Now for Nichole
Nichole took out her little butt book and was buzzing and didn’t know and wanted to know so badly that she just started writing. Her head was either overstuffed or empty and she didn’t know the difference but she needed to know.
I don’t know what I am writing, I just thought that maybe I should write something. Mmhh- muhmumhum-mhhmm. Mhm Mhmuhum mhumuhm ummmhh. I am pretending that I am writing with closed lips, like trying to speak like a ventriloquist but having no words come out clear. That reminds me of a time when a ventriloquist came to our school, or that one man I saw on tv yesterday who sang with a puppet. I bet that was all smoke and mirrors or whatever mom used to say. Speaking of mom, she called again today. I am getting so sick of her calls… I love her I think. I don’t know. Do I love her? Do I know her? Do I know ANYONE?
And then the tears started to come and she couldn’t stop those. She woke up a few hours later and wasn’t sure if she was still crying or if the tear reservoir located just in the very epicenter of her head was finally empty. Was it still overflowing or was it African-bone dry?
March 1974
She hated that. She hated the sudden warming of cheeks and crimsoning of face and quivering of voice and, more often than not, the miniature iceberg that abruptly lodged itself in her hot throat and melted into saltwater tears. Which she tried so desperately to keep in. This condition had beset her no less than nine times already that day, and she had only been home from school for 28 minutes. She normally wasn’t this sensitive, but that day’s circumstances had rendered her irrevocably red-cheeked, warm-faced, ice-berg-lump-throated, quaking-voiced, and teary-eyed. Circumstances were: She had liked this boy. She had wanted to tell him how she felt, in imitation of those strong, enviable, loved women she saw on the television or dreamed about while reading absurdly unrealistic romance novels. She had almost worked up enough courage to tell him personally, as the heroine of a favorite love story had, but in the end lacked a finishing impetus. She was miserable, and sought consolation in her favorite soap opera. In that particular episode, Clara had to tell Jesse that she was having his baby, but, unable to bring herself to tell Jesse to his face, she wrote him a letter. This lovely method of communication, however ill-used by the sorry, thankfully fictional characters of the soap opera, was just the inspiration she needed. She had spent the remainder of the evening composing the perfect epistle: the confession of her innocent love and the expression of hope for their future adoration of one another. After spraying the paper with a splash of perfume, like Clara had done on TV, she folded it up and left it on the boy’s desk the next day in science class. She had nearly cried with delight and relief after finally accomplishing the apotheosis of worry for any lovesick adolescent: the declaration of admiration. She hadn’t thought about the aftermath of this avowal, however. In her mind she had always imagined somehow telling him of her love and then her fantasies always skipped ahead a few years to their wedding. But the immediate consequences of her letter should have perhaps been given some more thought. If her imaginings had remotely resembled what had happened after she left him her letter, she would never have set pink glittery pen to paper. But sometimes, and this is a wonderful aphorism coming up, thought robs men of their actions, thereby depriving them of some mistakes, hence cheating them out of needed experience and education. Well, after she foresightlessly, forethoughtlessly dropped that letter on the boy’s desk in science class, she couldn’t help but overhear in world history that the boy had sardonically declaimed her letter in class, feigning an acerbic infatuation with a fellow student pretending to be her, and then, after a farcical argument between the two “lovers,” torn the letter to shreds and thrown her fragmented emotion-on-paper away. She was obviously distraught, and her discomfort and embarrassment was only exacerbated by the hallway recitations of various lines from her sweet, simple letter. She thought she might be able to bear the taunting, and she probably could have, but something worse (or at least, as bad) happened twenty-eight minutes after she arrived home. Her father, who was an associate at a successful law firm, had been fired: through the mail. A letter had unexpectedly terminated his (previously) very successful employment. He hadn’t been talked to personally, but rather, scratches on paper had dictated his 90-day-notice. She was shattered awestruck unnerved horrified shocked crushed guilt-ridden. The parallels were too perfect. She could only assume that her cowardice in informing the boy through a letter had been reflected and replicated, however arbitrarily, in the boss’s termination letter. Both of the matters-of-letters ended badly. She therefore resolved, the next day, with new icy eyes and cold, un-blushable cheeks, to never leave anything to impersonal communication. If she wanted to accomplish something, she would trust to her voice, her throat, her cheeks, her eyes, her gestures - not the ambiguity and indirectness of pen and paper.
And she threw away those trashy novels, too.
Who is this woman? Who is this woman?
She threw away those novels and went to college and double-majored in Classics and Communications - she loved reading the dead languages and she wanted to speak the new.
Today
Nichole wiped her eyes though, intent on floundering until finding whatever it was she felt she was so close to finding. She took her pen in hand again:
I just fell asleep while I was crying and had some weird dreams, or maybe I was crying while I fell asleep and had some weird dreams. Whichever. They were really weird. It was summertime in Canada, and mom and I were living on an amazingly steep hill. At the bottom there was immediate beach and Lake Huron. It was always daytime. So for most of the dream I was just in my bathing suit lying on a towel, eating Charleston Chews and Mars Bars while reading a book. The candy wrappers were so hot. They shone in the sunlight and sometimes when I opened them the reflecting sun seemed to blind me. There were some trees overhead, but they still allowed sun in. And I can't remember what book I was reading, but mom kept interrupting me, and part of me wanted to talk to her and part of me just wanted to read. So then I decided to roll down the hill, rather than have to choose between the two I think. And so I rolled and rolled and rolled and it made my breath stick in my stomach and not leave my mouth, and then I hit the hot hot sand of the beach and walked across. My feet felt like they would never be able to walk again. I mean it felt like I burned off my soles. The beach was deserted, which was strange, and then suddenly I was in the middle of the lake walking on the water with my sole-less feet and then I was suddenly in a cabin on the beach. Dad was there and everyone else was away, and he said no with his head just floating in the air. And then I was back on the hill, reading again, and mom was gone and I was alone, just feeling the bright sun on my back and the hot pages of my book (I don't know what I was reading). And then I got up, walked up the top of hill, and found some dogs and a parrot and then we ran home to the same cabin, and it was full of windows and curtains and people now. Most of the family was there, Dad too. And we sat around in the never-ending daytime making small talk, and I wanted to finish reading my book. And then the dogs started barking and the parrot squawked and I woke up. If Mary were reading this she would probably ask me to tell her what the dream means. Does it have to mean anything? I think I would just not answer. I don’t answer things that I find silly. Is that mean? I am asking too many questions I think. I wish I didn’t have to ask any questions anymore. Why can’t I just know everything? There I go again, asking and asking. But if I keep asking and still get no answers, how can I really expect answers now? I think I’ve read somewhere or heard that madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Or stupidity. Or maybe genius. It’s all the same anyway. Actually, I think genius was doing different things to get different results. But if you’re always doing different things how can you stay sane? So maybe genius and madness are the same thing. But I think that if that is true, I want to be crazy. I think I already am. No, I guess I can’t really say that. I’ve seen true insanity in that man. I don’t know if I can write his name, and now my hand is shaking really badly and I am hearing aloha in my head and it won’t stop!!!! Ugh! And now I am crying and why am I? Really, I think he is the only one who has ever made me cry. But then again I did just finish crying because of dad. I just don’t know what to do around him. I have never loved someone. I mean loved someone and cared about whether they like what I wear or do or say. And I tried to give him a hug today and he froze when he was cutting up the potatoes for the gnocchi he is making for dinner for Randy, Heather, and me. I wish I had something special about me. All of this that I am feeling has been felt by someone else somehwere sometime and I just wish that I could at least enjoy my troubles as my own troubles, instead of hearing that people understand or are trying to understand. I think I wish that I am the only person that has problems. But then at the same time I think I am horrible in wishing problems on other people sometimes.
Her eyes were drowning as she wrote, and the realization was coming closer. She wished that nobody knew what it was like behind her teary eyes, and she was disappointed in the realization that she was not the first person to have been discarded or unloved or untouched. And she fingered her locket and tried to stop the hiccupping that accompanied her lazy, frenzied tears.
The more indifference Nichole developed in regard to her mother, the more pronounced her mother’s acts of love became. It was some awful foxtrot they were dancing, mismatched partners whose long steps and short steps were alternating out of place - more of a chase than a dance, except it didn’t look like anyone was going to be caught. So her stepfather finally graduated from chiropractic school and they threw a small party. Nichole’s back by that time had curved a bit, but her stepfather really had proven to be a bit helpful (despite the fact that it was his abuse that exacerbated her predisposed condition in the first place…). And so Nichole’s mother forced him to take Nichole to the brace-fitting back doctor rather than to take her to the orthodontist. “Schcolioshish ish worshe than thish shilly lishp… she should get her back fikshed more than I should get my teeth fikshed. Jusht do it, please?” And she folded a few more pairs of shirts and ironed some creases into dressy slacks and turned her healthy back to him.
Nichole sobbed enough to feel hollow. Her sternum rattled when she breathed now and her throat felt more like cement than flesh. She felt like she just threw up a few times - hurled or regurgitated or vomited or tossed her cookies. She couldn’t think of any more euphemisms for the action, so she had to tell herself the raw, pulsing feeling straight out once more: I feel like I just threw up a few times. But even though it hurts, I think it might be helping. Maybe crying so much (I hate it!) is good. Jay never cried. That always made me scared. I never really thought about him except when he got to eat more at dinner and when he never cried - even when he was a baby and wanted to get his diapers changed. That may be why he never cried. Did he want to get his diapers changed? Did he care? I don't think he wanted anything, and that's why he didn't cry. Well that must mean I am crying because I want something.
I don’t know what I am writing, I just thought that maybe I should write something. Mmhh- muhmumhum-mhhmm. Mhm Mhmuhum mhumuhm ummmhh. I am pretending that I am writing with closed lips, like trying to speak like a ventriloquist but having no words come out clear. That reminds me of a time when a ventriloquist came to our school, or that one man I saw on tv yesterday who sang with a puppet. I bet that was all smoke and mirrors or whatever mom used to say. Speaking of mom, she called again today. I am getting so sick of her calls… I love her I think. I don’t know. Do I love her? Do I know her? Do I know ANYONE?
And then the tears started to come and she couldn’t stop those. She woke up a few hours later and wasn’t sure if she was still crying or if the tear reservoir located just in the very epicenter of her head was finally empty. Was it still overflowing or was it African-bone dry?
March 1974
She hated that. She hated the sudden warming of cheeks and crimsoning of face and quivering of voice and, more often than not, the miniature iceberg that abruptly lodged itself in her hot throat and melted into saltwater tears. Which she tried so desperately to keep in. This condition had beset her no less than nine times already that day, and she had only been home from school for 28 minutes. She normally wasn’t this sensitive, but that day’s circumstances had rendered her irrevocably red-cheeked, warm-faced, ice-berg-lump-throated, quaking-voiced, and teary-eyed. Circumstances were: She had liked this boy. She had wanted to tell him how she felt, in imitation of those strong, enviable, loved women she saw on the television or dreamed about while reading absurdly unrealistic romance novels. She had almost worked up enough courage to tell him personally, as the heroine of a favorite love story had, but in the end lacked a finishing impetus. She was miserable, and sought consolation in her favorite soap opera. In that particular episode, Clara had to tell Jesse that she was having his baby, but, unable to bring herself to tell Jesse to his face, she wrote him a letter. This lovely method of communication, however ill-used by the sorry, thankfully fictional characters of the soap opera, was just the inspiration she needed. She had spent the remainder of the evening composing the perfect epistle: the confession of her innocent love and the expression of hope for their future adoration of one another. After spraying the paper with a splash of perfume, like Clara had done on TV, she folded it up and left it on the boy’s desk the next day in science class. She had nearly cried with delight and relief after finally accomplishing the apotheosis of worry for any lovesick adolescent: the declaration of admiration. She hadn’t thought about the aftermath of this avowal, however. In her mind she had always imagined somehow telling him of her love and then her fantasies always skipped ahead a few years to their wedding. But the immediate consequences of her letter should have perhaps been given some more thought. If her imaginings had remotely resembled what had happened after she left him her letter, she would never have set pink glittery pen to paper. But sometimes, and this is a wonderful aphorism coming up, thought robs men of their actions, thereby depriving them of some mistakes, hence cheating them out of needed experience and education. Well, after she foresightlessly, forethoughtlessly dropped that letter on the boy’s desk in science class, she couldn’t help but overhear in world history that the boy had sardonically declaimed her letter in class, feigning an acerbic infatuation with a fellow student pretending to be her, and then, after a farcical argument between the two “lovers,” torn the letter to shreds and thrown her fragmented emotion-on-paper away. She was obviously distraught, and her discomfort and embarrassment was only exacerbated by the hallway recitations of various lines from her sweet, simple letter. She thought she might be able to bear the taunting, and she probably could have, but something worse (or at least, as bad) happened twenty-eight minutes after she arrived home. Her father, who was an associate at a successful law firm, had been fired: through the mail. A letter had unexpectedly terminated his (previously) very successful employment. He hadn’t been talked to personally, but rather, scratches on paper had dictated his 90-day-notice. She was shattered awestruck unnerved horrified shocked crushed guilt-ridden. The parallels were too perfect. She could only assume that her cowardice in informing the boy through a letter had been reflected and replicated, however arbitrarily, in the boss’s termination letter. Both of the matters-of-letters ended badly. She therefore resolved, the next day, with new icy eyes and cold, un-blushable cheeks, to never leave anything to impersonal communication. If she wanted to accomplish something, she would trust to her voice, her throat, her cheeks, her eyes, her gestures - not the ambiguity and indirectness of pen and paper.
And she threw away those trashy novels, too.
Who is this woman? Who is this woman?
She threw away those novels and went to college and double-majored in Classics and Communications - she loved reading the dead languages and she wanted to speak the new.
Today
Nichole wiped her eyes though, intent on floundering until finding whatever it was she felt she was so close to finding. She took her pen in hand again:
I just fell asleep while I was crying and had some weird dreams, or maybe I was crying while I fell asleep and had some weird dreams. Whichever. They were really weird. It was summertime in Canada, and mom and I were living on an amazingly steep hill. At the bottom there was immediate beach and Lake Huron. It was always daytime. So for most of the dream I was just in my bathing suit lying on a towel, eating Charleston Chews and Mars Bars while reading a book. The candy wrappers were so hot. They shone in the sunlight and sometimes when I opened them the reflecting sun seemed to blind me. There were some trees overhead, but they still allowed sun in. And I can't remember what book I was reading, but mom kept interrupting me, and part of me wanted to talk to her and part of me just wanted to read. So then I decided to roll down the hill, rather than have to choose between the two I think. And so I rolled and rolled and rolled and it made my breath stick in my stomach and not leave my mouth, and then I hit the hot hot sand of the beach and walked across. My feet felt like they would never be able to walk again. I mean it felt like I burned off my soles. The beach was deserted, which was strange, and then suddenly I was in the middle of the lake walking on the water with my sole-less feet and then I was suddenly in a cabin on the beach. Dad was there and everyone else was away, and he said no with his head just floating in the air. And then I was back on the hill, reading again, and mom was gone and I was alone, just feeling the bright sun on my back and the hot pages of my book (I don't know what I was reading). And then I got up, walked up the top of hill, and found some dogs and a parrot and then we ran home to the same cabin, and it was full of windows and curtains and people now. Most of the family was there, Dad too. And we sat around in the never-ending daytime making small talk, and I wanted to finish reading my book. And then the dogs started barking and the parrot squawked and I woke up. If Mary were reading this she would probably ask me to tell her what the dream means. Does it have to mean anything? I think I would just not answer. I don’t answer things that I find silly. Is that mean? I am asking too many questions I think. I wish I didn’t have to ask any questions anymore. Why can’t I just know everything? There I go again, asking and asking. But if I keep asking and still get no answers, how can I really expect answers now? I think I’ve read somewhere or heard that madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Or stupidity. Or maybe genius. It’s all the same anyway. Actually, I think genius was doing different things to get different results. But if you’re always doing different things how can you stay sane? So maybe genius and madness are the same thing. But I think that if that is true, I want to be crazy. I think I already am. No, I guess I can’t really say that. I’ve seen true insanity in that man. I don’t know if I can write his name, and now my hand is shaking really badly and I am hearing aloha in my head and it won’t stop!!!! Ugh! And now I am crying and why am I? Really, I think he is the only one who has ever made me cry. But then again I did just finish crying because of dad. I just don’t know what to do around him. I have never loved someone. I mean loved someone and cared about whether they like what I wear or do or say. And I tried to give him a hug today and he froze when he was cutting up the potatoes for the gnocchi he is making for dinner for Randy, Heather, and me. I wish I had something special about me. All of this that I am feeling has been felt by someone else somehwere sometime and I just wish that I could at least enjoy my troubles as my own troubles, instead of hearing that people understand or are trying to understand. I think I wish that I am the only person that has problems. But then at the same time I think I am horrible in wishing problems on other people sometimes.
Her eyes were drowning as she wrote, and the realization was coming closer. She wished that nobody knew what it was like behind her teary eyes, and she was disappointed in the realization that she was not the first person to have been discarded or unloved or untouched. And she fingered her locket and tried to stop the hiccupping that accompanied her lazy, frenzied tears.
The more indifference Nichole developed in regard to her mother, the more pronounced her mother’s acts of love became. It was some awful foxtrot they were dancing, mismatched partners whose long steps and short steps were alternating out of place - more of a chase than a dance, except it didn’t look like anyone was going to be caught. So her stepfather finally graduated from chiropractic school and they threw a small party. Nichole’s back by that time had curved a bit, but her stepfather really had proven to be a bit helpful (despite the fact that it was his abuse that exacerbated her predisposed condition in the first place…). And so Nichole’s mother forced him to take Nichole to the brace-fitting back doctor rather than to take her to the orthodontist. “Schcolioshish ish worshe than thish shilly lishp… she should get her back fikshed more than I should get my teeth fikshed. Jusht do it, please?” And she folded a few more pairs of shirts and ironed some creases into dressy slacks and turned her healthy back to him.
Nichole sobbed enough to feel hollow. Her sternum rattled when she breathed now and her throat felt more like cement than flesh. She felt like she just threw up a few times - hurled or regurgitated or vomited or tossed her cookies. She couldn’t think of any more euphemisms for the action, so she had to tell herself the raw, pulsing feeling straight out once more: I feel like I just threw up a few times. But even though it hurts, I think it might be helping. Maybe crying so much (I hate it!) is good. Jay never cried. That always made me scared. I never really thought about him except when he got to eat more at dinner and when he never cried - even when he was a baby and wanted to get his diapers changed. That may be why he never cried. Did he want to get his diapers changed? Did he care? I don't think he wanted anything, and that's why he didn't cry. Well that must mean I am crying because I want something.
1 comment:
I read about Nichole and I don't know if I'm the boxer or the bag. Am I the beaten one or have I done the beating? Is it my bound-up fists or my jaw that hurts the most? My memories of high school lay behind a merciful cloud of ambiguity. Nichole is a warm breath between pursed lips that blows those coulds away if only for a moment before they settle again.
That's what Nichole does for me.
wow
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