Alison McGhee

What does a chinchilla have to do with limberness, if limberness is even a word? (limberness, limbericity, limberous, limberical?) Something, no doubt, but something that is beyond my ken at the moment, fixated as I am today on words that keep coming to me, beautiful words rarely used, words that seem from another time.

Limber.

Ken.

Lo.

Anon.

Beloved.

In the middle of the night I woke with limber scrolling its way across the subtitle section of my brain. Around and around it scrolled, much like a duffel bag abandoned on baggage claim carousel #3. Thoughts of limber, and all things limber-related, limned on a mental movie screen.

The man at the Y:  “Are you the woman who was twisting herself into a pretzel up there on that mat?”

Yes, that was me.

Limberlost: part of  a book title I wish I’d come up with myself. That it refers to a swampy area of Indiana does not lessen the enchantment.

Limbs. I have four of them, for which I am forever grateful.

Limb: to go out on one, which can be a good and intense, if exhausting, way to live.

Long-limbed Girl: my favorite Nick Lowe song.

Limbic: A group of interconnected deep brain structures, common to all mammals, and involved in olfaction, emotion, motivation, behavior, and various autonomic functions.

Limn: To describe, or to depict by painting or drawing.

Limb: in astronomy, the circumferential edge of the apparent disc of the sun or moon or a planet, which is something that I – star-ignorant that I am – never knew until this morning.

Limb: any of the main branches arising from the trunk or bough of a tree, like the ones that Fred Anken and I built my treehouse in, lo those many years ago.

Limb: a very rare surname, so rare that in the U.S., it ranks #26355. Another fact I never knew until just now.

What if my name were Alison Limb? All my life I would be spelling it out for people, just the way I spell out McGhee for people now – “It’s M, C, G, H, E, E. Yes, I know, that H is weird, isn’t it.”

If my name were Alison Limb, would I have a chinchilla for my pet?

When they were little they had what they called shoe-boots. They pulled plastic bread bags over their shoe-clad feet and slid them into rubber boots lined with thick felt. Then they zipped the shoe-boots up – there was a central zipper that ran from the toes up to the top of the ankle-high boot. They pulled their snowpants down over the shoe-boots.

Were the shoe-boots warm? Not for her, cold-footed cold person that she is. She liked the bright Wonder Bread circles on the bread bags, though.

Then came what they called moon boots. Giant stomper things that weighed nothing. Were they warm? For everyone but her, they were.

She had a pair of Frye boots in her twenties. She wore them with short dresses, a red one that laced up the back and a black and white polka dot one in particular.

Were the Fryes comfortable? No. They hurt like hell, but she wore them anyway. Up and down the cobblestone streets of the city in which she lived, she tromped in the Frye boots.

One day she was feeling particularly fine, wearing her Frye boots and her black and white polka dot dress, striding through the public garden in the sunshine, whistling no doubt. Then came the bird poop, glooping its way through her hair, down her neck, onto her shoulder. Why, bird? Why me, why now?

Then came a long stretch of post-Frye bootless years, years in which her only boots were the Sorels that she dragged on every endless winter to go slogging out into the snow and ice and bitter wind. Stunningly heavy, those boots. Warm? Of course not.

Now she has a pair of cowboy boots, real ones. Is she a cowgirl? No, but in another life she might be. She puts the cowboy boots on with jeans. She puts them on with dresses. She likes the smell of the tooled leather. She likes the cool warmth of that leather against her bare legs.

Sometimes, in movies, she takes her cowboy boots off in the dark and perches them on the empty seat beside her so that they can watch too.

 They appear in the early summer down the dirt road, low to the ground. Scraggly green, lighter than clover, but the leaves are similar in shape. Take a tin bowl out of the lower cupboard and put your sneakers on in case you run into a snake. You are sore afraid of snakes.

Tell your sisters you’re going, but only if you want company, which you might not. Walk down the dirt road. The heat of the earth is rising in shimmers, and all the smells of early summer are there: sweet grass strewn on the field from the first haying, manure spread on the far pasture, flowers you don’t know the names of.

Crouch down and turn over the light green leaves. See that tiny red ball? That’s a wild strawberry. If you’ve never seen one, you might not recognize it, it’s so much smaller than its laboratory-bred cousin. If it were a human it would be a Little Person. No, it would be a Microscopic Person.

Wild strawberries are so small that sometimes they mush between your fingers when you’re picking them. That’s all right. Go ahead and eat the mushed ones. Put the whole ones, cap and stem and all, into your tin bowl.

It will take you a long, long time to fill that bowl.  Or maybe not. You wouldn’t know, because in your nine years you’ve never filled one. An hour or so into the search, a half-mile or so down the dirt road, the drowsy stillness of the sun and the fields and the woods overtakes you.

Why am I saving these strawberries? you think. Why shouldn’t I eat them all right now?

There will never be enough wild strawberries for any sort of kitchen magic. They’re too small, too hard-earned. A cupful would barely be enough for a batch of muffins. Who would want to eat wild strawberry muffins anyway? All muffin, no berry.

Go ahead. Sit down in that patch of Indian paintbrush and eat them all. Stain your fingers with that particular kind of red. Lie down in the sun and close your eyes.

You are young. It doesn’t matter. You know you’ll come down here another day, with the same tin bowl. Another summer. You’ll come down this road forever. And everything will be the same – the tiny trembling berries, the shiny tin bowl, your stained and dusty sneakers, your scratched and bitten legs, the sun beating on your long dark hair – until everything changes.

So much hair in this house. A river of shining black. A cascade of curly near-black. Dark brown pigtails. Shorn light brown. Black dredlock dog.  And the eyes framed by the hair: near-black, hazel, bright blue, gray-blue, brown. Hair stroked with a brush in the early morning. Hair tied up with clips and binders. Get your hair out of this sink. Where’s my hairbrush? Who took my hairbinder? Hair, hair everywhere.

The mother of the house remembers her baldheaded babies, and how she wondered what their hair would be like. How she loved to smell their baby heads. How she still leans over them to catch a whiff of their hair: shampoo and conditioner and a scent that is each their own.

First Haircut

She wants to grow it long, and
she wants to go to the barber.
She wants curls floating down her back, and
she wants the barber’s hands on her
skull, tilting her head now this way, now that.
She wants it both ways.
She wants her locks for herself and
she wants to be
shorn, dark petals drifting down.

It’s not possible to do both, I tell her.

She looks into the mirror, picturing herself as
she might look if
she keeps it, imagining what
she might lose if
she doesn’t.
In the end, she can’t resist her own longing.
The hands of the other win out.
Studying herself in the mirror she sees someone new,
a familiar stranger.
The girl she was, gone.

This is where you’ll find her. She’ll be launching her houseboat on the Apalachicola River in northwestern Florida. Her houseboat is very small, just big enough for one, possibly two people. And a dog.

The houseboat has a miniature kitchen with miniature appliances. There’s a tiny bathroom with an envirolet toilet and a solar shower. See that long cushioned bench up front? It unfolds into a double bed. When she goes to bed she’ll read as late as she wants, until sleep overtakes her.

On clear nights, and most nights are clear, you’ll find her on the little aft deck, sitting on the rope-suspended swing. This is where she’ll gaze out and up at the stars, thousands of them. She’ll count the shooting stars until she loses count, and then she’ll find the Big Dipper, and the North Star, and the Milky Way, and Orion. She’ll look for the Seven Sisters, that faint constellation like a sprinkling of freckles on the dark night sky, that her star-knowledgeable traveling companion taught her to see.

During the day she’ll putter along the River, River with a capital R because it is a river from before time. Just under the sepia surface of this old water, hundred-year-old alligators will keep pace with her houseboat. Skeletons of wild hogs and ancient turtles will line the riverbanks.

She’ll pass camps with names like Smith Creek Hunt and Fish Camp, and the KeepOut Camp, and she’ll wave to the old Airstreams and broken-down campers that are the homes of the inhabitants, knowing that they are inside, invisible, and watching her.

No mail down here. No cell phone signal. No landline, no internet, no nothing.  Yes, this is where you’ll find her. Or not.

Black dog on the sand at sunset. Pouncing on sea foam, racing waves, turning to see how far behind are the man and woman on the sand. Clay-colored dog in the glowing coral house risen high in the dunes. Raising his head and sniffing the salt air. Black dog. Black dog on the sand. Clay-colored dog barks and paws. Door of the high glowing house opens. Thunkathunkathunkathunk. Clay-colored dog runs from the house aglow. Black dog folds himself into the sand, ears pinned back. Clay and black in the sun-going-down dunes.Silent feather dogs dance and spin. Into the salt waves and out again. Race the tide line, wet tails streaming, and back again.Black dog’s man and woman wander down the sand. Black dog. . . black dog. . . Clay-colored dog stands still. Far down the beach is an open door in a house aglow. Clay-colored dog turns and runs. Black dog’s woman watches clay-colored dog, puffs of sand rising. Clay-colored dog: a far-off horse galloping through hills behind clouds, into the dunes, onto the boardwalk, toward the house aglow.

To be a clay-colored dog. To be a dog who runs like a horse. To be a dog who leaps like a spinning feather. To be, only to be, no idea how beautiful you are.

Here is the apartment she lived in, long ago and far away. Please, come on in. No need to take off your shoes; this is before she thought about such things. Yes, it is quite a small living room. In fact, this is the living room, the dining room, and the bedroom, all in one.

No, behind that door is not the rest of the apartment. Behind that door is a triangular blue-tiled bathroom, complete with a triangular blue-tiled shower. It’s a good thing you’re thin; otherwise you might not be very clean, if it were you who had lived in this apartment.

But you didn’t live here. She did. This was the first apartment she looked at, and she signed a year lease – her first lease of any kind. She was charmed by the woodburning fireplace. She was charmed by the miniature refrigerator and the two-burner stove and the tiny sink. She was charmed by the wardrobe, and the black and white tiled floor, and the big window that looked out on the street. She liked the fact that it was one block from the subway, and three blocks from the garden, and three blocks from the river.

She imagined sitting in front of that window typing the student papers that would pay the rent. She imagined her friends walking by her window on their way to the garden, or 7-11, or the ice cream store, and she imagined them tapping on her window – it was street level – and calling in to see if she was there. She imagined that if she wasn’t too busy, she would put on her shoes and run out and go with them wherever they were going. She imagined that on hot summer nights, if she couldn’t sleep, she would go out in the dark and walk to the river and lie on the grass to feel the breeze.

All this came true.

At night, in front of the fireplace, she unrolled the camping pad she had found on garbage night. If it was a cool night she walked to the 7-11 and bought a Duraflame log and lit it and lay before it watching the blue and yellow and orange Duraflames. She slept in her clothes because she was in a phase where she liked to get up and be instantly ready for the day. No muss, no fuss. One night she woke to find that her white shirt was slowly burning up. But she was wearing a tee-shirt underneath. Phew. No harm done.

In the morning she got up, put away her camping pad, and made coffee in the tiny percolator that her grandmother had given her. While the coffee was burbling and splashing in the little see-through percolator top, she walked to the market and bought a day-old pumpkin raisin muffin for breakfast. When she came back she poured herself a mug of coffee and sat on the fake Oriental rug she had found on garbage night and drank her coffee and ate her muffin.

Sometimes it rained, and her friends would take shelter in her apartment. They would sit on the floor with her and laugh.

Her best friend worked at the restaurant down the street, and every night she came by the apartment to sit on the one chair – a folding chair she had found on garbage night – to have her hair French-braided. Sometimes she would French braid her best friend’s hair down the back of her head in a single braid, other times two French braids on either side, and sometimes a single braid that wound around her head and looked both graceful and as if it had taken hours to do. It hadn’t. French braiding came easy to her.

Late, late at night, after her best friend’s shift was over, her best friend would sometimes knock softly on her window if she saw the light still on. Then they would sit on the floor and count up all her best friend’s tip money – ones and fives and quarters – and if they were in the mood, they would cross the street to the neighborhood bar for a drink. She would stare at the bartender, who reminded her of someone she knew and missed.

Time passed – a year- and she moved out of the apartment. A single year. And yet, of all the places she has lived since, it is that one tiny room that always comes shimmering up.

Birds  of the last three days:

Bird, or bat, or winged creature of the nighttime who was imprisoned, and tried to escape, from her bedroom and closet and hall, and from which – cowed by recent and ominous tales of bat attacks – she hid under her blankets.

Cardinals in Velta’s back yard who alight in her lilac bushes and from there venture to the bird feeder filled with sunflower seeds.

Solitary hawk skimming above Route 61.

Clouds of birds rising like confetti from the trees along Route 61, parting suddenly above the highway as if startled by something, and rejoining on the other side.

Bird of her own self in the dream that comes too rarely, arms outstretched like wings,  carrying her up and over the mountain, swooping into the valley below.

You and your sister Oatie are learning how to sew in 4-H. Mrs. N  has you stationed upstairs in her home, known as the Cleveland House, because Grover Cleveland lived there for a year, or a month, or possibly a day or so, when he was a little boy.

What are you sewing? You are sewing a red-and-white checked shirt. The shirt has a collar, which poses major problems. The shirt has sleeves, which pose major problems. The shirt has buttons, which means buttonholes. Moreover, the shirt is checked, and the checks are supposed to match up exactly.

Oatie is sewing a long dress, the color of peaches in a pattern of tiny flowers and stripes. The long dress has sleeves. The stripes and flowers are also supposed to match exactly.

Exactitude is not your forte, nor is it Oatie’s.   Mrs. N moves from girl to girl. There are others in your 4-H club, and they too are learning to sew, but all you remember is Oatie and you, Oatie weeping silently onto the peach fabric, you making ample use of your seam ripper, a tiny instrument of torture used to rip out stitches which must be ripped out.

Why must the stitches be ripped out? Because they were put in wrong. In an alternate universe, wearers of clothes would view inside-out sleeves as pleasing anomalies. In an alternate universe, people would find a collar in which one point hung three inches below the other as an example of pleasing asymmetry. In an alternate universe, all clothes would be snapped and not buttoned.

Oatie weeps on. She is the master of silent weeping. Her hot tears stain the peach fabric with wet blotches. What has gone wrong for Oatie? You would inquire, were you not so busy ripping out your fourth attempt at sewing in a sleeve. You would have sympathy for Oatie were you not so focused on your own situation, which is bad and getting worse.

How many times can a single seam be ripped out before the fabric begins to shred and can no longer be sewn at all? About four. You are Sisyphus, grimly pushing the rock of your pointy collar and recalcitrant sleeves up the mountain.

You glance over at Oatie. Now her tears are staining the card table on which rests one of Mrs. N’s sewing machines and the long lengths of peach fabric. Oatie feels your gaze and raises her head. Her huge brown eyes are swimming. She has the look of a family dog awaiting euthanasia.

You want to tell her the hell with the long peach dress. You want to cast aside the red-and-white checked monstrosity on your own card table.

You do not know that the day will come, much later, when you will look back on these Mrs. N days and know that you were in the presence of a saint. The day will come when you look about and realize that you are one of the few adults around who knows how to make quilts, sew on buttons, hem a skirt. And will you have passed these skills on to your children? No, of course not.

For now, you look down at your red and white checked disaster and figure that you can wear it with a sweater and turn the collar inward. It will look lumpy and ugly, but what else is new? You look over at your still-weeping sister. Let’s make a break for it, Oatie,  let’s get the hell out of the Cleveland House. You sit with your seam ripper, silently vowing to quit 4-H the same way you quit every other club you are required to join, which is as soon as your parents allow you to.

Pick a photo, any photo. The rule: it has to come from the vast file of hundreds upon hundreds that go only by number and not name.  The moving finger circles, and having circled, descends upon photo #03-slides-33.

And who have we here? Why, I do believe it is little Oatie. Was your nickname already Oatie, back when this photo was taken? But it’s not a photo; it’s a slide, a slide among many other slides, slides that were every couple of years loaded into a fan-cooled slide projector and projected onto a screen set up in the living room.

Here you are, Oatie, sitting in a little white chair. Look at your brown eyes. Look how quietly you gaze into the camera. Who took this photo? Oatie, you look solemn.  Do you wish to get down from the little white chair? Are you waiting for someone to spoon food into your mouth? Are you impatient to grow up?

Or do you foresee the day fifteen years from the day this photo was taken, when your family will be in the station wagon, honking the horn, while you – last in the shower line in a one-shower-six-person-family – frantically try to blow dry your hair? Are you already picturing the future blue chair next to the future woodstove in the future kitchen, that blue chair next to the only heat source, and how you will have to fight your sisters for sitting rights?

Perhaps you are looking far, far into the future and inwardly sighing at the knowledge that your large future cat, the large cat that out of the goodness of your heart you rescued from the woods, will in the course of a single morning chew through your phone charger cord, your iPod charger cord, and your camera charger cord.

But these things are many years hence, Oatie. Maybe it’s me you’re looking at now. Am I, the older nicknameless sister, standing beside the grownup taking the photo, waving at you to try to make you smile? Smile, dear little Oatie, smile.