Comeuppance

She was the trophy girl in high school. The boys wanted her the way boys want girls; the girls hated her for being the girl the boys wanted. She learned to watch the illusion of relationship. She learned to protect herself from adolescent male greed. She learned to be alone. For years she watched herself and her lovers reading from the script. Inevitably, the same conclusion: what the boy wants. She'd get there, and then she would burn the script, walk away.

High school taught her well.

Years later during a chance encounter: "Maura never liked the way you treated her friends." Those boys, and I was one of them, he meant. "And she wanted you to know that.”

She closed her eyes and saw again the glaring girls who hated her into solitude. She said nothing.

"Why are you blushing?" he asked.

She smiled; said nothing. She had learned well.

Why Haven't You...?

I was teaching my worst class--you know, the most difficult, obstreperous kids. They were at a simmer. I had them, but barely. The cell phone went off. I answered it--reflexively, you know? I mean, I never take the phone out during class, but this time I did. And I flipped it open and said, "Hello." It was not a question. Maybe I was expecting the call? I don't know.

The voice on the other end said, "I don't know why you haven't put a bullet through your head yet."

I looked around at the faces of the sociopaths. I said, "I don't know. I'll get back to you," an slid the phone back into my pocket.

It woke me up, you know? I was sweating. Sleeping on my belly, the sweat was all over me. I raised my body and it just tricked down to my underpants and rolled along the top of the elastic.

"I won't sleep now," I thought.

I didn't sleep.

When I got out the next day, I told everybody this dream. Not my kid, you know? She couldn't handle it. Shouldn't. She's a child. But I told others. I needed to. As if telling them would keep me from doing it. I felt like the Manchurian candidate in a way, you know? Like I was told to shoot myself in the head and I would and it left me feeling very, very tired. Though I wasn't the least bit annoyed, you know?

The voice? You mean on the phone? It was another teacher.

I don't know what it means. But I don't want to hear that voice in my dreams again.

The Baby Dreams

She never checked her baby at night. She never felt inclined to. Her husband, she knew, checked the little girl, who was now nine months’ old, whenever she made a sound loud enough for the intercom to deliver it above his snoring in his bedroom. She and her daughter slept soundly in their rooms, and the mother never knew until he said in the morning that he had checked the child that they even had slept. The night passed that quickly. Perhaps she trusted sleep and, therefore, never roused herself for her daughter as night traveled through their lives. Surely, she trusted her husband and only half believed the parenting magazines’ foretelling the dangers of a baby’s sleeping on her stomach, as her child did. Her daughter sought that position, perhaps because the pressure of the mattress was like an embrace, and that was enough. Her daughter would always be fine. She would not look in the room.

She did one night, however. She thought she would have a look for the sheer pleasure of it and out of a vague, new sense of concern. She perhaps sensed that some other being was present, rather like when she could feel that a deer must be watching her from behind some leaves. She would turn and there would be the animal, watching and waiting for the moment when it would flee. It stung her deeply that they feared her.

She crept along the edge of the hallway, where the carpet was not worn and the floorboards did not squeak under the pressure of her weight, until she was just outside the nursery. She thought she could feel the light of the full moon streaming down her body. It was sweat, though. It was a humid August night, and the slow-moving air brought no relief. Along the way down the hall she had fought sleep, until she reached the child’s room. Then, notions of sleep fled her body.

From the doorway, where she stood frozen, she saw her child merrily awake in the arms of a woman who looked very much like the new mother’s grandmother. It could not be; her grandmother had died seventeen years to the day her daughter was born. The elderly woman sat in the bamboo chair that had belonged to her in life and cradled the bright little girl, who was reaching for her great-grandmother’s face and giggling. Then, the old lady dangled her beaded necklace in front of the child, who squealed with glee. Neither the baby nor the woman in the chair—the young woman was sure it was her grandmother—noticed the startled, wide-eyed woman in the doorway. Nor did it seem they would, for the woman was unable to bring herself beyond the door or to make a sound. She stood, mesmerized, until it seemed she woke up in her bed.

So still she had lain that the sheets were still cool and smooth and tucked in with the forty-five-degree hospital exactitude that had always marked the comfort of her grandmother’s guest bed. Indeed, the light bed sheets had been the only attempt at neatness that her grandmother had ever made. The young woman never mastered the art but was happy when the bed looked smooth under the thick quilt that dressed it by day. The young mother awoke to a cool morning, the soft fog and clouds of which promised that, if the sun were to rise that day, it would leave soft shadows. The memory of last night tumbled like rain into her consciousness as she sat up, and she lept from the bed and ran to her child’s crib; the baby slept.

Despite her relief, the young woman was not satisfied that her experience last night was a dream. She turned to the bamboo chair and sniffed the cushions for the scent of Chanel No. 5, the fragrance that pervaded everything her grandmother had owned. The scent was not there. The young woman stood up, disappointed, and returned her gaze to the sleeping child. She wondered whether she should tell her husband? No. No, because she believed her grandmother had been there, had loved her child, hand not seen or wanted to see her--and might come back, if she did not tell her husband.

She emerged from her sound sleep the next night to discover a different visitor with her child. This woman was her great-grandmother, after whom the child was named. The young mother was a child when the daughter’s namesake died. She could remember only a gentlewoman in a wheelchair who allowed the girl to ride the chair’s footplates from room to room. She took the ride only because she was afraid not to. Do what you’re told, her parents had told her. The baby gurgled to the lady, who put a delicate doll in the baby’s arms. The young mother remembered that the doll had belonged to this visitor’s daughter, the young woman’s grandmother. As the young mother remembered the doll, however, it was undressed and missing a leg; this doll was in perfect condition and dressed beautifully. Her daughter’s face shone bright for the elderly woman, whose purse, the young woman was sure, jangled as she shifted the baby’s weight in her lap.

Next morning, the young woman did not tell her husband that she saw their daughter with the child’s great-great-grandmother. He would ask what she had done about it. Did she enter the room? Rescue the baby? Call the police? He would be annoyed with her for trusting a stranger in the house with their child. He would not understand, or believe, that the woman was family and that the child had been safe. Then, too, she could not explain why she could not enter the room. Something had prevented her from entering the nursery, accosting the visitor, and taking back the child. On each occasion, she had sensed that her staying out of the room was the right thing to do. Besides, she might have dreamed the whole thing.

The visits continued but seemed to have no recognizable effect on the baby. She awoke at the usual hours, giggled and played and pulled herself up at the usual intervals, and napped as usual. The young woman would check the child during the baby’s daytime naps only to discover that the child was fine, asleep, and alone. The young mother realized great peace in watching her child sleep, as if her years of living and waiting and seeking joy had come together in a beautiful life. Nothing else mattered. Why shouldn’t the child have a unique, perhaps spiritual, relationship with long-dead members of the family? The visits continued.

On one especially long, humid night, a man that the young woman recognized as the child’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather took her daughter in his arms while he sat in the bamboo chair. She recognized his wizened beard, large ears, tight mouth, and bright eyes from a photo that she had found in her grandmother’s attic when she was a child. The old man and his wife, farmers, grimaced at the camera. The photo troubled her when she was young; she was frightened to think their blood was her own, that such poverty and trouble had preceded and, in some way, determined her life long ago. Sawdust and manure clung to the old man’s trousers even now. He and his son George trapped beaver in water very near the young woman’s house. They kept a horse on whom their lives depended. He was their wealth when they lived very near the young woman’s home. The old man kept diaries. “Shooting in town last night. George out.” Now he held her child.

There was now gentleness in his face that had evaded the camera in his sturdy portrait. They baby reached impudently for his long beard and tugged as she giggled with self-satisfaction. She held the coarse grey wool covering his chin and pulled herself up by it; the old man hugged her. This time, the young woman wanted to join her child and the ancestor. She wanted to tell the old man she admired his courage to carve a living out of a miserable hillside and his success. She was proud of all he had done for his neighbors when they were sick or in need of hands to harvest their crops—the terse diaries told his story—but she could not, of course.

Man after woman after woman came until, one night, they all came and interacted with each other and the baby as if it were a party. The same sense of vague energy pulled the young woman from her bad to the end of the all to observe her child. Each guest, in turn, turned to her, nodded, and then turned back to the baby. They greeted her one at a time. She gripped the door casing until the last visitor acknowledged her, but she felt no need to enter the room.

The child was safe in the arms of her grandmother, who was talking to a woman the young mother did not recognize. Then, the young woman’s great-grandfather took the child and nodded to her in the doorway. This man had supported his wife, their six children, and his mother- and sisters-in-law. He had been a plumber. The baby reached for his earlobe, and he slowly, gently lowered his head so that she could succeed. The baby giggled.

Now she realized it was for her to come and watch her daughter as the child touched her ancestors’ faces and giggled. Perhaps she had done the same as a child. She felt a palpable sense to these visits, though she could not name it. She felt she did not need to, anyhow. A sense of heavy sleepiness suddenly overwhelmed her and she turned, her heavy head lowered, to return to bed. “I will ask her someday,” she thought as she pulled the covers about her neck, "what it was like to know them.” Perhaps she would have wondered something else if she had seen beyond the open door to the crib, where the child lay sleeping the whole time, as she did every night. Nevertheless, she awoke early next morning, sure that she had slept the night in her grandmother’s arms.

Coming Home

All those months (months!) of running around (there is no other way to put it) had taken their toll. She was tired. Depleted. In fact, after a shower that morning, she nearly fell over as she took her jeans off their hook in the closet. They weighed more than she had remembered.

A conversation (Conversation? An honest question, more like it.) that had gone South in the mind of her lover was the final kick over the precipice of her ill health. For a time she enjoyed the free fall. She knew well enough how those ended; she knew to enjoy the ride.

When are you coming home? she had asked.

When I have a job, he replied.

You could take it on faith, come home, and look for a job, she said.

I have a job here now, though, he said. It's not much, but it's a job.

You could find a similar job here and keep looking, she said.

It seemed so reasonable. It seemed so....

I am tired of being alone, she ventured.

Don't I keep you from feeling alone? he asked.

Yes. But I am alone. Here and now, I am alone. And I am tired, she replied.

I am sorry you feel that way, that I don't fill you up.

You do, she said, yet it is a simple physical fact that there is nobody here in the room with me. That is the kind of alone I am tired of.

He disappeared from the conversation. She said she was tired and needed to sleep. He told her he loved her. She replied in kind. They slept simultaneously and one hundred and two miles apart.

Her sleep was as deep as death but not long enough. When she awoke, she recalled the conversation. She knew he wasn't coming home anytime soon. Maybe not at all. She accepted it, put on her heavy old jeans, and tried to walk.

She called him. He asked her how she was feeling.

Tired, she said.

You need to take better care of yourself, he said.

The irony very nearly killed her.

Flash Fiction 55: My Reality X 3

She brought in a half-empty bottle of wine; he knew where she had been.

She brought in leftover food; he knew what she had done.

"Where were you?"

She closed her eyes and for a moment stood under the ancient grapes breathing deeply the fragrance of abandon of the night before.

Silent, she walked away.

****************

He made love to her in every way; she received him eagerly; time stopped. On the other side of the world, his lover from years back googled this new lover’s name and found her blog, searched his name, found so little—but enough to know she still couldn’t imagine why she had loved and lost.

****************

The grape vines connecting the ancient, failing buildings behind his grandfather’s home of long ago were the strongest things about the buildings. The grapes were so blue they were black and full and perfect, and she wanted to take them in her mouth and devour them. She was a hungry woman. He showed her everything.

****************

And the woman on the other side of the world?

What about her? he might ask.

Oh, indeed, she might ask and likely will.

What happens to love? To passion? And why?

The questions are fair. And it’s so good to know.

But who knows, and who can say?

Oh, indeed, who knows the answers?