Betwixt-and-Between

by Jenny Boully

  [Digression for the sake of inclusion: One in ten persons aged sixty-five and over has some form of Alzheimer’s disease. Nearly half of persons aged eighty-five and over is also affected. There exist chemical agents in these patients’ brains that trigger memory loss, and according to researchers, for the Alzheimer’s patient, there is no past or future, only the present.]

  The need to write fictions arises from the desire to say one thing and mean another. Storytellers are just that: storytellers. And a lot of storytellers think they are writing fiction; however, the fiction writers, the true writers of fiction, branded with invisible wings, dare not crush the storytellers’ egos, dare not dispel their notion of sky as sky. Fiction writers are wearers of the magician’s top hat and like gods, they can create ex nihilo; they spin cocoons around mere storytellers; they emerge as winged things; they begin in various ways; they all say: When I first met Butch, he was chopping chickens at the block.

  Chapter 2

  When I first met Butch, I was already aware that the sky was held together with pins and needles; I had already given up on watercolor, having progressed to charcoal. You speak in riddles, he says; no, the riddles sneak into objects, needing the manifestations of ideas. Then a boy blows his horn, hides behind a red wheelbarrow, and cries wolf. I mean, someone performed a magic act; I mean, what the red wheelbarrow means is so much more than everything that depends upon it; I mean, literature. I mean, give me a bag of bones and I will shake them and cast them into the dirt and make a fiction.

  He said he was engaged; he asked, Do you want me to take her? She looked up at me and asked, Mommy, was that man my daddy? He overheard. She was confused by the word copse. A wooded area, I tell her—in this case, where the male characters go, for sport, to shoot birds. You speak in riddles, he says.

  CONCLUSION

  What I mean was, my body wasn’t taken with me. When the soul goes, the soul is a very spacious thing. Our dreams were right: we would come to discover, over time, independent yet certain truths. Discovery number one: we will be lonely. Two: no matter what, you will never be privy to my diary. Three: even though the moon may be rising, there will be no weeping trees or intervening ivy, no conscious oaks, no dowagers, no dowries, no contemplating orderlies, no oranges, no redeeming qualities. When you leave, you will leave incredibly softly.

  Fragments

  The arrangement of words

  Every love affair presents itself as a rough draft, to which, ideally, both partners contribute. I wish to delete the last few winters; for the sake of simplicity, I shall refer to this error as X. X and I could not agree on one word in our poem. I wanted Love; X insisted on love. All winter, X lit fires; all winter, the early mornings were icy and gray, traffic sounded from far away. All winter, in bed, X and I became a hibernating microcosm. X is the embodiment of many persons, all that I have encountered and left behind or was left behind by. The arguments always began in February and continued into April. Once, they ended with a telephone call. While X was conversing, I stole away to the kitchen and sought the use of those refrigerator magnets with words printed on them. I arranged a handful in the manner below and then, having said all I needed to say, departed.

  The last thing that X said to me before the phone rang was, “I can’t do this forever; something has to give. If you are looking for love with a big L, I can’t give this to you. I don’t know where my heart is. If we continue this way, both of us will succumb to some sort of falsity, which can never be good for a failing love affair. You may know me better than anyone, but it matters little; I am accustomed to being with myself; I stay here alone; I live alone. You can continue sleeping here with me, but no more talk of the future, no more talk of emotion. If you need to say love, I prefer you substitute that word with the word pizza.”

  Somewhere in those last words, if I arrange them to my liking, X said, “I prefer you alone. I give you love with a big L. I give you forever; succumb to my heart. Talk of the future, talk of emotion, say love. I pizza you.”

  I resigned myself to knowing that X and I are like two words that do not belong next to one another. If we are two signifiers pointing at the same sign, then we are written in two separate languages; therefore, we may occupy the same story, but we exist in different books, on different bookshelves, in different countries, conjuring our separate connotations.

  Lines from the terrible poem

  The rough draft exists so that one may partake in ritual: one may rip, crumble, scribble over, cross out, discard, burn, destroy those words that are not arranged to one’s liking. The rough draft exists so that one may select those portions that are to one’s liking and build on these favorable arrangements.

  After confronting an X, after the great deletion, there exists the ritual of ripping the rough draft and attempting to discard it. Afterwards, each morning, drinking tea and mourning, I began thinking about sky. Indeed, I even woke with dreams of sky: the sky a pale blue, blank of clouds, the sky cut here and there by the flight of birds.

  One morning, the sky, I remember, existed solely for me. I wrote a poem. It was, like my typical post-breakup heartbreak-without-the-appropriate-mourning-period poems, terrible and forty pages of self-pity, quasi-aubade, quasi-elegy. It took until dawn the next morning to rip the poem to shreds. I drank tea and looked to the sky, which existed exactly as it had the morning before. Taking the poetry shards, I wandered outside and cast them into a cloud of monarchs flitting by. The monarch butterflies carried them away and high into the winds, but a single shard drifted back to me. It said:

  I feel ashamed for having written this, for the emotion, which prompted the writing. I only want to be rid of these lines, to hide them, and all of my life, this fragment will haunt me—me casting it into the wind, the wind returning it. It will get caught in my hair, find its way into my purses and pockets.

  When I think of growing older, I am made so happy, consoled, imagining the swarm of paper butterflies that will have accumulated over the years, reminding me perpetually of those things that cannot be so easily discarded.

  My consolation

  After an occurrence of X, after a great deletion, one which span stanzas, paragraphs, months, pages, years, I change location and opt for experiments in form, in hopes of discovering something new, in hopes of discarding the old. If I am a rough draft of myself, then I am always forgetting; I am always adding; I am always ripping apart; I am always confusing, leaving out some important detail, which would fuse and clear up matters. But, alas, I am a mere rough draft. Why did X and X and X expect so much?

  After deleting one X in particular, I lived in a small cabin in the coldest place I had ever known. Arranging my books on the bookshelf, I picked one up that I began but never finished; on the bookmark, in my handwriting, although I had forgotten the occasion, was written:

  I taped it to the window facing east. Through the blizzards, it was this fragment that kept me company. And never did I utter a sound. Never did I see another soul until the spring bulbs were yearning. My writing became sparse, a few words lost in a land of whiteness. Whatever transpires, whatever words arise, whatever is put on the page, it is never my fault, but the weather’s; it is always the fault of the weather.

  The postcard

  Why should I be the one responsible for explanations? X accused me of speaking in cryptic codes and waxing poetic. But why should I waste language, which has never done X and I any good? Why should I waste language, when one sentence says all that needs to be said, says where I’ve been, who I’ve seen, what I’m doing, who I’m missing, and who I wish were there? On a postcard, I wrote:

  Two years later, the postcard was returned to me, covered with a multitude of postmarks, some from as far as Japan and Madagascar. Apparently, it had gotten lost all over the world before reaching me. The original inscription was hardly legible; however, I could still make out X’s handwriting underneath my own. It said: What the fuck is this supposed to mean? Thus, the last words of our relationship; thus, once mor
e, the crossing of oceans and years to reach, once more, the closure of confusion.

  The abandoned ones

  Some mornings, I attempt beginnings, but that is all. Some mornings, my only consolations are the weather and clouds. I keep trying to make a story arise from whatever transpired between X and me, the big Xs, but there were, along the way, many xs, small xs. These small xs could have been big, but they came at the wrong time, when my plot was still entangled with an X, when my devotion was still focused on an X. And so, I experimented with the small xs to see how they would affect the plot, but they proved to be little more than distractions, and besides, they were so kind, lacked conflict, and promised endings, which were so cliché in their happiness that I, as a rough draft, had to abandon them for the sake of good writing. These small xs clutter my drawers:

  x1.

  x2.

  x3.

  x4.

  x5.

  I forget my intentions, but I keep them tucked away, in the dark, in case I should need them again someday. The small xs are always waiting; like saints and martyrs, they will wait until the end, in hope that you will find a way to use them, somehow, in your draft, but when you do, they will always manage to make you feel guilty for loving them so little, love with a small l.

  The one I could have done without

  I remember, after a long session of revising, struggling, deciding what to keep and what to discard, X made the decision for me: he came over, demanding the return of a hat, dumping a box containing my belongings to the floor. I remember the lilacs and the wisteria and the sky were all purple, and the bumblebees made their way through the crack under my door. The buds on the weeping willows were only beginning to show themselves, and here was X demanding his hat, and I gave it to him even though I wanted to keep it because it smelled faintly of him. And here I was in April, nested in the Blue Ridge Mountains, my most tragic self empathizing with T. S. Eliot, myself transformed into a creature of memory and desire, past and future, my present state nothing more but reflection and longing.

  When X left, I looked through the items scattered about the floor: tweezers, a book of matches, a pearl earring missing its backing, my blue bath towel, a few rough drafts, and a scrap of paper, which said:

  What a sick-o, I thought, and all this stuff that I don’t need and don’t want and have been doing without for so long. I thought of visiting the butcher for a pint of blood with which to seek my revenge.

  The following morning, I watched the fog lift and then the clouds dispersing ever outward and thought that perhaps X hadn’t returned the paper scrap out of malice. It was, after all, written in my handwriting; it did, after all, belong to me. I remember later, toward dusk, that I wrote it down sometime in January to remind myself of a disturbing dream I’d had. I can no longer remember the circumstances or persons or place.

  22

  I remember it beginning this way:

  The summer I turned twenty-two was the summer of knives. Shopping always made me nauseated, thinking of all the plastic in the world coupled with the bad fluorescent lighting. This one is good—for meat and bread, A. said.

  Because it was cheaper, I bought the generic brand of antinausea liquid medicine, cherry flavored with a rainbow on the label. At work, I took swigs when no one was looking. It was an art supply store and I wasn’t an artist, but I would dream of being able to express myself that way: in watercolors despondent and dripping, in pastels crumbling and mixed with charcoal, in oils thick and embarrassing. I would spend money on brushes, paint, pencils, canvases, but the story never turned out to be the one I wanted to tell myself. The same thing would happen again later, with A.’s guitar.

  This must have been about mid-June because the ennui had set in:

  When A. wasn’t too heartbroken over some damsel who flocked to some far and foreign locale, he could whip up some interesting recipes. The night of the great fight, he made spinach and pasta. I can’t, I’m nauseated, I said. What I didn’t know then was that I wasn’t feeling nausea but rather the feeling of dying. A few bites then? A. asked. A few bites, I said. And after, beer and pot and a game of chess. We had no idea what we were doing then, knew no reason to protect ourselves by castling or how to mate with a rook and queen.

  Late June:

  We found a knife rack at Goodwill, the one where I found the baseball shirt that I so loved. (It was red, and the team was the Braves, and on the back was the number 2; the symbolic significance to me: I would have to learn to be brave on one side even though my heart was longing for union with another on the other.) The first thing A. did when we got home was stick knives into the slits; I never wanted sex again.

  This is where the guitar comes in:

  I am sick and lonely. A.’s guitar is there, and I can’t paint anything, and so I want to make songs. I know no chords, but I can strum and have it sound almost like music. Beth comes over. She’s a sexpot, and I know she and A. are still fooling around, but I pretend not to know. She wants me to kiss her. No, I say, I don’t want to do that anymore. I play her my song. She sings, making up the words as we go along: Somebody stole the kitchen and Boully’s oh-so-mad; she’s about to lose it, the past and what she had; the bathroom is moldy, the knives are dull; she waits for the milk to curdle; the firecracker wind blows the kitchen to its knees. Those are the parts I remember: her singing about me and how I could have but I didn’t kiss her. She shows me that her bra and panties are leopard print. I have almost no pubic hair, she says and lies on my futon.

  When A. comes home, Beth and I play our song and he loves it. Beth and I go around everywhere and play our song, and everyone loves it. I tell A. one night when he is sad and dreamy. I tell him, Beth and I go around everywhere and play our song, and everyone loves it. He stares at me like a parent. You are imagining, he says, you are imagining this and everything to be the way you want it to be, the way you will want it to be when you write about it years from now.

  Because I write this years later and it is June again:

  What I didn’t know then that I know now is that I kept using the same knife for everything and this pissed A. off to no end. What I didn’t know then that I know now is that I wanted A. to love me so that I might love myself. Other things I have since come to realize: (a) those long dusks when A. and I would take mushrooms and stare off into the clouds, forever dispersing outward, and I saw that they were actually drowned women who had been beached, and I felt truly happy, it wasn’t that I was truly happy, but instead, truly lost; (b) when Beth told me, you’re withering away, what she meant was that I had become the vision of drugged-up, anorexic America; (c) the night I bought A. the drill and he broke shit up while I made beeswax candles, the night he said he loved me, it wasn’t him: his drill and my candles had temporarily possessed him: I know that now.

  Horoscope for Cancer, on my birthday—July 8:

  Play your cards close to your heart.

  This was when July was becoming too hot:

  I started caring for the hermit crab because A. had come to resent it. It had a red shell and Beth named it Elgin before giving it to A. as a gift, to get him to “come out of his shell and stop being so damn mean all of the time.” I knew it was lonely because it kept burying itself in the sand, and so I got it a companion with a pale green shell. At night, they would touch and talk, and their voices sounded like a violin when someone is new and shy with it. I could never tell Beth and A. how I loved these crabs, how I befriended them and even bathed them and let them roam in the summer grass, how I, like them, would rather be torn apart than lose the security of my shell.

  Although I remember summer ending this way, I think this was the last day of July:

  I knew I looked beautiful in Misti’s swimsuit, because I was only 108 pounds. I knew this because I weighed myself every day. I knew I looked beautiful because A. and Misti both kept staring at me and debating whether we should skinny-dip. I felt like shit because the night before, A. and I took mushrooms at 1 a.m. and I only got one
hour of sleep before getting up for work. While Misti stripped down and A. went over to her, I floated on my back with my ears underwater and stared into the purple sky turning dusk blue. They used to date and lived together for a while before Misti kicked him out because of his temper. I could feel little fish feeding on my feet. Misti swam closer to me, saying, You know, Jenny, I really want to fuck you—do you ever sweat?

  Sometime in August:

  My best friend and college roommate of three years moved into an apartment about ten minutes away. I see her again there. Where is your Buddha? she asks. She named my stomach Buddha once when I was high and laughing and rolling about the floor. Are you eating? she asks. Yes, I say. She says, I’ll be back. When she returns, she lays a huge German chocolate cake on the table in front of me. Eat it all, she says. I can’t, I say, I’m nauseated. You’re nauseated because you don’t eat, she says. I stare into the cake’s coconut flaked icing: a million anemones, waving in the sea, reaching out to me.