I remember the azaleas. Our house was brick, one-level, and outside there were azalea bushes-red, pink, purple, white. Some years, my mother and I would be struck by a sudden flash of motivation and would don garden gloves, flannel shirts, and old jeans to go weed the azalea sea.

We were not gardeners. Quite frankly, we had no idea what we were doing. In one very unfortunate year, we learned that the shiny, olive-green-leafed vines which threaded through the bushes were poison sumac. We itched mercilessly for weeks. After the blisters on my mother's forearms had all finally healed, and after the strip of menacing redness on my forehead had dwindled to a dry bumpy patch, we began wearing wild gardening costumes: head kerchiefs (made of strips of old lace or red silk bandanas-whatever was handy), long-sleeved button-down shirts, goggles, rubber gloves. We looked like bag ladies and still, even with all the protective gear, got poison ivy. Eventually we gave up and the weeds took over, though the azaleas never quite submitted to their wrath.

After we stopped devoting our weekend mornings to gardening, we started devoting them to all-day breakfast fiascoes. My mother hated cooking. She usually swore when she made dinner. It was, therefore, a nightly spectacle, a haranguing display of her worst qualities. I sat silently, swung my knobby-kneed legs off my phone book perch, and listened to her curse. Breakfast, on the other hand, was her passion, the one moment where she and the kitchen called a momentary truce. She would make pancake batter, lay out bacon, and I would drag a chair to the stove and stand, aproned and with spatula in hand, waiting for the pancake globs in the pan to bubble so I could turn them over. She tried to teach me to flip eggs the same way, but my chubby little fingers weren't coordinated enough and the yolks always broke.

Breakfast-time was like Thanksgiving every weekend. Our small oak kitchen table would be coated in butter, syrup, pancakes, eggs, bacon, grits-any breakfast food possible. The three of us-my mother, my grandmother, and I-would sit for an hour gorging ourselves like a small starving army. The kitchen tiles were brown and the room was filled with sunlight, and there was a calm restfulness to weekend mornings spent licking powdered sugar off my fingers until my mother made me stop. She ate the yolks of my eggs and the crusts of my toast before piling all the dishes into the sink for later.

At that age, my aspirations were simple, the dream close-I wanted to be my mother. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. When I was six, my mother's hair was almost as long as I was tall, or so it seemed. It was wavy and thick and I loved to run my hands through it. Mine was blonde, wispy and always tangled from playing in the woods and being unacquainted with a comb.

She taught me everything I knew about everything. On weekends after breakfast, we would drive to the elementary school-she in the driver's seat of our gray-striped Toyota pickup truck, shifting gears and flexing her muscles to turn the steering wheel, which was not blessed with power steering; I in the back, the wind blowing through my tangled nest of hair, the sun beating down on my face. Sometimes I laid down to watch the sky whizz by above me; sometimes I clung to the sides, watching the asphalt magically disappear under the rear tires.

We would show up to the elementary school and park on the basketball court, away from the hoops. We brought basketballs, softballs, kickballs. She taught me how to shoot a basketball at the corner of the hoop, how to bounce-pass, how to beat her in Around The World. We'd make fun of each other and I'd show off my new gymnastics moves before walking over to the brightly-colored playground. I was terrified of the twisty slide but week after suspenseful week I'd stand at the top, my mother's reassuring arms at the bottom, and try to get the courage to let myself fall. It was months before I did, but I was a twisty-slide fiend from there on out.

My mother taught me how to throw a baseball and we bought a dog from the pound. We named her Lady, and she escaped at least once a week to roam our neighborhood. To catch her, we would hop into our car and drive around, calling her name out the open windows. She loved chasing cars and loved car rides and would always come back, panting and smiling happily at us from the back seat.

When nighttime came, girl, mom, and dog made a happy mountain of sleepy family on the double bed in my mother's room. My mother and I often shared a bed, though I had my own bedroom. We just loved each other's company. We read stories to each other, illuminated by the warmth of her mauve bedside lamp. She rubbed my back with one hand and held a book in the other, her voice echoing softly off the silky pink walls which enveloped us. The dog would snore and my mother's hand would droop softly to the small of my back when she started to fall asleep. I would have to take the book from her hand and read aloud myself, my words sometimes stumbling into each other. Her hair would curl into pools on her pillow as my voice grew steadier and my small hands turned the rough-edged pages. Before the light went off, one of us would pull a chair up to my side of the bed-I was prone to tumbling off at night. Then the light would go off and the darkness would come in, cool and inviting and beckoned by Lady, her paws twitching as she chased dream-cats in the cricket-filled night.

* * *

Many children, when they are young enough to believe that they are grown-up, will pack up a suitcase and head out the door at moments where their parents are angry or repressive. This was not my style. My grandmother was a tyrannical despot and still, I never so much as threatened to walk out the door. Maybe I knew that the world out there was scary; more likely, though, was that I could run away-through books, movies, my bicycle, and mostly my own imagination-without ever having to leave the confines of my room.

There is no denying that I was an odd child. A neighborhood boy and I spent much of our time sneaking into the forbidden woods (really just a small sconce of trees speckled with litter) behind my house, looking for hidden treasure. My grandmother would ceremoniously peek out from the pink curtains of our back door at least once every four minutes, and if we ever escaped her sight, she would open the back door, its hinges creaking feebly, and scream ("Jehhhhhhhsica! GET OUT OF THOSE WOODS! Get back here!"), which meant usually that we had about five minutes more before she would shuffle out, dragging her right foot along for the ride. Her voice would take on a menacing quality that implied that she Really Meant It This Time, but I was rarely afraid. I was small and fast; she was old and slow and only slightly taller than I was. Even in our most brutal screaming matches, I never recall being intimidated.

I was her favorite grandchild, not only because she could control me but also because I was not afraid to yell back at her as loudly as I could. There were six grandchildren besides me, and three of which she hated with a passion. These were, of course, my favorite cousins. She thought they were a bad influence on me, which they were, without a doubt.

Amy, Beth, Stephanie. Their house was in the country, with a driveway a quarter-mile long. Standing in their yard, the only time you could see the road was in the dead of winter when the leaves were nothing but dust under your feet. There was a hammock and a pond and hundreds of trees, and freedom, endless freedom.

Their house was my runaway place. They smelled like home in a way none of my immediate family ever did-like blankets and car rides and long, muggy summer nights when we would steal down to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. The floor was soft and dusty under our bare feet; the windows were drafty, the counters cluttered and messy. My uncle mowed the lawn every Saturday morning, and we would sleep until our bodies told us to wake up and go downstairs, where my aunt Ann would cook bacon and toast and we'd sit watching cartoons on the kitchen TV.

Amy was the golden-haired middle child, twelve years old to my ten. She was slender, graceful, gorgeous. She laughed with her mouth open, her teeth apart, her head tilted back. She walked with her toes turned out on long dancer legs. The hair on her arms was fine, blonde, downy-soft. I worshipped her.

She was the rebellious child, the aloof one, the one whose eyes burned angrily at almost everything, the resentful one. She was, she told me, the one who was going to get the hell OUT of here. She wanted to be a model, a marine biologist, an interior designer, a social worker. But first she wanted to piss off her whole family, and she had talent, oh yes.

We were trouble, the devilish duo. On summer afternoons, we would walk up and down Florence Road searching for slightly unsmoked cigarette butts. We carried packs of matches with us in case we found any worthwhile remnants of Camels or Marlboros. We had no idea how disgusting we were. Our favorite game was tormenting the people in the house next door-the Merglianos, who consisted of a stodgy, overbearing father, an overweight and underheight oldest daughter (who ended up being charming and intelligent, though we rarely let ourselves have the chance to see that), and a geeky younger brother with a crush on my Amy. We hated them because we were adolescents, because we were snobbish and self-conscious and itching for excitement. On one particularly memorable day, we speared a dead fish (dragged from the pond by their oafish dog, Maggie) and left it on their doorstep. We super-glued another fish (a goldfish) to the inside of their mailbox. We threw their spare key (hidden in the trellis of their garden) into the pond. We prank-called them on a daily basis, we blasted our stereo until they threatened to call the police, we left large logs-too large to drive over-in the middle of their driveway. We sprinkled Life cereal in their yard, calling "get a life!" We were bored, immature, and relentless. Amy's parents were often not home, which gave us the freedom to be as troublesome as we dared. Once, we decided that a good way to spend an afternoon was to climb up the side of the house. We dragged a bed from one of the bedrooms over to Amy's window, tied a long length of rope to the bedpost, and dropped it down two stories to the ground below. We were halfway up the rope, struggling with all our might not to fall, when my oldest cousin, Beth, told us that their mother had called and was coming home in five minutes. I hung, my legs dangling six feet from the ground, and clutched the rope desperately while Beth ran to grab the ladder. We pulled the rope back into the bedroom just in time to avoid their mother's eyes. My cousins' house was a place of great freedom and experimentation-they got in so much trouble on a daily basis (with or without my presence) that I knew I would never be ratted out by my aunt. She was far too embarrassed about the state of her daughters to admit to any of her sisters-especially my mother, since I was ordinarily a very well-behaved child-that they were secretly hoodlums. My ordeals, then, went mostly unreported. Only once did the truth almost come out: the day Amy and I decided to take a stroll down to the orchard nearby and steal canteloupes and watermelons by stuffing them, oh yes, under our shirts, which would have worked out fine except that my aunt had impeccable timing and drove by just as a watermelon was bulging out from my small white tank top. Amy was not far behind, two canteloupes for breasts, and we dropped them just as the car pulled up. My aunt said little to us for the rest of the day, but we knew better than to try our luck. The watermelon could wait.

Generally I spent a week out in the country before my aunt would gather me back into the van, bags in tow (though I never remembered everything and something-a tee-shirt, a pair of shoes, a bathing suit-always had to be sent back later). I would arrive back home tan and tired, bored and restless, yearning for adventure, danger, excitement. I would hop on my bike and go searching for a new tale to tell.

I had some reason to consider running away from home. As a child, I was innocent and did not attach the word "alcoholic" to my grandmother. I rarely, if ever, saw her drinking anything other than white wine (Chablis) or beer (National Bohemian, Michelob, Bud). They say that beer, like coffee and even meat, is an acquired taste, one unnatural to the palate of the human body. I acquired a taste for beer by age five. My grandmother would say, do you want a sip? and I would take one. She watched The Young and the Restless every day at 12:30 (I still can sing the theme song) after the news at noon. She had gnarled hands and always painted her nails red. A stroke at age 50 caused her to lose most of the control of the right side of her body, and stubbornness made her refuse physical therapy. She was right-handed but wrote with her left in an embarrassing chicken-scratch. I only ever knew her as she was in her sixties and seventies, post-Jack-Daniels-and-Southern-Comfort-induced-stroke (the only time her stubbornness waned was when the doctors said, "If you keep drinking hard liquor you will die"). She had a small pot-belly and she never EVER washed her makeup off at night. She was barely five feet tall and though she never smoked, she had a large, husky smoker's voice, gravelly and unclear, that was most evident when she laughed. She wore open-toed sandals and dragged her right leg behind her oh-so-slightly when she walked.

She was five-foot-two, an immovable giant of a senior citizen. She dyed her hair once a week and still flirted with the men who changed her oil at the Shell station down the street. In her heyday, she had been a knock-out. In her sixties, she was my formidable adversary.

Sometimes she made me so angry that I would go into my bedroom and bite my blankets as hard as I could. She loved to argue for argument's sake; I never wanted to be wrong and never wanted to be told what to do. We spent half our time yelling at each other and slamming doors. Her voice when she screamed at me was phlegmy and deep, almost frantic. The other half of the time she spent extolling my virtues until I wanted to throttle her. I wanted her dead at least once a week.

I awoke one morning to my mother's voice shouting angrily, echoing off the bare white walls of our living room. My grandmother's voice was jsut behind it, rattling and wild, nearly maniacal. It was seven in the morning; the sun was streaming through my bedroom window and I laid there terrified, staring up at the multi-colored hearts of my canopy bed. In my post-slumber stupor, I couldn't entirely make out what was being said for the first few minutes or so, but understood eventually that the argument was about my mother's serious boyfriend, Steve.

I was in fifth grade. My mother had met Steve at the beginning of the school year, and just after they met, he took me to a horse farm belonging to one of his friends. He couldn't have given me a better gift-I had, after all, attached "reins" and "stirrups" to my pink Huffy bicycle and named the bike-horse Pink Lightning. Steve won me over, mostly from the start, though I was still wary of his presence, especially when I saw him lay on top of my mother (both of them fully clothed) on the beige basement couch.

I was in fifth grade, it was a school morning, and my mother and grandmother were yelling at each other as forcefully and angrily as they could. My mother was not fierce-tempered (unlike my grandmother and I) and I could not remember hearing her voice at such a volume or violence. I did the only thing a ten-year-old child can do to stop a fight-I started bawling at the top of my lungs, more out of fear than sadness. I had to cry with real gusto to compete with the decibel level of their screaming match, but after a minute or two my mother came rushing in and sat at my bedside, stroking my hair. When my grandmother's dwarfed frame entered the doorway, my mother said, now look what you've done.

When my grandmother walked away, my mother asked me what was the matter, how long had I been awake, how long had I been crying, was I okay? I didn't even know why I was crying; I told my mother I had been afraid but really I was upset that a man, any man, could come and tear our family unit, as unhealthy as it was, roughly apart.

The fight between my grandmother and my mother was the signifier for the end. My room went into boxes and plastic bins. My mother started buying her own kitchen utensils, pots and pans, flatware. She bought a new bed and told my grandmother thank you for everything-for ten years of being a nanny to me-but I was eleven, my mother thirty-one, and we had a life to start living, thank you very much.

I didn't know how to feel about leaving. I loved our yard so much-the trees especially-and we would be moving to an apartment. I didn't want to live with my grandmother anymore-she picked on my hair and my friends and we got into screaming matches at least once a day-but I felt a sort of vague, nameless sadness for her at the idea of leaving her behind, all alone. I wasn't sure if I loved her but I at least felt pity for her, and even a little guilty for going away.

Ultimately, though, I was excited. My mother and I were going to be out on our own, living in an apartment that felt like a hotel-the carpets were clean and there was so much sunlight. Our apartment, 3017E, was neat and spacious, newly-built with flat white walls and brown floors. We lived on the third floor and had a balcony and a lesbian couple for neighbors.

Our things were all new-new tools for a new life. My mother's credit problems had finally cleared, the bankruptcy erased. She'd just been approved for her first credit card. We'd been given a second chance. I had a new bed-a day bed, white with lots of culicues and with brass balls at the end of each post. We had new silverware, a kitchen table, a real dining room. We made the pantry into a games closet (we never had enough food to fill it anyway) and played double solitaire every night, sitting at the ends of my mother's queen-sized bed until our backs ached from leaning.

We were like two bachelorettes living the high life. We lived in freedom and carefree chaos. We ate ramen noodles for dinner, or french-bread pizzas. Breakfast food was good for dinner; microwaveable was better. We watched Saturday morning TV, we ate breakfast on the balcony, we played Parcheesi in the kitchen and left half-finished puzzles on the dining room table.

On summer afternoons, while my mother was at work, I made her bed, picked up her clothes, washed dishes and sometimes even started dinner. We were living in a hotel and I was housekeeping. My mother would come home and smile, and that was the only reward I needed. We played each other nightly in Wheel of Fortune (my mother always won) and watched old episodes of Mary Tyler Moore before falling asleep on the couch.

Christmas-time came, and my mother and I went tree shopping on a particularly frigid and blustery day. We stopped at the local grocery store, where a small nursery had set up shop for the weekend. Evergreens were filed neatly into rows between the yellow lines of parking spaces, and my mother and I shuffled slowly down the asphalt expanse looking for our perfect tree. My mother was notoriously picky-we would drive around town for hours some years, in search of The Tree. It was deathly cold in the parking lot, though, and we were miserable and nearly hypothermic. We picked a quick tree-it seemed okay, really-and loaded it into the pick-up truck.

The two of us managed, with quite a bit of sweat and several fits of uncontrollable giggling, to get the tree up the three flights of steps to our apartment. We decided to put the tree right in front of the sliding-glass doors of our balcony-it was too cold for breakfast out there anyway-and I stood holding it firmly by the trunk while my mother rifled through boxes, looking for the tree stand.

She located it (after five minutes of grunting and clattering) and we set to work. I lifted, tilted, steadied while my mother nudged, hammered, and screwed the tree into the stand. We backed up. The top was slightly crooked but the tree was, at least, standing on its own (notorious was the year we had to tie our crooked Christmas tree to a nearby curtain hook to make it stay up).

My mother was too tired to start threading lights so we settled back on the couch to relax and admire our purchase.

"It's not so bad, is it?" I said, trying to give the situation the optimism I thought the holiday warranted.

"Not too bad," she replied, "though... is it me, or does it look a little yellowish?"

I squinted. The needles had scratched up the tender skin of my forearms, but I'd attributed that to the cold and not to any intrinsic defect of the tree.

I frowned. "It does look a tiny bit sickly," I said. "Let's water it and wait until tomorrow to put the lights on-you'll just cut up your arms if you try to do it now."

We grabbed a pitcher and poured it into the tree stand, hoping our little tree was only dry from thirst. We played a round of Rummy and then went to bed.

The next morning, my mother awoke in a frightful mood. I sat in the living room drinking orange juice and watching TV when she came in. "I don't like the tree," she said.

I furrowed my eyebrows.

"Well," I said, "what can we do about it now? I mean, we already bought it and put it up-we can't take it back."

She made a face and walked back into the kitchen. I put my glass in the sink and went into my room.

A few hours later, Steve came over. He had no sooner walked into the kitchen to grab something to drink when my mother said, tell me what you think of the tree.

He walked into the dining room.

"It looks nice," he answered-bad news.

"It's AWFUL," my mother said. "It's dry and yellow and dying, and we only bought it because it was so damn cold and we were in a hurry. I don't want to put lights on it. I'm just DISGUSTED." And with that, she walked back into the kitchen and threw the dishtowel onto the counter. Steve, our voice of reason, said, why don't you just get another one?

My mother's mind was made up. A few hours passed-enough to allow for some darkness-and then we slowly opened our balcony door. The cold air flooded in as we took out the last of the tree-stand's screws and then my mother, with one triumphant and decisive grunt, heaved the enemy tree into the woods beyond our balcony. We watched it careen down the three-story drop and slid the glass door closed, bursting into occasional fits of laughter as we walked away.

* * *

My mother used to drive us to the airport. I had never been on a plane. We'd go inside the airport and I was always awed at the hugeness, at the vast expanse of sterile brightness. There was potential there-potential energy in the form of people carrying suitcases full of tank tops, even in the middle of winter. We would find a quiet spot, away from a crowd and near a window, and we would watch planes take off. Some days, we wouldn't even go into the airport. We would just park the car and sit outside, listening to the deafening roar of engines and watching people sail away into the blue.

As a child I never realized how much my mother wanted to take off and go-she always seemed to be almost in flight. She ordered National Geographic and joined the I ¤ NY club. We belonged to AAA and there were boxes of maps in her bedroom. At night sometimes we would sit and stretch the maps out in front of us, look at all the possibilities etched out in wavy lines of red and blue along a purple paper prairieland. I saw that she wanted to get out and see the world, but it was not until I grew that I saw she wanted to get out and get away, that she wanted to pack up her things and escape from the world she knew: the world where she had just declared bankruptcy, where her parents were alcoholics and her husband was gone without a trace and the only thing she had was herself and her tumble-haired daughter. She wanted to pick me up, stretch her wings, and go.

When I was nine, we finally went. We drove my mother's pick-up truck, the tape deck blasting Billy Joel as she let me shift gears on the highway. I'd listen to the motor grow louder and more demanding, my left hand on the gearshift. With a word from her-a "now!" with force and verve-my hand would crank the engine into a higher gear, onetwothreefourfive, and we were off.

We both had the wild frizzy hair of the early nineties. It was four hours of open road and then I fell in love with the New York City skyline. There it stood, just past New Jersey, in wild, smoggy gray splendor. We hurtled toward it in the truck and I clutched our NJ Turnpike toll pass eagerly. We were off to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade-we'd been dreaming for years of floating Garfields and Ernies, and we were on our way.

My mother would later tell me she had been petrified, driving us into the city like that. The Lincoln Tunnel, it takes you underground and then it spits you out suddenly, like a bad piece of fruit, and you're drowning in skyscrapers and taxi cabs. My mother had no idea where she was going and she was sure she'd gotten us in over our heads. I never gave it a second thought. She was capable of anything.

We watched the parade from a spot near 34th street. I stood on two water main pipes that jutted out from a dingy gray building; my mother's feet were planted firmly below, keeping watch over me and marveling at the hugeness of the world around us. When the parade ended, we spent hours in Macy's before eating Thanksgiving dinner at Libby's in Times Square, with slightly greasy menus and the best cheesecake in the world.

We left New York behind, feeling freer than we ever had in our lives as we watched the skyline fade into the distance. I scoured the highway for license plates and we talked. Those were the days when there was no such thing as a secret from my mother. I had her all to myself and we laughed and loved and saved each other from the potential pain our lives could have held. Instead of being weighed down by our obvious financial strife, by my grandmother's alcoholism and my lack of a father and our overall predicaments, my mother and I played cards until our backs ached from bending over. We watched sitcoms; we played board games. I learned piano by ear, I sang tunes into the antenna of an old pink cloth-covered radio. I played with stuffed animals and pretended all my fantasies into truth. We were in love with everything. My mother, with daughter in tow, learned how to fly with her own wings.

1/8/03

I haven't written anything in months. but I wrote before that, and oh, this poor neglected page.

the beginning of my novel, unfinished:

"I'm leaving," she said.

The words dropped like a mountain, cold, into his lap. He paused, his cereal spoon hovering in mid-air, and looked up to where she stood. Her eyes were calm. He marvelled suddenly at her beauty, her ice-blonde hair, her deep blue eyes, as though he were seeing them for the first time. She stood next to their kitchen table, where he sat eating breakfast. He noticed the bag in her hand and the sunglasses perched on her curly head. He felt as though he were moving in slow motion, like being underwater, or like he had a cold, unforgiving mountain in his lap. He looked back down at his spoon and watched as the cereal fell piece by piece in a series of liquidy plops back into his bowl. He said nothing but looked up at her again.

She shifted her bag from one hand to the other. He saw red glaring lines on the palm of the hand which had previously been clutching the pack and realized the bag must be quite heavy. She wiped her hand on her faded jeans and looked at him, waiting. Finally, she sighed and closed her eyes.
"Eat your cereal," she said. "I paid the electric bill. My car is already packed. I thought you'd notice when I took my stuff out of the bathroom but I guess I expected too much. I'm leaving, Robert. For good--a long way, and for a very long time. Eat your cereal."

Still he sat, unmoving. She stood and looked at him for a moment and then shouldered the bag and headed for the front door. She took one last look back--at the unadorned kitchen walls, at the stovetop with a pasta noodle still stuck (glued, she thought) from last night's dinner, at his still and solid back. She looked out their living room window, where the sun was rising, and opened the door. It made no sound as she closed it behind her, and neither did he.

8/12/02

they met because her transmission died one afternoon between Jefferson City and Kansas City, Missouri; he lived outside of Columbia. He bought her coffee and a sandwich, but maybe if it hadn't been for her dog or her car, he would have been on his way. Instead, he went with her to be introduced to both, and found that he'd found a home in the whole package- girl, dog, and car.

He studied her as she talked to her dog, squatting down on the cold dirty cement of the garage. Her hair was short, very blonde (almost white), curly, and unkempt but not badly so. She was slender but not overly thin, and by the build of her shoulders and upper arms he guessed her to be an athlete in some form, at some time now or not long ago. Her eyes were dark blue and her eyebrows were strange, bare in some places as though they grew unevenly or she'd gone overboard with tweezers. She was an average height, if not a little short, and her legs were graveful but not overly skinny. Her hands, he noticed, were red by the cuticles and her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

she laughed as the dog licked her face and toppled backward, warm fur in her lap. Eddie smiled.

6/13/02

the things I know:

bagels and cream cheese taste good
trash day is wednesday
I stay up late
I love my boyfriend
heat is better than cold
Jacques Derrida is the devil but doesn't scare me like he used to
I tan relatively easily
mosquito bites itch
smoking is bad
I love my mom
Rocky is Casey's childhood stuffed animal, a raccoon, and sits on my kitchen table
I need horseback riding like I need air, but I breathe much more than I ride
I don't like sleeping naked, not even with my beautiful naked boyfriend next to me
I like fire and fire imagery
red is a pretty color
blue shirts make my eyes pretty
being alone isn't always easy
my boyfriend has proposed eleven times and I have accepted, breathlessly, eleven times or more
life tastes good, too

things I don't know:

who Lord Baltimore was
how to cook, with some exception
why my ivy plant looks sick
why lately I bruise easily
who my father is
how to get sweat stains out of clothes
if there is a god
the names of plants, birds, stars
how to kill the water amoeba in zelda
what I want to be when I grow up
where I'll be this time next year

sordid intrigue. seven minutes.

he stood and smoked a cigarette on the balcony next to hers. he was missing the lower part of his arm and the fingers, all but the stump of a thumb, on his smoking hand. she looked at him out of the corner of her eye with a sordid intrigue. she wanted to say hello-- he had a beautiful face. he looked miserable. she wanted to shout hey! hey you, in the apartment next door. how come you never come out, how come we never see you? She pretended to be looking for something down the street. He was wearing a black tee shirt. it had a hole at the top of one sleeve-- the sleeve with only the stump of an arm. the shirt looked old and worn, the comfortable kind you wear to bed or to clean your house with. he didn't look at her. she squinted, still looking for nothing down the street. he exhaled slowly and coughed. under the black tee shirt he was probably fit, athletic. she was intrigued. he was beautiful. he had dark hair and a melancholy face, and she wanted desperately to ask about him, to ask what had happened to such a beautiful boy. she looked down at her feet and cursed her social ineptitude. others could casually call out 'hello!' but she stood here, mentally stammering. she turned the other way, and just as she'd decided to say screw it, to walk back through the doors to her apartment, he said, excuse me?

glory be to god for dappled things, for things with spots and imperfections. Glory be to god for white carpets with brown stains, for brown stains, for blue inkstains on the dry, tired hands of writers. Glory be to god for lingering cigarette smoke on dirty fingertips, for coffee stains on unbrushed teeth. Glory be to god for warm, sweaty fingers entangled, no longer comfortable but still stubbornly refusing to let go; for nights of no sleep and shirts torn from too much wear. Glory be to god for broken hair ties, broken china cups, broken white plates thrown off third-story balconies, broken pens, broken hearts. Glory be to god for lukewarm coffee, for sore shoulders, for untied shoelaces and dirty, frayed jeans and tired eyes, for too-closely-clipped fingernails, for too much caffeine, too much nicotine, too much alcohol, too much, too much. Glory be to god for too much. Glory be to god for all the rust and the dirt and the dust of life, for the bad symptoms of good things.

the towns and cities you love. ten minutes.

home-- home with country roads that are mostly one lane, though we always manage two-lane traffic. Home smells like logs burning, like tree bark and uncut grass and cold muddy gravel. The sun sets over the trees, over the field that used to be my bus stop; it sets in reds and oranges and blues, in glimpses of fire. there is only one real traffic light and only one real gas station. Three pharmacies! a convenience store, a down-home grocery store that doesn't carry enough of anything except tea. There is a florist and a tack shop and three bars, a library, a post office, and the high school. One road ends before it should-- no one has ever bothered to fix the bunker hill bridge, which was swept into the gunpowder river ages ago. At twothirty on weekday afternoons, traffic comes to a standstill as high school students rev the engines of old Mustangs and worn pick-up trucks. The half-traffic light changes from yellow to red and the town is infested with yellow, with school buses lumbering unfortunate non-drivers to their homes. In winter, school is frequently closed for snow, for ice, for threatening imminent weather. The roads curve dangerously next to the river and the buses won't brave the roads. Prettyboy dam reservoir is almost always closed but it's the prettiest place in town-- on quiet afternoons when the sky is clear, I drive my car over its loud bricked expanse and park on the other end to walk out and hang my arms off the sides, to watch the water course through the rivets and to see the leaves pile up against the cement. It is always quiet and few people drive over it-- after all, it is nearly always closed and everyone has found an alternate route which has now become their main route. The river beats a path through the woods on the unstopped side of the dam, and all you can see or hear for miles are trees, everywhere.

11/22/01

Detail in our writing is good. Often we use general statements: "things are good", "I'm fine", etc. to make a point. Sometimes this is vague, unhealthy. But-- take a general statement: "I'm sorry", "Thank you", "things are good". now, back it up with a list of details. Start with the generalization, or end with it.

Love is wonderful. She skipped down the gravel driveway, oblivious to the rain, because the flower man had called to say he would be by but his car couldn't navigate the mud. It was torrential, this rain. She skipped and leapt and ran down the driveway to pick up her flowers. She hadn't bothered to put shoes on, or even to change out of her nightgown. She had simply thrown on a pair of jeans underneath and her blue bathrobe on top and waltzed out the door.

The flower man stood grimacing as he waited for her to meet him. The rain poured down in sheets and he scowled as his windows fogged up, and then let out a rather girlish shriek when she knocked briskly on the driver-side window. He rolled it down a few inches and yelled, "Don't worry about signing for them! Just take them-- they're on the passenger side."

She whistled as she ran to the other side of his truck and flung the door open. He put his head in his hands as he watched the door's interior quickly get soaked. She grinned as she picked up the flowers and waved merrily as she shut the door. He rolled his eyes and she ran full keel back down the driveway, almost oblivious to the sharp rocks on her bare feet. He turned the wheel of the truck and gunned the engine, and then pounded the dashboard in frustration as his rear tires spun uselessly in the mud. She was long gone.

She reached her house again, barely winded at all. She flung the side door open and wrung her hair out in the sink before tearing off the card and opening it. She read it four times and spun in a quick circle before plunking the flowers in a vase and smelling them. She put them on her kitchen table and sighed happily.

8/6/01

what has already been done?

we went around the world twice that night. I stayed up too late and waited for his words to finish, and my eyelids drooped and the hours of sleep I would have diminished with every waking breath. But still I sat. I could have fallen in love with him, and I knew it and I was afraid. I was afraid of the truth, afraid of lying to myself, afraid of the unreality of it all, of the dream ending.

I had already written a novel. it was incomplete, unfinished, not at all polished but it was there, words on the page, and I reread it six times, or maybe seven. I loved myself, the words that had poured forth, and I wanted to share it everywhere, to spill out onto every blank page that ever was. I finally had a muse.

I ate grapes that were too sour, and I thought of him and what he was doing. I was out in the country, home in the grasses and gardens of my childhood, and I was picking the ripest tomatoes I could find and eating unripened grapes from the vineyard vines. The humidity made the hair stick to my neck and I thought of him and wondered if I could be captivating, if I tried. The juice peeked out of the corners of my mouth and I made a face at the sourness.

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