My mother loved the food. I loved mine. I was marginally disappointed in it. I escaped when I said I had to go to the bathroom, the same way I forgot with my hand on the handle of the fridge door why I had wanted to look inside. It is a great natural law, I think, but of what?
Diane, I was the first of us to swoon, entering the glass elevator, descending—my only purpose being to resemble a human being going down.
A Progress in Spirituality
We were in our own backyard, with everything that that could mean, portending. This could be important.
To taste his drink, to look into his eyes, to be shocked, to give my opinion, I had been up on my feet.
“I am shocked. It is so sweet,” I said. I was.
He said, “It is.”
I sat back down.
The wind took his paper cup, almost blew it away. He got it back. He put it down. He picked it up. No-handed, he bit the rim.
“It’s no trouble,” I said. “I’ll take it inside and throw it away.”
My guess is, it was my “trouble” or my “no” he heard, when he saw my shapely form as I turned with his paper cup.
Things got all knocked back—I don’t have a clue how.
To have seen his face then—what’s it called?—turgid with lust for me?—was a forgotten truth, and tonight I am destined to shoot the rival woman who tried to snatch him. I shoot her by shaking her hand.
When I take her hot hand in mine, we could be the rivals dipped in stone, in the antique story. There should be a story. I don’t know the story. There may be a story of them getting a grip on each other forever.
What does that mean? Nobody gets killed. I’m stuck with her. He’s stuck with me. All I remember is our kinship, which makes me sick. I have gone so very far to deny death.
It is already only a memory.
The Band-Aid and the Piece of Gum
There was the possibility up until five o’clock—then there was no more possibility. I expected to hear from Walter today. When I woke up, I was cheered by the thought that maybe today, today would be the most important day of my life. Today I ended up using the Band-Aid Walter had given me on my toe. He had thrust it into my hand. “Take it. You never know when you may need it.” The piece of gum he had once given me I chewed finally today also. “Try it. You could learn something,” is what he had said. Remember how I told you he grabbed me around the neck the last time I saw him? It was practically impossible to walk, which he was trying to do all at the same time, and trying to get me to walk along with him, too. There was the possibility, perhaps, that we could both have toppled over onto his floor.
That’s it. Usually they start where a person was born, then their parents, their parents’ parents, where they were born, occupations, so that includes dates, names, locations, character traits of all the parties concerned, chronology, trauma, wishes, dreams, eccentricities, real speech, achievements, including struggle, the obstacles, someone’s dementia, another chronic illness, a centrifugal drama, certainly all the deaths, photos, paintings if any—likenesses of many of the parties concerned, plus summary statements made periodically throughout to sum up the situation at any given time.
This One’s About (_____)
This is being written to explain my sister’s most fundamental, the most important discovery ever made in human history so far by an individual. Her discovery—it is so shocking—stemmed from, as in every other sphere of life—a rude awakening.
My sister, who made the discovery, was doing the driving. My mother was in the backseat with the attorney. I was in the front seat next to my sister—the discoverer!
We had the attorney in the backseat scrunched up. This is now thirteen years later, after our fierce journey that night—it was indeed at night.
My sister at the wheel—I forgot to mention she had a lame right arm and bad vision, which had been allowed to go uncorrected, and that, also, she had forgotten to turn the car headlights on. I forgot to say that it is easy to see how this resolved, but all quite obviously was not quite lost.
At the great speed I turned around whenever I wanted to take a look at the attorney when he made his statements. I did not get a look at my mother. In fact, did she ever speak?
At the great speed what did my sister say about everything that hung in the balance—that is—how we were doing, when the attorney told her to check her speed?
Strange as it sounds, I still do not know how clear the danger was then. Speaking for myself, I felt then, This is an important drama. If I were the driver, I would be questioning what our alternatives were for where exactly we were heading.
When she got out of the car, all that was real to my sister was the answers to the questions. At the beginning of life we are not in perfect harmony with the universe. I am fond of my sister’s idea, which is slowly gaining favor, that at the beginning of our life, when observers are observing any one of us, metaphorically speaking, they get sick. Most of the observers refuse to observe that all this all really has to do with is clothes!
And finally, a big thank you to Chuck Cohen in Highland Park, Illinois, because he gave my sister her idea!
Torah
I carry this plate of triumph into the school building with my Saran Wrap all aflutter all over my iced cakes. I have iced my cakes because I think everyone nowadays has an expectation of icing on it from a cupcake, as I am sure I do, too.
The corn candies I pushed into the icing are the tough lumps, my vicious triples, my quadruples, the repetition of an idea an idea an idea an idea an idea. Are you keeping track of this as I did? This situation could be handled.
I took control of the situation when the official in the office did nothing when she saw me create a situation in her office. But I gave up control when this official declared that no man had ever hooked his fingers into her vagina and then keenly observed her face, or pleaded to go down on her, or pushed her against a wall into her own shadow and said, “We call this dry humping when we do it in school!”
As it turned out, for no good reason, I tested the woman sorely.
I was wicked.
Yet perfectly delightful when I was God.
An Imperishable Romance
I’ve been trying to get hold of someone to have some fun with. They both have. Let’s pretend nothing is awkward. Three of us abreast, with the ancient and august chapel behind us, and in front of us the alarm was not so great. It was the moon. When he squealed about the moon, what I said was, “You should have seen it this afternoon! It was so big and red!”
I had made a mistake.
The crux of her advice about walking in the cold toward our car, way down the road, was, “You just have to do it.” We were not dressed for the cold. As a group, we had looked at her black suede French oxfords because we had wanted to, and she didn’t want to get them ruined in the dark. She watched her step. I watched my boots. Yes, they sank into the grass at least an inch, not out of sight. I had told him which of his shoes to be wearing. When we were alone, I had spoken to him while tapping, “I like this and this and this.”
Certain things should not be spoken of in front of children. I agree with that. Children should not do certain things, and I agree with that. Thank God, she ran like hell, once out of the car, at her house.
It’s a Japanese lantern hanging up there—wildly picturesque—before you get to her front door. Has this person never heard of a bood?—my favorite word for it.
Nude
The parrot’s owner gives me information about the parrot that the parrot is molting, or something that is awful—that it hates women. The parrot’s owner is also a treasure house of information about libidinous debauches.
The parrot’s owner should be a handsome man. He has wrapped himself in a white bath towel. His hair is wet.
His little girl is sort of
chirping She hates me! I just hate her! about their parrot, as a little girl will. She sort of bounces brightly in her swimsuit with its dots of purplish blue and reddish purple, and purplish pink.
I am wearing my brand-new nude—what the shop owner called the nude. The slip has a crease running down its center, not between my legs, from its having been all folded up inside of a drawer in the shop before I took it to try on.
I bought a robe, too, from that shop, which I could have had in any one of three different colors—which I will not name—the colors. But I could have.
However, when the shop owner spoke to me of underclothes the color of pink ice, I sort of lost hope that I would ever get them, but I have imagined nothing strong or deep or vivid or very dark or bluish in all the pricks I will have.
How could I?
How could I?
How could I?
Jeweling
In the deep dark recesses of her curse, there lay everything she had.
She was an expert diver, but this had nothing to do with that. She opened her purse and she told her friend, “Look in here.”
He said, “What?” but he looked inside. He was used to acceding to certain commands.
She was showing him what he had given to her, where she had put his gift—how the thing was situated in the deep dark recesses of her purse.
Someone thought the object he had given her was an object beautiful to look at.
He had just given it to her, and that is where it had ended up being—for the time being.
He needed no special perspicacity to know that she meant, See how it looks in here, your thing in mine.
He is a friend in a clandestine, passionate arrangement.
He is mine.
It is my purse.
Now his gift is all mine, with its deep capacity for spectral light. It is as cold and as hard an object as is the love I receive from two men. It is so hard.
I believe in coincidence and providence.
I believe in these two men as I believe in my right hand and in my left hand equally, and in my two eyes, that they are equally mine, and in my ears, and in the two of everything for and on me.
Two created me thereof, in the beginning. Is it precious? It took two to make me what I am.
Naaa
There’s the baby who gets the bee sting. In my opinion, there’s the baby carrying around a paperweight that, if he had dropped it on his bare foot, would or could have broken his foot.
The mother of the babies has sprained her ankle, and chipped a bone in it, and she is using a cane to help her get around.
Here’s where the plot is thickening. Here’s the plot: When the baby was stung, at first no one was sure what had happened, but then the mother said, “His arm is getting all pink.” Not to go on and on—the sting was discovered on the tip of the baby’s thumb. Finally—I was there—at the moment of the discovery, when just then: the baby stopped his crying.
I was the person who took the paperweight away from the baby. He walks. He’s old enough to walk, just old enough, which is why I call him a baby. He was disappointed, but did not appear outraged, when I took the paperweight away from him. “You should not be carrying this around,” I said.
If this were an issue larger than the worry about human extinction, I could allow myself to think about it.
Secretly, I believe the paperweight is an item which should never have existed, ever.
The facts of the matter are complex, but this baby’s power is nowhere limited.
This baby’s power is his renunciation of all power.
The Fullness of Life
Is from Something
Exploring the front of her blouse herself—she leaned her head down—her nose, her mouth, her eyes became unpleasantly close to the rest of her. She did not feel, however, disgust. Happily, she was imagining a dark rose-red rose on its black bed.
In her present mood, unfolding before her, she saw valleys and shadows upon herself with something else—we’ll get back to that—introduced that she did not crave, that had nothing to do with the turmoil of her spirit, nor with her modest capacity as a person.
This was happening not purely by chance. What had happened was that she had said, “The roses are so beautiful.”
“Do you want them?” he had said. “You paid for them.”
Next thing, he was wrapping the three roses up for her to take with her. Next thing, she had thought about nipping a bud and wearing a bud. Next thing, she had thought about it again, more nipping—because she had not nipped any bud yet, nor had she put any bud behind her ear, nor fastened with a hairpin a bud into her hair, nor stuck a bud into a buttonhole on the front of her blouse, where a bud would barely make itself famous, because it was not a bud that would glow in the dark.
Next thing, when her sister was putting her face unpleasantly close to hers, she was uncomforted by the nearness of her sister, or by the apparent growing kindness of her sister, as her sister talked, talked, talked to her, as officially as her sister could manage to about the void.
Sex Solves Problems
There is no going back, and no use insisting I have a bath to look forward to. Is four o’clock too late? Dinner, sure.
As I carried the baby off for her bath, I felt I was doing the right thing. It was what I had been asked to do, and I was trying to be helpful. The baby was naked as a baby, and she took up almost all of the sink, and she was slippery when wet, and not at all easy to hold on to, and I don’t think I got much of the soap on her, and she kept shutting her head up into the faucet.
“I have an idea,” I said. “You better go to bed.”
It was the greatest stroke of luck. It was like putting the baby away. I am not a fusser. It was like having any old thing for dinner and not giving a hoot. This is so basic.
The first person who decided a problem could be solved came up with the idea the same way I did.
We are easy lays, too.
Seraphim
I suppose that I do have places, a few places, left to wear my mustache to. I have worn it almost everywhere. Before we go, I put on my fur coat inside of my house simultaneous with my putting it on. My mustache is faint and spiky. My coat is thick and dark.
Going around town tends to be sad, like walking around behind a dog who won’t go. You wear what you wear. Tonight we are going to the Fontana for pizza. There will be a TV on in there. There will be plastic chandeliers to simulate glass chandeliers. There will be simulated oil paintings on the wall to simulate the idea of things: a woman with a hat on, perhaps her skirt roughed up by the wind, her hand lifted to keep her bonnet on her head.
When the pizza comes, I put a fingertip into my plate to get a crumb stuck to it, then to lick the crumb off.
This is my gift to my children—whereas theirs to me is not to be nasty about having a mother with facial hair.
I am telling you, I never wear it anywhere near my perianal or my vaginal-lips locations. If it as much as touches my eyes, I wash them out with a solution. I promise you—you are an angel!—I keep it out of the reach of the children!
No, Cup
Get the family out forever, out from around the table.
Now, at breakfast, the most important objects on the table are the way-out-of-whack coffee cups for the parents, twice normal size, and their double-sized saucers, all shiny black.
The cups are almost as tall as the normal-sized white pitcher of milk that was there for the children, when the children were there.
The white paper napkin, not nearly as important as the cups are, partially hidden under the biscuits in the basket, and getting soiled by biscuit grease, is sticking up. The points at the corners of the napkin are what stick up the highest, but the points do not reach as high as the white milk pitcher reaches with its lips—pardon, lip. Even so, allow
for the possibility that both the lip of the pitcher and the napkin points express human aspiration, conceptually.
Already, there is too much to think about on the table. What is the most important thing? One of the cups should be enough to think about.
Cup.
The shine on the cup. Light.
No, cup.
The most important thing in any circumstance is what people want to believe is all wrong, you asshole.
Defecation.
My Radiant Girl
I am not so sure there is a reason to tell this except for my wanting to say things about magic, about myth, about legend that might brighten up your day, if you believe in magic, myth, legend. It was Coleridge who said we might brighten up the day this way. Emerson might have said there are real nymphs in your city park, if you look. Oh I’m sure Cocteau and George Eliot had their opinions on nymphs. Let’s say Edith Wharton’s daughter had the last word. I’m adding, though. My nymph in Central Park I did not know was a nymph right off. I believe thoroughly in her now.
The nymphs don’t have to be little. She was. She had removed most of her clothing. Men watched. There she was, oiling herself—an unblemished beauty with her teacup breasts, with boy hips, covered by her sunning suit, which she had had concealed under the other clothes, a necklace rimming her neck, and yellow hair tied back.
She looked at nothing except to do the sunning—to take care of the oil, her skin, and how she should rise up, or she should lie down, or turn—she had to look. Two men next to me, whom I also earnestly watched, watched earnestly.
The Collected Stories of Diane Williams Page 9
