English Studies Forum

TGFOP/Sandra

Stacey Levine

1.

            If there were a sickmakingly tall person ever, it was she.  She was all about sitting in her living room all day, all June, breathing billowishly, drinking tea from a membranously thin cup.  One dark hallway led to the alley; another hall also led out; my hair was brutishly cut; sitting opposite her, talking, seemed equivalent, in effect, to being unreal. 

For she was far too real, and I allowed this fact to soften me such that my borders grew indistinct.   Her legs were crossed; her inhalations pulled as if weary soldiers; her expirations were scented of the flowers of tea.  Outside the window: a gouge that ran deep through the grass.  From her living room’s ceiling, a theatre of lilting puppets hung; the room was high, tall, made conical as if by her machines, the grip of her tight musculature.  Continuously I searched for the key to the house bicycle, the long-necked, insectlike instrument that, surely, at my command, would fly.  Yet she knew where the key was kept, not I.   

With her magestic moods and discontent, she was horribly real; I crept to the upstairs rooms of the house, stacking paper straws—gashes of time all around me—in order to remake her and this place, the town and month; I shaped each of these into something else, hearing the cabbagey squeak of leather masks, sex and rocks, urine sipped in space, words she repeated again and again and only to my liking.   At all peripheries were school riots, pungent verdigris, and a purity that could not normally exist; an hour trailed past; I woke, pilfering a glance downstairs, turning to the scabby wall.  

Stalking around the first floor, I could not find her anywhere.  Do not worry, the house’s rooms of echoic calm seemed to say; she will be back.  She is gone momentarily due to her strong urge, each day, to launder her clothing.

2.

Like an Argonaut, she wore smooth golden boots for exploring and I found in her wily smile a suggestion the boots were correlated to, illustrative of, her intelligence.  And her fingers with their spatulate tips—different from her—were so sharply unreal that they were, in fact, horribly real.  Periodically objects from her bookshelves dropped: pamphlets in sheaves, broken woodwind instruments, outsized plastic beetles, filthy bowls, kitetails of vellum.   I again asked for the bicycle key: from one chemist to another, I tried to say, just between scientists, we, just between high-strung notetakers of this culture; but she sat there, speaking mildly of corn futures, while the tea in her cup cooled, then warmed. 

One morning she brandished a hair dryer, then dropped it into a pitcher of lemonade in order to conceal it.  She could get wild like that.  In the microwave oven hunkered a pair of sneakers.  I worried over the gelid, ongoingly boiled water on the stove; the upstairs bedroom’s short exit slide.  The afternoon was hot and tallowish.  She waited on the hard chair, her eyes scanning the surface of the mahogany tea, and at last she referred to the bicycle key, offering details, for example: “It looks like a cookie.”

3.

She was utterly tall and kernel-sharp.  Overall, though, she bore a likeness to types of music-collector men who rent darkish houses throughout the Midwest.  Drinking magnificent amounts of the copper colored tea, drawing her finger through a tray of salt, she sat, while again I tried to derealize her, for her hands, small waterfalls, now moved empathically and with a self-possession that to me was cruel and did not require me at all.  Real, she perspired tea; real, she worked hard at our nighttime endeavors; real, she stood a moment on the stairs, her arms running with cooking oil; oily, she removed the headphones, her sunglasses, tremendous province in her eyes of willingness—terribly messy—and holding the key, I made for the bike. 

It was all right to ride without a helmet.  They do this in Europe everywhere.  The pavement nearly glows when the ride is fast and smooth.  I would speed from the house with its prohibitively quiet rooms—soft, worn gloves of rooms, with the battery of her apparatuses and other belongings, the mean household gorgeousness altogether, the torn pamphlets and the dusty remains of cat food—or that was the plan.  It is well known among bicyclists that the present moment is too bright and diagonal, too floppy, too true.