Night of Grace

Parable of the Prodigal Cat

2011-11-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

The other night the new family cat didn't come home. Big deal, huh? It was to me. Every time I woke up in the night realizing the cat was still outside in the dark, exposed to the potential dangers of coyotes and raccoons, cold and cars, I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. I got up several times to try to call him home, I heard him scream once or twice in the middle of night as if he had been ensnared by something evil. Finally, I prayed that God would send my cat home. Ridiculous. After all, the cat had chosen to stay away. Even though I am one of those people who will talk to God about any and all things on a constant basis, I thought asking for the cat to come home seemed absurd. Really. And then he came home and I was overjoyed. I can't explain it any differently. Overjoyed.

Last week I lost my favorite earring. I wear them almost every day. On one unidentified day, I decided it would be cool to wear my big hoops and stick my little earring in a partially opened second hole: residue from a line of self-inflicted piercings from my college days. Maybe I was feeling old and thought this would young me up a bit. Who knows? By the end of the day that ear was aching and I took the extra earring out. For the life of me I could not remember where I put it. I looked in every cup, every jewelry box, every tray, every knick- knack holder in the house (for those of you who know my penchant for small receptacles-a Hurculean task). Soon, I was pulling the furniture out from the wall, wrestling with giant dust bunnies, emptying out the garbages, taking apart drains, sifting through the laundry and vent registers. For two days, I obsessed over it, even thinking the cat might have eaten it and that I might have to sift through the kitty litter. Again, a seemingly petty incident but, oh so important to me. I rarely care about material things but these particular earrings were given to me on my fortieth birthday by my husband. Somehow they speak to me about the life we've lived together and the love we've shared, so it would be a little sad to lose that. On Sunday I walked down the stairs on my way to get ready to go to yet another soccer game and there, at the foot of the stairs lay, sparkling, my little tourmaline earring. My heart leapt. I kid you not, it leaped right inside of me with joy.

So what? Right? Why write about my petty triumphs? Well, as I contemplated my good fortune I couldn't help but remember Sunday school parables we've all heard so many times we've barely heard them at all. In one portion of the story of Jesus, the "religious" people were challenging him about his penchant for hanging out with prostitutes, tax collectors and low-lifes. In response he tells a series of three stories:

1. A man has a hundred sheep and one wanders off. The owner of the lost sheep will leave those 99 to go find the one that is lost. When he finds him, he will carry him home on his shoulders and tell his friends "Rejoice with me, for the one I lost has come home."

2. A woman has ten silver coins but loses one. She lights a lamp and sweeps her entire house until she finds the lost coin. She then calls her friends and says, "Rejoice with me, I have found my lost coin."

3. Jesus finishes with the story of the prodigal son. You know the story, the ungrateful kid takes his inheritance, wastes it on wine, women and song and he ends up eating pig slop. The kid comes to his senses and though he has disavowed his father, he figures he can at least go home and get a job at his father's house: better than being a beggar. While the kid is "still a long way off, the father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; threw his arms around him and kissed him." The father throws a party to celebrate the son that was lost and now is found, once was dead and now is alive.

Sometimes my heart grows dry and hard. I forget. Old parables lose their meaning. I don't have sheep, ten silver coins hold no relevant value to me. Into my husk of a heart, a story speaks specifically to me, featuring a young tabby cat and a single tourmaline earring. All at once, my heart is drenched with a downpour of grateful tears and I remember. So, please, rejoice with me because I have found what was lost.

anniversary ring

2011-06-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my twentieth anniversary and not for nothing but I 'm crazy about my husband. This kind of talk might make you want, at the very least, to pinch me maliciously or cyberpuke all over my facebook status like this: :O~~~~. I'm okay with that. Sometimes a girl has to stand at the top of the highest peak and declare her love and good fortune, in fact it would be downright rude and ungrateful not to.

Anyhoo, what brought me to the blogosphere today was a kismet encounter with an artist's work on the day of my anniversary and I wanted to share her with you.

First, there's a little backstory that I need to lay down. A long time ago, over twenty years to be precise, in a faraway land, Perù to be exact, my fiancé returned to his home country to tell his parents that he was getting married to a girl they had never laid eyes on. Upon his return, he surprised me with a beautiful engagement ring. When he handed me the delicately handcrafted piece, I was shocked. I knew we hadn't any money between us, he just coming out of college and I not even close to being finished. He explained that his grandmother had donated the beautifully burnished 18K Peruvian gold and his mother a baguette from her own engagement ring. I had never heard of recycling gold or imagined a woman I had never even met would give up one of her own engagement stones for me. What was interesting about the ring is that it was so unexpected. Not only because I didn't know he was bringing it but because the style of it was so different than anything I had ever imagined for myself. My mom had a big emerald cut flawless diamond set in platinum from Tiffany's. That was my idea of an engagement ring. This tiny little work of love and art was so different and yet, exactly what I never knew I always wanted. In this, it reminded me of my husband.

Fast forward twenty years, I and my long since lawfully wedded husband are waiting to have a delicious anniversary lunch at Bette's Oceanview Diner as seen on Diner's Drive-ins and Dive's

on Fourth St. in Berkeley when I spot a sidewalk sign advertising gorgeous rings. The sign sends us over to Fifth St to visit the storefront of the artist selling these wares: Melissa Joy Manning.

My words cannot accurately capture the mood of this store and alas, I didn't take any pictures. I was so enthralled by the jewelry and the artistry of the displays that I didn't even think of taking pictures or blogging or anything. Each display case was intricately simple in its appointment: juxtaposing sometimes a ring with the husk of a locust or an organically crafted pair of earrings with the skeleton of a bat. I kid you not. It sounds so odd in print but in situ, the effect was perfectly charming. Immediately my eye fell on a raw diamond ring, the diamond the color of gray sea salt. The extremely solicitous shop assistant let me try it on. We arranged and rearranged the ring to see if it would fit with my engagement ring and matching wedding band. Before I knew it, my husband was purchasing a twentieth year anniversary ring and the new ring fit right in like it had always been intended to join the group, it just needed those twenty years to find its way home.

I am not a woman who needs objects and material goods for gratification. I never even thought I would get an engagement ring much less a twentieth anniversary ring. Still, I do love what it represents: this lovely work of art is a constant little reminder that I have been loved so well and so long by a good man. That is something worth remembering. Thanks to Melissa Joy Manning for helping me remember in such a delightful way.

most important role

2011-03-07T14:40:00.000-08:00

Regarding the picture: Another work from Shu Nung Lee. Whenever I do get a blog up, I will try to include an original work from someone I know.

I don't blog much anymore but some stuff has been making me think lately and that always spells Trouble (note the capital T). It's really the Oscars' fault. To start with, the Oscars bug me. How can the people in Hollywood take themselves so seriously? Actors, have you forgotten what you do for a living? Stop bowing at me! Am I your sensei? Do not steeple your fingers together and point them at me like that, you're creeping me out! Old ladies (yes Susan Sarandon I am talking to you, don't look so surprised), hear me well, there is such a thing as long sleeves. Ask Helen Mirren, she knows.

I've devised a system of punishment for contravention of my Oscar rules: bow=you will be tazed, give a political speech=a basketball game buzzer will be sounded until you have finished your nonsense, expose your arm cellulite= be forced to wear an altar boy carapace with the word shame emblazoned on the back. The list of crime and punishment is as labyrinthine as my crazy brain so I will limit myself to this final observation on the subject: in my world, next time Sean Penn forgets he started in Fast Time at Ridgemont High and was married to Madonna, he will be given the old vaudevillian hook.

In addition to suffering over the individual actors and their buffoonery, I was destined for disappointment because I had all my hopes for winning in the eggbasket of Inception. I am in love with Inception, I would marry it if: a. I wasn't already married to the love of my life b. it was a sentient being. Honestly, I haven't even seen the other Oscar picks for best movie, I'm waiting for the videos, whereas I have seen Inception a number of times too embarrassing to type out. On this subject I have only to say: Christopher Nolan, you are brilliant. There aren't enough members of the Academy smart enough to get you.

Knowing the Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts will invariably irk me, I watch anon with avid fascination, like a teenager in the mirror picking at the pimple she should leave alone. I know it's bad for me, I just can't help it! There are bright moments, like that fluffy haired kid's, "I should've gotten my hair cut," and enragingly beautiful Natalie Portman's deprecating acknowledgement of the wonder of being a mother. Real human moments like these make me want to slap Hollywood less, a little bit.

Two days after the Oscars I heard about that Salon article lambasting Natalie Portman for daring to call motherhood "the greatest role of her life." Somebody sent me the article and asked me what I thought and I was able to name that tune in five letters: eejit. Please, go over and read it yourself and make up your own mind. I might have picked over the article, refuting the author point by point had I not been so deeply satisfied with my knee jerk summation.

But today on the elliptical machine at the gym I was running along, reading this book called The Furious Longing of God, by Brennan Manning. I can't tell you what thought led to the next but there I was running along with tears streaming down my face, absolutely bowled over that I have been given the opportunity to share in the creation of life, in the nurturing of life, in the union of spirit that comes from having a life inside of myself, of the colossal wonder of helping to bring that life to fruition in birth and then through life to adulthood. Amazing. Awe inspiring privilege.

In the denouement of my 24 fitness epiphany, I thought to myself, "Why did Natalie Portman's admission of her awe at being a mother piss that author off so much?" Actually, Ms. Williams tells on herself in the article when she hails as pithy genius some cranky piece of bizness' tweet that said, "Like, my garbage man could give you your most important role lady." Really? Is that what it boils down to? Will you reject the ultimate wonder of creation and nurture because any lowlife can do it? Just because you don't need a PhD to get pregnant or press credentials to nurse a baby, will you turn your nose up at this fundamental life-giving role? Because it doesn't make you feel superior to even the most ignorant human being, will you fail to give it its proper importance?

What happens when you take this snobbish elitism to its fearful conclusion? What happens when someone, say a garbage man, has a Rhodes scholar for a child and you, a highly educated feminist, have a kid that turns out to be a (gasp) janitor? Is there a fear that, in giving our role in the formation of our children its proper importance, we will be horribly accountable if our kids turn out to be obnoxious turds? If Sally Jr. is not so bright, or is lazy, or even average, will we then be the ultimate failure? Would it gall us to no end if someone we feel is inferior to ourselves genetically, socially, intellectually, has a "better child" than ours? In the world where garbage men are treated so dismissively, I imagine that is a terrible prospect.

Just maybe, if those of us who get pregnant and become parents could embrace our share in this ultimate creative process as "our most important role", our children would develop into secure, loved, human beings who are free to fulfill their potential, whether as actress, writer, or as the best friggin' garbage man you've ever met.

In parting, I note that the author begs the question in her article "When was the last time a male star gave an acceptance speech calling fatherhood his biggest role?" Um, dearest feminist, I didn't realize that women were supposed to model their behavior after men. When was the last time a man peed sitting down? Just because they never do doesn't mean I'm gonna start trying it standing up. All that's gonna get me is a bunch of urine dribbling down my leg. No thanks.

RocketCity: Bedroom Demos

2011-02-04T09:40:00.000-08:00

Taking a long hiatus between book chapters, I thought I might just be done with the blogging business. But my son's boldness has brought me out of hiding for a second. Initially started as a Salon des Arts, Night of Grace is the perfect venue for me to give a shout-out for my singer/songwriter son Antonio Silva, better known to a small community as RocketCity.

While the video above does not quite convey the full heart-clenching poignancy of this song, "The Shorter Story", you gotta start somewhere. That is what I most admire about my son's endeavor: without waiting for the polish of a studio edit, he put himself out there, to be judged, to be liked, to be hated, to be ignored. I have never had the courage to lay myself bare in such a way, inviting the world to poke its fingers into my sorest secrets. So, bravo to you Toño, you're the balls.

Below, you'll find the link for his album Bedroom Demos, eponymous in that it was demoed in his bedroom.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=V4O9X1O4

Wait forty seconds so that you can get the free regular download.

NOG 10

2010-12-06T08:25:00.000-08:00

Interlude

בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת

The physical impact that accompanied these words came like an ocean wave. Grace was caught up by the wave and then sucked down into the wild undertow of the sea. She was tumbled in the whitewash of force, arms and legs flailing, no up or down, no air for her lungs. Panic came, as it always did when she got caught in a power too overwhelming for her personal strength. She began to feel lightheaded and faint from lack of air, slowly the world turned dove grey, grey, slate, charcoal, obsidian. Her bones flushed of all calcium as if she were a chicken-egg-in-vinegar experiment gone terribly awry. Her body collapsed, her frame leaving no support.

She fell but didn’t land. She fell and fell and fell. She fell some more. Days and nights passed, years passed, a millennium passed and she continued to fall.

Later, she landed on a hillside of grace, soft as a whisper. Her eyes opened and she saw cedar branches arching overhead like timber rafters. A scent of something, myrrh–

I don’t know what myrrh smells like

—licked its way past her nostrils. She turned to see her companion with his arm under her head, he reached his left arm to embrace her. She lay enraptured for as long as she had fallen.

Again later, there was a table at her feet. Rough hewn giant planks worn smooth by the ages formed a low table around which were strewn beautiful cushions of purple, blue and crimson. Voluptuously languid, she barely lifted her head and the edge of the table, embedded with jewels, caught her line of sight: jasper, sapphire, carnelian, chrysolite, topaz, jacinth, amethyst, chalcedony, beryl, chrysoprase, onyx, emerald sparkled brilliant flashes at her. As she counted the beautiful stones, twelve on each side, she wondered how she knew some of the names. A casual jewelry maker, she was a little familiar with gemstones from sporadic visits to the local bead store but she was pretty sure she had never heard the word chrysoprase and jacinth before in her life. It seemed as if this mysterious place imbued her brain with a wealth of information.

On the table were seven bowls. One looked to be hammered out of gold into the shape of an almond tree flower, one was of silver engraved with a tree growing next to a river, one was translucent, like alabaster, capturing and holding within its walls the unique golden light of this pasture. Another bowl seemed to be made of a pearlescent shell or maybe even a pearl of giant size, seamless and pristine. The last large bowl was carved from the fallen branch of one of the cedar branches overhead. Around the inside lip were carved lovely characters:

וְנָחֲךָ יְהוָה, תָּמִיד, וְהִשְׂבִּיעַ בְּצַחְצָחוֹת נַפְשֶׁךָ, וְעַצְמֹתֶיךָ יַחֲלִיץ; וְהָיִיתָ, כְּגַן רָוֶה, וּכְמוֹצָא מַיִם, אֲשֶׁר לֹא-יְכַזְּבוּ מֵימָיו

The remaining two bowls were smaller; handcrafted pottery so beautifully manipulated and glazed that Grace wondered if the potter had been possessed of supernatural powers.

These observations rushed to Grace with an unusual combination of clarity and celerity as she was escorted from her verdant bed to this nearby banqueting table. Her body moved, in tune with her escort, with unprecedented fluidity of motion. In unison they sank into the softest of raw silk cushions. Her host pulled the two smaller empty earthen bowls closer, placing one before her and one before himself. Grace wanted to jump up and serve her companion but he restrained her with a glance and reached for the golden bowl filled with apples. She watched him move as if in a ballet. He touched an apple and it fell into sections.

Wait, what happened?

Some sleight of his hand had cored and sliced the apple in the, literal, blink of her eye. He placed half of the slices in her bowl. She watched him lift the food, she thought, to his own mouth and instead he offered it to her. She bit and the crunch against her teeth was crisper than a brisk autumn wind, refreshing, surprising, so beyond anything she had ever experienced. The taste shocked her tongue. The sweetness was unbearable but she was saved from it by a balancing act of tart juiciness. It brewed up a fleeting picture of tousled haired children bobbing along in a red wagon being pulled through the paths of a small orchard, jewel toned leaves falling everywhere. Oh! how to describe the bounty of a single bite of apple. It seems like the most mundane act of alimentation and yet Grace knew she was experiencing the joy of life as it had been meant to be lived, food as it had been meant to be tasted.

They continued exploring with each bowl of food, her host leading her on a culinary adventure. Next he pulled over the silver bowl filled with raisins. Raisins in the red little boxes should be embarrassed to share a name with these giant, plump, red, gold and sable beauties being offered to Grace’s communicant mouth. These were edible gemstones, something out of Narnia, perfect droplets of heaven communicating the Maker’s brilliant genius. Grace was overwhelmed. Each bite brought a new thought of awe and wonder at the creator of such delight.

In the next wave of grandeur, he brought the pearlescent bowl filled with figs near. She wanted to shake her head and refuse these fruits. Grace never liked fresh figs, only the dried ones. But she couldn’t bring herself to say no to his kindness. So she opened her mouth and received his offer. So soft, such a surprise: Grace was astonished. This was nothing like any fig she had ever tasted. She couldn’t describe it even to herself.

Heaven.

Though different, it was familiar; the lovely little crunch of seeds was still her favorite part. Here the seeds served to punctuate and syncopate the rhythm of consuming a piece of paradise.

The fruit was so rich, Grace knew she should be full. Instead she actually salivated as if starving when the nourisher drew the next bowl near. Upon closer inspection, the alabaster revealed a slight reddish hint behind the reflected golden light to be pomegranates. He took one in his hand and the fruit stripped itself of its rosy leather jerkin as if in obeisance to its liege, revealing perfect rows of light filled ruby teardrops, sparkling, begging to be consumed in a culmination of existence.

Fruition.

Her companion fed her, drop by drop. She felt a tear form with every seed that entered her mouth: tears of appreciation for careful nurturing. The bitter afternote on the back edges of her tongue sang a melancholy requiem for the source of all nourishment and the cup of bitterness he had swallowed.

As a tear splashed on the rough hewn plank of the table, her companion pulled one last bowl toward them. She looked inside and saw a strange fruit she didn’t know. It was the green of a granny smith apple. The sides were faceted like a giant jewel or a grenade depending on whether you tend toward Athena or Mars.

“It is a chirimoya.” He explained as he split the fruit with his hand as if splitting a hunk of bread off a loaf. “It comes from one of many reminders of Eden.” Grace was enthralled by the juicy, creamy inside spotted with big dark teardrop shaped seeds. “Take, eat.” He offered a wedge of the milky flesh, into Grace’s mouth. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, submerged in the newness of flavor and texture. It was like a slightly tart, vanilla custard.

No, that isn’t quite right.

Again Grace did not have the vocabulary sufficient to describe eating the divine. Another picture erupted spontaneously in her mind, this time of a beautiful couple, naked and unashamed, sharing a delectable treat while sitting on a mossy hillock in a lush jungle, blackened magenta orchids hanging in ropy tendrils from a cool fortress of shading trees. The other fruits had been a new taste of an old fruit. This was a new taste of a new fruit and Grace thought she could die now, complete. A thought inspired by his reference to Eden budded in her brain,

“You know the story of Adam and Eve?”

This time his chuckles were flavored with apple, pomegranate and chirimoya.

“Okay, so you know it. I’m thinking about the part where they get thrown out of Eden. I remember there was a second tree. An angel was put on guard in front of this tree because it was the Tree of Life right?” He nodded for her to continue. “Do you think God didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat that fruit and be stuck living forever in their ruined state?”

As he nodded, Grace stopped to contemplate her own words. She had never thought of the banishment of the original couple in terms of mercy. Always before, she had envisioned the defeated couple skulking, slope-shouldered, away from a furious angel pointing his fiery sword away from the garden.

“That was weird, I don’t know why I said that. Where did that come from?”

“Haven’t you noticed that my presence has brought you increased wisdom tonight? Now, here you are in the anteroom to the inner sanctuary of wisdom. This is a place where your questions can begin to be answered.”

Grace nodded her head up and down hypnotized by the fact that this information had already been in her brain before he answered.

“Do you have other questions?”

Grace hesitated. Maybe if her questions could be answered, she shouldn’t waste hers on these new ideas popping into her head. Maybe she should be rummaging through those top pantry shelves, retrieving the items she’d been looking for all night. Grace tried to focus on her old questions but could only think this new thought about the fruit she had just been fed.

“That fruit you just gave me, the chirimoya, is that the fruit of the Tree of Life?”

“No Grace.”

In the tsunami of silence that followed Grace felt she needed to find somewhere to hide from what was coming. There was nowhere to go. There was nothing she could do but stand in the face of his answer.

“I am.”

The two words trembled the earth around Grace, causing it to roll and undulate like the sea. Still a mediocre sailor, Grace lost her legs immediately and fell on her face. She lay in awestruck and uncomprehending wonder.

What do those words mean? They have the power to throw me facedown into the grass. It’s all so strange.

Am I dead?

Maybe I’m dying was one thought that had fleetingly passed through her mind along with twenty other arbitrary guesses as to how she had begun tonight’s strange journey. For the first time she seriously considered that she might actually be dead dead. Why hadn’t she questioned the ramifications of all these incredibly bizarre events? She had floated along passively absorbing a visit from a beautiful stranger, traveling though time and dimensions she could not fathom, watching her life flash before he eyes, without any substantive analysis. Most of the journey Grace held in the back of her mind that this was all one giant drug induced delusion or dream. The new and very real possibility of her death excited her. Faced with the obvious idea of a new life in death, she hoped it could be true.

If this is death, then kill me now.

NOG 9

2010-11-29T09:01:00.000-08:00

image from http://feastonthis.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/angel-food-cake/

Grace woke as if falling, arms flying out to catch her illusory descent.

“Did I fall asleep?”

“Yes.”

“What about the trip? The magic?”

“That was it.”

Then she noticed that she was rested. Really rested. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in three months. Cocaine tends to keep a person awake. Often she would lie in bed until the night turned to grey dawn and the time would come to get up. Even on the nights that she did fall asleep, that sleep was disturbed, haunted, full of fitful movements. Now the constant soreness in her muscles had disappeared. The endless buzzing feeling in her nerves had quieted. Hollow guilt that incessantly plagued her had bowed out for this act.

“How long was I out?”

“You could say: For the distance between the past and the present.”

The thing on the back of the shelf again, this time Grace didn’t bother to reach for it. She didn’t need to grasp it. She only wanted to enjoy the sensations of well-being. It had been so long.

“I feel like I could face anything–no matter how bad it is.”

She looked out to see a volleyball game in progress, one of her own. She relaxed her guard a little but not entirely. Though the court was a refuge for her: tensions and worries forgotten in the wash of adrenaline, sweat and lactic acid, she knew from experience that any situation could turn ugly without notice. He had warned her.

But really, how bad can it be?

“This one might not be so bad.” Her companion didn’t answer her hopeful prediction, watching as the other Grace crushed a ball down the line. “That was good hit. Don’t you think I look pretty good out there? Those briefs show everything but I don’t look horrible.”

“Grace, you are beautiful to me, especially when you’re healthy. You are strong like bull.”

Grace laughed that he had borrowed the Russian accent her mom affected when she said the same thing, making it sound more like ‘st-dawng like booll’. In the wake of her laughter she grew immediately uncomfortable with the compliment she had so brazenly solicited. She waffled, “I guess I could lose five pounds. Still, I look okay right?” Grace cringed at the desperate need in her voice. She might just have well have said, ‘Please like me. Think I am pretty. Reassure me!’

Pathetic.

“I do like you. You are pretty.”

Nice.

Grace had begun to notice that she was unable to differentiate between real and imagined, even within the confines of this fantastical scenario. She didn’t know whether her companion had actually spoken or whether she had wished the words into her own hearing. She was too embarrassed to ask him directly, ashamed at her need, afraid the words hadn’t really come. For now, it didn’t matter. Real or imagined, she basked in the warmth of his favor.

The game she was playing ended. The crowd started clapping. Grace watched herself walk over to the players bench and grab some sweats. Pulling up her pants, the team went into a stretching warm-down ritual that was really just an excuse for the coach to blather endlessly. If talking made for good coaching this lady would have been coach of the century. Grace didn’t enjoy listening to her yammer in real life, she wondered if their time was best spent listening to her now.

“Um are you sure this is where you want to be? We could probably skip this part.” As those words departed her mouth, Grace caught a glimpse of the person standing near the bench talking to their trainer. The trainer was laughing and batting this person’s arm, twirling some trainer’s tape around her finger in her usual come-hither stance. All the volleyball players called her See-through Sally behind her back and sometimes to her face. Although the University issued heavy duty white polos to all its training program staff, somehow Sally’s always managed to be see-through. There was an actual betting pool, guessing how she had achieved this transparency: she washed the shirt with a washboard, she sanded the shirt to a paper thin fiber, she bought a different polo and reaffixed the trainer’s insignia to it. In order to win the pot, somebody was going to have to ask for her secret.

At this point, Grace felt a sudden and inexplicable rush of jealousy at Sally’s unabashed petting of the stranger’s arm. He was wearing the red sweats particular to the school’s soccer team. But Grace didn’t know anyone on the soccer team.

“Hey, is that–?” she cut her query short, reluctant to draw attention to her interest. She felt a chuckle drop on her and was startled by a sudden shifting of perspective and speed of motion of all the people around them. “Oh wait, are we leaving? Where are we going?” she felt swift disappointment.

“I thought you didn’t want to listen to your coach.,” his pleasant laughter rippling speculatively.

“I don’t, it’s just that–I don’t know.” She didn’t want to articulate this thing, so ancillary, maybe even frivolous, on such a crucial journey. Embarrassed, she shut her mouth.

They watched as sweaty Grace moved up the bleachers to where her parents sat with her sisters Honey and Molly and her brother Ben, her number one fan. At some unseen command, the speed of movement tripled and then quadrupled as if everything were fast forwarding.

Talk about your Universal Remote.

High fives and hugs moved in a blur, her family filed out of the gym at a run, got into the car and gained momentum that jumped over the ride home and stopped in the kitchen of Grace’s home.

“Neat.”

Back at normal speed, Grace stood, leaning against the smooth soapstone of the kitchen counter, breathing in the baked vanilla of an angel food cake, fluffy and pure, a prim virgin queen on a cake-plate throne. Across the counter her mom and dad were seated at the kitchen table with Molly and Honey. Beyond the kitchen table over in the den section of the great room, Ben lay on the couch, mouth open, air raking across adenoids. The sound of his rasping breaths caused one of her momentary bouts of panic. Ben’s frailty was able to leave her weak with fear.

This fear had started one gorgeous day when the bay had frozen over. Such a huge body of water didn’t often succumb completely to the cold so it was kind of a big deal. Ben had never been out on the frozen bay so the whole family had gathered to take their precious cargo for his inaugural visit. Everybody was there: Annie with her husband Charlie, even Wendy had come home for Christmas. All the siblings had scrum rummaged in the closet under the staircase, each person looking for the right sized skates. Ben waited patiently like little Lord Fauntelroy on the bottom step. The sisters tumbled out of the closet en masse, bestowing the double-bladed learning skates on their little brother like a benediction. Each one of them had used those red laced skates as her first. His juicy lips had twisted into a smile of delight lighting up his face with the glow of excitement for his first day of ‘eye-kay-dee’.

Glorious sunshine glinted off the ice, guiding colorfully sailed iceboats across the endless expanse in a crunching shoosh. Between the cold and the beauty, it was literally breathtaking. Unforgettable. Each person fought for the right to hold Ben’s mittened hand and guide him through his first day out. He didn’t do much actual ‘eye-kay-dee’, mostly he just walked around and then finally everyone took turns holding him. Ben didn’t want to leave but his nose had turned Rudolph red and signs of green had begun to tell in the line of mucus from his nose. Time to go home. That night he had been rushed to the hospital with sudden onset of pneumonia. Safe at home, Grace had tried to pray for Ben’s rapid recovery but fell asleep instead.

That night she dreamed that Ben had died at the hospital. The crushing desperation of loss had been stunningly unexpected, leaving her paralyzed. She couldn’t remember all the details of the dream, just the overwhelming hopelessness of never seeing Benjamin again. In her dream she had cried with the rawness of agony she had only felt once before, in another dream.

During the summer approaching seventh grade, young Grace had read almost all the books in the bookshelf in her living room. She was nearly finished the most daunting collection of butterscotch leather books, each classic title listed in gold leaf on a rectangular field of a different jewel color. After exhausting every other resource she had reluctantly settled on the emerald bordered Faust. Always one to judge a book by its cover, Grace had already decided she didn’t like this one but read on with dogged determination. The story disturbed her deeply and as happens in Grace Land, her mind translated the disturbance to dream. While sleeping, dream Grace made an unremembered Faustian trade that consigned her to hell. Though most details were misty, she woke with a sharp remembrance of herself kneeling in the auditorium of her Middle School, waiting for final, eternal judgement to be passed on her.

That night, she cried the same black wretchedness that had followed her dream of Benjamin’s death. Both times the tears in her dream had finally crossed over into her real life and she had awoken with tears soaking the pillow, sobs clutching the air around her. She remembered the raw panic of irrevocable loss in her first moment’s awakening,

Am I going to hell?

Is Ben really dead?

She had raced down the stairs to find her precious brother nestled between her parents in their giant bed. Relief nearly dropped her to the floor at the door of their bedroom. Still she couldn’t forget that sinking feeling and was often unsuspectingly besieged by the panic of that memory. Her eyes rested protectively on her favorite little piece of angel food cake as he lay peacefully sleeping where she had deposited him on the cushions, looking over the head of her father whose glasses were busily twirling in her periphery. Grace watched herself flare her nostrils and roll her eyes as her Dad began his nightly ritual of reading the bible to his family. Distracted from Ben, she turned microscopic attention to the greasy smudge marks on his bifocals while she and her other self made a pact to tune out his words. She would rather be listening to her coach.

She deliberately diverted her attention again, picking up a knife, plunging it into the golden exterior of the pristine cake. Carefully cutting a generous portion, she grabbed a fork and stabbed the tines full of lovely white sponge. Hungry, as usual, from her game, she was poised to eat when words penetrated the barrier she normally erected in these situations.

“Are you sure you want that?” Her father’s voice grated her ears in every dimension. Grace could tell that she and herself were equally annoyed when she saw the snarl that distorted her face. “Don’t make such an ugly face. I’m just trying to help. I saw you in those briefs and they don’t hide much.”

“I’d like to see you in a pair of briefs Mr. Angel Food Cake.”

Grace mumbled, barely above her breath. Her father didn’t catch the response but she and her companion did. Lilting drops of joy fell from his mouth, landing on Grace’s ears with gentle healing. Grace was almost willing to get another barb from her dad if the reward was that laughter.

“Interesting response.” He nudged her, distracting her from the tears that threatened to join a pool being formed by the other Grace in the sisterhood of hurt feelings.

“If I thought he knew me better I would think he was deliberately pushing my buttons. The truth is worse: my buttons developed over time in specific response to him. Without even trying, everything he says makes me overreact wildly. He doesn’t even know he’s driving me insane. If he did, he wouldn’t care. Nobody else can get beneath my skin like that and make it itch like a thousand insects invading. His helpful little remarks instantly make me feel horrible, small and fat at the same time. I wish I could say the perfect thing to let him know how it hurts me and then hurt him back in equal measure. Instead I just trip over my own words, tongue-tied and miserable.” She leaned in for comfort against his side, ribs and muscle a soothing fortress.

Grace knew from not too distant memory that she had immediately lost her appetite but watched as she spitefully and deliberately shoveled that forkful into her mouth and a second gigantic portion to chase it down. Sad to see herself force feeding a huge chunk down to her churning stomach, she noticed her mom making furious grimaces at her father.

“Huh. I never saw that.”

“I guess you were busy proving something.” he pointed out.

“I was hungry before he said that. I had just finished playing a college level volleyball game. That burns calories you know. Do you know how much fat there is in Angel Food Cake? None. What the heck? Can’t I get a break?”

“So, instead of repeating these facts in a rational way, you decided to force feed your fugitive appetite to teach him a lesson? Again, this is a very interesting response. I don’t see how it helps you. I don’t see how it makes him understand you better.”

“I told you, I get tongue tied and if I try to say anything I end up shrieking and crying and then I get in trouble for being disrespectful. That’s the worst part, when, all of a sudden, I’m in trouble for doing absolutely nothing besides eating a piece of cake. Did you notice that he interrupted himself reading the bible just to share that nugget of helpfulness? Is telling me I’m fat supposed to be more important than his precious bible?” She challenged, once again shifting the object of his scrutiny.

“Grace, be fair. You weren’t even listening to him.”

“Oh yeah, I know. I can tell you what he was saying though: ‘Blah blah blah something about sacred man-loins, something else about head coverings, a happy tale of children being stoned at the gates of the city for disobedience, a recitation of the need for a millstone to be tied around the neck of somebody—probably me, and why? because I bear a striking resemblance to a lady named Jezebel, witch of the Old Testament. We finally get somewhere when he reads out in his giant booming voice, so full of conviction: ‘if you love me you will obey me.’ Only he isn’t talking about obeying God. He’s always talking about obeying him. Small g god of our family.”

As if to bear witness to Grace’s stream of invective, her father’s voice carried across the kitchen, swelling in her ears with what she called, 'oulde thyme religion.' She even spelled it that way in her mind.

“I am God’s representative to you on this earth. That's why He gave you parents. You weren’t beamed down from a spaceship. He gave you to us so you can follow us.”

Grace turned to her companion. “How can anyone justify that? What kind of God would let that be His representative? Not a good cosmic marketing plan if you ask me.” Grace looked into his dark eyes with her challenge and saw profound sadness.

“Why did you?”

“Why did I what?” she quizzed him despite knowing exactly what he meant.

“Why did you let him be the only representation of God you relied on?”

“I guess I wasn’t interested in what was being sold. If I was in the market for anger and hypocrisy I might have kicked the tires. But, surprise surprise, I was all stocked up.” Grace despised the petulant weakness of her own response. She was deflecting, once again focusing on cartwheels in a supermarket. Still, she felt marginally justified as she turned back to the familiar kitchen table in time to see her father pick up the bible to read a choice morsel of what seemed to Grace to be furious condemnation. She saw his face twist and watched as spittle flew from his mouth.

“That,” her newest and loveliest friend placed himself between Grace and the contorted visage, “does not justify you never getting to know God for yourself.”

He looked at her, commanding her attention.

“Grace, let’s imagine you’ve met someone you find attractive. You are intrigued. Wouldn’t you look for opportunities to see this person? Wouldn’t you want to know more about him? Hear his voice, examine him more closely, learn his features, find out about his character to confirm your initial reaction?” She nodded, her head bobbing on the ethereal waves of recent discovery. She had been blindsided by that desire ever since the stranger in the Ceramics Studio. More importantly and to her complete surprise, she wanted that very thing with this stranger by her side. The more she knew about him, the more she wanted to know.

“Would your dad have to drag you, sullen and reluctant, to see that person?” She didn’t bother agreeing in the negative, they both knew an absurd notion when they heard one.

“Would you need your father to act out a perfect pantomime of this person, to be sure you were interested, to know he was really attractive, to know if you liked him?”

She made a little retching noise,

“Okay, I get it, you don’t have to gross me out to drive home your point.”

“Grace, I don’t think you do get it. Imagine you began to fall deeply, madly, wildly in love with this person. You’ve discovered his beauty is exactly what you’ve always waited for, that his love is profound and true.” Again, her head nodded in acknowledgement of something she had begun to learn this night. “He has sent you letters detailing his past, present and future plans for the two of you. He has sent ardent letters and poetry declaring his love, your exquisite beauty in his eyes, how he could move mountains for you and walk on water just to be by your side.” Her eyes filled with tears remembering the assurances, the kind words, the gifts he had already shared with her.

“Would you wait for your father to read those letters to you?” She reared her head back against that absurdity. “No, you would anxiously await the moments until you could rip open this person’s letters and devour his words. Even if someone else did get hold of those letters, reading only the parts that made you feel confused, in a voice that irritated you, wouldn’t you want to see for yourself what the letters actually said? Read them with his voice in your mind? Make sure his words sounded like the person you had come to know and understand?”

Grace nodded, reluctantly fascinated by the questions following each other out of those compelling lips,

“Finally, once you knew him, wouldn’t you want to spend time with him, listening to him, letting him listen to you, just being together in the quietness of bliss? This could be the love of your life. Wouldn’t it be worth the effort to really get to know him?”

Grace, interrupted the trance induced by his words. A desire for control always wanted to cut in on the new dance her companion was teaching her. After all, this conversation had started as an indictment of her father and the one who put him in charge.

“I get it.” her voice sounded curt and rough to her own ears.

“So why didn’t you bother to get to know me for yourself?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. In this lovely fantasy picture you’ve created I’m supposed to have been magically attracted and intrigued. What about real life? In that reality I felt no interest or attraction.” She paused letting that sink in, “Never once did I even come close to falling deeply, madly, or wildly in love. I get your point, but it presupposes me discovering you as the love of my life. That’s never been the case and I don’t think one night’s journey is going to make up for it.”

In the words of the singer, Grace can be viciously unkind. At some point she had chosen to be annoyed that he had challenged her excuses and turned them upside down. She was so busy trying to be right that she didn’t even notice they had transitioned from the third person to the first person. His word picture had brought out his truth into the simple, clear light, for the billionth time, outshining the darkness of her complaints against her father but she was petulantly angry that he deftly stripped her of all pretense. The part of her that still wanted to control this situation designed her half-truths to hurt and punish him for finding the giant error in her logic and blasting it to kingdom come. She knew they had hit their mark when his hand trembled. She turned defiantly to him and saw tears standing in dark pools of pain. Grace was suspended in horror and maybe, yes, disgust.

How pathetically needy.

The words sprang to her mind and while causing guilt they gathered momentum.

Is he so desperate for me to love him?

“Grace I am wildly, deeply, madly in love with you. I have walked across a sea of stars to reach you, changed my form so you could comprehend me, accepted death on your behalf and stormed through hell and back again just so we could be together. You are beautiful to me. You are the love of my life. I could spend an eternity with you.”

NOG 8

2010-11-15T12:40:00.000-08:00

Interlude

שְׁבֹּת

By his words, Grace was seated, on what, she had no idea. It seemed that a force equal and opposite to every angle of her seated body was holding her suspended in space. She felt like she was floating in a swimming pool filled with jello.

Not really jello, there’s nothing there. But I can feel something like the soft supportive density of jello.

This confused and woefully inadequate description confirmed that Grace really didn’t have the vocabulary to describe the grandeur of the unknown. Maybe somebody better with physics and concepts of force and matter could have explained it. On the flip side a poet might have lent some insight. Grace, regular plain Grace, had to rely on a trite phrase,

Floating on a cloud.

As if floating on a cloud wasn’t lovely enough, her friend–

Hmmm friend, this is what the word friend is supposed to mean.

Grace became lost in the recognition of a friendship so unexpected.

Her friend sat down on the cloud right next to her. He still hadn’t let go of her hand. As they rested, an image appeared before them. The sudden picture had the feeling of an eight millimeter film projection. Different from old home movies which are characterized by graininess and randomly occurring marring scratches, this picture had the pristine crispness of sharper-than-life clarity. As a scene began to unfold, Grace understood that her initial identification with a home movie was provoked by the oddly stuttering articulation of the progressing story, as if every individual and object had been rendered slightly robotic when translated to film. It was like a flip book of incredibly clear pictures.

Not that I would know anything about home movies. Nobody ever bothered taking any of me.

“I know,” his voice interrupted her silent self-pity, “that’s why I want to show you this. I know the desires of your heart. This is my gift to you.”

As they watched, a girl walked up a beach boardwalk. Her Shirley Temple curls bobbed as she made her way up the meandering path. The grey weathered boards nestled between hillocks of sand. Tufts of dune grass sprouted to break the pristine cleanliness with sprays of green, yellow and brown. The fronds whispered in the breeze mimicking the more distant sound of ocean waves whooshing onto the beach. The girl was skipping barefoot on dry wood, summer tough soles impervious to the daggers of splintered silver cedar that threatened each footfall. Her skin was carefree gold against the red terry cloth of her two-piece. Her fingers worried the frayed edges of an embroidered whale on the left breast of her bathing top. In the right hand, she held a piece of red stained-glass shaped like a school kid’s plastic ruler, three inches long and shrinking with its every trip to her artificially rosy mouth.

“Did she get that at the old snack shack? Gosh I loved that place. Didn’t they tear it down because of dry rot or something? The new snack shack was never the same. Can you show me the old one?” She interrupted one thought with the next, “Jolly Ranchers! Watermelon! You can’t find them in those long sticks anymore, only the little suckers or sometimes a stubbier version of the original if you look hard. What is it with me and the candy? You know I don’t even like candy that much. This must have been before the candy embargo. Or am I sneaking again? I thought this was supposed to be a gift”

His laughter interrupted her onslaught of words and he nudged her.

“Look at you. So happy and worry free. No guilt, no skulking. This was definitely pre- or post-embargo. Even though it seemed like forever to you, candy prohibition didn’t last as long as you remember.”

“It did seem like forever.” She didn’t pause, catching up quickly with her own meandering thoughts. “I loved that bathing suit, so soft and comfy. I wore it every day, I think I might even have slept in it. It would be lovely to be her again; smile on my face, sand in my bed. Unmitigated happiness.”

The girl reached the end of the boardwalk. She stood at the head of tall stairs that led down to the beach. Tucking the whole candy into her mouth for safekeeping, she unceremoniously hurled her body off the edge of the top step. Her hair lifted in the breeze as her arms and legs splayed out in star formation. A pink grin of untarnished delight spread across her face, suffusing the air around her with joy. The happiest flying starfish. Grace held her breath for that suspended moment of flight. Her self hit the sand with a dull thud and continued to roll down the hill of alabaster grit until she was completely breaded in sand. Losing the momentum of her roll, young Grace leapt to her feet and headed toward the ocean in an all-out downhill sprint. She whizzed by an older lady, distracting her from snapping the chinstrap of her blue hydrangea-flowered bathing cap under the left ear, kicking up sand and drawing a furious glare. Oblivious, the wild girl reached the shallow water, slowing slightly only with the hindrance of water. She dove headlong with complete abandon into the first curling wave her small body could fit under.

“I miss that so much.”

“The beach is only ten minutes away. Why should you miss it?’

She was sad with inexplicable loss, “I am not the same. I can’t be her anymore. She was fearless, wild, fun, free, adventurous. Not ruined”

“You’re right. She was fearfully and wonderfully made. You’re also wrong. She isn’t lost forever. You can find that pure girl again. Every morning there are new mercies waiting for you. I can make all things new for you.”

Grace wanted to believe him. What he said was so tempting. Unfortunately she knew there were things she could never recover, never recover from, never rediscover.

He doesn’t understand.

A perfectly synchronized pause and the scene switched abruptly, as home movies like to do, to the next vignette. The smell of diesel fumes mixed with briny bay wind wafted into Grace’s brain, calling her, Oh little playmate, into the apple tree of recollection. She jerked her head sharply to see the sun and sea twisted mop of her own childish hair whipping against the force of wind generated by a ferry cutting across the water. The toasty sand waif was huddled at the back of the boat, in the coveted corner seat of the bench where one lucky passenger could lean a head back and be exposed to the full expanse of late afternoon summer sky.

Again, the hand of loss reached and wrung another twist in Grace’s heart, squeezing out salty tears. With limbs gathered to her chest, the child nestled into the corner and lay her head on the cheek height ledge, feeling the vibration of the motor buzzing her head, soothingly irritating. A huge green-headed horsefly landed on an exposed ankle not covered by the tattered gray sweatshirt pulled over her knees. A guerilla hand eased out and hovered over the biting fly, waiting for the perfect time to slam a punishing assault down on the offending intruder. Crack! Precision strike, the corpse fell to the greasy grey painted floor of the boat, joining a mass grave of his compatriots.

“Nice shot. How many is that?” A voice inquired.

Grace quickly counted the round and raised, red bite marks on her legs and subtracted the number she had failed to kill.

“”I’ve gotten eight so far. How ‘bout you?” She lifted her cheek off the buzzing ledge to hear the answer, hoping she was ahead. The inquisitive neighbor could have lied about her kill count but there is an honor code generally hallowed among ferry riders.

“Only six, they’re really fast today.” Grace nodded in agreement. Some days the winged enemy just sat there, dull and bloated, seemingly suicidal. The afternoon had sent a brisk breeze, sweeping away the muggy and turgid, adding a spring to the step of each horsefly and making combat a little more challenging.

“Why can’t I think of her name? I’ve known her all my life. I just saw her at the deli the other day when I was grabbing a breakfast sandwich.”

“A strange thing has been happening to you lately Grace. If you haven’t noticed, it seems like you have been relinquishing all the good things in your life— just letting them go like so much dead weight. You have taken on heavy ballast with your recent activities and you have to make room. Sadly you have let go, one by one, all the sweetest memories, even names of the nicest people you’ve known.”

“Yeah, I noticed. It’s like the Nothing in The Neverending Story. Have you ever seen that movie?” Despite the question seeming ludicrous, he nodded his head. “It’s taking me over. Chunks of me are just falling by the wayside. And I feel numbly powerless to do anything but watch. It’s horrible”

“Yes, it is horrible.”

“How is this supposed to be a gift?”

“I just gave this memory back to you. By the way, her name is Lauren. Remember?”

As if his question were a command, a flood of memories came back: bike riding, roller-skating, heads up seven up, HORSE in a driveway basketball court, crack-the-whip ice-skating, sucking nectar out of the back of countless honeysuckles, crabbing on the dock at night armed only with raw chicken legs on a string, a flashlight and expert net scooping skills.

This provoked one particularly clear memory of a night on the dock under the full moon. Unable to sleep in the heat, her parents had let her stay out late. She and Lauren had raced their banana seated Schwinns down to the bay. Flying down the hill at obscene speeds, the night wind blessed their sweaty brows. Round the bend and down the straightaway, Grace had arrived first at the end of the bulkhead. Deftly tying the string to a raw chicken leg pulled out of the white plastic bucket, she let it plop softly into the inky water illuminated beneath a yellow street light. Another race ensued in which she and Lauren fought to see who could tie the most lines before all the chicken parts had disappeared. Grace secretly let Lauren win this time, already satisfied with her biking triumph. By the time they returned to the first line, it was taut, indicating a crab had taken the bait. Together they shone their flashlights on the chicken. There was nothing more exciting than watching a blue claw try and drag a monstrous chicken leg through murky waters. Grace giggled at the furiously industrious delicate paddles located behind the claws and legs at the back of the razored oval body. As Grace slowly, slowly, slow-ly lifted the line, Lauren readied her net. Grace pulled, Lauren lowered the boom with stealth; the two girls moved in the perfectly synchronized ballet of practiced understanding. Swoosh, the crab was netted, still trying to tear chunks from its prey, unwitting that he had now become the prey. Whispered whoops issued from the two huntresses over the first catch of the night.

Grace was washed in the thrill of finding lost treasure. Backing out of her mind’s eye, she recommenced watching the fantastical ‘home movie’ of her young self and her recaptured playmate enjoying a round of cat’s cradle with a chinese jumprope that magically appeared out of someone’s pocket. They collapsed on each other, laughing hysterically as their hands became hopelessly entwined in a kaleidoscope of geometric designs.

“Thank you, that was fun. I had almost forgotten how great my childhood could be.”

“You’re welcome. Only be careful, and watch yourself closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart for as long as you live.”

Despite this momentary reprieve, she could feel the inexorable tug of the quicksand haunting her, waiting for her. The sinking mud offered no support. Instead, it seemed to want to suck her down into its vortex, covering over her head just like that horse in the movie.

Artax.

The last three months were only the culmination of a thousand poor choices that chipped away at the integrity of her life. Why had she made so many bad choices? There must be something intrinsically wrong with her that she had fallen into the pit so easily. Why hadn’t she been looking where she was going? Why hadn’t she gone the other way? Why had she dived headlong into the most abominable looking mudpile she could find? Wallowing in the Pit of Despair, she had walked into the nightmare of epic fable.

But who will come to save me with a name?

“Grace.” His word interrupted her tailspin. Completely engrossed, irritation buzzed her like a one of those nasty horseflies.

“You should check that tendency. I have known too many people so enamored of their own tragic grandeur that they choose to stay broken, refusing to get better.” Grace knew he was generalizing to soften the blow. His light pierced the truth of who she was. She loved to roll her sadness over her tongue, savoring its taste. She didn’t mind using props to enhance the experience: sad songs, tragic poetry, verse in a foreign language—a particular indulgence—facilitated a specific brand of anonymous self-pity. Having sufficiently worked herself into an emotional frenzy she would then enjoy the fruits of her labor by watching herself cry in the mirror until the redness made her eyes shine green. He continued with searing insight,

“There are people who choose to remain ill when there is a great physician waiting to heal. Even worse than refusing treatment, the longing for the intoxication of drama becomes so great that some individuals will deliberately and continually sabotage themselves in a sort of spiritual Munchausen’s syndrome, perpetuating the agony, the madness, the sickness.”

He doesn’t understand.

The scene changed one more time. Deposited onto the mainland by the five o’clock ferry, beachspent Grace ambled, alone again, up the patchy asphalt of road. Suddenly energized by a spurt of youth, she broke into the padded run of calloused bare feet, catching the faded stripes of the towel tied around her neck on the wind of her speed. She put her arms out wide in front of her, waiting to be taken onto the wings of the air. Ten seconds later, unsuccessful in flight, she slowed down and then quit altogether. Pooped by attempting Icarus, she took a sharp right and hopped over the split rail fence that bordered the road because using the opening a foot away from her vaulting point would have defeated the purpose of the steeplechase. Grace hit the grass and stopped to assess the small orchard of five trees.

She stood staring at the trees for a considerable amount of time, swaying almost imperceptibly to the rhythm of the slightest movement of branches. Grace knew what was happening. Having done this so many times, she immediately fell into the familiar ritual along with little Grace. She let her eyes go loose, unfocussed like searching for a Magic 3-D picture. Under her near cross-eyed gaze, the trees began to transform. Holes, knots and swirling bark clarified themselves into eyes and a variety of features whose placement would have made Picasso proud. The gnarled and twisted branches morphed into beckoning arms with many jointed fingers. The shoulders, elbows, wrists bent again and again at broken angles with arthritic swelling at the joints. Slow fingers crooked, calling Grace to come taste their wares. Each tree had become a tiny wizened ancient person, welcoming and familiar, vying for Grace to pick his shoulders to sit on and taste of his fruit.

This was a strange realm that Grace’s mind entered on many a lazy summer afternoon. Usually able to work herself into a tizzy of fear over an elaboration of her imagination— an anonymous hand shooting out between the slats of the cellar stairs, sinister eyes lurking from the crack in the bulkhead that keeps the bay from washing the shore away, the muscular arm of late summer’s swirling undertow holding Grace down indefinitely—oddly, the tiny grove of wrinkled mutated treemen seemed friendly, not frightening.

Today, she chose the nearest tree whose lowest branch was just the right height for a limber kid to swing up with agility born of desire. She straddled the branch and shimmied backward into the crook, where trunk meets branch. Settled in safe and snug on a favorite set of strong shoulders, Grace lifted her legs up into a balanced lotus pose that comes naturally only to children, Gumby or Ghandi. Finally and perfectly comfortable, she fell to her task of picking and eating mulberries.

“Don’t you think it’s weird that she’s all by herself? You’d think everybody in the neighborhood would have been in those trees. A murder of crows swarming and devouring.”

“Not weird. I would just say it must have been nice for you to have time alone to look at the water, watch the sunset and enjoy the fruit.”

“Yeah, that’s a much better way of putting it. Still, it seems like I’m always alone.”

“Grace, you were never alone.”

The mulberries were perfect. Deep crimsony-aubergine mounds comprised of smaller globelets of juiciness. All of the fruits were not fully ripened; there was a rainbow of readiness ranging from tartest green, sungold, fire-orange, almost luscious scarlet, not quite burgundy, perfected purple. You definitely had to be a pro to pick the perfect mulberry, careful and patient. Still, there seemed to be an endless supply. Every day that she climbed up the tree, she would climb back down sated, fingers, mouth and (who knows why) soles washed in purple berry. Grace watched herself, sitting and munching, enjoying the end of the day, oblivious to anything but the goodness of it all. Knowledge loomed that she could not go back and climb into that tree and enjoy the simple act of picking berries. The void was an unbearable hollow ache inside her. She poked at it absently, relishing the pain of the wound.

“Stop Grace, this is supposed to remind you of the goodness in your life-- not cause you an endless reverie of the bitterness of loss. Remember the good things that will give you joy and bring gladness to your heart.”

He doesn’t understand.

This betraying thought, voiced internally a third time, provoked a dawning somewhere. Words crowed:

That’s a lie. He does understand.

He understood her better than anyone else, probably better than she ventured to understand herself. Could she trust him? Could she believe him? Did she dare to hope? At that moment, Grace noticed that, as they watched the movie, she had reclined against his chest. She felt secure, safe, comfortable.

I am falling in love.

This startling recognition made her sit upright. Repose abruptly ended, she noted with bittersweet longing that her show had ended also. The reel was over, a non-existent tape slapping in an endless circular rotation and they sat watching nothing but the stars. Grace didn’t know much about constellations but she was almost sure this was a different sky than she was used to seeing.

“The past is over. It is time to move on.”

Grace had a moment of panic in which she thought he might leave her. She clutched hard at his arm, marveling that this was the same arm she had refused to touch such an endlessly short time ago. Where she once feared intimacy she was now terrified of losing it.

“I don’t think I’m ready for this to be over yet. I know there’s more.”

She couldn’t articulate her desperation to know him better and find out what this night was all about. She couldn’t express her fear at returning to the street, alone, full of drugs with nowhere to turn. She didn’t want to be back in her own bed if she was just going to wake up and go back to that street at the end of the day.

“Don’t worry Grace, I’m not finished with you yet.”

A hiccuping sob noise of relief popped out of her mouth before she could cover it over with her hand. Leaning back into his arm, she barely heard his voice recede into the muffled folds of her consciousness,

“Don’t forget how you trust me right now Grace. We are moving into ugly territory. You’re going to feel ashamed. Know that I love you.”

NOG-A long chapter

2010-11-11T08:40:00.000-08:00

image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/carreon/1006874428/

Far from sensing hurt, anger or exasperation from her companion, she felt a warm caress on the side of her cheek. Pushing a stray curl behind her ear, he managed to convey deep affection in a simple gesture

“Time to move on, Grace.”

And then they were rushing through space. Grace thought she felt a wall of air pushing against her body as they moved through the distance between her last vision and the next. So strange to whiz by at the speed of something akin to light—country light’s sophisticated town cousin. She could feel them reaching their destination as the momentum of her body began to slow as if pulling into a station, a nonexistent locomotive braking at the prescribed phantom platform of their next stop.

“Why do we travel differently every time?”

“How can I explain this? By providing identifiable contextual sensations, I can help you travel through dimensions you cannot yet perceive or comprehend. If I didn’t provide these sensory illusions, you wouldn’t survive the trips physically or intellectually.”

“You mean I could lose my mind?”

“It would be a race between your mind and your body. Your organs would fail pretty fast if I didn’t protect them”

“My organs are really here and not back home in my bed?”

“Where do you think here is Grace?”

“I don’t know, somewhere where my unprotected organs could be destroyed?”

“Your organ failure here wouldn’t necessarily preclude you being, at some place in what you call space and time, back in your bed, if bed is where you really are.”

Not helpful. Grace grabbed her head in frustration, as if she might be able to squeeze out some revelation. She knew she should probably just quit asking questions but couldn’t help herself. She hated not knowing, not understanding.

“I just don’t get it. How about a more simple question. What exactly was that invisible train ride?”

“Exactly? That’s not really a more simple question. Here’s an oversimplification: you are traveling inside the cocoon of me. Imagine if I took you into space. I would need to accommodate your need for oxygen or regulate against pressure changes, right?”

Grace shrugged, biting back the obvious remark about her not being a rocket scientist,

“If you say so.”

“Think of me as your rocket ship. Inside of me you are protected from all the rigors your body, mind and spirit could not withstand. In this case, the media I am bringing you through are much more alien to you than outer space.”

Grace squinted and tried to imagine a medium more alien to her than outer space. She felt if she could just concentrate hard enough she might catch a glimmer of his explanation. Maybe if she looked into a mirror, she could peek at it over her shoulder like an intellectual Annie Oakley.

“Why a train ride?”

“That’s what I meant by identifiable contextual sensations. You understand the feeling of a moving train. You understand it pulling into the station. These familiar sensations put your mind and body at ease with the idea of moving from one location to the next.”

“Why is it different every time?’

“Two reasons. If I did it the same way every time, your conscious mind, possibly even your subconscious mind, would become attuned to the illusion. You might see past the trick which is protecting you and glimpse the unfathomable.”

Grace furrowed her brow. She felt as if she were reaching for something on the very top shelf of a pantry. She didn’t even know what her fingers were brushing against but as she stretched she only made glancing contact and pushed the object further back into the dark corner of the cabinet. She exhaled in frustration, momentarily giving up the pursuit.

“What’s the second reason?”

“It pleases me. I love to see the look on your face when I introduce you to each new gift.”

“So far the everythingness, you know that ambrosia thingamajig? That was my favorite.” Grace lapsed quickly, basking in remembered delight. Her lack of comprehension nagged, marring the peace of her reverie. Again, she stretched her arm out in a renewed effort to discover the hidden object, without luck.

“Do you think if I were smarter you could explain it more thoroughly?”

“Childlike acceptance of your limited understanding is the best tool for coping with matters beyond your comprehension. Even the most brilliant human has built-in limitations that do not provide them access to my knowledge. Genius lies in humble acceptance. Some call it faith”

Grace scrunched her face in concentration one more time.

There it is!

A name, a melody, a memory, something. And then it scurried away.

“Here we are.”

The elusive item snuggled away into the recesses of Grace’s brain fissures as she turned her attention to the newest scene. She groaned audibly when she recognized herself standing in front of her mom and dad. This particular memory had nagged Grace with the persistence of shameful regret. She didn’t plan on enjoying the view. Here, she had arrived at the age when she had started to stop liking herself.

“This was one whacked-out night.” She murmured, becoming the audience to a familiar conversation.

Grace felt a renewed dismay at the look of confusion on her mom’s face. Her mother’s bewildered eyes reminded her of the times her grandmother, teetering on the brink of dementia, would forget where she had left her purse and then wildly accuse her grandchildren of grand larceny. Under indictment, the kids would mobilize, finding the bag in question where she had craftily secreted it under any number of pillows in the house. That familiar mask of panic, alarm, suspicion, inability to decide whether to trust her own instincts or the reality being presented to her, had passed in an untimely generational trick to the unfamiliar location of her mom’s face. Terrifying the first time, Grace liked it less on its second go-round. Able to recite the words that accompanied that look, from memory, she mouthed along with her mother:

“You mean I’m pregnant?”

Incredulously, her mom pointed at her own belly housed in an Indian cotton patchwork dress of turquoise and magenta. Looking down at herself, just past a yoke of floral motif appliqué, this bewildered woman was confronted with the undeniable reality of five months worth of baby pushing a green-blue sea of material into a mini spinnaker. Grace watched as her younger self and father simultaneously rolled their eyes and exhaled with frustration. She felt familiar shame at this reaction. Adding insult to injurious insult, she was profoundly mortified to witness, as a third party observer, how her behavior so closely imitated her father’s. There they stood, wrinkled foreheads, disapproving frowns, arms folded in judgement across their respectively heartless chests. Grace was reminded of an image from a Dr. Seuss book. The kangaroo standing in all her gloriously ugly indignation and the baby in her pouch echoing with a ‘Hmmmph too.’

“What a jerk.” No correction came from her side. He didn’t even inquire of whom she spoke. She thought she felt a nod of agreement disturb the air next to her.

Hmmmph too.

Having so recently seen a gloriously younger version of her Mom, the sudden toll that nine years had taken struck Grace hammer to anvil. Pregnancy had never done her mom any particular favors. Gone was the nature-girl waterfall of hair, it hung dull and lifeless, mousy and insipid. The ever-present tan of the tennis player, sailor, gardener had turned to boiled fish pallor. Grace was sure, under that tent of fabric, her mom’s legs had finally been brutalized by varicosities of constricted blood-flow. Worst of all, at the end of those legs her mother had surrendered to the tyranny of shoes. No saucy, flirty shoes to mitigate the betrayal, these were brown utilitarian clodhoppers, serviceable for a pregnant woman with aching legs. Grace quickly mourned the passage of her mother’s gorgeous youth and felt a stab of guilt for her part in stealing her mom’s essence.

“You don’t need to pity your mother because her outward appearance has changed. She is beautiful in the only way that is truly important. She will always be beautiful in my eyes.”

In stark opposition to his words, Grace noticed herself. Despite her ugly attitude, young Grace looked sweet in a crown of french braid that reached from one ear to the opposite, sprigged with fresh baby’s breath. Her mom had shopped with her, helping find and buy a gossamer confection of white cotton. The yoke of the blouse was beautifully embroidered, a necklace of intricate floral design, each flower stitched in vibrant floss of colors stolen from a Cézanne palette. The multi-tiered flounces of the peasant skirt had a matching row of needlework just above the final ruffled flourish.

White canvas espadrilles with a rope-covered three-inch wedge heel, laced up her ankle. Grace hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, contemplating the shoes her mom had so unexpectedly let her choose. Graduating from eighth grade had become secondary to the excitement of wearing her first pair of high-heeled shoes. Late by only seven years, Grace realized how much fun she and her mom had together while getting ready for this evening. What a waste to have missed fully enjoying the experience in actual progress. Too bad, because good times were a rare commodity in the unlucky thirteenth year of her life.

Her mom spoke again in a panicky voice,

“There’s a baby inside me right now?”

Grace, still seven years shy of an inkling of understanding, was busy being furious with her mom for spoiling everything with her bizarre behavior. She pulled her flute apart and slammed the pieces into the crushed blue velvet nest of the case, trying to convey displeasure with every violent movement. A piece of spittle flew off the mouthpiece and hit the hemline of her mother’s dress. Grace flinched as if her pubescent self had deliberately spat on her mother.

“To be fair, I was already pretty angry before my mom started acting strange.” If her companion could only understand the mind of a thirteen year old girl, maybe he would give her brattiness a pass.

“Hmmm?” Listening sounds prompted her to continue.

“I just wanted to go to the dance after. Just for a little bit. Everyone else was going and they wouldn’t let me.” Grace gestured toward her parents with refreshed annoyance.

No more listening sounds.

“Well, don’t you think it a little ridiculous. How much trouble could one thirteen year old get into in one hour?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“Okay so I could have gotten into plenty of trouble if I tried. Or, I guess, even if I didn’t. But in this case I think we can safely assume that in the gymnasium of a middle school in the suburbs of America with twenty chaperones around, I would probably have kept my darker impulses in check.”

“Grace, just to be clear, trouble doesn’t only depend on your own impulses but that is another discussion. In the interest of time I will concede your highly debatable point so that you can focus on the real reason we are watching this.”

Grace mumbled, overcome by nervous anticipation,

“I was kind of hoping that the point was that I had unreasonable parents and their crushing of my independence provoked me to bitterness and caused me to rebel in sneaky ways.”

Silence. Dead silence.

Grace turned back to the sight of her mom. A couple, Mr. and Mrs. Crane, parents of Tabitha, with whom Grace shared a stand in the flute section, started to approach Grace and her parents. As her mother’s eyes continued to dart hither and yon in an almost cartoonish impression of nervous confusion, her father turned his back abruptly on the approaching couple. He leaned down toward Grace and whispered,

“I have to get your mother out of here and safely home before anyone talks to her. I’m going to take her to the car. I can just imagine how fast it will get around your school and then the whole town if your mom starts asking her questions about phantom babies and surprise pregnancies.” With a heavy emphasis on the word her, Grace’s dad jerked his head backward in the direction of the woman who was quickly gaining on them. He was right, Mrs. Crane had probably instinctively sniffed the makings of a petit scandal and was hunting it down with the efficiency of a bloodhound. If she caught up with her quarry, she would have disseminated the goriest details of her mom’s altered state before the night was out. Grace didn’t miss the quick Machiavellian ember that lit amber sparks in her own young eyes,

“Okay Daddy, you take Mommy out but I already promised to help put stands and chairs away back into the band room. I’ll meet you at the car when I’m finished. Okay?”

Grace wished her companion couldn’t hear the false sweetness in her voice that clashed with the cold calculation in her eyes. While she was counting on her father’s distraction to blind him to his daughter’s quickly hatched ulterior plans, she knew her fellow observer wouldn’t be fooled. Sick with guilty knowledge, she watched as her dad agreed and whisked his wife away from the threat of Chatty Cathy, the notorious teller of tales.

Funny, her name really was Catherine.

Thirteen year old Grace waited until her parents were out of sight and then sprinted past Her Chattiness, as fast as her wedges could carry her in the opposite direction of the band room. She didn’t bother to worry about what Mrs. Crane would make of her mad dash as she made her way down one hall and then another. She hustled to a sliding halt on the dusty floor in front of double doors marked with a plastic sign: Cafeteria. A glittering ball suspended in the middle of a dimly lit room was visible through glass squares at the top of the wooden doors.

Omniscient Grace watched helplessly as her eighth grade counterpart blithely glided through the doors and into the graduation dance. On a tight schedule of treachery, she searched hurriedly through the crowd for her friends. She found them in a loose circle, dancing and talking. She ran over into the middle of the group.

“You’re here!” Two girlfriends screamed. Grace had relished their excitement, having anticipated the thrill of her grand entrance. She hadn’t noticed the four other people who retreated a step back, instinctively crossing their arms, annoyed by her loud look-at-me arrival.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to come.” Behind her, the voice of her mad crush spun her around. The truth was embarrassing on so many levels. She couldn’t exactly tell them, ‘Well my mom can’t remember that she’s pregnant or anything from the past two years of our lives for that matter. She’s really freaking my dad out so he rushed her out to the car. He was totally distracted, especially when Mrs. Big Mouth McGee, you know your mom Tabitha, almost caught up with us to have a chat. So, brilliant me, I am capitalizing on this moment so I can sneak into the dance I was already forbidden to go to.” So she went with the less freakish lie,

“Well, I can’t really stay but my dad said I could come say hi and have one dance before I go home to the party my family is having for me.”

Grace willed the dark haired boy she faced to take the hint and ask her to dance. She hoped the force of her desire would move Chad like a marionette, causing his mouth to say,

“Can I have that dance?”

She stared at him hard, sure that her brain could overpower his. She was confident her superior will would triumph when suddenly, out of nowhere, Chad’s girlfriend appeared by his side. Apparently she had misdirected her psychic energy. The foiler of her plans, perfectly named Cindy, gave Grace a sweet smile as she slipped her tiny hand, prettily manicured with bubble gum pink, into her boyfriend’s. Grace hated the girl even more for being so genuinely nice.

“So much for that plan.” Observed the observer.

Thwarted, Grace ungraciously turned her back on the couple and began to dance with the two girlfriends who had been sufficiently wowed by her arrival. Despite being at the dance she had dreamed of, she wore a bitter mask. She glanced obsessively at Chad and his perfectly perky partner, whispering things that Grace chose not to hear. She was sure she was making derogatory remarks about Chad’s eyebrow or the shape of his poor Cindy’s derriere. Grace was ashamed and hoped by not hearing, her companion would also not hear.

“Was it worth it?”

Grace startled to attention, guilt making her jump a little in her own skin, if indeed this was her own skin.

“Worth what?”

“Worth lying to your dad, sneaking around, leaving your mom to sit in the car when there was clearly something wrong with her.”

She turned to his challenge, facing him defiantly. Her mouth prepared a defense but when she saw his face only the truth would come out,

“No.” she exhaled the word. Simple honesty was a relief.

“Even though they didn’t go to the hospital that night, she did have a stroke.”

Grace winced at the bald confirmation of a suspected truth.

“Yeah. One time, about four years later, I had to go to some college interview and I left her all alone in the house. She was sitting there on the floor of the kitchen leaning against the cabinets. She did not look good and when I asked her what was wrong she told me she felt like an orangutan was crushing her chest. I was the only one home with her but I was worried about missing my interview. She told me to go, that she’d be fine in a minute.” Grace choked on her words, renewed guilt swallowing the syllables. “I left and she wasn’t fine in a few minutes or even a few hours. Thank goodness my mom decided to call her friends, Marcia and Mary, who rushed over and insisted that they call a doctor. They brought her to the emergency room and the doctor told her she had had a heart attack. Her heart condition finally acknowledged, I was released to find out more about it. I read some stuff on my own and realized that this graduation night’s event could have been some sort of stroke.”

“You reacted poorly on this night. You had no compassion for her.”

Not wanting to talk about her lack of compassion, she veered the conversation down a side lane.

“It would have been a lot easier to be more sympathetic if I had known what was going on. Maybe I could have gotten out of my own thirteen year old space if we didn’t wait four years to find out there was something really wrong with my mom. Why didn’t we go to the hospital that night?”

Grace knew he knew she was attempting a diversion. Still, he didn’t dismiss her.

“I know you think you know why Grace. The truth of a situation is always much more complex than you can possibly know.”

“Okay maybe I don’t know exactly why we didn’t go to the hospital that night. I’ll tell you what I do know for sure: it wasn’t our amazing faith in God’s healing that kept us out of the hospital. That was the party line but that was a load of baloney– convenient baloney.” Grace gathered momentum hoping to make sure everyone received an unhealthy share of blame. “You wanna know my theory?”

Again he patiently waited to hear her out. “I think it was because we didn’t have medical insurance. Dad was laid off and started his own business. Medical insurance just didn’t fit into his budget. How convenient that at that exact period of time we stopped believing in the efficacy of doctors and started exclusively believing in the healing powers of God. Fine if you don’t have money for the doctor but why did it have to become our theology? So irritating.” She paused as if waiting for an answer but really, she wasn’t finished. “That’s the practical side of it. The cherry on that bit of dysfunction is that going to the doctor’s is what normal people do. When you’re different than everybody else you simply don’t do what the common rabble do. ” Grace’s voice was soaked in acerbic sarcasm.

“Grace, you are such a smart girl. You make quick observations that are astute and scathing but inadequate to comprehend the whole. Certainly you don’t presume to judge someone else’s heart?” She clamped her mouth shut despite his questioning tone. “Even if you could, our business tonight is to look into your heart. Don’t you see that identifying others’ bad choices doesn’t mitigate your own bad choices?”

“Even when their bad choices have given direct birth to me making those bad choices?”

“Have your bitter, secret observations helped to heal you? Have you ever openly discussed this with the people you are angry with? Has your private speculation regarding the failures of others made you stronger or fixed the mistakes you have made?” Grace refused to respond to questions he already knew the answer to. He laid a protective hand on the nape of her neck and she relaxed into it despite herself. His voice began to soothe, “It is perfectly natural to point the finger of blame, but it has no effective purpose in helping you, in healing you, in making you whole.”

“So I’m just supposed to forget about all the garbage that’s ever happened in my life? If somebody else’s actions have harmed me, I’m supposed to sweep it under the rug?” Grace was happy to prolong any discourse that led them further from the other subject.

“No Grace. But it isn’t healthy to dwell on the negative, to hang onto it like a precious treasure.”

This insight took Grace by surprise. She knew exactly where she had secreted her treasure trove labeled ‘sins against Grace’. Like a well worn leather pouch filled with precious gold, she kept it around her neck, hidden but ready for the moment she wanted to share blame for her poor behavior.

“Additionally, your black and white analysis of the motivations of others leaves no room for subtle nuance. Have you ever done anything without having a thousand different factors affect your behavior?”

“I rarely know why I do the things I do,” she blurted, cooperating against her will.

He smiled affectionately at her admission, “So, you barely know what is going on inside yourself. How can you possibly guess at the fine inner workings of another? How can you know anyone else’s precise motives?”

Again, she was surprised by his truth. She remained unable to anticipate the tremendous power of his ability to pierce her heart.

“You should know this Grace: even the smallest step motivated by honest love for me is credited as an act of faithfulness. If you paint every person’s actions, small and big alike, with the wide brush strokes of your jaundiced anger, you miss the minute details of that love and faithfulness. And though the entire canvas has become tainted in your eyes, those small acts of faith are like undiscovered jewels: beautiful droplets of ruby, sapphire, topaz that shine in the universe as a testament of love and trust.”

Grace was confused by the mash-up playing in her mind. Not just two conflicting emotions played incongruous melodies in one space. Grace tried to enumerate the different threads creating this tangled jarring mass. She was annoyed, feeling like a child over whose head an adult conversation is taking place, crucial words being spelled out cryptically, leaving her in the dark. She was flattered because, in truth, her companion was addressing her as the other adult in the conversation, as if she had the intelligence and maturity to sustain this dialogue. She was paralyzed with frustration because, despite his confidence in her, she still couldn’t identify the crucial words in this conversation and didn’t really understand all he was saying.

Finally, in an overriding note, she was taken aback by his sudden fervor. He seemed to speak out of nowhere on the subject of love. Unexpected and, to her mind, out of place, his words were, nonetheless, outrageously true. Like an earthquake, the truth shook her and knocked down the nicknacks of her understanding, shattering them on the floor. His poetic descriptions left her speechless, adrenaline shaking her veins, fine hairs standing on end. Gentle as can be, he stroked her hair,

“Grace, I know you have heartaches and truly I want you to cast all your cares on me. But I know which of your burdens are your heaviest. If you will just trust me, I can lead you to the place where we find those burdens and bring you relief.”

Despite her confusion, his kindness was leading her into the temptation of trusting him, at least for one conversation. She threw up her hands,

“Fine then, you lead the way.” He squeezed her hand in appreciation.

“We were talking about your reaction to your mom’s distress,” he prompted. Immediately she felt her rebel rise up but quickly quelled the insurrection. To demonstrate her capitulation she responded,

“Part of me thought she was faking. It was so weird that she lost her memory and her grasp on reality.”

“Curious.”

“What?”

“Why would you think she was faking? Was she a dishonest person?”

“No,” she admitted reluctantly, “but it was creepy. I guess I would rather she had been faking.”

There was a silence indicating waiting for something. She conceded,

“Okay, there was something else. It is possible that because I was kind of a sneak and a liar I thought deceit might be lurking under everyone’s exterior. Don’t forget I had no doctor’s diagnosis to explain inexplicable behavior. All by myself, I had to come up with an answer that made sense to my thirteen year old world.”

“Kind of a sneak?” He didn’t give her an inch for personal dishonesty.

“Really? That’s where you want to go? All right, I was a big fat sneak and a constant liar. Honestly though, they wouldn’t let me do anything. I couldn’t wear pants. I was never allowed to go over anyone’s house, I couldn’t watch T.V. and I never got to go to parties. No haircuts, no blow-dryers, no makeup. I couldn’t even use pimple medication. I could go on forever with the list of don’ts. They practically forced me to sneak and lie.” She hoped the outrageousness of these prohibitions would make her case.

“Just out of curiosity, did you even once feel fulfilled when you put pants on behind your parents back? Did the empty places inside you get filled up when you snuck over to your friends’ parties? Did watching TV at someone else’s house make you feel like a complete person? Did that borrowed pimple medication resolve all your blemishes? Did you feel any better after you went to the dance?”

“No. Obviously you know that or you wouldn’t even ask.” Grace was sullen, her internal guerrilla asserting herself against the wobbly legs of newborn trust. Wanting him to see her perspective she continued, “Why did every little inch of my life have to be such a struggle though?”

“If these things aren’t really fulfilling why did you struggle so hard to get them?”

“I just wanted to be normal. Even though it only lasted for about eighteen months, this period of can’t and don’t and no seemed to last forever for me. Days came in an endless parade of new things my parents came up with that I wasn’t allowed to do. I literally thought they went to bed at night just to plot their list for the next day. Ironically these prohibitions were supposed to make me get closer to God or something. What a joke. Each new rule just made me more determined to avoid Him and His giant list of Do Nots. All I could ever think of was the things I wasn’t allowed to do: from wearing shorts and pants, to watching tv, to liking boys. I literally couldn’t focus on my life because I was fixated on the things I was missing out on. That can’t be good. If they had let me live like a normal person I would have behaved like a normal person should.” Grace wanted him to concede that her parent rules were excessive and detrimental.

Why did I have to live like that? One break over the fence in a year wasn’t that big a deal.

His voice was so gentle, letting her know that he felt compassion for her while he stripped away the fat of what she had said,

“Grace, you live in a broken world. In it, there are countless people who lead horrible lives filled with wretchedness even from birth. They don’t have mothers, they don’t have fathers, others are beaten and molested and left for dead or worse. It would break you to know the things I have seen people endure.”

Grace interrupted with the full force of her snottiness,

“Are you seriously going to give me the poor starving children in Africa who would love to eat my spinach lecture?”

“No Grace, I am trying to tell you that even the people who have endured the very worst this world has to offer have the opportunity to choose right or wrong for themselves, regardless of their circumstances.”

“So what?” Grace couldn’t seem to control her ungracious tongue. “I don’t really see how that applies to me.”

“Like everyone else, you have always had, and still have, the opportunity to make your own choices, regardless of your circumstances.” He paused letting his words really sink in. She ruminated over his seemingly simple statement. She wanted to make a thousand arguments to dispute this assertion, explaining how certain circumstances were just insurmountable, making it impossible to make the “right” choice. She used air quotes in her brain because,

Who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong?

She shrank away from this piece of treachery, hoping her companion hadn’t been eavesdropping on her thoughts again. She was unequivocally sure that he knew the difference between right and wrong. Her heart skipped a beat when he started speaking again,

“By the way, what you so dismissively labeled as ‘the story of the starving children in Africa’ has a powerful purpose. It’s a reminder to anyone who has forgotten how abundantly blessed they are and how much they have taken for granted. You have no idea how bad life can be and the depths that parents can reach in failing their children. I hope you never forget how fortunate you have been in this life. Your parents made those rules because they loved you and wanted the best for you. Even when they made mistakes and failed, as all humans do, there was never a malicious intent to harm. They were trying to do their best.”

Having dodged the ‘right v. wrong’ bullet, she was peeved to find herself surprised between the eyes with what she hadn’t seen coming. She folded her arms across her chest stubbornly.

“Well their best made my life miserable. I don’t see why I have to be grateful just because my parents didn’t stink as much as the worst parents on earth.” His voice grew stern, piercing through her façade of petulance,

“Grace. Look outside yourself for just one moment. You were embarrassed because your parents made you an oddity in a small, narrow minded culture. Not everybody in the world, throughout history, in the future or the past does, has or will conform to these limited cultural structures of your suburban American childhood. But you were so desperate to be the same as a small subset of people, that you were willing to do whatever was necessary to conform.”

“You’re always turning this on me.” Grace interrupted to derail his train of thought. She didn’t want to trust him anymore, even with the simplest conversation. She wanted to wrestle control of the steering wheel out of his hand.

“Yes Grace, you’re completely correct. I am trying to turn your focus on you. Take, for example, your embarrassment over your enforced code of dress. You were so worried about what kind of clothes you had to wear and what people would think of you. You should have been far more concerned with the quality of compassion and mercy that you clothed your spirit in. You dreamed every day of wearing a pair of jeans as if that would make your life better. But what are blue jeans compared to the garment you weave with your words, attitudes and actions? Imagine, you could have crocheted such a delicate scarf of love by attending to your mother when she was clearly unwell. You could have made the better choice. Instead you made the choice to satisfy your own desires. You did this on your own, Grace. Don’t try to share the blame.”

Something tugged at her heart at the idea of weaving a beautiful garment of love for her mom but she hated everything else he was saying about her,

“Man, you’re harsh. You know, I was only thirteen.”

Undeterred he pushed on, “Grace you are so determined to make me see what I already know about your parents, that you are deliberately denying what you don’t want to see about yourself. I would like you to honestly face yourself. What do you see?”

“Why do you want me to say it out loud? It’s humiliating enough to have my every bad trait paraded in front of my eyes. Why do I have to announce the thing?’

“Grace, we haven’t really covered every trait. I’ve isolated your viewing to some crucial behavioral patterns that have led you ruined, to a beach, face down in the sand. Remember, to make the change you have to acknowledge it, enunciate it and stop doing it. Speak up!”

His command was stern. She straightened her shoulders put her hands behind her back like an obedient schoolgirl and looked at him with angry and obstinate eyes,

“I have a habit of seeking fulfillment from things that can’t give me any real satisfaction: a pair of jeans, a dance with a boy, even a lovely piece of candy. Additionally I have a perverse habit of desiring a thing more if I cannot have it: being told to wear only skirts, liking a boy only after there’s a girlfriend in the picture or finding a piece of candy all the more achingly beautiful because it is forbidden. The further the thing is from my reach the more I am sure it will be exactly what I desire.” Her singsong recitation indicated rebellion.

“And?”

Grace glared at him and grit her teeth, “And in my desperate reaching for the things I desire I often don’t think of the consequences of my actions to myself and those around me.”

“Isn’t that a relief?” As he said the words, the weight of guilt from that night of graduation lifted. She had desperately wanted to be annoyed but could only feel the lightness of freedom. For years, that night had weighed heavy on her. Her secret sacrifice of her mom’s wellness had nagged at the back of her conscience. That night had not ended with the dance. Grace had slipped out of the gym, miserably unsatisfied and hurried out to the car where her mom was still disoriented. A very long night had ensued.

Without being transported, Grace mentally viewed a snippet from later that night. The family had been gathered around her mom’s bed. Grace was still fuming that her family ‘party’, lame as it had originally seemed, had been cancelled by her mom’s altered state. Her mother sat in her bed, propped up against pillows, grey faced and bewildered, completely unable to reconcile her memory with the present.

“Can somebody explain one more time why the girls can’t wear shorts even when they play sports? That just seems impractical.”

Grace’s snit was forgotten in an instant. Without moving a muscle, she had light-heartedly leapt up from the foot of the bed and skipped around the room in delight. She would never have dared to ask this question. She was more pragmatic (read sneaky), simply salvaging an old pair of shorts, shoving them in her school bag and changing at school. This method had always been easier than honest confrontation. Now her mom was broaching the subject with her dad, who seemed completely nonplussed by the challenge to now accepted standards of family practice. Hearing her own unarticulated insubordinations coming from her mom’s mouth had made Grace want to run over and hug her. Even now, Grace wanted to cross into the space of her own memory and wrap her mom in that scarf of love she had never crocheted. The image of her mother’s eyes opened wide with questioning innocence was rebranded on Grace’s brain, superimposing itself on the original memory, embossing it with new depth.

“There seem to be so many rules and I don’t understand the reason for them. I don’t remember our life being like this.” Her mother had shaken her head in bewilderment.

In all, there hadn’t been that many questions. But the questioning opened up a floodgate of ‘Why are we doing things this way?’ and ‘When did we become this family?’ Even after she had regained her memory, her mom’s questions echoed with resonant change. Once a reevaluation began, one by one, many of the draconian restrictions in their home had loosened slowly and then lifted. It had been the beginning of relief. In place of the bundle too heavy for a back to bear, a lightness of joy returned to the family.

During what Grace secretly called The Reign of Terror, even her mother had changed into a dour old lady, virtual twins with the pitchfork wielding farmer’s wife in that painting, American Gothic. Grace was never sure if it was physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual or some magical amalgam of factors but after that night, her mom’s appearance began to change back to normal: her skin began to glow again, her hair gained some old bounce, her breath even smelled better. She began to sing again—happy songs with her beautiful voice. Grace had spent so long guiltily focusing on her own poor behavior of that night, she had failed to acknowledge the good wrought by her mother’s loss of memory. They had been released from painful bondage by the elixir of a few innocent questions triggered by an undiagnosed stroke.

“You don’t always see the whole picture right away Grace. Sometimes you never do. Even more often, the entire picture is right in front of you but you are busily staring at your own solitary image that you fail to adjust focus to take in the whole. It is a common human propensity.”

Grace kept being surprised at meeting him on a bend in what she considered her private mental path.

How did he know I’d be there?

“Would you say it was a good thing that my mom had a stroke that night? You could make the point that if she hadn’t had that stroke that we would still be living crushed under rules that only served to make me hate my parents and distrust their angry God.”

“Would I say that? No. You are trying to define a picture of cosmic proportions by looking through the peephole of your own perspective and then explaining it with words that are insufficient to grasp the whole.”

“Was that a yes?”

“You are being deliberately obtuse. Defining your mother’s stroke by your own relief at wearing pants again is as single-minded as defining her stroke by how your eighth grade graduation was ruined.”

“Isn’t it natural for a person to want to understand the things that happen in her life? Put it into perspective as it pertains to her?”

“Very natural. That doesn’t make your definition correct or complete. Imagine if a baby tried to explain how her mom bakes a cake. Here’s what you would hear: agooooo, gurgle, mama, papa. The infantile babble might accidentally converge with cake baking at the word milk. Even this convergence would be limited by the fact that the baby would say nana, baba, meew or some other nickname for the substance that comes out of a mother’s breast or the powdered formula in a bottle. The word would be unrecognizable and the baby wouldn’t even be talking about the same kind of milk used in a cake.”

“I literally have no idea what you just said. I think you lost me at agoo.”

“You are the baby Grace. You have a baby’s understanding of the broader world of cake baking. When you try to describe and define events on your own terms, it is simplistic at best but mostly gibberish. Even when you do get a glimpse of a right idea, your understanding of it is limited to your personal experience. You’re explanation of that idea is limited by your vocabulary. There is a wider whole than you can imagine.”

“So I can’t try to define it?”

“You can do whatever you want Grace. But you were trying to get me to agree with your definition. Not only can’t I agree with your finite definition but I have more to show you. I have the vocabulary. I have the big picture. I have the ingredients. I know how to bake the cake.”

Grace, always the student with her hand up first and most aggressively, was hurt.

“I thought you wanted me to see things and tell you what I learned from them.”

“Grace, tonight I want you to see you. I don’t need you to take everything you see, categorize it, label it, put it in a box, wrap it in thematic paper according to its label, and add a coordinating bow. You don’t have to earn my favor by getting the right answer about everything in the universe. I already loved you.”

His smile filled her with assurance and then reassurance. Grace froze; a wild animal caught in the cross-hairs of the sights of the hunter. Ages too late for self preservation, Grace realized that she had been looking into his eyes through the whole exchange.

How did I ever survive without looking at his face?

He left her no time to ponder this ancient question.

“Time to move on, I have something to show you.”

Part 6

2010-11-01T12:11:00.000-07:00

photo from http://www.astralresearch.org/mysticalmovieguide/mmlist.pl?exact=Winter%20of%20the%20Witch&year=1969&master=1&index=2

Nothingness engulfed the pair.

Nothingness? But this is so different from No Man’s Land. Would everythingness be a better description? Is everythingness even a word? It should be, I just discovered its secret.

Grace couldn’t think of a better way to describe this new place. She felt as if she were in a vacuum full of light and all its light-bearing properties. Completely contrary to this feeling, she was suspended in total darkness. Her eyes didn’t see light but every other sensory cue told her that she was immersed in something related to light. It tingled through her synapses, melting away tensions, smoothing flexed muscles, massaging her internal organs. Somewhere in the eye of her mind she could picture her poor battered heart floating in a warm bath of–

Of what?

Brandy. Gorgeous amber color, warm and liquid.

No, the smell is all wrong. Brandy makes me gag. This smell is perfect.

Ambrosia.

Ambrosia. Something golden, light, delicious, erotically perfumed, exotic and yet familiar. Ambrosia was as good a word as any Grace could find. They say that a lot of mythology stems from some truth. Maybe this is where the notion of ambrosia had originated.

Nectar of the gods. Definitely. This is another one of those things that I must have been missing without knowing it.

“Can we stay here forever?” The moment the words slipped out, the delicious sensation drained through the tips of her toes, right out under the nails. She wondered with helpless longing where the sensation flowed to.

Is there another lucky someone out there absorbing its benediction?

“I ruined it by talking?” The feeling of primordial disappointment and loss rocked her words loose.

“We have arrived at our destination anyway. Next time you might consider just resting in a beautiful place when it’s been offered to you.”

Grace knew he was looking at her. She felt his gaze compelling her to make eye contact. Against her will, she stubbornly refused his invitation. An exhalation of the

Mmmmm

ambrosia blew warm past Grace’s face. She rolled her eyes back in a brief moment of pleasure as if basking in the sun.

“Your sighs are beautiful,” she murmured involuntarily.

“It’s time to see.” His voice commanded her.

For a split second she struggled against the command of his voice. She did not want to see what must be coming. Grace’s dreams had always followed a strict protocol. For lack of better understanding of what this night’s journey might be, Grace, once again, inferred a dream protocol: a good dream, particularly one that the dreamer didn’t want to leave, must always be followed by a bad dream. Her last encounter with a stranger that left her with such an inexplicable ache of longing, must perforce, be counterbalanced by something so bad she was afraid to open her eyes. In order to restore equilibrium to the dream universe she feared she was in for something exquisitely ugly.

Her futile struggle ended and she opened her eyes, trying to adjust to what she couldn’t see. Her optic nerve behaved just as if she had been basking outside on a brilliant summer’s day, face sunward, when an insistent telephone called her inside. Indoors, she couldn’t see a thing, everything was too dark while bright flashes assaulted her retina as she groped for her ringing ocular receiver. She slowly adjusted to the transition, light separating from dark, defining itself into almost recognizable objects. The first thing Grace noticed was that the color was off kilter; someone had turned the tint knob of an old TV, overwhelming the screen with the same split pea green that infuses a summer afternoon just before a thunderstorm. Grace had to immediately admit this was an inaccurate description. The color in the air before a summer storm causes a thrill of anticipation. Skin tingles knowing the sheets of warm rain, low black clouds, goose-bump inducing cracks of rolling thunder and crisp wild designs of electricity are on the way, making arm hairs stand at glorious attention, just waiting for the onslaught. This drab, thick, wholly unnatural color didn’t carry any promise of wild natural force. It filled Grace with a sense of dread and descending doom.

I know what it reminds me of: that Laurel and Hardy movie, what was it called? Babes in Toyland, that’s right. It reminds me of that part where they fight the boogeymen in a place that looks like hell. Pretty creepy for a kid’s movie.

As her eyes adjusted some more, she began to recognize the tableau. She was looking down a hallway: the upstairs hallway of her own home. It grew darker as it receded. She could barely make out the figure of herself as child standing at the end of the hall. The walls narrowed too quickly, more quickly than normal perspective would allow for. Grace the observer was reminded of Gene Wilder as the purple velvet host of the Chocolate Factory as the wild haired kook leads his guests through a series of dysmorphic hallways and doorways. Anyone with the slightest claustrophobic tendency would feel its spacial oppression. The walls seemed to be closing in to squeeze and steal freedom. Grace wanted to help the little girl at the end of the hallway, a tiny figure on the black verge of being crushed.

Grace watched herself standing alone, a seven-year-old’s terror forcing her eyes wide. The child wore a short nightgown with a picture of Holly Hobby on the front. Holly’s blue calico bonnet matched the ruffle brushing small trembling knees.

“That can’t be right. My mom said we couldn’t afford that nightgown. Alexis down the street, who had everything including a pony in her backyard and monkey bars in her bedroom, had that same exact nightgown. She also had the coolest plastic belt filled with Wrigley’s Doublemint chewing gum wrappers. I must admit, I coveted that particular neighbor’s goods like it was my job.”

“It’s your dream. I guess you can wear whatever you like. I’m surprised you’re not wearing the belt with it. And those pink cowboy boots. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing you’ve ever worn in your dreams.”

She chortled involuntarily at the mental image of his described ensemble, down to the forgotten footwear pictured on a dog-eared page of the phone book sized Fall Sears Catalogue.

“I’m actually watching my own dream? From inside of another dream? That seems pretty tricky, even for you.”

Grace could feel his smile,

“Nothing is too tricky for me.” His strange way of delivering snippets that resonated with truth deeper than their surface tension was comforting and troubling all at once. “Do you think you’re dreaming right now Grace?”

Comforted by her decision to accept her journey as a dreamer, Grace had no intention of addressing or even acknowledging his question. Sometimes the truth is just too hard. She deflected,

“When I was little, I had this dream so many times I had almost come to think of it as real—as if it had really happened to me.”

“Of course it happened to you. In your dreams.” He squeezed her hand, cueing a scene shift.

Shift indeed. Her perspective rotated in a roller coaster undulation. The new location allowed observation of the hallway as if it had been bisected along its full length. The hallway had become a stage set and Grace was both audience and actress. Knowing the floor plan of her house, she figured they must be watching from somewhere in the vicinity of what should have been the countertop of the upstairs bathroom. The walls and a hall closet that would have blocked their view were gone, removed in the compartmentalized unreality of a sit-com or play. Grace found it difficult to digest the logistics of spacial reconfiguration to facilitate observation of a childhood dream.

Good luck explaining that to the folks at home, Dorothy.

At the other end of the hallway opposite from little Grace, a woman appeared. Grace knew this woman with the familiarity of dread. She had memorized that long, raggedy head of dreadlocks. Those coal chute tresses had always reminded Grace of one particular doll she had left at the bottom of the toy box after many years of abusive amateur hairdressing and frustrated neglect, complete with random irremediable matting and constellations of lint and anonymous debris. One or four pieces of debris seemed to crawl with guerrilla stealth through that black forest of hair. The strange ashen hue of the woman’s skin was also unforgettable. It seemed that all the warmth had been leached from her soul and the thirsty soul was trying to borrow from her pigment. And after all these years the woman still hadn’t changed her clothes: several layers of amorphous robes or blankets looked like a heap of soiled laundry she carried around on her back or an unwashed street bum who had caught her for a piggy back ride. Each article was dirtier, mustier, darker than the next; the cumulative effect was that of filthy chaos.

Grace, the dream child, began to tremble at the sight of this night time visitor. Her honeyed chocolate curls bounced faintly as her teeth tried to rattle inside her mouth. She clenched her jaw in a bid for control and held her fists tight.

“Tonight is the night isn’t it?” Grace whispered, frightened for the child. She wanted to help her: hold her balled up hand, calm her shaking shoulders, speak words of strength and peace to her self.

The woman reached into her robes and pulled something out. At first it was hard to see what she was holding as she held up her crone’s claw. The hand bore a near perfect resemblance to the witch’s in Snow White when she holds out her apple of death to the easily deceived innocent. The gnarled knuckles turned and a twist of her bony wrist revealed, instead of that tempting red fruit, an inordinately large hypodermic needle. At the end of the sharp, a single drop of silver liquid glistened, ominously balanced on the tip of the razor point.

“I’ve always thought this part was strange.”

“How so?” he always seemed so genuinely interested.

“Where did the hypodermic come from? I don’t mean from those dirty robes either. I mean in my child’s mind. I can clearly remember the other things that influenced my dream. There were movies I saw as a kid that affected the imagery in my dream. Each one had a big impact on me: it explains the creepy greenish hue of the dreamscape, the crushing perspective of the hallway, and that crone’s gnarly hand. But the needle doesn’t seem to fit in.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot.”

“Are you kidding me? From the first night I had this dream until I took my first Psych class, ‘til every time any bad dream triggered a memory of this dream, I’ve thought about it. And I can’t, for the life of me, remember any experience with a scary needle. Why did my mind create that imagery? Maybe something I don’t remember seeing? Maybe some movie I wasn’t even supposed to see. Did I have a bad experience at the doctor’s office? You know stuff. Can you tell me?”

He laughed at that,

“Yes, I know stuff. Not everything can be reduced to imagery created from a known source in your conscious life. Things you weren’t even aware of were occurring in your life, your home, your psyche, your spirit. Imagine, before tonight you have never travelled to the places I have taken you, but they have been there, unseen, hidden from you. Just because you can’t see a threat doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There is a war for the spirit that may manifest itself only when you have relinquished your vice grip on the sensual world of your consciousness. Dreams are a perfect venue for this release.”

“Real or not, conscious or subconscious, sensual or spiritual, she and her needle scared me to death.”

The witch, that’s the name Grace had given her thirteen years ago after too many confrontations, suddenly started advancing down the hallway. She moved with menacing swiftness without appearing to move her feet. To clarify, there were no feet in sight. Her robes swirled around the area where feet would make anatomical sense. As if the robe skirts were some sort of propeller, she gathered momentum, seemed to levitate, fly and sail, or some combination of the three, across the dull brown carpet. Little Grace turned to run as she did every night this visitor haunted her dreams. She had been running until waking for countless consecutive nights. Legs ready to spring to life, torso half-twisted to turn into one of the darkened doorways on the hall, Grace hesitated. She set her body rigid, turned back toward the accelerating horror, squared her shoulders and lifted her chin in defiance.

“You have no place here. Jesus is with me and you have no power.”

The advance halted abruptly. The ugly face filled with wretched fury and disbelief. She opened her mouth as if to scream. Without sound, the opening got wider and wider, the growing blackness finally swallowing her entire face while her body simultaneously shrank into the gaping void that had once been her opened mouth. She vanished completely. The hypodermic clattered to the floor. A blink later, the needle was gone.

Big Grace watched this familiar scene washed afresh in her triumph.

“My mom told her to say that. Poor little kid couldn’t sleep. She was terrified of that lady with her needle coming night after night. Exhausted, she finally spilled it all out and my mom helped her.”

Grace remembered without seeing. She had come home from the next door lady’s Summer Vacation Bible School, so excited to tell her mom all she had learned that day.

“First, each of us made a felt banner with all sorts of shapes cut out. Birds, flowers, the sun, a tree. Mine was definitely the best. Then we sang a song. It was nice but I don’t really remember the words except the part that said, ‘His banner over me is love.’ There are hand motions that go with the song, kind of like a hula dance. Mrs. Gardner said we made the banner because Jesus’ banner is love. She said it means that I can be protected by the banner of love. Or something like that. I’m not really sure what she meant. Do you think I could be protected?”

Grace remembered the look of concern on her mom’s face as the words came gushing out of her agitated mouth.

“Why do you need to be protected Grace?”

With a flood of relief and words, she poured out the whole dream to her mom, describing it in detail, sharing how the dream had been coming back with relentless frequency.

“I wish you had told me this before Grace. It makes me sad that you were so scared.”

Looking at her mom’s face, she remembered wondering why she had kept this secret to herself for so long. Her mom seemed angry, sad and a little frightened too. Maybe this is why she hadn’t told. Had she felt silly? Or stupid? Or tainted by the lady in the dream? For some reason she had held the fear to herself.

“Do you think I could be protected in my dream?” Grace hoped. She remembered anew being surprised as her mom swooped down on her and scooped her into her arms in a bear hug. Her mom was not a particularly touchy-feely person and that moment of secure embrace in her arms was a secret treasure Grace revisited in times of need.

“Absolutely honey. When that mean lady comes, you stand your ground and tell her what Mrs. Gardner shared with you today. Mrs. Gardner is a good woman and she speaks the truth.”

Funny, as Grace had the memory, she thought of Mrs. Gardner for the first time in the twelve years since the woman had moved away from the rambling white house with the black shutters and giant porch. The porch had been so big that twenty neighborhood kids could sit at her informal classes, learning songs and stories of peace and love. As a pièce de résistance, there was always a craft project that allowed each kid to bring home a bit of that love and peace, fleshed out in felt, sequins and popsicle sticks. It struck her that Mrs. Gardner had been a truly beautiful woman. She had never thought of the quiet, pleasant woman with a gray ponytail and serene but completely unmemorable features as beautiful. She had been a nice, unassuming older lady. Grace had taken it for granted that Mrs. Gardner was so patient with the pack of summer stained locals that hung out on her veranda. Strange not to have thought of her for so many years when she had played such a vital part in ending those horrible nightmares.

As the memory within a memory faded from her mind, Grace’s attention returned to the scene at hand. She looked down the hallway and felt an enormous wave of affection for the child at the end of that dreamscape.

“She was great. She’d hop on her little green Schwinn just to see how far she could go. She played endlessly in ocean waves that seemed impossibly huge. Life was a good adventure and she was free to enjoy it. She faced the things she was afraid of, determined to overcome them because they stood in her way. I miss her.”

Her reminiscence cut itself off as she saw past the trembling child. A figure stood behind her right shoulder. She could only make out a faint outline at first. As she stared he became clearer. Grace froze, caught looking at the face she had, thus far, successfully avoided seeing.

“You were there that night.” Tears rushed to the wells of her bottom eyelids as she greedily gathered up the detail of his hands resting on her childish shoulders.

“I was. When you call, I am there.”

“I thought you would be more beautiful. I think that’s part of why I didn’t want to look at your face. I was afraid you would be so beautiful I would be ruined.”

“And now?” Too late she wondered if he could be hurt.

“Your face is kind of homely I think. From the first touch of your hand I pictured a face that would take my breath away.”

“I wonder what eyes you are seeing me with.”

Grace still hadn’t looked at his face in her own presence. Her will felt like a boat she couldn’t control against the stubborn winds driving the vessel away. She couldn’t find the strength to trim the sails in and take command of her actions. She never had been a very good sailor. Instead she looked at him across the span of thirteen years past.

“I don’t know what eyes I see anything with. I’m often fooled. What I thought was beautiful has turned out ugly so many times I can’t count them. Do you know that woman in the dream? She’s a real person, once upon a time my mom’s best friend. When I first saw her, I couldn’t help staring at how gorgeous she was. Her caramel colored skin, wild black waves of hair to the middle of her back were captivating. She wore these awesome flowing, wildly colored kaftans and the coolest beaded jewelry. I had a crush on her in the way only an impressionable girl can have on a beautiful woman. She even had the coolest name–Artemis. I mean, who has a name like that? I couldn’t wait to see her and was happy whenever we visited her until the dreams started. I definitely thought she was far more fascinating and compelling than comfortable old Mrs. Gardner. In the end, her ugliness wasn’t only limited to my dreams. I think she did some bad things to my mom. I never got all the details. It was all very hush hush, behind closed doors but they didn’t call me Harriet The Spy for nothing. I overheard enough to know that the woman I found so beautiful had hurt my mom pretty badly and brought an abrupt end to their friendship.”

“She was a beautiful woman once. Your dream witnessed the toll she had taken on her own spirit. She made choices that damaged her profoundly. Your dream saw what her spirit had turned into. She tried to drag your mother down with her. Thankfully, your mother made different choices. She chose me.”

Grace voiced a thought that had struck her the moment the dream began.

“She reminds me a lot of Marisa. You know?” Grace mentioned the name, carefully gauging her companion’s reaction.

“Oh, yes I do know. They are very similar.”

Grace hung her head, letting her mass of hair hide her shame. Against hope she had hoped he didn’t know about Marisa, about all that her friendship with Marisa had wrought.

Friendship?

Maybe association would be a better word in the light of experience. Grace wanted him to like her and knew he couldn’t possibly find a way if he knew all about Marisa.

“I find you beautiful Grace.” The words didn’t seem to make sense, incongruous, no logical progression. Had she hoped them into being? Had he really said them?

“Why did you show me my dream?” Grace again retreated to the safety of changing the subject. She placed her hope in a secret pocket for private perusal, later.

“What do you think?”

“You know, after I turned and spoke up, I never had that dream again. Not once. That night I felt so strong. When the dreams didn’t come back I knew I had been empowered in some mysterious way,” she replied without answering.

“Yes, I do know.” He seemed to be waiting for more, patiently.

Grace felt inexplicably uncomfortable. She thought she could outwait him. She squirmed and fidgeted, then realizing his infinite patience, she made a stab,

“I guess you wanted me to see that you were there for me even way back then.”

He chuckled. Grace supposed chuckle might just be the perfect word for it. Noises fell out of his throat. Joyful, delightful notes invoked memories of the delicious fruit flavored jelly candy covered with a dusting of sugar for crunch. Five flavors in one white cardboard and clear cellophane sheath: cherry, orange, lime, lemon and incongruous licorice. His laughter fell deliciously like those flavors onto her ears.

Chuckles, I loved those candies. I wonder if the candy-maker knew he had created a confection of one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard.

“Way back then. It has been thirteen of your years Grace. For me it has been the bat of an eyelash. I know this moment as if it were your yesterday. I can still feel the surge of joy I felt when I heard you call me. Your innocent frightened voice was so sweet to me, I couldn’t wait to rush to protect you. I remember your bony shoulder trembling violently under my palms. But you squared them up defiantly and trusted your Mom and Mrs. Gardner and, best of all, me. That was a good moment in time for me. Pure and clean and true.”

Grace was shaken by the force of his recollection.

Why should I be so important?

In the switch of a current, she was not sure she wanted him to think she was beautiful.

Too much. Too overwhelming. Too big.

She wanted to withdraw her hand from his, to distance herself physically. Now that she had reached out, she felt he wouldn’t let go of her. She couldn’t think of a way to extricate herself from the hand lock. So she distanced herself mentally, emotionally and then verbally,

“You only feel that way about seven year old Grace. She’s still virtually untarnished.” When he didn’t answer, she withdrew into a dark recess of her mind where she felt his probing light couldn’t find her out.

Wait till we get to the part of the story where I am not some innocent in a Holly Hobby nightgown. Wait till we are standing stuck in an unbreakable handlink and he is completely disgusted by me, shocked by what we can both see me doing. I will deserve it because I am disgusting. I’ll bet anything that he’ll let go of me then. I should get rid of him now. Maybe I can force him to quit me before I am stuck standing there, touching him, watching my deepest shame.

She panicked at the thought of him withdrawing his hand, withdrawing his love after seeing her gross depravity.

I wonder, if I hurt him badly enough, will he go away?

Her perverse logic made her repeat her earlier observation,

“You’re really not as beautiful as I thought you would be.”

Her desperate attempt sounded feeble. What had made her think this weak assault could wound him, much less cause him to flee? What arrogance to think her puny insult could shake the foundations of love. In addition to being ineffectual, her words were inauthentic. They had been true when she first stupidly blurted them out. Oddly, as she heard them empty out of her mouth for a second time, she no longer believed them.

NOG installment 5

2010-10-25T08:22:00.000-07:00

photo from http://s181.photobucket.com/albums/x52/HollyGirl9008/?action=view&current=Pottery_Wheel.jpg

Maybe if a dreamer, upon wakening, could summon her dreams in their entirety to the forefront of her consciousness, the transitions between dreams would make better sense. Perhaps imperfect memory is what makes the leap from one dream to the next seem incongruous or nonsensical. What if there is a perfectly logical segue from one dream to the next and the dreamer just can’t pull it back through the undertow of waking? Whatever the case, Grace and her companion had moved in the nonsensical shuffle of dreams to a different location.

Nocation,

spoke itself into Grace’s brain as she suddenly knew she was nowhere. She had accidentally found that fictitious place No Man’s Land: grey, numb, blind, deaf, deprived of all sensation, she felt a moment’s horrific panic.

“Where are we?” she heard her panic muffled by the heavy emptiness of a sinus cold. Her companion didn’t answer and panic lifted itself to clawing terror. “Where are you? Are you gone?” the distant rising shriek of her own voice would have made her shiver if her numbness would have allowed.

“That’s some grip.” His voice saved her from free fall as she, by the suggestion of her hand, was able to feel her limbs again. In a moment’s exquisitely unbearable crushing grey pressure, they were pressed through a pinhole of light with the force of a spitball, expanding and ballooning onto the surface of the next scene.

Grace sucked in the air in one huge gulp.

“Where are we?” came again as if these were the only words she could remember. Her eyes caught the familiar as they zoomed past a Bursar’s Office on the right and an atrium café, The Meeting Place, on the left. Grace recognized people and places in flashes of clarity, each flash disappearing in the wake of their speed. They moved down a hallway and left, down a flight of stairs.

“The Student Union?” Grace queried, not understanding how the aisles of a nonexistent Bohack could possibly relate to the school she fled in failure, tail tucked between her legs. Maybe failure was the theme. Not a pleasant prospect.

“I’ve never been down here,” came even though she was looking at her own back in an unfamiliar doorway, abruptly contradicting these words. “And there I am. How is that possible?” She couldn’t look at him, even for the reassurance she craved.

“On a linear timeline, this is you in a future tense. You can’t remember it because you haven’t been here yet.”

“Was that an explanation?” Too much to try to make sense of, Grace fell, instead, into the acceptance of dreamers.

She looked around trying to take in clues. Her eyes landed on the sign next to the room into which her other body was leaning. Ceramics Studio.

“Hm, I didn’t know we had a Ceramics Studio. Then again, the list of things I don’t know seems to be growing by the minute.” She delved into the deeper layers of that thought only to be interrupted by the sound of her own voice.

“Hey, do you have time for lunch?” Grace strained to hear the muffled reply. The anonymous murmuring response incited a visceral surge of interest.

“Can I see who she’s talking to in there?”

Abracadabra, a face peered through the door, causing her a quick rush of adrenaline followed quickly by buzzing lightheadedness. In the disconcerting anonymity that often characterized the denizens of her dreams, she already couldn’t remember the features on the face she was staring directly into. If quizzed, Grace would not be able to tell if this person had dark hair or light, the color of his eyes or even his height. Despite this complete failure to recognize his person, or perhaps because of it, like a blind person with heightened intuition, she thought she knew him. Inexplicably and totally she knew him, she trusted him, she felt something toward this unknown entity that she hadn’t felt before. Grace wished she could trade places with herself as this stranger gently pushed against her with his palms against her shoulders, the softly worn denim of his thigh against her thigh. She became shamelessly jealous of herself as he moved strong arms around her shoulders and grasped his clay-splotched hands together at the middle of her back. She sighed in vicarious bliss, as his chin burrowed into her hair and he breathed her in.

“You always smell delicious.” His words poured out on Grace like warm honey, giving her the chills.

This is right,

sprang from nowhere causing the fine hairs to stand up on the back of her neck.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you ‘til later but sooner is always better than later.”

“I have something I want to talk to you about. Can you take a quick break?” Grace felt like she was eavesdropping on something so private that was both none of her business and crucially important to her and was immediately alert to a small twinge she heard in her own voice.

“For you? I can do anything.” The generosity of his smile complemented his words as he spun her around and tried, with one clean elbow, to rub a schmear of clay his embrace had deposited on her back.

“How sweet is that? Almost too sweet. Under different circumstances it might even make me nauseated.” Grace was confused and excited. “Not that I’m complaining but I don’t really understand what we’re doing here. I haven’t felt like this in–” she lost her train of thought, sucked into the drain where sadness and a nasty ball of hair lay in the dankness side by side. Here, she couldn’t remember the last time she had been happy and didn’t want to wake up from the illusory promise of happiness. “I don’t really want to leave here.” she whispered.

“Grace, be patient. You have so much to learn and so little time. If you will trust me I can help you.”

She whispered again,

“I hope you aren’t just dangling this in front of me to rip it out from underneath me. This is something. I know it.” She needed more information. “When did I meet him?”

“Oh, you’ll see.” She could hear him smile an enigma. She might have been irritated had the challenge of a mystery not always been so powerfully seductive.

“I feel like we’re –they’re pretty serious.”

“You or they, whichever makes you more comfortable, are engaged to be married.”

At the age of twenty, in the throes of ruination-by-drug, all avenues of her life aborted, the word marriage sounded like jibberish to Grace.

“What?” plopped stupidly out of her mouth. And even as it came out she recognized that the couple in front of her were, indeed, linked in a way that seemed like jibberish. She tried to sound it out. “I, or she, or we have a fiancé? He makes pottery? I can’t imagine liking someone who does pottery–” she veered off that nonsensical rumination, picking up a more substantive thread as if her fingers had skimmed it accidentally, “I don’t even know him, I don’t even know about a Ceramics Studio, I don’t even go to school anymore.” The impossibilities were overwhelming.

“And yet, there you are.”

“I know, right?” she glommed onto his statement of the simultaneously obvious and obscured.

Grace watched herself and that incomprehensible fiancé of hers walk across a narrow hallway into an intimate cafeteria. An old song by Don Henley, flying solo without the rest of his Eagles, was playing from a portable radio on the counter as they ordered sandwiches from its glassed display. Grace was content to just watch the couple be together while they waited for an egg salad on pumpernickel and a chicken salad on sourdough. The mundane details of the music and specific sandwich orders gave substance to a hope for an irrational future she didn’t quite believe would ever exist.

Hope for what?

Hope that this scene will someday exist on my real linear timeline.

Oh right, mumbo jumbo, bibbity bobbity boo.

Grace almost skipped over to the small table in the corner the couple had chosen as a lover’s nook. She wanted to be with them, her knees kissing their touching knees.

“My dad wants us to stick to a budget of five thousand dollars for the entire wedding. I don’t know how he expects us to do that. I wish he would just give us the money and let us have a ‘family only’ ceremony. I just want to get married and get out of the house.”

Grace found herself easily nodding along with the wisdom of her self making bizarre plans for an inconceivable wedding. She couldn’t even really see this man she was looking at and still she couldn’t wait to start a new life with him. The prospect of escaping her old life to a new one was irresistible.

“Grace, let’s just cooperate. Do whatever it is that makes him happy and then we’ll be together. I’m sure it’s hard for him to let go of you. I wouldn’t want to let go of you either.” Both Grace and Grace rolled four eyes at his dreamily idealistic interpretation of her father’s motivation for making the whole process difficult. He didn’t know that her father operated on a constant need to make life as difficult as possible for everyone around him, as if it were a daily contest he had with himself to see whose life he could make just a little less comfortable. Grace shook the uncharitable thoughts out of her head and the other Grace seemed to agree as she didn’t argue the point.

Why ruin a perfectly good moment with my own nastiness? If he wants to think generous thoughts, then I can go along with that.

Grace was so giddy she felt she could float to the nearest field of daisies to pluck up a blossom:

He loves me, he loves me, he loves me.

Somewhere in the midst of her flowered idyll, her stomach began to curdle with a rumbling undercurrent of undeniable tension.

Something's not right.

While she had taken a mental time out, the happy faces had grown agitated along with their tone of conversation. She knew it had been too good to be true. She asked her companion,

“What’s his name? I don’t even know his name. He doesn’t look happy.”

“Shhhh, listen.”

“Grace I am trying to be reasonable. I wish you wouldn’t go out with him tonight. I don’t ask much from you. Please don’t go. ”

Grace pushed one side of hair behind an ear and curled her lip.

“That’s an ugly face.” Grace whispered.

“You’re being a big baby. What ever happened to: for you I can do anything? Is it that you don’t trust me or that you are just so insecure that I’m never going to be allowed near any other guy again.” She snarled.

“Ooh that was uglier.” Grace, the commentator, was getting nervous.

“Grace this isn’t any other guy. You dated him seriously for a year. You were irrationally attached to him and so devastated when he broke up with you that you started doing drugs. Your whole life was almost ruined after he dumped you.” His eyes pleaded with her, his vulnerability tangible.

“Irrationally attached? I was dumped? Like garbage? This just keeps getting better.” As her voice impossibly rose an octave with each question, he opened his mouth with a conciliatory look on his face but she held her hand up in front of his face, determined to pick this fight “Let me get this straight; I’m so weak I’m going to fall back into the arms of a guy who dumped me like yesterday’s trash? Or I don’t love you enough to be faithful? Or maybe you don’t think you will measure up to him.” She pounced on this idea and began mauling it like a tiger. “Are you man enough to handle this or aren’t you?”

“Grace, I feel extremely uncomfortable with this situation. The only thing I’ve ever asked of you is that you wouldn’t cheat on me. You kind of have a track record of unfaithful behavior in your relationships, especially with this guy. I just can’t tolerate cheating”

“Uh oh.” Grace's eyes went wide anticipating the impending onslaught of her own rage. She was justly rewarded with a near shriek.

“Are you serious? You can’t tolerate?”

He tried to stop the unavoidable barrage of fury,

“Grace, you know that’s not what I meant. Why are you so desperate to misunderstand me?” He looked at her anxiously, questioning the true intentions of the storm she seemed to be deliberately brewing.

“Of course this is my fault. I love the way you have worked it out so I am the one who is misunderstanding your perfect motivations. Please save your perfection for someone else. And just for the record: nobody dictates to me which of my behaviors they will or will not tolerate.”

She could see that he was bewildered but also saw a growing annoyance climb into his demeanor as she refused to capitulate. He struggled for control.

“Why don’t we calm down for a second.”

His reasoning tone obviously infuriated her. She wanted him to enter the fray as a participant, not as a referee,

“You calm down! Don’t you tell me what to do. I have had a lifetime of someone else’s rules shoved down the back of my throat. I don’t need a new life with a new set of dictator’s rules. And another thing, you don’t need to throw my ‘track record’ in my face.” Grace shook her head in misery as she watched her own exaggerated and angry air quotes clawing the air. “You know all my crap because I trusted you with it. I didn’t share with you so could use it against me whenever you’re not getting your way. I guess the sensitive, understanding guy routine works when it suits you. ”

He put his hands over hers thinking he could still defuse the situation. It was clear that this wasn’t the first time he and Grace had clashed. It was obvious that he knew the routine and he was hoping his protons would have a balancing effect on her wildly zipping electrons.

“Grace please stop. Don’t say anything else. You’re just starting to say stuff and you’re going to say things you can’t take back.” Above the fray, she found it interesting that he didn’t retaliate at her insults.

What must life be like inside his head?

On the other hand, she knew his placid tone alone was enough to push all of Grace’s buttons. What he thought was soothing, shredded through her nerves like acid burning through flesh. It was a lost cause by the time he made his last desperate suggestion,

“Why don’t we all go out together? I know a good place.”

She ripped her hands from where they were being smothered by his,

“Why on earth would you pick the place? You’re not even from around here. Are you seriously trying to tell me what to do? Why do I always have to shut up and be a good little girl? What earthly purpose could you possibly serve in going out with us? Are you planning on feeding me my food? Maybe you can put a bib on me. Maybe you could talk for me while I just sit there and look pretty. Look at my mouth while I tell you this slowly so you can understand my words: I am not asking your permission. I am going and I’m going without you. If you don’t like it you can take back your stupid measly ring and we’ll call this off.” Grace’s words gathered momentum, rightness assured by volume and viciousness. She didn’t wait for a response. Suddenly standing, the back of her knees knocked her chair over. In an impetuous rush she turned around and left the room, leaving her sandwich alone and forlorn.

The Grace that did stay peered inquiringly at the face of her five minute fiancé while the words of the song floated across the room.

And I think it’s about, forgiveness, forgiveness, even if, even if, you don’t love me anymore.

“I feel bad for him. Maybe she’ll come back when her rage wears off. It’s been known to happen” An old pro at these altercations, Grace felt compassion for him, so obviously unprepared and unequipped for this kind of warfare. Impervious to her psychic sympathetic vibe messages, he set his jaw hard, calmly stood up and walked out of the room betraying not a tic of emotion.

“Wait! Don’t go, she might come back.” Grace was powerless to do anything but watch. She turned to the only person who could hear her, “What does this mean? Where does this leave us? Why did you even bring me here?” Grace grabbed her companion’s arm and shook it in distress

“Be patient Grace.”

With the deep regret of a dreamer, Grace reluctantly left the stranger she wanted to know. As if she had a choice.

night of grace story-part 4

2010-10-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

In the next few moments Grace was convinced she was on the wrong end of some kind of hallucinogenic trip. Maybe the right end of it.

Moments? Is that what they’re called? Is that a measurement of time? Is there any such thing? Or is this just an artificial constraint that our minds use to define the unknown by pouring it into a Pyrex cup and measuring it with graduated lines of varying length?

Yup, definitely tripping.

The walls of her room disintegrated, crumbling like wet sand that’s been flash-dried by a blast of heat, instantly divested of all adhesive properties. For three heartbeats, the trees stood their ground outside the dissipated room and on the fourth beat they vanished: oaks simply swirled upward as if flushed into the sky. Breathe in and out, on the next inhalation the sky joined the choreography of metamorphasis. The night dropped each of its stars in a magnificent shower of light, leaving behind obsidian emptiness. Grace giggled like a child in church.

“Have you ever seen those slide shows people spam your inbox with?” Nervously trying to explain her sudden

Inappropriate?

laughter, she forgot to wonder if he knew anything about the world of slide shows, spam or inboxes.

“I know about everything,” again his voice was so calm, so warm. The stunning magnitude of his simple statement sucked the breath out of her lungs with a truth she couldn’t fathom but could feel in places she hadn’t felt since childhood. She struggled to organize amoeba thoughts floating toward entropy inside her mind. Gathering courage, she blurted a tiny amorphous entity randomly corralled as it drifted through her brain.

“That reminded me of one of those slide show that celebrates the beauty of nature with beautiful pictures. Only this was like standing in the middle of each picture. And those transitions–” She stopped herself mid-sentence, afraid to trivialize what had happened with her fumbling analogies. He squeezed her hand,

“Go on Grace, I like the sound of your voice.”

A wave of hot ache swelled in her throat, and she felt the strain of warm salt at the back corners of her eyes. She gulped down the bittersweet richness of his unexpected interest.

He likes the sound of my voice?

And she knew it was true, so she continued.

“It reminded me of the fireworks I used to watch on the Fourth of July down by the bay. Especially the finale. One beautiful floral kaleidoscope of color after another, coming in faster and faster succession, each display more spectacular than the last.” She fizzled out, her words embarrassed by their own inadequacy to do justice to the marvel she had just witnessed.

“Yes, I remember.” Soothing mom sounds, reassuring and inviting to express some more.

“Would you call this the supernatural?”

He didn’t answer but she thought he might be nodding.

Does he think he can lure me into looking at him?

“This is way different than any supernatural I ever imagined. I thought it would be terrifying and horrible and too huge to contend with. Maybe it’s because you’re here with me.”

Again no answer, at which she began to second-guess her instincts.

Why should I find his presence reassuring? I don’t even know him.

“You know me Grace.”

She stiffened her neck and clenched her jaw.

Did he just talk to my thoughts? I definitely don't find that reassuring..

She hurriedly spoke out loud to drown out any thoughts that might provoke any more creepy inner dialogue.

“Is what I just saw the kind of thing people talk about after an acid trip? Is this what they see? Is this what they’ve been searching for?” Carefully, Grace tip-toed into this sudden secret.

Is he going to be offended? Is that a disgusting comparison?

She heard or remembered his words inside her head,

I know about everything.

This piece of truth struck its chord again, resonating through her synaptic gaps, jumping from one place to the next. The first note, the melody, sang out clearly and simply, assuring her that he knew and understood what she was saying. The next note in the chord sang a close harmony about his knowledge of things throughout the world, in the universe and beyond. A lower note, rich and mysterious, gave deep witness to his knowledge of things from time before time, unknowable and unfathomable. Giving a shard of evidence of his knowledge, he began to explain the thought that Grace could barely begin to articulate.

“People are constantly seeking to connect with spirituality on some level. Humans try to fill the voids in their lives by any means possible. There is so much that you know nothing about. Still, you miss those very things of which you know nothing. You long for them, you yearn for them and you didn’t even know you needed them.”

Grace wasn’t really sure what those things were. She was sure that her hand felt warm inside of his; complete, as if her one hand had never realized its true purpose until this moment. She wished her whole body could enjoy that sensation. More, she wished her mind and spirit could enjoy that sensation. She thought this might be one of the things she had been longing for and yearning for without ever knowing she was missing it.

“It is called rest.” His voice responded to her unformed words. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her hand at rest. Bliss.

In a moment,

Moment?

her eyes opened and she was standing in a supermarket. ‘Standing in’ had just become another one of those terms like ‘moment’. It had been robbed of all relevance. Grace’s feet were not literally touching the floor of the supermarket. She was not able to interact with the people in the store. An unconfirmed suspicion told her that if she reached out to touch the navel orange immediately on the right she would not feel the bright leather of its skin. She had the notion that her hand might pass right through it. Even then, rather than feel the juicy pulp of the fruit, she would, instead, experience through the soles of her feet and the follicles of her hair, the very essence of citrusy tang: sweet, sour, full of zest and nutrients. Grace as part of the orange for a moment.

Ugh I can’t even use the word moment. How am I going to get through this? And what about the other bizarre thoughts zinging through my head?

Surely, I am not here to contemplate my oneness with the produce.

“No, you aren’t. And stop calling me Shirley.”

Grace still couldn’t look at his face. She couldn’t name her fear, or which one of many that prevented the eye contact. His ridiculously stupid joke broke through her defenses. Disarming. She took, instead, a coward’s look at his forearm.

Sinewy, strong. Is he human?

“Why are we here then?” She spoke to disengage, withdraw from the threatened intimacy of desire begging her to touch the rope of muscles on his arm.

“Don’t you remember?”

She looked at the grid of one-inch hexagonal floor tiles. Dingy grey and brown laid out in a pattern that formed a geometric floral design in the honeycomb of the floor. The produce stands were made of wood; real wood, sturdy and rustic, with scalloped green and white striped awnings overhead. Here was an old-school grocery store, not one of those cookie-cutter supermarkets that fill the shopping centers now.

“Oh! We’re in Bohack. Didn’t they tear this place down? I think they replaced it with a Walmart or something. Yeah, I remember now, this store was the best. There’s a section over there,” she pointed past the produce, “filled to overflowing, row after row, with the most beautiful candy. There is one kind, my favorite to tell you the truth, so pretty it even has pictures of the fruit of its flavor incorporated in the–” her voice petered out.

“You do remember.”

“Seriously? That whole spectacular supernatural intro and this is where you were headed?” sarcasm oozed out of her pores racing the fear to the surface of her skin.

“Yes. I want you to see this as an observer.” He gently led her to the left along a store-length alley between the line of registers and the aisles of groceries. Grace tried to make herself leaden but he easily arrived at their destination. Strange how a seemingly trivial event in a child’s life, barely worthy of notation, can cause an immediately roiling cauldron of emotional soup: anger, fear and shame expertly diced into tiny cubed pieces and tossed into the frothing broth of guilt. Silly, but not. She became engrossed by the tableau.

“Can they see us?” she whispered.

“No and they can’t hear us either,” his gentle susurrations matched hers, soothing and teasing all at once.

She looked sadly at four year old Grace. A red and white gingham shirt with white piping outlining a cowboy yoke paired with ancient hand-me-down Billy the Kid jeans. She held on to her mom’s hand. More accurately stated, her mom had little Grace’s sweaty fist in a death grip. The veins on her mom’s tough hands were bulging with telltale force. Grace was looking down at her feet, with her free hand reluctantly held out to a man. The man wore a green grocer’s apron. with matching green bands on his sleeve,

What are they called? You know those things worn only by singers in a Barber Shoppe Quartet or one of the seventy-six trombonists from the Music Man?

I don’t know, they look like garters for your sleeves.

Whatever you call them, I hope it’s part of his required uniform or this dude is seriously out of touch with reality. Freak.

He was a manager, a fact Grace had brilliantly deduced by reading his name tag: ‘Bill-Supermarket Manager’. He grimaced uncomfortably, rolling his eyes slightly, obviously wishing the event over.

“What’s his problem?” she hissed to her new partner in crime, fully annoyed by Bill’s discomfiture.

“Do you think he honestly wanted any part of this little drama?”

“I never thought of how he felt about it,” she was struck for the first time that this extra in her life’s play might have had any feelings. She turned again to the strangely familiar show.

This small child, stocky and strong, stood trembling with fear, unable to look up through the hair hanging over her eyes. Grace remembered vividly fixing her child’s eyes on a crusty scrape on her own knee and concentrating on that with grim determination. Dirty tear tracks trailed through a Milky Way of rusty brown freckles.

Her mom’s voice rang tight and angry, “Speak up Grace.”

“Look how pretty she is, even when she’s angry. My dad always says her eyes sparkle brighter blue when she’s mad. Must be true because they are on fire right now. Makes her look beautifully fierce huh?” Grace admired her Mom, sixteen years and three children younger. Her hair was golden streaked sand and sable, fluffy like the lady on the old green Herbal Essence shampoo bottle.

Not that revoltingly orgasmic redo. The original. That beautiful hippie, naked and organic, clothed only in her hair, flowers and birds.

There stood her mom in all her natural glory, thankfully not an exactly naked replica of the Herbal Essence lady but clothed in the tennis outfit she had been wearing when she discovered Grace, literally red-handed, sticky strawberry flavoring smudged all over her guilty little palms. Below the sassy pleats of her white skirt, Grace admired strong, perfectly shaped and tanned legs not yet marred by the ravages of those horrible varicose veins that now lived like a colony of purple slugs just below the surface of her mom’s older skin. Grace laughed out loud when she noticed that her mom hadn’t even bothered to put shoes on. Mom was famous for playing barefoot at the courts while still winning the club championship tournament each year. Accustomed to dominating without the benefit of shoes, she certainly didn’t need to subject her feet to the prison of footwear just to teach her daughter a lesson. Maybe the store’s ‘no shoes, no shirt, no service’ policy didn’t apply in a situation like this. Grace was willing to bet that Bill-Store Manager wasn’t going to make the challenge.

“Yes, she is a beautiful woman.”

Grace was startled out of her trance by the voice next to her, unexpectedly filled with a surprising ache of longing. She wanted desperately to see if the longing was stamped onto his features, confirming what she was hearing. She caught herself from turning, stopping in time to witness the rise and fall of his chest. Actually just the rise as his chest seemed to catch and hold his breath.

“I am sorry I stole this piece of candy from your store.”

Grace’s attention quickly shifted to the child whose voice was shaking with fear, shame and one other thing.

What is it?

Her peripheral vision caught sight of legs spinning through the air.

Oh right! Anger.

Grace wanted to laugh as she saw little Grace half-turn toward the distracting legs windmilling across the supermarket. Her young eyes squinched up in fury and tried to shoot daggers at the offending legs while multitasking a demonstration of contrition to Bill-Store Manager.

“I almost forgot about Brooke for a minute. To this day I’d like to slap her. She cartwheeled around while my mother forced me to apologize to the manager for stealing. She is the one who told me to take it! She was eating it with me when my mom caught us behind that bush in front of the house. Why is she cartwheeling?” Grace continued, not really waiting for a response, “You’d think she might have felt a little guilty that I was standing there crying, humiliated, taking one hundred percent of the blame for our crime. You'd think she could have stopped cartwheeling just for a second. She wasn’t even that good at cartwheels. Look at those bent legs.” She fumed at the memory she was being subjected to.

In a tandem flash of emotion she felt a sudden sinking of a stomach in an elevator ride, remembering that moment of being discovered. The two girls had been safely ensconced in the shady fort created between the thick privet bush and the cool brick façade at the northeast corner of her house, away from the midday sun. Sitting in the dirt, trading licks, they transferred tacky red guilt between them, leaving a trail of evidence. The sensation of her mom’s arrival had been horrifying, her angry disappointment suddenly blocking the little sun that had filtered through the bush. Grace had slowly looked up to her mother’s head, a fringe of hair haloed in golden light and when her features finally came into adjustment, Grace had been sick to her stomach with fear. She felt the forbidden cloying sweetness curdle in her otherwise empty belly and a thin stream of candied bile coated the pathway between her stomach and mouth, rising from the bottom to the top. She recalled, as if it were in slow motion, how she had turned to look at Brooke. She had been utterly amazed as her friend, seemingly unfazed, continued to get her last licks in before the candy was confiscated. A voice interrupted her remembered misery,

“Grace, do you know that is exactly what you were focused on at the time?”

“What?” Grace felt the stupidity of numbness, like walking out of the dentist office.

“Brooke.”

“Oh right.” She slowly swam up to the surface of her memory, still discombobulated.

“Even when you remembered this incident, you invariably turned your attention to Brooke’s part in this. Is it important that she got her last licks in? Who cares about her bent legs?” Gentle prodding was obviously meant to lead Grace to a point.

Grace resisted,

“Well, I just have to say one thing. She has always been a big fat pain in my butt.” Her one thing unfolded its arms and legs revealing itself to be a much larger thing than apprehended at first glance, “You know what she did to me two years after this little episode?” She rushed on, afraid he wouldn’t let her finish this one extended thing, “When we were in first grade she brought Good and Plentys to school every day. I don’t know why she liked them so much, they made her teeth black and all the boys laughed at her calling her ‘Black Tooth Brooke.’ Anyway, every day she offered me some at lunch and I would say no because, to be honest, I didn’t even like them. But one day, I just gave in and took some. I don’t know why, like I said, I didn’t even like them. Long story short, my big sister Annie was over her house to play with her big sister Gretchen. For some insane reason, Brooke felt compelled to tell Annie that I had eaten her candy that day. And, of course, perfect hall monitor that she was, Annie marched home and ratted me out to my mom. They interrogated me for what seemed like hours ‘til I finally cracked and admitted it. Then I got punished for the double dose of eating candy and lying. What the heck?” She wanted to look at him to see if he understood the ridiculous part that everybody had played in the farce. Apparently he didn’t,

“You do realize that if you hadn’t taken the Good and Plentys in the first place, none of this would have happened don’t you?”

“So that’s how it’s gonna be huh? We’re not even going to discuss what was wrong with Brooke that she felt the need to constantly be tempting, then tattling on me? We’re not going to address the fact that Annie could have just minded her own beeswax.” Grace had reverted to the cadence of childhood speech, “This is just going to be about me?”

“Exactly. I am not here to fix Brooke, she is not the one whose life is hanging in the balance between the hell of addiction and death. This is between you and me.”

She looked down and to the right at his foot,

Is he seriously wearing flip flops?

His footwear reminded her of the beach where she had laid tonight, weighing her bleak options. She suddenly remembered that he was here to help her, so she capitulated a bit.

“Okay, so what are you trying to tell me?”

“You never really felt sorry for stealing. You felt humiliated at being caught. You felt resentful for being forced to apologize and return the half-eaten candy. You felt indignant at Brooke’s cartwheels.”

“Give me a break, I was four years old.” She listened in disgust to that small child’s whininess as it hobbled out of her mouth.

“You were old enough to feel humiliation, resentment and indignation. You were able to recognize Brooke’s culpability. I think you were old enough to feel remorse.”

Grace felt backed into a corner. She didn’t perform best from that location. “So you dragged me here to show me that stealing a two-cent piece of candy when I was four led me to an addiction to crack?” Now she was off the ropes and swinging wildly, blurting the first outrageous thing that came to mind. Those cartwheeling legs made her feel perverse even this many years later.

“That was a big leap. Funny thing is, you are trying to distract with what you think is a wild exaggeration but you’re closer to the truth than you know. We have limited time, so I’m going to see your wild exaggeration and raise you a chip of absolute truth.” She could feel his gaze pinning her down and was supremely relieved not to be looking at those eyes. “You do frequently like to ignore the things you have done wrong or mitigate your errors by deferring blame. It is a recurring theme for you. If you don’t admit what you’ve done, accept culpability, then you can never address it and fix it.”

“Oh silly me. I wish I had known life was so simple. See it, admit it, fix it. You’re a regular Tony Robbins.” Her nasty tone was a practiced defensive weapon. She knew she would not have the audacity of blunt rudeness if she dared to look at his face; another reason to hold him at bay and speak freely at the general space around her.

Completely unruffled, he handled Grace deftly,

“Tony wishes. But yes, it is a simple equation and it is effective.”

“So let me get this straight, when you offered me your hand, you were really offering me some sort of mea culpa mind trip where I get to seek and destroy all the stuff you think I should feel guilty for? Had I known that’s what you were offering, I might have considered going it alone.” She knew she was bluffing, going back to alone was a terrifying thought.

“Grace, you may relinquish my hand whenever you choose.”

Relinquish his hand?

The mercy of his tone was enough to make Grace want to do the exact opposite. She redoubled her grip on his, worried that he might soon grow tired of her mercurial mood swings and remove the choice from her hands. She thought she felt him smile in response to her thoughts.

I don’t know what that means.

And then he squeezed her hand three times. She didn’t know what to do with this information. She and her mom used to play this game when she was little: her mom would squeeze her hand three times, signifying ‘I love you’, to which Grace would respond with two squeezes, ‘me too’, Mommy would reply two squeezes, ‘how much?’ and they would squeeze together as hard as they could to indicate how strong was their love for one another. Mommy, with her Spock grip, always won. She said that was because she loved Grace more than she could ever imagine.

Does he know about our game?

Maybe it’s just something everybody knows about.

So, is he telling me he loves me?

Love you? I hardly even know you.

Grace’s mind had always worked in such a way that, while mulling over any number of thoughts, she would be pierced by an unanticipated and mostly unrelated insight. So, as Grace played the hand-squeezing puzzle in her head, she was broadsided by a fragment of the other truth her companion had been trying to show her. She felt the profound weight of it in one flash. For one breath, she knew that her inability to address her own weaknesses without diverting blame was a common thread running through her twenty years of life. In the next breath, she could see the physical path that led from the supermarket and ended with her face down on a beach, body full of toxins, begging for an escape. Her mind raced up that path with an impossible combination of clarity and speed. Having pulled at that single thread, the whole fabric of her life seemed to unravel.

My life just flashed before my eyes. Not a pretty sight.

“ Not exactly your whole life Grace, just the one strand.”

They stood and watched for another moment.

I don’t think that word will ever be the same for me.

Little Grace reached out her hand offering a slimy sucker on a napkin. It had been beautiful, a disc the size of a quarter, the thickness of her pinky. Red around the rim touching a thinner line of lime, contrasting beautifully, the rest of the field was pure white. Nestled in the middle of the snowy pureness was the tiniest, most perfect picture of a strawberry, complete with stem and tiny seeds, not stamped on to the face but an integral part of the candy. A few years later, before TV watching was fully banned from the home, Grace had seen a Sesame Street mini-documentary which had demonstrated in detail this particular candy-making process. Colored sugar was rolled and stretched into long thin straws, bundled together into a log and cut on the cross-section revealing wily and seductive beauty. Not that she was obsessed but there was a lot to be learned about these lovely drops of heaven.

Earlier on that fateful day, while her Mom was occupied in pursuing her own idea of a delicious indulgence,a ring of dried figs and coconut covered dates, one particular piece of candied craftsmanship had called out to Grace in a tiny, perfectly-formed, sweet voice. The youngest of the mermaid sisters had regained her powers, singing,

“Pick me.”

Brooke had chorused furtively in a guttural hiss,

“Take it.”

Grace knew it was wrong. She wasn’t even allowed to have candy: not to have, not to hold, not to eat. Candy had been forbidden fruit since her mom had decided to bring the delights of a strict health food lifestyle to their home. To add a criminal element to her disobedience, she knew she was stealing. Just as quickly as knowing, she gave one furtive peek around the store and popped that beautiful piece of candy into the front pocket of her Billy the Kids.

Returning to its home at the supermarket, the candy was no longer so perfectly formed, not so sweet, and certainly not so beautiful in her tortured, dirty, pudgy, outstretched hand. The sweat from her palm had wet the napkin on which sat that gob of ruined delight. Focusing on the tiny pieces of black fuzz that had gathered on the ride over, Grace offered it for Bill-Store Manager to take. He shied away with a look of minor disgust. He opened his mouth, obviously ready to say, ‘I don’t want it, you keep it.’ Instead of those words, a strangled noise came from his throat as her mother caught his attention over Grace’s head. Cold steel locked his gaze. She narrowed her eyes and clenched her jaw with the patented but rarely used look that meant: ‘I will knock your teeth into the back of the oven.’ She mouthed the words with strenuous articulation,

Take It.

Clenching her jaw until the muscles were finely twitching golfballs, she thrust her chin forward and widened her eyes, allowing the blue lasers to penetrate the hapless grocery worker’s soul. She dared him to defy her.

Looking at her skips, little Grace never saw this exchange. Big Grace considered for the first time how frustrating this must have been for her mom. Humiliating that your child is a thief. Everybody in town now knows the daughter of Mrs. Health-Food Nut steals candy. Awesome. Her mom had determined to see this uncomfortable task through in an effort to build Grace’s character, make her understand the consequences of her actions. Small town public opinion be damned. Grace wanted to run and say sorry or give her mom an encouraging slap on the back for scaring the great googly-moogly out of Bill-Store Manager. She stepped toward the scene but was constrained by something like a plexiglas wall of invisible force.

“Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. In terms you would understand, we aren’t even in the same dimension as they are. You can’t interact with them.” He gently pulled her back from the precipice.

They watched quietly as Bill took the offending lump of goo. Grace thought she saw his hand tremble just the slightest bit. That tickled her. Grace briefly contemplated this latent hostility toward Bill and realized she must still be angry with him for witnessing her shame. Poor Bill. Mission dispatched, her mother turned quickly to go, whiplashing Grace into her wake. Once she had thanked Mr. Store Manager for his time, her Mom had spun so quickly that Grace’s shoulder caught the tail end of a leg reaching for the floor to complete one last cartwheel. The minor collision sent Brooke careening off into a small display of cereal boxes. That amateur acrobat landed splayed on her stomach with a pile of LIFE on her back.

“I don’t remember that at all.”

How did I miss so much?

Grace glimpsed the briefest smirk fly across her mother’s face as she oopsy-daisied Brooke upright. The manager scurried over, rubbing his sweaty hands against the thighs of his apron,

“I’ll take care of that ma’am. You have a nice day.” He bobbed his head up and down and practically bowed in nervousness, reaching to right the display. He clearly couldn’t wait for them to exit the store.

“Too late,” murmured Grace from across her dimensional plane as her mother marched out of the store with a girl in each hand.