Her hair, strewn back and across her sharpened shoulder blades, so much seaweed but in a champagne tint, wet and soft. It came around as she whipped her neck in a quick arc, slapping her cheek, moistening her nose, surprising her. Slurping audibly on her skin as she turned back, now, slower, motivated less by his words and more by her desire to move away from it all, from the light and the speed and the anger, away, away, away.
If you think you can treat me like, like -- why. Why, I could -- I could just, just snap, and things would be SO different, you can't imagine. You think you're so important, such a key element in my life, but actually? NO.
She snatched up her wine glass and hid her slightly tottering movements as she paced away from him, back toward the campfire where her mother and husband and child laughed and looked a picture of comfort and cozy near the yellow-orange spires of flame. Her dad, with a sour grimace she could barely discern, simply peered, with pinched gaze, into the vague middle distance and away from her softly crumbling beauty, once statuesque, once impressive, now gentling, like couture removed, several seasons beyond sharp-chic recognition, at first blade-harsh, at present a thing that goes on and on and on until it suddenly is akin to your mother's curtains: dated. Garish.
Unpleasant.
The window streamed, angular, with highway lines of irregular water, her eyes tracing through its tracks, waiting for a rhythm, an ancient quiet of steady logic, where none would exist, not today. She turned blearily to her husband's ruddy cheek and remarked on its stoic length without fingers to aid her. Fingers that ache, now, a little, fingers she flexed upon the thought, beneath the salmon-pink blanket, fingers too taut and congealed to be her own, too old. Too soon.
The little boy, his voice a dusty, delightful LP of scratches in the cobwebbed morning, brought his arrow-straight body into their bed as a catapult of energy, still surprising despite its being routine of late. She saw the man wince as the harpooned child hit its mark, the father's body lanced with his offspring's weight straddling his gut. She put her hand over her mouth to catch the laugh, so the child wouldn't think it was a move he ought to incorporate into his routine just to amuse her.
The man and child rough-housed as she lay, static, her mind skipping lightly over the conversation she'd held with her own male parent the previous evening. The feeling of its being the newest rendition, a cover of all their attempts at this very conspicuous, repeated piece of disastrous wreckage recorded on warp speed and played back in a screech in her mind. Not just a feeling, a true truth, her knowledge of their inability to find a groove to fall into in their talk that remotely resembled the other's, and how lifelong-harsh that frustration, that frustration.
Then she remembered, with an ease, a sliding-down toward the thought, of the day when she had chased her brother down from the attic in their rented house that lay outside the tiny town in Missouri, chased him, with hoarse screams, down the ladder from the attic that led to the top of the carport, she crawled down as quick as she could but still trailing him as he leapt, sprung to the first of the rough 2x4s nailed into the stately tree's bark, a rung too high for her six-year-old state. She railed at him, screamed more, even wept. But he was on and on, higher into the tree, until he'd simply - disappeared. His usual trick. Going where she could not follow.
And then her father, behind her, catching her up, in his strong, steady arms, and suddenly there they were, bursting through the dark, guarded leaves and into the strong light that shone on their bright heads. They lay on the warm, wooden platform, then, all three, side by side, and picked out the bunnies and giraffes and monsters and the profiles of beautiful ladies in the massive white ships of cotton drifting easily above them. It was the longest afternoon of light and warm and safe, safe, safe. And she felt its beauty in her small hands, gripped it. It felt like golden light and green winds, soft and swaying, and the bluest blue ever written about by the greatest of wordsmiths. And her father and her brother, their camaraderie together, they three.
Her father interrupted her reverie to ask if she would like a cup of the coffee he was pouring into a thin white cup. A curt head shake was her response, after which she felt guilty and gave a further explanation, messy and overwrought and altogether unnecessary. Then she got up and walked outside so she could catch her breath.
Small fires were already smoldering in the early morning drizzle, their pungent scent a meager offering to her bruised emotions, her own gaze into the gray mist a study of bitten lip and creased brow. Her rancor and her acquiescence a braided chain to tuck into a sequestered spot somewhere deep and still accessible so that she could remind herself without too much digging about.
You make me hurt..but in such a beautiful way.
Posted by: Jenny, bloggess | July 27, 2009 at 12:39 PM
Yup. I totally know. Except I would have had to have used profanity and lots of unpretty words to explain it.
Posted by: nadine AKA scarbiedoll | July 31, 2009 at 07:42 PM