Kindred Spirits

Kim looked at him in the ambient lighting, over the rim of her wineglass. Sam’s lips parted, slightly, as he arched his neck to emit a sound the others would recognize as laughter. But then, they had probably never actually heard him laugh. How were they to know that the sound they heard was nothing more than a calculated response, meant to endear, to draw close, to inspire comfort; a social necessity practiced by a man dependent on their goodwill for his livelihood, and, thus, his sense of self?
She turned away, noticing the pained expression on a waiter’s face as a demanding diner thrust a wineglass in his direction; soiling white linen before dripping, sanguinely, on the young man’s carefully polished shoes.
He used to laugh. They used to laugh. They used to laugh all the time. She remembered the rumble of his Firebird as he pulled up outside her dorm room, and the way it reverberated in her chest before her heart jumped. She ran for the window, parting the blinds with one hand, while placing the other over her chest to still it. Minutes felt like hours, as she waited for him to emerge. She had memorized each movement he would make, and never tired of watching, as he slung first one, and then the other denim- covered leg behind the yawning car door. As he stood, he turned, taking a quick survey of the parking lot. She used to wonder what he was looking for. Apparently satisfied with his surroundings, he ran one hand through his stylishly shaggy, brown hair as he shoved the door shut with the other. His keys were tossed, just once, into the air in front of him, before he pocketed them, taking the curb with a slight jump, before falling into his usual long strides on the way to her door.

He had convinced her, once again, to skip class for a day at the lake. And, as he neared the door, she left the window and hurriedly gathered her carefully packed bag and a sweater she would need after the sun had fallen. She wouldn’t be back until long after sunset.
She felt Carmen’s fingers on her elbow, breaking her reverie.
“Tell me!”, was all she said.
Kim looked down at the manicure on her arm before looking up at her friend, in question.
“What?”
“You should see the look on your face!” Carmen whispered behind a carefully painted smirk. “Who is he?”
Several conflicting thoughts bounced around inside Kim’s head as she struggled to form an acceptable answer. It wasn’t lost on her that Carmen assumed her preoccupation was with a man other than her husband. She realized, too, that her friend’s attitude was one of acceptance, even delight.
“No…”, she managed as she wondered if her friend was hoping for an opportunity to share her own indiscretions. “I mean…” She stopped, as a linen-swaddled wine bottle split the two women, and raised a grateful smile to the pouring waiter.
Hoping to avoid further conversation with Carmen, she looked across the table at Sam, wishing as she did, that he would feel her gaze, and something more. She studied his face as he inclined his head slightly in the direction of the man sitting beside him. A frown crossed his features as his unseeing eyes studied a spot in the center of the china-strewn table. She willed him to look at her; to see her, to remember the times before she was a necessary business accessory, an ornament. His mouth formed slow, thoughtful words that distance prevented her from hearing, and she turned her gaze to the other man. His eyes, over the slight curve of a knowing smile, bore into hers before moving lower. She instinctively brought one perfectly manicured hand to her neckline, grazing, with one fingernail, the diamond pendant Sam had presented her on their tenth anniversary, and scanned the group, wondering which of the impeccably accessorized women was his wife; her kindred spirit.

Seven Day Mental Diet: Day Four-Surrender

As challenges go, today rates right up there…
Beth Hart wailed me to a good start, and as I exited my car in a driving downpour in order to pump gas, I anticipated the opportunity to “fluff” the raindrops into my hair, accentuating the “bed-head” look I had embraced on hearing the weather forecast.
Rhonda Byrne purred in my ear, between guitar riffs, and time stood still, once again.
The morning went swimmingly. As a controlled chaos persisted in my periphery, I was neither needed, nor involved, and managed to complete a trying Sudoku while ferrying telephone calls.
Curry, for lunch, was the perfect antidote to the dreary landscape outside the office windows. I finished, with fifteen minutes of my self-imposed time limit to spare, and used the time to check in on friends.
And then it began…

As my chair rolled to a stop in front of the telephone, it began to ring, and the noise didn’t let up for the next three hours. As soon as I disconnected my head-set with a promise to fax requested information, the ringing began, again. A yellow legal pad/desk blotter/armrest filled quickly, with the names and demographic information of prospective clients, and, as I struggled to keep all their balls in the air, the “right” side of my brain appreciated the interest, while the “wrong” side wondered when I would have time to satisfy all their demands.
One particularly eager client called five times in less than an hour. I memorized his telephone number, without effort, as it repeatedly paraded across my Caller ID, and, on seeing it, yet again, I squelched the desire to tell him he had absolutely no chance of qualifying; choosing, instead, to press “hold” as I collected my positive wits about me.
As the “big” hand on the clock over my desk creeped towards freedom, I turned my thoughts to the evening, and my son’s basketball game.
“Got a game tonight!”, I called through a co-worker’s open office door. “I’m hoping for another double-digit game!”
“Cool!”, he answered without raising his head. “Good luck!”
Pewter colored clouds, floating overhead, promised more precipitation, as I rolled to a stop, in rush-hour traffic. I remembered the forecast, and hoped the dark clouds would hang around long enough for the temperature to drop, while making a mental note to warn my northernmost friends of the darkness blowing their way. And later, while riding the passenger seat, on the way to the gym, I clutched my jacket about me, while thrilling at the obviously plummeting temperature, and the continuing chance of snow.
Sharing a spot along the gym wall with friends I hadn’t seen since football season ended, I readied my camera. As I positioned it, in anticipation of a “moment”, my friend leaned in to point out how short our players were in comparison to the other team. I smiled, benignly, while setting up the shot.

Play ensued, and our sons’ challenges became quickly apparent. Unfortunately, they had nothing to do with height. The score became lopsided, long before the halftime break, and I cringed at the expression on my son’s sweaty face, while determining to remind him of the importance of positive leadership after the game was over.
As we exited the gym, I drew my jacket closer, and lowered my head against what I hoped were snow-bearing winds. My son and I danced anxiously, outside the SUV, while his father/coach gave a trite-ridden, post-game speech to a supportive mother.
Three car doors slammed with emphasis, obscuring the first few words of my son’s post-game diatribe. A team-mate, touting an as yet unproven pedigree, had loudly announced his intention to quit the team. I listened as the two of them shared their experiences and opinions on the night’s activity.
A jar of peanut butter sat beside a sheaf of buttery crackers on the holiday-themed placemat in front of him. My son’s hand disappeared inside the peanut butter jar as I took a seat at the table beside him, while his father retraced his steps, in search of his jacket. Their conversation continued, as though uninterrupted, as I waited for a pause.

“Found it!” Roger’s call came from an adjacent room.
“You need a defense.”, I ventured.
Shane chewed as his father re-entered the room with purposeful, rubber-soled strides.
“Do you run plays?”, I asked. “I didn’t see plays. Do you have any?”
Roger’s head dropped to one hand as he slid onto a padded wooden chair.
“They won’t do it.”, he answered. “I tried. They won’t do it. Did you hear me calling “three”? That’s a play.”
“It’s a “pick-and-roll”, right?” Shane’s voice begged for confirmation.
“What about half-time?”, I asked, while re-running visions of seven aimless eleven year-olds, heaving the ball at the goal, in a game of “Me, first”.
“You can’t introduce plays at half-time!” The face Roger lifted from his hand was florid. “There’s not enough time! You don’t do that!” He paused to reposition his head inside his hand, while moving, from frustration, to defeat. “I tried.”
“Ok, so it’s only the second game of the season, and you’ve given up trying to teach plays?”, I asked.
“Mom!” This time, Shane spoke through a mouthful of butter-coated crackers. “He stopped after the second practice!”
“They don’t get it.”, Roger finished.
“I’ve seen it done.” My voice was resolute; full of experience, positive, and sure.
“When?” Roger rose up, placing his hands upon the table.
“Mandledove.”, I answered, simply, sedately; invoking the name of a former coach.
Rising to his full-while-seated height, color filled his face, and his voice, and frustration, flowed from his mouth.
“I’m sick of hearing about Mandledove! So, I suck!” He sucked a breath. “I suck at coaching.”

Numbers floated across the surface of my mind as I struggled to decide, at which point in puberty, his maturation had stunted.
“You’re a good coach, Dad.” Shane’s voice, free of buttery debris, remained weak, and indecisively supportive.
And, I watched, as a fifty-year-old man gave up, while an eleven-year-old boy struggled to determine the difference between what was real and what was important; and, I learned.
I learned that a positive outlook must be desired before it can be obtained.
And, with that, I raised my hand, in the universal sign of surrender, before training my eyes upon my son.
“Two minutes until shower time.”

Absence of Light

The house is dark.

It’s just we two.

The tone of your voice and the way you stress the syllable tell me where to find you.

In the absence of any other light, the glow of the monitor in front of you tints your five-o’clock shadow blue.

You wear your usual squint above your customary scowl.

Bending over your shoulder, I anticipate the struggle inherent in overcoming your dilemma.

And the screen goes dark.

I twist the knob on a lamp that answers with an empty click.

I flip an impotent switch on a darkened wall, and, as I move into the next room, I feel you behind me.

The weight of your need bears down upon me as I struggle to find another source of light.

A third switch fails to respond.

Your hands, bearing down upon my shoulders, and your hot breath, coming quickly against my neck, threaten to overwhelm me.

My pace slows, as I wonder how you expect to be protected and supported by one who can not find her way,

in the absence of light.

Toronto

You always knew it was wrong, but you held your tongue.

You always wondered why, but refused to accept their answers.

You always heard “You can’t.”, but you did.

You like what you see in the mirror, but fear what lies underneath.

You possess goodness, but fear no one else will see.

And when you get too close, you pull back; afraid you are wrong, without reason, unable, ugly, and bad.

But, when you write…everything that is you comes through. An earthy beauty flows from the tips of your fingers, and you smile, knowing you have hit your mark.

A new day dawns, heralding a number that you secret in your shirt pocket, making it your reality.

You stop trying to be right.

You stop asking questions.

You stop looking in the mirror.

You stop.

Knowledge

Judging by the color of them, the ceiling tiles must have been recently replaced. The walls, unevenly covered by some kind of plaster and patched in several places, unsuccessfully blocked noises from surrounding exam rooms. There was a screw missing on a panel near the ceiling that might once have featured a clock. The glass covering an innocuous aluminum-framed print needed washing.

I began to feel the chill of institutionally gray tiles through my thin cotton tee shirt, and realized the danger must have passed. To my right, viewed between assorted steel railings supporting the bed between us, the P.A.’s navy-pinstriped legs moved slightly with her efforts. Her shoes were expensively sensible. I admired her slacks; the hang of them, the color, the fine weave of the fabric from which they’d been fashioned. I wanted to ask where she’d found them, but worried I might not be heard from my vantage point on the floor beside the bed.

I considered getting up, as the floor seemed to grow colder every minute I lay there. I eyed my jacket, draped across the back of the ridiculously uncomfortable chair I’d ridden for the better part of three hours.

“You ok down there?” Her Midwestern accented voice carried no judgment.

“Yeah, I’m good.” I answered, making the decision to stay put for the time being.

The sight of his sweat-pant covered legs, dangling as they did, from a gaping hole in the ceiling, alarmed me. All sorts of maternal recriminations sprouted inside my head, and I kept them there, knowing he would consider me unnecessarily concerned, and motherly. I approached with pursed lips in anticipation of cradling the box of ornaments he would hand down, and was met, instead, with a rain of limbs. He recalls his foot slipping from the ladder he meant to jump upon. I remember a slow-motion, herky-jerky, free-fall during which my mind immediately began to catalogue possible injuries.

As my brain continued its seamless shift into “medical-mode”, I watched the way his feet met the floor and felt sure he’d done no lasting damage. He plopped to a half-sitting/half-crouching position against the wall. Raising up as I bent towards him, he held one arm with the other hand, and below that was something I’d seen only in well-worn textbooks. I immediately bent his arm at the elbow, in an effort to close the gash.

Surreally, images of pioneer women rending their skirts flashed across my brain, before training took over again, and I envisioned the gridwork of veins and arteries snaking through that part of the human arm. I had no skirt to rend. The size of the dressing seemed most important to me as I envisioned wrapping towels of every size around his arm. Discarding each of them as too bulky, I raced through the house in the direction of the rag bag. Grabbing the telephone on my way back, I dropped it twice, before successfully dialing 911.

I raced back and forth around him following, implicitly, the instructions given by the emergency operator.

“Do I have to sit here?”, he asked from his puddle of blood.

“Well…” I hesitated, conjuring something akin to a “scene of the crime” kind of vibe.

He drew his legs up to rise.

“No! Wait!” Seeing he was determined, I helped him up, observing, as taught, for any changes in his gait.

I planted him on a chair in the kitchen.

“Hey? Can you get my cigarettes and coffee?”

Complying, I placed them before him as diffused strobe lights began to play in the next room, and removed them as quickly as I’d lain them down.

“It’s not cool to meet paramedics with your cigarettes and coffee between you.”

After opening the door, I left them to their ministrations, tempered with cheerful holiday banter. They were good at what they did.

The house was quiet again. The lights continued to play while they settled him inside the rig. I took the puppy out to feed him.

An insistent rapping against glass caught my attention and I fixed my expression on my way to meet the curious neighbors I’d been expecting. Robert lives next door.

“Yeah…” The word was jovial, coming from my smile.

“Uh, look, he wants to ask you something.” This was not what I had expected. “You know, I was just coming to make sure you were alright, and he stopped me. He wants some things from the bedside table, and he wants to ask you something.”

“Ok…thanks.”

“Let me know if you need anything…”

They had him strapped onto the gurney under very bright lights. He wore the grin that always means “I need you but you’re not going to like it.”

“Did you know that if I don’t ride, there’s no charge?”

I looked at the paramedic manning the door.

“Really?”

He inclined his head.

“Yep. Joe here’s not even gonna ride in back with him. He’s only a 3 out of 3. I mean if he’d been a 10 out of 10…but he’s only a 3 out of 3.” There was a hint of apology in his voice.

I marveled, silently, at the notion that the fuel required to drive a person to the hospital had more value than medical services rendered on site, before looking again into the jarringly bright light.

The grin had widened.

“Well, sure. I can drive you….sure. Let me get some things…We’ll take your car, you’re not comfortable in mine.” Most of this was thrown over my shoulder as I hurried back inside.

“God! You just seem miserable! You’re making me miserable! Just go home!” As he said it, from his perch on a bed in the middle of a room that, at least gave the look of being sterile, he turned his head away slightly.

“You know? Here’s the thing. It’s a problem of too much knowledge. It’s knowing that while we’re in here for hour upon hour, they are out there talking about what they served for Thanksgiving and flirting with the maintenance man they called to fix a drawer that won’t open, and they don’t care. It’s just a job, you know? I mean, they don’t mean to be disrespectful, but it’s just like you in your office. You visit right? You walk down the hall and talk to Chris or Steve, right? And you think nothing of it. It doesn’t matter that you’ve got reports on your desk that need editing. You’re bored. You walk down the hall. It’s the same here. And most people don’t know it, but I do, and I just want to go out there and say “Hey! I had plans here! My son is away for four days and I had plans tonight! This was supposed to be my night! Can we hurry things up here? Can you flirt with the guy from maintenance tomorrow maybe?”” Spent, I stopped.

Save for the sounds of a lift being pushed on a bed next door, and the beeps from a portable x-ray unit, and the sound of high heels on tile, and a rough-hewn voice that sounded like a maintenance man’s calling playfully, “Hey, come here!”, it was silent inside the room until the P.A. stepped inside.

After introducing herself she set about gathering supplies and began her work; the picture of kind efficiency. Holding a vial containing clear colored liquid over her head, she inserted a needle of some proportion, explaining that the lidocaine would “deaden the area”. I saw his sharp intake of breath as the needle disappeared behind his body and felt expected to do something. Averting my eyes as I approached the bed, I took his other hand.

“Here, squeeze this.”

I stood, and he squeezed for several minutes, before the back of my knees began to tingle. I bent them slightly as taught in chorus so many years ago and focused on an array of buttons set in the opposite wall. The buttons, and even the wall, itself, became cloudy and I attempted to will it away by blinking. When I realized I could no longer hear the cheerfully kind banter of the P.A., I patted his hand, explaining I should sit down. As I struggled with consciousness, I remembered the coolness of a tile floor, and I climbed off my chair, hoping no one would notice.

Rain sheared across the windshield as I struggled to make out faded lines in the road.

“What was that about?” His speech still carried Dilaudid. “You were a nurse!”

“Now, you know.”

“What? What do I know?”

“You know the real reason I didn’t want to come.”

“But you were a nurse! You saw things like that all the time! How did you do it?”

“It’s different…when the outcome affects the picture you carry in your head, of your life.”

We rode in silence for several minutes before he spoke again.

“Did I imagine it, or did you tie a dust-rag around my arm?”

Taxi!

She pushed away from the table.

Half-eaten, she left it on the plate,

and, reaching the sidewalk, she threw up her hand.

He Said, She Said

He doesn’t so much sit as drape a chair; filling it with athletic grace. His head lies cradled in the receiver as he drags one sturdy hand through a day’s growth. His eyes squint, unseeing, as his own mortality supersedes the flashing image on the other side of the room.

“Have you thought about marriage?”

I push my hair behind my ear as I cross, hurriedly, into the next room. A familiar irony fills me.

My hand holds the same telephone, in the same room, in the same chair. My daughter’s voice comes through the receiver, and, as my hand parts my hair, I ask my question.

“Is this what you really want?”

Cold

The door opens on a blast of cold air,

and you.

A relative peace, bought and paid for, by hours of contained pleasantries, shatters.

You speak, I listen, neither understands.

And this is how it is.

Just As You Intended

Just as you intended…

Your words wash over me in waves, a soft caress

soothing

As my soul relaxes, I answer your request to look inside,

at the wonder of you,

and am blinded by strobe-like flashes

of your hunger

of your need

of your brilliant capacity for love.

I ride the crest, luxuriating in your warmth,

until, longing for more, I turn to you

and sink inside your silent void.