Along the Breaking Waves

At first it seemed like nothing. The wind was whipping grains of sand around it, the waves spurring it forward on to the beach. It probably was nothing, she mused to herself. She turned her gaze away from the breaking waves and towards the thick gray sky. Rain is coming, she thought.

It was a heavy, dark, dry day at the beach. Seagulls beat their wings as if suspended in very dense liquid, thrusting through the skies with slow forced movements. Anne Marie felt that way too, as if every step of her morning walk was more difficult than usual. She imagined that the beach was full of quick sand, and she was methodically being pulled under. Maybe it was her age. Turning seventy had come more as a shock to her body than her mind. She woke up in the morning and her joints ached and she had to fumble around aimlessly searching for where she had left her glasses the night before. She spent more time standing in her doorways, wondering why she was leaving a room and where she was going.

She had always been an active person, and the gradual slowing of her physical abilities were starting to wear on her spirit. She didn’t like feeling old, didn’t like the feeling of waking up one day closer to immobility, to death. Anne Marie hadn’t slept well the night before. She had spent the previous day inside, trapped by a resilient storm that dumped rain and uprooted her potted plants.

But this morning was eerily calm. The sky was a complacent gray, the waves lapping calmly against the shore, but the beach looked like a war zone. Littered with pieces of rocks and cans spit from the bottom of the ocean. As she surveyed the scene, she saw it again. A hint of green, a flash of orange. She marched resolutely towards the object.

She reached the water and dunked her hand in the icy Pacific. Her fingers wrapped around the smooth object and she tugged it from the grasp of the waves.

 She recognized them instantly. Lilium bulbiferum, tiger lilies.  A dozen, tied together by a waterlogged piece of white organza. She strained her mind to remember the details of the flowers. Showy but long lasting, perennials. Grown in open woods along Western side of North America. Six petals per flower, enlarged stigma and stamen. Anne Marie ran her fingers over the wet fabric, examining it. Each flower sagged heavily, as if tired from a very long trip. The bright orange color that characterizes the tiger lily was now only a pale orange, the black spots a light gray.

“ The ocean has been hard on you.” She whispered, pulling the lilies to her chest.

After thirty years of living on the coast, Anne Marie had come across her fair share of treasures. Her favorites were pieces of sea glass, frosted green and blue shards of glass turned smooth by the pummeling and churning of the deep ocean. Before she retired, she would collect enough sea glass until she had a piece for every one of her fourth grade students. She told them they were good luck, offerings from the sea.

That is how she always felt about things she collected on the beach, as gifts from mother nature. But lilies? Her heart twinged sadly. What sadness could have brought them to her beach?

             “Darling, what is it?” A tall, bird like shadow of a man stood about five yards behind her. Until he spoke, Anne Marie had completely forgotten he was there. He had a wispy head of gray hair, and little black pebbles for eyes that shone from behind half moon frames. Anne Marie noticed he was wearing the navy fleece she had bought him for his birthday. She always felt extra fondness for him on these walks.

            “I’ve found something!” She chirped to her trailing husband, and turned back toward the waves.  

            Anne Marie held up the dripping bundle to her husband.            

            “Aren’t they beautiful?”

            “How odd, lilies washed up on the shore.” He said. “I wonder who they belong to. Maybe there was a funeral, and they were thrown into the ocean.”

            “Or!” She said, her eyes lighting up. “Maybe it was a couple on a moonlight boat ride,” She looked excited, as if she had found the final piece to a thousand-piece puzzle. “You know how they offer those night cruises from Lincoln City? Well, maybe it was a couple, a young boy and girl who had met and fallen into a relationship, the boy raised on the coast and the girl from inland. Maybe the boy was looking for a romantic way to propose to her, so they went out last night and at midnight he got down on one knee, as the boat rocked gently back and forth, he asked her marry him. Maybe she said yes, but felt a dreadful pang of loneliness as she said it, as if by speaking the word she was losing a whole lifetime. Maybe she said yes out of obligation, out of caring for the boy but not love. Maybe he embraced her and kissed her passionately. Put the ring on her finger and handed her lilies and made many promises about their life that she knew wouldn’t come true. And maybe, later when he went to grab them drinks, she threw the flowers as far away from the boat as possible, in hopes that one of them would escape.” Richard looked at her sideways, but she was enjoying imagining this clandestine affair, conjuring up the metaphorical escape of the flowers she had just rescued from pull of the waves. She loved stories, especially those of love, and lately had found herself rereading her old favorites, surprised to find the endings felt brand new. Richard was silent beside her, tracing a pattern in the sand with his sneaker.

            “Yes, maybe that’s what happened” He said quietly. “You have always had an imagination.”

            “It is quite a strange day out, isn’t it?” Anne Marie said. “I think it might storm again.”

            Storms made Anne Marie think of her mother, who she needed to call, because when her mother was young and healthy, she had been a prolific painter. Anne Marie had grown up in Prineville, a lonely town in Central Oregon. It was situated in the middle of a valley surrounded by rolling hills and endless forests of Ponderosa Pines. Weather rolled in suddenly and violently and it was often she fell asleep to the sound of pounding rain on their tin roof.  Sometimes, Anne Marie felt like she could remember her childhood better than her present. She remembered how her mother would sit out underneath their veranda, her head bent feverishly over the canvas, and paint the angry clouds and the resilient faces of the trees. Richard was a painter too, but he preferred still life.

            “Maybe we should turn back.” Richard said. “I don’t want to get caught out here in the pouring rain.”

            “In a few minutes,” She said. “ I need to rest for a moment.” Anne Marie sat down on a piece of driftwood, she was still holding the flowers.

            “Maybe you would like to paint these Richard?” She said, holding them out to him. “There is something so interesting about them.”

Richard loved Anne Marie. He loved the way her laugh lines were now embedded into her tissue paper skin. He loved her encyclopedic knowledge of plants, the way he would catch her in the morning bent over her and whispering to the tiny wisps of green that would one day be flowers. She was a passionate woman, his Anne Marie, and their life together had always been full of laughter and light. Even the house they had built along the breaking waves had gigantic windows where the volatile ocean sky was always in view. But now, as he looked at his elderly wife, sitting on a piece of driftwood and softly stroking the dead flowers, he knew he was losing her. There hadn’t been a diagnosis yet. But Richard knew, in that place in your heart that recognizes truth and tragedy, that the disease which took her mother was now taking her.

He knew he loved Anne Marie the second she walked into their class at Oregon State in 1948, her huge smile, blonde bob and tortoise shell glasses. She had freckles splashed across her face like oil paint and an easy laugh that rolled out of her like thunder. He was enraptured. He had loved her from afar for months, until finally, timidly after an exam in class, he had asked her to lunch. After six months of careful courtship, had had proposed to her on a midnight boat ride off the coast. He had given her lilies, because their life lasted through the harsh Oregon winter.           

     “Richard?” She called to him. “I think I will try growing lilies this summer. They’re just so lovely. What do you think?” He walked over and sat next to her on the driftwood. He wondered if she would remember these lilies in six months, if she would be able to tend to her plants like she could now. He imagined the harsh bleakness of doctor’s offices and pills and his chest ached at the image of her forgetting his name. But for now, she was next to him, imaging a summer like all their others, her kind eyes that he had memorized so many years ago, looking into his expectantly. A drop of rain hit his cheek.

            “I think that’s a lovely idea darling.” He said, and kissed her cheek.

We Talk with Voice Boxes

Note: This is for my Kidd Tutorial writing class. It's an out of class writing exercise. The prompt was "A mother- and father-to-be are arguing over the phone about baby names. Write each side of the conversation as a separate scene able to stand on its own yet make sense within the context of a larger discussion. Each scene should be suggestive of its own story. Do not mention pregnancy.

“Janelle.” He says into the phone, with a tired wheeze. He’s leaning on the kitchen counter, his head rested against the receiver and the other hanging languidly at his side. He keeps glancing through the kitchen door into the living room, where he can hear snip its of the Twins game. This conversation will be over soon, he hopes.

“No way.” The voice on the other end says. She sounds tired too. They are both tired of this nightly ritual. This exhausting back and forth they keep engaging in, searching for a compromise that doesn’t seem like it will ever comes.

“Jessica?” He says. He had a long day at work today, all meetings and computer screens and missed deadline, and it’s a Wednesday which means two more days of the grind and then he has a break and she will come home.

“What is it with you and J names?” Her voice, normally high and sweet like a songbird cracks with irritation. He thinks she sounds more like a crow tonight than a sparrow. “How about Harriet?”

He cringes. What is it with her and old lady names? He imagines stenciling in that god awful name on the wall in their spare bedroom.

“I hate it,” Better to be honest, he thinks. “Too old fashioned.” He hears the roar of the announcer as a player cracks one into the outfield, he moves towards the door but stops. She’ll know if he’s watching the game and not paying attention.

She can hear the sounds of ESPN in the background, over his asthmatic breathing that means he’s had a hard day and forgotten to take his inhaler. Amazing, she thinks, all that she can know about him just through a few seconds of static.

“Well I happen to like Harriet, it was my mother’s middle name.” She’s annoyed that he’s forgotten this. She moves away from the window where she’s standing. “Anyways, what would you prefer? Something more modern? Miley, Rhianna or maybe Beyonce?” She moves toward the flat, uncomfortable bed she’s calling home for the next few days and sits on the hard mattress. She feels it sink beneath her added weight.

“Honey, I’m sorry.” He says. She imagines him standing in their house alone, the cuffs of his work shirt rolled to the elbows, his tie loosened, his feet bare. “I can’t talk about this anymore. I want to know about your day. We can figure the rest out when you get home.”

“But this is driving me crazy!” She says, letting herself flop back on the sheets. “I want a decision. How about Mallory? Taylor? Melissa? What do you think about those?”

He is silent. She knows she’s lost him to the all seducer of men, the sports network. She thinks about those whales that end up on the news, about one a summer. How they get separated from the herd and make one wrong move, choose one wrong direction, and they end up stranded on an isolated beach, stuck on their side and unable to move. Calling, braying for their family members, an oceanic farewell song, never heard by those who it is meant for because it is not sung underwater.

            “Yeah sure, those sound okay.” He says. 

Ode to the sea (part one)

(This is the beginning of a much longer story I'm writing. I'm going to post it in parts as I write it.)

Mariana’s hair was wild, and with one look you knew she was a child of the sea. When the sun set and she scrambled up the steep staircases that lead to her home, her mother would lovingly scold her as she pulled shells and bits of seaweed out of her daughters dark matted curls.

Her mother, Aliana, was a fisherman’s wife: small and round as a pearl, with a slight bow to her back and calloused hands from a life spent cleaning her husband’s catch. Her eyes were starting to wrinkle at the corners, but her hair shone black like an opal caught from the greatest depths of the Pacific. She had given birth to five children, but now she only had Mariana.

Their city was a menagerie of brightly painted houses, perched precariously on a hillside above the sea. The streets followed no system of order. To foreign merchants and sailors, who docked there before their final destination, the criss-crossed labyrinth of alleys and byways lead to more than one of them getting lost and left behind. The city was full of these men. Their drunken antics kept Mariana up at night, and Aliana would curse them under her breath in a language indigenous to her country. She blamed them for the trash and sin that had begun to pollute her city. 

Her husband, Alberto Giron, felt the same way about the foreigners. He was a man who spent his life in the lonely expanse of the Pacific. He spent eight days a month with his family, mostly pacing though the narrow city streets attempting to reacquaint himself with the stability of land. Tall and rail thin, he walked like a ghost, running his fingertips along the stone walls. The neighbors whispered that he was an ahogado, drowned by sadness.
But most of the time, it was only Aliana and Mariana filling the small cramped house with songs and the sweet smell of mote.

Aliana woke up that morning, alarmed. She sat straight up in bed, startling Mariana, who was asleep next to her. She had been dreaming, a horrible nightmare filled with smoke and she blinked and shook her head several times, trying to shake the clouds from her eyes.

“Mama?” Marianna questioned.

“Oh darling, it’s nothing.” Aliana cooed, ignoring the persistent feeling of anxiety and began her morning routine. The one she had followed every morning since she had married Alberto. She dressed herself and Mariana, they walked together down to the well, where they greeted the other mothers and pumped water. They walked back to the house, hand in hand, where Aliana began cooking rice and beans and Mariana swept the spiders out from their hiding places. The house was simple, one room with four walls and a stone floor. The bed they shared sat in one corner. A wooden frame covered by a thin mattress and a thread barren patchwork quilt. A small (adjective) stone oven squatted in the opposite corner, and a small window above it overlooked the harbor. The other two walls were decorated with knickknacks that Mariana had picked up from the beach. 

Aliana stirred the rice slowly, starring out the window as a large clipper ship pulled up to the coast. The routine was calming her down, but she still had an unexplainable feeling of anxiety. What had her dream been?

being realistic.

     School was not how Erin expected to spend her summer. She told me so, one humid night in my backyard. We had ignored the dirty plastic chairs in favor of the grass, stretching out on our backs and observing the stars above. Erin was wearing my favorite of her summer dresses: white with thin straps and a skirt that framed her hips and swayed rhythmically as she walked. Under the full moon it glowed as if it was lit by fireflies.
      She had spent the dreary Oregon winter days dreaming of tanning, bike rides, barbeques and a possible summer romance with the dark haired boy that lived down the street. My heart tightened and stomach dropped at this last bit, but I just smiled and assured her that I'm sure he liked her too. How could he not? She sat up and lit a cigarette, what does it matter anyway? She asked me,  her thin lips pulling hard on the marlboro. I won't have time to find out.
    Erin's mother had insisted on summer school. She needed to graduate on time, she refused to pay for a fifth year of school because she had fucked around. Fucked around was how her mother had said it, hissed it through the phone. I had heard it, Erin put them on speaker phone so I could. She had failed a few classes the year before. After she turned 21 she was never able to turn down the opportunity to go to the bars.  I could picture her mother's face on the other end of the phone: thin and tight lipped, skin stretched tightly to hide the wrinkles that she had  gained through three divorces. Bleached hair cropped into a perfect bob. Thick black eyeliner painted menacingly across her eyelids. Erin was the opposite of her uptight mother. Where her mother was rail thin and meticulously manicured, Erin curved and bounced, even her chocolate hair twisting in directions she couldn't control.
   So, instead of chasing that neighbor, she was locked inside a dark brick building from 8 am to 4 pm studying accounting and economics with an old professor that smelled like moth balls. Only able to catch glimpses of the summer rays through the small windows. She felt like a prisoner. You're so lucky Dan, she said, tossing her cigarette butt into the grass. No school, no job, endless hours to enjoy the sun.
   Yes, endless hours. I had graduated with my degree in economics. I was stuck in this dead end college town until I found a job somewhere else, until I found anything anywhere else really. Endless hours to sit in my house and reread Sarte and wait for Erin to finish class. Everyday I left my house at 3:45 so I could be outside waiting for her exactly three minutes before she finished class. She usually stormed out of the building, dark hair billowing behind her like a storm cloud, only a so happy to get the fuck out of there as a greeting. I always worried if I wasn't there exactly on time she would leave without me, and then what would I do?
     I'm not that lucky, I said to her, sitting up and reaching for my beer. I get sorta bored now that my roommates have moved out and the city is so quiet.  She just shook her head, hair undulating down her back. Dan, you're being ridiculous. While you're sitting around moping like an antisocial loser, I'm plugging numbers and listening to my professor drone on about sunk costs. Everyday all day. I know we've been friends for years, but no one feels bad for you here. She pulled out another cigarette and lit it. I can help you, I responded lamely, I did major in economics you know. I know you can, you always have. Sorry I called you antisocial. It's just...sometimes I feel like you need more friends. Maybe a girlfriend! Oh a girlfriend would be great for you.
     I stared blankly up at the sky and heard her lay softly back down next to me. Even without looking at her I knew she was picking at her fingernail polish, a habit she had gotten into only recently. I knew she had painted them salmon even though she wanted coral, knew she would bite of tips of her beautiful nails after she had fully picked off the polish. Knew she would want a snack later of a peanut butter and honey sandwich. I knew she would be bored of star gazing in five minutes. I knew tomorrow, despite it all, I would be waiting outside of the big brick building three minutes before four.
    So, she said, breaking my train of thought. You really think he likes me?
     
    
 

For My Travel Partners

December 12th, 2009.  Mendoza, Argentina

"We sleep on the grass, homeless in a country that is ours for only a handful more days.

We wash our faces. We brush our teeth in bus station bathrooms, stealing bits of toilet paper to have for when there is none.

We know the rhythm now. The outfits to wear in case the bus is too cold or too hot. I pop Benadryl and Tylenol to induce the sleep that alludes me on these long trips. The other two sleep whenever possible, curling into balls, but I am never quite able to do this. There is some part of me that's afraid of missing out, of missing an experience, a moment.

It's getting close to ending now. In a week I'll be home and thousands of miles away from here. Will I be happy, will I be sad? If I'm happy does it mean that I didn't make the most of my time here?"

(I'm writing an article that requires me to go back through my journal and find quotes and pieces of information that I meticulously collected and stored in a battered 250 page moleskin. I am missing those days today.)

Eyes

This is how I saw it, all in the eyes.

At some point, the words we were saying became meaningless and our communication became based in the occipital. Long stares and belated eye contact were all cryptic signals in our language. Avoidance born in down turned eyelashes and longing in one up and broken glances.

 A wink and I was dunked in ice water. Gasping, starving for air and only tasting the salty, cold sea. A hint of a smile in those mahogany eyes and I knew. And he knew. 

When I thought back, I realized we had always spoken this way. What was it that we couldn't say? Couldn't verbalize? Or what was it that I was afraid to hear?

While we spoke in the normal rhythm to friends and family, to each other the cadence of our eyes was a second language. Something brighter and darker, heavier and lighter, paradox upon paradox of meaning without definition.

But I knew in the war torn part of myself that it was not a language, only a filler for for something we were both searching for. And the haunting seconds where I was lost in another sense was only seconds.

And the sooner I broke the stare, the better.

Breathing Room

Mrs. Stewart's purse felt extra heavy today. The Italian leather strap was digging into her left shoulder and as she shifted it, she wondered why it wasn't stronger after nursing three babies, carrying three screaming toddlers and now lugging all three of their soccer gear to practice.

She grudgingly went through her mental checklist. Blackberry. Check. Adderall for Chloe and Dylan. Check. Jesus she needed to get that perscription refilled. Glue for Marie's science project. Check. Book on Menopause for sister. Check. Extra tie for Mark because he had spilled coffee on his this morning. Check.

What could be so heavy? The triplets were fighting in the back of her car now, and she suddenly realized she'd been sitting inert in the drivers seat, ignoring the screams of protests of her children still locked in the car. She hit the button on her door, and the van door slid silently open, the triplets tumbling out and leaving Mrs. Stewart in silence as they raced towards the soccer field. Her eyes darting quickly left and right, she jerked her bag off her shoulder and popped open the little orange plastic container. Yes, she thought, she would need to get another perscription.