She’s spent twenty-six years striving. Hasn’t made of herself a person complete in the way her friends have. Most days, she reckons she never quite learned how. Blames it on the gaps in her schooling, on her mother keeping her home, on her daddy never driving her to school. She’s not been clever like the other girls, so now she sits alone, cold side of the tub digging into the flesh of her bum. What an ugly ass she has. Still, he seems to like holding on to her. Most times. He doesn’t have time for her often, and that’s been a given since they started, and of late, it’s less and less, but when he does – have time – he likes to hold onto her tight and not pass her on to nobody. Makes her feel safe. She likes to make out as if he doesn’t make her feel anything at all, only he’s too old for her games. He’s been around the bench a few times while she was still deciding, reads her from the doorway, from the light inside when he’s out, from the way she leans precarious over the balcony and lets her hair down for him to climb up and twist her ponytail into a chokehold.
She should be too old for this. Should know better by now. Should’ve figured out somehow the way of good little girls. What’s the moral if Red never strays from the path? It’s questions like that keep her up at night when he’s already left and his side of the bed’s grown cold. Kids herself. They’re both her sides, one for laying out the nightclothes, the other for ripping them apart. It’s good, fertile soil under his nails, this, her old maid unmade bed.
Now that he’s gone, all dissipated from her. It’s the tragedy of when he leaves, that she can’t anymore remember wanting him. Remember longing to be alone when he’s here, but not the evil inside her bones makes her act this way, lose her head, her mother’s shame. Drags through the dirt and kicking up the mud all over her Sunday best. Hoolala. She is singing. Edith Piaf, dangling her feet over the ledge. She likes to get out here when the smell of him gets too much in there. Behind her, room is airing. And the bed? She was just in bed. In his head. But she’s kicking up heels now and reaps the first of snow on her bare calves. It’s much too late in winter to be this lonely, and the night is at its darkest. It’s tonite, the witching hour, the fall-off-the-ledge, but like a cat, she learned early how to land on her feet, and cherish each of her nine lives, of which already she’s squandered three. And so long before her thirtieth. What a waster.
It’s a trick ledge. Drops, but whoever built this filthy building has foreseen women like her. She’s never made out just what it is. A second ledge for the ones who can’t quite keep balance on the original. A safeguard against rain and snow – tonight snowfall, blizzard in her marrow – to keep the gentry from stepping into wet.
She lives just above the entrance, so that some nights, a drunken stumbler will spot her and stop dead, and our ledge-dweller will arch her back and growl, and she’s terrifying when she’s on her own. It’s alright. She’s long accustomed herself to this, her role, as something to be feared, a woman to be mis-desired.
Out here, with the cold digging into her shoulders bare and her still-young cheeks, she could pity herself, suppose. But she won’t. Knows better than to make of herself an object of pity. Boo-bloody-hoo. Tying herself to the uncertainty of his future. If you wish to be a good girl so bad, you could start by bolting the door. And she always intends to in the morning, but never does. For this, her first-floor, above-entrance flat is a house built on intention. Flimsy, fickle, prone to flooding when under the weather.
From way up here, she’s never liked to jump. Suppose she might. If there’s a fire. Some genuine threat to her status quo. But mostly, she comes out here to listen, to forget, to remember herself to the night. She may be a disappointment, but if she can withstand the wind out here, all bare and clean, then maybe it’s not too bad. There’s times when she worries her life’s becoming too foreign for her own liking. Times when she needs to stand, when the trees shimmy, remind her of New Orleans, of women she never was. And there’s pellets, ice pellets slap against her skin, grow-red skin, like children under too much sun, except what sun when it’s the dead of winter? Suppose if she stands out here long enough, she could freeze to death. Imagines her elderly neighbor whose name she’s never bothered to learn explaining away the collapse, the nakedness, the unmade bed and the moaning sudden into the pillow, then he’s gone. Would he find in his memory all the little nitpickings to tell? Would firemen care, and is it firemen at all who come to rescue you when you die of cold on the makeshift, over-the-entrance porch? Would it be her mother peering down on her nakedness? Her spare key saving them from having to break down the door? Be a shame. She’s so low already. They’d just need a small ladder to make it up here, wouldn’t need to get her mother out of bed at all. Still. Suppose she can’t die here, not with semen in her belly, because sure, someone in this Lynchian rescue party would get awkward for looking at the cunt of her, the swell of her dead belly and finding her attractive. Someone’s bound to ask questions, and then wouldn’t that land him in a spot of trouble? Trouble of the what’s this dead girl here doing with your maybe-baby- in her you-know-what and did you murder her so word wouldn’t get back to your wife? Was he that kind of man? Would they just look through him the same way she did and see the boy he’d once been? She expects not, though. Guesses they’d forego the questions about her father and tie his hands around his back, and would his son claw at his wrists? Can she be the reason that little boy first sees his father as a reprehensible man?
There’s dirt under her soles. She promises to clean here in the morning, whenever she comes out here, and she’s meant to once or twice, but in the bright of day, it gets to be too much, to be embarrassing, can’t picture herself standing out here in the full light, for all the old bitches to snicker. Besides, the gutter might collapse. can it be a gutter if it’s like this, suspended up in the sky? And how come it holds the weight of her in the dark, but never when morning comes? She never cleans out here, and so her feet stay dirty when she slithers back in. By now, the room is cold and the smell of him is almost gone from the air, but not, she knows, if she nozzles tight into his side of the pillow. The same pillow she moans into, the one he drools on, bites of, whispers his words of love and desire that he’d never dare say to her aloud. There’s just things you don’t do when there’s light outside.
The bed remembers him, the weight of his body, grow a little heavier from year to year, though he’s learned to hide it well. Has need to in his profession. No one will hire old, out-of-shape actors, not when they were leonine and womanizing in their prime. If he is to continue, he must distill the essence of that prime and reapply as needed under the eyes and smoothing, smothering his jowls. He grows heavier, slower overhead, yet she undresses herself for him anyway. And it’s dirty and I’s new, this life he’s opened up to her, except not really. She’s ran down this interstate so long, the day he pulled up outta nowhere hardly even registered. A blip. Is all he is in the annals of her saga. She’s known men like him all her life. Men who don’t recognize the ‘n’ in enough. Men who open their mouths wide and chew with relish, men who ask for seconds. Long men. Low men. Dirty men drawn to the lick of flame. Men who stand in their manhood as she is a woman. It’s after all by dint of recognition that she’s attracted to them. And what does that make her, if not a bad, dirty woman?
it intrigued me for a while, this strange ambivalence of recognition in another. it's the footbed of this writing. this strange, bellowing thing i glimpse sometimes in other people, the knowing, the humanity of a terrible thing. i get really caught up in that, then end up writing things like this.
