Alison McGhee

Andes Mint #14: Which will you choose

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I woke up in the middle of the night last night curled on the far side of an enormous, cushy bed in an enormous, cushy hotel in the Rocky Mountains. It was 2:47, which is a time I often wake up.

It was black in the room the way only a hotel, with those magic light-canceling curtains, can be. I think of that particular blackness as Hotel Dark.

The one question on my mind, curled there on the edge of that bed so big an entire family could have fit onto it, was this: Which wrist are my birthmarks on?

These are two tiny Rice Krispie shaped birthmarks. They have been with me since birth (which is probably why they’re called birthmarks). This means that every day of my life, I have lived with my birthmarks, which are visible every time I look at that wrist.

But which wrist was it?

It was 2:47 a.m. and I needed to know. But I needed to remember, and not figure out the answer by quickly touching each wrist. It seemed crazy not to know which wrist was the birthmark wrist.

Pitch black. 2:48. 2:49. I forbade either hand to touch the other wrist. The vast width of the invisible bed stretched behind my curled-up back, and I was conscious of the seven pillows I had tossed to the far end.

Which wrist?

You have lived inside this body your entire life, I told myself. It seemed so sad that I didn’t know the answer, by instinct, by familiarity with my own self.

Nick Drake started singing inside my head, that haunting song of his: Which Will.

Then I started thinking about my face. I realized that I had never seen my face in real life. The backward reflection of it in a mirror, many times. The outline of my nose, and my Donald Duck-like upper lip that one time that the bee stung it.

But my actual face, the one that everyone else sees? Never. Not even once. And I never will.

I thought about how when I lace my fingers together and then look at them all twisted up and command one to lift, and another to twitch, most of the time, the wrong finger will lift or twitch.

How well do I know my own body?

Which will you go for? Which will you love? Which will you choose from? From the stars above. . .

Andes Mint #13: Walk slowly.

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Walk slowly. All you can ever come to is yourself. (Middle Eastern proverb, at least according to the Reader’s Digest magazine you read it in, back when you were in middle school)

Three decades after you both graduated from that high school in the foothills, you feel a tap on your shoulder and turn to behold him, smiling, having recognized you in line. You’re back, from a thousand and more miles, to that place that you still call home, while he never left.

?? and !! and ?? and !!

And the whole time you’re smiling at each other and small-talking, a whole other conversation is taking place deep inside: that night you slow-danced together at the bar, when the drinking age in upstate New York was 18 and that’s how old you were, that summer after senior year, year of cut-offs and baby doll shirts you made by cutting up thrift-store nightgowns.

Dreamweaver on the radio. Roller skates around and around the gym on Saturday nights. Fribbles and blue cheese salads during your break at Friendly Ice Cream. Boys who pressed coins into the chocolate fudge in their sundae glasses for a tip, printed their phone numbers on paper napkins. The red Datsun pick-up that shifted like butter, that you drove up and down Glass Factory Road, Route 12, Route 274.

Sun-drenched days and long nights of crickets and mosquitoes and goodbye parties.

You were leaving soon and you would never return again for longer than a week. College for you, a carpenter’s toolbelt for him.

Now you get out  your old yearbook and flip through its pages. Feathered bangs. Turtlenecks. Serious eyes, composed smiles. Walk slowly. All you can ever come to is yourself. Decades later, you would still choose the same quote, still put it beneath that photo of you standing by that tree.

Andes Mint #12: Mother of Stars

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Your mother woke you when you were a child, took your hand and pulled you from that little bed in that little room, led you downstairs and onto the cool cement porch.

“Look,” she said, and pointed to the heavens, pulsing green and blue and yellow. “It’s the northern lights.”

Tired, you leaned against the wooden porch post and held her hand. Angels dancing, is what it looked like to you. Silent angels.

* * *

Thirty and more years later you walked with your mother by a mighty river. You were in the lead. The two of you climbed a winding stair to a bridge and looked down at the wild water, churning its way south. You had just told your mother about something wild and churning inside yourself. She took your hand and held it.

“Everything will be okay,” she said. Her eyes filled but she looked at you steadily. “Everything will be all right.”

* * *

Years later, she told you that she had not been able to imagine how anything would possibly be all right.

“But I knew that’s what I had to say. That’s what you needed to hear.”

You’ve seen the northern lights many times since that night you were, what, four years old. But when you hear the phrase northern lights now, it is that first night you go back to. Your young mother, not yet 30, holding the hand of her little girl and pointing to something unearthly in the sky, something beyond any explanation that makes sense.

And for reasons you don’t understand, you also go back to that day by the wild water, her hand in yours, her voice calm, telling you that everything would be all right.

 

Andes Mint #11: Credo

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Credo

I believe in tenderness.
I believe in lying on your porch swing on a summer night and watching the passersby.
I believe in eating as many Oreos as you want.
I believe that climbing down the mountain is harder than hiking up.
I believe in standing in the doorway watching your small children as they sleep.
I believe that I have lived too much of my life in fear.
I believe in Mint Sprint toenail polish.
I believe that you can choose to be kind.
I believe that I would not know how to live in this world without my best friend.
I believe that the most fun place to eat in a restaurant is at the bar.
I believe that art has saved me from madness.
I believe that the older I get, the more I enjoy life.
I believe that I have done many things that scared me.
I believe that I am loved.
I believe in a world invisibly part of this world.
I believe that sick days are best used for days when you are not sick.
I believe in the CFTD method of parenting.
I believe that I have courage.
I believe in slant rhyme, slant worlds, and slanting roofs.
I believe you should listen to the same song as many times in a row as you want.
I believe in holding hands.
I do not believe that everything worth doing must be done well.
I do not believe that everything worth doing is difficult.
I believe that I have tried.
I believe that I have tried, at times, too hard.
I believe that I have hurt people I love.
I believe that the people I love know that I love them.
I believe that a single moment of truth and tenderness can redeem years of pain.
I believe what Stanley Kunitz said: that in breaking, the heart can break open.

Andes Mint #10: Steamed clams and boiled new potatoes

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You were a small girl and the state fair concessionaire stands sold pink puffs of spun sugar in paper cones, mesh bags of tiny boiled red potatoes salted and buttered, paper containers filled with fried fat-bellied clams glistening with oil. Paper cups filled with lemonade made from a squeezed lemon stirred up with sugar and cold water.

Decades later you stand in your kitchen making lemonade in just that way: A single lemon, big spoonful of sugar, water cold from the tap. Stir.

Back then, in those state fair days, you wanted the world.

I don’t want to be normal, you used to think. Once you said it to your mother –I don’t want to be normal— helpless to explain what you meant, searching for the right word but not able to find it, then or now.

You wanted the world, the world, the world, all its oceans and continents, its mountains and valleys. Now you imagine your footprints, all the places you’ve been, all the faces you’ve beheld, all the days and nights of marvels.

So why is it that it’s a single afternoon at the New York State Fair you go back to, a single memory, you and your father, that man you were so often so afraid of but not on that day, not on that one day when you sat on a red stool beside him, under a red awning there at the fair, eating the salty buttered baby red potatoes, the fried clams that he treated you to?

You were seven, he was 31, and when you think of your panicky desire not to be normal, why is this what you remember?

Because that was the whole world, you hear a voice say, the whole world is everywhere, in every moment.

Andes Mint #9: Show me a girl who's not afraid

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You and your girls and their friend were in London, staying in a sunny room with four twin beds at the top of four long, narrow flights of carpeted stairs that one of you always stumbled on at least once.

You strolled Kensington Garden and had afternoon tea. You admired Princess Di’s dresses, still and quiet on mannequins behind guarded glass. Toured the Tower, anxious the entire time because you could feel the spirits of the unquiet dead ghosting around you.

You rode the double-decker buses, hopping on and hopping off. Ate bangers and mash. Took the tube. Fed fat pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

Now you were sitting in a restaurant open to the sidewalk, the four of you at an oilcloth-covered table. There was too much mayonnaise on your sandwich. This had been happening all over London. Gobs of mayonnaise, white and thick and not Hellmann’s, oozing between bread. You wiped some of it off with your napkin.

“Too much mayonnaise yet again,” you said, and looked up to see three pairs of girl eyes fixed on you, three small girls frozen in fear.

“What is it?” you said, bewildered. “Girls, what’s wrong?”

“Is that man drunk?” one of them whispered, afraid to look at the man shouting and weaving on the sidewalk behind her.

You had barely noticed his drunken, ungainly walk, the repeated slur of his angry plea for a sandwich. Now you focused on him.

“Yes,” you said, “he is. But he won’t hurt you. You don’t need to worry. He’s just drunk.”

You went back to your sandwich and the ongoing mayonnaise issue. But when you glanced up a moment later, you saw that they were not eating. They couldn’t relax. Couldn’t shed their fear. They stared at you worriedly.

A great gulf appeared between you and them: you on one side of the table, three little girls on the other. It came over you that in their whole lives none of them had ever been the target of a drunken rage, ever been approached by a grown man with anything but tenderness.

Your heart twinged open and shut, open and shut, in pity and fear and love for the day that would come for each of them, no mother on the other side of the table to wrap her hands around theirs and tell them they were safe, that they had nothing to fear.

Poem of the Week, by Fady Joudah

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Mimesis
– Fady Joudah

My daughter
wouldn’t hurt a spider
that had nested
between her bicycle handles
for two weeks
She waited
until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said
it will simply know
this isn’t a place to call home
and you’d get to go biking

She said that’s how others
become refugees isn’t it?

 

* * *

For more information on Fady Joudah, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/fady-joudah

My Facebook page: : http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Andes Mint #7: Tanka (the last time)

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Tanka* (the last time)

I’m crazy about
you, he ran back up four flights
to whisper. His eyes,
burning. His coat, flying. His
decision, already made.

 

*A tanka is a Japanese poem consisting of five lines, the first and third of which have five syllables and the others seven. Tankas, like the blues, often deal with intensely personal subject matter.

Andes Mint #6: Phantom ice cream

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When you think of Charlie, which you do every day, he appears to you smiling, sitting on a chair wearing dark pants, a white shirt with a faint stripe, dark shoes. The chair is simple, one step up from a folding chair, and it’s set on the linoleum floor of the dark pantry-like space in his old house, the same space that once held the commercial soft-serve ice cream machine he bought at an auction and installed for the use of himself and his family.

The house burned down many years ago. The ice cream machine was uninstalled shortly after Charlie got his triple bypass. The night your parents called to tell you he was in the hospital, you sat down and wrote him a letter that began, “Do you have any idea how much I love you?”

Charlie was your father’s best friend. He is inseparable from every moment of your growing up, and from your entire life until he died last year. When you think of him now he’s always in that chair, always smiling, always chuckling.

Hi Charlie.

Hi Al.

You hear his voice perfectly. It’s as if he’s in the room with you whenever you think of him. His voice, followed always by that easy chuckle. The man could get along with anyone in the world, and others counted on him to be the conduit through which they got along with others. This was a role he was born for and he fulfilled it unerringly.

He was a farmer for much of his life, an extension agent for the state for many years, a Walmart greeter for a few. Sitting here typing this, on this buckling white couch in your basement, where you’re trying to escape the heat, you try to think of even one person who didn’t love him. You can’t.

There he sits on that chair, smiling, that easy laugh, that mellow voice that has always sounded to you like a cello turned human.

Hi Charlie.

Hi Al.

In your mind you pull up a chair opposite him, there in that dark pantry where the soft ice cream machine is churning away. This is where you meet, now that he’s gone, in a disappeared pantry in a burned-down house: a place where he used to sit you down with a spoon and a big bowl of melting vanilla ice cream.

He’s talking to someone else at first, someone you can’t see, but after a while he glances over and meets your eye. He nods and smiles and you nod and smile back. There is the same deep, wordless understanding between the two of you that there always was.

What you know –and he knew you knew it– was that Charlie’s easy chuckle was his defense. It was how he got through, how he bought time so that his brain would have a few extra seconds to whisk through a thousand possibilities, figure out how to defuse, how to smooth over, how to make everyone in the conversation –especially those who were angry, quick to judge, quick to injury– feel listened to, seen, known.

If Charlie could have been cloned and installed in embassies around the world, there would be no war.

Now he is gone, but you still need his presence. So every day you draw up a chair opposite him. You smile. You listen to that easy laugh. Charlie steadied the lives of those who knew him. He smoothed things over among people he loved and people he barely knew. An invisible filament strung through his hands held so many things together.

In life, the two of you never spoke openly of what you knew about each other, which is how much effort that takes, not only to do it but to make it look effortless.

Andes Mint #5: and she drove like a bat out of hell, too.

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She was fifty-five when you were born. Hers is the first face you conjure at dawn when you bow your head to your clasped hands. Hers is the scent that you tracked through a Hallmark card store until you found the old lady wearing it, bent over the Get Well cards, who looked up when you started to cry. Hers are the dresses, old and flowered and heavy polyester and unlaundered, that you keep tied up tight in a white plastic bag on a shelf in your closet, that you sometimes untie and bury your nose in. She is the one who taught you how to fold a towel the right way. She is the one who could wring a chicken’s neck and tat a doily and scrub a floor and grade 45 English compositions all in the same evening. Hers was the pantry in which you slept at Christmas, surrounded by tin after tin of her cookies. Hers is the tiny nose that turned bright red the one time she drank a sip of Champagne. She is the one who swayed in the kitchen to the sounds of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. She is the one who played the tiny electric organ with the choose-your-own background accompaniment. It was she who took you to Dairy Queen every night when you visited for that week in the summer, and it was she who asked you if you were sure that one little cone was enough, and didn’t you want a sundae at least? She was the one who gave you fourths on everything. On her coffee table was a blue glass bowl full of butterscotch candies. She laughed and laughed when Arthur tossed his spitballs at the dinner table. She had a dog named Jody. She put reflecting balls in her flower gardens. She is the one who said Semi-gloss, that’s what you want, because you can wash it with a sponge. She wrote you hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters, all of which you still have, overflowing from boxes and bags in your basement. She is the one you always replied to.  She is the one who that one day when you went to visit her could not, suddenly, make you dinner anymore. She is the one you pushed in the wheelchair. She is the one who wrote in shaky handwriting What a happy life we had together, but it wasn’t long enough. She is the one you talk to every day in your mind. Hers is the unmistakable scent you smelled the day you needed her so badly and you walked into your friend’s house and stopped short, overcome, but your friend smelled nothing. She is the one who found no faults in you. Hers were the hands you held, knotted and gnarled with the arthritis that she swore didn’t hurt. She is the one that you, phone hater, called once a week. It was to her that you said It’s okay, you can go, you don’t have to hold on anymore when your mother held the phone to her ear that last day, and then you hung up and made that sound you had never heard yourself make. It was her eulogy you wrote and read in that sun-streaked church after Oatie sang Danny Boy. Her name is the answer to every one of your computer security questions. She is the only person in this world about whom you have not one, single, regret.