by Chris Baron
It’s an old, broken-down plant nursery,
a big gravel parking lot
with light-pink stones.
Vines grow wild over old
wooden fence posts
and rusting wire.
This is a place that could be anything.
We walk in slowly.
The place is open to the sky in every direction,
salt and wet air,
corroded terraces
covered with cracked plastic sheeting
and piles of collected driftwood,
ornamental and smooth.
A kitchen, bathroom with an old mirror,
and lots of tiny rooms for planting
and storage and everything else.
Space.
My mother walks to the center of the courtyard
and spins. She actually spins.
She does this in moments where things come together.
This, she says, is ours.
Ours. I say it to myself.
We look at each other,
unsure.
We can actually hear the waves crashing down the beach,
the real and the dream, like so much sand and water.
Inside
There are shelves in the main room for display,
an old kitchen,
several workrooms,
alcoves, a broken kiln,
plastic bags of molded soil.
All the rooms
face the courtyard
in a giant horseshoe.
Dirt everywhere,
spread across the floors,
broken wood railings,
and cracked concrete,
an old walkway
between growing things,
vines reaching
and flowers sprouting,
the ground left to its own.
In the middle of the courtyard
is a plant graveyard,
organic matter dried to black.
A mulch pile, smelly, worm-filled.
I climb to the top
and stomp down a conquering foot.
This is the place
where my mother will escape,
reclaim her artist self,
and take me with her.
Who am I? I think, Pick’s question
still burning in my chest.
This question, like me,
too big to be asked
or answered in words.
Digging in the Dirt
A marine layer
sits on top of everything,
washing the wood.
More cleaning today.
Mom moves boxes,
pedestals, containers,
and paint.
I haul boxes of brushes
from car to studio,
sponges and rounds,
filberts and fans,
mops and riggers,
horsehair and synthetic
mixed together.
Pick and I clear the mulch pile,
sorting the larger debris,
random leaves and cuttings.
The smell is noxious, overwhelming.
Chemicals release,
mix with saltwater air,
organic things,
beautiful things,
breaking down.
Even solid things like buildings can change,
sometimes corrode when they are not cared for.
By the time the sun is overhead,
my arms are sore, tired, scratched,
my legs chafed red,
but it feels good.
We do this for hours,
slowly at times,
until the last piece of rot
is undone and pushed away.
Trolls
On Sunday, my mother
cuts the ends of a clay brick,
gives me and Pick
each a half brick,
a bowl of water,
wire-threaded sticks,
and a wooden spoon.
Use this—she points
to the edge of some chrome tool—
for the finer points.
Pick makes
simple, definable creatures.
At first it seems that they’re
from the game we are creating,
but soon I can tell they’re
trolls or gnomes of some kind,
big as thumbs.
Some have hats that actually can come off.
Some have weapons
or pets.
I make one,
green and tall,
with a long staff,
and another, its
belly falling over its waist.
He fills a tray with the creatures,
a metal baking sheet
where the trolls are clamoring
to make their way off,
to maybe slip into the dark places
of the gallery.
We take them to burn in the round
kiln in the courtyard.
When they are finished
and airing in the sun,
we paint the trolls
different colors,
sloppy at first, but we get better.
Pick puts tiny
price tags on their feet,
then hides them around the gallery.
Later on, some kids will find
one and pull it down in wonder,
carrying it
two-handed to some
wandering grown-up.
When one sells, we call it
going home.
We make a clay box the size of a big fist,
and trolls crawl all over it.
We put money in the box
every time
a troll goes home.
Sunday Drive
By the next Sunday,
my father visits,
and he puts us
in the back of the Sunbird.
The wind is blowing my head off.
My father drives with the top down.
Always.
He wears Porsche sunglasses
and a long coat
with a million pockets.
He was made for this.
But my insides are a step behind
each twist and turn.
He traces the lines
of the winding roads
and me and Pick hang on
until it’s over.
My father comes on Sundays, sometimes.
Doesn’t stay long.
A Talk in the Car
Mom loves to take drives too,
in an old yellow four-door truck
she bought to haul her creations.
We learn how to handle
the winding roads.
I listen to my mother talk
about a million ideas
she has for the nursery.
I think she thinks I’m an adult.
I learn to listen.
Somewhere
between Muir Woods
and Stinson,
where the road winds
and is full of disaster,
Pick asleep in the back,
she starts to talk about my father.
When I met him, you know, he was so handsome.
And then some details about suits
and hairstyles, Hawaii, crashing a dune buggy,
riding horses.
Today, just before the Bolinas Lagoon
spills blue from behind the mountain,
as I am lost in my own thoughts,
she says,
He was incredible at lovemaking.
Her accent suddenly flares,
almost unrecognizable,
thrown back into a Bronx summer.
I don’t look. I just stare at the window.
I wonder what would happen
if I opened the door and rolled
out of the car?
What about you?
Do you ever, you know?
It feels like she read a book
or watched a TV show
that told her to “talk to your kid.”
I say nothing, look toward the Pacific.
I grip my seat belt.
I want to tell her what I’m going through,
that the changes in my body terrify me,
that I’m seeing myself in the mirror
and I feel so much weight,
that I’m filled up,
sometimes with sadness,
sometimes with hate.
I want to tell her that I lie all the time
so people will like me.
I lie to myself about why I’m this way.
I want to tell her that everything is changing.
I want to tell her that I don’t understand
anything I’m going through,
and that my mind has a mind of its own.
We roll straight into town,
turn left into the nursery,
the quiet crackling of gravel
beneath slow-moving rubber tires,
and she waits, looking at me.
If I could, I would just let her see
inside my mind because I don’t know
how to tell her,
so instead I just say,
I’m fine.
Fat at the Beach
At the beach,
boogie boards and sand shovels,
shirts and sandals
and towels in a heap,
and everyone runs to the water,
the sand kicked under heels.
I feel the way my body flops.
The freckled girl looks over,
runs next to me,
stares, points,
and says, Fat.
When I hear them say fat, I feel
naked
completely uncomfortable.
I slip,
fall back,
the front
of my black shirt
rolls up
my stomach,
exposed
fat,
the ribs
tucked inside
undulating rolls
of fleshy whale skin.
Silence lingers
in the sand.
It’s the stark,
sudden loneliness,
the no-pants dream
made real.
It seems to matter more now
than ever before,
a weight on my body
like a friend suddenly cruel,
like a bad word whispered
in a library aisle,
stupid, moron,
or the first punch
in my gut where I can’t
find my breath.
This new feeling,
a sudden and irrevocable
change because of a word
and a look
and a lifetime
of a feeling
that I never understood
until now,
where everyone else is perfect
and my life is different
because someone called me fat
and I am.
The Game
Pick and I
focus a lot on our game.
We started making it last year,
a new role-playing game
about the future:
charts and dice and drawings,
giant robots bigger than the Golden Gate
rise out of the ocean
to protect San Francisco.
We script the first aliens ever discovered,
life-forms, brilliant engineers
who talk to machines with their minds,
merge with humans,
eat radiation.
We fill walls with graph paper,
hinge the edges together
in tape and glue.
We calculate probabilities and probability curves,
argue about how-many-sided dice we need.
We structure character generation,
attributes, debate
the importance of charisma,
invent heroes,
plot cities and space stations
and underwater domes,
storyline after storyline
between humans, creatures, robots, and monsters.
We place a Dungeon Master’s Guide
in the center of wherever we work,
our inspiration, a shrine to Gary Gygax
one of the creators of the original
Dungeons & Dragons.
In school
we learned
to make a plan,
write it down,
so the work is real.
We linger in twilight
before the sun rises,
two boys with the world
in front of them,
making a choice
to be like brothers.
Pizza
Friday evening,
the lights in the town come on
in a slow flicker.
Families walk here to there for dinner,
and we watch the world happen
from behind the nursery fence,
rusted wire and rotted wood.
Pick and I notice
how many kids there are,
girls our age.
Near the nursery
there is a pizza place like a barn,
and we convince my mother to take us
the one hundred steps and buy us dinner.
Inside, the room is stuffed
like a breath being held,
the air is basil and pesto and bread.
We order an extra-large,
laugh about the day.
At the table,
we pull clay from our pockets
and sculpt tiny trolls.
Each one holds
the Parmesan or the red pepper,
a fork like a pike, a spoon
as a tiny bed.
When the pizza comes,
it’s perfect.
Pizza is made of magic.
Perfect cheese, perfect sauce,
and perfect crust, perfect smell,
perfect.
I down my first piece before
anyone else’s second bite.
I feel myself eyeing the slices,
counting them,
worried that I won’t get enough.
I need to make sure I do, so I eat fast.
Another. And more like this, until
I find that I have eaten half the pie.
Slow
down, my mother says sharply.
She shakes her head at me.
She’s seen this too many times.
I want to,
but I don’t.
Once, my aunt Cookie told me
I should wait for my mind
to catch up with my stomach.
The moon is out now.
The waves crash and disappear
in the distance.
We play around,
running from car to car,
ducking in and out,
some tag or battle game.
We decide to launch
a race for the last fifty steps
back to the gallery.
Pick blows past me
and through groups of people
walking around the town.
Then, out of nowhere,
I hear the sudden voice
of some young man,
a group just passing by,
as my heavy legs reach Pick’s dust cloud
swirling in the moonlight
You’ll get ’em next time, Fatboy,
and then laughter in the dark
from somewhere in the space
I just ran past.
Pick is in the nursery now,
already putting his pizza troll
on the shelf.
When You Are Fat …
there are
long stretch
es
when you don’t
think about
the way your body presses
against your clothes,
when you don’t feel tired
when you run in the sun
like everyone else.
There are times
when you eat dinner
and nobody
looks at you funny,
like you might eat
way more than your share.
There are times
that you can just be
who you are.
There are also times
when your body betrays you.
There are times
when you feel
like you can’t stop eating,
because eating
is the only way
you know
how to
feel
right
again.
Something Finally Happened
That night, we sleep
on our old camping mats
in the planting room,
our sleeping bags
zipped over our heads.
Outside, the cold marine layer
settles over the town,
the buildings submerged
in wet summer fog.
I half dream all night
about voices in the dark
like a choir singing out
a million mean names
through my life,
piling on top of me
like old blankets.
When my eyes finally open,
I feel the weight still on me.
My hands move to my belly.
Too soft, I think.
Too much.
I remember a doctor’s visit in fifth grade.
The doctor talked about salad,
told me to try Italian dressing.
It makes the green stuff good.
Once a day, he said. A salad.
I tiptoe through
the nursery,
across the creaking wood,
trying not to wake everyone.
The door to the nursery bathroom
is a barn door that locks.
I lay a piece of wood into
the brackets, but the wood
is loose and spaced.
I hang a towel on the door
for more privacy.
I stand in the bathroom
in front of the old brass mirror.
It’s warped across the center,
creates illusions,
widens anyone in its frame.
I’m certain that they can hear me looking at myself.
I stare in the mirror,
