Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (72 page)

Brenda Miller

 

BRENDA MILLER
is the author of
Season of the Body
, a finalist for the PEN American Center Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. She has received four Pushcart Prizes, and her essays have appeared in
The Sun
,
Shenandoah
,
Fourth Genre
,
Creative Nonfiction
,
Brevity
,
Utne Reader
, and
The Georgia Review
. She coauthored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction
. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and retrospectives devoted to the personal essay, including
The Pushcart Book of Essays
, a selection of the best essays published in the Pushcart Prize anthologies in the last twenty-five years. She is associate professor of English at Western Washington University and serves as editor in chief of
The Bellingham Review
.

When I return naked to the stone porch, there is no one to see me glistening.

— Linda Gregg

 

A man I like is coming for dinner tonight. This means I sleep very little, and I wake up in the half-light of dawn, disoriented, wondering where I am. I look at my naked body stretched diagonally across the bed; I look at the untouched breasts, the white belly, and I wonder. I don’t know if this man will ever touch me, but I wonder.

I get up, and I make coffee. While I wait for the water to boil I vaguely study the pictures and poems and quotes held in place by magnets on my refrigerator. I haven’t really looked at these things in a long time, my gaze usually blinking out as I reach for the refrigerator door. This morning I try to look at these objects clearly, objectively, as if I were a stranger, trying to figure what this man will think of them and so, by extension, what he will make of me.

He’ll see pictures of my three nieces, my nephew, my godson. He’ll see my six women friends hiking in a slot canyon of the San Rafael swell, straddling the narrow gap with their strong thighs, their muscular arms. He’ll see the astrological forecast for Pisces (“There’s never been a better moment to turn your paranoia into
pronoia
,” it insists), and the Richard Campbell quote which tells me if I’m to live like a hero I must be ready at any moment, “there is no other way.” He’ll see Rumi: “Let the Beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” He’ll see me kayaking with my friend Kathy in the San Juan Islands, and then, if his gaze moves in a clockwise direction, he’ll see me sitting with my parents inside the Oasis Cafe in Salt Lake City. He’ll glance at me standing on the estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay, my arms around my fellow artist colonists, grinning as if I were genuinely happy.

Who is this person on my refrigerator door? Every morning, these bits and pixels try to coalesce into a coherent image, a picture for me to navigate by as I move solitary through my morning routine of coffee, juice, cereal, a few moments of blank rumination out the stained-glass kitchen window. I suppose we put these things on our refrigerators as subliminal reminders of self, to fortify those parts of the self most necessary to get us through a day. But I’ve seen these fragments so often they’ve come to mean nothing to me; I barely see them, and I know this collage exists only for others, a constructed persona for the few people who make it this far into my house, my kitchen, my life.
Look
, it says,
look how athletic/spiritual/creative/loved I am
. And my impulse, though I stifle it, is to rearrange all these items: delete some, add others, in order to create a picture I think this man will like.

But how could I know? How would I keep from making a mistake? Besides, I tell myself, a mature woman would never perform such a silly and demeaning act. So I turn away from the fridge, leave things the way they are. I drink my coffee and gaze out the window. It’s February, and the elm trees are bare, the grass brown under patches of snow. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, a fact I’ve been avoiding. I think about the blue tulips I planted in the fall, still hunkered underground, and the thought of them in the darkness, their pale shoots nudging the hard-packed soil, makes me a little afraid.

I’m thirty-eight years old, and I’ve been alone for almost three years now, have dated no one since leaving my last boyfriend, who is now marrying someone else in California. Sometimes I like to be alone; I come into my bedroom, pleased by the polish of light through the half-closed venetian blinds. I lie on my bed at odd hours of the day with a small lavender pillow over my eyes, like the old woman I think I’m becoming. At times like these, the light in my bedroom seems a human thing, kind and forgiving, and my solitude a position to be envied, guarded even if it means I will remain unpartnered for life.

But this feeling of “unpartneredness” can set me adrift in a way that frightens me. I gaze into my bedroom and see no light, smell no lavender. Instead, the empty room throbs like a reproach — dark, unyielding. I can’t move beyond the threshold; I stand there, paralyzed, panic gnawing beneath my skin. I try to breathe deeply, try to remember the smiling self on my refrigerator door, but that person seems all surface, a lie rehearsed so many times it bears faint semblance to truth. I cry as if every love I’ve known has been false somehow, a trick.

At these times I want only to be part of the coupled universe, attached to some cornice that might solidify my presence in a world which too often renders me invisible. In my parents’ house an entire wall is devoted to formal family photographs, and the family groupings fall into neat, symmetrical lines: my older brother, his wife and two children flanking one side of my parents; my younger brother, his wife and two children balance out the other. When I lived with my boyfriend Keith for five years, my parents insisted we take a portrait as well, and we did: me in a green T-shirt and multicolored beads, Keith in jeans and a denim shirt, standing with our arms entwined. So for a while, my photo, and my life, fit neatly into the familial constellation.

Keith and I split up, but the photo remained on the wall a year longer, staring down at me when I came to visit for Hanukkah. “You have to take that down,” I finally told them, and they nodded sadly, said “we know.” Now a portrait of myself, alone, hangs in its place — a nice photograph, flattering, but it still looks out of line amid the growing and changing families that surround it. Whenever I visit, my young nephew asks me, “Why aren’t you married?” and gazes at me with a mixture of wonder and alarm.

A man I like is coming to dinner, and so I get out all my cookbooks and choose and discard recipes as if trying on dresses. I want something savory yet subtle, not too messy, not too garlicky, just in case we kiss. I don’t know if we’ll kiss, but just in case. I don’t know much about this man at all. I know he has two young daughters, an ex-wife; he writes poetry, and teaches a hundred high school students every day. I don’t know how old he is, but I suspect he’s younger than I am, and so I need to be careful not to reveal too much too fast.

It will be our third date, this dinner. From what I’ve heard, the third date’s either the charm or the poison. I have a friend who in the last five years has never “gotten past the third date.” She calls me at 10:30 on a Friday night. “Third date syndrome,” she sighs. She describes the sheepish look on her date’s face as she returns to the table after a trip to the Ladies’ room. She tells me about the “Let’s just be friends speech” that by now she has memorized: “You’re great. I enjoy your company, but a) I don’t have a lot of time right now, b) I’m not looking for a relationship, c) I’m going to be out of town a lot in the next couple of months.” My friend sighs and tells me: “I just wish one of them would come right out and say, ‘Look, I don’t really like you. Let’s just forget it.’ It would be a relief.”

I listen to her stories with a morbid fascination, the way I might listen to a friend’s travel adventures: the wrong turn into the Men’s bathroom in a bus station in Turkey, the fish heads staring out at you from a plate of stew in Italy. I listen to her stories with both wonder and relief, as if she is traveling in some dangerous land to which I’ve, thankfully, been denied a visa.

But then we hang up and I turn back to my empty house, the bed whose wide expanse looks accusatory in my bedside light, the pile of books that has grown lopsided and dangerous. I stare at my fish, a fighting fish named Betty, who flares his gills at me and swims in vicious circles around his plastic hexagon, whips his iridescent body back and forth. My friend Connie tells me this behavior indicates love, that my fish is expressing his masculinity so I might want to mate with him. I take this explanation as a compliment.

A man I like is coming to dinner, which means I need to do the laundry and wash the sheets, just in case. I don’t know how long it’s been since I washed the sheets. There’s been no need to keep track. It’s just me here after all, and I’m always clean when I go to bed, fresh from the bath; nothing happens in that bed to soil it. When I lived with Seth, or Keith, I washed the sheets every week, but then I had someone in the laundromat to help me fold them when they were dry.

As I dangle the dry sheets over the Laundromat’s metal table, I realize that I’ve never really dated before. I’ve always been transparent: approach me and you see inside. Touch me and I will open, like a door made of rice paper, light and careless. It’s difficult to remember the beginnings of things; was there always this dithering back and forth, this wondering, this not-knowing? On my first date with my first boyfriend, Kevin, we took LSD and sat in a tree for five hours. We were eighteen years old. We communicated telepathically, kept our legs intertwined, sinewy as the branches of a madrone.

Now I have to weigh everything: to call or not to call. To wait three days, five days, six. To ask everyone who might know him for information, to take this information and form a strategic plan. I shave my legs and my underarms, I make an appointment for a haircut, a manicure, all of which will make no difference if nothing is bound to happen. I don’t know if anything will happen, but I plan for it anyway. I think about condoms, and blush, and wonder if he will buy any, wonder where they are in the store, how much they cost these days. I wonder about the weight of a man’s hands on my shoulders, on my hair. Marilynne Robinson, in
Housekeeping
, writes that “need can blossom into all the compensations it requires…. To wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”

I want to believe her, so I crave the hand. I close my eyes and try to picture this man’s wrists, to feel the soft underside of his wrist against my mouth. A man’s wrists have always been the key to my lust; something rouses me in the power of a hand concentrated in that hinge. And yes, I feel it. Yes, my breath catches in my throat, as if he stroked his thumb against the edge of my jaw. My body’s been so long with out desire I’ve almost forgotten what it means to be a sexual being, to feel this quickening in my groin. And it’s all I need for now: this moment of desire unencumbered by the complications of fulfillment. Because craving only gives rise to more craving; desire feeds on itself, and cannot be appeased. It is
my
desire after all,
my
longing, more delicious than realization, because over this longing I retain complete control.

I lied. I changed everything on my refrigerator, on my bulletin board, on my mantelpiece. I casually put up a picture, half-hidden, of myself on a good day, my tan legs long, my skin flawless as I pose in front of a blazing maple bush on Mill Creek. I try to suppress an unbidden fantasy: a photograph of me and this man and his two daughters filling in the empty place on my parents’ wall. I know this is a dangerous and futile image, but it lodges anyway in my head.

I call my friend every half hour or so with updates on my frame of mind, asking for reassurance that I am not a terrible person. I ask questions as if she were a representative of the tourist board: “On what date does one start holding hands? Kissing? If I ask him out and he says yes, how do I know if he’s just being polite?” If there were a phrasebook, I would buy it; a class, I would take it.

Yesterday I discussed this imminent dinner with my hairstylist, Tony, as he bobbed my hair. Tony has a new boyfriend, they’re essentially married, but he’s had his share of dating and he gives me both sides: “Well on the one hand, you’ve
got
to play the game,” he says, waving the blow dryer away from my hair, “but on the other hand you need to show some honesty, some of the real you. You don’t want to scare him off. This is a good lesson for you. Balance.”

Tony is my guru. When I came to him the first time, a month after moving to Salt Lake City, I told him my hair was in a transition: not long, not short, just annoying. “You can’t think of it,” said Tony, cupping my unwanted flip, “as a transition. This is what your hair wants to be right now. There are no transitions. This is
it
, right now.”

Yesterday, he cupped my newly coiffed hair in his slender fingers, gazed at me somberly in the mirror. I smiled uncertainly, cocked my head. “Good?” he asked. “Good,” I replied. He whisked bits of hair off my shoulders with a stiff brush. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Play it cool.” I nodded, gazing at myself in the mirror which always makes my cheeks look a little too pudgy, my lips too pale. Whenever I look at myself too long, I become unrecognizable, my mouth slightly askew, a mouth I can’t imagine kissing or being kissed. I paid Tony, then walked carefully out of the salon, my head level, a cold breeze against my bare neck. In the car, I did not resist the urge to pull down the rear-view mirror and look at myself again. I touched my new hair. I touched those lips, softly, with the very tips of my fingers.