by Jones, Nath
They were not hippies. Not by any means. Too prickly, Mom would say. Or even antisocial. Not interested in alcohol or drugs. Religious, perhaps. Dad was born in 1933 and Mom in ’39. They were children of the fifties. Conservative, cautious, and upstanding. Straitlaced.
And the rules applied to me. No long hair. No perms. No fingernail polish. No denim skirts. No jean jackets. No dyed hair. No pierced ears. No skirts above the knees. No makeup. And by some tacit law this all meant no sex ever.
But in every other way I was free. Free to do or not to do any and every thing. My sister chose to do her homework. I chose not. She chose to read. I chose not. I chose friends. She chose loneliness. And that was good enough for our differences. In every other way I followed her. I was in summer theater as she had been. I played bassoon when she had played oboe. And although I never really was, I desperately wanted to be studious and well-read. Even now I could read all the books in the world and not ever believe I had read anything more than the funnies compared to her.
For the most part it is always okay to be different. That's what they say, those kindergarten teachers of the world. But there were times, too, when sticking out was unbearable. Sometimes there were no real reasons or at least ones people would dare say. But other times when paychecks were small, Mom would come home and swear and curse and scream about not being Catholic and trying to do her job. We always had meatloaf those nights. Seemed to help. Or Dad would disappear for a nap earlier than usual. Or Gen would lock herself in her room and read. Or I would turn on the TV and drift away into black-and-white Zenith-uncolored worlds for a while.
Now Mom was Mom and there was no changing it. When I said she had no friends, she filled the bathtub with ice and invited the entire town. They all came, too. When everyone else had turkey and family for Christmas the four of us sat alone and ate duck à l’orange, cow's heart, mint lamb, or tongue. If a well-balanced meal meant protein, fruit, and veggies we had cheese, apple pie, and popcorn. There were extravagant shopping sprees at Saks Fifth Avenue the same summer we couldn't possibly afford to water the lawn. And most importantly, when all the sameness of the world seemed forever for my friends and me, my mom would flip it and jostle it and cut it and sprinkle it all over us and we would believe again in fairy dust.
It was always a strength, I thought, the differences. But then came the sickness. Gen's mostly. Then mine. And through both an understanding of what Mom must have been through. And I began to realize where the differences originated. The differences of our family from others. Some came from the disease itself. But these are few. Most are from the adaptation. It is hard to live as the one who went crazy. And finding yourself again can be impossible if you panic. So life is lived slowly and thoroughly. No conventions are accepted until they are proven to be of some value. The opinion of others is a welt numb with age. The true knowledge that life, a conscious life, is more precious than anything is a fact so furious that I have seen myself often inflict it upon others who may or may not have cared to know.
My mother has so many folds. I admire and envy them but am so afraid to attain similar traits, suspecting the strange recesses and edges of their origins. On one hand, a foolish person might think, she was an explorer who brought great treasures of the mind to reality. Patience with oneself in adversity and triumph. Humility without weakness. But these trophies are met with disbelief in our time. And like other pioneers she feels only rejection for her efforts on frontiers. And though I would love to be a fool, I know that to be insane, even if only for a short time, is no great journey. It is hell. Such that cannot be represented. If we are all accustomed to shimmering mirror waters that slosh one-inch waves quietly against the sun-warmed shore, insanity is that most furious storm which tosses seized seas against the earth with such a destructive force that boulders rain down from the sky as sand through God's hands while the winds sing anguished songs of survival.
So my mother is not a triumphant warrior returned from a victorious battle. She is the small sand shrimp who emerges after the storm happy to have been spared.
No. Perhaps the explorer analogy is more apt and the warrior, too. For it is the explorers who have seen the furies of the sea and the warriors who have seen endless death. Perhaps then nothing can be explained of hell. Words must be understandable and we do not understand storms or war or insanity. And my mother knows this. So for the most part she stays quiet, there in her life, like a soldier home from war sitting in peace and never really believing in it. But never apologizing for having earned it back.
WHITE TRASH GLAM
Can someone please explain to me this latest craze of White Trash Glam? I opened up a new Cosmo, my most precious moment of the month, only to be met with what could have been seen at any point in my Rensselaer childhood: a scrawny blond wearing a ripped slip. She stands in a sunburnt lawn of a small ranch house. White siding, blue unhinged shutters, broken blinds, chipped trim, broken door—every indication of personal neglect. On top of it all are remnants of careless barefoot children: two BMX bikes lying in the lawn; one smaller bike with training wheels and tires full of mud (a prologue to drunken days of muddin' in supercharged pickup trucks perhaps.) Against the house a toddler’s toy and a fine example (carefully chosen by a committee of Cosmo designers, no doubt) of that strange household refuse that seems to surround so many smaller lower-middle class homes. A large piece of something yellow. It might be old carpet or a tablecloth, possibly even a uniform of a fireman—the father? It is an example of so many uncompleted or unfulfilled thoughts. It is a rug which could have been thrown out in a fit of rage: dirty, water-damaged from a leaky roof, pissed on by an untrained dog, or perhaps rescued from a family friend’s home improvement project to later line a still-unbuilt tree house.
Minus the model's go-go boots and flawless skin, it is a believable image of wilting life.
But why is it there in Cosmo, a fashion magazine supposedly representing the cutting edge of glamour? I think much lies in the fact that it is there. Perhaps it is that magazines such as this pursue not glamour but extremity, so that whether the images portray haute couture or destitution they have equal impact on the mainstream readership.
Beyond this I think the images of the photo shoot foretell a huge economic backswing. A definite trend toward the conservative. The glorification of the underdog and failure which fuel the backwoods egos of militias. And a primal call to the senses stimulating the sex appeal of the woman-child. The sex appeal of abuse which is being represented more and more often in extremely acceptable circumstances: movies, magazines, talk shows, etc.
What are we to do? In the same series of magazine photos a blond wanders aimlessly. A country road, farm equipment, railroad tracks, pickups, and a dusty Texas road sign support her in the role of a bored teenager in tight cut-offs. Another photo is black lingerie in a cheap motel. Then black leather fringe and a fully-stocked bar. A crocheted tablecloth and a blue lace shirt.
But who is paying for this look? Who are the buyers of destitution?
It seems white folks have turned on ourselves, attacking groups within our own group. Confused innocence asks, "But having made the pages of Cosmo hasn't the poor white country girl arrived?"
No. She has been purchased. In a world of physical labor, slaves were once bought and sold, used and killed. And now in our world of images visual identities—represented symbols—are bought and sold. It might be too extreme to compare slavery to a game of dress-up. No doubt it is. But with intellectual property becoming more and more important and with intangibles gaining on physical commodities the apprehension of identity has taken a different form. And still such apprehension is the destruction of human rights. Because there is something important in living the lives that create who we are. That create what we look like. And it is inappropriate for someone to don the look toward the purpose of insinuating they have lived the life that created the look—that they have known the hard days and impossible-to-endure nights of poverty.
I s
ee a wealthy woman—as haggard by sun and cigarettes as any working-class woman—slide into a beach club chair and order a vodka on the rocks. She wears the dress shown in this month’s Cosmo and is careful that her two-carat platinum doesn't snag the $480 cap-sleeved cheap chic dress from Moschino.
It is as if in a last-ditch effort to maintain dominance the rich whites say, "We can't all survive." And then draw a line in the sand. Those on this side will be on top. Those on the other side are the same as Indians, Africans, Guatemalans, and Jamaicans have been in the past: toys, games, playthings. Their cultures are breeding grounds for fads and deserve not respect and acceptance but denigrating acquisition.
White girls with henna-painted hands and midriffs. White girls in African tribal dress. White girls carrying Guatemalan bags. White girls with Jamaican wrapped hair braids. And now rich white girls dressing up like poor white girls. Maybe not. Maybe there is no effort to avoid confrontation with 'the other.' But it seems a reinforcement of the deepest rift in U.S. culture. That quiet insistence against equity, that there is an other. And that the other is inferior, with some degree of dominance and submission at stake, and like warriors taking scalps a woman in another woman’s clothes signifies nothing if not that a conquering has occurred.
I may well be wrong. And hopefully I am wrong. I hope that white girls wearing all sorts of multicultural garb reflects acceptance and integration. I do not wish to support segregation which by my argument seems necessarily part of the case. But somehow the appropriation of images of other cultures without also taking on the responsibility of their meaning does not signify real acceptance, understanding, and integration to me.
Just clothes. Yes. But still bright, bold images. The miscast representation and offering of the rural poor to the minds of upper-class suburbanites. Twice today, living in New Jersey for this internship, I explained where Indiana is to people who make a minimum annual salary of fifty thousand dollars. These are the people who buy the images in Cosmo but who have no interest in what created the represented worth.
But these things: Stereotypes. Bigotry. Prejudice. Simplifications. Generalizations. Toxins. The country woman looks at the page as I did today and sees reflected there on page 211 a woman similar to herself yet lifeless—clichéd. If she is not careful she will be satisfied by this image. Even overjoyed by these pretty pictures, for the beauty is certainly there.
But on another day, a harder day, she thinks, "What does she know about any of it? How many people did it take to make her look like that? And how much money did she make trying to look like me?"
There is no resonance. Only echoes from a deep hollow where character, integrity, and self-awareness should exist to make any woman what she is.
But hollowness is nothing to most people. Nothing to worry about. And yet so many housewives realize themselves locked in an image-life, which is constantly enveloping them. And somehow they feel their lives ending. Somehow they know what has been robbed from them. The same as Indians, Africans, Guatemalans, Jamaicans, and even the White Trash Girls before them.
A friend. A red-roses-and-dancing friend met me at a bar full of regulars. Regular clothes. Regular drinks. Regular customers. And their regular conversation. A banker. A lawyer. And an insurance salesman. Living the beginning of every regular joke there. In that red bar. Discussing the regular South Jersey God.
THE PILOT
Can you believe there's
nothing there,
no strings or cables or
fraudulent illusion
attached over, under, and
around the clouds he
has to breathe?
PROPHET’S ROCK
He hushed me, condescending. "They died here." But his silence was the inviting kind, which tries too hard toward something profound. And as we walked toward the end of dusk crossing the September battlefield, I listened to screeching hawks echo each other from sycamore cliffs, warning us of some small gossip.
I looked out through a goldenrod sea and sank into it up to my shoulders looking for buoys of purple aster and letting my eyes float up to the sky for a rest. Clouds as coals of a smoldering sunset—deep gray and cooling.
I did not accept his shadowed voice or believe the scoldings of his words. Because death is everywhere. They have died everywhere. Every footstep takes us through the cemetery of someone's lonely child. And if not a person, then a wolf, muskrat, or sparrow.
Each takes turns. Moving slowly, one by one, on out of life. The only remorse is solitude. Journeying eternity would perhaps not seem so impossible if traveled with a friend. But we die alone. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. And the dust piles up. Dunes of used heartbeats and seasons and dreams blanket our quiet acceptance that the earth is passed-on life.
Gravity is that weight of our eyes, our helpless wishing-to-be-guilty eyes, resting accidentally on the rising monument of this great tomb. We hurry by for some reason. Blinding our lives with rush, smog, and schedules as the sun obscures so many stars by day—their distant eternities also so singular and same. Too real and constant a reminder, I guess.
So for me the battlefield is a great reassuring beauty. And the tribute is made not because they died but because they died for the same reason, of the same blows, in the same rotting pain. And whether quiet or with screams damning God, they died under the same coals of a sunset cooling.
And if I hadn't known he was leaving, I might have said, "But they died here.”
BEAR BELLS FOR AUGUST:
And Genny will go too, just in case, for the company of birds, black flies, and sky. North there, to a summer short-wedged down into an arctic year where the aging Earth gets most dizzy from spinning small circle days. Let him look up and hope. Let an absent hand drift over his old white glacial cap as he tilts back, blinking, to catch sight of one snowy owl or tundra swan.
LOVE NEAR A FIREPLACE IN WINTER
Love was never meant to stand alone. Love is as a season. As dependable as the seasons. As true. As ancient. As natural. As real. Yet as transient. People blind themselves to this.
It is not at all uncommon to hear of relationships disposed of because Love has passed.
But what fools would we be if we ran toward the snowbank screaming that it could not melt in spring? How foolish were our tears if we believed the leaves falling meant death of the trees every year? And how stupid if we ceased to believe in the sun as the earth spin-slants toward night.
But we do insist snowbanks not melt in relationships.
Love could be any season. Love is as much spring or summer bright with new life or drenched in sun as it is fall or winter fraught with released potential and dormant hope. As we are born every day so Love joins us. Then Love is something of the beginning and something of the melting snow and something of the falling leaves and the leaning roll of Mother Earth nodding herself to sleep.
We may last many seasons and cycles of Love but regardless of the repeated reassurances and truths of the fact of Love's return, a relationship is so often disposed when the seasons change. As life changes from one time to the next. As we age. But there will be snow next year the way there was a sun this summer. And it is our responsibility to maintain Love's home—the relationship, the marriage, whatever—while Love is a formless misunderstanding.
No one believes this. They say, "We do not have to work at this. We should not have to. If it is true Love." Strange. Or, "We should not try to do anything; we should just be." I don't know.
Because yes, I can lie on the grass in summer and bask in the sun as I would readily bask in Love. Or I can pile myself in layers of wool and lie down with Love near a fireplace in winter. But time changes. It is naive to just be. The summer child must go inside when the chill comes. She must put on shoes and escape the harsh wind. The winter child must put out the fire and take off the layers as the heat returns in spring.
And that is the work. The work not of pleasing each other by continually overextending ourselves. Not of giving up our precious alon
e time. Not of indulging each other in comforts beyond those necessary or of surpassing the needs of each other, but of getting up off the grass together. Going inside together. Putting out the fire together. Folding up the sweaters together. This is the work.
So often I said to another or the other has said to me, "Come, it's time. The changes are here. We have to accept them." And between us there's always a fool. Either he or I. One of us insists on staying out on summer grass that piles high with snow around our bare feet. Or one of us insists on keeping the fireplace hot and the wool tight as the heat and humidity return from their travels.
What would you say to a barefoot man in the snow? Or the fire-scorched woman in summer?
"You are crazy." "You're a fool." "What in the hell are you doing?"
Changes come. One person does not inflict them on the other. Who would ever blame the snow on a child? But we do this to our young loves. We do not simply prepare ourselves and our lives for the true changes that come as freely as wind. We stand like blind fools screaming, blaming, refusing, and failing.
Love leaves anyway. And love will return regardless. It is how we wait. It is who we wait with that is the relationship. Changes come.
I am not afraid of the first snow. Are you? I am not even afraid of thick blizzards and blinding drifts. Are you? I know I will survive in my home. I know this as much as I know the sun will rise. Why do we distrust our relationships?
And why when the relationship, as a home for Love, needs maintenance or repair does someone so often slap the tools from my hand? Always with the same words, "Love will survive anyway if it is true love."
