Mon Nov 16, 2009
She looked out the window of the welfare office. The clouds were
low, dark, suffering against the landscape. Remains of what was once
clean, white snow--brittle, dirty, too tired to even melt--rubbed up
against sign of the motel across the street.
“Rooms for Rent for a day...or a lifetime”
So inviting.
Listening to the murmuring in the rooms around her, she heard
the same story over and over again. About to be kicked out of the
apartment, lost the job, mom told them they couldn’t move in with her
again, and the kids were hungry. Stories of corroded lives with no where
to go.
They could all move into the Cadillac Motel across the way.
She watched the denizens of the endless motel shuffle in and out of their rooms.
How could everything look so flat?
She imagined lifting out of the chair and floating across the
lot, down across the Merrimack River, the sky staying flat the whole
way.
The blue-black clouds smothered even the bricks to gray.
One day, she thought, I might have to move into that place, The
Cadillac Motel. Rent a room and get an old t.v., sit in there with the
mustard yellow stained carpet, the shag gone all misty with use, puke,
and old man sweat, turn up the volume to annoy the neighbors and shout
obscenities at anyone who passed by. Then dressed only in a muumuu and
slippers clomp down the stairs to the grocery store and pick up a
six-pack.
It seemed there was a vortex over this city--somewhere behind
that anvil of cloud-- hovering. It sucked up all good intentions. It
swallowed memory. Nothing remained.
It was time to go. She gathered up her belongings and left the
room. Walking past the room full of emergency foods, she said good bye
to the receptionist and unlocked the door to the waiting room. There
were still people waiting to be heard. An old man, a mother of two whose
children argued over the stained Fisher Price telephone and a skinny
man, who might be the father, stared out the window bored, bored and
worn. They glanced at her as she opened the door, taking in her clothes
and hair. The obvious assumption was that she wasn’t there to help them,
so they fell back in on themselves into the doldrums of waiting for a
can of macaroni and cheese and a bed for the night.
Outside the air was fresher than she expected. Perhaps it was
just the sense of having escaped, again, the doom that always hit her
when she went into the welfare office, as though a hand was waiting to
pull her into that world forever.
She made it to her truck, started it, and began to drive onto
the street when there they were. Two men. Two scraggly, dead-eyed, beat
up men screaming at each other. One had a baseball bat behind his back.
The man with the bat pulled his weapon out and raised it over his head.
She drove her truck onto the sidewalk between them and stopped.
They all just stared at each other and then the men walked away.
She backed up off the sidewalk and drove home. She felt a sudden rush of happiness.
She had made them stop--for a moment.
The truck rolled down the hills away from the city out to
more open roads as she tried to drive away the thoughts that threatened
to swallow her sense of accomplishment.
Driving by--driving by--the houses the fields the houses homes
and houses barns field more houses and hours and hours and wondering why
she was here and then more houses and then she wondered what happened
then and why she did it and when would she ever learn she could have
been killed what difference did it make she hated them anyway they
were ugly men and she hated ugly men who came at each other with bats
she was sick of the petty angry men and their drunken women who fought
each other too for no good reason more sex more luggage and she drove
and drove and her truck was low on gas but she had to keep moving and
drive away from all of this and it was getting dark
it was dark and there was snow on the ground
it all looked dingy and old and full of stains and she wanted to be
home but she had driven so far out of the way and that bat was mean and
black and when he lifted it she just drove right through them she could
have driven right into them but she, at least stopped that.
She drove home past the other homes with windows lit against the
cold gray evening, past stores with lottery ticketed windows and
cigarettes on sale, or houses co-opted into little travel agencies and
real estate concerns. She felt sorry for those former homes, wondering
if they still held comforts in the night, remembering how it was when
families argued and played inside them.
Sick of moaning voices that asked for more in darkened rooms
when she waited there looking out the window across a blank landscape
and the hotel always said it was a home
nights and weekends she rode around looking at houses and houses
looked back at her with the same blank look of primal expectations as
the voices in the room next door begged for a morsel in a can of canned
corn that had been cooked so long it was only watery corn now and she
was sick of the men who looked like they always drank and beat their
women and then the women drank and fucked around and hit the kids but
when it came time for rent money or a can of canned corn they always
managed to look pitiful enough and she blamed them for their lives
and kicked them all onto the floor of that beat-up hotel where they all meant to only come for a day.
She took a deep breath and then another. She couldn’t, for the
life of her, tell what had gotten into her lately. Thoughts about the
consequences for her actions--as the adrenaline rush faded from her
blood--the anxiety returned--crowded in.
Jeeze what the hell was she doing?
She had to get to the Doctor’s office.
There had been a sense in the air that fall that it was
going to be a rough winter. Something subtle, caught between the
brushing winds that tore away the leaves. He sniffed it as he roamed
through the grasses, looking for that last juicy cricket or
grasshopper.
He was just a small field rat looking for a warm bed for the
night. His mate scampered beside him up to a bunch of rocks and
something tall and white above them. There was a hole and he could smell
warmth, and good things to eat behind it. Eat, they must eat. He
ducked inside and his mate followed.
They crawled up on rough wood past white cords until they reached
an open space that was warm and dark, and then they scampered about
rolling and tumbling, happy and warm. A place for the winter--what a
find.
The doctor had her spread her legs after she put her feet in the
stirrups on either side of the long bench. She always felt strange
doing this, wanton somehow, as though anything could happen. With one
hand deep inside her the doctored moved about, looking at the wall,
like this was nothing His other hand manipulated around while pressing
on her belly. Then there was a look on his face like he’d found
something.
“You’ve got fibroids.” he said, after a bit more probing. “We
need to get you in for more tests. They are big and we can’t be sure
what they are.”
Always something she thought. She wasn’t going to dwell on it. It wasn’t her time, so she drove home.
Her house seemed like it had always been empty. The place had
been a shell, not lived in for years when she got it. She used to walk
by it on the way to the library, pressing her nose against the windows,
disregarding the old lady across the street who used to yank aside her
decrepit cotton curtains, never saying nothing, just glaring, with the
room dark behind her, so that it was hard to tell where the shadow of
the old lady ended and the room began. She watched that place in summer
when the crickets sexed up in the tall grasses. No one ever visited that
house except her.
Through the dirty window, where she pressed her hands to shield
from the glare, she had seen piles of rubbish and wiring sneaking out of
the unfinished walls as though they had a secret to tell. She had
wanted to enter the house and just sit with it, make it less lonely.
The house, it had called to her. She was unfinished too.
And now it was hers, this place, through fluke of luck and a
compassionate former owner who had hated the house. It worked out good
for both of them, one got rid of hated memories, one, the fulfillment of
a long held dream--a home of her own--but that night when she opened
the door she knew she was no longer alone in the house. There was a
something skittering above her head in the rafters of the ceiling.
She lay on the couch, looking up at the ceiling towards the
opening that let heat go upstairs from the heated downstairs. She had
always meant to put in a screen to hide the rawness of that wound.
Phone in one hand, up to her ear, half listening to the
practiced, compassionate voice of the nurse from the hospital, she’s
thinking about the scampering of rats above her head and how, with very
little effort, they could fall through that hole and land on her head.
The idea disturbs her thought process.
“Do you have any meddle in your body?” the nurse asks.
Meddle...did she say meddle?
“I don’t think so.”
“Have you had any operations?”
“Just the one.”
“Which one?” The slight exasperation in the nurses voice jerked her back from the duality of her thoughts.
“Gall bladder, that was removed, but I don’t think they put any metal in me then.”
“You’ve got a metal clamp there.”
She was going in for an MRI. A milestone was being past in the
history of her relationship with her body. Things inside her required
imaging--they needed to take a look.
My womb, this organ has ruled my life with its monthly rising
and purging. It has shaped my emotions, it has driven me to despair, it
has longed to be filled and pushed me forward. Enthralled by its
chemical influences all my life, by its urge for self-determination, and
now, perhaps, because it was denied fulfillment of its purpose, it has
filled itself with muscular growths--out of control.
Lay me down, lay me down on the thin railed bed, the wide circle
into which I will be slid pounds before me. Swirling patterns of light
on the wall to my left, I contemplate the machine. I am half-naked
before the machine. Lie down on the bed. Enter, I close my eyes and
breath, deep long breathes. I’m not going to panic. I’m not going to
panic. The walls close around me. I open my eyes anyway. It’s a long
narrow tube it’s close so close I can’t move. Close my eyes and listen.
What is that music in my earplugs? Hammer dulcimer. Will I hate hammer
dulcimer now that it is so intimately associated with my time in the
tube. Pounding sounds above the dulcimer pounding machine sounds. Why is
it so loud? Breathe close your eyes, breathe go far away breath--think
of nothing.
“It is like you are thirteen weeks pregnant” the doctor said
gazing at the results of her MRI. Rows and rows of black pictures were
strung along the light box, interior shots of a body. “You have several
choices to make. You can either have a total hysterectomy, which
couldn’t be vaginal because your uterus is too big, you could leave it
alone, but with the pain you are experiencing and the blood in your
urine, that’s really not an option, or you can have a uterine
embolization. Let me tell you how that works...”
“Can I look at those pictures some more?” she asked only half
listening to his words. The doctor took the mouse and pushed through a
picture, down past her muscular thighs, her veins, until it hit the hip
bone and came back out again. He shifted to one of her belly,
explaining as he went about the procedure as he made the mouse hit her
spine. Fascinated by seeing her interior--she was really made of flesh
and bone--here was the evidence. She liked the ones of muscles, they
splayed out, neatly connected as though sewn with darts and pleats.
White spine, white hip bones, this is what I stand on, this is
what makes me straight. Here I am, this is me...I’m really like that,
that’s really me?
“We are going to enter through your femoral artery and pass on
through to the veins that feed your fibroids. There we will inject the
substance that will keep the blood from feeding them.”
She suddenly felt sorry for her fibroids. After all they were
hers and here she was plotting to starve them to death. A belly full of
fibroids.
She leaned forward on the toilet. She could only squeeze the
urine out now. It ached. Not to mention the three day pain event taking a
crap. She could feel the turds moving through each curve of her
intestines. In an odd way, she had never been so in tune with her bodily
sensations and what they were telling her, while at the same time she
felt herself slip into a bi-folded sense of self, one, shocked that
anything could ever have gone wrong with her strong body, the body she
had always depended on--the other--crawlingly pleased to be part of the
experiment.
She looked at her protuberant belly. That’s why it would never go down. This is how I would look permanently pregnant.
She hated the rats. They kept her up at night, gnawing and
gnawing at the inside of her house. They filled her with panic.
Invaders leaving marks in her home. They made her feel guilty.
dirtiness and grime.
She went around the house filling all the holes where the
molding should be. She stuffed the cracks with plastic bags and steel
wool and still they scratched and rolled around up there.
She tried talking to them but they didn’t listen.
“Get out! You Rats!” she yelled one time. “Get out or I’ll KILL YOU!”
It was her last threat. She knew she had to do something before
the operation. She wouldn’t be able to go upstairs after that for a
while. Sleeping on the couch was her only choice. She kept having
visions of rats falling through the hole in the ceiling landing on her,
biting her when she was weak and vulnerable.
Finally she bought the poison. Rat poison. It was after a long night
of scratching and chewing that had left her exhausted and angry. She
bought a huge bag of it.
She looked at the blue pellets. What animal would eat that?
Blue pellets smothered in peanut butter. That was the thing. She got
out a bowl and mixed it up, put it in the conveniently provided trays
and slid it into the hole in the ceiling.
next night she could hear them chittering to each other over
their new feast. They spent a long time over their dinner. She almost
wanted to warn them. She felt such a strange combination of vindication
and horror at what she had done.
Those animals were going to die. Nothing could stop it now.
She was glad she had mixed up the rat poison with the peanut butter and slid it up there.
She had listened with horror as they had found it, jumping all round
and eating and eating all on night. She knew what would come next for
them. The rats in her house. The scuttling in the ceiling had slowed
down in the last few days before the operation. She thought they must be
dead up there.
The rats ran and played. They heard the wind outside and rolled
around again on the floor of their new home. At night they chewed into
the warmer place. What luck! Food was everywhere, more food then they
ever imagined. They thought about the young they could rear in this
protected place as they gathered more food in the warm area of their
cave.
He watched his mate dig into the brown chunky goo, eating and
eating and then dancing around. She rolled over him and nipped him until
he ate, and it was good, so he ate some more.
They ate and ate until they couldn’t eat any more.
The day of the operation came and she checked into the hospital.
They had her undress and lie on a gurney in a drafty hall of curtains,
bedpans and other patients in various degrees of pre or post-op
distress. She lay there a long time contemplating the smallness of her
life. She was a patient now, something to be worked on. The notes for
her medication were left lying on her belly. Atavan, morphine and some
other thing she didn’t recognize. The nurse came and started the I.V.
(it was always a drama finding her veins--they hid from view) and then
injected the cocktail of drugs into hose.
She waited for the release, the slow fade from the world but it
didn’t come. She didn’t feel woozy. She felt very alert. She continued
to feel alert when they wheeled her into the operating room. There were
many people in blue gowns swirling around the room. She heard the sound
of silverware clanking and looked up to see a man opening a blue cloth
holding shiny metal tools.
They are going to use those on me and I’m letting them.
There was a glass wall with a three or four people watching her and the television.
This was going to be a televised event.
They put a small tent of white cloth between her and her groin
area so she wouldn’t see but she would be awake throughout the
procedure.
A man came in and stood beside her lower groin. He held up an
electric razor and examined the blade. She suddenly realized he was
going to shave her down there. She started laughing. She thought she
said something but wasn’t sure but then everyone started to laugh so she
must have.
Having my pussy shaved in front of a bunch of guys...it’s
almost like a fantasy fulfilled, but then, reality is always stranger,
isn’t it?
A woman’s voice floated up from behind her.
“You okay, honey?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She felt the nurse stroking her hair. If felt good.
“Don ‘t you worry, I have lots of lovely drugs for you.”
She found herself straining to watch the screen of her operation
over the top of the draped sheets. She asked questions. She compared
notes.
“This screen doesn’t look like an MRI at all.” she said, proud of her medical knowledge all of sudden.
“No, this is only to show the veins so we can put in the material.”
Back in the recovery room she’s lying on the bed feeling like a
butterfly pinned to a board. There’s a catheter, hard and cold, running
up her urethra to empty her bladder. She can’t help but touch it and see
if the urine is running out. She’s not supposed to be moving--she might
bleed out. All she can do is consider how she got here and wait for her
attendants to come check on her in this darkened hospital recovery room
that was usually reserved for happy exhausted mothers welcoming their
newborn children.
Yes, like a butterfly, or some sex cult figure, her legs open to
the world of her tormentors--the ones she had allowed to push things
inside--a kind of queen of her domain. They checked on her, they prodded
her, they approved of her abasement.
It must be the drugs making me think weird thoughts.
It had been a few days since the pain in his belly had begun
with a low gnawing it had grown. Along with the pain was the thirst,
endless thirst.
He stumbled around in the dark where the food had been His mate
had rolled in agony and then she fell down into the passage way where
they had entered. He lay on his side. He found it hard to breathe. Must
find water. The pain.
She lay pinned to the bed all night. Her attendants came in every hour to check on her.
She fell in an out of nauseous drowsy sleep. Sometimes she woke and
checked the catheter. When she pulled it up she could feel the hard
plastic deep inside her body. There was always a yellow liquid in the
tube. For once she didn’t have to strain to pee.
She looked at the room. It was like a hotel room. All dolled up.
She liked the long low couch across the room in the alcove. It was like
a divan in a harem, low with pillows and a colorful spread.
In the morning two teenage boys brought her breakfast and congratulated her on her new baby. She could only smile.
A few drowsy hours later the catheter came out and she was
getting ready to go home. Her friend came to pick her up after the
nurses gave her directions on what to expect and a prescription for the
pain medication. She hobbled into the car and they drove to her house.
She would be glad to be home again lying on the couch watching television sounded just right.
She opened the door and walked through to the kitchen when a sudden loud scream came from behind her.
“A RAT! OH MY GOD IT’S A RAT” her friend screamed and slammed the kitchen door shut.
She looked down and saw it. Some how she had stepped right over
it when she entered the kitchen, it had been there, right between her
legs. It was sitting up on its hind quarters looking like it was
begging for something. She stared and stared at it, hardly able to
believe her eyes. It wasn’t the biggest rat in the world, but it seemed
huge at the moment. It seemed unsteady, like it couldn’t keep its head
up. She kept staring and staring at it. She could hear her friend in the
other room asking her what she was going to do about it. She knelt down
beside the rat. It lunged forward shakily as though it could still
attack.
“Your dying, rat.” she said.
She looked around for something to put it in and saw a pot with a
cover. She wondered if the rat would run away if she tried to cover
it--but it didn’t. This rat was almost like it was in a dream. She could
see its belly shudder and roil in pain. She put the pan over the rat
and slid a cover under it. The rat was in the pan.
She opened the kitchen door and said, “I’ve got it.” Then she
took the ratted pan outside and walked towards the woods. As she walked
she felt the last of the hospital medication beginning to wear off and
something sharp in her belly.
At the base of the woods, near the bottom of her favorite elm tree she released the rat.
It managed to stand but then it just stood there swaying, eyes glazed.
“I told you to get out of my house, rat, I told you!”
She stared at the brown fur and little eyes. The eyes looked at
her in misery. It held its paws up as though it were praying. It swayed
slightly. It couldn’t move.
This was a creature and she had killed it in a most painful way.
She knelt on the dry leaves, exposed in the last melt of winter, and cried.
