The Struggle for Happiness

black squirrels
The beautiful days are the worst.
The bitter blue of the sky. The sun glaring like an interrogation spotlight: Confess every crime; betray every accomplice. The innocent green of the trees hiding the terrible spores and pollens and industrial chemicals that make me sneeze and ache and cry.
Although for a moment, sometimes, when the temperate breezes have massaged me into a state of relaxation, the sky and the sun and the trees all possess a majestic clarity. But resplendence is always sharpened by impending loss. Witness Alexis. She had never looked more desirable than the last time I saw her, our belongings segregated into hers and not-hers in our on-the-market apartment. The apartment had also never looked more inviting, its countertops gleaming from Windex and the lack of clutter of daily living.
But this is more serious.
This is the planet.
Though most people don't see it; don't perceive that the earth is dying, gasping and thrashing.
Maybe it's the pleasantness that prevents people from comprehending. Days like these, perfect as five-for-a-dollar postcards, lull people into thinking that everything is fine. The sky is nothing other than wallpaper: embossed with clouds anduniformly blue. The sun a gently swaying chandelier; the trees coat racks of green jogging suits. Instead of sharpening perceptions, people get dull. Insensate. That's what beauty does. I should know. I wrote a book on it: Aesthetics and Argument in Women's Literature.
I also used to teach a course by the same title. And one called "Identity in Twentieth Century Manuscripts." And one named "The Sex of Text." And every fifth semester, in the democratic departmental rotation, I would be assigned "Survey" or even "Composition." Although it didn't really matter what the course was titled. I always taught the same thing, only the context varied. Literary criticism according to Derrida. Take a text and twist it inside out. I guess I was effective, or at least entertaining. I was a popular professor. My enrollments and student evaluations told me so.
Despite all the pronouncements about the death of deconstructionism, it was thriving at what we called Cool U.
And I was thriving.
Although, of course, I didn't think so.
I thought I was riddled with neuroses. In another era, I would have used words such as angst and existential. In this era, no labels were necessary. In fact, no labels were permitted. To describe was to court imperialism, annulling all the referents that went unexpressed by one's statement. I achieved an enviable level of vagueness, but I used very important and precise words in discussing this vagueness.
But my main weapon in my struggle to be happy was my secret box.
Handmade paper, ten by twelve, and a cover with flaps lovingly diapered over the exposed slits. Baby blue, like worn and well-loved jeans the moment before the knee is about to rip. And as soft. Even the nubs are soft. Inviting as any fantasy: A lover (in her torn-at-the-knee jeans) sits on a couch; my face is on her thigh, my cheek rubs against the pulls in the warp of the thin denim.
It was expensive, purchased at one of those trendy papiershops, and it wore a deep blue velvet necklace to conceal its cleavage. It was difficult to violate its virginity with the first piece of paper, but eventually I stuffed it with a motley assortment of mementoes that might convince me I was valuable, appreciated, and loved. There were thank-you notes from students, expressing their feelings that I had made a difference in their educations, if not their lives. There were a few photographs of me in the company of people who were prominent and smart and voguishly controversial. An acceptance letter from a semiprestigious journal and my first and second book contracts. An anniversary card from Alexis.
When I was feeling what I called underappreciated, I could lift the lid of my baby-blue box and have a tangible argument that my feelings were a brand of self-pity rather than a glimpse of truth. It had not been enough when I was denied tenure. Or not denied, according to the chair of the committee, but advised to withdraw my application. I don't think I consoled myself with the contents of my box even once during those dreadful two years when I felt that everyone at my second-rate university thought I was third rate. But after another--more traditional--book and another application, my baby-blue box could boast the formal university letter awarding me tenure.
Tenure: success.
It felt like failure, of course, but it was success.
It all changed with the accident.
Not that it was an accident. To call it an accident negates the intentionality involved. The gross negligence, as my attorney would say. The sheer cruelty of it.
To call it an accident makes it seem sudden. Like a lightning bolt on a crystal-clear day. Or like an automobile driving through the plate-glass front of my favorite bookstore, where I had been standing on line, waiting to purchase the newest translation of something or other. Like a rat bite.
Instead of a seeping reality.
I had expected Alexis to come up here once in a while. Tobring me some lasagna and gossip from the city. It isn't a far drive, not really, or that's what she used to say when she wanted to escape the cement summer of the city. That's what she had argued when she had wanted to buy this cottage as our vacation home. I had wanted to be on the beach, preferably in a gay resort: to be surrounded by surf and sand and women holding hands. She had snorted, as if I was being impractical. She said something about tax rates and disaster insurance costs. The numbers were on her side; they always were. I didn't even argue. I let her win.
"Isn't it lucky we got the cottage in the country?" she said after the accident. After we were splitting up and splitting everything. After the doctors said I needed to live in a more pristine climate, away from the city if possible.
"The beach would have been better," I said. I no longer wanted to let her win.
Still, I suppose I thought it would not be a far drive now; I suppose I thought she would want to check up on me. But she hasn't been here even once. She did help me move out of the apartment and arranged for some of her students to help me move in here. Move my clothes and my books and my desk and my computer. Which was nice of her. Very nice. It was amicable, really. She got the proceeds from the apartment and I got the country cottage. She got an offer from the mathematics department at a more prestigious university and I got disability payments. It all seemed so sensible, so fair, so fucking rational.
I'm sure I depress her. Hell, I depress myself. It's better not to think about her. Forget any speculations: Forget shoe; forget other foot; forget if.
It isn't as if the accident were her fault. It was just synchronicity.
I didn't used to believe in such things as the possibilities of patterns in nature. Not patterns. Not nature. I was poststructuralist, postromantic. But sitting on my deck all day watching the squirrels weave through the woods has changed my perspective about a lot of things. Including Alexis.
I'm glad she left me.
She is a selfish, shallow twit. Smart, certainly, but without depth. When I tried to talk to her about environmental degradation, she exhaled that superior-sounding sigh she had perfected in our years together. I think that was the last time she telephoned me. The irises had just been starting to unfold their brief but purple existence. I was talking to her on the portable phone, sitting on the deck, enjoying the sun.
She laughed, a sour little laugh, and told me I should think about other things.
Like what? Like the day I won't be able to slide the sliding-glass doors open and get out on the deck at all? Like this morning, leaning on the bathroom wall so I wouldn't fall and trying to pull my pants down fast enough so I didn't piss all over myself? Like trying to open the refrigerator?
I didn't say any of these things, of course.
Not because I wasn't thinking them or feeling hateful enough to say them, but because I didn't want her pity.
Didn't want to imagine her getting off the phone and turning to her new girlfriend, the artiste, with a significant tear gleaming in her left eye (her left eye always teared first) and getting comforted. Like she was the one who was sick.
It was probably that day or the next that I finally called Helping Hands, as suggested by my new physician and my social worker. I didn't want strangers in my little house, but I realized that Alexis wasn't going to be here to help. And even if she were, she had become a stranger, so what was the difference?
Linda was a student, she explained. Mountain Community and Technical College. Doing an internship at a home-service organization, Helping Hands. Working nights as a security guard, Protection Unlimited.
And sometimes she was pretty tired. Once she fell asleep on my couch, still wearing her green uniform. And I let her sleep there. While I maneuvered myself through the sliding-glass doors onto the deck and sat in the sun, looking at the weeds grow around the tomato plants. On a good morning, I could get myself into the garden. It was hell bending over withoutfainting, so I would lie down on one of the boards between the rows of plants and pull up those dreadful things Linda told me were called purslane, dropping them into a bucket. Then I'd slide forward and weed some more. It wasn't relaxing, but it kept me from thinking about next summer's garden and how I would ever manage to plant anything.
An hour of weeding usually sent me to bed for the rest of the day. Once, I fell into bed before I could manage to take a shower. I woke up smelling like tomato plants, the summer sun slanting deep in the hollows of the mountains.
On a really good morning, I can drive. I get myself over to the Nissan pickup, then scramble in the door. I catch my breath and always count to ten before I turn the key. Backing up is a real drain on my energy, but once I'm on the road, usually everything is fine. It's the destination that is the biggest problem. How to slide out of the truck in the grocery store parking lot while looking natural? I'm terrified that someone is going to come over and ask me if I need help, but no one ever does. I always try to park close to a grocery cart, so I can use that for support. And I always bring my three-pronged cane, hooked on the metal cart like an explanation to all those unasked questions.
And yes, it usually sends me to bed for the rest of the day. I am careful never to buy anything that needs to be cooked that night. I plan ahead and buy something from the take-out deli in the back of the store.
And yes, I always wonder whether I will be back as I look at the produce section for what might be the final time. The apples gleam green and red and yellow, absolutely resplendent.
I have taken to lying to Linda. About going to the grocery store, because she will yell at me if she figures out I've made the ten-minute drive to the Grand Union. But about other things too. Things that don't matter. Not to her. Not to me. Telling her that Alexis just telephoned, for example. Or that my parents are dead. Or that a black squirrel ate a nut right from my hand.
It helps me pass the time.
It helps me convince myself that I am still interesting, still fascinating. That I still have a life worth living.
It helps me to ignore the carcasses of my frost-crucified tomato plants, their withered limbs hanging on the galvanized steel of their cages, begging me for a decent burial in the compost pile.
It helps me to ignore the songs of the birds, entreating me to fill the squirrelproof feeder with sunflower seeds, now on sale in those inconsiderate five-pound bags at the Grand Union.
The cold weather is descending rapidly. It seems unnatural. I guess because I had never stayed here except in June or July; for me it was a place of only summer. Yes, there had been that one Thanksgiving--the year I was waiting for the decision in my first tenure application--Alexis and I had driven up here. Snubbing the Grand Union, we had brought all of our groceries from the city: a kosher roasting chicken, rosemary and lemons, oysters and bread for stuffing, and some exotic gravies. We had made a delicious dinner, pretending in some subtle way, I suppose, that we were in the French countryside. Provence, perhaps. Though without the sun. It was so gray that the security lights stayed on all day, their motion detectors activated by the leaves whirling in the wind.
We drank a woody red wine and read our books. I recall I was reading the newest translation of Helene Cixous. I don't remember what Alexis was reading, though it was probably some book of equations. I do remember that I looked up from my pages and right there at the sliding-glass door had been a pair of eyes looking back at me.
"A mink!" I stage-whispered to Alexis.
She put down her book. "I don't think so," she said. "It might be a rat. But I think it's just a squirrel."
It didn't look like the squirrels in the city, I thought, at least the ones I saw in the little triangle of dirt called a park that huddled near our apartment building. Those animals were smaller and had vague tails. They also ran around in circles, which Alexis said reminded her of me. I thought she was teasing, but she began to say it every time we passed them. She said it so much I started to hate those damn squirrels.
"Squirrels are gray," I reminded Alexis, not wanting thisbeautiful, sleek creature to be the same as those city animals she used as an excuse to mock me.
"Maybe it's a mutant," she answered. By now the animal had scampered off the deck, past the garden, and back into the woods.
"Or a different brand?"
"Brand?" she laughed. "You mean breed, don't you, baby?"
"It's the wine." I giggled.
"Have some more." She rose to fill my glass.
"It could be a mink," I said.
"It wasn't." She shook her head. "Though I'm sure you want to think it was." She kissed me as she handed the wineglass back to me.
I vowed to do some research when we got back to the university.
"I didn't know you liked little soft and furry animals," she teased, but her voice was gentle. She reached for the bottoms of the aubergine silk pajamas I was wearing--an anniversary present from her--and untied the belt. My pajama bottoms threatened to puddle at my ankles.
She did that for the rest of the weekend. She would laugh and I would laugh and I thought that laughter would echo through the cottage and through our lives forever.
Or at least I didn't think it would stop so soon.
After I was advised to withdraw my tenure application, things got a little difficult.
But it was worse after I was granted tenure.
Throughout everything, I was popular as a professor; I still had a few students who wrote me thank-you notes; still had overenrolled classes and overflowing office hours. Though once I was tenured my students had to come to see me in another building. In the basement of another building. Nothing personal. A row of faculty offices was being made into an administrative suite. My office, of course, was in that row.
"Re: Restructuring," the memo from the chair of the department read.
I tried not to believe I was being punished for getting tenure.
My new office, windowless and small, was in the Sciences building, cuddled between the Zoology Lab and the Small Mammal Research Development Office. It was always empty in the corridor, in the early morning when I came to work, and even in the middle of the afternoon. In the evenings and on weekends, it was positively ghostly. It was almost as if I had the whole floor to myself.
I took me a while to arrange my books on the shelves. I put my blue box in a place I thought it would be safe and bought a fluorescently purple Indian bedspread to cover the metallic desk. I started toying with doing something creative, now that I finally had tenure. I was thinking of inverting narrative by rewriting that classic narrative of inversion, The Well of Loneliness . But I couldn't get past rereading the first three pages about the birth of the character I would call Stevie without succumbing to a desperate headache.
I thought it was The Well. Such an intimidating choice. Who the hell was I to try to render it as a poststructuralist text? But I had dissected my plan into pieces: I would set it in the United States, make its discourse of identity much more contemporary, give the beloved Mary a voice, and have it have a happy (if indeterminate) ending. My ideas sounded plausible inside my own head, but I could not get them to float on the computer screen no matter how long I tried to focus on the letters that stayed still only if I squinted.
I started getting stomach aches. I blamed caffeine. Now that I did not have access to the coffeepot in the English department mail room, I was drinking more coffee, not less. I had bought a small coffee maker for my office and made myself a cup as a substitute for the conversation I could have gotten in the mail room. And then another cup.
If I was the kind of person given to self-pity, I would have complained of being lonely.
One night I fainted. Although for a while I convinced myself I had fallen asleep. Wiped the vomit from between the plastic squares of my keyboard with tissues folded strategically. Told Alexis I had been working hard. Making progress on mynew book. I can't recall whether she seemed to believe me or not to care.
It was just malaise, I told myself.
I was overworked and underappreciated and stressed out.
Friends prescribed a sabbatical. But the university had suspended them because of the budget situation. I tried not to dwell on the fact that if I had gotten tenure when I originally applied ... I tried not to think of the money being spent on the suite of administrative offices. I tried not to be bitter.
My physician wanted to prescribe Prozac or Paxil. Take your pick, he said.
I panicked.
Perhaps my powers of description had failed me. Perhaps I was being too obtuse, too indirect, too pedagogical with the doctor. I tried again. I told him that I felt fine on the rare weekends I did not go into my office. I told him that even after those weekends, by Thursday I was sick again and weak. I told him I had fevers. I told him again about the vomiting, the fainting, the vertigo.
"Are you depressed?" he asked me.
I didn't cry.
He made the decision for me. Paxil, he said, try Paxil.
My lawyer later told me that I could not sue him because I never filled the prescription.
Only one student came to see me all the times I was in the hospital. She brought directed independent study forms for me to sign. Her project description had something to do with ecolesbianism and Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring. Now I wish I had paid more attention: to the student's name and to her theory. Then I could only shake my head. I could not even hold the pen to sign my name to the form.
Or maybe the student was a dream.
I am telling Linda about the student's project. Telling her the student had completed the project and that it was brilliant. "It should be published by now," I say. I am suitably proud, although I knowingly but modestly try to imply that the student could never have done it without me.
Linda only says, "I'm in the LPN program."
"This is relevant," I argue.
On a good day, I argue with Linda.
This can be difficult because she does not argue back. I suppose they teach the interns at Helping Hands techniques to avoid conflict. I assume they instruct them not to engage in hostility. We are to be helped, not aggravated. There is no one to whom I could explain that a good argument--an abstract argument about aesthetics, for example--would help me more than having my damn dishes washed.
But sometimes I can get Linda a little riled. If I'm honest, I'll admit it's probably more her mood than any technique of mine. But I have to take credit for even the smallest successes these days.
Like the day I complained to her about the development down the road. I had been driving to the Grand Union, but hadn't felt confident enough to make the turn into the parking lot because my clutch leg was going a bit numb, so I'd just kept driving, then turned up the road thinking I could circle back. That's when I saw it. The hill stripped of trees and dotted with yellow machines. Men in heavy boots dancing around with orange streamers, marking this or that for destruction and construction.
It made me so dizzy with anger that I drove back home without getting any groceries.
I asked Linda about it, trying for a casual tone.
"It's going to be a mall," she explained.
"A mall? A mall? Why do we need another mall? There's one not far from here." I suppressed a memory of an argument with Alexis one summer, at the ice cream store in the climate-controlled cavern called Mountain Mall.
"This one will be bigger. And it's a lot closer."
"What, people can't drive twenty miles to go shopping?" I said snidely, as if I were not a person who could barely manage to drive two miles.
Linda shrugged. "It's been controversial. Haven't you been reading the newspaper?"
"It really makes me angry." Part of my vehemence came from avoiding her question, not wanting to admit that I find the local paper pretty weak. And not wanting to admit that I'm worried that the ink from the paper will have some hidden chemical that will make me sneeze and redden and gasp for oxygen.
"Doesn't tearing up the pristine land to erect some ugly mall make you sick?"
Linda's nostrils flared slightly. "First of all, it used to be a landfill."
"Great! Shopping on top of toxic waste."
"You're just angry because you're sick. Not really because of the mall," Linda said, finally departing from her training as a Helping Hands volunteer.
"What do you think made me sick?" I challenged.
"Not the mall," she answered matter-of-factly. "You were sick before you moved here."
"Maybe not this particular mall, but malls in general. The mall-ness of life."
Linda sighed, her irritation subsiding. "Besides," she added, "it will mean a lot more jobs for people in the community."
I tried to engage her again. "Sure, minimum-wage jobs."
Linda looked at me accusingly. I knew what she was thinking. That I was some city snob come up here for the wilderness, such as it was. That I could afford to preserve the land, what with my disability payments and my summer cottage insulated into a yearlong house. That I was some former professor, head stuck in the clouds, without an inkling of what it took to survive.
"I make more than minimum wage," Linda finally said. It was then I learned that Protection Unlimited had assigned Linda to the construction site. Guarding the steel beams from theft. Guarding the earth movers from being moved. Guarding the enemy.
On a bad day, I can hear the clanging of the machines in the distance. The sound of metal on metal. The sound of the ground groaning in desperation. I can hear the earth screaming inside my own head.
On a good day turned into a bad day, I try to drive to the Grand Union, only to be halted by some huge truck flagged with fluorescent OVERSIZE LOAD banners and surrounded by police cars with flashing lights as if it were a parade instead of a waste of my tax dollars and more destruction.
On a good day, I sit on my deck and read books I have ordered from the Mountain Library system or from on-line bookstores. One book leads me to another. I liked Rachel Carson's letters and I admit I find it reassuring to think of her as a dyke since so much of the other environmental stuff seems to have been written by staunch men with beards and axes. Like all the ecological defense stuff. I can't believe that some of these books aren't illegal. They have instructions on how to spike trees to deter timber sales. And how to forestall roads to impede development of the wilderness. And how to cut fences and disenable snares to save animals. I reread the sections on destroying heavy machinery.
Water and diesel don't mix.
Sand in the oil tank is very effective.
An articulated loader pivots in the center.
Sugar and syrup are overrated.
Introduce abrasives into the lubrication system.
In the local paper, to which I am a new subscriber, I read about a gas blast at the mall construction site. A drilling contractor punctured a gas main, creating a "wall of fire" that damaged eleven vehicles.
There is nothing in the ecology books about creating a gas blast.
"The ninth accident at the job site since June," the newspaper reports.
I try to keep the newspaper as far away from me as possible, but have to raise it closer to my face to read the inset that lists the other accidents: a backhoe ruptures a sewer line; a tractor-trailer spills two hundred gallons of diesel fuel, which flow into storm drains; four water mains break.
There is nothing about spilling fuel or breaking water and sewer lines.
Perhaps there is a different book about ecological activism that I haven't seen.
The afternoon sun slants on the wood slats; the black squirrels, wearing their luxurious mink coats, run around in circles burying this or that.
"You shouldn't be out here in this chill," Linda says when she arrives. She brings a chenille spread out to the chair, arranging it so that the hole in the fine fabric is concealed, and asks me if I want a cup of tea. I agree, closing my eyes against the fact that she is anything other than my considerate lover, home from a hard day.
"How was school?" I ask her, hoping to prolong my fantasy.
"Fine." The answer of a petulant child to a prying adult.
"That good, eh?" I return to my book.
"It's actually pretty bad," Linda admits when she brings me my cup of tea. Lemon Zinger, no sugar and the tea bag removed, just the way I like it. I blow on the tea, making a careful ripple across the surface, waiting for Linda to talk.
When she finally does, she is close to crying. I notice that both of her eyes start to tear at exactly the same time, though not a drop of moisture can escape her eyelids the way she wipes them with the back of her hand. I want to take her in my arms and tell her that everything will be fine, that she has nothing to cry about, but instead I find myself all professorial. Not all that strange, since she is having a student problem. Grades.
"It's stupid," she says. "Or I guess I am."
"No one is stupid," I say, although I've never really believed this. Or never believed that everyone is good at academics, which doesn't mean anything about intelligence. I have always tried to believe this.
"It can't be all that bad." I smile at her.
Because I'm thinking, even if she can't read French, even if she can't read English, at least she can reach the damn saucepan to boil some water to make some tea. So it's hard for me to feel sorry for her. Hard for me not to think I should have the damn stainless-steel whistling kettle that Alexis now has. Idon't remember Alexis liking tea. Maybe her new girlfriend does.
I don't remember Linda bringing me the tea. Maybe we sipped together.
I don't remember Linda leaving. But she isn't here now.
I think I remember the stepladder. Or a stool. I'm not sure what I was using, what I was looking for--the saucepan for more tea? the blue box I have not been able to find since I moved? the funnel I know I have and now might need? I only know that I've fallen; only know that I can't move my legs, can't feel them. I only know that now it's dark, but that happens when it's barely five o'clock; I only think that if Linda is gone, she won't be back until tomorrow. But, I hope, I'll be off the kitchen floor by then. I will not be lying on the tiles, my face on the long blue rug that runs the length of the sliding-glass doors. I will be sitting propped up in my chair as if nothing whatsoever has happened.
I have been dreading this. But it isn't as bad as I thought it would be. I'm not panicked, for example. That's what I've always been afraid of, panicking. But I'm relatively calm. There's nothing to do except wait. Wait until Linda comes or my strength comes--whichever comes first. I could think that neither of those things will happen. I could think that Linda will never come back or that my strength will never return, but I don't think those things. Not yet, anyway. I have postponed thinking about them until another nightfall. If the night passes and then a day passes, then I will allow myself such thoughts.
Now, I try to entertain myself with my mind. When I was in college, they were always soliciting student volunteers for sensory deprivation experiments. They would put a student in a dark tank of water, totally suspended in a soundless world, to see how long the student could tolerate an environment without external stimulation. One could push a panic button or something, which many students did after a few minutes, believing they had been in the tank for hours and hours. "It's like the end of the world," one student proclaimed.
The common knowledge around campus was that themathematics students could stay in the tank the longest. The secret seemed to be focusing on things that didn't require perceptions. Apparently, the math whizzes recited equations to themselves or something. Liberal arts students were the worst. As an English major, I never volunteered. The only thing I had memorized were some song lyrics, which I didn't think would amuse me very long. My memory has always been bad.
It isn't much better now. As a deconstructionist, I need a text to deconstruct. Who could recall all of The Well of Loneliness? Who can even recall the first line? Not me. The only text I have handy is my own life.
This could be my In Search of Lost Time, which I still think of as Remembrance of Things Past, thanks to the Moncrieff translation. My A la recherche du temps perdu. Yes, much better in French. Like everything. Even cookie sounds better in French: madeleine.
I should never have chosen English.
English is dangerous.
Sure, it seemed like a safe occupation. A literature professor, ensconced in an ivory tower; what could be less hazardous than that? What could happen to me, a paper cut? A little carpal tunnel syndrome? More likely I could be crushed by my own ego. Who would think I would become an environmental-illness casualty? Who would think the university would put the office of the author of Aesthetics and Argument in Women's Literature next to the Zoology Lab? Who would know that the main function of the lab was not the study of cute and furry creatures but the destruction of them? Who could have guessed that I was being poisoned, slowly and then not so slowly, by the chemicals wafting through the walls, into my office and into my lungs, and into my blood? My cup of coffee was toxic. And not from the caffeine.
"Nerve damage. Compromised immune system. Abnormal tissue." That's what the lawyer said. My lawyer. The university's lawyers said no such things. During the deposition, the university's lawyer kept asking me about diagnosis and theresults of the tests on my blood and my equilibrium. I kept trying to answer with how I felt ("dizzy," I said; "itchy from rashes," I said; "like I can't breathe," I said), but the lawyer told me to state what I knew about the EEG, or the EKG, or the CT, or the MRI.
"Isn't that hearsay?" I asked, trying for some legal phraseology.
"I ask the questions," he said, "and you answer them."
"I don't know the answers."
"You can just say you don't know," my lawyer instructed me.
"That's hard," I said, "I'm an English professor. I'm supposed to know the answers."
No one laughed.
"Ask me something about feminine écriture," I said.
Everything sounds better in French.
The stenographer asked me how écriture was spelled.
"I know the answer to that." I laughed.
Alone.
Paralyzed on the floor, I could let the scent of the Lysol waft me into my childhood as sturdily as the lemon tea and madeleine carried Marcel Proust. Though Proust wasn't made sick by sniffing; I should switch to something less toxic for cleaning. And my memory is no match for his. I scurry through my mind, upturning the leaves that litter my forest floor, and do not find any of the treasures I so carefully buried. When my mother and stepfather disowned me when I was twenty-one, I hid their existence, even from myself.
And in my foraging, even if I do find some meaty nut that I can crack and consume, I have no idea whether it is mine or someone else's. I have read and reread other women's lives; I have criticized the critical commentary; I have deconstructed author and character. I am not sure I never lived in a room with yellow wallpaper, or in a house by the gray sea watching the lighthouse blink, or in Africa. Was it my lover who left me when I became sick or was that a character in a lesbian romance?
It must have been a character. Real people are not that cruel.
My lawyer told me I did great at the deposition. I thought she must be crazy. I couldn't answer anything they asked me about my condition. And then there was the whole embarrassment before we even got into the conference room.
There were stairs.
A small set, not even a flight, four or five steps at most, separating the large wading pool of the reception area from the busy stream of lawyers who flowed from the tributaries of their offices and eddied in the conference rooms. Four stairs; five at most. Their purpose aesthetic rather than architectural. Or perhaps symbolic. But whatever their reason, they were a hurdle for the wheelchair.
I hadn't wanted to use the wheelchair.
I thought I could walk, leaning on my three-prong cane.
But the day before, I had fallen down the front steps at one of my physician's offices. Why a damn doctor would have an office with steps was a mystery to me. And now I couldn't walk.
My lawyer was raising a fuss.
The university's lawyers were trying to be nonchalant.
Then one of them, not the one who would ask questions during the deposition, but another one, older and bigger, more like a regular guy instead of a lawyer, his hair not as styled, his hands not as smooth, took charge. Enlisting the other lawyers to pick up the wheelchair and its occupant--me--and lift us over this "small problem."
They almost dropped me. A wheelchair is heavier than it looks.
One lawyer clutched his spine, moaning. The older lawyer scolded, "I told you to lift with your knees, not your back."
After the deposition, there was a piece of plywood on the stairs, and I rolled down, half afraid that the wood wouldn't hold the weight, but it did.
"You were really great," my lawyer said.
I figured she meant because I didn't die from humiliation.
Only when I am awakened by the glare of my house's securitylights do I realize I must have fallen asleep. That is one thing I always wondered but never asked: why the students in those sensory deprivation experiments simply did not fall asleep.
I would have fallen asleep during some of the medical tests, I convinced myself, if only I hadn't been bothered so often. Especially the MRI. The technicians strap you on a narrow bed and then you slide into a capsule, all snuggly and safe and claustrophobic. I told myself this was my chance at sensory deprivation. But the moment the senses relaxed into emptiness, the clanging started. Followed by a symphony of jackhammers. Then the technician's voice. Breathe this way or that. Hold the breath. Exhale and hold the breath some more. Then more jackhammers. Then voices. Then the taste in the mouth of the metallic fluid from the IV Then clanging. And on and on for fifty minutes.
Even if I had known some equations, I wouldn't have been able to recite them.
Even if I had been able to sleep, I would have been awakened.
Maybe I am still sleeping now and the huge ghostly rat at the sliding-glass door is a dream. It must be a dream; a real rat, even out here in the country, would not be so large. Or so furry. And a real rat would avoid the security lights shining on the deck. It wouldn't be snuffling with its pink nose and blinking its pink eyes, feeling the wooden deck with its pink fingers.
This albino rodent is looking right at me, though it doesn't seem to see me. Our faces are maybe six inches apart. Luckily the sliding-glass door is thick. And between us.
It is walk-rolling as slow as I do when I'm very tired, though at least I don't have dirty white fur everywhere. Except for the tail. Which looks naked and shaved and as vulnerable as a sex organ. It's waddling around the deck, sniffing, I suppose, for food, prowling casually, its fingers rubbing at a spot on the wood. Finally, it waddles off the deck, into the yard, out past the halo of the security lights.
If I were in the sensory deprivation tank, I would push the button now. Just so I could find out the time. How long have I been immobile here on the kitchen floor. Maybe all those Englishgraduate students were not panicked, just curious. Not apathetic like those mathematics students.
My legs are not cooperating, but I think they feel a little less numb. I try to use my arms to push myself back from the sliding-glass door. If I could turn myself around, maybe I could use my arms to swim myself back to my bedroom.
I know I've really been asleep this time when I wake up again to a sea of beige light. Know I've really been dreaming. Alexis. So fucking unfair. She never appeared in my dreams when I lived with her. But now, she's always popping up. Always kissing my breasts or caressing my thighs.
"In your dreams," she used to say in that sarcastic tone she was always perfecting.
There are two, then three black squirrels on the deck. Smaller than last night's rodent and dark as eggplant. It seems to me as if the dark animals would come out at night and the pale ones would prefer the daylight, but I guess it's the opposite. One has a nut in its mouth. The animal sits on its hind legs, baring its dark stomach, its tail like a pirate flag whipping in the morning breeze. Another squirrel approaches, and the first one scampers away, but not far, until it looks over its squirrel shoulder at its companion. Then the third one runs between the two of them, until there is a circle of black squirrels, chasing one another and stopping to wait for one another and it's hard not to think they are having a damn fine time.
The birds provide the tunes for this sexual squirrel production, here on the dance floor of the deck just past dawn.
The machines from the mall construction clang in the distance.
If I ever manage to get off this damn floor, I am going to remember to feed the squirrels and not just the birds.
If I ever stand up again, I am going to stop the mall. Blow the fucker to bits.
Not if. When. When.
Like a prisoner plotting and planning what I will do when my sentence is over. There must be parole. This cannot be a life sentence without that possibility.
"Degenerative condition," the lawyer said. My lawyer.
When I get up off this floor. When. When. I am going to seduce Linda. Or let her seduce me. It's possible. There's some feeling that could turn into action; some confidences exchanged; some mug of tea passed from hand to hand, the fingertips touching a mere moment longer than strictly necessary.
The black squirrels come back to cavort on the deck for a minute, as if to celebrate this idea.
"In your dreams," Alexis would say.
It's like a dream, really. Me pulling myself across the floor. Managing for a while on my knees, my legs almost unnumbed. Crawling the final few feet to the bedroom. Flopping myself into bed. The best part is managing to get my pants off.
It seems as if I've just fallen asleep, my quilt more comforting than any lover, but it's dark again when I hear Linda. She's brought some food, Chinese chicken, I think, but what I really want is for her to help me to the damn bathroom.
I don't tell her I spent the night on the kitchen floor.
I do tell her about the huge furry albino rodent.
"Possum." She laughs.
She's making some tea. I waddle to the couch, my legs feeling almost normal. Normal for me, anyway.
I am wishing I had on those silk aubergine pajamas. But I'm not sure I even know where they are now. Probably with the missing box. Wrapped around the box or inside the box with the letter granting me tenure and an anniversary card from Alexis.
I am looking at Linda's jeans. Faded blue. Baby blue, the moment before the knee is about to rip, revealing clouds of white string.
I am imagining my face on the thigh of that soft, soft fabric, my cheek rubbing against the pulls in the warp of the thin denim.
I am sipping tea.
Linda is crying, serious crying now. Not just gleaming eyes, but wet cheeks and sobs.
It takes me a while to notice this, but when I finally do, at least I put down my tea and stop thinking about her jeans and act like a concerned human being.
It's her paper for her internship: "The Psychology of Disability."
Without an acceptable paper she won't get passing grades for her course, without which she won't get her LPN degree, without which she'll never get a permanent--and paid--position at Helping Hands and she'll be working nights at Protection Unlimited as a security guard for the rest of her life and maybe not even that because the guards are thinking about honoring the picket line of the carpenters' union at the mall construction site.
I am telling her I'll help her.
"Do you have a draft?"
"Just some notes in the car."
"Go get it."
"Right now?"
"I'm not going anywhere." I smile.
I need her departure to digest my new realization. I've lived pretty much my whole life in semesters, the seasons of academia, but now that I don't, I guess I thought such rhythms had ceased to exist. I thought Linda was forever, or at least as forever as anything ever is. I knew that I was her subject, her internship, that she brought me tea for college credit. But I somehow forgot that the arrangement was limited to a semester.
Next semester there would be someone else.
A stranger.
If I'm lucky.
Unless Linda could get a permanent position at Helping Hands and I could be part of her permanent assignment.
It's atrocious. There's no other word that does it justice. She had obviously never absorbed the concept of the topic sentence. Or what came after: the development of an idea. Never mind its deconstruction; it had to be constructed first. This was basic stuff.
I try to figure out a tactic that does not involve me rewritingher paper. But first I blurt out my astonishment that she had gotten out of high school, never mind this far at the community college.
"There weren't many papers. And my lover--my former lover--used to help me." Linda achieves a slight lilt in her voice. "She works for the newspaper now," she adds, as if this explains something.
"Type your notes up on my computer," I tell her, hoping a nice font will make everything look better.
"Sources?" I ask her, looking at her draft.
"It's supposed to be reflective," she says.
I sigh.
"Write more," I say. "Don't stop until you have twenty pages."
"It only has to be fifteen," she complains.
"You'll need twenty," I say.
Obviously the woman has never heard of editing.
We are sitting on the couch, days later, talking about her finished and submitted paper, though I'm thinking again that I might try to find my blue box and those aubergine silk pajamas, when she kisses me. It isn't a chaste kiss. There is some teasing tongue to it.
"Sorry," she says.
"I'm not." I smile.
She guides me to bed like she has done a hundred and one times before, only this time she joins me.
My skin feels scabbed wherever her hand lands; her gentlest touch scrapes against me. It doesn't hurt me, not really, but I imagine how I feel to her: ugly.
"I don't want pity," I say.
"How about a back rub?" she asks.
I demur and she withdraws.
This is the end, I think, cursing myself, but also, I admit, relieved.
But it isn't the end. She is still next to me; we are lying face-to-face on the bed, so close I could count her eyelashes, which I start to do. I keep losing count and my fingers reach up tosmooth her cheek, close under her eye socket. Her skin is soft there, though marked with creases and a small bruise where a vein has contorted. It's beautiful, but I don't say that to her.
Instead, my fingers follow the bone until it curves under the fur of her eyebrow, then my fingers slide across to her temple. I make circles there for a while with my index finger, but my pinkie keeps straying into her hair, bringing the other fingers along for the tangle. My thumb becomes enamored of her skull; it seems uniquely solid.
I'm floating. Floating in the sensory deprivation tank of my bed, where it seems she and I have been forever. Maybe only a few seconds have passed; maybe several hours.
I have my mouth on her neck now. I want to suck the hard muscle there. She tastes of sweat, but not unpleasantly.
She reaches for my shoulder; I stiffen involuntarily. She recants.
I have my ear on her chest. I can hear her heart, more of a whoosh than a beat, I think. I try to decipher its messages, listening for a change as my hand brushes against her breast, finding the nipple and almost scratching it. The whoosh is still soft. I rearrange myself so that I can reach her thighs, keeping my ear to the ground of her chest, hoping for a significant rumble. Her heartbeat stays constant as I pull my hand along the bed between her thighs, finding the small stand of her hair, like aspen, I think, though I'm not exactly sure what aspen feels like. Perhaps pines, I revise, pines with curly needles.
I want to linger, but then she exhales suddenly, the hot wind of her breath at the top of my head, and then I'm deep in what I had been imagining as her streams and canyons, only I'm not so certain of my images now, only that I want her. And that I'm as open and unfenced as an undiscovered prairie and she is everywhere all at once.
She doesn't ask me what I like and afterward she doesn't ask me what I had liked or whether I had liked any of it. That isn't the only difference from Alexis, so sure of herself except when something couldn't be calculated, but it's the one thatseems most explicit, as I drift off to sleep, feeling Linda's heart whoosh against my back.
Linda starts coming over in the evenings, before she has to leave for the eleven-to-seven shift at Protection Unlimited, guarding the construction site.
On a good evening, we have sex.
On a bad evening, I drink tea and ignore the dizziness that pulses behind my eyes and listen to her tell stories. Her old girlfriend. Her childhood. Her camping trip to Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Even the bad evenings are good.
She starts coming over in the mornings too, after her shift at Protection Unlimited and before her classes at Mountain Community and Technical College.
On a good morning, I make her breakfast and watch her nap.
On a bad morning, she makes breakfast and we nap together.
One morning, she pulls me close to her and I put my mouth to her neck to kiss my favorite muscled spot there and inhale the smells of her scalp. As I move away, I get dizzy and feel my knees tremble. Then my eyes blur and I start coughing. The next thing I remember, I'm in bed.
"I'll be back," she says.
I wonder if she will be. I wonder if she has gone to join Alexis.
But she comes back, showered and changed. I feel better, although not good enough to eat the toast she brought me.
"Sorry," I apologize. "I don't know what happened." I hate apologizing for not feeling well, but it seems I always apologize anyway.
"It was probably me. The chemicals," she says.
"Chemicals?"
"Yeah. They've been spraying at the construction site."
"Spraying what?"
"Fumigating. You know, the place used to be a landfill."
"So what's left to kill?"
"Rodents, mostly."
I turn away from her, trying not to think of the black squirrels, dead over there at the site of the future mall.
Dead as rats.
Dead as we all would be. Dead as the earth would be. It isn't bad enough they had to tear up the earth, they have to poison everything just to make certain they achieved their ugly purpose.
She gets a B-plus on her paper.
The semester is over.
Neither one of us mentions it.
On a good or a bad evening, after she leaves, I practice trying to see in the dark, like some nocturnal animal, like a possum. Night vision is important. Defending the earth against the machines is best done in the deep of the dark.
I find socks that fit over my shoes: obscures footprints.
I have gloves and a ski mask: both black.
I locate a pot holder that I can tie to the bottom of my three-prong cane: my own idea. The ecodefense books I read in the long afternoons do not seem to anticipate my kind of activist.
There are more newspaper articles about the mall. One written by Linda's former girlfriend, which is pretty weak on topic sentences and paragraphing skills, but seems to imply that the gas explosion might not have been an accident. Perhaps I have co-conspirators somewhere.
There's a strike. The Carpenters Local voted. Wages and working conditions. Some security guards are crossing the line.
"Scabs," I say.
"Double-time," Linda says.
"Selling out," I say.
"Have to eat," Linda says.
"Well, I'm glad you're not doing it." I smile, grateful that Protection Unlimited has transferred Linda to another job, at Mountain Community and Technical College, as a matter of fact. I suggest she spend most of her time guarding the books in the library, but she says that's not possible because she hasto make rounds or something, and besides, she's done with her work for her courses.
"You could read Proust." I try to make my recommendation lighthearted but serious.
"Is he one of those save-the-trees people you're always reading?"
"No," I answer. "You might like him."
"I'll try to look him up," she half promises.
We are sliding into other half promises and half plans. We're shaping schedules into habits, into a future. We both hope it will snow on Christmas Eve and think this coincidence so amazing we promise we will spend the night together, here in the cottage that I'm coming to think of as our house. Our house.
Our.
For the holidays, I order Linda a few things. Silk aubergine pajamas from an expensive catalog. And a very abridged, one-volume edition of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. And a not-so-abridged edition of The Well of Loneliness. I hint that I want a tea kettle.
I am going to cook a Christmas Eve feast. I talked to the manager at Grand Union and ordered a kosher roasting chicken. I'll stuff it with rosemary and lemons; I'll use oysters and bread for dressing; I'll improvise some exotic gravies. It will be better than any Christmas Eve in the French countryside.
We have a small argument; very small. I'm not sure what it's about. It is not about me being too circular and squirrellike, or about her being too sarcastic. I think it has something to do with the tea kettle and the chicken and the oysters.
It ends when Linda yells at me that she doesn't want me for my money.
It hadn't occurred to me that she did, at least until she tells me she doesn't.
And then she says, "Something came up."
She has to go to her parents for Christmas Eve.
I figure this is the end of the semester.
She tells me she could come over on Christmas, later in the day.
I try to act casual.
I don't want the pity of Christmas Day when she had promised Christmas Eve, so I tell her I now have my own plans for Christmas. Not with my own parents, the ones who sent me the usual holiday card, the ones she thinks are dead.
No, I tell her Alexis is coming.
On Christmas Eve.
To spend the night.
She turns away from my lie; I can't see if her eyes glisten with the wetness of regret.
It's true I have plans.
I'm going to the mall on Christmas Eve. Not for last-minute shopping, for at this mall there is nothing to buy. And if I have my way, there never will be.
Sabotage. A French word.
On Christmas Eve, it is not snowing.
I put my funnel and my milk carton of sifted sand in my backpack. I've memorized the locations of oil fillers on backhoes and bulldozers and articulated loaders.
Maybe it isn't any colder than usual, but it feels colder to me. My gloves are on my hands and my socks are over my boots. The ski mask makes me feel like a criminal.
I am stiff.
Dizzy.
I am too ill to go.
No. No. I'm feeling better than I have in months.
I'm strong. I am.
It's just a matter of willpower.
No one ever said I lacked willpower.
Not even Alexis.
But it does seem as if I'm smaller than usual. Scrambling into my truck, I look up through the open door and see a slit of moon I could swear is farther away than it was last week. The roads are pretty empty, it's past dark and past dinner, and most everyone who was going somewhere is already there.
I try to imagine Linda at her parents' house, which is difficult, since I don't know much about their house, even where it is, or what her parents are like. I suppose I should have asked, but I also suppose she should have told me.
Past the Grand Union, closed and dark, I turn my little truck up the hill and then into a small lot, being careful to stay on the paved part. Don't want to leave tire tracks in the dirt. I sidle out of my truck, keeping my cane close, hoping not to have to use it. I slide along in my sock-covered boots, pretending to myself that this is a good way to obscure my footprints rather than necessary to forestall the cane.
The wind batters me. There is little protection out here. There are no trees, none. Once there were so many trees in this part of the world that squirrels could travel for miles going limb to limb and never touch the ground. At least according to the books.
Sand should be sifted for the best abrasive effect on the engines.
At least according to the books.
The big machines, sleeping on Christmas Eve, are farther away than they seemed; farther away than the moon. Or I am weak, getting weaker. The backpack, with its funnel and the milk carton of sifted sand, beats against my back.
My breath stings my own lungs.
My fingers are numb in my gloves.
My cane dangles.
I look back, grateful for my night vision, perfected and practiced. But I'm worried to see that the truck is just as far away behind me as the big machines are in front of me. I am out here in the middle of the sensory deprivation tank of the entire universe, unsure how long it has taken me to get this far, certain it will take me longer to get back. I must go on. The fate of the earth is at stake.
Use a funnel to pour the sand into the oil.
According to the books.
"Didn't you think it was strange that you were the only one down there?" she asked.
Alexis.
The university neither admits nor denies that the activities in the Small Mammal Research Development Office or the Zoology Laboratory caused the plaintiff to become ill.
Settlement Agreement.
I hear something. Some sound. Some rustling. Must be the rats, I think. No. No, it's probably a possum. Better yet, some black squirrels, staying up tonight to accompany me.
I feel dizzy.
I'll just rest a bit. Shift my backpack. Steady myself with my pot-holdered cane. Adjust my eyes.
Acid. That's my first thought.
Then I realize it's just light. A flashlight, huge as the sun, bitter bright and full in my face. The universe is obliterated.
I'm caught, I realize.
I'll never confess, I promise.
I hear my name.
I hear a soft sigh, a muffled laugh, a rush of words.
"How did you know?" she murmurs as she pulls me close.
"Triple-time," she starts.
"Your old girlfriend?" she asks.
I lean against her, my eyes and ego stinging. I bury my face in her neck, trying to find that muscled part, deep beneath her jacket. Trying to smell her scalp. Trying to hear the whoosh of her heart.
Maybe she's my co-conspirator. Maybe she's here to sabotage.
It's my momentary desire.
A poisoned corpse under her circling words. She's here to work. To guard. To make extra money.
She's sorry she lied.
She wanted to buy me a present.
And how did I know?
And what am I doing here?
If only my backpack boasted a rosemary-and-lemon-filled chicken with tender but crisp skin. Instead of sand and a funnel.
I will think of a way to explain this.
I will.
My left eye squints open, hoping to meet her eyes, but my field of vision is filled with the collar of her Protection Unlimited uniform, an absolutely resplendent green.
PART ONE: JOY










The kitchen floor is my sky. The blue linoleum is that same color as two minutes before twilight, or three minutes after dawn. Even the speckles of shiny silver embedded in the floor look like they might be stars, or the seeds of clouds. If I lay my face down on the cool linoleum and squint my eyes, it can almost seem like I'm back where I belong, standing in the wide front yard and letting the whole world swallow me.
It can almost seem like I am happy again. Though I was just a kid then, so maybe I wasn't really happy, just too stupid to know any different. Mom says things are better now, that an apartment is better than any trailer; that the city is better than the country; that the North is better than the South. Mom says it doesn't matter that we don't have a yard anymore. No one has a yard here, or at least what seems like a yard to me. A piece of ground no bigger than a grave is not a yard.
I tried to tell Marisa this. About the size of the yard and a grave, but she didn't seem to care. That's Marisa, always trying to seem like she doesn't care. But she does. I know she does. I know it because one day we were sharing a cigarette. It was cold, so cold that my ears were burning. Which is another thing that I don't like about it here. It's cold for a long, long time and the few scrawny trees lose any leaves they had and it's so ugly that it's hard to believe it's not a nightmare. But people just walk around like it's normal. The way I walked around after Marisa and the cigarette and the kiss. Normal.
When spring comes, everybody acts real happy. Like someonehas stopped beating them up. Like the world might be alive after all. Like it's really special that there's a pathetic little bud on some mangled tree. Like it's a damn miracle--which it is.
And then the bud turns into some sort of bloom and then it drops off and then it's almost summer, like now. And it's hot as hell.
It's hotter here than it ever was in Florida. Where there was a breeze, off the ocean or around the lake or across the Glades. And we had a yard. No matter where we lived, in whatever part of the state my mother found a job or a man, we always had a yard. A yard bigger than a grave.
I think the sky is what I miss most. I would like to show Marisa the sky, the way it spreads huge into a thousand different shades of blue. The way it borders itself with purple. Or explodes into orange. She would care then; a sky like that is enough to make anybody care. But I can't. Not just because I don't get to go outside or see Marisa much anymore. Even when I was outside and was sharing a cigarette with Marisa, even on the best of days, the sky seemed all crowded with brick. The buildings aren't really that high--not skyscrapers like in Manhattan--but I guess it is because they are so close together that there is only an alley of light.
So in some ways, it's better to stay inside. Better to stay here, looking at the kitchen floor, waiting for two minutes after twilight when my mother will be back from work and might bring me some Chinese food from my favorite place around the corner, right on Utopia Parkway. Better to stay here, my left ankle in a handcuff, chained to the radiator pipe.










The kitchen floor is my ocean. The blue linoleum rolls from corner to corner like the calmest of seas, rough only near the dirty cloud that is the stove. Even the shimmering flecks impressed in a random pattern on the floor look like they might be foam, a promise of unbroken whitecaps. If I lay my head back on the hot afternoon floor and close my eyes, it can almost seem like I'm back where I belong, spread on the hot sand of a real beach and letting the sun bake all the evil out of me.
Happy on a real beach. Like the ones near Fort Pierce, where we lived when my mother took up with that crew leader who had the red truck. Or even like the ones on the other side of Florida, the Gulf side, where the water was calm but very aqua and the sand was pink with crushed coquina shells. Not like the beach that Marisa took me to. I must have been telling her how much I missed the ocean when she suggested we cut school and go to Rockaway Beach. She said it wasn't really that far: "If we had a car, we could just jump on the BQE." I pretended as if I knew what the BQE was, later figuring out it was a highway called the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. I pretended as if it was just a minor annoyance that we didn't have a car, not saying that even if we did, neither of us was old enough to drive. Though I was thinking that Marisa was old enough to drive in Florida, where everything, including kids, could grow faster.
We sat on subways for hours. First into Manhattan and then out again into Brooklyn, a big semicircle on the subway map. Apparently, there was no subway under the BQE. That'sthe thing I don't understand about it here. Or one of the things. It's like they don't want the people with cars above the ground and the people who ride subways underneath the ground to be on the same paths. Maybe the earth would collapse.
Though I still think it would make more sense if the routes at least ran in the same directions. Like 95 and A1A--running north/south along the Atlantic Ocean. Or Alligator Alley and Heavenly Seventy--running east/west, below or above Lake Okeechobee. But here, everything is crowded into a maze and there are a million ways to get from one place to the next and a billion ways to get lost.
It was still cold when we got there. Although it was May and way past spring. I pulled my shirt around me and started to complain.
Marisa had no pity for me. "Of course it's cold. The frost date isn't till the fifteenth," she said.
"How do you know about frost dates?" I was surprised. Frost dates are things that farm workers know, not girls from Queens. I smiled to imagine Marisa in an orange grove in north Florida, swinging a smudge pot to keep the fruit from freezing.
"My grandfather has a fig tree in the yard."
I tried to remember if figs were tropical, but all I knew about them was that their leaves could be posed on naked people like Adam and Eve and Greek statutes. But those naked people must be from warm places; they're never wearing parkas or shivering.
"You can grow figs way up here?" I fished for information.
"My grandfather can."
"Any oranges? Avocados?" For a moment it seemed as if anything was possible. As if Marisa's grandfather could have found some secret.
"No, just a fig tree."
"Mangoes?"
"No."
"How about bananas? I had a banana tree once, but the bananas were tiny."
"No. I'm telling you he just grows figs. Just figs. Jesus Christ, Joy Parker."
Whenever Marisa gets annoyed at me that's what she says: "Jesus Christ, Joy Parker." She calls me by my full name, as if she were my mother or something. Though my mother never says my whole name, annoyed or not; I guess because the "Parker" reminds her of my father or something. She just says "Jesus Christ, Joy." Jesus Christ is not really part of my name, but it seems to go with "Joy." Like a Christmas card.
When we finally got to the edge of the world, it was kind of disappointing. There were too many trees for one thing, dishonestly green, as if I wouldn't remember that a few months ago they had probably been dead wood, just like the ones on Utopia Parkway. Across the street was what Marisa insisted on calling the beach, though it looked like a sinkhole. The sand seemed like dirt, more brown than the silvery white I liked. The waves weren't big enough to even ruffle my ankles, not that I was going to step in the water anyway. It wasn't just that it wasn't blue. It had garbage in it. Plastic bags and crack vials and syringes.
"Medical waste," Marisa said.
I nodded. But she couldn't fool me. It was junkie debris. The trash of people so sad that they needed a fix before they could appreciate a walk on the beach. Though I had to admit, seeing the world looking this scummy made me want to get so high that I could look down and it wouldn't matter.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Marisa asked as she put her cigarette out in the dirt/sand.
I nodded, afraid I was going to cry.
But then she kissed me so soft and so hard all at once, it was almost as if I could hear the ocean. It was almost as if the ocean were kissing me, instead of Marisa. Or maybe with Marisa. Both of them kissing me and me kissing both of them.
Sometimes I kiss the floor, pretending it is the ocean and Marisa. Pretending it is that too-cold spring day when we cut school and rode the subway far from Utopia Parkway to Rockaway Beach. Pretending the damn attendance officer nevercalled my mother. I let my tongue slip from between my lips, licking the blue linoleum. It tastes a little like a cigarette, like Marisa and the ocean.
But the floor never kisses me back.










The kitchen floor is an eye. The captive blue of the linoleum as dull as the wolf eye. The other eye is brown; I can see that although the animal has its head tilted away from the television camera. A beautiful sweet brown, like the best chocolate, like Marisa's eyes. But the eye the TV focused on is blue, veined with icicles of white. It makes the animal look ferocious, just like it is supposed to.
Although I thought wolf eyes were yellow. Or maybe that's just true in spooky movies. I could ask someone, but there is no one here to ask. The days seem so long. So, I just say it out loud, testing its truth. "Yellow," I say. The color of piss, I don't say, because then I might remember that I have to pee and I haven't peed all day because if I pee in the bucket I will have to look at it, and its yellow embarrasses me.
So I look at the television set, pretending it is a window. The wolf sits on the other side of the window behind another window, this one of wire. The wire window is on a truck, lettered in red: ANIMAL CONTROL. The wolf looks depressed.
The reporter is gorgeous. I like this one. She has a smooth Spanish accent, lulling and friendly, even when she tries to sound strict. Like now. As she tells us, her faithful viewers, about this dangerous animal. A wolf. Being kept as a pet. Her voice lilts: "Just off Utopia Parkway, in the greenery of Queens." A wolf, found in the yard, chained to a clothesline pole. The neighbors complained at the howling. Animal Control was called. They came with their truck, lettered in red.
"Chained all day," the reporter says, as if she feels sorry for the animal. She reminds me of Marisa. So serious and soft. Although Marisa would probably crack some comment about how pathetic the wolf looked. Not like anything wild and dangerous. Not like something that killed grizzly bears in the wilderness. More like a German shepherd with mange.
"Mange--that's what happens when you live in Queens," I would say to Marisa. Or maybe I wouldn't. After all, Marisa lives in Queens.
I wonder where Marisa is. I heard her in the alley the other night. It was dark, so it must have been late, and her voice funneled up between the car alarms and radios. I heard her clear as day. Heard her ask for me. Heard my mother tell her I had gone back to Florida; heard Marisa say she didn't believe my mother; heard my mother call Marisa a "lesbo-slut."
I wonder if the man on the television set, the one hiding his who-knows-what-color-eyes behind sunglasses, is sorry about chaining the wolf. I wonder if he will go to jail or what will happen to him. I wonder whether he is still wearing sunglasses.
I wonder what will happen to the wolf.
I wonder if that is my mother coming up the stairs with Chinese food for me. I hope she brought sweet and sour. I love sweet and sour. But it sounds like too many voices to be my mother. Too many voices outside the door, one of them knocking, one of them barking out "Joy Parker," all of them past the uncrossable blue ocean of linoleum.
THE STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS. Copyright © 2000 by Ruthann Robson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.