DELUSIONS
Necessary Angel
When I tell my friend of forty years that I’m concerned about promoting my newly published novella, as I’m still squeamish about social media, she says, “Well, it’s not like you’re this famous writer. I mean, it’s a really hard career, but you’re not going to sell tons of books at this point.” And in the car on my way home, I think, I’m not dead yet, I have time. And what about those stories I had just published––I mean, what about those? Then I remind myself: This friend has always given it to me straight.
When my sister once said to me that maybe I should give up writing because I don’t seem happy, and maybe I should do something that makes me happy, and I remember thinking, But I am happy––this is me, happy.
When my sons, who are in their twenties, occasionally say, “How’s the writing going?” And I think, They work, well, 85.5% of the time, and what if I could work 90.5% of the time? Would I be more successful? Come on, I say aloud, be real.
Bounce My Life Away
If I could have had my way, I would have bounced my life away. A child’s rhyme but my truest self. As it was, I was well into my thirties before my knees gave out, and I had to stop rocking incessantly on all fours on my bed. Bouncing my family called it and, apparently, I was barely two weeks old when, to the astonishment of my parents, I raised myself up on shaking arms and started to rock.
I can’t fathom my thoughts in those early days, I was pre-language after all, but the movement must have tickled some part of my brain. Why walk, crawl, or cry (much appreciated by my father) if I could rhythmically rock? The family accepted this as they did my older sister sucking her thumb, my father needing two drinks before dinner and two after, or my mother’s insistence in sucking the marrow out of chicken bones. The fabric of a family.
Lessons I Learned on my 40th Birthday Trip to New York
1. Stamina! A drowsy West Coast or less aggressive Midwestern lifestyle can lull one into a comfortable misunderstanding of physical prowess. Two miles seems like a walk requiring sensible shoes and loose-fitting clothes. It’s exercise. In New York, on my fortieth year, I casually and unknowingly logged over ten miles of continuous hoofing in heels with a snug dress and make-up. Energized by the beauty of Central Park, the commerce-fueled bustle of 5th Avenue and the appreciative hungry-eyed Tom Wolfe gents of Central Park West, I felt as light as air and unstoppable. Hours later, while lying on the couch drinking my second bottle of wine (you don’t need Gatorade to replace electrolytes after a damn walk!) I did pull a never-before-recognized muscle in my inner thigh. Luckily Matt, a friend from the tumbleweed town of Tucson made good as a Manhattan tax attorney, brought home a cache of Makers Mark and administered its medicinal properties like a doctor of the Old West.
Smoke and Mirrors
“I don’t know how you guys do it,” Harold said, his tone at once admiring and contemptuous. “You two are a regular pair of magicians, aren’t you? You’re all smoke and mirrors.”
I hung my head in shame, thinking, for fucks sake we’ve got to get a new accountant.
My husband laughed nervously and motioned for me to fetch Harold another cup of coffee. In the kitchen, I thought of how everything odious Harold said was true. He had been my accountant before I got married and I disliked him intensely, but he was the only accountant I knew. He came highly recommended through a friend of mine who worked at The Daily News. I dreaded Harold’s February arrivals the way, years later, I would dread the arrival of stinkbugs.
He drove a Lamborghini, a ridiculous car, and once he arrived he required endless cups of coffee, which I prepared for him like a barista.
She is a Mess
She is a mess in so many ways. Fat, to begin with, and unkempt, hair like a bird’s nest. No sense of style, always hoping to find that one perfume to make her identity snap into focus. Discipline. She lacks it. Flosses five nights in a row, then forgets until her back tooth starts to ache and then flosses again for five nights. Puts her glasses who knows where. Every night some new spot.
She remembers being taken to the pediatrician when she was eight years old for chest pains. He could find no cause. Now in her fifties, she understands that the chest pain was just pure worry. In the dark of night, she lies in bed thinking: Little Girl, you were right to be worried.
She is uneasy, waking up night after night, staring round-eyed at the ceiling, certain that her life has come to nothing, even when everything is essentially alright (she has no debt, she reminds herself -- she has a happy marriage). In her secret moonlit heart, she fears she is a ship permanently wrecked on needle-sharp boulders.
The Chin I’m In
Look, he said, you can have this.
I squinted at the screen.
Or this.
Heart-shaped, he was saying. Square. Distinguished. His finger pointing, my eyes following, the computer screen alit with versions, visions, transfigurations into pretty.
Imagine being pretty.
The Zumba Hour
Okay, I know I am not JLo or Queen Bey, but right now, I am one of their backup dancers. I am booty rolling and fist-pumping and single, single, doubling it, and flipping one hip-hop knee toward the other to the beats of Britney and Pitbull and Enrique.
And I am crushing it.
I am cumbiaing and chachaing and I could definitely, no doubt about it, be their backup dancer. Who cares if I’m a decade older than JLo? It’s the moves that make the dancer, not the sagging armpits, for god sake. Why wasn’t I warned that the armpits go? And the crooks of the elbows? The boobs heading south, sure, I’d gotten that memo, but why had no one mentioned the parts of your body you never contemplated before?
Never mind, it’s doesn’t matter, because I have the moves and for one entire hour I follow Adelaide, our eccentric, was almost a Fly Girl, Zumba instructor. She’s up on the center stage and we are on the floor below sweating and puffing and for that whole entire hour, I do what she does, or try to, and completely forget everything else.
Joy surges through my body.