War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (4 page)

9 — Be Where

Be where the life runs solid—not like
whey protein isolate—but where Weights and Measures get conducted
through ceramic-insulated copper wire as an invalid warranty, as
electric-wire arsenals carry speeds of light after the installation
of 44,000-V, XLPE, CSA, and PE sheathed underground cables. Be
where domestic silenced biodiesel, natural gas, clean coal, and
tapped core-of-the-earth heat carries cash to dissipate fuel on a
prerun accounting calendar with easygoing beta carotene repeats and
sun damage specifically designed to excel what’s piled up on
recalibrated local roads for metadata blasting hip-flexor
bronco-buck-monkey-minded citizen-athletes.

40 —
Action/Reaction

Catfight: Rosie the Riveter and June
Cleaver. More and more it is a woman-world I cannot grasp. Where
would the wind even be? Where should I listen to clotheslined
bedsheets flap-snapping dry? I run into every kind of day looking
for this most-me to be, inviting implemented ideals, setting humane
traps for what’s best. But wherever I am, there are no catalog
photos of terra-cotta tiles nor any gorgeous bare feet on warm
radiant-heated kitchen floors, no little voices to overhear when
it’s highly inconvenient to be interrupted, no green things to
fiddle with in their season.

I'm somehow crowded out. More and more
the ‘Merican 21st century feminine ideal relinquishes its hold—the
grief of never finding her is like trying to remember eyes. Why can
I not walk into her skin? How can that most domestic be most
wild?

The trap is empty every time I check
it. Why go looking for pelts? We are the children of the political
correction. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, is
it possible to live ethically in action? It’s too easy to say women
still live in fear. If I win that means you lose, and so then I
won’t play. We are worried that our actions will have fallout and
consequences, not results and fulfillment.

Light may penetrate, but we
don’t.

Why kill and stuff something just to
have it look lifelike? The way these worlds open up it does not
seem to be tragic. And yet, knowing somehow, it begins drifting
slowly away. If I see a woman, fabulous woman, somewhere in my
mind, and she is happy and industrious, presentations about the new
economy are everywhere with cookies on three-tiered trays but I
cannot see her face or walk right into her skin. .

Why even catch and release? I look out
a kind of window toward her, suspended by the impossibility of
accessing that perfected taxidermy life.

10 — Just your usual
woman

There were thirteen pens in her purse;
other than that, nothing worth mention, just your usual woman where
rooted hydras thrash.

91 — Wasting Your
Time

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I think about my mother sometimes.
It’s difficult. She’s someone who has done a lot for me, but, for
some reason, she is always trying to get more credit than I am
willing to give. You know?

I’m in this weird maternal economy. I
don’t quite want to call it emotional extortion. That’s extreme.
But. Like. I give a little credit and she wants more. So then I let
a couple weeks go by and don’t give her any. Run out on the rent,
sort of, sometimes, too. Frankly, I’m not exactly sure what she
wants credit for. I’m thinking about giving it to her anyway, just
to get her crazy ass off my back. I mean, when I give a shit, I try
to give her credit, but, honestly, I feel like I did most of
everything myself, even if I wasn’t paying for it for twenty-five
years. But really, Mom didn’t have much to do with the
finances.

I do have some memories of her that
are great. Like I remember having water tossed from a jug in the
front seat onto me and my sister in the backseat at random points
of family trips since there was no air-conditioning in our car. I
remember three generations of our family going into high-tide water
together for a silent loose-skinned dip at sunrise. And she played
these sea chanteys on the harmonica. So that’s all really great.
Not quaint. Not paper dolls and Cabbage Patch kids. Nothing girly.
But stuff like laughing at bats that drop somnolent from
gas-station-lawn trees and wake startled in the hundred degree
dust.

We tend to laugh our asses off despite
the tragic realities. And so anyway, I was thinking about calling
her up and telling her about these memories that I have in some
sort of verbal communication. Maybe like a story, or a conversation
that includes gratitude or something. Even like do it on Mother’s
Day or explain the import to more people than just Mom. You know,
really make her feel commended and special. Is that a good
idea?

Dear Wasting Your
Time,

Never mind.

13 — Trop Gaté

I rent a space in a garage a block
from my building where familiar men, emigrants, take my car every
night and tuck it with care into subterranean slot B-46. After the
meeting but still pissed off at a colleague I thought, “What does
it matter?” The garage door opened and I pulled up to the line
where cars should stop. I got out and handed a tip to this new
valet with the slight smile and too-young-to-have gray
hair.

Women are part orchid, no matter how
much we disown ourselves. I can’t abide it. But, true enough,
almost as if to keep my heart supple with femininity this new
parking guy told me a story about him, his mother, and his
ego.

Names are important. Men who park cars
are in no hierarchy. David’s lost weight. Fakhry is getting older
and older, and I really don't know how he manages the stairs. Ribhi
and I understand each other. He’s a playwright, Arabic. We share
cologne-drenched hugs in the middle of the night, green almonds
from Jordan, classical music, and a solidarity of laughing and
crying together through so many stories of his thirteen-year-old
son, who slipped up and threw a brick through school windows,
enraged.

It was a one-time thing. Fathers must
act. But, how?

Anyway, the guys I knew weren’t there
that night. Weren’t there to witness how incensed I was about what
had happened at the meeting. I had to rein it in, be cordial to the
new valet who has that gray-white hair, is smiley and pudgy, and
wears those roundy-black glasses.

I didn’t know this pudgy man's name. I
should have.

I got out of the car, listened to the
reminder chime ringing out repetitively, not for an instant letting
either of us forget those keys in the ignition. The new guy said,
"Is your mother still in town?" He met her on Friday. I said, "Yes.
We're having breakfast in the morning."

His name tag depended from a
uniform-issue band of nylon around his neck: Salman. What to do?
Lately, I've felt less inclined to cross boundaries with the guys
at the garage, to learn names. Being me, polite enough, and
endlessly curious, somewhat resistant to discussing my mother
freely, boundaries be damned, I deflected his question with one of
my own. Near the open door of my silver car, I said to Salman, "How
'bout your mother?"

He said, "Oh, no. She passed away a
few months ago."

Did I want to know? The ignition chime
kept ringing out. I made my decision, leaned into the car, pulled
out the key. Sound stopped resonating against concrete walls. So he
said, "Let's see. It was 31st, August."

He revealed how everything had
happened. I heard about the emergency call, the quick trip home,
the sister that sat at the mother's bedside twenty-four hours a
day. The coma. The tube that went into his mother's mouth and how
her chest heaved on the ventilator. He said, "My sister asked her
to move her foot if she understood." The foot moved.

But that was all a few days before
Salman arrived at her bedside. By the time he was there, she was
non-responsive. The foot could not move anymore, or didn't, or
something. He doesn't know, for sure. Has to speculate.

Except. Except! Then he paused, pulled
a finger across his temple, said, "I don't know the
word."

I said, "Tear."

“Yes. Tear.” After he had caressed his
mother's hair, and held her hand, and talked to her for hours, his
sister said a tear fell away from his mother's eye as he was
leaving.

He said, "This is why our
parents are so important to us. Especially me. Because I was
trop gaté
."

Fils a sa maman.
I didn't understand. He explained in broken
English, laughing at his own admission. I finally got it. "Oh. A
mama's boy!"

“Yes. Trop gaté.”

Trop gaté. I have to say, I thought of
the man I love. He’s not a man with a waxed chest popping hundreds
of disco-ball cherries into drinks. Not one with wolf nipples
against any of my smoky smudged luminizing eyes. He’s a regular guy
and with him, I didn’t dare turn my synchronized-swimmer limbs into
vaginal flowers. I just wandered away and wondered later if he
might be a bit of a mama's boy, too, somewhere in his own
lithographed cityscape. But I don’t think he’d ever tell me a story
standing in some garage, the way Salman stood next to my car so
easily talking about his mother.

Without really wanting my mind to
wander, I imagined me and the man I love leaning together against
harlequin jester pillars during a charity balloon release: him with
his linen newsboy cap, me with my adhesive eyelashes peeled off and
temporarily stuck on a pincushion. There I was: thigh-high patent
leather boots for him under Canis Major still staring down the
barrel of a slosh-steaming iron that lost its UPC code and haughty
purpose.

Doesn’t matter. Can't. I slowed the
treadle, let the pink thread run off the bobbin, zip animated
through the sewing machine needle’s eye, and out of my life
forever. With sewing skills atrophied pieces of the material
separated, slipped. The story sketchers lost their
nerve.

After all that seemed wrong about
perspective drawings that widen away from their closing-in focal
points by putting interminable train tracks on casters—ones that
just let everything splay open, regardless of any concrete
sleepers—back in the reality night garage I asked the new valet,
Salman, “And where did you have to go to be with her?”

I listened so hard to get my
fear-rage-release wish in his answer:

He smiled a positive ribbon
charge, nothing coy or inappropriate, just an electric fence in a
lightning storm with subliminal flying buttresses and plenty of
cleavage, not quite completely repressed with all those bedtime-lap
gargoyles who surely deserved their happily-ever-afters, and their
curses. Oh, sweet trop gaté.
Where was your
mother 31st August?

"Algiers."

8 — Debriefing

Every Friday before they released us
to go buck wild after being oppressed all week they debriefed us. I
stood at parade rest with the other soldiers. We sweated through
our BDUs in the Texas heat and endured a suicide
lecture.

Imagine a little, tiny,
drowned-rat-looking-mustached, bourbon-skinned drill sergeant
standing at the front of the company. He kicks the cement, shakes
his head, paces. The rant ends with, “There’s always a solution.
You might not like the solution. But there's a
solution."

Then, after the week’s recap, he
screams at all of us. "Do not trucking kill yourselves this
weekend! I do not want to have to call your momma. No motel maid
needs to deal with finding your head exploded in the bedsheets. And
I'm not going to do the dang-blasted paperwork. So if you get any
trucking ideas about breaking into the ammunition shed, or hanging
yourself in a hotel room, or slitting your wrists in the shower
bays, think again!

“You will be here Monday morning. You
will stand up. You will be counted."

That’s what he said.

14 — Blue Butterfly
Falling-Out Barrette

The organ music from a tape recorder
on a banged-up, cherry-veneer folding chair in the funeral parlor
skips sometimes. People pretend not to notice. They don’t want to
upset Elise, the young wife of a man who died in a motorcycle
accident six days ago. He was too young to die, too old not to know
any better, etc. At the wake she stands guard by his casket, for a
few last loyal hours.

Honey, we’re all so
sorry.

Sometimes, Elise, a mourner, or
someone else obliged to be in the space to witness the effects of
no real cause, looks over at the baby girl, almost a toddler now,
but still with a white-ruffled diaper butt. She plays on the floor
near a long-stored row of more cherry-wood-veneer folding chairs.
Silken hair curls, continually escaping from a blue plastic
barrette shaped like a butterfly. She doesn’t have enough hair to
hold it in place for long. The thing just hangs onto those few fine
strands of baby hair that almost always need to be brushed
again.

Her mother’s pewter pin stay-twists,
holds too much wool inside its clasp.

Their eyes meet.

She can stand the shock of
sudden death. But not her daughter’s big baby eyes. Elise begins to
cry, feeling too much
nothing
and too much
all
.