Lingering

 Lingering

Yah . . . it is true.  I do linger . . . loiter . . . take my time making my way home from school. Dawdling she calls it, like doodling, like I’m some stub of a pencil aimlessly inscribing a path through the snow covered street.   Dawdling. . .

            “Jack, get the hell in here right now.”  

I laugh (just in my head though).  She’s got on Sam’s old rubber boots, the black ones with the green stripe running ‘round them, with her jeans stuffed right down inside and dirty old  rubber bands stretched around the tops of the damn boots holding in her jeans.  She’s got those bright yellow rubber kitchen gloves on too, but that’s nothing new.  It’s the rubber bands I can’t get over - wrapped around her wrists and ankles like she doesn’t want to expose any skin or nothing. 

            Kali is propped on the floor in the living room crying; her dollhouse stuff is semi-circled around her caging her in, her half empty bottle lying just outside the arc of toys.   I can hear the twins, Jacob and Daniel, upstairs play wrestling and laughing and I hope they stay up there and keep it down, ‘cause I know someone’s in for it. 

Rubber-handed, she grabs me by the sleeve of my jacket—my favourite one, the navy hoodie that’s worn so it feels just right, the one that used to be Sam’s—and, yanks me into the hall. 

“For Christ’s sake, get the broom and kill it,” she says. 

Peeling gloves, reaching for her cigarettes, she heads out the front door for the porch.

           

Man, I should have guessed.  She must have been freaking out all afternoon.   I scoop up Kali and her bottle and plop her in the big armchair in the living room and make my way into the kitchen where the broom is tucked in beside the fridge.  

I feel queasy, sick inside.   I can smell the mouse now, close, heavy with rat poison, hiding somewhere, knowing, waiting for death.   The broom feels odd in my hands, too long for me, not sturdy enough.  I wish I had gloves.  I stop in the middle of the kitchen listening, waiting.  If I’m lucky, it’ll be in the kitchen and make a scurrying sound on the linoleum ‘cause I don’t want to think about having to search the rest of the house.   I stand there - oh so still - trying not to think, listening to the sound of my own heart.

Kali starts crying again and I have to go into the living room to soothe her. 

            “Kali, Kali, shh, shh, I need to listen for the mouse,” I say.

            A basket of unfolded laundry, greying socks and underwear, is piled high on the pink (dusty rose, she calls it) chesterfield and I pray that the mouse hasn’t curled up inside searching for its last warm bed.   I can hear the twins arguing now and I yell at them not to come downstairs.

I listen and wait.

I am sure I see movement in my peripheral vision and I feel a tight knot, a kind of ache, forming in my chest.  The movement is quick, but I am good at sensing their presence.  Sometimes I see them in my dreams—a tail disappearing under a pedal of the old piano or, worse, under the oven drawer.   My eyes scout the room wanting, and not wanting, to find that mouse.   Again, I wait and listen.  Kali whimpers. 

Ode to Hemingway on the 50th anniversary of that death

More unfinished fiction. . .
           I am not, I think, a violent man.  I can, and do, on occasion, take part in light-hearted fraternal one-up-man-ship usually involving good quantities of alcohol, but more times than not limited to the standard and unimaginative—beer chugging, cards, snooker, or, that old stand by— the sword fight.  But, since my college days, when naively thinking it was the right thing to do, I pummeled Eddie C. black and blue for something he said to a less than comely girl whose name I have since forgotten (if, in fact, I ever knew it), I have channeled my aggressions to the odd boast or dare or arm wrestle.

            Channeled is perhaps the wrong word.  One I do not like and one that seems to imply a conscious effort.  My wife uses it often, probably on the advice of her well-intentioned, but less than helpful marriage counselor.  I say “her” because, as far as I am concerned, we have no need for counseling.  Seeing a counselor is, in my humble opinion, simply one of those “in” things to do.  It is difficult for me to envision what in the hell they, the counselor and my wife, talk about.   Caroline is a “no nonsense” mid-western girl, straight talking and right to the point—no heavy-handed abstractions for her, just tell it like it is.  I imagine poor Harry Dueck has trouble charging her, although, I am sure, there is due compensation in leaning back in his chair gazing at my wife reclining just short of seductively on his couch.  

Most likely though, Harry doesn’t use a couch, preferring a “business” approach, new age music, and a clean air policy.  Poor Harry, he doesn’t know what he’s missing.  Me, if I were a therapist, I’d have a dark cluttered office at the end of some dingy hall, dim lighting, overstuffed chairs, books strewn haphazardly about, and old Van Morrison tapes crooning in the background encouraging intimate talk—or, better, no talk at all.  

But Harry.  Harry is a different guy.  Nice guy.  Sincere.  Earnest.  A hard worker.   Good at what he does without getting too involved.  That’s the key— not getting involved.  That’s where I’d come apart, get lost in their lives, add to their entanglements, and send them off with bad advice.

            What Harry and Caroline talk about?  Gardening? Our friends?  Harry’s wife Beth?  Harry’s kids?  Caroline probably gives him advice.  The funny thing about Caroline is, even if she did have something to say, I doubt she’d confide—she’s just not that kind of woman.  Hell, for all I know they won’t even talk about last night other than to worry a bit about how I’m doing or to wonder what the hell came over me.  Harry will say it was the liquor and Caroline will just let it go at that.

            She knows me better though.

           

I don’t think I have any regrets, just an odd sort of uneasy feeling.  No, not unease— more like light-headedness—release.  Christ, John deserved it.   I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole damned bar was silently cheering me on hoping I’d spill more blood, leave more bruises, throw a few chairs.  Not that I don’t like John, he’s a likable enough guy; no, nothing on such a personal level.  Besides, I’m sure they’ve forgotten already—an event to be exclaimed over lending interest to an otherwise dull evening.

            That I managed to be the center of this little brawl is not, you understand, true to character.  I prefer a quieter kind of attention, you know, not-so-accidental glances held a moment too long risking just the slightest danger of betrayal.  That kind of thing.  I used to think Caroline indulged me in this.  In a sense she does, but she misunderstands.  She prefers what she, with emphasis, calls an honest approach—open flirtation.  She wants the guy across the room to confront her and tell her how beautiful she is (and they usually do).  Don’t get me wrong, I like this about Caroline, but, it’s not what I’m looking for.

            What I want?   I want to forget where I am, to reduce my existence to holding some woman’s gaze for as long as I can, to savor the moment, to hold on to the present as an ever possible future begging god to let that hand-worn ground-beaten pigskin ball hang in the air just a few seconds longer . . .  and then, you’ll never ask for anything again.

            Usually, about this time, Ed leans over and interrupts with something like, “Sure good to that dress isn’t she?” 

Escape

It struck him that if he could have sex with this girl for one second he could face his parents confidently, and that if he could keep on having sex with this girl once every minute for as long as his parents were in town he could survive their entire visit.

             from The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

She no longer remembers clearly when the visitants became rooted . . . became the host . . . stayed, but what she does know all too well is the guilt-ridden, heart-torn, angst-filled insistent (persistent) inner voice that forever upbraids yet silently wishes (oh so selfishly wishes) that they had not stayed, wishes, in fact, that they still traveled from afar leaving her innocently blithely free of the inevitable weighing decisions.

It is eating away at her—the waiting, the watching, the knowledge—the expectation that she, the first born, will step forward, take care, solve the unsolvable problem, provide the necessary relief.  It is, after all, what she has always done. But this is Loyd's mystic square—impossible to resolve—the Manhattan distances insurmountable.