Issue Six Author on the Wall

Alison Stine

Elsewhere | Instructions for Living: San Fransisco | One for Sorrow | One Hundred Consecutive Times

 

Elsewhere

We went to the Tropical Treat, the drive-through by the highway where people park their cars in two rows, and wait for teenage girls in bright and tight T-shirts to come take their orders for root beer floats and burgers. We stood outside in line. It was July, evening. Everything elsewhere was a green field.

Do you see them, child? the old man asked, looking behind me at the corn across the road, and the woods. There are three.

I looked. Three deer. The highway, the corn.

A group came out of the back, near the picnic tables, and got on the motorcycles parked at angles in the lot. All of us in line, old men, mothers, turned to watch them. I watched the girl with the long loose black hair, the lipstick, tattoos on her legs. I watched the way she hung off the boy, lazy, hardly holding on. They pulled onto the road. When he hit the pavement, gunning, she bounced once; her hair streamed behind.

I have often wanted to be the girl on the back of the motorcycle. I have often wanted to be the singer with the corset top, the one who smokes, the one who looks bored, the one who studied opera, the one we left at the bar talking to the older man with the cane; he said she knew him so it was all right.

Once I was the girl on the back of the motorcycle.

If I don’t bring your girlfriend back in a few days, go on with your life, my friend said to him as we left.

But he made me wear leather and long sleeves and a helmet, and we were home from West Virginia in four hours. I knew him so it was all right.

Three deer. The highway, the corn.

I have often wished myself elsewhere: at the mountains, the steam. Tell me the way to the blueberry field and I will go there.

But first, we drove home, ice cream in hand. An old silver mail truck turned off the road, up a driveway that spit dust, up to a farmhouse with a porch, laundry, corn.

I wanted to be the one driving the truck, bringing the mail. More than that, I wanted to be the woman waiting inside the house. More than that, I wanted, finally, to be exactly what I was: a girl in a white dress, come to say goodbye.

 

Instructions for Living: San Francisco

Leave the apartment. There is sunshine and crepes and a woman in Jackie O shades walking a poodle, and a small dark-skinned girl with a black bob and red dress, eating a corn dog, and a curly-haired boy coming home from the bus stop who swatted the flies from his eyes and then smiled.

The kids drink cream sodas after school, and the cook doesn’t make them pay, says: say hi to your father for me. How is your father?

Sick, the boys say.

Learn how to say thank you and please and excuse me and hi in Spanish and French. You knew it once. Maybe Chinese. The library knows.

Write a letter, one a day, to someone you love. Everyone you love is somewhere else now, but not forever.

Just because everyone else drives like a maniac does not mean you have to drive like a maniac.

Don’t drink so much coffee. You have the tolerance of a child. A small child who can’t drink coffee.

Don’t be afraid to ride the bus. Once you were happy and lived in England and rode the bus. Is this coincidence? Ride the bus.

Talk to strangers.

Accept rides from friends.

Don’t turn around when you hear a whistle.

What are those purple flowers, smashed on the sidewalk?

Your job is to write. Your job is to live. Your job is to use this time. Your mother never had this time. Your father never had this time. You will not always have this time.

Find out about those purple flowers.

Don’t spend money on your apartment. Your apartment is a collection of other’s gifts: the couch, the coffee table. Your apartment is a series of: look what we found, look what was given. You don’t have the money to decorate your room, and who cares? It is only a room, a white square where you sleep. You won’t spend your time there.

The world is your room now.

One for Sorrow

Happiness is a scrunched-up face and crinkled nose. Happiness is hair messed up. Happiness is sun in eyes. Happiness is wrinkles. Happiness is being lifted.

What you can't see in the photograph is how high lifted--dress flung up, red shoes kicking. What you can't see is the poem James read to me about his mother. Night beat through our windows. We stayed up talking, drinking beer in tall bottles. What you can't see is the hill behind the windows, seeded with clouds.

What you can't see is what we didn't know: it would rain for days and days. The city would be abandoned, the city of jazz, the city where once I found a hundred dollar bill under a hotel bed, and silently thanked the woman who had lost it because I could afford to eat.

I won't let you down, I thought. I will enjoy every minute, I thought.

This morning before waking, I dreamed the hurricane reached Ohio. A friend drove me around in his pickup truck. We drove by the neighborhood where my childhood friend Sarah once lived. The houses were empty--I knew this--except for the fathers who had stayed behind. It was night. Her father stood in the backyard, building a bonfire with all the furniture.

That's because he's never lived alone, my friend said. It was too dark in the cab to see his face.

I have lived alone. I have started over four times now, but each time I have looked back. Could you abandon the city? Could you leave with nothing, return to nothing?

I would miss the photographs. I would miss the evidence: the letters, the paintings, the dress. What are our things but evidence of being alive, being in love, loving?

All my favorite things are broken, the architect said in the magazine article when asked: what do you love the most?

You can see in the photograph we knew. We knew we would have to say goodbye, me and my friend. Why else do you think we were happy? Because we knew it wouldn't be like this forever. Each moment is there to help you through the next, the way each poem helps you write a better one later.

Later, you'll want this, I thought when I sat in the field the next morning with my sweater, my tea. Stay as long as you can. Wind whipped the clouds behind the mountain. Everything was gray or green. It would rain later, but I didn't know this, watching the sun be risen.

It did rise, I would insist later in the gray day to my friend.

Remember this, I told myself. Set it aside, like counting out stones. Make two piles: one for sorrow, two for joy.

I have to remember, it's all right be happy; it's all right to feel joy. It won't be like this forever. It's all right to be lifted up.

One day you will do the lifting.

 

One Hundred Consecutive Times

I have bought myself a hula hoop.

It is aqua blue with silver threads. It is just the right size. It cost four and a half dollars at the super store where I was buying responsible things, like an emergency blanket for my car. It is utterly perfect. I tried it, and it all came back, this business of hula hooping, this business of balancing, maybe better than before, now that I have hips for the hoop to swerve on.

Yesterday I went swimming in a cold green lake, after much persuasion from an eleven year-old girl.

It's not that cold, she said. I promise.

It was, and she lied, but I went all the way in. I swam out past the children, past the shallows. I like deep water, water with no hope. I like to stay in as long as I can, longer, treading, reminding myself how to live, that I can live.

It no longer matters what happens. Where I move, where I live, who loves me or doesn't love me. I have so much to do, so much I don't even know. But there are green shoots sprouting from the corn spilled by a tanker on the railroad tracks--really-- and I am happy.

I wrote yesterday at a picnic table in the sun, then swam, then we ate peanut butter ice cream from the camp store, my friend and I. Walking back, I said how much I loved this.

It might not always be there for you, he said, going to study the map.

I think I'm going to enjoy it while I can, I said.

The very fact of your enjoying it means it will run out, he said. Someone else might like it, too.

I don't think so, I said. I don't think there is anyone else like me. I think I am the only one like me in the world.

What will we say about this, years from now? This is the summer it was hot, and the power kept popping off. This is the summer my freckles came back, a constellation of stars, and my hair grew wild and golden. The summer I swam in strange lakes. The summer I went to movies in the middle of the day, entertained hikers with stories from my head, planned parties in my earth-spotted backyard, said goodbye to friends. The summer I wrote things and they happened: like the power, like his love.

This is the summer I became a girl who finished writing a book, who hula-hooped one hundred consecutive times. At least I plan to try.