“I want strawberry shortcake.” Kristen said.

“Okay. Well… Where should we go?” I asked.

“I dunno…” she said.

“Let’s get on the bus and go to Wal-Mart.” Tierra said.

We walked three blocks to the MITS station. It seemed to take ages in the heat. We hopped aboard Route 13, which travels from the Downtown area, across Ball State Campus, to that omnipresent pinnacle of consumerism, Wal-mart. The bus smells like rubber and sweat. The seats are blue with a neon geometric pattern that fails to please the eye. The seats rub uncomfortably against our damp, tank-topped shoulders, scratching like a heat rash that just won’t go away. I didn’t mind. At least it was air-conditioned.

At Wal-Mart, we made a bee-line for the frozen fruits, all the way at the back of the store. We roamed past screaming children, their faces covered in something gooey. One child’s frazzled mother, covered in more snack residue than the child, screams back. Her pink stretch pants have damp spots behind the knees, and clash with her red face.

We grab strawberry goop, you know, the part-liquid, part-Jello stuff that you can throw on your shortcake in ten seconds, that tastes exactly like fake strawberries, a melange of berry flavor and chemical. Delicious. Grab a can of Redi-Whip, some already-formed shortcake. I head for the industrial-grade, auto-open, for-your-comfort doors, but I realize that my comrades are not following.

I trail back through the store, a little worried. I don’t want to deal with the embarrassment of going to the Customer Service Desk and paging my friends. I’d rather search the store for days than go up there and admit to having lost the rest of my party. I walk back through the grocery aisles, glancing straight down each one as I pass, wondering if they’re hiding on an end-cap as I walk by. Nope. Not in the grocery section.

Electronics? Not there, either. I check soft lines and there they are. The lingerie section absconded my friends. Kristen grabs three pairs of panties. They are of a variety that my gigantic butt would split in about six seconds. I am jealous of her tiny waist, her tiny hips, her tiny everything.

We hit the checkout lane, number six according to the plastic triangle towering over us. Strawberry goo, whipped cream, shortcake and sexy panties make their way onto the conveyor built. It quickly turns into the conveyor built of mortification. The cashiers face drops like a two ton boulder. I presume he’s imagining what three teenage girls are doing with a can of whipped cream and panties. My face bursts into flame, and I bustle my friends through the line, snatching up our purchases and hopping back onto the bus.

Downtown, we spy the city building, more grey concrete. It has the pleasure of playing host to numerous picnic tables, where frazzled civil servants eat their bag lunch and smoke Tourneys. We sit down at an unoccupied table, its bare wood warped so badly that you could stick your hand in between each plank. For the rest of the afternoon, we make towers of strawberry decadence, shooting whipped cream into each other’s mouths and laughing so hard we choke.

This is based on a prompt from William Carlos Williams’ Poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”

so much depends upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

The prompt was to write about a scene outdoors with reference to the poem

—–

When I moved out of my parents’ house in the summer of 2008, I realized that so much my concept of summer depends upon time spent in the back yard with my mother. We sat on green plastic lawn chairs, our conversations mostly inane. Sometimes, we sat in the kiddie pool my parents inevitably bought for the grandkids or the dog.

Many times, we read our separate books or worked together in the garden, the overzealous sun pressing against our backs, coated in sweat. The smell of lilies and lilac wafted across the yard. The bees flitted through the air, collecting pollen like black-and-yellow wheelbarrows. Cicadas sang off and on, alerting the hungry sparrows to their presence.

When I moved into the apartment, I was disappointed when I found it surrounded by pavement and concrete, with no lilies and lilacs in sight. The bees buzzed around garbage and our apartment filled with flies. My mom gave me a green plastic lawn chair, and I would sit outside, surveying my kingdom of potholes, the sick-sweet scent of garbage coming in on the breeze.

So, I would visit my parents’ house with my boyfriend in tow. He sat in the living room, splayed out on the couch, watching television and napping in the cool air. I sat outside with my mom, watching the grandkids play, sitting in those lawn chairs. Our huge glasses of iced tea glazed with water from condensation.

The kids ran around the yard, jumping on the trampoline and blowing bubbles. I would sigh with relief, surrounded by “controlled” nature, my hands sticky with “bubble-soup”. Locks of my hair adhered to my forehead. My skin was stiff with sunburn.

The kids fought for dominance over the yard, scattering dump-trucks, dolls and balls everywhere. They crawled over the tomato plants and ran from the bees. My parents’ back yard is a land of safety. It is guarded closely by the lawn ornaments, my mother’s frozen angels and my father’s stiff, white chickens.

I.

Personality is at least twenty percent genetic. My personality belongs, in part, to my parents. I am fascinated by their secret lives before my birth. I strain my ears for any hint of these distant people. I want to meet them, to sit and have coffee and joke with them, to find out who they are when they are not my mom and dad. To me, it’s as though they were made new when I came into the world. Who did they love most, before they loved each other? How did they come to be who they are? I yearn to understand this, because in knowing I might come to know why I was born, to glean some hint of my destiny from them. They tell me I have to find out for myself, that it’s not their responsibility. Sometimes, that is too difficult for me. I want the rigid surety of being told. The winding path of the self-made becomes tiring.

I certainly wouldn’t mind being the child whose parents told her how to live. I wouldn’t mind being frustrated with all the orders flung at me. It seems more productive than being frustrated with myself for not knowing enough about the world. Paradoxically, to give myself some certainty, I look toward my parents, who after more than 50 years, still do not live as they wish or know what they want.

II.

So, I find myself sitting with my parents’ photo box, devouring each picture. Once upon a time, there were four photo boxes, but three were lost when the basement of the farmhouse we used to call home flooded. When I think about it, my eyes burn and fill with tears for the moments I have lost. My parents aren’t the type to put photo albums together, to find the sequence and nail the memories down, not like me. They don’t even look at the pictures anymore, not unless I beg and peck and prod them to get it out and tell me this, that and the other, so that I can pin their history down for them.

I have never thrown away a picture, even a marred one. I have boxes of blurry thumb marks, over exposed shots, extreme close-ups of random body parts. Peculiar snapshots of our old dog, Ginger, standing on piles of snow, framed by my wayward fingers. I keep everything, even pictures where I look my worst. I don’t display them, though. They are the parts of myself that I can’t bear for others to see.

III.

My mother is invisible, caring for all her children with no praise for doing so. She is the keeper of cookies, the laundry machine, the voice on the phone calming your panic at two o’clock in the morning. Her face is lined with age, stress and cigarettes. Her hands are calloused from the garden, musty earth packed underneath her long fingernails. Occasionally, Mom will let me in on little secrets about her life before I was born. They come in the form of aphorisms, passed down in a voice disconnected from its owner. “I knew I loved your father the first time we made it by the river.” she says, when I explain that I don’t know what it means to be in love. Sometimes, the wisdom is darker. She was gang-raped and escaped out a second story window before they killed her. Her first husband broke her jaw. Inside me, the voice of my mother is hesitant, distant, muffled.

When I was raped, I still could not stand to tell my mother until the resulting pregnancy became something I could not ignore. So, I told her that it was intentional, that I loved the person, so she would stop asking questions. I didn’t want her to think she had failed. When I miscarried, she could not have known the depths of my relief.

IV.

My father is bald, and has been for as long as I can remember. He occasionally claims that Diet Pepsi and chocolate milk are the cause of this affliction. He is arthritic, stiff, wounded by hard work. When we talk, it is about war, cars, cowboys and sci-fi movies. His voice is still firm, even though his body is not. When I turned 16, I learned that my father is an alcoholic. When I turned 18, I learned that he wants to be a woman. Mom and I found him passed out in a purple velvet dress. I sat on the porch crying, not because I couldn’t love my father this way, but because I did not understand why he couldn’t tell me before. Mom came out, hugged me close and spoke to me in hushed tones about Dad’s other life.

“I know you’ll understand.” Mom said. “I know you will. But don’t tell anyone else.”

Later, my father told me that he would have had gender reassignment surgery if it weren’t for my mother. She told him they could be best friends if he decided to become a woman. My father chose my mother instead. He gave up alcohol for my mother, too. He sat in the bathroom for three days, alternately shaking and vomiting. I thought he was going to die. We resist ourselves to love other people.

V.

I make photo books for my parents, filling them up half-way then hoping that they will fill the rest in themselves. I make an effort to make their history available for analysis. My parents must have thirty half-filled photo albums gathering dust on the shelf. My photo albums are shelved, sequenced, oft-looked at. My history, I think, is preserved in them. They tell me who I am. I do not understand the part of myself that tells me this is important, as though memory were anything more than flimsy, stitched-up half-truths.

This Christmas, I keep telling myself, I won’t bother. I will get them something they actually want, rather than something I feel I need. Still, my mind plans it out, the order, the position, which pictures I will use. My brain works to patch things together, to make something whole and comprehensible out of the scraps.

VI.

I do not tell my parents who I am, or what I want. I do not tell them about what I have experienced outside the walls of their home. I do not open myself up, I do not make sacrifices. Perhaps, in some way, I have shaped my parents into who they are. If I could open my mouth and tell them who I am, I do not know what I would say.

I am a walking identity crisis. My self is based on my memory. What did I like once? What qualities did I value? How much of me is like them, and how much of me is just me? How much of my life will be weighted down by their pain? I smoke a cigarette, read a sci-fi novel. I have my father’s forehead and my mother’s nose. My personality belongs, in part, to my parents, who help me to be myself, who shape me, whose boundaries give me freedom. Today, it is sufficient.

]]> http://trogiumpulsatorium.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/genetics/feed/ 0 trogiumpulsatorium http://trogiumpulsatorium.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/on-the-various-uses-of-chicken-noodle-soup/ http://trogiumpulsatorium.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/on-the-various-uses-of-chicken-noodle-soup/#comments Sat, 01 Nov 2008 16:53:41 +0000 trogiumpulsatorium http://trogiumpulsatorium.wordpress.com/?p=42 Continue reading →]]> Playdough

After she comes home from work, my mother makes chicken noodle soup. The chicken, its skin coated with ground peppercorns, boils into chicken stock on the stove. I peek over the counter as she drops eggs into the flour one by one, then stirs it up with a fork. “Do you want to help?” She asks. I nod. “Just put your hands in the bowl and mix it up.” “Eww. Gross!” I respond, delighted by the chance to get dirty with my mother’s sanction. She swings me up onto the counter and I shove my fingers into the sticky mixture, squishing it between my fat little fingers. Mom leans against the opposite counter, watching me while she smokes a cigarette. I do not so much mix the eggs and flour as I pretend it’s playdough. It adheres to my fingers and I giggle. Mom takes the dough from my hands and presses it back into the rest. She kisses the top of my head. “Thanks, little helper.”

Panacea

Everyone in the house is sick. My brother, my mother, my father and I. My sinuses burn and drip, so I carry a wad of tissues in the pocket of my flannel housecoat, its mittens and ice skates appropriate for seventh grade. Dad is asleep on his recliner under a pile of scratchy blankets. Mom is hovering over the stove, coughing over her shoulder as she watches the contents of a tall aluminum pot. The ladle clanks against the side as she stirs. “Chicken soup?” I ask. It sounds more like “Chik-ed Zup?” Her voice is raw, so she just nods. I imagine how the broth will feel running down my throat, the heat of the soup clearing out my sinuses. She pulls the chicken off the stove and begins shredding it, removing the skin with a fork. Steam fills the small kitchen. I offer to help with the noodles. As I drop eggs in, a sneeze sneaks up on me. It flies from my nose into the noodle bowl. I scrape the flour-egg-snot mixture into the trash. “What’re you doing?” she asks. “I sneezed in the noodles…” I mumble in reply. “Oh, honey. Go lay down. I’ll take care of it.” With a sigh, Mom starts the noodles all over again.

Penitence

Mom puts the chicken into that same tall pot, only seasoned with salt and pepper. I lean my elbows against the counter. “Do you want to help?” She asks. “No thanks, Mom. I’ve got some stuff to do.” “Sure, sure.” She says. As I walk back to my bedroom, I imagine I can feel her disappointment, but I suspect it’s my own. I lie on my bed for a while. It’s not like it will kill me to help. But I’m feeling lazy, and teenagers are supposed to be rebellious. The deliberation goes on and on. Finally, I reach a decision. I walk back into the kitchen. “Sure, Mom. I’ll help you.” I say. She drops noodles into the broth. “Thanks, sweetie, but I’m almost done.”

Parallels

I come home from class, and Mom is in the kitchen. She seems frazzled. I hug her gently, wash my hands, and start making the noodles. Eyeball the flour, add five eggs, stir with a fork. The mixture is a sick yellow color. I add more flour and dig my fingers into the noodle goop. I squish it against the palms of my hands. I hold them up and wiggle my fingers slowly. I am the Swamp Thing. Mom giggles. The scent of the broth wafts through the room, carrying a slight hint of its taste to my tongue. I roll the dough out and cut it into thin strips. We pull the chicken out of the pot and toss the noodles in. Little bubbles of fat sit on the surface of the broth. We remove the skin from the chicken and shred it up with serving forks while we talk about our respective days, stealing bits and pieces here and there. The noodles puff up, lumpy and white. Dump the chicken in, stir. I pull the blue bowls out of the cabinet. The soup sloshes into the bowl as Mom ladles it in. She hugs me, kisses my forehead. “Thanks, little helper.”

Ten years old. In seventh grade. On January Twenty-third. I met Tierra. Joanna introduced us. I was mean. I was a clod. She forgave me. An honor student. Bright and charming. Took her SAT’s. And her ACT’s. In eighth grade. She did well. I didn’t try. Grades were poor. Books were better.

She read tarot. I was afraid. Of her, maybe. Of myself, too. I stayed over. Her room, wrecked. I remember once. We made breakfast. Four O’clock AM. Biscuit-wrapped marshmallows, chocolate. Cinnamon donuts, too. We’re health conscious. Her grandparents disapprove. They eat oats. We sugar up. Then crash out. Wake up time. 3 O’clock PM. Our work, trashed. No-one else ate.

Nothing in common. At most, reading. Somehow it worked. We read together. Laughing at Harlequins. We went downtown. Napping at Carnegie. Tucked into corners. Cuddling on mats. Red and blue. Sticking to them. I remember once. We stole Kama-Sutras. Went to McDonalds. “It’s for boys.” She tells me. “To have sex”. Giggled about penetration. Every day, reading. Sci-fi, fantasy, romance. Our friendship grew. Amidst musty leather.

Best friends still. Twelve years old. Went to high-school. Life got messy. We skipped classes. We shop-lifted, too. “I love you”. We would say. “I hate you”. Just as often. I got depressed. I started smoking. She tolerates it. Self-absorbed slacker. I remember once. “Love yourself, now!” She declares, forcefully. I tried, maybe. It didn’t work. I got sick. Sick of school. Sick of life. I was truant. Had a hearing. I quit school. Had my reasons. Took correspondence courses. Didn’t tell anyone. Cleaned my locker. She stayed in.

We watched movies. Indie, Foreign, Comedies. Played video games. But she worked. Got good grades. I wasted time. I remember once. Japanese horror film. Title: “Freeze Me”. Watching for hours. “Institute Benjaminta”, too. It’s incredibly surreal. There we are. Pressed tightly together. On the couch. A 1980′s bigscreen. TV colors bleed. Contrast is high. In summer heat. We sweat, staring. The screen flickers. Talking is unnecessary.

At the Academy. She hates it. She loves it. We never talk. I am lost. Weekends, we hang. Well, sometimes, anyway. I didn’t realize. Summer, she’s depressed. I remember once. We went camping. We came home. Under my desk. She cuts herself. With dull scissors. “What’re you doing?” I ask, terrified. “Trying to die” She says softly. She cries, violently. I don’t understand. Can’t stop it.

At sixteen, now. We almost never talk. Summer again. I am introverted. My life, books. I remember once. She calls me. Almost don’t answer. “I had cupcakes.” She tells me. “Is that bad?” I ask, confused. “So many calories” She is crying. She bikes over. She wants exercise. “Let’s walk, okay?” I don’t respond. “I’ll feel better. …Got a cig?” She asks me. She doesn’t smoke. She is purging. She starves herself. I tell her. “Hey, you’re beautiful.” She doesn’t listen.

Eighteen, looking up. She is better. I think, anyway. I am, maybe. We go out. Breakfast on Saturday. Playing fighting games. We get drunk. I remember once. Before her graduation. We’re up late. People we dislike. Well, they’re twenty-one. We walk home. Arm in arm. Might get caught. We’re not afraid. Cuddled together, close. Twin size bed. “I love you.” I tell her. “Yeah, you, too.” She says. Like old times.

I met someone. I lost him. Our friendship, neglected. I remember once. Evening, over coffee. “I’ll marry him. It could work.” I say, softly. “No, it won’t.” Her pessimistic response. “It’s cute, though.” I was livid. How dare she? She was right. She usually is.

We’re at college. Drinks a lot. She doesn’t care. About grades, people. I remember once. 9 O’clock AM. We’re at breakfast. She’s drunk, again. From last night. She’s acting erratic. Sitting on the sidewalk. Head up my.. Up my skirt. I am embarrassed. “Hey, stop it.” “Why? Everything’s fine.” “Are you drunk?” “Yeah, I am. Tony and I. We partied yesterday.” I am disappointed. We fall apart.

She met someone. Got it together. I met someone. Got good grades. She was jealous. I remember once. After my 4.0. “You work hard. Too much, actually.” Some anger there. “Get a life.” She tells me.

We talk sometimes. I remember once. Not long ago. A grey day. A group of friends. “Mom has cancer. Did you know?” “No, I’m sorry.” I am shocked. “Are you okay?” “Yeah, I’m fine.” I call her. After the surgery. I want it. Our friendship returned. To comfort her. How to help? We have changed.

Yet it is the focus of the photo that interests me here. Two little girls playing in the water. Both are blond, after their own fashion. Both are close in age. Myself at six, with “dirty dishwater hair” facing my four-year-old cousin, Sara. There are no bunny ears or picked noses, just our little-girl grins, with tiny white teeth. The business at hand is quite serious, in its own way. My brothers left long ago, to play with the boys across the street. We are the only children left outside, under the sometimes-watchful eye of my aunt.

My pink-and-blue swimsuit hangs loose around my torso, an attempt at frugality that embarrasses me. It wrinkles up along my torso, the spandex transformed into a punishing terrain. My cousin is wearing a pair of underwear, white cotton. The underwear, like my bathing suit, is also too big. It hangs off of her because it is, in fact, my underwear. Despite the desert sun, neither of us have a tan. The sun glints off the water on our skin and makes us look even whiter.

Children are to be kept out of the sun during the worst heat of the day. Las Vegas, with all its glitz and glamor, is in the business of pretending, and its inhabitants pretend they are living somewhere else. They water their prickly yellow lawns in the face of water conservation laws, plant trees instead of cacti. They keep their children pale and tame, protect them from the harshness of that arid world so they might grow up and plant geraniums and struggle to turn the landscape from brown to green. But if we were to spin camera around by one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, we would see a palm tree towering up against the face of a sandy cliff. We would see the pale sun burning against a slate sky.

It is a rare ritual. Indeed, it is the only time I will ever play in my grandparents’ hose despite the heat of the region.

For now, though, we are wild girls. Our hair sticks up at odd angles. Although we don’t know it, we are revolutionaries, ruining the pre-planned, sodded lawn. Rather than running through sprinklers or swimming in a pool, we pretend to be water-bearers. We know that we live in a village amid the wasteland, and we are bringing the sweet, cool liquid to the thirsty village of Las Vegas with my grandparents’ good plastic cups.

We are going to visit my great aunt, Mickey, whose decline in health has my parents concerned. I have never met her. I do not want to be in this car, in this heat, chubby legs in shorts stuck to the leather seat with no air conditioning. Meatloaf blares on the tape deck, and I sing along, although I don’t know what the words mean. Sometimes, I don’t even know what the words are. My parents tell me that this part of my memory belongs someplace else. It is not in this scenario, the driving, my brothers, the heat, Meatloaf, but it is there in my mind, a part of the memory that cannot be extracted and attached to some other event.

When we arrive, I meet Mickey for the first and only time, in the dark of her bedroom, propped up on a hospital bed. Everything smells of rubbing alcohol and age and urine and sickness, and I am scared of it, of her and of my parents, who brought me here to see this strange old woman. Even now, I find that smell terrifying, knowing that it means the snuffing out of life and light. It means closed, yellowed blinds and fatigue, and I begin to cry again.

My parents sit me in an olive green, threadbare velvet chair in the corner and hand me a book. At three, books are my lure. They coax me onto my potty chair with books. I have been learning to read, forming the sounds in my mouth, pink cheeks, lips, teeth and tongue working together in a concert of chatters, my mouth as round as the letter when I make my long Ooooos, my tongue poking out as I work hard at Elllll. Plosive sounds are easy, but fricatives tickle the inside of my lip and I don’t want to say them. Fffff and Vvvvv are appalling to me. My parents are sure that I simply imitate the words they read to me, learning how to speak without comprehension. Still, they give me books for comfort, like a stuffed animal, even though they suspected I could not read them.

The book is also green, although darker and somehow more real. Hardbound leatherette and musty with age, the cracks in the binding rasp against my fingers. I open it, peeking out over the edge of the book, staring at the tatty Persian rugs over worn woodgrain in Mickey’s room. My brothers leave to play in the yard. I want to leave, too, but my feet dangle off the chair, feeling heavy at the end of my legs. I feel like it is two stories down. I swing my feet and bang my shins and stare, hugging the book against my mouth, breathing in the taste of ancient paper, lingering on my tongue with every in-bound whoosh. I am sure, now, that my Aunt must have thought I was retarded, mouth latched over an old book, staring into space and banging my shins over and over again.

The vague, booming voice of my father asks me to read to my aunt. Startled out of my ennui, I take the book away from my mouth, set it down in my lap and stare at the pages. My mother also offers her encouragement, scooping me up and setting me in her lap, surrounding me with soft arms, smelling like sweat and soap. Delighted, I read aloud to the scary lady on the bed, to my parents and myself.

I could not tell you the details of the story I read. It was probably a fairy tale book, or some such, suitable for children. Those particulars escape me. I do not remember the faces of my parents, although I have seen pictures of them around this time, my dad’s handlebar mustache and my mother’s perm, but I remember the amazement on my parents’ faces every time they tell the tale—of how I did not imitate, but read the words of the story in a strong but halting voice, a story I had never heard before.

]]> http://trogiumpulsatorium.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/bookworm-larvae/feed/ 0 trogiumpulsatorium http://trogiumpulsatorium.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/sexual-selection/ http://trogiumpulsatorium.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/sexual-selection/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:32:28 +0000 trogiumpulsatorium http://trogiumpulsatorium.wordpress.com/?p=9 Continue reading →]]> Male Pygmy Auklets (A. pygmaea) grow large head crests for sexual selection. I did not know this when I opened the box my long distance boyfriend Adam sent me. We had only been “dating” a few months, both of us still wrapped up in that new relationship smell. I called him my gypsy, after his Romany heritage. Inside the box, a few CD’s, a letter, dried flowers, and something fuzzy wrapped in tissue paper. Adam is not the type to send stuffed animals, and I am not the type to ask for them. Curious, indeed. I unwrapped the tissue paper carefully, and inside lay his mo hawk, lovingly tied with six rubber bands. His head crest. An explicit statement, perhaps, of having found a mate.

Other species of birds grow incredibly long tails. I hoped he did not expect an exchange. My hair had been growing since my thirteenth birthday, and had finally reached my waist. It was my curtain, my shield from the rest of the world. Perhaps I would have done it for him, but he never asked.

Adam without hair looks like a cancer patient. He weighed ninety-eight pounds, his shoulder blades bursting from his back like stunted wings, his expression perpetually sad. While we were together, he grew his hair back out. It teased around his shoulders, delicious black ink spilling over his olive skin. His gypsy heritage.

On the day of his cousin’s wedding, he shaved the mo hawk back in. I remember his curls falling into chunks on the floor of his grandmother’s bathroom. Soon after, he stopped pressing his hand against mine, against the gear shift of his car. He stopped calling, or asking me to visit. Then, I became “too young and full of life” for him, a cop out excuse. A gypsy boy has to wander.

Years later, he emailed me to tell me about his new life. He had shaved off his mo hawk again. He had never stopped loving me, but could not stand to be apart. I was the only woman he knew who wasn’t crazy. And by the way, what was new?

Dear Adam,

I cut my hair.

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