by Will Walton
(she does)
(she doesn’t hang around long)
(too much hurt)
I love you.
(another goodbye)
(too many)
(she leaves, and Ms. Poss keeps talking)
(I try to listen.)
You know I read every single one of those damn extra-credit responses and … just terrible. I can tell you’re all on Twitter, 24/7.
How can you tell?
Because it’s like words, words, words, words, no articles or compound sentences, just everything smushed together, enough “abbrevs,” as y’all say, to make me hurl. Trying to say the most in the fewest number of words. That’s what it’s coming down to.
Hasn’t that always been the goal, though?
(even Ms. Poss had said it)
(to say as much as you can in as few words as possible)
(is a strength)
Well, your generation has taken it to new heights.
(Mom, Gia, and Luca find us)
Did you see her?
(they’ve been hiding Mom from Babs)
I didn’t. She must have slipped out.
(it seemed like a better idea to lie)
(walking to our cars now)
21.
GAP, FAP, PAP & MAP were friends, almost like The Seven Deadly Sins were friends, or Punch & Judy.
This is a story about relationships.
GAP: Grandparent-As-Parent: I wasn’t sleeping. Thinking about Babs putting money into the GAP jar. Eating away at me. I had to pee. I was also thinking about how I might like a cell phone after all. That way, I could text Luca. It’d been days.
I made my way down the hallway with the crutches. Peed, imagined a horror movie, a home invasion + 16 y.o. boy on crutches, a cat-and-mouse deal. Someone knocked. I startled, shot pee into the corner of the bathroom.
“Avery?”
“Yeah?”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.”
When I walked out, the lamp in the living room was on. A quilt there, on the couch, where Babs had been sleeping.
“Pal snoring?” I asked.
“We’ve tried everything,” she answered. “Flonase, neti pot, Zyppah, Brez strips. He wore a chinstrap for a while. No progress. And the plants, the sage, dead nettles, then thyme—all snoring remedies, and not a single one worked.”
22.
See, GAP was supposed to look after MAP, while PAP was away (at rehab), but the GAP started to undergo meiosis. It’s animal, natural, no one’s to blame. But MAP was disrupting “the natural flow,” as they say:
so MAP went to FAP’s house, to see if he wanted to “fap,” as they say.
MAP needed touch.
FAP: Friend-As-Parent: “Hey hey, it’s been a while!” I said. “Just a few days,” Luca said. “What are you doing?”
“I am … I am going to stay at my place for the night. Babs can’t sleep very well right now, so she needs the garden room, and I need space. I think they need space from me too. And I can pretty much get around on my own now, so do you want to come hang tonight, maybe watch a movie or something?”
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this to you, Avery, but honestly it’s like, I’m sorry, things are a little confusing for me right now. Like I maybe think things are moving too fast, or something,
like maybe I think I need some space.”
“You made me a fucking wedding CD!”
23.
But then FAP needed space; it’s okay. Even plants need space. MAP understood. He unfolded the map from his pocket. He followed the directions home.
PAP: Parent-As-Parent: Once when I was a kid, I was very sick. I was an allergic kid, got a sinus infection that moved into my chest, coughed for days, probably drove Mom crazy. Probably she got drunk so she could sleep. I remember I got up, walked to the living room. Mom was blacked out on the couch. I tapped her leg. She didn’t move. I really couldn’t tell if she was alive. I went to the kitchen. I got a cup of water. I came back. I let it drip on her. With every drop, her hand would flinch. It’s how I could tell, finally.
I got the medicine myself. I got the cream to rub on my chest. I got my own glass of water, and I crawled into bed.
24.
PAP, let’s face it, had been unready to be PAP. It’s like when you halt meiosis, it just doesn’t do. No one’s to blame.
Even plants experience it, exactly the same.
MAP: Myself-As-Parent: I got some eggs from the fridge, light brown with brown freckles. I cracked them into a bowl. I decided I wasn’t hungry. I hadn’t stirred the yolks together yet. I put the bowl back in the fridge. Opened up the Sexton, read a line I’d underlined, from “The Gold Key”: She introduces a sixteen-year-old boy, who she says is “each of us.” No, he’s me. I set it down. I stirred the eggs. I poured a glass of vodka. It was in the freezer. Blah, gross. I added ice. I added a splash from some orange power drink. I drank. I swished the eggs around the frying pan. Yolk-swirl. Saw strands of gold hair like Rapunzel, how I could tell I’d been reading the Sexton—or getting drunk—or both.
“Have you ever thought about homosexuality in relation to evolution?”
—A.S.
I watched a video, a science talk about homosexuality and evolution. The scientist was
not gay, but his son was. Possessed a “male-loving gene.” The scientist said, “There are not that many studies about lesbians, so forgive me.” He said,
“The ‘male-loving gene’ predisposes an infant to being more ‘family-centric.’ It makes the male more passive as he grows into, not the warrior—not the hunter, not the gatherer—but have you ever heard the term ‘gay uncle’?”
Some people laughed.
The good gay uncle. His purpose is to hold the family together.
MAP’s purpose, then: to hold everyone together.
“Now, we’ve also noticed,” the scientist continued, “a very strong correlation between men who were born homosexual and mothers who experienced highly stressful pregnancies.
“Like the mom’s body has said to her baby, ‘Okay, I might not make it out of this. I might need you to be the one to stick around, to look after everyone, in case I am gone,’ and then her body flips the switch; it turns the gay genes on.”
I stopped the video, and kept drinking. I put on a Sia music video instead, for “Big Girls Cry”—I love how Maddie Ziegler dances in that video. With just her hands and face. Her expressions: mouth gaping, looking stunned. She’s afraid. She is angry. She is fighting to live. She is making a hook with her hand, finger crooked inside her mouth. She is biting her wrist. “Sorry,” she is mouthing to someone offscreen. It’s poetry. Pure poetry. I watched it again, and kept drinking.
25.
MAP has an oar. He is rowing. God, it is an awful rowing. He is following directions.
“I might be in trouble,” her body had said. Her mother had died. She was grieving. And she was doing this, by and large, alone. “I might be in trouble.” Had I been, then, her prayer?
She used to sing him this hymn for a lullaby: “You are my saving grace / My lighthouse in the storm / You are my rock of a-ages / Whenever I’m forlorn / You are my saving grace—”
She always ended on the first line.
His first exposure to enjambment.
But it was also a hymn. The “you” was God. What does that do to a kid?
Sometimes she would sing it to him over and over again.
He is too tired to write any more poems, read any more poems, tonight. Too noisy. He tries to tune it out with drink. And yet, it’s everywhere he looks. Everywhere poetry. He walks out into the street, beneath the streetlamp, and stands. The street spins, a-sudden. He wants to lie down.
He stumbles past bushes in the cool night air. There’s a light behind this window. He curls beneath it, a little match girl.
A fairy-tale Anne Sexton never retold.
&n
bsp; Except that she did.
She is telling it right now.
Most of the fairy-tales she tells end in bite.
This one ends in love:
A cat happens up to hear the fairy-tale retold. A stray, long-haired tabby with an ancient quality. Her name is Grimalkin, like in a fairy-tale.
The poet Anne Sexton, noticing she has an audience now, restarts the telling. She animates a little. She breezes through her beginning: “The little match girl has had too much to drink tonight, yes, so we will have to light the matches for her. So I’ve brought the matches with me. You’ll see there are four, just like in the fairy-tale, and you’ll recall—this is canon—that each time the little match girl strikes a match, she sees a vision in the flame. These visions are depictions of happy times, some of which the little match girl has experienced, and some of which she has only imagined: a lighted Christmas tree, a reanimated roasted goose—disturbing if you ask me—”
“Excuse me.”
“The goose, it practically jumps out at her—”
“Um, pardon?”
“Yes, cat?”
“Before we go any further, may I ask you why the little match girl has been drinking tonight?”
In response, Anne’s eyes roll upward, her open mouth chortles. “Of course she’s been drinking, cat—she’s an artist, isn’t she? Well, a poet, specifically—a particularly torturous trade. We have been known to imbibe!” But then Anne’s eyes grow sad, and in a moment of clarity (it would seem), she goes, “I think there are several reasons why our little match girl has been drinking tonight. I think, to look at it simply, she is young and curious. But—to go deeper with it, I think she wants to understand it better, the power of it, how it got such a hold of the people she loves. She wants to confront her fear of it.” This is starting to feel like too nice a ribboning. With her thumb, Anne rolls the four matches in her palm. She looks down at them. She wants to end this tale in love.
“Or maybe she feels like it’s her turn to have a problem—her turn to make someone worry about her, for a change. Maybe she’s doing it to teach them a lesson, to demonstrate their power to hurt her, to show that they have hurt her—or otherwise, maybe she just feels doomed to it.” Anne looks up. “Or maybe she figures, hey, I gotta die some way—I really don’t know, cat.”
The poet’s eyes grow dark.
She slowly brandishes the four matches clutched inside her fist. “So we’ll strike the first for her—let’s see. My, how the bulb from the strike ‘swelled’—how phallic—into a vision of … let’s see: ‘The first match lit, and in it, she saw her grandmother. Her grandmother, who died before the little match girl was born—beckoning her, standing over—why, it’s a barbecue grill! How funny!” Anne is delighted, restarts, orates accordingly: “ ‘The first match lit, and in it, she saw her grandmother. Her grandmother, who had died before she was born—beckoning her, arms open, standing over a barbecue grill. In one hand, the grandmother possessed tongs—shining tongs with which she turned cobs of corn wrapped in gleaming silver foil. Mmm, thought the little match girl, then it must be the Fourth of July—”
“But wait, if you’ll please,” Grimalkin interrupts softly, “once more-hrr …” (A mew slipping out, surprising the cat—what happens when she gets emotional.) “How does it end?”
Anne pauses and pulls in a deep breath. She spits the air up against the back of her teeth. It is very disrespectful to ask a storyteller to reveal her ending, Anne thinks. Besides, she doesn’t know yet how she will end it. Who does this cat think she is? Anne wonders. And then she realizes. How she will achieve her ending. How she will end this tale in love.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to wait and see, Grimalkin,” Anne answers. She looks toward the sky, spreads her arms out, wing-like, and spins. (She must play the comic villain here, the ignoramus, to achieve the ending she wants.)
“In the original telling of the fairy-tale, the little match girl burns through all her matches. And in the end, she freezes. She dies. She dies alone!” Anne keeps spinning. She just has to keep rambling like this. Long enough for Grimalkin to get away.
“But perhaps, in my retelling, the little match girl will get to die with witnesses! It would be so much less depressing that way, don’t you think? So much sadder to die alone, would you agree? Wouldn’t that indeed be almost happy? If the little match girl got the chance to die with witnesses—her witnesses being you and I, cat?” Anne stops spinning. She lowers her arms, and finally her chin.
She hopes it has worked.
The streetlamps, the dim houses, the cars parked on the road, and the passed-out little match girl on the lawn—each one holds its pose. But the long-haired Grimalkin is missing. Having sauntered over to the house across the street; having perched outside a window of the old couple’s house; having begun to yowl and yowl for help (as hoped); she has begun to save the little match girl.
She will yowl—nearly howl—until a light comes on inside the old couple’s house, and someone will step outside to shoo her—Babs; who will spot the little match girl—and run to him. That is how the fairy-tale ends. In love.
The accusation that hurled us into the next morning, the morning after the dull orange drink incident: “It’s not just the drinking, Pal—it is the lying, it is the hiding, it is the deceit …” Babs pointed it all out. The smuggled sweets he kept hidden—things like ordering two McFlurries on the last day of school, saying one was for her, when I knew he was only going to eat it later, the box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day—saying he hadn’t been “much of a drinker” since that dark period after Nell died.
“And he has inherited it from you! It’s in his genes! He will always be trying to get out from under this, Pal!”
(“—always!”)
So we were trapped—at least I was. I hung my head inside the toilet bowl. I could still hear Babs talking. It felt like she was having this great epiphany—“It all started with you!”—and the only logical solution—in retrospect, I realize—would be for her to leave.
The full weight of our family had hit her. It had sunken in. I know she was panicked. I know she was worried about me. But maybe now it all seemed bigger—too big. I would always be trying to get out from under it, maybe. But she wouldn’t be—she didn’t have to be. Is this when she decided to leave us? I can’t really say. I will not talk about Babs, I will not talk about Babs, I will not talk about Babs. It is not my place to talk about Babs—to try to tell her story.
But I do have to tell the next scene. That guy who liked Mom, who gave her that card, and would stand in his underwear—he started to think I was “off” because I wasn’t showing an interest in girls. I only wanted to hang out with Luca. He gave Mom these books, fanatical books on guiding cis, hetero, Christian boys through puberty. One was called Does God Love Gays? On the title page was the question; on the page right behind it was the answer: YES—God did love gays! “And, as a Christian, you should too!” it said. “But remember, Christians are called by God to speak out vehemently against sin! So how do we navigate this? This book will tell you.”
I found it in a stack of his things, after he was gone. I wasn’t sure Mom had seen it. I will not talk about this man, I will not talk about this man, I will not talk about this man who plugged his need to drink with religion, and encouraged my mom to do the same, who made my mom feel happy for a while, but who gave her this book that made her think she did not love me. I will not talk about church, I will not talk about church, I will not talk about church, because I know it is complicated. I know church does a lot of good for a lot of people. I know not every believer is like that man.
So I’ve cut up the next scene, which is set in a church. I have kept in the good parts, the good advice I was given, which has helped me, and the rest I have weeded out. In those spaces I’ve included substitutions.
I am still working. On this part especially.
Babs and I waited on sofas in the waiting room. Pal was at home. All morning, after t
he fight, they hadn’t been able to look at each other. He hadn’t been able to look at me.
“Avery, you can go on in!” It was the sweet lady at the front desk. She had white hair with bangs and round glasses.
“The pastor is ready for you!”
I crutched in—I’d been feeling like I was over the crutches, almost completely. But I must have banged the patellar in the night because it was sore. Pastor Daisy remarked, “Ah! I could hear you coming—from a mile away—on those Mechanical Wings!”
She had bright red hair, which was tied in a bun, and amplified by the halo through which I was seeing everything: effect of a hangover. That, and a rotten-feeling gut, apparently. She wore the reverend collar and a white coat. “I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a state,” she said. “I was gone for two weeks on vacation and left only one instruction, for someone to water my abiah root”—she nodded at the doorway—“and no one did, so …”
She pushed her desk chair back and stood. “Do you think you might be willing to lend a hand?”
I followed her out of the office and down the hallway—through the corner of my eye, glimpsed Babs in the waiting room.
Babs was reading a magazine. I didn’t think she had brought the magazine on her own, but I also wasn’t sure where she had found one. I hadn’t noticed any magazines in the waiting room when we were sitting. Maybe she had brought her own but had kept it hidden from me, as though it might offend me. That she might, for a moment in the waiting room, try to escape this. The sunlight coming through the windows, reflecting off the pages—through the halo of the hangover, effect was like vapor. Like light and shadow at the same time. She raised a tissue to her nose, like she had been crying.
I’d never felt so responsible for someone’s hurt before. I felt so guilty.
“Psst, Avery—” Pastor Daisy was at the back door, the abiah root pot lodged against her hip. “Come on. I don’t want to let all the cool air out.”
