sig and onto spain

tomorrow we go to spain but this morning we are in Sig - the men in matching blue jackets and hard hats pound up walls and measure thin steel pipes by eye - the hats and coats give it away as a government job. anything else and they'd be in fake LaCoste t shirts and maybe a baseball cap

i am sneaking a look through the three layers of curtains that puff in and out of the balcony door- gauzy white; rose petals on thick gold, and a striped blue and yellow that recalls the sea far out and away from this inland town. they are layered for modesty? For the women of the house to keep sheilded from peepers. but i am the one peeping in this place

in this house, the house of my husband/s brother/s usually it is his wife that cooks and controls the kitchen but these days she is on a trip to Mecca so her grown up children and another brother are here running the show. which is how i come to cook filflah /roasted peppers/ how i came to be in the kitchen so long that the filthy square began to unfold its sense and order to me/ that the heat could creep and creep until i was suprised when my husband came in bearing a bag of stingy limes and commented on the heat of the room

of course. but i hadnt felt it until the two youngest girls come in to close off the one window- its yellowed glass all the more smothering than sheer would have been- because

a man who doesnt live in the house, who is tall and dark, and by dark i mean black, with a deep deep voice has come to help kill the lizard who has taken up residence on the back balcony in the sprouting eyefulls of potatoes and blurry, rotting onions.

when i insist that i have met this man before, his name is Beludjma and i myself have had coffee and then later lunch on my own balcony and that his sister had cooked for their grandfathers funeral funeral feast of mountains of cooscoos and whole lambs slaughtered for the guests who sat in plastic white chairs in the street down below they crack it open again a bit

this is greeted by the oldest son who has grown to his full height _huge_ and grown out of his pimples and given up on college and settled into working for his uncle in the business they run out of the ground floor of this sale house all of which is inhabited by them-- the oldest son barks

but now i have to leave this place sig and so i will continue later again this journey

Carol

Carol, I am making sun tea on my window sill.

You'd approave of the crimson pomegrante that takes it's time and works thru the clear water all the day. this is the way i saw my life: a place of beauty and light and when i think of your home, that is what i remember. how you welcomed a small girl with chewed nails and stinky keds summer day after summer day into your home. how did you make me feel so welcome? adding me into the blessing at dinner time. (we are holding hands, the room is golden with skylight. we are singing Johnny Apple Seed. you are thanking jesus for bringing me to your home. these are blessings, you say. and i believe you. i believe you.)

Carol, the other night i had a dream i was at your table again and i woke aching for your cassarole and your love. because that is what you showed me. bringing me far out of the city to The Garden where i caught frogs and escaped sidewalks and tore through wild, lashing grasses taller than myself. where i stripped beans to their internal perfect pelllets from my teeth and just rolled them on my tongue.

K was so young then. her skin as white as the Dessitin I'd smear on her backside, then carefully pin on her diaper with the yellow duckie pins.

here is what i took away:
sitting in your living room rug leaning over the record player with Bookends in my hand. listening to how quiet a voice can be in song.
here is what you gave me:

i cannot say how much the love you showed me gave me. standing in your kitchen, the glass jar steeping sun tea on the counter behind me, i wash our dinner dishes because the sink is full and then i wash them and they are clean and the job is finished. (at my house, any job moves forward and then slides back over you, never finished. greek. tragic.) i wash the ziplock bags to use again. they dry alongside the bubble glass glasses and the green flowered plates.

I sit on the floor with my arms wrapped around my knees and watch you golden daughters run piano scales. I bury my hands into the thick orange carpet and never want to leave. The alley has smashes of bottles and its the endnof summer so I've been barefoot for days now and living in my knobby swimsuit and jean shorts.

Now, when so much of my life can be spent doubting, casting ugly motives on those who call themselves Christian and offer help, I see you as a true Christian whose love I drew in closer to and can only feel that any part of the world is more blessed by your presence of grace and beauty and that light, what is that light you hold? I am so grateful that I had you in my life, that you welcomes that little girl at your table and held her hand and blessed her with your light.

After my first baby, I spent so many days feeling lonely in a pack of new moms, looking for some solace and finding little to none. Playgrounds, meet-ups at someone's apt, library story-times. I ached to connect to someone else who could sympathize about waking up every two hours to breast-feed, someone who had been cut off from the world that she had once called her own: long, lazy afternoons spent reading Salinger for the millionth time, watching the green crawl all over Thompson Square Park. Late night drinks with friends just because. All this and so much more had been lost to me and I wanted someone to tell me it was going to be OK, to tell me a dirty joke, to talk politics. I wanted to be the old me with someone who could relate to the new me. But I almost never found it for years.

Sitting with a slew of Moms and the one, balding father who kept chiming in his wife's pre-pregnancy breast size at innapropriate moments (but then, when would be an APPROPRIATE moment to chat about that?), a little puppet of a child strung out over his chest, arms and legs dangling, white flowered hat perched on her head.
"Well, we are at 40% of our income two years ago..." Drone.

I just swallow another bite of my chicken salad, pop another bread stick into my baby's mouth and look across the cafe to a beautiful girl. Heavy, dark braids newly stitched to her head tight off her face. Bright eyes and silver lips eating pizza with silked fingertips.

"What about you?" Brings me back to the chinless women gappling.

"When do you want to have your next one?"

I'm not chiming in on this one. No, I don't feel like chatting with them.

It's not enough that we're all mothers. That doesn't just make us all friends. And it hits me. It's just me.

Norma

When I come home and walk down my hallway, I know Norma has her apt. door propped open when I feel the breeze circulating and smell the fresh scent of starch and hear her stove CLick, CLick, CLick, the burner turned all the way up past high. She is boiling potatoes. The chicken she will fry after and then set beside the potatoes, cooled, cut in half, covered in a mixture of egg yolk, garlic, garlic, maybe a little mayo and then on top, halved red olives.

Norma is maybe 75 years old. Her short white hair and thick glasses, she calls me Merrry with her accent still thick if El Salvador even after 35 years in Queens and when she gives me a card on mother's day, she even spells my name this way: Merry.

During the winter, when I make soup, which is every day or every other day (I make it to survive the ice that remains piled up, rotten garbage underneath, dog shit laid in in every which step you take), I bring her a bowl of it boiling hot. We both love lentil and she is curious about what grain barley is. She brings back the bowl, impossibly clean, to me always when I have the kids in bed, quieting down and ready to sleep, "Thank you, Merry. Thank you." Big smile and she goes back next door.

We complain about the landlord's stingy grip on the heat. From 10:30 PM until 5:30 AM not a blast of hot steam releases from our radiators, no matter how low the thermometer drops. Within the letter of the law, but still.

When I walk past I call into her apt, "Norma, Hi!" And standing in her doorway we'll chat about this and that. Which medications she has been to buy today, which are still on order, which cost her more than $100 each. She's lonely mostly, and maybe I am too. It's comforting to have someone always next door to me. I hear her asthmatic cough when I am chopping onions in the kitchen, her window on the fire escape, my window on the fire escape. It feels safer with her there. Always watching over our floor.

Letter to Zak Rogers, 1999

(I miss this boy like crazy)


Dear Zaq,

I am still hours from NY. The train rattles by greenery and a cowboy with steaming hot Irish sits across from me dreading our arrival in the stinking city.

The train is dreadful for lonely people and alcoholics. They are boxed in and their faces over faces split and end up raw nerves, live wires exposed to the elements. The alcoholics find each other before the end of the first hours aboard, hands anxiously crushing Budweiser cans in hand, shaking hands, spreading out the cards and guffawing at each other's jokes no matter how bad.

The lonely might try a little more, put a little more effort in. They try the grumpy German Grandma next to them, but when she turns her face decidedly against them, forsaking their desperate speedy monologue for the raw, ugly industry of Indiana, they give up and wander to the lounge car and join the drunks.
My headphones barely hold them at bay. Ton Waits rolls his drunken moon songs over me and I try not to smile, stare blankly into the patches of green outdoors or my think, hard backed book that sits propped open between me and the world.

I go back to NY still hungry for greenery, starving for the drugging smell of lilacs in the dusk, in the evening as the sweat-lipped kids rush by on clipping Big Wheels.

I am still looking for silence. I drink it in from all the still waters we pass.

It was wonderful to see you, Zaq. You have to visit me in NY. It's frantic and beautiful and covered in a filthy fabric of voices and frying shish kabobs and bright saris kicking up midnight blue screaming parrot reds through subway tunnels packed with bodies.
Bodies bodies eyeballs smeared against walls pressed up against my ass stuffed down my shirt.

In subway cars the wheels rolling and rocking they dig deeper in.

Amtrack Train again: Old women are better than men with silence, with solitude. One hand on paper, lipsticked coffee cup, head nodding vaguely to the outdoors, one hand always on that cup anchoring they hold on.

I am dreading NY. Despite my rave reviews and love of its insane streets, I can't sit still there. It is hard to find peace. I need to learn how to find silence in it all. Only then will I be filled and whole.

In (the summer of Chicago) look for stink trees, as my dad calls them; trees of heaven, as my old neighbor Mrs. Jones called them. The city is built upon their name. They line the 'L' tracks and will creep in your windows while you sit sloppy with sweat on the living room couch.

I decided I can do whatever I want. I just need to set what that is.

Write me a letter back if you will. Don't if you won't. I am not suck a good letter writer anymore, but the train inspired me. Maybe it was my own loneliness popping its head up.

Zaq, take care of that girl with bruises all over her. Tell her to buy Vitamin C with bioflavinoids for the bruises. She is someone destined to get fucked up by those drugs. Her body so openly, so visually rejects it. Watch her, Zaq. I had a nightmare.

love,
Merricat

Sunday Sunshine

Birthday Poem for Jana

In the Sunday Sunshine
Splash, kids in the bath
and the green wraps
round wood banisters
and gives me breath.

It's spring again.
But the crush of black ice
and layer after wet sloppy
still sits on my chest and only the
small voices of your crocuses
can start to nudge me open
to warm again.

The ginger carrot soup, the
fiery North African spices
kept me above the water
but give me more of these spring days,
more violet light through the petals, yours
and I might come alive again.

figs

to be in algeria in the summer, driving through heat with the windows whipping more at you. this defies what i love about the place. but this happens when we drive south to sig. the water is sucked from the air, though, so are the mosquitoes, and replaced by more of africa than i can bear.

we drove out to our farm, where, by late august, the sky and the earth are bony and blue, respectively, togetherly, and yet, and yet, the hallowed halls of snails cling to dead grass. where can they possibly come from? they stick like burs to the ends of the grass blades and i try to pick some off to take home with me as a reminder, as a way to keep a memory of this place, but they always end up lost in the filthy floorboards of our car.

the farm close to ours is owned by a neighbor who lives next to my husband's family in town. so, he is familiar to us. we have eaten dinner at his house while visiting the sea. he, being, the grand papa of the house. Ahbess, his name is.

there, on a farm close to ours, i climbed out of the car to chase my kids down and make sure no scorpions were black and poisonous and close to them. far off into the distance of empty land there are people visiting the farm, where no one lives, unless you count the saint.

driving through algeria, high into hills, you often see small white buildings domed with aqua blue. these house local saints, which is either a custom that is reviled and mostly ignored, by people like my husband, or very carefully attended too, much as the pomegrate and olive trees that often share the land where the saints rest.

but since my husband falls into the anti camp, i have never been up close to a saint's toom.

the kids are chasing what look like dung beetles back and forth across cracks and crannies in the sandy-colored earth.

it is ramadan and no one here will be eating for a couple of hours yet. that is partly why we are here. killing time while the women in the house finish up their Syrian soap operas and put the final touches on the sunset meal. the first meal of the day.

all around us are fig trees in full ripening glory. not just the fruit gives a sweet, thick smell in this dry air, but the leaves glorify the end of the afternoon. this is a fruit blessed by god, eaten by the Prophet. it gives grace and cures. and now, my husband walks toward me with a handful of its sweet fruit and gives them to me.
















to be in ramadan, in a country where everyone all around me is fasting when i am decidedly not, is to exist in an unease. i don't know how to handle it. how to be polite to people who have not drank water ALL day in the blazing heat, who have not had one drop of coffee, when, by this time, two meals devoted solely to coffee have usually been observed. that is the word i am looking for. i do not know how to observe this time, when i am not Muslim, when i do not wish to fast, but i also do not wish to stick out like a sore thumb. and i do not wish to piss anybody off. and i do not wish to be viewed as more of an outsider.

my problem in life has always been this: i want to be accepted completely and yet viewed as apart from, distinct from. it is impossible and i am miserable for it.

but this is not just respecting another's religion. the whole country is living this experience and not me. yes, of course, some people must not fast. but i have yet to meet one of those individuals. and they are not visible on the street, drinking a coke or whatnot.

so do i turn from my husband, after taking the figs, and quickly stuff my mouth? do i hold them in my hand until we reach back home and i wash them and set them on a plate next to the sweet tray? do i try to ply them off on my kids, who both don't eat figs?

in this situation i do what my need strangles me to do: i turn from him and the eyes of the others and gorge on the sweet, seeded fruits.