The morning slices into me. I sleep
with the residue of her lips on my heart, and she is upstairs, in her own bed
clouded with stuffed animals and comforters, 20 feet above me, if it was two
years later the audacious writer wouldn’t have spent the day being so maudlin,
he would have kissed her the first night he was in town, he would have showered
her with flowers the second he got off the plane, everything he would have said
would have painted the mural of ecstasy on to her lips, he would have made vows
and publically composed odes about her beauty—but he is unfledged and coy and
she is upstairs, twenty feet above him, sleeping in sweatpants and a tee-shirt,
wearing the retainer she always wears when she sleeps that makes it look like
she has braces. She is sleeping their, her dog on the bottom of her bed,
coddled into a warm mound of flesh, lingering above me like the most beautiful
cloud.
There is the sound of muffled
overhead thumping. The morning sun
sidles into the down stairs basement window in thick fibers and strands of
light.
I arrive out of bed like a
caricature in a children’s pop-up book clad only in my boxers. My hair is
slightly unkempt. From the opposite side
of the ceiling it sounds as if someone is trying to move a piano over the
linoleum of the kitchen floor in their socks.
The entirety of my anatomy is stiff and kicking like a toddler learning
to swim for the woman who is twenty feet above me. The women whose residue is
still on my lips.
Perhaps because she planted the
petals of her lips on my lips last night I have slept better and am the last
one up. Whereas the Snow family slept in on Saturday a hearty bustle seems
alert and agog before 8am Sunday morning. Somewhere in the house the scent of
coffee reaches that of my olfactory senses. I sit up in bed, my shirt off, the
morning light leaking through the bottom eye-lid of the basement window in
horizontal slants of fool’s gold. My bag is close to me, my notebook splayed
open like something shot and wounded I pick up my pen and begin to chisel
thoughts into stanzas. There is the
smell of cleansing—steam sifting from a recently brewed vat of beckoning
caffeinated ambrosia.
I can’t help but mentally pun that the Snow
family is turning into an overhead blizzard-like flurry of upstairs activity.
I have stepped into one of the two
pairs of jeans I brought with me. I am walking around with my shirt off. My
hair is unkempt.
A voice carols down the stairs as
if floating.
“David, do you want to take a
shower or something?”
Downstairs there is a bathroom the
size of a walk-in closet in a college dorm room with sink and a pisser and a
mirror and bad flowery late 70’s wallpaper yet no shower. I still smell like
smoke. I don’t think I’ve showered since Thurs night. A slight film is
beginning to form like sandpaper frost across the angular contours of my
visage.
I still smell like cigar smoke. I
want to keep Megan’s odor from when I held her on the couch last night on my
body as long as somehow is humanly possible.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, the
moonlight mist of her scent still wading over my limbs like a cloud. There is
still more furniture-mover scurrying upstairs.
Splashing water on my face, I notice that if I still squint into the
chrome vertical hung rectangle above the sink my eyes still look like they have
spent the last twenty-four hours crying uncontrollably.
I leave the bathroom and walk to my
makeshift bed, tucking in the covers, smoothing out the mattress, placing my
gray shirt (thankful that I don’t have to get overly dressed up for church)
around the doughy contours of my limbs, placing the contexts back into my red duffel bag. A pair of rolled
jeans. Goiter-sox that are rolled into
each other and look like they could be humping. I place in the black notebook
where I have been scribbling my thoughts all weekend, chronicling every
molecular facet of the sojourn. I place in my photo album aptly titled Youth.
The last thing I place into the bag is the copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of
Grass, as if it were some sort of tombstone for a veteran dead in war.
Looking behind me I notice that the
video tape of Before Sunrise is jutting its plastic tongue out at me through
the hyphenated mouth of the VCR and that Megan will need it rewound before she
returns it tot eh one video store in Appleton where her credit is still good. I
try to rewind but every time it appears the cartridge has seemingly rewound it
only gets as far as the beginning of the closing credits, the last scene of
Celine looking out the window of a lapsing train, a violin decrescendoing into
a weep in the background as a slight forbidden smile untucks itself from
somewhere inside her lips. It is the same song I was listening to in my head
three days ago as I prepared to leave on my sojourn and now, I keep listening
to it, I keep listening to living life over and over again like a round.
After
listening to the song for the third time I take the cartridge out, get down on
both knees as if waiting to be blessed, and blow.
***
We are late for church. Her parents have already left. Megan is
dressed in a brown dress the color of the season, politely smoothed out and
pleasantly hung near the caps of her knees.
“Pico? Pico?” She asks, scurrying
around the living room. Pinecones and twigs leave her footsteps, her body is a
carousel found in the autumnal woods, deep, constructing from the dregs of fur
and pine. The carpet becomes a heavily trodden sallow ribbon, ferrying
footsteps deep into he well of Fairytales and childhood funnel cakes.
“Pico?’ Megan’s voice slaps the
living room ceiling fan with a mild echo. Without looking at me, she turns
around and prances up the stairs, yelling out the dog’s name, leaving me all
alone in the living room of the house. All alone with the bookcases and the
fireplace; all alone with the grand piano and the apple orchard at dusk drained
silence. All alone, momentarily, with my thoughts, her voice being bushing and
pressed throughout her lungs in various floors of the abode. Near the cobbled
entrance, where her parents gripped my palm just less than forty hours ago,
there are retro-glossed sheen Olin Mills portraits of the Snow family household
in various stages of their career. The one in the center, side of a window,
shows her father still looking modest in a off-tan three piece suit, her
mother, long velvet hair dripping off of her shoulders into a flowered blouse
with water fountain puffed pads foaming between jointed shoulder and chin. A
child, no more than perhaps four fingers, stands as the bridge between the
progenitors. Clasped between the matriarchs arm, attired in a little outfit, is
Megan. A smile blossoming into a ray of sunshine beaming forth from near her
brow.
Megan has still not arrived from
above the balcony of steps. I hear carpeted thuds, and the occasional door
slam. I hear Megan almost cursing to herself, looking for the damn dog.
“Pico! Pico!” Megan yells, her
voice itch against the carpet and the wallpaper. I stare at the ponderous drag
of the grand piano, how it looks almost like some water buffalo grazing. From
behind the day sofa, I see a brown sphere, coddling it’s limbs so that it
resembles a globe. Without thinking I lift Pico up in the air, cradling him,
holding him the way Megan’s mother is holding her in the portrait just inside
the alcove.
There are more hurried carpeted
steps. The lower hemisphere of Megan’s outfit is twirling around the final dash
of stairs. Her body hushes when she looks at me, Pico cradled in my arms, very
silently. With her mouth still buttoned she nears, holding out both hands. I
feel her arms as we barter the warm creature between us. She looks down at Pico
and then looks back into my eyes, a ruffled smile purling into her lips.
“Come on,” She says. “We need to
get to Church. My parents are going to wonder where we are.”
***
Frost licks its icy tongue into the
Earth early in mid-Wisconsin. I think of my father, late for his students,
holding his milked coffee, placing the thermos above the car as he first picks
the veneer of opaque frost from the windshield, tapping his limbs around the
old Pontiac, as if a dentist scrapping plaque from the caves of an inner
patrons mouth.
Megan is an old pro at this. I open
the car door and step inside as she immediately slaps the metallic door shut in
my face, surrounded my icy mirror that occludes my frosty vision with thick
sheaths of ice. The car is started and within thirty seconds I will no longer
be able to see my breath bubbled out before me as I speak. Megan twists the
keys in the ignition and operates the defrost on the windshield. She shimmies
around the car, dutifully scrapping off peels of frost, her scraper
transitioning into a military barber’s electric sears, granting the glass a
mandatory butch before Basics.
By the time she has circled the
caravan she slaps the side door close. Ice still gelled on the windshield,
flipping the wipers on, it quickly dissolves in two thick exclamatory marked
swipes. The inside car is toasty, and her head rotates behind the seat as she
pulls back and swooshes out a u, into the manor of Beeechwood court, where
heaps of leaves remained piles and pyred at the corner, awaiting the snuffed
arrival of the mechanical dinosaur to sniff them up.
“That was good,” I say, endeavor to communicate in terms of
small talk. “I’ve never seen a windshield thawed like that before.” Megan just
looks at me, slightly nods her head, and continues driving. I look at the cover
to the BEST MIXED TAPE I HAVE EVER HEARD and try not to think about her
boyfriend in Minnesota, try not to think about the mixed tapes I made for her.
Think about the long winding letters sloppily composed in blue-ink that looked
like spiked river hydraulics. Try not to think about any of this, as we drive,
into Downtown Appleton. I am seated next to her, my hand pressed against the
side of my face, trying not to hurt inside.
***
The church is located by the river, behind College avenue.
It is masonry granite and has an autumnal flare to it. Megan tells me that
there is only one service this weekend since the church is celebrating some
sort of anniversary everyone is agog and moving furntiure to verify there is enough room after the service for the potluck dinner.
Upon entering the building we immediately saunter into the Pastor.
“Why don’t you guys help and move
some more chairs.” He says, pointing to the community room off the ramp in the
narthex where the après service celebration dinner will transpire.
“Okay,” She
says, sounding unsure, sounding that she doesn’t want to get a verbal lecture
by the Reverend who confirmed her four years earlier.
Megan and I
each pick up a single chair and follow the rest of the teal-tie parishioners
into the community room, where set are tables each with what appears to a plate
of wafers and miniaturized plastic shot glasses full of wine as a center piece.
“It looks
like the room is already set for the dinner.” I say.
“What
should we do with the chairs?” She says, holding the chair by the back oak stem
as if trying to pick up a sack of potatoes, reminiscent of the illegitimate
ersatz child they make you carry around
the halls in highschool health classes.
“I don’t
know,” I say, looking back into Megan at the brown skirt she is wearing that
seems to correlate perfectly with the autumnal light. Sun is screeching into
the room from the east the way sunlight enters the church in spring on easter
morning. There is something beautiful in the method in which Megan is holding
the chair. Instead of sitting it down and resting she lets it slip just a
little bit and then reels it up, near her chin as if trying to perform one
final push up in the presidential fitness test fashion.
I tell
Megan we should set the chairs down and go sit into the sanctuary.
“We just
can’t leave the chairs here.” She says, sounding as if she is talking
about orphans in a third world country.
“It sounds
like church is starting though.”
“Church
won’t be starting for another fifteen minutes.” Megan then punctuates with a
rejoinder stating that besides, the pastor told us too.
I set my
chair down but Megan is still holding hers up as if she is breast feeding a
four year old. From years seeped in Lutheran liturgy mistakenly call the
community room the narthex.
“By the
way, have I told you you look nice today. I like that dress. It’s very apropos for the season”
Megan
smiles before she tells me that I don’t have to tell her that every time I see
her, David.
A friend of Megan is holding a flute and playing
with the scattered group of amateur musicians. He has long yellow hair that
looks like he dyed it with a stroke of sunlight and is lanky and the totem pole
and there is something about him faintly reminiscent of Drosselmeyer from the
Nutrcracker or the Horny old Uncle who has to register every three months for charges
related to youth and sexual misconduct. Megan looks at me and tells me that she
will be right back. I am sitting on the pew alone when I feel a subtle punch on
the back of my shoulders and realize that it is Megan’s father. He has a smile on his face. He inquires how I
like Sunday morning here in good old Appleton Wisconsin.
***
Even though the Lutheran Church Megan attends is not
Missouri Synod the flow of the service basically adheres to the formula I have
followed every Sunday morning of my life. There are hymns. There are readings
where the audience is require to perform calisthenics, there is the welcome
where everyone looks around as if befuddled and lost and says the words peace
be with you while shaking hands in Native American treaty like fashion. Since
this is a special service commemorating some sort of cornerstone anniversary
for the church Megan’s Mom is the MC introducing several special Guests. A lady
with blue hair from within the congregation reads a poem she wrote to
commemorate the occasion which makes my, “In
a world so jaded so inane/ to put its trust in Kurt Cobain.” Poem I wrote
in high school look like it just won a National Book Award. The main guest is a
writer named Tom Hegg, who wrote a best-selling thoroughly ilustrated Christmas book in the
early 80’entitled A Cup of Christmas Tea.
He teaches drama at a hoity-toity prep-school in Minnesota and just scribed
another book about a Grateful-Dead looking Teddy Bear named PEEF who has either
found Santa Christ or Jesus Claus or both.***
It is after church. Megan and I are seated in the room where two
hours earlier we were inexplicably holding chairs to our knees only she excuses herself and says she will return back in a minute. I am seated
near the front of the room since Megan’s mom is still em-ceeing. The tables are
round and host eight. I sit down next to Megan. On my opposite side is Mister
Snow. In the center of the table there is a variegated teddy Bear.
Megan slides down next to me and says sorry she had to pee.
Megan's mom continues to MC. She introduces Tom Hegg again who recites another rhyming verse to much applause. After performing Megan again looks at me and tells me that maybe I should try to meet him since I want to be a poet and all.
The pastor with the rubicund visage gets up from in front of
the tables. He gives the whole talk about how it is time to commune. The heads
at nearly all the table and look down in their laps as if they are
intentionally trying to be pensive. The silver bowl with little chunks of bread
is passed. For some reason at our table it is passed counter clockwise.
Everyone grabs a frayed slice. The pastor who mandated that Megan and myself shuffle chairs holds his individual scrap of bread up into the direction of the ceiling and states that this the true body of Christ, Ninety-eight percent of the human beings in the room sport pensive expressions on their faces or are looking down into their laps. Everyone places the bread into their lips at the same time and chews. We perform the same exercise circulating the vial of wine counter-clockwise around the table. The pastor again holds his vial up and says that this is the actual transubstantiated blood of Christ. Years later it will be impossible for me to hold up a vial of that size and not say cheers but for now, I drink, in unison, and look down.
After we partake from the body and blood I reach down beneath the helm of the table and give Megan's hand a little squeeze.
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