A Thanksgiving Letter (re-visited)

Thanksgiving Day, 9 a.m.
Dear Ava,
    
I’ve been up since six, bet you were too, and I wish I could have come over but Daddy says it’s slutty the way I run over to your house all the time and I told him it’s not slutty when it’s two girls but he said he’s speaking metaphorically and anyway this is Thanksgiving (like I didn’t know that) and it’s meant for families to be with families, which is just plain stupid, but anyway that’s why I’m writing to you and not talking to you in person and as soon as I can get out the front door without being caught I’ll run this over and put it in your mailbox. I hope you look there. Try to read my mind this second: M-A-I-L  B-O-X.
    
Do you like this paper? It’s not really purple. I know it looks purple but it’s called mauve and no I didn’t spell it wrong, my grandma sent it with a note telling me the color because she’s always trying to improve my mind, so get used to this mauve, you’ll be seeing a lot of it, who else would I write to?
    
She also sent me a book, “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” she is so two centuries ago, but I don’t want to be mad at her because the reason she’s sending me this stuff instead of waiting until Hanukkah is she thinks she might be dead by then which is really sad. But on the other hand it’s not sad because there’s nothing wrong with her, she just gets seasonal dread she calls it, but if she’s still alive on New Year’s Day then I’m really going to be mad at her for being so negative about life.
    
There was a lot of activity in the kitchen early this morning, Dad and his new live-in girlfriend playing around with the turkey, giggle, giggle, giggle. I stayed up in my room because watching them make out over a naked animal would turn my stomach, but now they’ve gone back to bed and it’s quiet as the grave though any second I expect to hear her panting and oh-my-god-ing and I'm sure this is not good for me, mental health-wise, but Dad, being a psychologist, would probably say “Facts of life, Dorrie, get used to it.”
    
So I'm just wondering about something: “quiet as the grave,” what do you think? Is it quiet in the grave? I doubt it. Gross. Hold on a sec, I’m going to change the channel in my mind. Okay, I’m back.
    
My ex-step-mother and her two gnomes will be here at noon. Is this the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard of? My father is like one of those men with a harem, he gets his ex and his current to come and fuss over him with their cranberry sauces and we’re all supposed to act like it’s normal. He says “We make the rules, not society” but by “we” he means “he” because if I made the rules I’d be at your house right now and we’d have mac-and-cheese from the microwave and we'd play with the Ouija board until our finger tips fell off.
    
One of the things I’d really like to know is how a woman who is old enough to drive still can’t figure out the meaning of the word vegetarian. When Dad’s live-in realizes I’m not going to eat a single ounce of that 300 pound turkey there’s going to be World War 4 in the dining room. My ex-step-mother might even start crying. She’ll be sad because now that she’s a guest in the house she won’t get to call me names and throw fits. But you never know, anything can happen, I’m sort of hoping for a food fight with the two gnomes, for old time’s sake.


So now it is so much later, how did this happen?
    
You might have noticed I still haven’t managed to get this letter into your mailbox, hope you haven’t been waiting there, that is if you read my mind in the first place. Did you?
    
There’s something of a scene going on downstairs, I’ll tell you every single detail when I see you tomorrow, but for now just try to picture this: After the so-called feast my ex-step-mother stood up and recited a poem she wrote especially for the occasion. I thought she would have outgrown that sensitive phase of hers, but apparently not. It was a very long poem, seemed like 3 hours, and I didn’t understand all of it, but I think it was supposed to be erotic, and it kind of upset the live-in who might be living out soon. Hallelujah.
    
This is the last letter you’ll get from me on this mauve paper. You remember Jeffrey, one of my former step-gnomes, well he was hanging out in my room — don’t ask me how he got through the barricade — and it turns out mauve is his favorite color, which was something of a shocker but not in a totally bad way, so he’s taking the whole box of stationery off my hands except for one sheet which I’ll use to write a thank you note to my grandmother. I couldn’t get him to take “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” though. What did I expect? It’s only Thanksgiving. They don’t promise you miracles on Thanksgiving.

Look for me early in the morning, I’ll be right there on your doorstep. You'll know it's me because in spite of everything that happened today I still look the same. On the outside.

Love, Dorrie

Here I Am (revisited)

{A story that I wrote years ago, after hearing the poem “Here,” by Grace Paley}
 

I was just pulling myself out of bed when Garrison Keillor’s voice floated by. “And now a poem by Grace Paley,” he crooned, in that overly familiar tone of his. But still, I sank back into the mattress, my ears stretching closer to the radio, and the man I sometimes call “Mr. Smarmy” (though, to be fair, who else reads us poetry in the  morning) began to recite the poem “Here.”         

Of course I’d rather have heard it in Grace’s voice, the opening words, “Here I am,” spoken around a white sugared square of Chicklet, or a smooth mentholated cough drop. She doesn’t stand on ceremony, I’ve been told.
    
“Here I am in the garden laughing . . .” the poem begins, and then goes on, how she sits there with her “heavy breasts” and her “nicely mapped face,” with her “stout thighs,” and her little grandson sliding on/off her lap. Not “on and off” but “on/off” — and I see that squirming boy in my sleep-fogged brain, wriggling all over his grandmother.
    
She tells us more, this aging woman, this poet gardener, about her husband, over there, on the other side of the yard, talking with the meter reader, explaining how it’s not a good thing, our dependency on oil, talking and teaching, while the poet watches, listens, patient and bemused.
    
She says to her grandson, “Run over to the fence and get Grandpa, tell him I’m too tired to come myself, tell him I’m tired but still I long to kiss his sweet explaining lips.” Not in those exact words, but something very similar.
    
And then it’s over, there is no more poem, and while the words are still lingering in my ears I begin to cry. I lie against my warm pillow and let the tears come, not so much for the last words as for the first: “Here I am.” It is a perfect opening, isn’t it? Three words that are themselves a prayer, an invocation. “Here I am” she says, “Here I am — in the garden — laughing.”
    
She is so clear in my mind, in her loose, generous skirt. I imagine her not-quite-clean feet pushed into worn-down sandals. A white cotton peasant blouse, or some other nice blouse, definitely not a T-shirt. This is before her grandson comes to join her, before her husband sees the meter reader and calls out “Wait, I have something to tell you.” This is earlier in the morning, while there is still some trace of a breeze, while the dew dampens the tomato vine, and she is up to her wrists in dirt, the dirt working its way under her fingernails.
    
A smudge settles on the bridge of her nose where she rubs her finger against her slipping-down glasses, the same finger that has pressed down on so many pens and pencils over the years, the finger that hits the “H” key on the keyboard. (Years ago, she might have used a Smith Corona Selectric. Today, the “H” of her iMac, the “H” of “Here I am.”)
    
She is in the garden, making things right, and later, when her son calls on the phone to ask after the boy, perhaps she’ll tell him “I was out puttering today, I was laughing, it was good.”
    
And I’m crying because I know that even if some day I grow up to be a woman who can say “I’m happy with my heavy breasts and my stout thighs and my nicely mapped face,” I will never be able to begin a poem “Here I am, in the garden, laughing.” I see no gardens in my future. I can picture Grace, patting a seed into place, pulling up handfuls of weeds. But not me.
    
My poem would start like this: “Here I am, at the window, watching.” That is where I place myself, an old woman framed by a rectangle of dark wood.
    
Like my great-grandmother, Ethel. Every day, all day, she sat at her window, pillows propped behind and under her. Her thin, tired old face breaking into a smile as my mother and grandmother approach, waving, calling out “hello, hello” while lifting me from my carriage.
    
“Make a kiss for Great-Grandma,” they coo at me. And I make a kiss, the first actual bit of body coordination I learn. A slight puckering of my lips, fingers lifted to mouth, then pulled away in a reckless arc. And that sound, like the ocean separating from sand, “mmmmmwhaaaaaa,” so that everyone laughs, even the shrunken old woman in the window. A silent laugh, her yawning, toothless mouth cavernous as any baby’s.
    
That’s what I picture for myself: “Here I am, at the window, watching.” Watching it all pass by — cars, bicycles, skateboards, young mothers pushing baby carriages, young fathers hoisting their infants onto their hips, carrying them around like big fat footballs. Teenagers, in packs, laughing and cursing, exhaling smoke. The boys trying to keep their pants from slipping down their narrow hips, acting like they don’t care, either way. The girls, skinny or plump, a bit on edge, nervous, just that much louder than they really want to be, putting on a brave front. And all the while there I am, invisible, at my window.
    
My great-grandmother was not invisible. The whole neighborhood saw her — strangers and friends alike — they’d wave and call “good morning,”  “good evening.” An Italian neighbor had a special greeting; one day she told my mother it meant “old grandmother, who sits all day in the window.” There isn’t a pretty phrase for that these days. More likely I’d be called “snoop,” “busy body,” “bitch.” So I’ll hang back, won’t lean over the ledge, won’t catch the sun’s rays on my upturned wrinkled face.

But still, I can see myself there, in the shadows, giving a silent “right on” to the loud-mouthed girls, blowing kisses to the big-eyed babies from behind the half-opened shades, sinking back into the embracing darkness.
    
I’m waiting for that day. I’ll be older, grayer, sagging in even more places. And if I’m lucky I’ll be able to begin my poem: “Here I am, at the window . . .  laughing.”

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Grace's poem:

Here, by Grace Paley

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.