Love & Darts (9781937316075) (14 page)

I wasn’t thinking about any of that last
week. I was just looking at this little girl with her lip all pouty
not knowing how to help the flag. My father’s voice became mine.
“Well, sweetie, look.” I pointed to a corner of the flag which had
settled on the wet grass. “Don’t let it touch the ground. Flags are
never to touch the ground.”

She leapt to her duty and stood with her
little arms extended far above her head; the flag wrapped wet
around them.

“I’ll get the ladder, and we’ll get it
down,” I said.

It’s not quick, you know. But my roses
climbed that trellis just fine. You just tie the branches to it as
they grow. That’s it. And the color of the thing doesn’t matter at
all. During the summer you can hardly see an inch of it anymore.
And it’s not gonna collapse either. Stood up in a storm that tore a
flag right off its pole, didn’t it?

I came back with the ladder but forgot my
gloves. For twenty minutes I wrestled with the rose branches’ long,
fat thorns. Ensnared material was everywhere because the wind had
changed directions so many times. But when I felt like shirking my
duty even long enough to just go get the gloves—let alone a big
pair of scissors that really would have expedited the process—I’d
see that little girl’s frame with arms still extended earnestly,
with full trust about my words that the flag should never touch the
ground. So I worked on. My wet skin burned from the scratches. I
looked down at her. “This might take a while. Won’t your mother
wonder where you are?” She was reverent and stayed silent, her head
under the makeshift tent. She reached higher. I saw her little
fingers adjust their grip.

I shook my head. “Okay. If you say so.”

But damn I wanted those gloves and that pair
of scissors.

Finally I extracted the thing and held it.
Together we stood near the trellis and the ladder holding the heavy
wet flag off the ground.

She started to get tired, whined just
slightly, “What now?”

How should I know? Folding the flag while
taps played on a beat-up old trumpet couldn’t be arranged quickly
enough to give an exhausted three-year-old a ritual tribute.

My arms were poked full of thorn holes and
burning. I rubbed my hairy forearm with a couple wide fingers.
Whistled low, forcing air through my teeth, buying time.

She kicked at mosquitoes.

I said, “Well, now we take it to the flag
box!”

“The flag box?”

“Yeah. They have one in front of the post
office. It’s where you put old flags.”

I put the ladder back and let her pick a
special flag container from all the stuff in my shed. We didn’t ask
for permission to go or really even think of it in the moment. Her
mom would have said no for little reason.

I drove carefully but let her ride in the
front seat. I think it was a first for her. All these child safety
laws with the car seats, you know. But. It was important that she
sit right next to me as an equal. The flag lay between us in a
wooden apple crate.

She kept one hand on it.

We rode through wet streets in silence. When
we got to the post office I showed her the flag box, a converted
blue street-side mail drop-box painted red, white, and blue with
stars and stripes. I said, “The American Legion puts these boxes
out so they can collect and dispose of the flags in an honorable
way.”

“What’s the ‘merican Legion?”

I’ve never been quite sure myself. “They
help out with flags and they probably fought in a war.”

She listened. And waited, thinking.

I hoped she wouldn’t ask me what flags have
to do with war. She didn’t. She said, “What do they do with the
flags?”

I had no idea. They probably burned them in
a ceremonious rite. I just knew they handled all the pomp and
circumstance required for caretaking flags. “They make sure the
stars find eyes to sleep in and the stripes go on end to end from
here to California.”

She nodded.

I held the flag off the ground while she
readied her step. After the apple crate was steady she climbed onto
it. I opened the little door and held the back of the flag while
she stuffed and shoved and pushed the material into the box.

I tried not to think of mildew. Surely the
American Legion folks check the box often. “Not to worry.” They
seemed the sort.

She kissed the last corner of the flag
good-bye, letting her fingers loosen one-by-one. When the last bit
slipped away I let the slot’s door snap shut.

Stilled isolation and forgotten sock sounds make the harmony
of my attempt at beginning.

I don’t remember why but I guess a week ago
a cop friend called my mother, said he was taking me to a hospital,
a psych hospital. Mom came to visit. Felt she had to. Resented it.
But. Came nonetheless. It was like usual. Five days to stabilize
the meds, to ask all the right questions, to teach me to cope,
again, to deal with my mother and the paperwork, and then to set me
free as if my mind would allow it.

Mom left yesterday, which is fine.

How do you do your best to sort everything
with a glued-back-together-and-held-by-vice-grips mind? You can’t
ask anyone for help with this part. No one knows what you mean. If
they do know, they pretend ignorance. So just hush and hurry to
fracture your constant stream with prism eyes as information comes
sideways.

Inanimate things take their toll on me. My
socks rest where they were left on an unremembered day. I think
about my broken mind and try to let the glue dry. Let it harden
while dealing with the coming of a teakettle in the apartment next
door. Culling awareness, I put what I hear in different places with
their pictures of female members of the family. Or men, sometimes,
for the guy sounds. Distant traffic revving at the streetlight goes
into a memory of the accidental night. Gasping hawks get put away
with photographs of my father. Inside the socks lay crinkled on the
couch and still. Weighing me down with their no-sound way to put
them anywhere.

If the floor is, in fact, under the bed, it
will not sink, I guess. But who can be sure where the floor ever
is?

But if the floor is, in fact, under the bed,
then I guess I am pretty hungry. Jell-O would be great. Knox Blox,
to be exact. Cut out with nestable cookie cutters of
different-sized stars. Slip yellow points into red corners and be
good enough, be someone worthy, be happy to put one star inside the
other like it shows how to do on the package. But you need
vegetable oil that has no flavor to grease the
perpendicular-pressure aluminum. I only have sesame oil. And I hate
eating art.

So then what? Gravy? I don’t know how to
make gravy. What’ll I do with the lumps? There will be lumps
because I am not good enough to make anything come out right. I
don’t know how to make gravy or anything so they gave me a brochure
about self-esteem and said to check a website once a week for
coping tips. I can chat in real time with a trained counselor who’s
twenty-two and makes eight fifty an hour. Sometimes, even so, a
yearning rises and grips my center, sending me into a kind of
God-lust. Sometimes a yearning comes undone and drifts sideways,
changing Mother’s hand-me-down thoughts into a kind of
almost-wonderland.

Life being half indebted inheritance and
half unrealized potential, I am trying to resurface in an
unrecognized welcome.

I am awash in similarity. I don’t even have
what-ifs. But whatever. Instead of getting anywhere with my vision
of the meta-almosts I end up with all sorts of
not-quite-good-enoughs and probably-could-have-beens and just give
up buying anything with built-in obsolescence, like boyfriends and
homes, though it seems there is nothing but continuing. No
splendor. No deep roots. Simply the day-by-day inebriation of
adulthood.

The church tears at the politician who
shouts at the people and says, “Hope. Change.” Change what? Hope
for whom? Myself with others? My other realms with each other? You
have got to be kidding. My rhythm of death-days has become so same,
so unending, and I am succumbing to the trance of disbelief that
shrouds nations.

But. It’s okay. There’s a pill for what ails
me. Just do the laundry. Clean the bathroom. Hang the towels. Spray
409 on the stove. Water the plants. Go to the gym. Feed yourself.
Clothe yourself. Take out the trash. Enjoy things like music,
books, TV shows, and beach volleyball. Participate. Learn. Invest.
Grow. Plan a trip to meet indigenous peoples in a rain forest and
discuss intercultural affairs on an ecotourism adventure that’s
well-enough controlled to be both liberating and safe. Airplanes
are natural. Drive your car. Don’t let the gas tank get too low.
Pay for things with cash. Live within your means. Hang up the
clothes. Mop the floor. Do the dishes. Remember the import of
eating a balanced diet, of exercise, of maintaining relationships,
of having people over to smell your scented candles, to pet your
dogs, to comment on your wall art, to play your piano, to rifle
through your medicine cabinet, and to sit back down on your couch
pretending nothing ever happened.

The house sits animated but still ready to
pounce around me with its penetrating unspoken screams. Ready to
emerge as
life moving on
.

Sandwich. Bread. Pepperidge Farm white
bread. Fresh. Mayonnaise. Salt and pepper. Leftover baked
rotisserie chicken breast. Lettuce. Not iceberg but romaine. Or
buttercrunch, I think they call it. Tomato. No. Tomato on the side
with more mayonnaise and salt and pepper.

The bed is moving. No. The walls are moving.
No. It’s the clouds outside the window streaming by. And the bed is
dropping away through the floor I knew didn’t really exist and
couldn’t.

I have to eat. That’s what they say. “You
have to eat.” They say if you can feed yourself sufficiently then
you don’t have to go to strange places where the doors are heavier
than the walls that ripple, haunted and waterlogged with similar
muzzled lives. So different than seedy hotels. So same. So eat. I
have to eat.

It’s not pieces of your mind falling into
shattered disarray again, unsortable. It’s low blood sugar.

Sandwich. There must be a way.

Fight. Like Christina in Wyeth’s muted grass
world. Make your way to what you want, what you need, what you have
to have. Make a well-deserved sustenance for yourself—your body and
mind.

The store is only three blocks away. You can
make it. You can do this alone. But is there any money? Under the
table in the hall: don’t you remember seeing a quarter? Yes. But
that’s been at least five years ago and it was at home in—well,
wherever that was. But the floor was a cheap, lacquered jewelry box
from Japan. A tourist trinket and black, almost, under that table.
It was dark reddish-fade-to-black hardwood veneer that will never
chip off. And the quarter was just there somehow in a beam of
sunlight. And I saw it. I didn’t pick it up. But I saw it there
just like that under the foyer table on the souvenir floor. Still,
just like that years ago. But it wouldn’t be enough to take to the
store today anyway.

Mom said there was money in a drawer. She is
always using drawers for things, like money, that shouldn’t be
hidden, that need to be seen.

But pull yourself toward the creation of a
sustaining reality.

Commit to small certainties. The salt will
sit on the chicken breast and on the skin from the rotisserie and
you will just barely be able to see how you’ve seasoned it.

I remember sandwiches like that.

I have to eat.

I will make a sandwich like that.

There are three dollars in my coat. I know
the money’s there. Or at least I hope it is. Hope it hasn’t been
changed. But it’s probably there from the time I bought cigarettes
across the street. Good. Yes. Here it is. It’s real. I remembered
it right and I am holding it with two hands, touching it, checking,
counting, assuring myself again, and counting again, but yes, it’s
here. It’s really here. This is one thing that’s not an illusion,
an expectation, a hope, a change, a delusion, a hallucination, a
must-have-remembered-it-wrong embarrassed moment, a confusion, a
frustration, a trust, an unknowing, a worry, a panic, a
thought-so-but-no. It’s real.

So. I won. I’m fine. I remembered it right,
which means it’s real, I’m fine, and my broken brain didn’t process
it wrong. Not this time. This time I remembered it right. There was
three dollars in my coat pocket. I was right. It’s real. It’s right
here in my hand. It’s real. I’m looking at it and it’s here. I feel
it and it’s real.

So the coat and the drawer and as long as
the floor is there again we’re okay. We’re okay and we’re not going
anywhere without shoes and a hat. Where is the hat? I guess it
doesn’t matter as long as I have the beach towel memory. The one
with the dancing Planters peanut on it from all those lost beach
summers. God. When will this glue dry? I need to find my hat. I
don’t need to remember a twenty-year-old, navy blue, dancing
top-hat-and-cane monocled-peanut towel on a clotheslined
breeze.