October 26, 2013

Fall Weekend

          Gary scrapes the hoar frost off the windows and drives away with his bag of gifts, flowers, and his best suit. 
          I stand in the driveway and wave. I am thinner, and I feel the map of my former bodysmell the ghostly breath of old love falling and crying against my torso and thighs. 
          But the busy sun banishes the frost from the Ipomoea vine, and I am alone in the house. The dogs turn quiet and dig in for the long wait.
          My companion—my consolation—is a pack of Marlboro I found, unopened, on the ground. 
          Back then it was Benson & Hedges, and before that Winstons (by the carton), and before that Dunhill ... and of course before everything were the gold-tipped Sobrane "Black Russians" that Sara fed into the garbage disposal when we were 22. 
          My boss in the copy shop on Walnut Street asked me Does it come off on your lips?
          I was narrow and lovely. There are too few photos.
          But I was 31 before my fingertips started to warm, going from one to the other, waving goodbye in cold apartments, subsisting on French toast and reading Absalom, Absalom! in the television-less evenings. 
          My twenties were hard as ice.
          I quit my job and moved into a whore house in Fishtown. I still have the pages of tic-tack-toe I played with one of the boys in between rounds of sex. Walking to the El stop, I was so stoned the blocks seemed to multiply in front of me. I biked for hours in Wissahickon Park with a minister—his mother was the first female eye surgeon in the countryjust for apple pie and ice cream at Valley Green Inn ... and the twenty he slipped me when he dropped me off.
          I was what they called easy to be with; a good listener, my shirt cuffs folded up high on my arms, my Salvation Army loafers two sizes too big dangling from my instep like luggage, my rent always overdue. 
          Once, my mother called: I mailed her one of my twenties.
          A tooth that had flamed in pain for months crumbled like an oyster cracker in my mouth during a dinner date with a sculptor; I excused myself, spit the fragments into the toilet, and returned to the table.
          Running on Pine Street to make the half-price cover charge at a new club, a hole in my shoe landed on an upright carpenter's nail projecting from a plywood sidewalk panel in front of a renovation. A perfect, bloodless puncture, I leaned against the brick townhouse and untwisted the shoe from my foot. A company nurse at the job I had started only a week before saved my life.
          But now the sun is unfurled onto the dining room floor, and Gary has already called asking for directions north around a stalled interstate. In my haste, I discover the Google search page no longer links to maps. 
          I decide against a fourth K cup. The dogs turn in their sleep.
          Shivering on the back porch, sucking deeply on one of the Marlboros, I wonder:
          Do we live one life or several?
          Am I the same person, or a different one?
          I can feel my hip bones, again, just beneath my jeans.



October 10, 2013

On the Eve of My Marriage

          Sitting in the tub, pointing my chin into the milky old silver shaving mirror, I draw the razor across my face.
          A single candle burns.
          It is my last date with myself.
          Tomorrow I will find out that I have been loved despite myself—the pouting, querulous, monster child who spoiled his loves like freckles of marinara on a white linen shirt.
          There were many. I sent them running.
          And I guess I wish she were here for it, the blindly selfish, myopic—gorgeous—monster from whom I was cuta depressed ginger snap.
          But at last we are not alone, Marion. We are not as bad as all that.
          The mirror clouds with steam, the water circles down the drain, and we are off!