Sweet Irony

 (previously published in So To Speak: a feminist journal of language and arts, Spring/Summer 2000 issue)

Once in our town, there lived two old ladies in an old house, a small house, with a deep porch where the shadows pressed themselves against the wood walls away from the light of the sun. Trees grew in on the house, their leafy tops forming a deep green hovering crown over the hidden roof. Tall green grass obscured most of the damp flag path that led to the porch steps. Somewhat unnecessarily, a 'No Trespassing' sign was hung by the front gate, a splintery wood and rusted chicken wire affair that was unencumbered by the remains of any fence.

No one knew the precise nature of the relationship of the two women, whether they were mother and daughter, sister and sister, aunt and niece, or simply two maiden ladies who had long ago taken up residence together to cut expenses. In the past, they had worked at the mill, two blocks up the hill from their house in its bamboo-filled hollow. What was generally known about them was that they were always in competition with each other.

When they had worked at the mill, so rumor went, they had been the best employees, their hands moving over the looms swifter than summer's end, quick-tapping feet beating time on the treadle, shuttles whizzing along race plates, weft and warp locking up tightly into the web. After work, the two ladies would walk along the road from the mill to their house, covered in cotton fibers from the tops of their grey heads, the color of ungroomed white poodles, to the tops of their black buttoned-up boots, and could be heard arguing through open windows over which had woven most that day.

After they retired from the mill, they took up reading as their new competition. The lights of the little house were on late into the night and well into the morning, and by day the two ladies could be seen walking to the library in town, tottering stacks of books in their arms, eyes purple-rimmed, their ink-smudged fingers clasped tightly underneath the weight of all that paper and knowledge. Soon it became known that they had read every book in the library, a dubious feat in the eyes of the townspeople, who were always suspicious of too much learning. Despite their accomplishment, the two ladies continued to debate who had finished the last book first, an issue that seemed to come down to a matter of seconds, and which each fiercely defended as being in her favor.

Next came the spinning. As every town child knew, there was a spinning wheel sitting in the corner of the ladies' pink-painted parlor, which could be seen by standing on the shoulders of a friend and peering through the peeling green shutters of the window on the side of the house. The lights in the little house were on again from evening till morning and soon the townspeople discovered that one spun by day and the other by night. While one was at work at the wheel, the other would comb the town looking for material with which to spin, thistles from their neglected garden, downy feathers, and long strands of fur from shaggy-coated dogs, who leaned happily against the ladies' long skirts, thinking they were loved for their sweet natures only. When the cotton came into bloom, the two ladies began to raid fields by night, stuffing their cardigan pockets full of soft bolls, till one night they were caught leaving a neighbor's back acres and were disgraced. The sheriff came and broke the spinning wheel into pieces on the sidewalk before the little house and townspeople took away the heaps and heaps of buttery thread nests which were piled beside the fragments of the wheel, and wondered at the rare quality of the ladies' work.

Time passed and it was noted that the two ladies were rarely seen in town. Sometimes they might be sighted outside their house, collecting pecans or gathering windfall apples in the perpetual twilight that the crooked-growing trees made of the garden. The people of the town began to worry after the two ladies, remembering soft holiday sweaters knitted from the miraculously spun floss, as fine and glossy as silk. Church ladies put together a basket filled with jars of honey-gold peach preserves and chartreuse-colored chow-chow, loaves of zucchini bread wrapped in waxed paper, a sugar-cured ham and bunches of garden-fresh greens, mustard, collard, kale, still flecked with red clay and mica. The basket was left on the ladies' dim doorstep and a neighbor child reported seeing a solitary hand poke out the barely-opened front door, snatching in the basket greedily with a gnarled old fist.

After waiting some time to see the ladies or hear some words of thanks, the townspeople began to worry after them again, thinking they may have come to harm somehow, or sickness in their little old house. The sheriff was sent out, accompanied by another loaded basket, and as he knocked officiously at the front door, he was alarmed by the grabbing-finger motions of the shadows on the porch. He stood and knocked while neighbors watched until finally a grim creaking was heard and the door swung out about an inch. He shoved the basket towards the door but was repulsed by a whispered politeness. 'Thank you, we have sufficient,' said one of the two ladies and then the door was drawn shut with a jerk. The sheriff made haste back into the crowd on the street and described the old lady at the door, saying she had wasted away to a nothingness, thinner than thin and lighter than air and her eyes looking too heavy for her head.

No one knew what to make of the two ladies or the sheriff's picture of the creature at the door, until a town child and his friends let it be known they had seen the ladies through their back kitchen window, making a feast of crumbs. They told of clean flowered china and a flickering candle and the pecking and picking of the two women at their table, each taking less than the other and urging the one to take more. A new competition, said the town, and sat back to see who might win the dangerous game which the two ladies had begun. The children were encouraged to go back and back and they always told the same tale, the plates and the candle and the crumbs of food growing smaller and smaller till soon the plates looked empty and the two women smiled in an unusual way, until one night, when the ladies turned to spy the child's face there at the window, round with surprise.

In the morning, people on their walks to work were stopped by their neighbors all agape staring at the sky. In the blue morning air, the two ladies could be seen floating above their orchard trees, tethered at the waists by lengths of illicitly spun thread, braided to a thickness like a spider's web and glistening with dew brought up from the damp ground of the garden. During the day, the two ladies swayed and bobbed, turning with the breeze, their loose clothes swishing with a noise like a kite tail. All through the night they were heard as a sibilant susurration above the aged and grey-barked pecan trees, the night wind passing them to and fro across the moon, their shadows falling long on the road in front of the dark little house in the hollow.

Days passed and the two ladies pushed themselves up and up into the sky further, letting out the silky rope until they could hardly be seen in the light of the bright afternoon sun, feet and hands little birds in the white hot haze, nipping out of sight and in again, and twirling themselves about, a motion told mostly by their tethers, glinting and shimmering as they spun out of the treetops, till one day they could not be seen at all. Only the tethers were still held suspended, spiraling into the atmosphere, to show that the ladies remained buoyantly above.

And then one night a storm came, with rushing clouds exposing the angry moon in lightning flashes, flowers and shrubs bent sideways by the gale, tree limbs ripped free and sent flying into the air, the whole of the earth at odds with the sky all through the long, long night. Townspeople cowered by windows, peeking through white lace curtains at the roiling nightmare above them, searching for a glimpse of the two ladies against the blind blackness of the sky.

In the morning, neighbor joined neighbor in the leaf-strewn streets, damp clods of vegetation mounded next to storm drains, to find the impossibly long lengths of the ladies' tethers running along the ground for miles. The sky was still grayish-white, the color of the two ladies' hair, and while townspeople surveyed the damage and searched for the bodies of the two ladies, an unseasonable snow began to fall, a pale grey papery snow, that coated the town thinly with its substance before evaporating with a hushed hiss. One child, the child who had discovered the crumb-eaters in their candle-lit kitchen, stuck out their tongue to catch a flake of the stuff and began to cry out that it was sweet, sweeter than sugar, and all the people of the town put out their tongues for a taste, a little crumb of which was the sweetest thing they would ever know, and as they did so, they could feel a welling inside them, a bubbling of something undiscovered in themselves, distant memories of books they had never read and the feel of spinning floss soft as rose petals and hands flashing over tightly worked cloth. As the sky cleared and the strange ashy snow ceased to fall, the townspeople went quietly on with their day, not speaking to each other yet, waiting to feel the lasting effects of the ladies' gift to them, which would answer in coming years in tapestries and stories and all ways of storytelling, rich gardens and charity and a certain slim long-tailed kite that could go higher into the air than ever any had before it.

 Breaking something.

Well, I survived the week at the beach with my in-laws, getting home in time to drive the Crazy People (my parents) to the airport for their flight to Italy.  I feel for Italy, for all the people on the tour with my parents, for anyone liable to get in their way.  The Crazy People, or The Doom and Gloom Twins, are in Italy because my mother told my father, and I quote, "that he could pay for a divorce or a trip to Italy." I haven't heard from them since just before they boarded their flight out of Newark last Monday night, and I know this is because my father has shot down every opportunity to call or email me as being too expensive.  My parents were poor growing up, my mother especially so, but they haven't been poor in YEARS, and their continued poor-mouthing drives me crazy.  My parents are not poor.  If they can even see poor from where they are standing they must have excellent vision.

I'm not too worried about not hearing from my parents, but I am a little.  I figure if there is an incident the State Department would contact me, so I'm trying to roll merrily along hoping all is well.  This isn't easy for me.  Not too long ago, I could not get either of my parents on the phone, not the home number or their cell phones.  I became convinced that this was because one of them had killed the other and then killed themselves.  It was irrational, and crazy, and of course turned out not to be true, but when I told my best friend ahickpoet about this, she could see why I would feel that way.  They RAISED me to expect disaster.  They see poor because they don't trust that any money is enough.  They sweat health insurance in a way that is certifiable.  In some ways, the more secure financially they have become, the crazier they have gotten, and certainly the tighter my father has become.  About a week before my parents left for Italy Mama shared that she had been turned down to donate blood because she is anaemic.  My mother is 57, underweight for her height, and has osteoporosis.  All of this is because she allows my father to control the food in the house and always has.  I have suffered from eating disorders since I was 13 and my mother still can not see how my father's behavior, and her own, contributed to my problems.  For years I resented the fact that when in restaurants my father would make me eat from my mother's plate.  It took a long time to realise this had been as damaging to my mother as it had been to me.  I mean, if you can afford to eat in a restaurant, you can afford for EVERYONE to eat in a restaurant.  Am I right?

I know that my father is trying to keep my mother from food while they are in Italy.  He took a jar of peanut butter in his carry-one bag.  He won't eat a meal there that isn't already paid for by the tour, which leaves out all lunches and some breakfasts and dinners.  So I'm worried.  I know it doesn't help, and I'm not losing sleep over it, but I also know that when I pick them up at the airport this coming weekend, I'm going to get an earful, and possibly the information that the trip wasn't enough, my father is still going to have to pay for a divorce.  I feel awful young, and they are awful young, for me to already feel like the parent in this situation, but in some ways I do. "What is wrong with you?" I want to say to my mother.  "You work, you earn your own money, tell him you'll eat if you feel like it."   I don't know what to say to my father.  I want to quote my grandfather, his father, and say, "Let the child eat what she wants."  If my father has an inner child, it's starving.  It's as if he's practicing anorexia by proxy on my mother. I just don't know.  If they are the Gloom and Doom Twins, sometimes I feel like their child Despair.  I despair of their happiness, of their sanity, of their marriage.  This September they will have been married 40 years, if they make it that long.  After all they made it this far.  Maybe I shouldn't judge.

But I do.

Pray for me, y'all.

Back on the 19th.  Have a good week.

I can remember being in the duplex where my family lived when I was four or five years old, sitting at the ledge of the big front window drawing inside the covers of one of my mother's faux-leather paperback classics, drawing that endless cursive e loop the way children do.  I wanted to write, to read.  Not long after, my mother took me to the library for my own library card.  I had learned to read and I was so excited, I wanted to do the summer reading contest advertised in the children's reading stacks.  My mother cautioned me that many of the books would be too hard yet for me to read.  At this point I was really only able to read  the pictures books from the low shelves, and one I distinctly remember reading then was And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, by Dr. Seuss.

It didn't take long for me to move up to the tall stacks of children's books, and I was one of those obsessive kids that would start at the A's and work my way around to end of the alphabet.  I read Peter Pan, and Louisa May Alcott's novels, not just Little Women, but Little Men and Jo's Boys, and I read Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and books whose titles and authors I have forgotten though some details of the books have stayed with me.  One was about a boy and his dog (but it was not A Boy and His Dog, which I would read later) but the dog was an alien from outer space (and it wasn't Dogsbody which I have also since read, hoping that it would be that book) and the boy and the dog could communicate telepathically.  I remember one book just because it was the first time I heard of Fleetwood Mac.  I read Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Understood Betsy and the Shoes books by Noel Streatfeild, many of which are now out of print, and so many others that I don't even remember.  And that was just what I got at the County Public Library.  At the elementary school library, I remember checking out biographies of Walt Disney and Mozart and Maria Tallchief and Elizabeth I.  I read these odd little books about Mushroom Men on the Moon.  I went back and read Beatrix Potter and there was this book I absolutely adored and checked out over and over that was just little tidbits of folklore and so forth, superstitions and sayings, and it had the funniest little illustrations.

And when I stayed at one babysitter's house, I read her astronaut brother's left-behind Star Trek TV show novelizations.  And when I stayed at my grandmother's house I read the perfectly preserved 1950's era Encyclopedia, usually picking out "D" so I could read about dogs and dolls.  My grandmother even helped me make a cornhusk doll after I showed her a picture in that volume.  And at my granny's house I read books of fairy tales and myths left over from my mother's childhood, books worn out by the hands of six children and a lifetime of living in a house with no air-conditioning in summer and not enough heat in the winter.  When I was about ten, I stayed with Granny for a few weeks while Mama was away at summer school (I wasn't left with my father because my mother wanted to be certain that I would be fed) and when I had run through the kid's books at her house, she sent me off down the train tracks to the local library, which was a converted Tudor-style house where the librarian took one look at me and said, "You must be Annie Stewart's granddaughter.  You look just like her daughter Ellen.  Ellen used to work here back when she was in school,etc ....."  God bless small towns.  She sent me home with the Oz books, the only one of which I really remember being Ozma of Oz. 

And before my parents and I would go on vacation, my mother and I would go to the Book Swap Place and trade in old books and buy used books for small change, and I would sit in the back seat on the way to the beach or Florida with my paper sack of paperback books and read anything, Lassie stories, a book about the Von Trapp family, The Ghost of Windy Hill, all kinds of things.  And if I read all of my books, my mother would hand back an Erma Bombeck for me to puzzle over.

My nose was always in a book.

To be continued ............

 So I've been reading Amy's and Levi's and Dean's posts and now I want to get to know a little bit about everybody, all the Magnificents, but most particularly I want to know what you are all reading, who you have read, who is your greatest influence, inspiration, the writer you would most like to be.

I want to know this because I think it will help me when I read your work, to see where you are coming from and what you are after when you write.  It's not just random, because I believe you can't be a writer without being a reader, and what you have read is going to affect the way and what you write in many ways.

So in a way I guess it's a challenge, and a good way to develop some biographies of ourselves when we have our own site.

I will do my own literary biography in a later post, as the migraine I had yesterday appears to be coming back and I have got to get off the computer before I puke.

This July my husband's parents will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.  Though my husband is only three years older than myself, his parents are twenty years older than mine, children of the Depression, whereas mine are Baby Boomers with a vengence.  Dan is the youngest of five chldren, while I am the only spawn of a boy and girl barely out of high school when they had me.  Some of Dan's sisters are closer in age to my parents than they are to my age.  I think this may account in some way for the terrible terrible ideas they have come up with regarding this summer's family reunion at the beach.

The first problem is that they are Yankees.  I'm sorry, but they are.  This doesn't mean they are from New England, they are in fact from the great Midwest, but to a South Carolina born and bred belle like myself, they are Yankees.  When I first moved up North (as my family refers to all states past the Mason-Dixon), my father said, "Why do you want to go up there and live with all those Yankees?"  To me, my in-laws' leading Yankee characteristic is that they are all card-players.  I grew up Baptist, seriously Baptist, and cards is gambling, unless you are five and the game is Old Maid.  I don't play cards, I don't want to play cards, I've tried it and it bores me.  Why would I want to do math now that I'm not in school?  This is the first hell that awaits me this summer, the endless invitations to play cards.  And it might be different perhaps, if they also weren't all sharks and bad losers, but they are.  They can even fuck up a game of Scrabble.  My mother used to play Scrabble when she was a young Navy wife away from home for the first time, and she played with another young Navy wife in the afternoons over a nice glass of cheap white wine.  The game itself was mostly an excuse to get together with another woman and drink and complain about husbands.  My mother-in-law plays the same game of Scrabble over and over, scrabbling in fact for short words that give the most points, and even that might be OK except it's laborious, cheerless, and without conversation, a game sucked dry of all sense of play.

You might think I don't like my mother-in-law after all that, but I do, she's a gem of a woman, whose most sterling quality is that she speaks her mind without any petty silent treatments and long-held resentments intefering with her self-expression.  I just don't like playing games with her. But the card-playing and vicious Scrabble gaming is as to nothing compared to the nightmare they are gearing up to make mealtime, and for me that is a much more serious matter.

I love the beach.  To me, that is a vacation, going to the beach, just about any beach, to sit on the beach and walk on the beach and play in the ocean and to sit reading English mystery novels under a bright striped umbrella.  Meals are supposed to be careless and easy, cereal and toast for breakfast, or a cup of tea on the porch, lunch is a ham and pimento cheese sandwich eaten in front of a Spanish soap opera and dinner is whatever sounds good, a salad, a pizza, another sandwich.  I'm not much of a cook at any time, but at the beach my idea of cooking dinner is watching my husband nuke a Chinet plate of nachos in the microwave.  So imagine my horror when Dan's sister called last night to "plan" the upcoming trip to the beach.

 Each night, they think one family should be responsible for planning and providing dinner.  First off, this just isn't fair.  My "family" is Dan and myself.  Two of Dan's sisters have five children apiece and the other two have two each.  Second of all, they are just not good cooks.  They just aren't, bless their hearts.  It's an oddity but a fact that I have never eaten a meal at Dan's parent's house that wasn't comprised wholly of leftovers.  I have nothing in particular against leftovers, but I have honestly never seen his mother start with a fresh anything -- even the pre-bagged salads are usually on their last legs, or worse, just starting to grow legs -- which of course begs the question, where the hell do all these leftovers come from?  What meals are they left over from?  And his sisters aren't much better; I don't see how they could be with all those kids, really.  Thank God my husband is one of the sanest people I have ever met, and his reponse to this crazy talk was, "We don't want anything to do with that bullshit."   Dan's sisters are fucking up.  Meals should not be planned at the beach.  When a kid comes along hungry, give it something not too junky and move on.  The adults can fend for themselves, go out, order in, fire up the grill for burgers and dogs.  Open a bag of chips, get some deli slaw, Jesus, you're at the beach, settle down.

So.  They also want to pool up for groceries, the staples, etc.  Dan's response to that was, "Well, you know, if somebody drinks my milk, I'll just have to cut their hands off."  What he really means is that he doesn't care, he'll just go buy more milk.  My husband's most endearing quality to me is that he is not stingy or cheap and that he would just as soon pick up the check as not.  In fact I have a good idea that most dinners will be provided by Dan, the supplies, the actual cooking, or grilling I should say, and all the margarita mixing.  Dan makes a wonderful margarita.  If you don't stand up before you finish your first, it will be some time before you can stand up again.  What we need to do is make sure everyone is so hammered with tequila that dinner just doesn't seem that important.  I think I'll tell Dan to make the Knock-You-Naked margaritas we had at our last party.  That ought to do it.

It's a circuitous tale, like many stories of mine, and it unfortunately begins with a death.

Almost two years ago, I was driving to the grocery store when my cellphone rang.  Though driving, I answered, because it was my friend Jeanne and I break rules for her.

She said, "Are you sitting down?" and I said, yes, because I was driving, and then she said, "I've got bad news.  Thomas is dead."

So now I have to go back a bit further, to college.

I met Thomas through mutual friends in college and we dated for about a week.  Once while we were dating, we went for a walk but stopped to sit down on some steps and started kissing.  At some point in the proceedings Thomas paused and said, "You aren't really into this, are you?"

I wasn't.  We agreed there that it would be best to be friends and we were, we sat up late eating Cheetos and drinking Diet Coke, listening to music, we had a college radio show together for a month or so (midnight to three, The Goddess and Godot), we stole his roommate Hamp's MG one night and went joyriding, and basically had a blast when we were together.  Thomas, his girlfriend of the moment, plus his roommates, several cadets from the Citadel and myself survived Hurricane Hugo together, huddled in a dark dorm room on the Horseshoe of the Carolina campus.  Thomas and I stayed awake to watch the storm, and the lights that lit up the sky, red, blue and green flashes that played across the clouds like the coming of the end of the world.  We tried to create a graphic novel together, he the artist, me as writer.  When college was done and all my friends were scattering across the country, Thomas and I wrote letters to each other, actual pen and ink letters sent in envelopes with postage stamps through the endless void of snail mail.  We tried to stay in touch.

But then I met my husband and started moving cross-country on a regular basis, went back to grad school a few times in different places and it got harder to stay in touch.  We weren't phone talkers, and email didn't suit our relationship.  I hadn't heard anything from Thomas for several years when I got a call, yes, out of the blue, when I was living in Knoxville.  I couldn't believe it. We talked, caught up, he was married, had moved himself, etc.  And he promised to email.

Well, we didn't.  I sent him one, and it bounced back, and I gave up, having my own problems, like moving again, this time to South Carolina.  And that's where I was when Jeanne called.  Thomas was dead.  I hadn't talked to him in over a year, and what was worse, Jeanne had only just found out about Thomas' death some three months after the fact.  And we were devastated.

Let me digress.  When  I was very little, my parents and I lived in a trailer park in Maryland for a few years.  While there, my parents were befriended by an older couple, Lawrence and Beulah.  Every year after we moved, they sent us a Christmas card.  All they did was sign their names, Lawrence and Beulah, until one year it was just Beulah and then we knew that Lawrence was dead.  One year no card came at all and my parents cried.  Then the next year, a card,  with a note from Beulah that she had been sick.  And my parents continue to get these cards, hard as it is to believe, letting us know each year that Beulah is still out there, alive and well.

After Thomas died, after several of my far-flung college friends had found out, there was brief flurry of reunion, phone calls, a few letters.  One friend suggested that Myspace, despite our advancing ages, would be a good way to stay in touch.  We could just stalk each other without correspondence if we wanted, just our way of finding out, as I bluntly put it, if any of us were dead or not.  So we did.  I found other friends there, lost friends mostly, and still check in daily to see what the others are up to, to be sure that we are still with each other on this mortal coil.  It's morbid, but it works.

Without the death of Thomas I would never have joined any social networking site of any kind, and  would not have been open to the suggestion of joining several as I have now done.  Because of where I live (a post of its own surely), I have not met many people or made many friends.  I find I like the pen-pal aspects of online communication, meeting and conversing with people I would otherwise never get to know.  So that's why I'm here today, floating my glass bottle out on to the digital waves.  It's all because of Thomas.

Here's to Thomas.

Love, Wendy
 

  I could not say that setting up house here at LiveJournal has gone so very well.  I couldn't register as the name I originally wanted and when I found myself thwarted I thought of other names I have gone under during my life.  One of those was free and it opened up a persona I could use here, my old Inner Goth.

She is not happy about a few things.  For example, I entered a few choice bits of personal info and preferences while signing up and now I can't figure out where the hell they have gone.  They aren't in my profile etc.  And how the christ do I get rid of that stupid welcome/info screen.

I'm sure all this will come clear in time.  For now I will offer up this.



One last thing: my Inner Goth looks a lot younger (something like this picture) and feels a lot older. A lot.