2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) (11 page)

There is no sense in getting attached to a
comfortable, regular, dependable bra. It is an impossibility for
one to replace bras because they do not ever make the same bra
twice. Even if they did the little tags that come on the little
bras are printed with fadeable ink so that once the thing is washed
the first time its identity can never again be ascertained.

Then we come back to the hangers. My hands
are turning purple with lack of circulation but I am focused and
squatting there on the carpet among the thousand brands, colors,
styles, etc. And I can't remember what is at home already in the
ridiculously full top drawer. (I say ridiculous because although
one wears only three or four of the twenty-some bras one owns, the
mistakenly-purchased weird bras providing the bulk in number, one
can never throw away bras that are perpetually new because they are
so damn expensive.) I can't ever remember my size. And even if I
did it would be different because of the brand and the amount of
elastic and the length of the straps and the size of the cups and
everything else.

So I look over at the child who is pulling a
magenta satin thong over his head while his mother intentionally
ignores him by focusing on a pair of tummy-control hot pants and
without another thought plunge my hand into the rack.

It wouldn't matter what I pulled out. I
would have bought anything. I really would have. But like a fish
caught in a net suddenly I realize I am bound irrevocably among the
hangers. They are little brittle straight-across hangers with
claws. My hand is bound among them with my shopping bag and there
are bra straps entangling my arm and reaching toward my throat with
malice. The little boy throws the thong on the floor and runs away
in terror, and I am left thrashing on the floor trying to free
myself and my chosen merchandise, if at all possible, from the
bewildering strands of elastic.

And then of course she appears. "Looking for
anything in particular today or just browsing? If you need any help
just let me know. My name's Lyona." Then she's gone. The only
reason she said her name was because she works on commission. There
is no way that she is going to endanger herself amid the hangers on
my behalf.

So I fight my way free and leave the store
trying not to cry. In the car I am thinking that if the hangers
were better, or if they could employ some sort of display like a
tool rack or poster file that they would sell a million more bras
and the damn things wouldn't be so expensive. Satisfied with my
justification I take a deep breath and of course feel a hook flick
against my shirt and am driving on the Interstate with an insipid
bra crawling around sickly-useless inside my shirt.

FIGHTERS

It’s 4:44 a.m. and I'm up for the day thanks
to the first fight of the year. I live near a rowdy campus bar and
there were three guys screaming in the lot behind my house at 4:02.
Two on the ground, then three. One screaming, "Let's not do this.
We'll all get arrested." The other, "Bring it on, you fucking
pussy-man.” And the third. "Mike, I'm not going to fight you."

And so it went on until 4:13. Back and
forth. And I was afraid from my window, wondering whether someone
would get hurt, and if I'd feel guilty for not calling the cops.
But one of the guys was my neighbor. So I held off.

By 4:17 the voices had begun to recede
somewhere away down the alley. But within three minutes they were
growing again. The fighter had turned on the other friend who had
been trying to prevent it all. And they were walking fast with beer
cans when the cops pulled up in the alley. Guns drawn and
everything. Fine. Someone else had called. So talking and talking
and talking. Explanation. And I heard the tall one say, "I didn't
do a thing." Pussy.

Last year there was a big old huge fight. It
woke me up, and I lay in bed pissed off and tired. I finally
decided to call the cops. (I've never called the cops except to ask
rather obscene things. That was before caller ID. And that was
usually from a friend's house anyway.) But when I went to the
window to see what was going on three or four cop cars were already
there. They were the ones fighting. And the guys they were fighting
were black.

One of the black kids (are college kids
men?) was bent over a muddy puddle screaming, "My eyes. You fucking
sprayed my eyes." And another three were frozen on the porch
saying, "This wouldn't happen if we weren't black." One had run
away. Two careful white cops and a tall clean-cut black man, who
didn’t look like a fighter, dressed in a very white sweater, were
talking carefully and trying to appease one another. It didn't
matter. I saw five black guys get arrested that night. Or at least
they all went away in the car.

The white kids tonight weren't screaming at
the cops. They didn’t mind getting into the car. And they didn't
try to run. But they didn't have to, because at 4:42 I saw one of
the cops, his gun very nicely stowed away, go into my neighbor's
apartment. He was not going to incriminate him. Instead, he turned
off the light in the kitchen, found the keys in the bedroom, and
came out locking the door up tight—taking care to shut the screen
door.

CIARA E.

- 29 September 2000

One eye sky and

one eye sleep. And

three months, day

by new. Your

one eye sky and

one eye sleep

and both Lake

Michigan blue.

AFTER HOURS

I wish you could wander back into the same
familiar-land where quiet voices recur in chorus. But somehow like
lying in bed as a child hearing the TV or Mom on the phone or Dad
discussing something in the next room, those separated voices are
the best lullaby. Because they mean you are not alone. Such a
beautiful shiny restaurant bar. And so much darkness was
reassuring. Similar but not the same as the darkness in my
apartment after a cocktail party for the wind.

Memories are fickle things. And I suppose a
degree of truth is necessary. But I feel that if I am going to have
memories at all that they should be beautiful, and so I will tell
you this one in that light.

Two years ago I sat on the floor of my
silent apartment watching the streetlight and the wind turn my room
into a burnt-shadow cocktail party. We chatted, the shadows and I,
about the weather, the night sky, and while the walls weren't
listening I told the most attractive shadow quiet whisper stories.
I've never seen the moon so drunk. And the shadows and I were
embarrassed for him. We were glad when he left. But it seemed, as
soon as the clouds appeared, the streetlight had other plans. And I
saw him later rushing madly through that canopy not caring a bit
that I could see just about everything. I was so tired by the time
the wind threw down an almost-finished cigarette and let the
shadows on his arm wave good-bye.

I hate to clean up after a party. Too many
barely-made memories.

I decided to leave the cleaning to the cat.
And as she licked the crystal carefully and lightly stepped among
the plates, assessing them each with a sniff, I curled what was
left of the oh-so-good party feeling up under my legs and began my
mind retreat. Sometimes I do that, and in a memory, I craved
mangoes and sweet sticky rice.

There was a bar in Texas. Really it was a
Thai restaurant, but the shiny black bar with neon lights and glass
brick stretched out comfortably between the tables. I used to go
with my friend late at night. So late the place was just a neon
sign advertising to no one. Three rooms of luxurious red chairs
stripped of their grandeur in the dark. The space filling up behind
and under everything with the cool blue light around the bar.

We never got there before they closed, but
we pounded like fools until we made friends with the tired cooks
who didn't feel like opening the door. We would get the last of the
sticky rice, some drinks, and mangoes. We ate listening to women
who had loosened their embroidered silk dresses speak Thai. We
watched the men in tuxedos with their feet up smoking and staring
at reruns of soccer on TV. There was never any money on those
nights. No one cared by that time. Just wanted a little time to
chat and laugh and allow the evening to dissipate.

ANTHEM

"Oh, say can you see,

by the dawn's early light,"

rush hour traffic stopped in the

fair lanes of their everyday expedition?

Couped up behind mercury windows

with a bottle of sable polish

for the longest talon or tercel,

they mark vii ways to

achieva better life. Greener grass.

And just ahead of the neighbors

on their slow morning way

to the metro,

"What so proudly we hailed"

Le Baron Ford caravans from their

commercial Monte Carlo ease.

Billboard magazines. Flipping

through Sirius radio stations.

that jam the blazer

and Avalon's unstoppable

push toward the Yukon.

A prairie highway whispers fast

as the beetles venture home

"at the twilight's last gleaming."

When their civic accord returns

once more to the town and country.

Slow and fast.

"Whose broad stripes" define fields

of plenty? "And bright stars" blanch

the sodium night? Whose streetlights

and trash along endless fence lines?

Whose telephone-pole rivers

and oven-hot asphalt are ever

gonna end?

And can they have heard Lincoln's

freeway "through the perilous fight"

while explorers, rangers,

Cherokees, and sidekicks

(Zero to sixty. Seventy-five. Eighty.)

play samurai games with cutlass sabers?

Passing and braking, passing again

with a just-in-case Beretta hidden

under the seat?

"O'er the ramparts we watched"

for El Dorado and the sterling hope

prelude to an odyssey dream of

suburban worlds. The regal citations.

A century-long mirage, and fantasy

glimpses of the neon sundance

with infinity, looking for
clover-leaves,

and charging ahead like a lynx.

Every night on the double-

line contours the windstar,

skylark, and Taurus danced high,

"so gallantly streaming." Bright

white lumina entered the tollway gate.

And from that prism a grand prix

spectrum, of "the rockets’

red glare" broke. Such light

of the aurora sky rests

quick on two beating

firebird wings. Thunder

and a semi crash.

I watched the grand am probe

Montana, and saw "the bombs

bursting in air." The roadrunners

drive the mountains flat

and bridge the sea highway

with a tempo unbroken by night

or day. And the maxima traffic

moves faster and faster toward free.

Who can believe

there is anywhere not to go?

So then, is confident ignorance of

the nova's way, "proof through the

night that our flag is still there"

driving on in a breeze? Who knows?

I wonder.

"Oh say, does that star-spangled

banner yet wave"

at intersections where a

silhouette begins to eclipse the

world of protégés and corvettes

at breakneck speeds too fast

for wranglers on their broncos,

mustangs crazed by storm,

at junction streetlights of

impatient and cavalier celebrities

without their escorts, riding

intrepid down Fifth Avenue to

the sea-bringing heights of Malibu?

And at the end of the summit can they

see, "O'er the land of the free

and the home of the brave?"

LAST YEAR MY SISTER DROVE ME UP A MOUNTAIN

Near Riverside, California (or maybe it was
closer to Santa Barbara) last year, my sister drove me up a
mountain to look at the monks. I was afraid. Such a difference,
driving up a mountain, from the flat perpendicular, “No, you go
first," Indiana cornfield intersections that I’m used to. The
curving, sand-gravely mountain road demanded so little space. It
could have demanded more as far as I was concerned. No shoulder.
Sharp curves without railings. And my sister easing along in her
Sterling as though it didn't matter at all that there was no way to
see who was coming.

I thought about James Dean, an Indiana boy,
driving too fast on California roads. Maybe he grew up that same
country way of seeing everything at once when there is nothing at
all to look at.

Not used to being blinded by
possibilities.

We got to the top of the mountain and drove
slowly, looking at the monks, with our radio turned down so as not
to disturb them with their quiet sandals in their dry garden.
Hunching over joy of prayer. Supported by a rock. Looking toward
the ocean. In straw hats.

My sister's teeth-baring wave to a friend.
All of them believing easily in the overexposed heaven surrounding
them.

I was sullen. It was intolerable. This is
not the earth.

Indiana, grayed and gluttonous, is the
earth. Damp snow-melt days with wet intruding on your skin. Sloppy
average khaki-green living out rental contracts in sub-suburban
sprawl. And all the fat American cars.

“
Show me heaven there.” I
felt like screaming at the hummingbird and his broad-brimmed work
hat. How far away from this sanctuary can your belief survive? And
for how long in a jar full of acetone and butterfly
wings?

I could have cried.

When we drove down she went faster. And I
was even more afraid of all the sunlight I couldn't catch.