War Is Language : 101 Short Works (9781937316044) (5 page)

Dressed-up people keep
coming. Elise gets it together, holds in her emotions, does her
duty. In the middle of another hug, the special pewter pin escapes
from its clasp and stabs her near a clavicle. She jumps back from
the unintended consequence of the embrace and manages to reclose
the pin with blind fingers below a strained
bent-to-see-something-so-close neck. She does her best. The pin
hangs then, slanted, on a pinched lapel.
That’s lovely,
someone says, not quite
to point out the pin’s haphazard arrangement, worse than
before.

Elise thinks of stolen future days,
begins to cry, again. The person who hugged her, who made the pin
stab her, leaves, the obligation having been met. Elise cannot get
it together this time. Tears flow. Friends shuffle, look away,
disperse.

An older man stares at her from a far
corner, then catches himself in the fixation, goes out the side
door to have a cigarette, even though he shouldn’t. He should want
to quit.

Inside still the
white-ruffled diaper butt, patent leather shoes, and blue butterfly
falling-out barrette come crawling out with their toddler curls
from under a wooden folding chair missing some veneer. A nearby
ancient matron’s voice says,
Why. There you
are!

Not wanting to understand
quite so very much from that tone of voice the white-ruffled diaper
butt moves back under the row of wooden folding chairs. Back away
from the
Why. There you are!
ancient lady, who—after a despairing minute after
accosting such a shy child—falls asleep, doesn’t notice three
little fingers working their slow, curious way into the
brass-hinged pinch point.

Elise stops shuddering convulsively
when her mother takes her elbow and whispers. The sequence repeats.
The pewter pin on Elise’s lapel pops open again. Instead of
allowing it to stab her this time, having adapted, Elise hears the
little rotating clasp click over, feels the pin loosen, steps back
from the three-hundredth hug. She lets the pin fall,
lost.

Instinctively Elise’s eyes travel to
the floor, demanding to find the pewter gift with all its
significance among the weeds in the ornate carpet garden.
Unnecessarily, several men—old and young, all hovering,
useless—leap to action: leaning over, each hoping to be the one to
pick up the precious pin, to offer it back, to be helpful, to do
something other than flirt with the floor.

Still snoozing, the
Why. There you are!
ancient lady amply shifts in her seat.

Three fingers, baby girl
almost-a-toddler-now fingers, twist and pop. Soft bloody broken
bones get crushed somewhere inside the chair.

Why. There you are!
dozing wakes startled, reacts haphazardly to the
wailing scream of the child underneath her in agony and so changes
instantly to,
Oh my dear Lord in Heaven. I
didn’t know you were down there, Sweet Pea. Dear Heavens. Oh no. Oh
God. Don’t cry, precious girl. I didn’t mean to. I am so
sorry.

Hugging no one in that moment,
unwilling really, Elise moves away from her post near the casket,
walks over to her child in another slow-motion refusal to panic,
picks the little girl up ruffled behind and all, and lets her bleed
onto the best white silk blouse she’s ever owned for two
days.

Red face screams over a shoulder as
the pace picks up and the young mother hurries down the aisle of
chairs, through the door, across the patchy August grass to her
car, and all the way to the county’s emergency room.

What can anyone do?

At the funeral home people disperse as
quickly as is appropriate, which is unclear. The old woman who was
in the chair is a wreck. She gets comforted by Elise’s mother, who
hates her, always has. Even they go, individually, after a
while.

The flowers stay.

The last person, an older man, not a
great-uncle, but someone who would have probably stopped over to
the house anyway, picks up the blue butterfly barrette. He thumbs
it open, feels its tiny open-hinged plastic bed of nails, clasps
the thing tight again, and drops it, already forgotten, into his
pocket.

16 — Mothers of
War

An anarchist sat on my lap screaming,
"Why?"

I said, “Hush, little baby, don't say
a word. Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird."

The anarchist threw the very thought
on the floor saying, "I don't care. I don't want it."

I said, "Fine. Have it your way,” and
watched her throw my refusal against the table leg with her own.
Without caring, without wanting anything, we both let willingness
break into three irreconcilable pieces.

And then she blamed me, for
everything. Began with her agony. Wretched momentary
girl.

I said nothing. Could not bear the
responsibility bouncing on my knee, but a patrolling Marine lit a
sleep-deprivation cigarette between us. Her crying stopped. I felt
less infringed upon for a moment but then, remembering that he was
really trying to quit smoking, the Marine put the burning thing
down after drawing one long last breath. The anarchist went to her
crib for a nap and the Marine extinguished that single
cigarette—more fragile than most gods—somewhere not that important
near the bounds of freedom.

18 — In Medias
Res

For instance, there is a child crying
in the back of a classroom. This is not the child of any Madonna.
This is a regular kid, kind of a stupid one without a lot of
opportunity. He does not raise his hand. And he might not even be a
boy.

Regardless, he is unseen.

Don’t get all freaked out. I’m not
hallucinating. He’s not a ghost, goblin, or angel. He’s just an
idea. He’s that theoretical conception of unfulfilled potential. He
is no real human fruition—a pedagogical apparition of twining
potential and incapacity, unteachable.

This child though—this idea crying in
the back of the room—really is an unbearable nuisance. He seems to
alight, and finds himself on the ceiling tile, near the
computerized projector, bumps up against that 2,000 ANSI Lumen beam
of tricolor light—blue, green, red—and then sweeps down, screeching
as loudly as any silence ever can.

He lands on the fold of my ear and
says, “Are you sure? You should probably be more
certain.”

I swat him away. Stupid
idea.

But he will not go away. He insists.
“What do you know? Only people who know what they’re doing should
teach. You don’t have any business here. Why even
bother?”

I do not dicker with him. He is right
as much as he is disruptive. I have no clue what I’m doing. I hate
that he inhabits that room, haunts it, so I do everything I can to
be ready, to have prepared myself for anything before ever stepping
foot into his domain. I carry books, notepads, red pens, gold
stars, scratch paper, dry erase markers, and an attendance
sheet.

He is not listed. He goes back to the
ceiling. I do not call his name.

I will not be manipulated.

I’m new to teaching and not quite used
to dealing with the tangible and intangible forces of classroom
respect. Yet I will not allow someone beyond the pale to taunt me
with such discourteous insistence to malign my efforts. The twelve
real students are staring at me, expectant, for the better part of
two hours. I suppose I could ask them to quit it, to stop looking
at me, to leave me alone, but it might not be appropriate, given
the circumstances.

I do not care that he is that pitiable
child of whom the state and church can never quite rid themselves.
He is the one for whom no one cares quite enough. The one no one
believes in. A child ever exempted from his own requisite rescue.
What’s expected of him but to falter, to fail? But. Fuck it. What
can I do about it? Let him sit there on the ceiling, watching. The
reality of class goes on.

When I’m in the room, teaching in
reality, I try not to concentrate on him, because he is completely
absurd. He swoops and dives so close to me that his passing sends
quivering trembles through my body, yet I do not address him
directly. I ignore him, feeling that he must be at least as afraid
of me as I am of him. I refuse his possession of my mind; I
concentrate on the other twelve people in the room.

Most of this has no bearing. The point
is, there probably is no unseen problematic child of behavioral
pathology screaming and crying and using God knows what other
psychological intimidation tactics on me from up there on the
ceiling. That’s just some stupid idea. I’m really the teacher and,
even if I’m the kind of ninny who frets about the implications that
hovering ideas actually do have, I am deserving of
respect.

He offers none.

But how absurd are our expectations of
this child on the ceiling? What valiant anti-antiestablishment
establishment fight is bred in him?

When he draws you in, there you are
bumping your own head against the projector, looking down on a room
full of hopeless earnest fools eager to learn something about
anything, and you find yourself having to resist the domination of
your own mind by his entrenched apathy.

Why resist? Why not submit? Why not go
along with it? Why not let an ignorant child tell you exactly how
it is and how it’s going to be?

Why not enter into alliance with this
child, this stupid idea?

Shouldn’t he fight to become some kind
of self-possessed self-respecting something in reality? Empowered!
No. Probably not. I forgot. The assumption is not that he won’t.
It’s that he can’t. Beyond that, he has no voice. He’s silenced by
nonexistence but also by the bell curve’s adamant case that he
does. So damned by pedagogical theory, he is forced, forever, to
never learn.

The reality is, we are in the
classroom, right now. Mainly, we are here because we all want to
write as well as we can. I say things like, “What was that book you
recommended, Jim?” Or, “How is it that a canoe trip is like a
marriage, Lotti?” Knowledge is no beacon. But we laugh, together,
which makes that idea, that stupid irascible disconsolate unaware
unteachable child, dissipate altogether.

100 — Hysteria in the
Street

Dear Fake Advice
Columnist,

I am divorced. I really loved my
husband, but I was a bitch and he was an asshole. I’ve got proof. I
flipped channels when that plane landed on the Hudson.

Dear Hysteria in the
Street,

Oh my God. You are a bitch. Totally.
You are a train wreck, and everyone knows it. People are talking
about you. And not even behind your back. They are talking about
you to you, and everyone thinks you need help. So I guess you might
just get a job as a cashier somewhere. There are a lot of such
jobs. People take your money at a lot of different businesses. But
remember, you can't flinch. You cannot react at all when mothers
with enormous tits come in buck naked under lavender bathrobes
demanding, "My son needs his Sunkist soda before school. He's in
the car." You cannot flinch when old Indian women show you their
ripped-out linings of their purses. It wouldn’t be polite. Cashier
jobs are great. You can even put your own money in your cash
register sometimes. Just don’t take any back out.

19 — Whimsy

Anyway, Milo decides we should crawl
up the bar, over the curling roses in the woodwork, under that old
blower they use to keep the smoke inhalation to a minimum, and just
go right smack into the mirror.

It’s an antique. I admit a fleeting
moment of reservation. We’d been enjoying ourselves, chatting it up
with an irascible sushi chef and the bartender. Not that one girl
with curly hair but the skinny guy in belted black jeans. The one
who always makes us listen to Kenny G. on Tuesday
nights.

Conversation was enough for me. I
didn’t need the escalation but Milo seemed to know best.

Bitter glee, so unburdened by the
fates as to seem almost, well, almost as if our youth did exist,
replaced any notice of the passing time. So it didn’t really matter
that I was afraid. Milo climbed into the mirror demanding that I
follow.

I don’t blame him for not explaining
more. Likely he didn’t know what either of us was about to get
into, couldn’t have foreseen. But he seemed so experienced that he
might have mentioned what would happen when our dives
began.

Although, really, I forget myself and
am not sure I can describe it all that well, not from the very
beginning. Glass is an amorphous solid, a sort of
impossible-to-perceive liquid. I believed it wasn’t substantial.
Still I didn't know how fast, or how slowly, how thick or thin, how
sick or healthily I would have to go on to move through such a
strange seemingly-solid fluidity.

Oh. Wait. Now I remember Milo saying
that diving down into the mirror felt like rolling through a
roundness, hard and unfathomable, and it would almost be like
sliding around the curve of one of those colored twists that stays,
forever trapped, in a marble.

We each had our individual experiences
but falling through the mirror happened to both of us
simultaneously. There was no fun house displacement or
condensation. He was not me; I was not him. We were one with the
reflection.