naughty wrist faeries
Tuesday 18 May 2004 | I like a cookie
Trying to make it so the Unnarrator can’t blog! But she don’t care. Too much to relate and not enough time to write a paper letter, and it’s too late on the East Coast for a phone call (though she sat in the car, teary, for a long time holding the cellphone, and was in the end too afraid of the Latin Master—or what if Mandarin and her spouse are—she turns off the cellphone). Thus will follow horrid Helen Fieldingesque too-blasé-for-pronouns stylistic affectation.
Arrives at hospital on Sunday, having wept new, interestingly dry weeping since Waco, all through Austin, driving blindly yet extremely successfully along pitted familiar roads named Frederickburg and Louis Pasteur, menstruating heavily, and thus realizes Maman was admitted exactly four weeks previously—4/18/04, because she’d also had her period then. But this time without the great nausea, mercifully. Then realizes that, four weeks previous to that, she slept with Film Critic (some mild nausea does result from this thought).
Reacquainted with meds and routine, spends night in hospital, sleeping exactly once (from 11 pm to 12 am). Lies awake for hours and hours and hours, listening to hospital noises, hypervigilant for noises from Maman, and thinking helplessly, like some kind of fucked-up metronome: Film Critic…Librarian…Mandarin. Mandarin. Film Critic. Miss Thing. Mandarin. Librarian. Mandarin. Thoughts keep coming back to that one particular lovely basin of attraction, perhaps because Mandarin is who she loved first. Or anyway that was the word she used then. But has she ever loved anyone. Film Critic. Mandarin. Librarian. The Parisienne (?!). Film Critic. Mandarin…great exhausting ill-directed misguided unskillful obsessive weirdness, all the livelonglonglong night, interspersed with vomiting (not hers) and snoring (also not hers). Foolish Unnarrator. At one point even finds herself fantasizing about making out with Emmeline. Emmeline! Her new blonde straight super-normal sister. Buries her face in the pillow and tries not to hate herself too much.
In morning, unsurprisingly staggery and weird, blinking a bit too often. Emmeline arrives at ten or eleven and around noon the Un manages to leave. Drives to house in Pipe Creek to drop off stuff. House is Weird. Mandarin isn’t there, and Other People have been there. Calpurnia is wild with loneliness, meows operatically, won’t leave her alone for a second. She showers, changes, hugs Maman’s sister hello, shakes her nephew’s hand (large blond Mississippian youth) and flees. Checks mailbox. Twenty-plus-page letter from Young Monk, who has decided gleefully to be full-on in love with all the force of his twenty-plus years, despite the Unnarrator warning him that she never wants to see the ocean again. Hangs head in hands, car still running, and listens to Ani. If you ask me / I’ll say / yes please / to you today // so don’t ask me / cause I’m weak that way / just don’t ask me / okay?
I’m so glad we got that / straightened away….
Goes to Whole Foods to buy things Maman thinks she might fancy—orange juice, fruit, tidbits from deli. Rambles aisles of Whole Foods in Ani-augmented tears. Memories of Mandarin assault her from every corner. British/Irish cheddars and honeybee-fabricated facial products, gluten-free thises and thats. Turns abruptly into random aisle to escape looming absence and staggers unwittingly into chocolate section, a Film Critic boobytrap. Stands tearily over the Gorilla Bar, wishing her memory were not so good: “…and the Gorilla Bar, pecan praline chunks in sinfully rich milk chocolate, which shall be broken into bite-sized pieces and parcelled lovingly into your mouth…will you let me have my fingers back?” Defiantly buys Gorilla Bar. If Film Critic’s not going to parcel it into her mouth, she will do so herself.
Returns to first full day back on the good old oncology ward and carries out resolutions: to join the women’s club thingy and thus receive “free” parking for $10 flat fee…should have done this a month ago…and to climb all flights of stairs, no more elevator, also should have done this a month ago. [As a result calves all jerky and quivery when shifting gears, which is feckin’ hilarious when she figures out what’s causing it.] Frantic conversations with Emmeline when it seems Maman will be discharged the following day at 11 am?!?!? resulting in the two of them driving wildly around scouting skilled nursing facilities, all of which are either exorbitant or horrible (basement cinder-block rooms) (”To leave her there would be a death sentence,” Emmeline says of one, with grim finality and no trace of irony.) (She is wearing gold earrings, sandals with a manicure, and a cute pink plaid shirtdress; the Un is wearing red, um, pajama bottoms, an obscenely tight grey t-shirt, and purple glitter barrettes.) But at the last minute Dr. Colder arrives, is puzzled as usual: “I have no intention of moving her anywhere before the radiation is finished and maybe not even then.”
The sun begins to set and the Un brings her weary self home around 9:30. She stops and gets gas at the place where she and Mandarin tried to do so one late night and it took them like half an hour because the credit card thingy on that particular pump was broken. She remembers she was wearing her paint-stained gray t-shirt (floppy not tight) and hiking pants and her denim jacket and she remembers having that weird old protective butch feeling, the one she still feels when Mandarin weeps onto her collarbone, and she’s is briefly allowed to cradle her and think incoherently, Her. She’s my boyfriend. This one. That she’s always surprised by Mandarin’s littleness, the fragile bird-boned feeling of her throat and ribcage, because she somehow always thinks Mandarin is an all-powerful Amazon warrior, but really she’s just a little cat in a big cat suit. If Mandarin knew how everything in the Unnarrator’s head turned dark pink when that happened, and the pulse-pounding confused mess she is for an hour afterward, Mandarin probably wouldn’t let it happen again, she fears. So she doesn’t tell.
Then home. Eludes relatives watching loud violent dumb movies in the kitchen, and comes into the guest room to hide, wrists mysteriously burning. Emmeline has jealously guarded the guest room for herself and the Un, over objections, and the Unnarrator feels guilty but immensely grateful. Then goes into the bathroom and there is the fabulous big tub containing visions of bath faeries and there is nowhere safe on the planet from my own brain and aaaaaaaa Mandarin Mandarin Mandarin. Mandarin putting minute drops of lavender castile soap on a flannel and singing Well you know my name is Simon. Mandarin insisting we eat “little bits of things” and holding her fountain pen funny all these years, a thoughtful look it gives her, and scrawling smart incisive medical missives in sepia ink and hoarding the magical green powder and loving the fur off the kittens, looking in their blurry blue eyes and declaring, You are a professional cat, yes you are. Mandarin at night, plunking a crispy buttered toaster waffle pointedly on the Unnarrator’s plate (angry at those who are making her talk and not letting her eat—not angry at her) and once miraculously rising like a small ferocious wolverine to the Unnarrator’s defense, “You’re asking her questions she can’t possibly answer, and it’s not fair,” and how astonished the Un was, because no one has ever saved her like that though she’s saved her own friends over and over again, no one has ever had the guts and brains to leap in like that and protect her. M. couldn’t have done it. No one has ever done it.
And one morning which the Unnarrator will remember in her eightieth year, should the gods allow her such long life, after all her many sins—one morning when she came in around seven or eight after a long horrible sleepless night at the hospital, chilled and sickened to the bone and afraid, and didn’t think, just didn’t think, just blindly crawled in bed and flung herself on Mandarin, and started to twine around her in a way which felt completely natural as they whispered, but at some point that fragile lovely throat was very near her lips and she stopped absolutely, stopped like ice, panicked, and pretended to be sleepy, and Mandarin was nearly asleep again already anyway, and she turned to her side of the bed and just held herself there, an aware stone. Because her Professor once said:
“[Desire] is the transforming fire that softens all the old straitjackets we have brought into this life, until they dissolve like the worn out patchwork they were in the first place. Sitting still and watching with both a curious and a compassionate gaze is the only response, in the end, that is bearable. It dissolves all the obstacles. Remember, desire is the fundamental movement of energy throughout the cosmos; it is our human form of gravity. It is deep wisdom to wish to experience it in its fullness, lest premature action interrupt and deflect its full flowering and the message it brings you.”
What is this, she thinks tonight. That heaviness in the chest, like rain or stone, as the arms want to reach up and wrap around some neck and shoulders that aren’t there. What does the Professor mean. What is the message this brings me, has been trying to bring me for a full decade. Desire, greed, grasping, attachment. Thinks again of “pharmaceutical skillful means,” wonders if people should be spayed or neutered like pets. Emmeline will go to Mexico this week or next to get birth control pills, which she says are about $4 for a month’s supply, and has offered to pick up patches for the Un as well. She quotes herself, in her head, which is always worrying: “When we say I want you, what more do we want, beyond what we already have?” She doesn’t know, doesn’t know, doesn’t know. Tortures her own skin in the absence of someone to do it for her, in the absence of someone to remind her of the edge, where she starts and where the world leaves off. Feels that weird dry sobbing bubble in her chest whenever she thinks, in milliseconds, that she wants to hit herself—that she can’t, because she took precepts—that she can curl her fingers into the steering wheel instead.
That Maman’s cells are dying slowly, slowly, maybe only two or three a day, and the edges of her body dissolve into the world, little by little, become undifferentiated, losing her contour, losing the edge between herself and the other things, and the Unnarrator is shaken, thinks I don’t want to lose my identity yet, and falls asleep with the pillowcase between her teeth, grimly hanging on, not doing anything, not calling anyone, not calling, not calling, wanting to be fucked until her bones rattle, wanting to grapple with the angel until he relents and blesses her, wanting a hand to seize and move over and prove to her the outline of her own being. Falls asleep writing or muttering to herself or singing or talking or thinking of the words. But lets go anyway, lost anyway, temporarily slipped under, lost to the voiceless void of sleep.
[To dream of Mandarin and her looking for a flat in Boston, they are outrageously expensive and the Un keeps stopping perplexed and saying But wait, what about the spouse? very confused, and Mandarin waving that aside with her hand saying Forget about him, because he’s done something terrible but we never really know what it was—but somehow know enough to know this is some highly temporary spat, no matter how permanent Mandarin seems to think it is, and they move in together, Mandarin will miss her spouse horribly and regret her decision immediately.]
And anyway what can her Fleidermaus do to help, the Unnarrator reflects hastily, sending this the next morning having deemed it fit to be read (something about the blog being more anonymous than direct email—? to say nothing of using the omniscient third person), listening to Maman’s sister snoring, Callie whimpering, her organic toaster pastry burning, as she gets ready to go back to the hospital (must take a halved avocado and some cheese; Mandarin would want that)—she really doesn’t know. She wants to say something like, Take me seriously. Even when I don’t take myself seriously, even when I’m being flip. But she doesn’t know what that even means.
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