Laughing Down the Moon (7 page)

The last time I shut the door, I tiptoed up the steps to see him, but he must have heard me coming because he was looking right at me as I peered into the room. He bobbed his head. I bobbed mine. I grabbed the beautiful green velvet cloak Veronica had given me on Samhain, threw it over my shoulders and spread my arms out so the cloak made wings. I pretended to fly around the office. Dwight spread out his wings and pretended to fly. My heart felt too full, and I had to hold back a rush of emotion. I was so very glad he was here.

I wrapped the cloak around me and collapsed into my desk chair, laughing, and rocked myself to the left, to the right and back to the left. It was soothing, and Dwight copied my movements even though he had no chair in which to swivel. The cloak was warm. I felt so comfortable and cozy that I began to wonder if The Funk had left me. When was the last time I felt detached and edgeless like I was just sliding through life? I couldn’t remember. I smiled.

“Life is good, Dwight, life is good,” I said as I wheeled myself over to the window. I looked out over the playground and ball fields. The park was almost empty. A few kids played on the jungle gym while an adult stood nearby texting and looking up occasionally. Another person walked her Pomeranian on the far side of the park. A flash of black silk caught my eye. A black squirrel? I knew we had black squirrels, but this was bigger. It stopped in the exact middle of the park, turned around twice and sat down on the ground. It was a cat. And it looked up at me, through the window, as if it knew I was watching. I shuddered and felt my lips tighten. It was looking right at me.

We stared at each other for what seemed like a long time before the cat stood up, stretched low in the front and high in the back and started sauntering toward my house. This must be the fellow who pooped in my gardens. I drew back from the window but did not stop watching. I couldn’t; it was as if I were watching a slow-motion car wreck. I didn’t want to look at the sly thing, but I couldn’t look away. When the cat got to the edge of the park, directly across the street from my house, he stopped and sat down again. He never took his eyes from mine. He was now close enough for me to see that he had very pretty golden eyes. Pretty eyes or not, I wanted him to stop looking at me. I was becoming unnerved. He was close enough for me to see the tufts of black hair that sprang from behind his ears. He was black from head almost to toe—but he had one white toe in the middle of both back paws. These white toes gave me the feeling he was flipping me off. They appeared to be the cat equivalent of a middle finger.

“Well, fuck you, too,” I whispered and then snapped my head around to look at Dwight. It wouldn’t do to have him whispering obscenities. He was watching me, but he said nothing. Dwight leaned over as far as he could without tumbling from his perch. He attempted to peek out the window, but he couldn’t lean far enough to see out.

“That’s okay, buddy, you’re not missing anything.”

Chapter Eight

Slurry

The mound, slick and smooth and cupped in my hands, began to tremble. I reduced the pressure of my foot slightly to slow the spinning wheel, and the clay started to right itself. I had enrolled in an open studio class where I could pay by the visit, which was a grand idea because then I could visit whenever I wanted to rather than being bound by a class schedule. I think it might defeat one of Dr. Browning’s reasons for having me take a class, which was probably to make new friends, but it was a start, right?

I dribbled a small handful of water into the shallow depression atop what was to be my first ever thrown pot. I gave the foot pedal a light push to get the wheel back up to speed. That, however, was not the thing to do.

Gravity failed me and pure centrifugal force took over. Before I could stop it, the entire mound of clay slid off the wheel, careened through the air and smacked into the back of a very large young man.

“Oh!” he yelped, grabbing his lower back with a hand that was covered with a reddish clay. Conversations ceased as people looked up. He whipped around, his shaggy blond hair making him look like a large surfer. He looked at my face and then looked down at the mass of clay on the floor.

“I’m sorry.” I tried to stand up, but my apron caught the edge of the potter’s wheel and dashed the wheel and its tray’s contents to the floor. “Ooooh,” I breathed as the slurry ebbed over the cement floor. It oozed out around the soles of my feet and headed for a few frameless canvases that leaned against the wall. I scrambled for the canvases to save them when my feet went out from under me. I landed on my ass in the slurry. All the conversations in the studio halted now. Then the big guy who took the clay kidney punch started to laugh.

“Wow, way to distract attention from your original accident!” He offered me his enormous clay-covered hand and levered me to my feet. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Everyone except one black-haired woman near the back of the studio was peering at me or at the mess I had created. But even the woman who wasn’t looking seemed to be listening for my answer. I decided to make the most of a bad situation.

I threw my arms in the air, arched my back like a gymnast who had just stuck her landing and yelled, “I’m okay!” That cracked me up, so I laughed heartily. Many people joined me. Their laughter was a bit less raucous than my own. The big guy and two artsy-looking women helped me to clean up the spilled slurry and to right the upended pottery wheel.

“You know,” one of the women said, “you shouldn’t feel bad. That same thing happened to me once.”

“Really?”

“Uhm, no,” she said with a gentle smile. “It didn’t. But it could happen to any of us, so don’t feel bad, okay?”

I really didn’t feel too bad about it since it could have been so much worse. The guy could have been a prick about getting nailed in the kidney, or I could have cracked my head wide open and bled to death in a pool of bloody, watery clay. I also could have broken the potter’s wheel, which was kind of a lightweight, cheap one anyway, but it seemed to be in fine order. So I was going to say okay, but the other woman helping us to clean up beat me to speaking.

“No, I don’t think that could have happened to any of us,” she said. “Man, it was like a scene from a movie!” Her pink, orange and mousy brown dreadlocks wiggled as she exclaimed, “It’s like you practiced for all that to go wrong, you know?”

When I replayed the events in my mind, I realized they were kind of awe-inspiring, in the kind of way that you don’t necessarily want to be involved with but would rather just appreciate from a distance.

“Yeah, I did practice that, but after a few hours’ worth of rehearsals, I felt ready for all of you, my adoring fans.” I laughed. Over a bucket, I wrung out the cloth with which I had been wiping splattered slurry from the walls. I dabbed at a few last splotches and stood back to see if I had missed any.

“I think you got them all,” the guy said as he looked at the wall with me.

“Thanks for helping me clean up,” I said to all three of them. People were so nice. I looked at each of them, tried to imprint their faces into my memory in case I ever ran in to them again. If I did, I’d try extra hard not to be dangerous or messy. They each grinned and nodded and said it was no problem. So I said thanks again and wandered over to the vat of mixed clay.

I tried hand-building rather than the wheel for the remainder of the class. I pried out a couple handfuls of clay, found a space at one of the tables and started gingerly. I replayed the whole thing in my head. It was hard not to start laughing. Everyone had seen. Well, not everyone. There was that black-haired woman near the drying racks who had not looked. I looked over at her now. I could see over the top of her shoulder that she was building a sculpture that had many planes, some covered with sharp-looking spikey bits, some smooth as glass and some with striations like muscles in anatomy class. I couldn’t see her whole face, but the half of her profile that was visible made me think I knew her from somewhere. She wore a dusty canvas apron over a stylish red and white striped boat-neck shirt. The shirt looked expensive, but perhaps it was the cleanly cut edges of her chin-length hair. I watched her a minute longer, taking in the grace of her hand movements, the prettiness of her cheekbone and the way her hair was tucked behind her ear.

The clay was drying out under my hands, so I began pressing my thumb into the center of the ball until my right thumb was buried in the middle of it. The grit of the clay worked its way under my thumbnail. This, for some reason, was reassuring. I tried to remember what the instructor had said about rolling and pinching the pot while forming the walls. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to push or to pull at the edges, so I chose to pull with minute gentle tugs that were more like squeezes than pulls. Slowly, a fat, squat pot began to emerge. I liked this—less could go wrong here than with the wheel, that was for sure. I continued to work the pot around in my left hand, squeezing up the edges with my right.

Finally, the pot had walls thin enough to not be embarrassed by and thick enough to not collapse in on themselves. I set the pot on the table before me and admired it. I might use it for Dwight’s food bowl once it was fired and glazed. It appeared to be about the right size. I could picture his glossy black head dipping into the bowl for various… glossy black head…I glanced back at the black-haired woman and groaned. Was she the woman who had been looking my direction after the non-laugh yoga class? Really? Yes. It was the same woman. What were the odds? We had these two huge Twin Cities—Minneapolis and St. Paul—to live in, and she had to witness what might be the two most embarrassing moments of my life. It wasn’t fair.

Chapter Nine

In Ad Equate

Ugh. I pushed back from my desk and my chair wheels caught on the area rug so abruptly that my ride stopped and nearly threw me like an angry horse. I shoved my desk with my foot so that I spun in two lazy circles before coming to rest facing Dwight’s cage. I couldn’t bear to write another word about how Sentesto’s would revolutionize standardized test-taking for students across the nation. Maybe it was that my palms sweated at just the mention of standardized tests, or maybe it was that this column was starting to feel like a commercial and that seemed like the worst feel a column could have. Try this, buy this, it will enhance your life to the point of ecstasy. That is until the next great product comes out and is covered in my column, which, I know, I know, might easily be confused with a commercial. Had I sold out?

“Dwight?” I asked, “Have I sold out?”

I was tired of feeling like someone had used sandpaper to rub off all my edges. Without those edges, I had no way of getting caught by life—I was just slipping through now, unnoticed, ineffective and unaffected. I felt bland, off-white and boring like a slow-motion bullet with no edges to catch on anything, better yet, a stop-action motionless, ineffective bullet. No, not a bullet; a bullet had a target. I was without a target. I wanted my edges back.

I pulled my head up from my arms. I wanted my edges back even if it meant being hurt or not liking what I saw. Anything would be better than this uninspired feeling of not being caught by life.

Book of Shadows

Spell to Banish Negative Energy

Waning Moon

Cast the circle.

Set out bowl of earth from windowsill herbs combined with black pepper,

cinnamon, salt, ground ginger and cayenne powder.

Set out bowl of clear, clean water.

Burn chicory and waft it about to banish negative energy.

“Blessed be Creatures of Light.”

Light gray candles in copper holders to bring healing and love.

Greet and honor the four directions and the universal elements.

“As the moon diminishes, so too will this feeling

of living an uninspired life. By the time the moon recharges herself and begins to fatten up, so will my feelings of joy, inspiration and delight.”

Thank the four directions and the universal elements.

“Blessed be Creatures of Light.”

Extinguish candles.

Open the circle.

Chapter Ten

Burp This

“No, there’s no more burping,” Falina said and demonstrated the new snapping action rather than the old burping action. “See?” she asked as she held the bright orange bowl aloft. The lid was indeed intact, virtually airtight.

There were murmurs of approval and several women wrote down the name of the bowl set on their order forms. I wrote, “These women are hysterically sweet,” and “Fal, you do a great job,” on my order form. I was at one of Falina’s famous Tupperware parties. The wine and laughter were flowing freely, and the other attendees were Tupperware junkies.

“Is there anything left to burp?” asked a woman in a tight ski sweater. I had to admit, these were not the types of women I had imagined when Falina invited me along. I never would have said yes, not having a need to buy Tupperware at cost since Falina had always been happy to hook me up with my favorite plasticware at her discounted price, but I had remembered Dr. Browning’s therapy assignment of saying “yes” to social events and then following through on my commitments.

So here I was, along for the ride. The party was being held in a beautiful house near Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. This was the type of house that should be owned by a ritzy, stay-at-home mother of three East Coast university-attending sons. Instead, the owner was an edgy, chain-smoking, high school teacher with a penchant for hitting on me, even though she was straight. When we were introduced, Camille gave me a wink and a Cheshire grin and then asked me to call her Cami. She sported a thin, pale gray clinging cable-knit sweater and darker gray French terry yoga pants. On most people the outfit would never have worked, but on Cami it came together like champagne and strawberries. She wore no jewelry, but with those glittery hazel eyes, she didn’t need any. Her hair was tawny, parted close to the middle and just gracing the tops of her shoulders.