Green River
You are in a house on a block with other houses that look just like yours. You are part of a family. There are other families in the other houses. Those families look like your family. A mom, a dad, children. A community alongside other communities in a town in a city in a county. A pattern.
You know you are not like them. They know they are not like you. But everyone is uncertain just how much disparity there is. You stay quiet like this. Keep to yourself. Pay attention. Head down, eyes up. Continue reading “Green River”
cat maybe does not want to be bothered
my visual companion piece to the first page of my novel Girl’s Story
This is Muttie
This is Muttie. She came over from Germany on a ship in 1900 at the age of 19. She was an accomplished seamstress. She traveled to California and became a nanny for two kids and taught them German. For most of my life I thought Muttie was a wonderful grandmother and wished she had been mine. I felt that although my mother’s mother was horrible and my mother’s brother was horrible, my mom at least had her father Papa and her grandmother Muttie. Last year when we were visiting my mom, the two of us were playing cards at her table while Maddi and Mia were reading on the sofa. My mom looked over at Maddi and remarked how grown up she was becoming. She said soon Maddi might be wearing make up. I said I didn’t know. Then she called gin, putting down her three sets and said that one weekend, when she was sixteen and staying with Muttie at her home on Hoover Street, they were leaving to walk to the store to get groceries and my mother stopped to put on red lipstick. When they got to the sidewalk, Muttie noticed. She slapped my mother, called her a whore, wiped the red from my mother’s mouth, and told my mom that she was only fit to walk many steps behind her. For nearly forty years I thought my mom had had Muttie as a safe person in her life and within the short span of one little anecdote it was gone. My mom licked the tip of her pencil, counted up her points, wrote down her tally, pointed out that she was winning, gathered the cards, slammed the deck down in front of me and said, Shuffle. Continue reading “This is Muttie”
Driving 10 West
This is the black VW convertible bug my mom got right before we moved to Houston. It was not the greatest car. Every time it was turned on the smell of gasoline would flow out from the air vents and the rumbling of the engine would bounce you. We drove this car from Houston to LA and back again every summer for at least three years. It always broke down somewhere on 10 in the midst of the desert, and we’d have to wait for some stranger or the highway patrol to pull over and help us out. We carried one of those huge Rand McNally United States road atlases with us and I’d endlessly count the little red numbers from arrow to arrow to calculate the miles remaining between each town. My mom liked to stop at every side shop and follow the roads least traveled and I’d say, “Please, Mom, let’s just stick to the highway and not get lost.” One time, we were going along 10, windows rolled down, hot air rushing in, on our way to LA. Two lanes West, two lanes East, and then the wide dry dirt median between the two directions. The radio wasn’t tuning into anything, so we just had the sounds of the road and the wind and the heat. A fly was swept into the car and got trapped in the air between us, circling and dipping and rising, and I tried to catch it–it wasn’t exactly fast, but I couldn’t. My mom said, “Look, here, this is how you do it,” and went after the fly, and there we both were, hurtling down a desert highway in the noon day sun trying to catch a fly in the middle of our car. We looked up when we heard a truck blow its horn. We had crossed over the median and were heading straight for an 18 wheeler. Mom yanked the car over into the median, put on the brakes which spun us quickly around a multiple of times and we came to a stop with dust rising all around us, unable to see anything, both of us completely still. My mom’s hands were gripping the wheel and my right hand was on the door and my other was on the dashboard. I jumped out of the car and said, “Are we okay?” Which my mother found hilarious. The fly was gone. We were alive. We got back on the road, laughing all the way to LA. When we got there, everyone we saw, we tried to tell them this story about how we almost died trying to get a stupid fucking fly out of our car. But we could never get very far in the story because we’d be wiping our tears and laughing too much.
Dentist
Our first child was a headstrong child. I had to create games in order to get things done. One of our games was Dentist. This is how we brushed teeth each night. I would pretend to be the dentist and M. would walk into my office/bedroom for her evening Continue reading “Dentist”