-tongued, querulous, she asks what day it is.

"Is this the day my daughter is leaving?"

I nod and her face, the room, warps with salt water in my eyes.

She shuffles back to her room. I hear her throwing books, an alarm clock, pill bottles clothing. A cup of cold coffee sits on the linoleum floor; the surface is iridescent.

***

"Saskia," I say, I'm strung out and my voice echoes in my head, not like empty room echoing or auditorium echoing across rows of plush cushioned seats, red carpeteing, chandeliers, black doors, footprints on the floor where the usher would be -- "I hope you know what you're doing."

Echoing like a breath exhaled in a cavern in an ocean rock, a cave with only one entrance which is though an underwater passage. You swim out and dive into the darkness of the cold sea, feeling with fingertips along the barnicled stone, holding your breath, not knowing how much longer, how much longer it will be before you can or must breathe again. Finding the indentation, following it blindly with your fingers to the opening and pulling yourself in, the tunnel widening around you, jagged rock under your hands, following the rock walls up and up, breath contracting in your lungs, bones, muscles weak, chest aching, taste of salt -- and then the water is thin as rippling glass above you and your head breaks through. You exhale and gasp in, hair sticking to your face, seaweed between your teeth.

Saskia is bent over the candle. She heats the spoon until it makes tiny bubbling sounds. I tie the bandanna over my elbow, pulling it tight with my teeth.

Saskia is drawing clear liquid into the syringe. She holds it to the candle and peers; thorugh it her face is distorted. She flicks a tube with a quick finger and bubbles rise.

"Make a fist."

I grip my fingers and she slide sthe metal into my skin, I only feel it on the surface, then she is done, turning to wipe the spoon. The ocean washes over my ears, I dissove and become the sea, I stretch like a slow starfish across the rounded earth, feel gravity sucking me into the center, feel the moon draw me upward in waves. I roll and crash, wash against ice cliffs of Antarctica, spread over the shores of Africa, the yellow sand of yellow Australia.

Saskia is trying to get me to sit up but I keep turning into the ocean, I curl cold against abalone shells. She opens my mouth and her head disappears inside. She reaches for a screwdriver or a hammer or a pair of pliers, attaches it to my mouth, grips my jaw. Bracing herself with a hand on my forehead she pulls, twists, strains backward, all I see is the dirty soles of bare feet. Then she reappears, triumphant, grinning and holding up the tooth.

***

Once I stepped on a frog by mistake, all its coiled insides lay wet and glistening on the wet grass and the sound the frog made was almost like a kiss. How to put it back together, make it whole? The silver spots on the green skin shine iridescent, the gold eyes are painless with amazement. I sit up in the night, holding my ribs together. Living is iridescence. This is all I am, this piece of alive, only this and nowhere else beyond the curved edge of skin. A clock ticks in the stillness of a caught breath. This is all I know.