gotcha

just when you thought i had to be finished cleaning out my files ... i found this little bitty i wrote to apply for a scholarship a long time ago. the question in the application: tell us who you are.
i wonder, is it true ... was it true then ...
would i like it to be true ... ?

I accelerate on off-ramps. I have no trouble obeying the speed limit on the freeway, but somehow, after I pass that little green exit sign, I feel like I own those fifty yards. They are calling for a thrilling burst of speed followed by a punch on the breaks.

I live my life like I’m driving down a six-lane freeway, cruising in my own set of wheels and pumping music from the dashboard. Most of the time I’m collected, reasonable; I obey the law. I never need to hit the breaks when I see cop staking out the cars from the side of the road—I’m always going the speed limit, sometimes I’m going under it. But that’s all right with me.

When my father taught me how to drive he was relaxed and laughing in the passenger seat. He told me to pay no attention if people were tailgating me—I should drive comfortable. And if comfortable for me meant fifty-seven in a sixty-five, well, that was all right. I smiled when he told me that. And I’ve been driving comfortable ever since.

I don’t pay any attention when people want me to go along with the crowd; I just live comfortable. Happiness, I’ve found, comes from listening to myself. And somehow, I don’t have a problem with driving slower in a fast-paced world, or doing homework on a Friday night, or eating ice cream outside in the middle of a snowstorm.

But sometimes, life calls for a little craziness. So I push that accelerator all the way to the floor on those off-ramps. Those little detours in life that sometimes make or break us—that take our identity and stretch it out. I build up speed and excitement and passion until I’m certain that, at any moment, I will fly.

stricken

things i can no longer remember:

1. the date of the spanish armada's defeat
2. what my hair looks like blow-dried
3. when henry last ate
4. if he ate
5. if i ate
6. the name of the painting by whistler with his mother sitting in a rocking chair
7. the premise of post-colonial literary theory
8. how to analyze non-canonical english constructions
9. the name of my third grade teacher
10. what i look like without these extra 15 pounds
11. the taste of authentic mexican food
12. how it feels to sleep through the night
13. or eat a meal without holding someone on my lap
14. what mr. kurtz was referring to when he said the horror, the horror
15. who john galt is
16. whether i was disgusted or excited by ibsen's "a doll's house"
17. how empty the house was before hal's little laugh

cavity

i'm still wallowing in word document nostalgia. [i think only a bludgeon could make me stop.]

i wrote the following nearly eight years ago, in my very first fiction workshop [sniff], before i even met my dentist husband.

I think my dentist is trying to kill me. The way he looks at me—those murderous eyes. His instruments are so cold. The pick digs between my gums, leaving trails of blood to pool inside my lips. He wears a mask, but I know the dentist is smiling underneath the elevator music and sterile gauze. He loves pain; must have been the kind of child who tipped over beetles and let them die with their legs clawing at the air. He hands me toothpaste and floss, smiling, expecting me again in sixth months. I tell him never to expect anything.

I told Nana about the dentist, and she just nodded her head slowly, patting the wispy hairs on my head. She always hated the dentist too—the way he hides behind the diploma framed in the corner of the room. As if education gave someone the right to kill. She took my hand in hers, little knuckles and fingers swallowed up in wrinkles. She hushed me with her finger to her lips; I kept my mouth shut, smiling. It was our secret. I told her all my secrets.

But I didn’t tell her when my goldfish died. It turned up floating in its little bowl of water. Blue and red pebbles anchored with unforgiving gravity to the bottom. Nana got me the goldfish. She brought it home one day in her pocket bulging with the plastic bag full of water. Sometimes it was the only friend I had when Nana was gone. I loved to watch the way its tiny mouth opened and closed in constant surprise. But when my goldfish died, bobbing along the top of the water, I could only press my face against the glass, clouding my fishbowl with fingerprints and hot breath.

I reached in and pulled the goldfish out, holding it in my hands, watching the body motionless. I put it on the counter. My eyes level with the small pile of gold, as water dribbled out of its gills and pooled around its small body. Eyes red-rimmed and startled. So red, the capillaries had burst. Exploded.

Like fireworks on the Fourth of July, as I lay on the grass and spread out my arms, wide. Trying to hold the sky. But my little arms never stretched far enough. Even when me and Nana lay side by side, with our fingertips touching, just barely. Our skin grazing as we looked up and up and up. Into space. We always liked the way the fireworks popped and exploded across the darkness, sparkling and then fading black. Nana said I’m like the fireworks. She said one day someone will set fire to me and I will shoot from horizon to horizon, leaving a trail.

Nana said her ankles might explode—the way they swelled so. She sat in her armchair most of the day, resting. Her legs stuck stick-straight out from her body to the ottoman like red-hot pokers. With the blood pooling around her toes and feet and ankles and heels, waiting for her heart to decide to pump again. I laid with my head on her chest listening to the thump, thump, thump; whispering, pump the blood back up. From her legs. Pump it back up.

She fell asleep, mouth slack, hands limp at her sides. I tapped on her rib cage, steady. My index fingers to her bones. Pump, little heart. Take the blood back up the veins, up the veins. Make the blue blood red. Red.

Even then, her apron never came off; just in case, Nana said. Its garish blue and red flowers and bow in front. Most people tie their bows in back, but Nana didn’t like bows in back where she couldn’t see them. She didn’t trust them. Her hat never came off either, even when she brushed her teeth. Her way of hiding, I guess. I wore a hat too, brushing my teeth, smiling through the white froth smeared on my lips and spitting flecks onto the mirror. Then I laughed while Nana rubbed the white spots off with toilet paper.

But no one could rub Nana’s pain away—not those men in white jackets. They kept sucking things out of her and squirting things into her anyway. I waited for them to straighten Nana up, take the kink from her back. I waited. Even through the tears—hers and mine—I waited. But still her body bent forward and collapsed on the backs of chairs. And she gasped.

So they told Nana to lie in bed. She hated that bed, the way it penned her in her head all day. Couldn’t dance across the bathroom when the blood lived down in her feet and toes. I carried piles of books under each arm and sat on her pillow, touching her downy white hair. With a match, we could have made the bed a funeral pyre. Nana laughed when I told her that. Her wide smile bunched the skin up on her face; her teeth were missing and her lips curled around her gums. She ran her hand along my cheekbone.

But she got sicker. So much sicker. They forced her to the hospital with smells that reach up into your nostrils and won’t let you forget. She shriveled up in the hospital bed—so penned up. Small, crinkled, broken. I sat, holding her hand, smoothing her knuckles and tucking the thin, blue blanket around her bones. A metal tray stood next to her bed. Had different kinds of Jell-O in paper cups. Paper cups with bottoms that got weak and soggy. Red and blue. She hated Jell-O, the way it quivered and jumped. Nana couldn’t jump any more. Said she was like a wet noodle.
The dentist has a metal tray like Nana’s. But it swings around on a giant arm and he hovers over it. Delighted at the thought of torture. His hand trembles above each instrument; which one today, I’m sure he wonders. The sander is the worst. The way it rips the enamel from my teeth in tiny specks that flash around my mouth and then settle on my lips. He laughs and hands me a tissue as though I can wipe it all away and forget.

Nana never forgot anything—her memories were alive, always burning inside her mind. When she told a story, her eyes lit up like fire. She forced her memories to get up and dance in front of me; so that I could almost smell them, taste them, touch them.
But in the hospital, the fire was in her body. Spread from her lymph nodes, that’s what the doctor said. Lymph nodes sounded awful strange to Nana. Couldn’t see lymph nodes, couldn’t trust them. I blame those lymph nodes, those secret things that nobody sees, for the way her hair fell out. For the way her body hunched and crippled and tore itself from the inside out. When she spoke—small, quiet, little words. She missed apricots and string beans. And hanging from the oak tree out front to stretch her spine. She looked down at her hands, the fingers spread wide and the skin of her palms stretched taught. The capillaries burst underneath her skin. Spots of red. Their edges blurred and ran together. It was no use pressing my ear to her chest and begging her heart anymore.

They begged me to smile and wear a dress when Nana was laid out cold in her red mahogany box. The room moist and hot with tears. I covered my face, cursing the lymph nodes, the secret things. Between my fingers, I saw my relatives wrapped in black. Hushed. I stared at Nana, her legs stiff underneath her skirt. Flowers clogged the room. Bursts of red shoved into the corners. Like capillaries. Like fireworks.

I walked small and careful, step by step, up to her box. She didn’t much like to lie down, she would rather sit in her chair. I tried to tell them about her chair, tried to tell them. So many things, about Nana. About me. Even her downy white hair looked dead. Soulless. I ran my finger along her veins tracing lines across her arms, her hands—running after the blood. Not blue, not red. Sucked right out.
Sometimes the dentist sucks out my saliva. A white tube that he tucks in the corner of my mouth. My cheeks, my tongue, my palate—all dry as a cotton ball on the road in July. When he’s finished, he squirts a stream of water right on my incisors, my bicuspids. I jump; it’s so cold.

The dentist says that I have a cavity. A hole. A weak spot. An empty place.
I wonder what else the dentist knows.