Why I stand on the porch in New Hampshire and Stare into the Distance

2016 

Masters Program

White Mountains, NH

Why I Stand on the Porch in New Hampshire and Stare Into the Distance

Where I live, there is always noise. 

A thousand feet from my back door run ten lanes of roaring 

tractor-trailer trucks piggy-backing double loads, 

and Japanese crotch rockets shearing eardrums with high-pitched whining, 

and three hundred thousand cars and trucks every single day. 

My neighbor says the drone reminds her of the beach, 

then she smiles expecting me to agree. 

There is an ebb and flow to the sound from dark rumblings to singing growls. 

The sound is incessant like the waves that lap a beach. 

But ocean waves are powerful. 

They cleanse the sand of footprints and cigarettes. 

They leave behind a promise in the smooth, unsullied surface of newly wet sand. 

But those cars and trucks and motorcycles and mammoth, 18-wheeled beasts 

leave nothing behind but oily grit and noise.

Where I live, there is always sun. 

It is an angry sun, 

white-hot in lonely, blue skies bereft of comforting clouds. 

It is a brazen sun blinding drivers on their way home. 

There is no rain. 

No mist. 

No fog. 

There is only 

heat.

People who live in wet climates say, 

"But it's a dry heat, right?" 

They don't know that day after day, 

unrelenting heat sucks every drop of moisture from my skin 

and dries my throat until talking is difficult. 

They don't know that it roasts my skin and boils the tears in my eyes, 

that it saps the life out of my soul.

Here, in the bitter wind alone on the wide front porch, 

I remember the heat and absorb the cold. 

I inhale the sharp, frozen air 

and try to forget the acrid odor of traffic. 

Here, I see soft blended landscapes covered with pure white and dotted with blue trees.

Here, the mountains are white and blue and grey.

My mountains are brown and seasonal. 

In the winter, when the haze and smog is blown to the sea, 

we see majestic peaks tipped in snow, 

but when the winds change, 

my mountains disappear completely, 

shrouded by the smoke and Mars-red haze of wildfires, 

wind-blown sand, 

and exhaust. 

I must go home again.

I will go home. 

I will leave behind the peaceful greys and blowing snow. 

Next week I'll stand in my backyard and count the tumbleweeds 

rolling down the shallow canyon behind my house. 

I'll watch the wind pick up the sand and whip it through the air like dry snow. 

I'll listen to waves of traffic a thousand yards away 

and try to remember this week of winter 

when the snow kissed my cheek.

The Dark Cabin

It had been loved once, 

the dark cabin in the close woods. 

Children played there.

Parents kept the kudzu back 

and the trees cleared.

Light could shine in the windows 

and warm up the rooms. 

They sat on the porch telling stories 

and rocking children. 

A spring fed the lake above the house. 

Neighbors envied their clear, sparkling water. 

The father kept the roof shingles tight

to keep out the rain.

A shed sheltered firewood to warm the house.

The cabin sat in two parts, 

kitchen to the left, sleeping to the right. 

Parents wanted their children away from the fire

that burned hot in the stove.

Children played close to the house. 

Their mother watched them run and laugh 

and knew they were safe. 

Father worked in his fields 

and built a barn to house the animals. 

It was a good place. 

When the family left,

the house closed in upon itself. 

It shed its shingles like tears, and the rains came in. 

Young trees stepped into the yard. 

Kudzu sent out shoots looking for a board, 

a step, to take hold of. 

Fields went back to the wild, 

but the lake stayed clean and clear. 

A man came. 

He cut back the kudzu. 

He cleared a field and planted corn. 

He took the clear, clean water 

and made liquid fire 

which didn’t warm the house.

Children came, but they didn’t play. 

They drank the liquid and slept. 

They cried on tick mattresses crawling with bugs. 

They cried for parents who sang to them

and rocked them on porches, 

for parents who never came.

In time, the children were silent. 

Fire came to the house.

Angry fire that chewed at the man who grew the corn,

made liquid fire and hurt the children, 

fire that cleared away the children’s pain, 

that burned the mattress where they died. 

Fire burned until

the house was clean, 

the fire left,

and the wind cried through the trees. 

2017

Story 6: MATCHES

She looked at the drawer. There had to be matches in there. He smoked, so there had to be matches, but it was his drawer, and she’d been told not to even open it. 

This is stupid, she thought. I just want to light a candle. 

She stood there looking at the drawer. She knew there weren’t any matches in the kitchen. There weren’t any in the garage. There wasn’t even a lighter anywhere. It was just a candle. She just wanted to light the candle.

This is stupid, she thought. He opens my drawers all the time. 

She reached out her hand to ease open the drawer, careful not to shift any of the contents. He wouldn’t know she’d opened it if nothing was moved. She looked at the neatly arranged tray of his small possessions. 

There were several of his favorite mechanical pencils, the kind with the minute points that he preferred for ledger work even though now he used a spreadsheet; there were collar stays and small packets of extra buttons, business cards and restaurant receipts neatly folded.  She could see handwriting on the back of one. She picked up a pencil on the counter and gently lifted the paper the way a character in a police show might do it so that she could read the message: “Jazmien 888-123-3456 Call me XXX.” She read it again. Her hand trembled. The paper fell into the drawer.

She used the pencil again nudging items in their plastic squares, exploring the detritus of his life contained within a bathroom drawer. And there it lay. Just under the paper receipts, right next to Jazmien, his wedding ring.

She stared at it lying there as though it were a body, a dead body, as though something had died, but no one had told her yet, and she stumbled on the body lying in the parlor. She closed the drawer with the eraser end of the wooden pencil and stepped away as though she were in a crime scene and didn’t want to contaminate it.  

She didn’t really want to light that candle anyway. To hell with the matches. 

She decided not to take the candlelit bath after all. She glanced at the clock above the mirror and saw that it was nearly ten o’clock already. Sliding into her flannel nightgown, she walked towards their daughter’s room to make sure that she was asleep, then turned off the last few lights and went to bed. 

She lay there thinking. He came home from work eventually. Some nights it was so late he should have slept in his office, but he did come home. There was that once, the night of the company Christmas party, that he took a suit with him and said he’d be spending the night in town since he’d need to be there late to make sure everyone got home safely, but that was because he was the boss. It was his job to make sure no one drove when they’d been drinking. And he’d lost so much weight that his ring probably wouldn’t stay on anymore. It was that juice fast he’d been doing. All those vegetables he’d been grinding up and drinking. He was never hungry at night, he said, because he’d been drinking so much juice during the day and he was getting home long after the family had eaten. 

Eventually she had stopped saving a plate of supper for him. He didn’t eat it when he arrived anyway. Who wanted to eat a heavy, home-cooked meal at 10PM? Sometimes it was nearly midnight before he showed up. All he wanted to do was change into running shoes and leave for his midnight run. She remembered that he asked her to come in the beginning, but how could she leave a six year old alone in the house to go walking with him? And if she did walk with him, he left her too far behind for it to be companionable. It was almost as if he wished she hadn’t come along. So she stopped trying. And he stopped asking.

Story 4: SMOKE

What if he’d touched her that night? That first night when he’d taken her to his trailer, and they’d sat on the sofa, and she’d had trouble breathing because he was so close and so much a man and so unlike any other boy she’d ever known. He smelled of cotton and cigarettes, maybe the sweet kind he rolled himself. He lived by himself as young as he was, lived in trailer in a part of town she’d never been before, worked hanging sheet metal until it fell on his arm and sliced through to the bone. She could see the bandage on his arm, tight against the skin under the sleeve of his cotton shirt. He showed her boy things--rocks he’d picked up, bottles he’d found, coins he’d saved--in his man’s world of second hand furniture in beat-up trailer.

She’d been dating high school boys with smooth cheeks and slim builds but this was a man she sat beside with a man’s strong legs and stubbled cheeks, a year out of high school and a lifetime beyond any boy she’d ever known. This was a man who smoked and drank and worked and played cards for money so that he could eat after his job sliced open his arm and took his strength away. This was a man who could have touched her once and taken her forever without a murmur of protest, could have taken her before she knew where she was going and she’d have been glad of it.

But he didn’t. He didn’t take her for a long, long while.

He was there in evening church, but she saw him get up and leave. Then she heard his engine outside on the street as he drove up and down, shifting the gears, waiting. She ran out when service was over and waited on the sidewalk, just expected that he’d come for her even though they’d barely spoken. But she knew he was coming. She knew that engine, that little blue car. When he drove up and opened the door, she hopped in without even asking where they’d go.

Before he came with his calloused hands, she’d dated boys whose sticky, soft hands had roamed her body without invitation. Boys who joked and talked of girls who didn’t stop them because they didn’t know they should. Boys who took possession, who learned the map of her body and searched for that hidden spot not even marked. She knew what they wanted; she knew they’d take as much as she allowed or as little as they could stand before their adolescent control gave way. And she enjoyed the power it gave her. She laughed at their insistence, their greedy pawing, their growing need. She laughed when they shook with unmet expectations. She laughed and petted them like dogs. Then Monday in class when they should have listened and studied, she’d smile so sweet and look so fine in the laced-up shirt that hugged her small curves, tempting with the possibility that one slight tug on that lace would expose her flesh, that they’d pant with need and lean close and touch and beg. And she’d look shocked that they’d want her so badly they’d forget it was daylight in mechanical engineering, they’d forget the teacher at the front of the room who watched distractedly wondering if he should intervene.

Then that summer when she was seventeen, Jack had shown up at church. He just appeared, shaggy blond hair and red mustache. Sat there in the meeting hall flirting with girls around him and never looked her way. But she knew, she knew as soon as she saw him that he was hers. She knew because he took her breath away. He sat back in his chair, legs apart, arms crossed. His thick calves were thrust into heavy tan boots that rooted him to the floor. White western shirt with sleeves rolled to his elbows. Beach blue eyes above that red moustache. Those tight, pale jeans stretched around him like his own skin. He was beautiful.

She gazed at his arms, saw the muscles flex beneath the skin and ached to feel them tight around her. She watched his hands, broad strong hands that stretched across his thighs, hands that held the hammer and pounded the nails. He was beautiful. The planes of his cheeks were firm with lines around his mouth that deepened when he smiled.

Summer passed. She worked in a swimming pool company store selling chlorine and acid and testing water. She was good at sales. All she had to do was remember what the other clerk said, say it like she knew what she was talking about and she’d ring up $200, $300 easy. Her memory and her dimpled glances sold a lot of chemicals that summer. Days off she’d show up at church looking for friends, looking for him. Orange, yarn bows tying up her pigtails and another bright white t-shirt. They’d all hide in a cool room on the third floor and listen to music and talk, just clean fun. They painted some sets for a play and forgot to open the windows and got high on the fumes and had to walk for blocks to get it out of their systems. God, that was fun.

The play was for fun, too. Something to do, a summer theater for the church youth group. Jack built the sets; they painted them. They practiced lines and made costumes. She was the lady in red. He was a cowboy. The night of the performance she was to put on false eyelashes but her hands trembled, so he stood over her, and with his large, rough hands he placed the eyelashes one by one into place. She nearly fainted from forgetting to breathe. She forgot her words. She forgot the steps. She forgot everything but his beach blue eyes and the warmth of his breath.

Then that August Sunday came. The Sunday he’d left church early, and she listened to the engine of his little car pacing up and down the street outside the church, and she knew he’d come back for her. She jumped into his car without even knowing where he was taking her just like she’d have given herself to him without thinking. And that night in that torn up trailer, the power switched hands. That power she’d had over boys who couldn’t keep their hands away was gone for this was a man who’d learned to control his need and to respect a woman. Now the power was his because he left her screaming inside for just a touch, just a touch, a feather kiss.

Story 2: BLOOD

BLOOD

In her thirteenth summer, she spent two weeks with her cousin at her grandparents’ house. Fishing. Reading. Camping in the front yard and waking up to find cows brushing against the tent. She watched her cousin, two years older, use Vaseline to remove thick layers of black mascara. They shelled butterbeans and shucked corn. She learned to remove lint from the dryer and started her period. She didn’t recognize what had happened until her cousin saw her panties. 

“Mary Anne, what have you got on your panties?” Julie was slathering Vaseline on her eyelashes thick with mascara at the sink. 

 Mary Anne slapped her legs together over the commode seat.

“What?”  She was embarrassed. Her panties had been dirty all week, but she couldn’t figure out why. She’d been hiding them in laundry basket and hoping Grandmother wouldn’t notice.

“Let me see.” Julie looked at her reflection in the mirror. “Show me. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

All  could be was embarrassed, but she split her legs and showed her cousin her panties anyway.

“, you started your period! Didn’t you know that? What did you think, that you were messing your pants?” Julie slung open the door to the bathroom. “Grandmother, come here! Mary Anne’s started her period.

She wiped herself, glancing at the tissue to see bright red streaks. She’d never looked before. Her embarrassment strangled her.

Julie grinned at her while she a clean pair of panties and an elastic strap with buckles. Their grandmother leaned around the door. “Your granddaddy came home with a box of sanitary napkins a long time ago. I asked him what he bought that for since I didn’t need them anymore. I guess we know now why he bought them. God knew you’d be here when you started.” Grandmother was beaming, too. “The first time is always scary--”

“You can say that again,” Julie said.

“Hush, Julie. You can tell her your story later. The first time is scary, but this means you’re a woman now. Help her with that belt, Julie. She can’t figure it out. Didn’t your mama get you ready for this?”  Mary Anne shook her head no.

“She gave me a booklet to read last year. She said it was the one they gave her in high school.”

“That sounds like Azalee. I guess she thought a booklet would take care of it. You get cleaned up, then come out to the kitchen. I think we need some fresh peaches to celebrate.”

Years later Mary Anne would remember that beautiful afternoon when her grandmother and cousin celebrated her reaching womanhood. They stopped work for awhile and sat around the table peeling warm peaches from the backyard tree, the juice dripping down their chins and the peach fuzz stinging their arms. An aunt from down the road stopped by and was drawn into the circle around the formica-topped table. Her grandfather was given the news when he passed through. He gave her a wink and a nod, but he didn’t stay inside for peaches. This was a woman’s celebration, one that a man couldn’t take part in. Her cousin Bill wandered in and wanted a peach. Grandmother tossed him one, but told him to get, that this was Mary Anne's time. She told him why. He grinned and said that explained why she’d been so grouchy. And through it all, she was quiet, less embarrassed, and not ashamed. She was proud. Proud that she’d joined this group of women who treated her like an equal. Proud that those men treated her respectfully. She was a woman. She was thirteen, and she was a woman. She held that thought and felt its holiness. Streaks of blood on a tissue changed her life. Her body held a promise. 

On the day when her parents arrived, she stood with her cousin and her grandmother. Julie elbowed her and said go on. She left the porch and ran down to the road just like they’d planned. She ran down to her mother getting out of the car and whispered,

        “Istartedmyperiod”

Her slim, beautiful mother stepped from the air-conditioned car, smoothed the wrinkles from her dress and patted her hair.  Mary Anne moved closer to wrap her arms around Azalee, but her mother stretched out an arm to stop her. 

“It’s hot. Don’t touch me.” Her mother pushed her out of the way. She smiled in the direction of the house from under a raised palm, then waved to the folks on the front porch. 

She tried again. 

    “istartedmyperiod.”  She said it a little louder even though her father might hear her. 

Azalee turned to look at her. Her face lost its smile. 

“You’ll have to keep up with it. It’s not my responsibility.” She spun to start up the walk to the porch.

She froze.

She froze right there in the dust and the noon-day heat with her eyes wet and her throat so suddenly dry that she couldn’t swallow. Froze, cold in the white-hot, summer sun, stung by biting insects that she didn’t try to swat away. Frozen by the pain that couldn’t have been greater if her mother had struck her. That trickle of blood she thought made her important was nothing more than an embarrassing mess which stained her clothes and made her ache. Her mother made her feel ashamed.

The greetings and laughter on the front porch continued, but still she stood in the grit and sand, afraid to move, afraid to walk toward them. The shock and embarrassment chilled her. She waited until they went inside, then turned toward the pasture and began to run until she reached the barn where the warm, cow smell lingered even though the cows were in the field. The flies buzzed around her, lighting on her skin to taste the salt and sweat She wondered if the flies could taste a change on her skin. After a time the heat and the flies drove her out of the quiet aloneness of the barn. She had to go up to the house. She couldn’t stay with the cows forever. She guessed someone would notice eventually, and she could feel the stickiness between her legs creep down onto her skin.

She kept her eyes down walking through the pasture careful not to step in a cow patty. Huge, circles of cow shit cobbled the ground. Stepping in one barefooted wasn’t as bad as stepping in one with shoes. Feet washed off easier than shoe leather but she was wearing shoes.

    “Why’d you run?” asked her girl cousin when she climbed the steps to the porch.

    “Just cause.”  She didn’t raise her eyes. 

    “Didn’t you tell her?” Julie sat in the porch swing pushing herself back and forth with the big toes of her bare feet.

    “ I told her.”  She waited for the swing to catch her legs behind the knees.

    “What’d she say?”

    “She said that it’s not her problem, and I’d have to keep up with it.”

The swing stopped. Julie turned to look at her cousin, her raccoon eyes squinting, looking for a reason that her aunt would be so cruel.

    “That’s it? You heard her right?

 Mary Anne squinted the tears from her eyes. Julie reached for her hand and squeezed. The swing began to move. 

    “I’ll show you how. You’ll be fine.” Julie looked across the fields toward the grazing cows . “When you get home, find a calendar and mark the dates, then you’ll know when to expect it. You can take home these pads that Grandmother has, then get your mom to get some more. You’ll be fine.” She squeezed her cousin's hand again. 

 Mary Anne didn’t feel fine. She felt hot and sick. She felt ashamed. She wanted peach fuzz and laughter. 

They sat there in the porch swing, Julie’s foot balanced on the rocking chair in front of them, bobbling the swing back and forth, and watched the cows head back to the barn. 

Story 1: FIRE

FIRE

Mary Anne was never a country club girl.  Her father was an executive at the paper mill, the largest employer in town next to the bleachery and the rayon factory. But her father didn’t play golf, and her mother didn’t join the women’s club, so she was left off the roster of girls who came out in their junior year. That meant she missed the beach weeks, and the keg parties, and the shag lessons in the afternoon that would have secured her place in the social structure of high school. She grew up in the country on a sandy road in a new subdivision in a new brick house without air conditioning instead of the country club in an inherited house with a maid.

The short summer nights in the country where she lived were sticky and full of lightning bugs and serenaded by bullfrogs from the freshwater streams that ran nearby. Every night she fell asleep with the windows open listening to the mranh mranh of the bullfrogs and watching her daddy water the grass seed in the new yard after he came home. Her little girl life was safe.

But something changed the summer she went to camp when she was twelve. Some dark cloud appeared in her mind and took the fireflies and the bullfrogs and the hot summer days peddling through empty fields of wild grasses swaying, something took those innocent moments and twisted them into fear. Not a known fear. Not a named fear. Not one that could be explained. Just creeping, cold, repetitive fear of what could happen or what should’ve happened, of what she didn’t know. In the dark with the windows open, with the bullfrogs singing, sweat sheened on her skin as she gripped the covers over her head to keep them from being pulled away. She was afraid. She was afraid of fire and vampires, of the werewolves she read about even though she knew they were only words on the pages. She lay there in the heat, panting under the covers, and praying for the angels to protect the house. She prayed that there would be no more fires.

She had seen fires. Fires pushed by the winds through the thick underbrush, sweeping toward her house. Neighbors fought the fires themselves with hoses not quite long enough while they waited for the volunteer firefighters to arrive. Rakes swept away the tinder and the kindling. The fires never came close enough to her home to be a threat, but her fear was real, so she planned. The back of the house was a short drop from a single story, but the front of the house stood a story high on a steep slope, and the thought of dropping from one of its windows into the dark night was terrifying. So at night she begged God not to let a fire happen.

She was afraid of more than fire. She feared the wide, round eyes of the cat and dog in the paintings that hung on the wall above her head, and the tiny grandfather clock her mother was so proud of that sang songs in her mind and counted her heartbeat as it went tic, tic, tic...    

you are dying

you are dying

yes you are

yes you are

no one can save you

no one can save you

here I come

here I come

She feared her brother’s screaming, violent nightmares that wrenched the night in two. She’d wake to his throttling screams, his thrashing at the wall and the blankets, fighting the very demons she saw inside her own mind even while the bald light overhead scorched the room in which he slept. Her parents struggled to quiet him. Her father gripped him in his arms, assuring him that he was safe. But she knew, just as her brother did, that the demons didn’t need the dark to exist inside his mind.

Guilt consumed her. Guilt for some unnamed sin she’d committed but couldn’t remember. It racked her body in shame. In the quiet house when she was alone, she’d fall to her knees at an armchair, bury her face in the pillowed seat and scream to God for relief. Relief from the paralyzing sense that she’d committed an unpardonable sin, that she was consigned to hell without knowing why; relief that would take away the darkness that she wore like a cloak, that choked her and stole her breath.  At church she was reminded she was a sinner every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, every Wednesday evening. Sin was constant. Guilt was necessary. Repentance unto salvation was the only relief, and so she repented daily and prayed the prayer that would save her soul every night, begging God to take away the demons. 

Sleep didn’t take away the fear. Her sleep was haunted. Deep, peaceful sleep was rare which meant  the day was filled with groggy remembrances of the nighttime terror. She couldn’t explain the heaviness in her stomach or the fear in her mind. She learned to smile when she was afraid. She learned early in life to pretend to be what others needed her to be. Happy, efficient, well-behaved, well liked. Pretending at home was easy enough. All she had to do was read. Everyone left her alone because reading made you smart, reading kept you quiet. When she read, life was was easy. The monsters died in the end. Good won. And the nightmares were just words.