Independence Day

We laid ourselves on cotton sheets, spread over the sand, watching choppy water and kids in bathing suits walk past. A cloudy independence day at the beach, left with nothing to do but nap. So we spread ourselves out on the cloths, shielding our eyes from the light, wrapping ourselves in towels, kindergarteners going down for a rest. And when the breeze kicked up, it was time to walk and find ourselves the perfect little bar, filled with old Irish men, mostly retired policemen, watching hotdog eating contests and the horse races, buying each other rounds and smoking fat cigars. The old man in the stool next to me sipped on a Coors Light from a small, round, stemmed glass. He introduced himself as Burney, and his age-creased neck and kind Irish eyes reminded me of my Grandfather. We talked about books. He asked me if I’d read The Grapes of Wrath, and he asked me to tell him about Steinbeck’s life. And then he told me about a short story by O’Henry that I’d never read. And as he told me about this man in the story, laying in his death bed, watching the leaves of a tree out his window fall, tears filled his eyes, and he took many pauses to catch his composure and then he did start to cry as he finished the story: A painted leaf saved the man’s life. I pressed my hand against his shoulder, the bones of his shoulder blade so delicate, frail, who made it so easy to talk, really talk, about big ideas on a holiday afternoon.

Red Hook

A perfect, unexpected day. Tacos in the park, friends gathered on the grass, bikes and swimming and beer sipped from plastic cups on a pier. The industrial tint of the New York harbor in shades of gray and green, of black burned out factories and skeletal piers rusting into the sea, and grasses growing along the stone walls of melting buildings, their glassless windows gapin, eye sockets looking out toward the Statue of Liberty. Stalled bobcats sit still on a Saturday afternoon, amongst the rubble, the land soon to be a showcase for affordable throw pillows from Sweden. Fairway and artist lofts, boat moorings and cool, eclectic bars. A wasteland, a jackpot, a peaceful corner of the city. For how long, I wonder? One day, this entire city will be full of condos and coffee shops, and then it will all fall into decay again, only to be torn down again and rebuilt again. It doesn’t matter where you are, nature always wins. But for today, it was good friends and laughter and taking it easy, letting the day lead us softly by the elbow.

6/29/07

Sometimes, it amazes me how much women can talk. These three, behind me on the train, talk something important, it’s clear from the tone, but their Spanish is faster than I can catch, and the sense of what they speak is meant to stay between them. Their mouths are full of popcorn and gunfire, rising and falling, piercing and dodging, so that I cover my ears, like a latecomer forced to the front row of an IMAX flick. I fold my book at the creases, trying to pay attention to Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but the talk keeps piercing, keeps folding in over my shoulder, and I’m reminded that life isn’t in books, only reflected in them. On the next train, I look for the quietest spot to sit, next to a man reading a book. I notice his book is covered with paper, a picture of a woman and child that he wrapped round the covers himself. I find wrapped books suspect, like there might be pornography or white supremacy hiding between the pages. But when I lean over I see the book is in Greek, there is a whole other world behind that story. And so, I sit and watch the black of the subway tunnel punctuated by blue and yellow lights. Are they to lead our way? We are what we make ourselves. How we live our days is how we live our lives, Annie says. Ideas come in like arrows on a wire, sticking for a moment, then retracted by that unseen beast in the shadows.

A Thing of Permanence

Sky crashes. Heaven's pots and pans free-falling 10 stories to an aluminum sink, a bed of shattered glass. The sidewalk floats by, trees struggling out of the pavement shake like a Baptist choir singing 'God bless the rain!' Earth beads itself, a drop on the hood of a shiny red car, ready to break, ready to roll. Will we all ride down the curves into a puddle on one of life’s side streets? My clothes are soaked through, hair clinging to shoulders and face, seaweed on a rock. I've given up on weaving through the dry and wet spaces, refused to huddle under the eaves of passing buildings. This is a slow, peaceful, piercing rain that bounces off the pavement as soon as it hits. But there is no violence in it. Only relief at the end of this sauna summer day. An intermission from the pudding-thick air and toaster-oven subway, from the persistent growling under my skin for a gulp of something cool. The water washes the stains from the sidewalk, a million footprints and dog farts, gum wrappers and beer bottles, bum piss and ice cream mishaps. An urban track washed into the gutter, leaving a sand dune without footprints, a trail with no scent.

The Coffee Cup Erupts

The coffee boy fills it up barely to the top, and then the liquid grows, expanding past the lip, through the holes in the lid. I pour some into the ivy covering Bryant Park. But it continues to grow, and drip over the side, onto my hands, onto my white blouse and blue strappy heels. One more vexation on a long morning, thinking, is this what I want to wake up to for the rest of my life? A hot walk to work. Coffee in a paper cup fighting me every inch, pleading to go back to the pot it came from, to the beans it was ground and brewed from, to the airplane it was shipped here on, to the plantation and the farmers’ hands who picked them, to the bushes those beans grew from, the earth and water it fed on, to the sun, the sun, the sun, that gave it life in that dark chocolate earth. I press the elevator button. At least it’s cool in here. And walk to my desk, setting the cup down. The coffee now stays neatly in the cup, its top stained with the rust marks of this morning’s eruption. Lava or blood? Dried coffee stains are like watercolor, darker at the edges and soft, opaque at the center. Now, maybe, I can think about drinking it. Somehow, coffee isn’t as much fun in the summer.

Quitting Coffee

Honey freefalls down the curves
Of the crumpled plastic bear
Yellow top hat inverted
A silent, respectable old man flipping his top

There is beauty everywhere
In the viscous sugar dripping into my tea
The voice coming out my computer speakers
In the waking sunlight filtering through the kitchen curtains

Enjoy beauty, seek it out, create it
This is what I’m reminded of
The quiet early Spring morning blanketing me
The remnants of a cold scratching my nose and throat

Spiritual wholeness comes from many sources
The kind you make, and the kind you accept
Beauty is God’s gift
In too many forms to count

From Sea to Shining Sea

Sometimes you think
Hell rained over
Dripping amber waves of salt
Onto the kitchen linoleum
The morning news full of so much heat
Hot machine-gun fire and blood oozing
From the hearts of foreign babies
By the time it reaches my table
That angry fire and pain and wet tears has dried out
The blood aged, turned to rust
Dehydrated tears, piles of salt
And don’t you know?
Both sugar and salt lower the freezing point of water
But I’m not concerned about a sea of sugar
It’s the salt, piling up on those purple mountains
I’m not worried about the world melting, either
Ice cubes do it all the time and find their place

Battery Graveyard

Batteries fill the ground
Between the shiny steel rails of the subway tracks
Hundreds of tootsie roll-sized canisters
Caked in the oily dust of a billion footsteps
As if everyone in the city had reached West 4th and Washington Square
When their CD players stopped singing and cameras stopped seeing
And they flung their batteries off the platform
Retreated above ground to find easy replacements in the delis lining 6th Avenue
But wait, I think, peering at the chunky black muck between the tracks
Do these devices even use double A’s anymore?
If not, then where did this colony of Energizers come from?
Were they carried here through the subway tubes?
From some great underground dead battery reservoir?
Ferried by hordes of angry killer bunny rabbits?
Oh, didn’t you know?
Yes, New York City is crawling with killer bunny rabbits
Much meaner and vicious than rats
With their green eyes and little drums
Beating their way through the thin walls of old apartment buildings
Gorging themselves on discarded pizza and Chinese take-out
A forgotten band of furry percussionists
Keeping poor city-dwellers awake at night with their bad imitations of Stomp
But, wait, I think, looking into the dark abyss beyond the light on the tracks
These batteries, the ones in the crack of the subway tracks
Perhaps the bunnies have tricked us
Rigged this stop with an electromagnetic field
So that singing and dancing dolls, walkmen, and cheep GPS devises stop here
So that the tide of riders thinks it has no choice but to toss those useless used batteries
And go upstairs for more
But really, the bunnies have only momentarily sacrificed the lives of those toys
Have stockpiled the silver pellets for a time when they’ll rise

One night we’ll wake
To the beating, the pounding, the twirling fancy footwork
Of an army of fury robots
Demanding their piece, demanding their place
And what will we do? What will we do...

A Shitty First Draft, Part I

[Staring: Two Runaway Nuns, a 1965 Cadillac, an Australian Trucker, a Jewish Cowboy, the Downward Dog Ashram of Taos, and A Gambling Man and His Sheba Wife]

In the desert, the sky spreads like a canopy; a cellophane wrapper over a dustbowl. During the peak of night, when the backdrop is full of the black, oily universe, the speckle lights of stars and planets and satellites remind the casual observer that we’re living in a bubble, in a fractured reality, in a place where we can not quite find the center of things. This sky, opaque and moody at times, overwhelmingly clear and honest at others, invites the imagination. A shooting star becomes a wish, the lights of a distant city the neon halo of a spaceship alighting on earth. From the pitch of night we spiral down into the juicy blue of day, where horizon finally meets sky. The brown earth is as open to the supernatural as is the sky. Let’s not forget that this is the same sort of land where Moses saw the burning bush and Jesus was tempted by the devil. Yet, this is the American West, this is a land of vortexes and energy-drawing crystals, of missile testing and government conspiracies. The small rodents, snakes and bugs brave enough to live here nest under rocks and small, sun-scarred bushes, waiting out the heat of the mid-day. They know when to take it easy. Like clockwork, each afternoon the wind shifts, a patch of the sky grays, and lightening shoots from heaven and earth. A spring rainstorm, the tentacles of God and Devil duking it out.

In this strange land of earth and sky, of bushes and clouds, a road, flat and straight as a ruler, with what appears to be no beginning and no end, cuts from one horizon to the next. The sun is still bright over this patch of land, and the heat of the day bounces off the black asphalt in a gassy haze. There, at the far end of the road, a car moves along the slip of a road, a metallic spark in the sun. It’s moving fast, see? Hauling across that pavement, turning up it’s own wind, kicking up discarded beer cans and plastic cups along the roadside, whipping blown-out tires and cigarette butts out of its path on this deserted stretch of Nevada highway.

Take a closer look and you’ll see that it’s a Cadillac, cherry red, with white-wall tires, its convertible roof down. Seated on the white leather bench seat are two nuns, in full black and habits, a black canvas duffle bag separating them. The driving nun is in her mid-twenties. She squints into the sun and the shimmer of the road, holding onto the wheel tightly with both hands. She is nervous and excited because she is driving 100 miles an hour and secretly hopes that this deserted road will go on for eternity, that this feeling will stick with her. The nun in the passenger seat is older, in her 70s. It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking. Wide, black, Jacki-O glasses hide her eyes and she keeps her left hand tightly grasped on the top of the black duffle bag. The breeze ruffles both women’s habits and their milky complexions are turning rosy in the sun.

Move down the side of that cherry red convertible and you’ll see that, indeed, the white-wall tires are moving fast, spinning faster than they’ve ever spun and that the front driver’s side wheel is beginning to shimmy, in a slight right and left motion on its axel. A 1965 Cadillac was never meant to go this fast on such hot asphalt, but the young nun does not know this. She only feels the wind in her face and a thrill in her gut that she’d never imagined possible.

The tire disintegrates, withering under the weight of the car, shedding itself in strips along the road.

The car pulls heavily to the left and the young nun holds tighter to the wheel, shock and amazement in her eyes, helpless from driving into the dust and gravel of the desert. The old nun holds tightly to the bag, screaming unintelligible words into the air, forgetting how to coordinate her hands in the sign of the cross. A pushing on the breaks, a sliding into dust and garbage, the car fishtails across the road, spinning until it ekes to a stop, defeated at the side of the road.

The women are silent, breathing in deep ragged sighs. Dust blends with sunlight, coating the car in a fine powder and grit. The young nun still grasps the wheel; the old nun hugs the duffel bag to her stomach.

“Please forgive me, Sister Cecile,” the young nun says in a husky, burnt-out voice, still squinting into the distant road and desert.

“You should not have been driving so fast, Sister Magdalena” the old woman looks at the younger woman, then loosens her grasp on the duffle bag enough to cross herself.

The young nun steps out of the car, surveying the blown wheel, nudging the rubber that remains with the tip of her black canvas shoe.

“Do you know how to change a tire, Sister Magdalena?” the older nun continues to hold the bag in the front seat.

“I helped my father change one once,” Magdalena says, thinking of a long-ago camping trip in the Redwoods. She opens the trunk of the Cadillac, looking for the spare. The trunk is empty. No spare, not even a toolbox. Magdalena looks up and down the road. She wonders if this road is as deserted as she’d fantasized it was just a few minutes before, if it really does go on to eternity. “A road to eternity with no wheels,” she mumbles, closing the trunk. She considers praying, but finds that she has nothing to say to God at the moment. Her inability to pray is a disturbing new development. A nun who cannot pray. What is the point? She thinks. Magdalena hopes the old woman hasn’t noticed that she hasn’t prayed since they left Los Angeles the day before.

Sister Cecile joins Magdalena at the side of the car. They look at the road together.

“Should we start walking?” Magdalena looks at the old sister, she knows this is a silly question. Cecile is leaning on a cane. Her left leg is shorter than her right. It has been shrinking for years, the left leg slowly retracting a quarter inch a year, growing back toward youth as the rest of her body just keeps getting older. “I could start walking, and come back and pick you up,” Magdalena says.

“There was a time when I could walk the Great Wall of China. In fact, I did once. At least part of it.”

“Are you feeling up for a walk now, sister?”

“Ah, ha…” sister Cecile takes off her sunglasses and looks down the long, straight road, “walking is good for the soul and mind.”

The air has grown heavy and rain clouds filled the sky.

“We should pull the top up,” Magdalena says. The two sisters pull the top up and make it inside the car just before a torrent of rain reaches them. The raindrops pound the top of the car, turning the windshield into a waterfall.

“I would suggest praying, but” Sister Cecile says, looking at Magdalena, “perhaps we can say our own silent prayers.”

Magdalena wonders if the old woman has found her out? Is it that easy to see that she is loosing her faith? Can this old woman tell just by looking at her? She wants to ask the old nun all of this, but in her rearview mirror she sees lights moving down the road. Magdalena gets out of the car, running to the side of the road, waiving her arms. The headlights are wide, the face of the truck like a monster in the rain. The wheels of the semi stop beside her, brakes lock with a sigh. The window of the semi rolls down and a man in a baseball cap peers down at her, squinting at her soaked nun’s uniform.

“Need some help?” the man asks, he has a very thick accent that Magdalena can’t place with the pounding of the rain around her.

“Yes, our car has a flat and we don’t have a spare,” Magdalena yells through the rain.

“Well, jump on in here, sister,” the man smiles. The way he says “sister,” it’s clear he doesn’t believe Magdalena is actually a nun. “I can take you to the gas station in Sherman.”

Magdalena doesn’t know where Sherman is, but she nods and runs to the passenger door, helping Cecile out into the rain. The old nun grasps the duffel bag in one hand and her cane in the other, rain drenches them both.


***


Her future. That’s what Sister Magdalena was thinking when the fight broke out.

The cafeteria if St. Anne’s was full of old nuns wheeling themselves, or being wheeled, hobbling along on walkers. Most of the old ladies were eating soft foods. Overly salted foods. Magdalena new this, because she cooked nearly everything at St. Anne’s.

Over the past two years, since she’d arrived as the cook at the retirement convent, she’d woken each morning in her white-walled room with the purpose of cooking these old women three meals a day. And she tried her best to make the meals as good as she could. Many of the women could go at any time and if their last meal was one she’d prepared, Magdalena hoped it was a good one. But lately she’d felt a darkness fall over her. She would have once said that her soul felt this darkness, but now she wasn’t sure even of her soul. At 27, she wondered if everything exciting in her life had already happened. Her first and only kiss, at age 15, in the back of a movie theater in Pasadena. Her entrance into the convent at age 17; the discipline, study and obedience of those first years with the Sisters, striving in a quiet and obedient way to shed the world, to come closer to God. When had all that ended? Turning to her devotions each morning, she now only felt a blankness. Had she somehow, inadvertently, cut her communication with God? Was there some sort of rough spot in her soul that had never been smoothed, that was somehow blocking her way? Even her post, as the head cook at St. Anne’s, which had at first filled her with a sense of excitement and purpose now felt depressing. The convent was full of the smells of old women, of menthol mixed with ammonia, a place where death was approaching quickly.

Magdalena knew that she fell too easily into disappointment. This was her pattern. Discouragement. She was not faithful enough to her calling. She was too weak to give up her own desires. How could she ever come closer to God and remain so weak in mind and spirit?

The last weeks had brought unexpected questioning. Walking through the halls of the convent, with its shiny wood floors and small, community living rooms, with the old sisters living their days in quiet memory in their rooms, coming out for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Magdalena started seeing her life in comparison against theirs. Relative to these women, she was still at the beginning of her life. Many of these women had traveled the world in the service of God. Some had spent years, their entire lives, behind closed walls in the service of their own communities. Had they all reached the same crisis point that Magdalena now felt? Had they all wondered if they’d made the right decision? Had they all felt this rough patch in the line between themselves and God?

These were the thoughts running through her mind when sister Cecile screeched from the corner of the dining room. A loud voice of any sort would bring alarm or curiosity in a convent, where silence is of utmost importance for meditation. Magdalena couldn’t recall ever hearing this sort of racket, at least since she’d been a novice and one of the girls had gone into hysterics during Morning Prayer and they’d never seen her again. Magdalena stepped out from behind the table she was serving soup from to see what the matter was. Was Cecile having some sort of senile outburst? Was something medically wrong?

“This is none of your business, sister,” Cecile yelled at the woman across the table seated in a mechanical wheelchair, her back to Magdalena. The dining room had gradually erupted in whispering, the nuns like bees in a hive.

“Oh, I believe that it is, Cecile,” the nun in the wheelchair pointed a crooked finger toward the other woman, “you took vows, I don’t care how old you are.”

“You shouldn’t have gone into my room,” Cecile was so angry that her voice warbled and her white complexion had turned spotted red, “you had no businesses riffling through my things!”

“I did it to save you”

“You did it because you’re a snoop!”

“Ha!” the woman started revving the engine on her chair, fiddling with the controls, trying to turn it into reverse, “wait until I tell the superior about this, you may be retired but that doesn’t change the rules”

“You wouldn’t dare!” Cecile grabbed her cane, scrunching her lips, “it’s no one’s business but mine and God’s, you jealous old bag!”

“Oh, I see,” the other nun finally put her chair in reverse and buzzed backward, hitting the edge of another table, going forward, then reversing again, shooting straight back a few feet from Magdalena. “Old bag? You would know about that, wouldn’t you, Cecile?” and the woman turned down the adjoining hall, in the opposite direction of Magdalena and sped off, much faster than the rules of the convent allowed, Magdalena noted. She went so fast that the fabric of her shirt ruffled in the air, flapping against the metal of the chair.

Cecile stood, leaning on her cane, looking at the room of nuns, now quiet and staring at her. Magdalena walked cautiously to the old woman, taking her arm and gently leading her to the hall.

“May I help you back to your room, sister?” Magdalena said in a low, whispering voice, wanting to preserve the woman’s dignity.

“You’re the new cook, right?” the old woman did not bother whispering.

“Yes,” Magdelana didn’t say she’d been at the convent two years already. That was a mere speck of time to most of these women.

“How long have you been in the order?”

“Well, I suppose 10 years now. I’m 27.”

“Hum,” the woman tisked, “many, many years ahead of you.”

They reached the woman’s room, the door was slightly ajar. Cecile led Magdalena into the room. The walls were covered in black and white photos. Some of the photos showed black children in front of dusty huts. Others showed more children and adults, but these looked as if they’d been taken in South America, the people’s faces flat and brown, like the pictures Magdalena had seen in National Geographic of indigenous Mayans in Mexico. Something about Cecile slowly lipped into Magdalena’s memory. Oh, yes, she thought, the first day she’d been at the convent, when the superior had taken her for a tour they’d passed Cecile’s room and the superior had told her that this old woman had been a nurse for many years, before she’d taken her vows. She’d apparently worked all over the world, the superior had told Magdalena. Above the dresser was a picture of Cecile in a crowd of people, her hand extended, shaking the hand of a middle-aged man in a suit; Magdalena leaned in to look closer.

“Francoise Mitterrand,” Cecile said huskily, looking at Magdalena.

“What?”

“That’s Francoise Mitterrand, when he came to Montreal, when I lived there.”

“Oh,” Magdalena nodded, the name sounded familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it.

Cecile sat on her single bed, a fringed, peach-toned afghan on the hard mattress and clasped her hands together. She pursed her lips, squinted her eyes and looked at Magdalena. “Funny they’d put such a young nun to work in a place like this.”

“We all have our callings, sister,” Magdalena smiled at the nun.

“Yes, I suppose we do,” Cecile unfolded then refolded her hands. Magdalena looked at the pictures again. The room seemed so full of the world, a world she’d never seen. Sun streamed through the window behind the bed, the orange trees in the courtyard were in full bloom.

“Where were you before you came to St. Anne’s?”

“St. Benedicts, in Pasadena. That is where I’ve lived as a novice. My family is from there.”

The old nun nodded, squinting her piercing eyes at Magdalena. The old woman’s eyes made her uncomfortable, like she knew too much of what Magdalena was thinking. She remembered her soup,

“I should get back to the kitchen,” Magdalena turned from the woman.

“Can you drive?”

Magdalena paused at the door, she didn’t know why, but she felt she was standing at the edge of something, that she was about to enter into something new, that if she wanted to escape whatever this woman was asking, she should leave immediately.

“Yes, I can drive, I drive to the market for groceries a few times a week.” Magdalena looked at the old woman, “why?”

“Because I need you to drive me somewhere,”

“Well, sister, there is the shuttle that can take you anywhere you would like to go.”

“The shuttle is not going to take me where I want to go,” Cecile smiled slightly at Magdalena, “Sister, you are right that we all have our callings. I have mine, you have yours. Mine, at this moment, happens to need yours to drive me somewhere.”

The clandestine nature of the woman’s words, her small smile, intrigued Magdalena. There had been so little mystery in her life for so long, beside the mystery of her failed connection to the Most High, that she couldn’t help feeling her heart beat faster. What would be the harm in driving this old woman somewhere? Surely her intentions were not bad, perhaps this was something God had called them both to.

“I’ll need you to take me tonight.”

Magdalena nodded, stepped back into the hall, back to the kitchen.