Pageant

Sometimes my kava tea smells like a car ride home from the Christmas pageant at my church when I was a kid.  And my Burt’s Bees face wash smells like that, too. There is something a bit citric and slightly sweet about these fragrances – and like the mild, flattened out melange of an old spice drawer –  that reminds me of the one clementine and the plastic sandwich bag of rock candy given out to each kid as we left.  That aroma filled the car, the clementine rolling around on the seat, unloved, while I grappled to loosen a piece of candy from the lump that had stuck together.  The hard candy was disappointing to me, a fat kid who preferred all treat roads to arrive at chocolate town, but I would take sugar however it came to me.

The hippy-adjacent rituals of my cruelty-free cleanser and natural relaxation tea seem themselves worlds separate from a white bread family driving home from a baptist church in a Ford station wagon in the 1980s.  To be fair, while world peace and zero carbon foot print were not buzz words in our family, we were hardly model conservatives either.

The last thing on my mind was God and I suspect it wasn’t on the minds of my family, either, because talk centered around whose kid forgot their lines – with a lot of laughter and a healthy dollop of schadenfreude – and then, more quietly, there were gossipy exchanges between our parents about other adults.  Eventually we broke the barrier between front seat and back by sharing the tidbits of ignorance we’d gleaned from other kids before the show.

“I heard Barry Hart’s a queer,” one of us said.

And, “Mrs. Clatterbuck is putting Tammy Joe on pills because she’s gotten so fat.”

“Donna said Sven Jenkins is a child molester. Is that true, Mom?”

This wasn’t the first time my parents had to hear kid gossip and go to the bat to save the world from our brutality and flagrance.  My mom always either cried out in alarm or rolled her tongue in disgust at our childish ignorance.  She would caution us against gossip in general and then run defense for the rest of the community. This night was like most others.

“Barry Hart is not that way. He just happens to be a nice, polite kid, who cares about his appearance. I wish more kids were like Barry. And don’t forget how hurtful it would be if talk like that got back to his mother. Eloise has it hard enough, raising that boy alone.”

And, “Tammy Jo is a perfectly pretty girl. I don’t know why the moment someone puts on a couple of pounds, everyone becomes obsessed with how big she’s going to get. People are so stupid sometimes!”

That one felt personal. We weren’t blind to the fact that there was a little more lap to mom these days than there used to be.  Come to think of it, cuddling up with a pudgy mom when we were really little felt great, so it is strange that society gets so distraught about it. Maybe if we were all to get swept up in this hygge craze, we’d each discover the comforts of a vast and pillowy hug and finally set the fashion world aflame. Okay, now I’m taking it personally, because I, too, have a bit more lap these days. I wish people would leave Tammy Jo Clatterbuck the fuck alone!

Of course, the tidbit of pre-pageant gossip that had come up before and which my mother took pretty seriously was the one about Sven Jenkins.  It had been bantered around by kids for as long as I could remember.  This ride home from the pageant it was my middle sister who reopened the cold case, lisping in my memory because she was either in between teeth or worrying a chunk of candy.

“Donna said Sven Jenkins is a child molester. Is that true, Mom?”

“It’s Mr. Jenkins, Meredith. And, no, I don’t think he’s a child molester. Do you kids even know what that means?”

We bristled.

“It’s when grownups do stuff to kids and stuff!” That was my oldest sister, Molly, her voice a mixture of boredom and winter allergies from the wood stove at home. Nasal and flat, she usually chimed in from behind a trashy romance novel. Tonight she was pretending to study the pageant program in the dark.

“I watch 20/20, Mom!” That was me, wanting it to be clear that I had a level of worldliness far beyond my years. In fact, though I really was foggy about what child molesters were, I knew a lot about normal, everyday sex from reading Molly’s trashy romance novels.

I’m still surprised that a sixteen year old girl was allowed to read that openly in our house and that a nine year old boy could get by with it with little effort to hide his movements.  My sexual awakening was painted all the more colorfully by reading accounts of men with tanned and brawny thighs ravishing women on the beaches of Caribbean plantations or in the wet grasses of an English moor. Thanks, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, for all the deliciously filthy memories.

Regarding pedophiles in our baptist church, Meredith brought forth evidence from the court of public opinion.

“They say he lures kids to him with those pink mints.”

He did give each kid a round pink mint from the pocket of his nice navy blazer with the brass buttons each Sunday after church. A tall and lean farmer with a speckled tan and a blond flattop haircut that always looked freshly mown, he had to lean down pretty far to offer the sweets. It did feel a little alarming when he’d peer at you and hold out the circle of pink cradled in his palm.

“Oh my God,” Mom said. And that was as close to God as that car ride home from the Christmas pageant ever got. “Can’t a man give kids candy anymore without being accused of something? People are so…sick.”

I don’t remember how that conversation ended. I like to think we eventually grew quiet, tired of trying on adult themes, letting our heads lean together as we succumbed to a sugar coma. Maybe I even eventually tore away the skin of that clementine.

 

 

Failed Pass

I came to the party to see both the brothers.  Strangely it was not the one I was in love with who I hoped to hook up with before going home.  The one I loved was not an option, a guy a couple of years older than me who was strictly into girls.  But his brother, Dillon, was what we called open.  We had fooled around in the back of my car once, parked behind the high school, but it hadn’t ended great.  He’d been too drunk to concentrate and finally we straightened up the seats and I drove him back to his car across town.  I still thought about him a lot – the taste and feel and scent of him and perhaps most that things ended so incompletely.

 

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The party thinned until there were only a few straggling in the foyer, but still I hung back, pretending to read the spines of the books on the shelves in the library. Earlier in the night their mother had shown me this room, waving a dismissive hand at the volumes that climbed to the ceiling.

“But who has time anymore?” she’d asked in a breezy, rhetorical manner.  She smiled at me, “I guess when you’re young…”

Linda seemed more human to me in that moment, thought I still didn’t care for her. Earlier that night I’d heard her use the word ‘fag’ about her oldest son.

“I mean honestly, I don’t know why Linus is so sensitive about everything,” she told one of his friends, a girl named Terin who had big red lips and iddy-biddy bangs. “He’s such a fag sometimes.”

Terin and I had exchanged a glance.

I had glanced over at Linus, watching him shrug off the jab, and thinking wryly, ‘I wish.’

 

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He was slenderer than his brother, with a long bony nose and bright green eyes hidden under meticulously polished spectacles.  These weren’t eyeglasses as I knew them back then: the huge plastic frames that hid half the face.  These were small, clever, brass. They made him look bookish and vaguely historical, which was probably why he chose them. Maybe too why I romanticized him so much.

I used to study Linus like a painter does a muse, but when the muse doesn’t welcome the scrutiny, there are too many veils to peel away.  I wanted intimacy with him and when I was so young my hormones and naïveté conspired to convince me that was unattainable. Because the way I saw getting there was steeped in sex and sexuality.  I’d never had a solid friendship with a man and didn’t know how that was supposed to work.

Dillon spoke a language I understood more viscerally, a language not of words but of straight up sex.

 

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Even as the summer of my eighteenth year grew sweatier and more still, all the mild breezes of spring spent, even as I fell more in love with Linus, there were more chances to spend time with his brother.  We met with mutual friends at the tea house, bantering about topical things now forgotten, smoking too many cigarettes.  He had a hunger about him.  Despite the fact that he was handsome and athletic, Dillon seemed to always search your glance for admiration.  I sensed it about him and I was put off by it.  Perhaps I preferred the enigma that was his older brother.

Still I enjoyed watching Dillon for months before our singular hook up.  He had golden skin and dark golden curls. His legs were covered in golden hair and rippled with muscles he’d built playing soccer. His hands were broad and square and capable, his lips each full and quick with a reckless grin.

Then a friend of mine who went to military academy with him told me how he used to sleep with a boy that was their classmate.  I hadn’t seen this coming.  Dillon seemed unattainable until that morsel of gossip. Shortly after, he and I were the last ones to close down the teahouse – me lingering later than was my wont – and with only a slight pass, I opened the door to the fleeting encounter behind the high school.

It was sexy and yet not sexy all at once.  In later years I wished I’d made more of the night. We should have gotten out of the car and wandered down over the hill into the grass. There ought to have been night sky and the summer cacophony of cricket and cicada and swiftly running brook.

 

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When they invited me to the party, I was surprised to be asked.  I never really thought anyone liked me very much and was often taken aback to be included.  I didn’t know if it were Dillon or Linus who proposed my name.  I never found out, not that it came to matter.

It was odd to be there, wanting to be loved by one brother and to have sex with the other. Perhaps it wasn’t so much about want as realism and expediency. I knew I stood a chance with Dillon.  Linus thought of me as merely a new friend.

As the guests started to leave in groups, while I was hiding in the library, I heard Linus head out with his girlfriend.  Their mother even said good night, making a lot of noise about the clean up waiting until the morning.  There was one person left standing in the foyer with Dillon when I peered out from the library.  It was a girl he’d been talking to much of the night.  She had curves for days and hair like an angel in a Renaissance painting.

Dillon glanced my way and rather than be caught, I barreled out a little too quickly, pretending to only then discover how the house had emptied.  The girl with the beautiful hair said she needed to get home; she was going on a long road trip the next day.  Dillon gave her a kiss before closing the door. He peered through the sidelight until she drove away.

When he turned to study me, I dropped my gaze.  It occurred to me that we hadn’t really spoken much since the night in the car.  We’d never been alone together since then.  I wished I’d never come tonight, but a part of me longed for a chance to be with him again. There was a lonely craving in me that supplanted all better judgment.

“You not tired?” he asked.

“I thought we could hang out.”

He shrugged and I followed him into his bedroom down the hall. We sat on the bed and looked at an album cover together while he talked about things that happened at the party.  The scent of him made a kaleidoscope of butterflies circle in my stomach.  When I put a hand on his thigh, he stiffened.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

The butterflies dropped as if turned to stone by his tone.

“I thought we might…”

I faltered as he turned his brown eyes on me. Dillon always seemed to have laughing eyes, but tonight they were impenetrable, dense and cold like a pond in winter.  I felt myself grow smaller.

“We’re in my mother’s house,” he said.  “That was my girlfriend who just left.”

The funny thing is that I can’t remember how I responded. I didn’t say anything to him to change his mind.  Yet how he looked as I left or whether I stumbled out or was walked to the door are facts lost to time.  What I do remember is the light in his room.  There was only one lamp in a corner, casting long shadows over our suddenly sordid tableau.  Shadows trailed from his lashes and from his bed and from the soles of my feet to the top of my head.  Maybe he softened his rebuke with a smile. I honestly couldn’t say.

The drive back from their remote home on the river seemed interminable.  It was hard to believe I’d only passed these landmarks a few hours earlier.  The night had left me hanging open, exposed and restless.  With the windows down, I could feel the coldness of March on my skin and moving through my hair.  I should have turned on the radio and filled my bandwidth with raucous sound, but I made the trip home in silence, wondering what Dillon would tell his brother about my failed pass.

 

Birthday

The landscape of my childhood is not honey colored or bright with rosy reds. There were stormy blues and sleepy yellows.  If I colored it with crayons, it would be the hues children leave in the box.

In photographs that have faded as much as memory, the fields around our old house are paler than boiler onions.  All the winter walks have become one remembered walk, our breath blowing out ahead in thin clouds, the ice on the bent grass crunching under foot.  Let the snow birds break the air, startled out of the underbrush. Let the dogs make chase, each cry bold and bright and startling.  They are a part of this magic and cannot disturb it.  But we would walk gently, let no words pierce the air.  If I want her to hold my hand, I need only to reach up and my mother will curl her warm, work-worn fingers around.  She will never be happier than on this walk.  She and the woods speak a common language.

I am mesmerized by the pine needles on the forest floor.  If I nudge them with my shoe, they open, but they are deep and never reveal the dark soil beneath.  Yet I know what lies under them.  I dig open the earth each spring, following the smell of the chives, hoping to uncover how it all works.  Where do the earthworms go when the thistle drops its head and the ice returns, first thin and white as powder sugar, than thicker and grayer toward the morose stretch of February?

____________

My mother has a rage that runs deep, a sadness that is darker than all the long nights of winter.  We children are what constrain her, what contain her and pull at her to rise each morning and try again.  We did not ask for the burden; she did not ask for her pain.  She erupts at times, when she is at her limit, and there is no creature that could barrel out of the shadow of the woods that would be any more terrifying.  The boar and the bear would fall back before her and, glancing around her, design their escape.

  ____________

When a parent dies, they leave a child.  The age of the child does not matter.  When my father died, his son had as much grey hair as he had brown.  In the wake of his passing, childhood has been opened again.  I thought I knew my past.  But the youth I thought I knew was merely one edit.  The original cannot be altered, merely viewed at different intervals, seen in another way by eyes that know more now than they did before.

____________

On a warm summer night in my thirty-ninth year, I lose myself in an argument.  This is not the soft rage I have known before, nor am I fueled by anger so much as fear.  We are two souls, deeply in love, but not seeing each other or hearing each other.  Blind and bitter and ugly, we are up the stairs and down the stairs.  We are on the bed and in the kitchen.  Words on words, voices climbing and falling, but never arriving.

Before this night, I have glanced around for something to throw, but I have never done it.  I have wanted to rend the air, but instead have gone away to cry, pleaded for pardon and hung my head in remorse the whole of the long, sad day to come.  It is never just my fault, but I imagine myself the keeper of the joy.  The impulse to cook, to keep things tidy, to find the wisdom and the humor in the things that go awry – these are a part of me, a magic that lets the boat rise with the storm.

On this night, this summer night, I pick something up and send it across the kitchen.  The noise is tremendous.  I pick up another thing and another, each missile thrown harder than the last.  Then he comes to me, startled from our strange spell, horrified by what I have become in this instant. I am horrified, as well, but surely breaking the silence is something.  Now the opening has been forced, we can work up and out of the hole.

I clean up my mess on my hands and knees, first with a little broom and dustpan, then with the vacuum.  I stop only to hold him because he is crying.  We are children parenting ourselves and our love.  He fears we cannot find our way back.  I think we’re halfway there.

As I have always done, I want to bring us back to safer ground.  I sent us into deeper shadows than we have probed before, but my wings are strong enough to carry us home.  And sure enough, we do find the healing words and though we will go to work the next day with a terrible weight, we will get lighter with each night’s sleep.  It is in us to keep loving, to keep the light.

The dent in the freezer door and the scratches on the floor remain.  No amount of regret can pop the steel or knit the finish on the tiles.  My rage left its traces on the surface of our life, but through it, the hearts beneath are stronger and closer.

____________

When there is too much happening inside – a terrible brew of sad thoughts, regrets, incomplete sentences, formless worries and dreams bent over on themselves – the explosion is the thing that must happen.  There is a better way, surely, and we hope never to see ourselves blow open that way again.  We will walk away the next time.  We will let our worries out in short, safe little puffs.

Since the night I went mad, I see my mother’s rages anew.  It is true, she could make a wild animal bolt when she lost it.  Now I know what her insides felt like. Before I only knew how she looked on the surface.  I knew the vein on her temple, the black cave of her mouth, the fire running over her cheeks and the white ice of her knuckles as her fist clutched the air.  She was alone with a despair that was killing her and this was the best she could manage.

In my thirty-ninth year I lost my father, which is a terrible thing.  Yet I have found something grave and golden, a lovely cold comfort.  I have found another well of compassion, deep waters connecting me to my mother.

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She never had to explain to me the thing about being quiet in the woods.  I knew it because she knew it.  We come out of the pines and pause at the edge of the pond. The banks are brown and muddy on this end.  We step close, but not too close.

The other end is called the deep end.  Its banks are not dark and soft; they are pebbled with light shale.  It is easy to scuttle forward on that end, to slide into the water.  I don’t know how deep the deep end is, but I feel a sort of terror about it and seldom walk around to that side.

If she and I are careful, we can lean forward, holding hands to help balance one another, and we can peer at the gentle blue of the winter sky, mirrored on the surface.  But we cannot lean in far enough to see each other glancing up at ourselves.  If we fell in, the mirror breaks open and the cold water pulls us under.