LJ Idol champion entry for milk_and_glass
Theme: barefoot, uphill, both ways
Incomplete Tense
You fall in love with him at fifteen. You are in high school, a sophomore flaunting your brand-new shape and lifting your mother’s Maybelline cake mascara when she’s not looking. The drama club has just elected you its treasurer. Your circle skirts take nine yards of fabric apiece. You have friends: Ruth, Sophie, Dotty. You still wish on the first star at nighttime, a holdover from childhood. You ask for the following things in 1954: a Lucite purse, a spot on the pep squad, and to get pinned by a wonderful boy.
He’s nineteen, a friend of your older brother’s. A college man! He’s getting a degree in engineering, of which your father approves. He takes you out in his Mainline on dates to football games, soda shops, drive-in movies. You and your friends pluck just about every daisy in the field out behind the school playing he loves me, he loves me not. At Tarantula! you get bold and cuddle close to him. His hand rubs slow circles on your back, but dips no lower. You’re so glad that he’s a nice boy (although, shamefully, you lie in bed at night and thrill at the thought of what his touch would feel like, your own searching hands standing in for his).
You obsess for hours over the slightest things: the scent of laundry starch on his shirt, the accidental scratch of his fingernails on your palm when he took it in his, the divot above his lip where sweat collects in July when you attend barbecues and clam bakes. Before he picks you up, you fix your hair two or three different times. No matter how slowly you walk to the front door, you end up a little breathless. He talks to your parents and gives you a little diamond ring after two years, and you walk in your high school graduation as a woman, proud and engaged.
You get married the winter after high school. Ruth and Dotty stand up for you as bridesmaids; Sophie beat you down the aisle and is already too pregnant to fit into her dress. Your own gown is row after row of scalloped lace, and you carry a cascade of blush roses. When the organ plays and the church doors open, you swear that you glide right into his arms. Unlike so many things in life that don’t stand up to the stuff of dreams, your wedding day is even better than you could have ever wished. Looking back, you can recall looking up at him through the gauze of your veil, and the way he looked at you - like he was seeing you for the very first time.
The first six months are just like playing house. You practice the recipes you learned in home economics (casseroles, cookies, omelets) and get all dressed up to push a trolley at the grocery store. You sweep your floors and dust your shelves every other day, set vases of cut flowers on your table, and assume that this housework business isn’t so bad. As the lowest man on the totem pole at his firm, he works long hours. When he comes home at night, you have dinner waiting on the table, and your lips pursed for a kiss. He’s not always in a good mood, you discover, but by the time you have plied him with food and affection, his sour expressions are gone. At night, in your bed, there are no miscommunications. You love giving him pleasure, and you love what you take for yourself (that feeling of helpless glory that comes over you, as natural as paper twisting against a lit match). Afterwards, you press yourself into his back as if you could become one skin with him. You feel safe.
Your first daughter is born shortly after your first anniversary. You are so pregnant on the actual date that you can’t even bear to go out for dinner, but he smiles and tells you that he’ll make it up next time. Take you to Niagara Falls. That sounds wonderful, but not as wonderful as sitting on the couch and closing your eyes for a bit. You are exhausted and huge, ready to be done with the whole mess - for things to get back to normal. Mother tells you that you are so lucky for the twilight sleep, because childbirth wasn’t always so civilized. You have questions about what will happen, but she looks at you like you are crazy. You assume that you don’t need to know.
The baby is a good one, but still a lot of work. You sew a little pack to carry her while you do your cleaning; he laughs and says that you look like a squaw. It’s not a nice word, and the way he says it makes you blush with shame (even though you have no idea what you did wrong). You speak up, tell him that he’s hurt your feelings. He pauses in the midst of fiddling with the radio just long enough to tell you that you are acting like a fool. His eyes meet yours, and won’t let go. Suddenly, inexplicably, you want to walk out the front door. Instead you hug your little girl and make a mess of her jumper, crying into her round smallness as she mouths at your hair.
It hurts the first time you two go to bed after the baby. Your belly is soft and sore under his, and your insides feel unfamiliar, wrong. You are a little bit terrified, to be honest. In the dark, he promises to be gentle, but it’s been a long time and you can’t blame him for getting too rough. Not really. You chase the shadows behind your eyelids, breathing shallow and trying to make it look like you feel good. The baby cries just when he’s about to finish; he curses. It takes a while before you get the old feeling back, but it happens slowly and joyfully. You conceive your second daughter within another year.
Your life slowly, surely changes. With a toddler and a newborn, you begin to understand why all the women you know feel overwhelmed by housekeeping. Your new baby is colicky, and keeps you up all night for the first three months screaming her face bright red. On the worst nights, you scream too - but quietly, and always masked by one of the baby’s cries, so that you don’t wake the rest of the house. You don’t talk with your friends as much as you’d like, because it seems like you always end up tripping over the phone cord on your way to change a diaper or stop a pot from boiling over. You keep a bowl of dried petals from your bridal bouquet on your vanity, and sometimes you run them between your fingers.
Somewhere down the line, you change too. You ask for a new vacuum cleaner for Christmas (since the dust bunnies in the corners feel like an accusation), you notice that your hair is unfashionable and you just don’t mind all that much. Now, when you look up at the sky at night, you hum a little prayer that your children will be healthy through the winter. You just don’t think that you can handle another round of influenza this year. You are just so busy - your obligations with church and the girls’ schooling just keep growing, while your daughters’ knobby ankles seem to be habitually poking out of their dungarees. You still greet him with a dutiful kiss when he comes from work, but you don’t tumble into bed as soon as possible.
Despite that, you fall pregnant with your third a few months before your seventh anniversary. You spend a grueling summer battling first-trimester misery (your ankles, hands, and face swell - which your mother says means a boy), and you’ve worried a hole in the pocket of your housecoat fiddling with it. He spends overnights away from home, goes on lots of conferences. There is enough money, a roof over your head, food on the table. The pastor at church talks about gratitude for what one has. It’s not that you aren’t thankful. Not exactly. You just can’t help wanting, and you don’t even know what it is.
You deliver your third daughter safely, but only just barely. You rush the older girls to your mother’s house when your water breaks, and notice blood. An ambulance is called, the baby almost dies. By the grace of God, or whomever is listening, your doctor tells you that you shouldn’t become pregnant again. The comment is not directed as you so much as the other, silent presence in the room. He has always been awkward in hospitals, especially on the maternity ward. Nobody brings up the obvious - so many girls, what a shame that is - and he signs the consent for your tubal ligation.
That winter, at the office Christmas party, you meet the firm’s new administrative secretary. She’s a laughing redhead with straight, white teeth and the kind of shoes that you have come to dismiss as impractical. One of the younger men at the firm makes a joke about her long hours with a knowing, jovial wink, and you swear he looks guilty when he catches you listening. Her name comes up in conversation on the car ride home, and although everything in your head is warning against it, you don’t change the topic. You say, stiffly, that she is very beautiful, and he replies yes she is, isn’t she? It’s meant to bother you, you know for sure. He’s watching you as the passing streetlamps send bars of light across the dashboard, as you thank the babysitter, as you shuffle the kids off to bed, as you pour yourself a glass of water and quickly drink it down. You have trouble swallowing, but you don’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that.
The time starts to fly somewhere around your thirtieth birthday. You don’t measure the years on the calendar anymore, but in phases: spring cleaning, the Ladies’ Aid summer social, back-to-school, Thanksgiving, Advent. You tend to wander outside and see your windowbox petunias blooming with sense of surprise, because you temporarily can’t remember how they got there. You never make it to Niagara, but one summer you take the girls all by yourself to your parents’ lake house for a week during the summer.
The lake is as expansive and still as it was when you used to practice your strokes here during high school, and you lose yourself a little bit as you smooth on your cap and let your body cut across the surface. Your arms and legs remember the motions as surely as they ever did, and you’ve made it halfway across before you even notice.
Your baby is still in floaties, shivering in the cool water. (You feel guilty for having - for just a moment - forgotten that she is there.) You expect her to be ready to leave, but she kicks her legs and paddles away, hollering that she wants to swim some more. Your eldest daughter asks when you will be able to come back again.
You say someday, baby, the words leaving your lips before you even realize it. They ring more hollow than you’d have liked.
You can’t help it. You’ve just become a bit disillusioned on somedays that are unlikely to show up.
-
He passes away in 2007, a few months after you’ve celebrated a half century together. One day he’s there -rustling the morning paper, mowing the lawn, a warm body next to her for the evening news- and the next day you are talking to a doctor about life support. He had a heart attack, they say. (You think, in that exact moment, of tens of thousands of nights laying on his chest, listening to the steady thump against your cheek… and feel more of a sense of betrayal than you have in years.) You scatter his ashes over the ocean, and it’s through. Seventy-two years walking around this Earth come down to a few holy words, and a cloud of dust settling on the waves. You know what the Bible says, but it has never felt so real or inevitable. Your mourning is deeper and more profound than you could have imagined, stripping you of some fundamental dignity. Sophie, who now has bifocal glasses and a cloud of white curls, folds you in her arms and whispers her condolences. You cry like a child. Like your world is ending.
The house you’ve lived in for three-quarters of your life is now too big for you, but you don’t want to leave. Instead, you ask your first daughter and her husband to move in with you. Their own babies have all gone off to college and moved on, and the timing feels right. In this way, you stay connected to the lives of your family: these babies you spanked and potty-trained who somehow grew up taller than you and started lives of their own. It seems like the supposed grown-ups these days are getting younger every year. This is the curse of old age, you suspect: doctors and lawyers now look like downy-faced children, and your own kids boss you around like they know what’s best.
Your oldest grandchild is getting a divorce. She’s twenty-six, which shouldn’t even be old enough to get married nowadays, but she fell in love with a simpleton in college and that was that. Your daughter is a wreck over it, all late-night phone conversations and tears. Every mother wants better for her daughter than she had herself, and this just does not fit the plan. On a particularly bad day, she asks you if you’ll give your granddaughter a call.
Your own suspicion that perhaps it was a bad idea is confirmed when she answers the phone curiously, as if she has no idea why you’ve called. It’s your own fault. You haven’t been as close with this one as you have with some of your younger grandchildren, for some reason. You greet her tentatively, and ask how things are going. With the divorce, you clarify.
There is silence on the other end of the line. You take a breath, and brace yourself for what you know is coming:
What would you know, Gramma? You and Grandpa were together for fifty years. Life was a lot simpler. You were lucky. It’s so hard. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. It just hurts so much.
At the end of it, she hangs up. You don’t think that you have made much of an impact.
You get back on the phone, call your favorite florist to send her a bouquet of pretty purple flowers. Maybe they’ll cheer her up a little bit. The asters you send are supposed to stand for patience, but you don’t expect that she’ll understand that. Not yet.
Incomplete Tense
You fall in love with him at fifteen. You are in high school, a sophomore flaunting your brand-new shape and lifting your mother’s Maybelline cake mascara when she’s not looking. The drama club has just elected you its treasurer. Your circle skirts take nine yards of fabric apiece. You have friends: Ruth, Sophie, Dotty. You still wish on the first star at nighttime, a holdover from childhood. You ask for the following things in 1954: a Lucite purse, a spot on the pep squad, and to get pinned by a wonderful boy.
He’s nineteen, a friend of your older brother’s. A college man! He’s getting a degree in engineering, of which your father approves. He takes you out in his Mainline on dates to football games, soda shops, drive-in movies. You and your friends pluck just about every daisy in the field out behind the school playing he loves me, he loves me not. At Tarantula! you get bold and cuddle close to him. His hand rubs slow circles on your back, but dips no lower. You’re so glad that he’s a nice boy (although, shamefully, you lie in bed at night and thrill at the thought of what his touch would feel like, your own searching hands standing in for his).
You obsess for hours over the slightest things: the scent of laundry starch on his shirt, the accidental scratch of his fingernails on your palm when he took it in his, the divot above his lip where sweat collects in July when you attend barbecues and clam bakes. Before he picks you up, you fix your hair two or three different times. No matter how slowly you walk to the front door, you end up a little breathless. He talks to your parents and gives you a little diamond ring after two years, and you walk in your high school graduation as a woman, proud and engaged.
You get married the winter after high school. Ruth and Dotty stand up for you as bridesmaids; Sophie beat you down the aisle and is already too pregnant to fit into her dress. Your own gown is row after row of scalloped lace, and you carry a cascade of blush roses. When the organ plays and the church doors open, you swear that you glide right into his arms. Unlike so many things in life that don’t stand up to the stuff of dreams, your wedding day is even better than you could have ever wished. Looking back, you can recall looking up at him through the gauze of your veil, and the way he looked at you - like he was seeing you for the very first time.
The first six months are just like playing house. You practice the recipes you learned in home economics (casseroles, cookies, omelets) and get all dressed up to push a trolley at the grocery store. You sweep your floors and dust your shelves every other day, set vases of cut flowers on your table, and assume that this housework business isn’t so bad. As the lowest man on the totem pole at his firm, he works long hours. When he comes home at night, you have dinner waiting on the table, and your lips pursed for a kiss. He’s not always in a good mood, you discover, but by the time you have plied him with food and affection, his sour expressions are gone. At night, in your bed, there are no miscommunications. You love giving him pleasure, and you love what you take for yourself (that feeling of helpless glory that comes over you, as natural as paper twisting against a lit match). Afterwards, you press yourself into his back as if you could become one skin with him. You feel safe.
Your first daughter is born shortly after your first anniversary. You are so pregnant on the actual date that you can’t even bear to go out for dinner, but he smiles and tells you that he’ll make it up next time. Take you to Niagara Falls. That sounds wonderful, but not as wonderful as sitting on the couch and closing your eyes for a bit. You are exhausted and huge, ready to be done with the whole mess - for things to get back to normal. Mother tells you that you are so lucky for the twilight sleep, because childbirth wasn’t always so civilized. You have questions about what will happen, but she looks at you like you are crazy. You assume that you don’t need to know.
The baby is a good one, but still a lot of work. You sew a little pack to carry her while you do your cleaning; he laughs and says that you look like a squaw. It’s not a nice word, and the way he says it makes you blush with shame (even though you have no idea what you did wrong). You speak up, tell him that he’s hurt your feelings. He pauses in the midst of fiddling with the radio just long enough to tell you that you are acting like a fool. His eyes meet yours, and won’t let go. Suddenly, inexplicably, you want to walk out the front door. Instead you hug your little girl and make a mess of her jumper, crying into her round smallness as she mouths at your hair.
It hurts the first time you two go to bed after the baby. Your belly is soft and sore under his, and your insides feel unfamiliar, wrong. You are a little bit terrified, to be honest. In the dark, he promises to be gentle, but it’s been a long time and you can’t blame him for getting too rough. Not really. You chase the shadows behind your eyelids, breathing shallow and trying to make it look like you feel good. The baby cries just when he’s about to finish; he curses. It takes a while before you get the old feeling back, but it happens slowly and joyfully. You conceive your second daughter within another year.
Your life slowly, surely changes. With a toddler and a newborn, you begin to understand why all the women you know feel overwhelmed by housekeeping. Your new baby is colicky, and keeps you up all night for the first three months screaming her face bright red. On the worst nights, you scream too - but quietly, and always masked by one of the baby’s cries, so that you don’t wake the rest of the house. You don’t talk with your friends as much as you’d like, because it seems like you always end up tripping over the phone cord on your way to change a diaper or stop a pot from boiling over. You keep a bowl of dried petals from your bridal bouquet on your vanity, and sometimes you run them between your fingers.
Somewhere down the line, you change too. You ask for a new vacuum cleaner for Christmas (since the dust bunnies in the corners feel like an accusation), you notice that your hair is unfashionable and you just don’t mind all that much. Now, when you look up at the sky at night, you hum a little prayer that your children will be healthy through the winter. You just don’t think that you can handle another round of influenza this year. You are just so busy - your obligations with church and the girls’ schooling just keep growing, while your daughters’ knobby ankles seem to be habitually poking out of their dungarees. You still greet him with a dutiful kiss when he comes from work, but you don’t tumble into bed as soon as possible.
Despite that, you fall pregnant with your third a few months before your seventh anniversary. You spend a grueling summer battling first-trimester misery (your ankles, hands, and face swell - which your mother says means a boy), and you’ve worried a hole in the pocket of your housecoat fiddling with it. He spends overnights away from home, goes on lots of conferences. There is enough money, a roof over your head, food on the table. The pastor at church talks about gratitude for what one has. It’s not that you aren’t thankful. Not exactly. You just can’t help wanting, and you don’t even know what it is.
You deliver your third daughter safely, but only just barely. You rush the older girls to your mother’s house when your water breaks, and notice blood. An ambulance is called, the baby almost dies. By the grace of God, or whomever is listening, your doctor tells you that you shouldn’t become pregnant again. The comment is not directed as you so much as the other, silent presence in the room. He has always been awkward in hospitals, especially on the maternity ward. Nobody brings up the obvious - so many girls, what a shame that is - and he signs the consent for your tubal ligation.
That winter, at the office Christmas party, you meet the firm’s new administrative secretary. She’s a laughing redhead with straight, white teeth and the kind of shoes that you have come to dismiss as impractical. One of the younger men at the firm makes a joke about her long hours with a knowing, jovial wink, and you swear he looks guilty when he catches you listening. Her name comes up in conversation on the car ride home, and although everything in your head is warning against it, you don’t change the topic. You say, stiffly, that she is very beautiful, and he replies yes she is, isn’t she? It’s meant to bother you, you know for sure. He’s watching you as the passing streetlamps send bars of light across the dashboard, as you thank the babysitter, as you shuffle the kids off to bed, as you pour yourself a glass of water and quickly drink it down. You have trouble swallowing, but you don’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that.
The time starts to fly somewhere around your thirtieth birthday. You don’t measure the years on the calendar anymore, but in phases: spring cleaning, the Ladies’ Aid summer social, back-to-school, Thanksgiving, Advent. You tend to wander outside and see your windowbox petunias blooming with sense of surprise, because you temporarily can’t remember how they got there. You never make it to Niagara, but one summer you take the girls all by yourself to your parents’ lake house for a week during the summer.
The lake is as expansive and still as it was when you used to practice your strokes here during high school, and you lose yourself a little bit as you smooth on your cap and let your body cut across the surface. Your arms and legs remember the motions as surely as they ever did, and you’ve made it halfway across before you even notice.
Your baby is still in floaties, shivering in the cool water. (You feel guilty for having - for just a moment - forgotten that she is there.) You expect her to be ready to leave, but she kicks her legs and paddles away, hollering that she wants to swim some more. Your eldest daughter asks when you will be able to come back again.
You say someday, baby, the words leaving your lips before you even realize it. They ring more hollow than you’d have liked.
You can’t help it. You’ve just become a bit disillusioned on somedays that are unlikely to show up.
-
He passes away in 2007, a few months after you’ve celebrated a half century together. One day he’s there -rustling the morning paper, mowing the lawn, a warm body next to her for the evening news- and the next day you are talking to a doctor about life support. He had a heart attack, they say. (You think, in that exact moment, of tens of thousands of nights laying on his chest, listening to the steady thump against your cheek… and feel more of a sense of betrayal than you have in years.) You scatter his ashes over the ocean, and it’s through. Seventy-two years walking around this Earth come down to a few holy words, and a cloud of dust settling on the waves. You know what the Bible says, but it has never felt so real or inevitable. Your mourning is deeper and more profound than you could have imagined, stripping you of some fundamental dignity. Sophie, who now has bifocal glasses and a cloud of white curls, folds you in her arms and whispers her condolences. You cry like a child. Like your world is ending.
The house you’ve lived in for three-quarters of your life is now too big for you, but you don’t want to leave. Instead, you ask your first daughter and her husband to move in with you. Their own babies have all gone off to college and moved on, and the timing feels right. In this way, you stay connected to the lives of your family: these babies you spanked and potty-trained who somehow grew up taller than you and started lives of their own. It seems like the supposed grown-ups these days are getting younger every year. This is the curse of old age, you suspect: doctors and lawyers now look like downy-faced children, and your own kids boss you around like they know what’s best.
Your oldest grandchild is getting a divorce. She’s twenty-six, which shouldn’t even be old enough to get married nowadays, but she fell in love with a simpleton in college and that was that. Your daughter is a wreck over it, all late-night phone conversations and tears. Every mother wants better for her daughter than she had herself, and this just does not fit the plan. On a particularly bad day, she asks you if you’ll give your granddaughter a call.
Your own suspicion that perhaps it was a bad idea is confirmed when she answers the phone curiously, as if she has no idea why you’ve called. It’s your own fault. You haven’t been as close with this one as you have with some of your younger grandchildren, for some reason. You greet her tentatively, and ask how things are going. With the divorce, you clarify.
There is silence on the other end of the line. You take a breath, and brace yourself for what you know is coming:
What would you know, Gramma? You and Grandpa were together for fifty years. Life was a lot simpler. You were lucky. It’s so hard. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. It just hurts so much.
At the end of it, she hangs up. You don’t think that you have made much of an impact.
You get back on the phone, call your favorite florist to send her a bouquet of pretty purple flowers. Maybe they’ll cheer her up a little bit. The asters you send are supposed to stand for patience, but you don’t expect that she’ll understand that. Not yet.