The Space Between: A Meditation
My brain works in spurts: There are two hemispheres and a space between. The space between is filled with synapses, junctions that jump from nerve impulse to an unknown landing space. The space between is the vulnerable sweet spot of juicy possibility. The space between is a chasm, and beautiful, but how we land is entirely up to us.
No one had time to send greeting cards to William, my father, flowers meant for men, maybe an assortment of succulents in a ceramic dish for his coffee table. In his room, the plastic pitcher of hospital water sits beside an empty Styrofoam cup. A paper-wrapped straw lies abandoned on the swing-around tray to hold orange Jell‑O snack packs, never served.
LYDIA
He pushed the flowers into the folds of my apron. Keep walking, he said. Keep walking. So I walked. Then he said, You will lose all your roses walking like that, dear girl.
Sometimes we don’t want to know, frequency
so low we can’t arrive. Gratitude is
a stone in the pocket to remind you
to smile, and also a rock that drags you
down into the black of the glacial pond
to
When I opened my front door to let the detective in, I saw them immediately. They were hanging around her, some right there on the front step and others, a few feet off in the yard as if they weren’t sure they were welcome. There were at least eight of them, some fading in, some fading out. My Tommy was not among them. And that man they’d found dead, that Dr. Fremont, he did not seem to be among them. I wondered if the detective knew she was surrounded. Some people knew; some didn’t.
Portions of her memory slipped through a dark hole. She knew who I was, but just random facts about our history together. She knew we were married, but she did not know for how long, or anything about Elvis in the white leather pants who sang Jail House Rock afterwards when we laughed till we cried.
Hamburg
Martin didn’t want to leave home. But his wife had asked for divorce. He considered the end of his marriage as proof that he had grown timid and dull. He needed to blow up his life, to impulsively live—to become the man he had been before he was married.
Both of their hearts were broken, and they had the same scars slicing their chests in perfect halves. They met in the cardiac ward. Lana had a bypass at thirty-two; Mitch had a transplant at fifty that almost didn’t take and then did. Later, lying together in bed, they pressed their chests together and marveled at the symmetry. He put his ear against her left breast and then leaned back in surprise. “What on earth is that?” he said, and she said, “It’s a bell, of course.”
Gorillahead hates his name, calls it an aberration, but says the situation is too far gone, a nickname that sticks, given by idiots. He walks, knuckles to ground, the way I’ve seen gorillas walk in old pictures, holoflimsy, and long, stuttering reels of Twentieth century film. I tell him I think his name is fitting, minimalist, that it’s a fine descriptor.
In our Family Life class we’d all shared a table and watched Ms. Felton from Planned Parenthood unroll a condom onto a wooden dildo. She talked about single parenthood, how hard it was, how no one helps like they say they will. She was pregnant with her second and constantly patting her tummy. The whole class wanted to be her sitter.
When it rained we
put pots on the burners
and made soup
Someone here to see you, an intern had said, raising his eyebrows and lifting his arms to make a shark mouth, biting. Now that they’re “interns,” instead of apprentices, they do what they want—like children, Giorgio thought, shrugging and moving from the bench toward the door suddenly filled with a shadow. Il grande squalo bianco.
The client scratched at paste clotted in his hair.
The client was in a car. The client’s car was in a car space between newly painted golden lines.
A sign: Mini Bob’s Mart.
“We are quite lost,” said Deer Food.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image .…
–from “You Who Never Arrived,” Rainer Maria Rilke
I’m back in my hometown visiting friends for a wedding, and I stop at the supermarket to pick up avocados and limes, and I see–there across the produce section rummaging among the lettuces–myself. I’m buying iceberg lettuce–or rather, the other me is buying iceberg. This me prefers more exotic varieties: Boston or Bibb.
TERRORISM
The first time she has the dream, it seems perfectly plausible—substantial and factual, with all its details consistent—but because she realizes she is dreaming she is not deceived; she is a well-off, educated young woman with a white-collar husband and a new pink baby, and she knows this is not happening in the real world she will eventually wake up to:
She is carrying a bomb.
My smart foodie boyfriend Hans and I were working side by side in his uncle’s Williamsburg restaurant — Das Lokal with a k — a Euro-Southwestern farm to table nouvelle thing. And I really thought I had it pretty good: a sweet little apartment, a little life. I admit it, at that point six months ago, I was entertaining thoughts: on my 27th birthday we would decide to move in together, even use the M word, you know, mutually.
Spring is hard in Manzanita. The sun comes out, the flowers bloom, the grass turns bright green, then a storm blows in off the Pacific and stays a week. We’ve been here all winter, listening to the water splash from the gutters at the corners of our houses. The ocean heaves and sobs at the shore. We make soup. We walk the dogs on the wet beach or through the dripping woods, the green ferns and gray cedars. We make everything nice for the tourists, who won’t be here for another couple of months.
The husband isn’t breathing beside me or else the bright snow falling at that angle against the windshield obliterating his chest heave and forcing his eyes closed is just how I see it—
MRS. TONNAGE
These three AM robins who go quiet by six as if all that singing sends them back to sleep!
And the sounds during daylight: car noise, jet noise, delivery trucks, and the ship horn from the river. Why is it that her yard was quieter once, and she could actually hear an entire episode of her favorite program without simply watching mouths moving on the screen?
Questions like these keep Mrs. Tonnage upright.
The husband isn’t breathing beside me or else the bright snow falling at that angle against the windshield obliterating his chest heave and forcing his eyes closed is just how I see it—