Getting Back To It

There were other dramas we paid attention to, besides Amanda and Jerry, and the busboy. We were a band, with all that entailed, and we paid attention to the migration of the birds, the barn swallows in summer, the eagles in January, the trumpeter swans, the snow geese, the robins. We loved Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac, could listen to Landslide and Silver Spring and Stop Draggin' My Heart Around on repeat forever in the car, and Nathan and I had not figured out whether we were in love or not. Jenn B and Jen A were the ones with formal music training, met at some famous school back east. Jenn B knew how to play both violin and fiddle, same body, different sound. Jen A opened her mouth and the heavens poured out, sometimes wrathful and wild, all New Testament love at others, Jesus and John Lennon in the voice of a girl. The three of us wore bikinis and ran around barefoot, were told by Amanda that she had never met three girls who combed their hair less. Not that we had dreads or were dirty. We were a cliche anyway, I guess.

When We Were No Longer Afraid of the Beautiful

I found myself in New York on 9/11 this year and was caught by how much that moved me. I was in SoHo, and so pretty close to the tribute lights and I came upon many people just stopped in their tracks, remembering. It was some contrast to the political craziness. I am sad a lot lately over the awful, uncivilized way we are treating each other and how impossible it seems to have an honest respectful discourse about just about anything. This 9/11 made me remember how for a brief, brief moment that year we found a more common place to be. I wrote this short bit that October in 2011 when I missed it already as something we couldn't hold onto.

When We Were No Longer Afraid of the Beautiful / October 2001

After the day the unimagined played out like a movie we had forgotten to write, we said to each other that everything had changed. We held our breaths. We held the door open for each other and thanked the CTA worker for the free ride.

We felt ashamed, our irony exposed for fraud. All that pretending we were above it all when really we had no idea what we were talking about. Blindfolded dancers along the volcano.

What a relief. To stop and smell the flowers, even. To be cliché. To salute a hero, say the pledge, sing the hymn, unburdened of that ironic distance. Weary with the effort of holding everything at arm’s length, our arms suddenly so very tired. We let them drop. Let it hit us. Damn. Who knew?

I want to hold on to this awareness. Already, I sense it slipping, our impatience again returning. Yellow ribbons suspended at the ready, but we aren’t good at waiting. Quick and big. Wholehearted and no holds barred—our charm, our beauty, our flaw.

Tired of waiting for the drama to pick up again, we turn surly. But still we see. The way fall turns on us, first stunning and benign, then nasty and undressed. Exposing what was there all along underneath the haughty green.

The Next Things

The busboy was a tall kid, lanky and glossy, brown-eyed, long-lashed and graceful. He worked the early shift at the cafe, clearing the old timers breakfasts away, keeping up with their coffee consumption. Secretly, they liked him. In the evenings, we'd see him out on impossibly long runs all the way up the Farm to Market hill and over highway 20 to the other side of the valley. He came back looking damp, relaxed, shaking out his long limbs and brushing dark curls off his forehead.

Amanda had been a lacrosse player in high school, and once we found out about them, we all sort of pictured her tackling him more than we pictured anything sexual. It seemed like that between them, more a collision, an accident than anything. Amanda had her own unavoidable charms, poreless skin, the sweet freckles of summer across the bridge of her nose, always, a face that broadcast every emotion and   an easy way of touching everyone. She and her sister Iris used to walk to the cafe together in the mornings for takeaway coffee sometimes, Amanda's arm draped over Iris' strong swimmer's shoulders, their gait a kind of drawling, lazy thing.

She had told Jerry she couldn't do another summer of him in Alaska, that she wanted time together in the daylight for a change. She wanted him there when the garden was going, wanted help with weeding and putting in some new brassica beds. She didn't want to taste the first strawberries of the season without him, or stand out in the twilight alone watching the bats' quiet swerving flight over the back acre. There were meteor showers to be there for, and if he wouldn't let her hire Tucker Bennett to fix the corroding water line out to the greenhouse, then he would need to be there to do it. He had missed all her summer naps and the three times a year she swam outside and he hadn't helped wash the antique quilts, delicate heavy things she carried in the sling of an old sheet, arranged carefully on the back lawn to dry on the longest day of the year.

That was why he couldn't do much more then punch the kid, and why at the end of it he was apologizing to Amanda instead of the other way around, and that was how we finally got the Edison Free Library she had dreamed up ages ago, a cedar-shingled shack on the corner at the bend of the road, tended by Amanda twice a week like a vase of flowers that needed emptying, a good rinse, a generous refilling.

What I Have So Far

We were the ones who put all the labels on the postcards that were sent to the whole town, and we were the ones who stamped them. No one would say that makes us the ones to blame, though. Once Jerry found out she had slept with the busboy, the school parking lot fistfight was inevitable. It was just that our stamping and labeling made us involved, the same way sitting around the table with her and the busboy while they also stamped and labeled made us involved. The busboy probably shouldn't have been at a Ladies' Club thing in the first place.

The fistfight was on bingo night, the same night Jerry hit a skunk with his truck, so the parking lot smelled like skunk too. Amanda had won the pass to the Skagit Speedway and Jerry had spent most of the night chasing Aubrey up and down the aisles between tables, which was how the busboy got a chance to take a seat on the same bench as Amanda, who was not going to get up and move when all she had left before Bingo was B7.