Having Our Asses Handed to Us
Flowers, wings, Scrabble, and craft
[Happy Sunday, readers! Here’s a little story about Time And Stuff. It also has flowers.]
On Sundays I water everything. Calla lily, peace lily, asparagus fern, monstrera, avocado, violet, kalanchoe, silver squill, shamrock, angel-wing begonia. I give the Christmas cactus and jade plant a poke in their dirt; unless they’re actually dusty they’d rather wait. Then I give the orchids their biweekly bath.
As I walk past the bigger plants, the ones I lug in every fall, clipping off limbs on the doorframe, I notice they’re thirsty to get outside. Calla lilies hurl themselves toward the dawn that spills through the windows as if the light’s new color — more lemony, maybe — or new angle, I don’t know what, tells them it’s spring. If I turn them around, they’ll fling themselves back by morning.
Hurl, you say, but they don’t move — ?
Not as fast as you do, maybe, but will you look at the swooping angle of that stalk? That’s not a vector; that’s a gesture.
Patience, I tell them, It still might freeze.
Outside it’s all sunshine, beloved, and as we discussed, I’m going more feral, bare feet tender to the wet gravel until they harden up a bit. I look at my outside plants, daffodils, tulips, forsythia, Lenten rose, and the wildlings, henbit, bird’s-eye speedwell, purple deadnettle, and hairy bittercress everywhere in the unshorn grass.
I work out, also as always, but for once not springing, jumping, bounding, anything. ANYTHING, I almost write in capitals and italics, but correct it. I have hurt my right Achilles tendon enough I can’t rise to élevé — that’s rising to the toes without bending the knee to assist — from standing on that foot.
It is, I suppose, an overuse injury. Came on quickly but not all at once over a few days. My body’s a dumbass in ways that are convenient for me until they’re not; it’s our conspiracy. Wanna go hard? Me, too. Watch this. It delivers very little pain feedback, unless I slam a finger in the door or have a toothache, things like that. Extremities: so much pain. Rest of me: not so much. I’ve fallen and bounced my skull off a tile-over-concrete floor so hard I saw stars, well, not stars but that sparkly static they call seeing stars, beloved. It just itched.
In the case of my Achilles tendon, I just lost function, and when I explored, my ankle was swollen behind the round end of my fibula and the tendon itself was thickened, uneven. Tendinitis, I thought, and googled a bit as one does — high-deductible insurance for the win — and asked some folks what to do with it. A disabled veteran. My massage therapist, who’s also a dancer. People with practical experience, you might say.
Offload, no running, no jumping, PT it with slow movements, work against your Theraband from all angles, slow flexion, slow extension was the consensus, accompanied by warnings: You don’t want to snap your Achilles tendon.
So now this Sunday I do slow work, moving, say, from a left low lunge to a right low lunge at half speed, eight counts each way, rather than dropping from upright to the side lunge and springing up again. Sounds Zen, right?
Wrong. All the while I am thinking: I want to run.
How do humans live, beloved, without bounding, leaping, skipping, springing ahead?
And yet they do, we do, a big fraction of us.
And one day maybe me, too.
Will I want to live without flying?
Under what conditions can we live?
Do you still run, beloved? Is it beneath your dignity? Or — you said you’d fractured a vertebra — ?
I think I’d rather be demented and shitting the floor, then taunting strangers from high in a willow tree, than sane with my wings clipped, unable to leap the rainwater gully.
Alexander Pope, crippled with a form of tuberculosis that settled into his spine, wrote sylphs dancing through the air —
With my wing clipped, then, and feeling angry and sorry for myself, and knowing I’m being ridiculous, I drive to my mother’s house, taking my 17-year-old Middle Son with me.
Middle Son and I play Scrabble with my mother and his dad. Babydaddy’s mother having died while Middle Son was an infant, Babydaddy adopted my mother. This annoys his new wife, of course, but tickles me and Mother pink.
My dad, wearing his stalker hat with the furry flaps turned down over his ears, tells us three times how he’s set the clocks forward to Daylight Savings Time. He has one, he tells us three times, that sets itself.
“Do you want to play Scrabble?” I ask. “I can team up with Middle Son.”
He looks at the four racks for Scrabble tiles arranged on the dining room table. “There isn’t room,” he says.
Mother explains again that I can team up with Middle Son or with him to help him play, but instead he sits on the sofa, facing away from us in his fake-fur-lined stalker hat.
Damn these baby McMansions, I think, with their open floor plans, forcing folks to define cramped rooms with furniture that isn’t up to the task, supplying neither space nor privacy. I realize I’m being an ass; how is it my business what their house is like? They moved here for the convenience of my dad’s mother, now dead. Mother never bothered decorating the house much. I’m not sure she’s ever had any style of her own, or probably she does but I’ve never seen it: my dad is against any kind of style as far as I can tell. A paper calendar pinned to the wall, Christmas cards, family photos. Anything else is vanity except maybe religious prints from the early 1900s, all those sentimental angels — and Mother hates sentimental angels.
The Mausoleum, I used to call their house, taunting Mother.
Now, a few rounds into the game, I look from where Babydaddy has spelled Q-U-I-D, taking a triple-word bonus, to where my dad is still sitting on the sofa, facing away from us, staring at some nothing in the middle distance. Not daydreaming, but a fixed, blank stare.
What is he doing? Is he okay? I say to Mother with a couple of glances. She pretends not to notice.
I hope he’s zoned out, dreaming. But maybe he’s storing up a whole head of rage at Mother, who deserted him to play Scrabble for a full hour and a half.
The game ends. He stands up and climbs the staircase. On the way upstairs he tells us again how he set the clocks forward, all but one clock that anticipates Daylight Savings Time and sets itself.
Did I tell you he predicted I would die before him?
“I’ll outlive you,” he said to me when I was in middle school or so. Maybe once, maybe more than once. I think just once. I still remember the lip-smacking satisfaction in his voice.
Maybe that would have been his triumph, outliving his children, and he sees it eluding his grasp. But I don’t think he was sulking today out of that specific animus. I think it was some other matter, rage, boredom, sadness, maybe just vacancy of mind.
Are hours-long staring spells part of dementia? Of cancer?
I have no idea.
Mother and I go outside to look at all her plants — daffodils in full bloom, tossing on the chilly wind. Just starting up: yarrow, iris, peony, Sweet William, day lilies, so many more.
I’m not even trying for full sentence structure now, beloved. Giving you what I can, when I can. I started writing this Sunday and here it is Sunday again.
Mother stoops to pull last year’s brown foliage from around the day lily shoots. Her spine’s collapsing. She walks bent almost double. It isn’t that far down.
What will it be like to be old? I’m one generation off from being the 81-year-old, bent-over person in her garden. Think about that, beloved. I tell you, but I cannot believe it myself.
In the house Mother shows me her sewing. She’s making Barbie doll clothes for my infant niece, though Infant Niece won’t play with Barbies for three or four years yet.
“I have to start making them now,” she says. “She’ll need all kinds of outfits for her Barbies. I have to get them done.”
I look at the skirts and ballgowns for dolls whose waists are about the circumference of my thumb. My mother’s fingers, swollen with arthritis and kidney failure — did I tell you that, beloved? — are twice the girth of mine, and I can’t do fine work like that.
The life so short, the craft so long!
The patterns are almost as big as the clothes.
Next week when I take class I’ll do barre but not center, beloved. Though combined with this week — we’re on spring break, a hiatus I probably need — that puts me two weeks behind.
Behind on the way to what end?
No end, perhaps, except maybe the joy of doing a tour jeté and landing arabesque with the working leg up at a cocky angle like a mockingbird’s tail, yes, exactly like that bird, sure of his landing, ready to fly.
Beloved, dear heart, I don’t write you these letters because I imagine we are in a relationship, though I appreciate your kind reminder. Nor do I cling to the past. Time is short, and dear. Partial as they are, these stories that linger in my Drafts folder as I add, delete, cut, copy, paste — find the plumb line and hit Send at last — these are my craft, my wings, my great work for my one love.
Mother handed me, Babydaddy, and Middle Son our asses at Scrabble.