The Lesser Bouviers
As an authoritative amateur on everything, I make my own theories. Here’s one. Every child’s future is in some way revealed in the altars they keep…nests, acorns, feathers…poems, candles, stones, twigs…I had my own of course, an empty bottle of Vicodin; the remnants of Mother Theresa’s habit (given to me by God knows what pitying relative); the first shed (and rotten) tooth of my belligerent pony; a crinkled magazine clipping I found in mother’s sweaty palm the last time I saw her and took it from her hand. A decades-old ad recruiting women to live in the Barbizon Hotel for Women in Manhattan. Mom in her youthful ebullience, the defining muse: leggy, caught in the revolving door—halfway in and halfway out. All the hopes just within reach reflected off her expectant gaze, looking beyond the frame into her bright future. Encased by the veneer of architectural grandeur, arousing able men to buy diamonds and spirit away these chic, urban domestic hopefuls while they’re still caged. Barbizon delivers, it oozed.
Taping the wrinkled ad to my frost-laced window, I sprinkled the other objects on the sill underneath her image. Mother hovered there above the bric-a-brac like a religious icon. Catching the glow of the evening sun, a sword-like lateral beam shone through her—and her alone—blocking light from the puny inanimates resting below her. Empowering me with these revelations: objects lain on altars are not for show, they beg for a burning, mother held the matches, and I breathed fire.
__________
It was mother’s summer rite to run headlong into the Big Apple as the city folk flooded “out east” to the beach especially on muggy days when the sun’s ire vented its coal-breath. We were townies, and had long ago stopped renting out our house for high-season on account there was nowhere affordable to displace ourselves. Whatever family mother had remaining could be found locked up: convents, prisons, asylums. Father seemed to have immaculately appeared, one trace nothing of his past save the wrinkles of his furrowed brow and weathered hand-scars reminiscent of barbed wires, signs perhaps he came of age in a Montauk fishing boat, though he would never say. His family was—de facto—the plumbing company he ran: Bouvier Plumbing. Even that he’d inherited from mother, as one of the lesser, lesser Bouviers of Long Island.
The four of us lived in a glorified lean-to. One of those shingled houses in demise aggregated by the generations, teetering and bulging atop slanty fun house floors. Mother deemed our crooked abode a holy relic made of the bones of the saints: her ancestors, or at least their clattering ghosts. The truth was, we were the first humans to live inside the ramshackle. It had been an unkosher pig shed, a stubborn leftover piece of the larger property sold off parcel-by-parcel by the greater family, fast and furious, once the grand-dame died. The nub we inhabited was an amorphous unsellable sliver of a thing, a paltry inheritance at the intervention of some merciful great-something-or-other. The wiggly excess made the rest of the properties more valuable when snipped off. A fence was promptly erected so as not to scare off buyers from the more attractive acreage by sinking eye-sore.
Our parcel was continually boggy on account that the small brackish pond was held together by ambiguous borders, given to swampy erosion. Brandeis—my old horse—squeezed into the section between our shack and the waters against town ordinances. Horses needed a full acre, but dad did the plumbing for all the hoity-toities. What they saved on toilets for their second homes, they could spend on jewels and private planes seducing young mistresses.
When Brandeis wanted to run, he did. The fence posts were loose as a rotten tooth, sunken into the wet earth without staying power, often making a muck for the vacationers or raucous fundraisers on the other-side. But in the off-season, the almost full nine months of grey-ice, the townspeople at the bookstore or coffee shops considered a Brandeis sighting a sign of luck keeping wintry specters at bay. Whatever ghosts lived in Saggy Harbor or inside our house, I never claimed as kin as mother did. But it would have been fine with father if I wanted to keep them around; ghosts didn’t use the toilets.
It’s like being in a dog’s mouth. That’s how mother put those sultry summer days in those crowded, infrequent, and stifling bus trips. But once the screech of opening doors sounded and we were spat out, gleaming with dew of rightly earned sweat onto the cobblestone streets of the West Village, mother was happy as a pauper-queen. Cobblestone was a yellow brick road hemmed in by those awaiting her as onlookers from the bustling cafes. For a few moments or a forbidden stream of days, mother forgot all about the heat and the stench of our confinment in the sticks of Noyac. Manhattan was not just the life she deserved, it was home. The one stolen by some accursed fairy or deviant godmother and though she couldn’t quite name the deviant villain, she knew there was one, and that it was best not to rouse it. Shhhh, she’d say as we lurked about, tiptoeing our way throug fashionable darters as though father was having us followed.
Instead of the dark abyss one may expect from mothers inner disparity—the irreconcilable juxtaposition of what she had and what she wanted—mother fell into a wormhole of enviable childishness. A magnetic delusion that worked its own magic: people believed her. Believed she was the Park Avenue she emanated. When in fact, she had one really nice dress and lived in a rehabilitated shed with an almost empty bank account on good days, deficit on most. She talked like someone raised on Park Avenue after all, slowing down her vowels, winkingat the doorman. She knew the city better than the beatniks and cabbies. She was a real New Yorker at heart. If there was any true north for her it was the Cloisters. It was showing people the way to this and that. Being up on the museum showings and the speakeasy Leonard Cohen occasionally graced, the Signes hotspots. Sometimes we’d spend the day looking for tourists, guiding them to the best burger joint near Sloan Kettering.
But our first stop was always the now defunct family-run wholesale bakery in Meat Packing. We’d gnaw on croissants my mother charmed her way into, yesterday’s batch or those deemed malformed and unsellable. “Mangled butter is still butter. Besides! They’re best in the city! The kindest people! They believe in Ruth. They believe in leaving the leftovers for the common people. They believe in jubilee. Always be a queen to others, Blaise. People need your smile. Smiles are their own kind of jubilee.” I had no idea what she was saying. Ruth, as far as I knew, was the girl in class with crooked teeth, crossed-eyes, and penchant for wetting herself. When I saw Ruth my heart broke, my chest tightened like strings on a guitar pulled too taut by an amateur until they gave. No music, all reverberating ache.
Once sated, we climbed the ladders to the platform where a high train once took you all the way to Harlem with the best views. Before it was the fashionable tourist-laden high-line, it was a railway, and for a long time abandoned tracks leading north and south as far as the eye could see. I could hear her saying this even now with her elegantly quivery voice. Manhattan was always a worthy non sequitur.
Wildflowers grew up through the steel without fuss. When I picked at their tendrils, balancing along the raw wooden beams, I believed as mother did, they grow here just for us…blooms in waiting, just like you, Blaise. According to her, we were their sole delight. Finders, keepers, mother would say challenging me to a hunt. She’d run too, until she was breathless and void of expression, collapsing for a cigarette that always made her seem literary though she barely skimmed a Vanity Fair.
Mother’s hair was short in the style of Mia Farrow out of vogue by then, but it suited her pixie face. She enjoyed showing me the things other people had forgotten. The fledgling things covered over. You could say it was her unspoken theme, though she rarely made connections between disparate ideas. She left puzzling to others. Her mind was vast like the sky, thoughts coming and going like clouds…sometimes calm and static, sometimes stormy, sometimes suddenly gone and unsearchable. Maybe this is why she was restless when the sky cleared. She needed a buffer from all that watchful glory, from the scrutiny she believed was always hovering.
Though a grown woman and my mother, she had been left “in the care” of some off-beat aunt who’d converted to strict Catholicism and lived near us as a nun in silence. Auntie Nuncompoop, as I called her, came monthly with her cane, rapped on the door and belted out in song something like “adormamus te Christe…” in Latin. Mother would erupt in a tizzy at the always unexpected arrival, responding boisterously, head out the window like a teenager enthralled by the serenades of a flaming crush… “Gloriamus te Christe…” and that was the extent of any conversation. I was promptly scooped up and taken for the afternoon to sit in the crag of a convent watching the bread in a cage for hours while an exorcist swayed and hovered over mother in one of the cavernous nooks. The wail of birth, the howl of tortured animals, broke eventually into thunderous sobs. I liked the sobs. Sobs meant we were nearing the end.
Well-dressed, perched on the tracks like a girl in woman’s clothing, her expression reminded me of those she’d had with the exorcist, dazed but foreboding, in expectation of a violent convulsion, a contraction of revelation that would send her into the throes of release. On the elevated platform, I buzzed about like a frantic bee, it was the sunlight, not the holy water that induced her peaceful stupor. I left her alone to bask, scampering to collect all the flowers I could before she emerged and solemnly bid us leave. Shuttling each petal back to our bench until it appeared ample to weave a crown, frustrated I didn’t have the dexterity so many girl’s my age had. I was lucky mother’s hair was short even though its thinness made it hard to anchor my bruised reeds using twigs for clips. Working the fragile crown, lacing it through her hair, I pretended not to see tears gather at the edge of her cracked eyes, falling to freedom down her tawny, apple cheek.
Feelings and not words, she would say. But eventually words. You should put the flowers in your hair, dear. You have more. Such illustrious hair, my diamond. And when you’re older. You’ll use it. You’ll live in the Barbizon as I did, and be a dancer or a singer, and marry a man on Park Avenue. God knows, you’ve got the poise for it, and the blood. Then she’d become grave. But stay around the artists. Invite the artists. Art begets art. Yes, the artful life is worth living, Blaise. Don’t forget it. And with the catharsis of her speech, having found some final words she’d seem to suck straight from the nectar of the sun’s rays, she was re-energized, bolted upright, straightened her silk skirt and baby doll shirt, and held out her hand. Now come, let’s go to Saint Ambrose…I pocketed the remaining petals, grabbed the satchel she had forgotten all about, and squeezed her hand. We’re going to mass now, mother?
Not quite, Ms. Bou-vee-yay, but we are going to feast!
I stopped short, paralyzed, realizing we were about to violate father’s cardinal rule: no extravagant meals, straight to the tracks and home by dark. Tugging against her, the surge of light-heartedness turned to leadened dread. But the last bus home is six-thirty on Saturday, mother. Mother’s voice sharpened, shrill as a killing instrument, she shook both my arms by the wrists to emphasize her point. We’ll. Get. Home. When. We. Get. Home. And defying my signals, mouth agape and eyes a’startle, she slipped the satchel off my shoulder, pilfering to reveal her secret treasure: a bouquet of credit cards. I smiled, bamboozled as usual, took her hand, and hopscotched along the rubbled byway, placated by the revelation she conjured for me. It was always this way with me and her. If I stared into her features long enough, I was hypnotized. Her moods became my moods. Mother was my hand mirror. I searched for my face inside hers until I found some semblance of myself.
We descended onto the busy streets like old pros. Mother hailed a taxi with her signature finger-in-the-mouth whistle. I could make out the sketches of her youthful stature, emanations of her eager physique; she must have been unstoppable. A spark that set others aflame, and once their eyes could see again through her dazzling haze, she’d, poof, be gone. We could take the subway, I muttered as we jumped straight in and whirred down the mostly empty August roads, uptown! The street signs and street people blurred and morphed until we screeched to a halt at mother’s command.
Why there it is, just look at it!
The Barbizon towered above us. It’s more than a building, you see, button. It’s a future. Your chance to regraft our dried out branch into the great tree again: a great family of this city, of the nation—of the world—if you play it right. But first childhood and first, first salmon.
The revolving door swallowed us whole. We sat down on the red velvety chairs, the napkin was lain over my lap, and mother smiled so big I could count all of her teeth. This was the look of a woman aging but unscathed, longing but in love. This was the look I lived for.
——
Some years later I had it mind to take mother’s advice and go live in that magical Barbizon before I was of age. If I sketched them a new sign befitting the dazzle I believed raged inside those walls, and put on mother’s one nice dress and hid the tatterings of her artful headscarf, maybe they’d be fooled. I set myself this task for all of middle school and well into high school. By then, mother had more oversight and our getaways to the city were spotty, tiresome day trips. Soon, they were non-existent and mother fell almost permanently into a languorous stupor without regaining the revelatory relief of those earlier years. After prolonged doldrums, she was given to the nuns entirely. But the sketches, weak as they were as currency, kept me close to her and did eventually bring me some luck… I happened to be sketching Barbizon 63 with excessive swirls from a font I had admired on an old movie poster when the doorbell rang successively, neurotically. The hum of a large, black SUV made its own snug spot on our lawn. I was home alone as usual, mother now gone, father probably coital with his favorite plumbing client out on Accabonac, my semi-adult brother possibly dead in the house. No one ever looked for him unless there was a smell.
In my zone, perfecting font, I stalwartly ignored the irritating raps until I tore open the curtains and looked down, catching a glimpse of the railing pest. A vision of a woman weighed down by a large luxury bag costing more than all our winter utilities combine. Her impenetrable, wide-rimmed sunglasses and nonchalant air were something from the otherside, the posh part of our island. I wondered for a moment if it was some relative come from the wilds to dispense a forgotten heirloom, some nuisance that pricked their conscience to simply dump otherwise. Pacing back and forth on our cramped and creaky porch, this mystery woman was either a fiendish addict or had to pee. I figured my brother was to blame and relished the idea I could hold something over him, bilk one of his clients. I left my sketches splayed out on my bed, and bolted down the crooked stairs by fours, flinging open the door.
As I took in her angles and watched her lips move, muted by my darting calculations, taking in her essence, tracing her aura. My mind flew about trying to place her…until I was suddenly at the foot of a one my own favorite high rises, the one made of wedding cake stone on the high side of Park Avenue. I had found her analog. When the woman lowered her sunglasses to size me up in turn, I could smell the perfume of a rare permanency, that divine lineage. Just as I hadmany a spring day in Manhattan, the purr and pitter-patter, the inconsistent, picturesque ratatarat of the east side goings-on. Looking up as i do too often, buildings hovering, leaning ever so slightly; eaves-droppers that they were. A new kind of determination took over me—a desire not to just peek inside, but to be inside, looking out, looking down on the lookers-up. Fully immersed in their ways, walking in them uprightly, dunked into the font whence their unspoiled bodies emerged baptized with Parisian-hewn flats, starched-indigo pencil skirts, and Audrey Hepburn inspired short-sleeved button-ups. Those effortless ironed pony-tails defying wind, wilt, and cab-smog. Arrayed like kept, edible delicacies, immaculate behind glass, guarded by balding men in gleaming white gloves. Revolving doors opening on command, umbrellas lifted, newspapers unfurled. The world opening, activated by a mere step as in the days of Moses. Traffic parting as the waters; invincibly on-the-go.
I had conjured my muse—that enviable curio, the Upper East girl.
My only childhood muses had been the nuns of Noyac. Arriving feverishly and unannounced to our ramshackle activated by some unspoken vow they’d made eons ago to some relative long-dead: to watch over mother, ensuring she stuck to the protocol on average. Sumtotal, the woman who’d embarrassed them in life would not embarrass them in death. I could almost feel the jerking snags in my hair as mother combed, as the winds picked up and my cheap poly blend sweater electrified my locks like something from a carnival cotton candy machine. The abrasive, tinny horse-brush mother haphazardly—and without bothering to clean it—grabbed from a bucket on our walkway to the nuns’ car, would make any scalp bleed. Roughing it through my hair, making up for all our crookedness, one yank at a time. All this we we rode waterward toward the rocky edge where the small but stalwart monastic enclave sat defiantly despite the waves continual attempts to digest it.
Outside the car, standing before the brazen convent, the wind inevitably roused in all directions, typical of the bouldery-jutted foundation on which it lain, my naïve mane went wild again. Mother scowled as though I was mortal sin, while I imagined my unkempt mane a saintly covering, a holy but frayed apostolnik. I ducked inside, inhaled deeply the cold stone caked with spiced incense, tricking my stomach into thinking I’d been fed, furtively detached myself from the miming cluster of nuns and my deferent mother, and knelt down alone. My neck craned to muse on the Eucharistic bread. Mimicking what I’d seen for years when she was jittery; mother and solemn nuns led us silently in stiff togetherness toward Jesus pressed down and locked up inside this desiccated yet magical wafer.
The visitor prodded—So, is he here, or what?! Snapping her fingers at my face, jolting me into the now, I could see for the first time clearly what I wanted was what mother wanted all along. Not to observe otherly charms in some stalled trance, or merely accessorize myself with the accoutrement that weighed down in some form of cosplay. I wanted to be her, a kind of her, incarnate, safe and confident, the eyes of my heart illuminated to see and take the good I inherently deserved by blood right. Covered in glass, clasped tight by intricately borne, gilded and ancient hooks, displayed in a holy cage, high and lifted up: worshipped and adored.
This divine, needy creature cinched by Hermes scarf, smeared with last night’s mascara, brightened by a pop of moody cabernet lipstick playing just outside the lines, standing at my very own doorstoop, was a bodily revelation, an anointing. I had found my calling. For the summer at least; I was saved.
__________
I leaned over and wiggled the cigarette from her spindly fingers, all bones from the wet-cold of day’s end. We shared a small towel between us, something left behind, rummaged on my walks. Ratty and frayed but still in one piece. I liked how easily it rolled up, left some space in the medium-sized satchel I carried all summer for toiletries. The vitals. Just in case I was asked to stay over, or better yet, stranded on Gardiner Island. A private island I’d never been invited to, but one I knew others to frequent impromptu. We huddled together on the sand. I took one long drag of the stubby cigarette as much to warm my lips as feel the buzz while she fumbled with the binoculars tangle-laced around her neck, surveying the sea froth playfully zigzaging toward us.
The sea is brazen, she said. She was the kind who always anthropomorphized as though a professor awaited her narration. The sea is focused, I retorted, exhaling in her face with a jaded snarl.
The sea is mine! She yelped in brogue in a way that made you wonder if Shakespeare had written it somewhere, hoisting herself straight up, a flag brandishing its glory, flapping in the wind, repeating—the sea is mine—in twirls. Leaving me draped in the flimsy rag; exposed.
The sun was sucked up into shades of blue and grey when Abagail Tuesday Bach darted headlong, diving straight into the ocean’s shallow as though she were a predator. She emerged soggy and prickly, barreling toward me, yanking the whole shroud for herself but I wouldn’t let go of my musing.
The single motivating factor of the child is the unlived life of the parent, maybe that’s my problem. I pronounced with mimicking gusto, a non-sequitur that I imagined was the true answer to the real question the ocean was asking.
Who said that?
Said what? I’m starved.
It wasn’t me, but it IS the source of your problems.
It’s genius, I said, flicking the sand off the last bit of the cigarette, blurring her features with vapors as I exhaled. The kind of artsy close-up a genius photographer in the city would snap then become poor and famous in that Brooklyn niche way mattering to his friends and embarrassing his parents.
After a September dunk in the ocean and the etching winds, I was doggedly pensive.
Abigail was my only legit access into in the rarefied, keep-out township she called her second home and I deemed a life-sentence. She always belonged and this I conjectured, made her fatted and homey anywhere she went. Able to lug and cast nets, push forth through thickets, jump fences and still come out clean. She likely owned it all anyway, or knew the person who did. What did she have to lose when everything was found in her? Where she went, there was the world, the one I borrowed.
It was Jung.
Oh right. Carl Juung. Over-pronouncing the u to show her I had heard the name and knew how it should be said.
Carl with a C she added in good humor. It was the small things that mattered in conversation with her kind, the small things that trained me, sharpening me up for him.
Abigail taught me to smoke that summer but I stopped there. She went further on account of my beefy brother whom everyone mistook for a young Jon Favreau. But I taught her something sinister too: breaking and entering. Before me, she’d only trespassed yards or byways connecting her house to the beach, and she knew all the neutral backways by heart anywhere on this stretch of the island. But she had not illegally entered a yard or house until I came along. I chose one victim, but it was prime. A storied house that never seemed to exhaust its secrets, run out of plot-twists. She may have gone first as the foil, opening the wobbly iron gate, but I closed it behind us and locked it for good, vowing never to leave again. This was the summer to take back what had been lost. If not for me, for mother.
It had been a wondrous, hot summer all-in-all. If you’d handed me a half-glass of rose, and it was my first summer being handed one, it was the best summer on record. I feared it was the best summer ever to be. Summers had been the worst of my days since my eleventh birthday and Abigail Tuesday knew this. It would have been best if I’d never described our flinty, generational lineage, our errant maladaptive branching off. If I had just used her for the whims, I would have felt less vulnerable and probably never awakened to her schemes. If I had just given in to all the debaucheries and resigned myself to the path my mother had taken: madness. Or that other familial choice: religious consecration. But somehow as the story goes, I went for the illusion. I went for Barbizon. But if there’s ever an age to go for illusion, I was ripe.
I called Abagail the scholar because she was an educational franchise, had been able to buy into the top of everything. Top schools. Top college. And no matter which house, she had a killer library, or her father did anyway. She hadn’t bribed her way in, she’d just played all their games in that charming, nondescript all-girls-school way, evading too much focused attention along the way. Always pivoting to get you another gin and tonic if your questions probed. She used her endowments as a stalking horse really, objects to hide behind. To cross over safely into what she hoped would be a land of self-realization. A land of her own making. That was make-believe for Abigail: self-determination. For that, and only that reason, she was envious of me. I was mostly a blank slate. All I had was self-determination.
With her leg-up legacy and Princeton prowess, she was a one-percenter lapping up the last afterglow of her so-called accomplishments. She knew they were soon to ask questions, they were soon to demand real-life results…what was their ROI? They wanted to know. Naïve as she was, she romanticized a life of struggle of poverty really, which is what she thought everyone without multiple homes and an Ivy League diploma had experienced. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t snobby, she just knew how much higher the ladder went and how at the top, there was very little wiggle room, little room for error, and a lot of danger and death if the ladder teetered and toppled over.
She wasn’t innately curious and didn’t really have what you’d call an inventive spark; she was more the parroting kind—energetic, vibrant, well-read and poised exactly when she needed to be. If you asked her directly, she’d been brutalized as she called it, by the system she inherited. Heavy lies the graduation-cap, she would say struggling to find a way to leverage on what she’d be given. But it was summer so everyone got a pass. Everyone was more equal in summer, I always thought. We’d all been through the winter, we all sat on the same beach awaiting the same sun rise over head and crown us, change our palor to gold.
Abigail had reluctantly, but inevitably allowed the bludgeoning of her education and in her defiance kept only one souvenir: psychology books. They were the magic ink that made her invisible wounds visible. Wounds marked by invisible ink with invisible scalpels, oozing invisible blood. Whatever was not acknowledged by her parents and the intricate care system that supported their over-coached lives, didn’t exist. It didn’t fit in the calendar between the life director, the tennis, the oom-pod, or the Goop soirée. And so because she was battered with invisible wounds, Abigail seemed to, though she never admitted it to me, believe she didn’t exist either. And with that, she had a great deal of license which everyone envied and wanted for themselves. With all they had, no one wanted to pay for it. You see, her blue blood class, those living on Lily Pond in vast mansions, obfuscated their malformations with that great smoke of luxury accoutrement and party-throwing. They only ever took jobs that diagnosed others, none that put would them under a heat lamp. If no suitable job could be found they employed their inherent genius on entertaining their friends as a business. All of whom would shuffle, pool, and re-pool their money into various charities, the same causes by different names, for whatever was in the vogue. Even charity building had to stay on trend to survive.
But with me, the lowly girl from Noyac, Abby found a friend, the kind you found easily as a child before cultural and financial delineations drew boundaries. She was the only true one I’d ever had. Even if for her, I was merely a summer project, an anomaly, a hiding place. I was happy to be three of anything to anyone.
It’s a shame you never went to college. Scholarship is wasted on the rich. But let’s face it. All you need are my novels. The ones they made us read. The ones we all read. Read them and no one will be able to tell the difference. And with wild locks and diminutive frame, those chunky glasses, and a few hand-me-downs. They’ll think you’re a junior at Columbia.
You sound like my mother.
I take that as the ultimate compliment.
I envied Abagail. But not in cold green way you may think. Mine was the balmy yellow kind. I was toasty with admiration. Warmed myself by her nonchalance, her total confidence that the good would come to her. But in the September, the sun was orange and fading. The kind you depend on as the bite of fall nibbles away at your flesh. So I sprawled out and let myself melt into the whimsy of her sometimes jarring late afternoon plans. Even then she was like a memory, the light and perilous kind that makes you homesick for what’s still in front of you.
A few of my family went to places like Columbia. They have plaques some of them, I was told. My mother would know.
See, it’s in your blood.
But not in our banks.
She exhaled in disapproval. Before she could ask anything more, I over-explained.
The good, the educated, the sound ones; they’re dead. Some one-off cousins have survived, holed up in their fortune-bunkers, distant and in denial the rest of us who live in plain sight, exist. Ready to go down with the whole ship. We’re what’s left of the mostly-dead tree. Nothing to do but cut the deadwood. They’re right about that part, you can’t fool trees.
Abigail shook her legs around, stretched her fit, full body in the slanting sundown, speaking as if the words made her pliant. Plant your own tree.
Warming herself with jumping jacks combined with ninja moves. You’re story’s not special, by the way. That’s the fate of every family. Happens faster to some, I guess. No one can keep it up forever. If it’s not wastrels, it’s taxes. That’s what dad says. What do I know about taxes? And why are we yakking like grannies? Let’s go!
Abigail breached the fence-line of a beach house that was just behind us. Come on! You’re the one who showed me first. She disappeared through the garden, her voice rising and falling through the labyrinth of the uneven overgrowth. I stalled as I heard her splash into the pool, running my hand along the intricately hewn iron gate. It was so easy to open. I wondered if we stall in life because we imagine gates are all locked shut.
Come on! It’s September and they’re goner than gone! It’s 105 degrees in here, suckers!
September. The month it was all suppose to be different. Urban, independent. Why can I never seem to stay on course? Why do I deviate? Why could I not learn from math and be at least, asymptotic? I shuddered at a newsflash fate I caught that morning. A young, divorced mom who used her vacation time to write a sprawling novel always haunted by a premonition that time was running out, only to be murdered by her ex-husband before it was finished; mission aborted, prematurely vanquished.
I let myself submerge into the silken weight of the salty pool, fighting buoyancy. My body floating all the way down to the bottom, letting the stone slab catch and hold me. If only I were a writer, I’d finish that woman’s book. I had a rendezvous with the Barbizon. I was supposed to be drawing for the movies, an apprentice story-boarder, the one promising job I’d landed. Had I shown up for the final interview and moved into room 404. Instead, I found him, or he found me, or maybe it was all for the youngster? But the rest as they say, is history, the kind interrupted by a snagging kind of love.
______