Some Q. and Some A.

Though not necessarily surprised at finding the toilet full of debris--copies of my books, the jewelry I had given her, and some of her feces--I was shocked at the vulgarity of the note that had been scotch-taped to its handle.

I am giving you everything you ever gave me back to you. I wish there was more. Enjoy it, it’s all you have left because I am gone forever and am never, ever, ever coming back. I wish there was more.

Love always Denise

XOXOXOXOXO

you stupid fucker

“XOXOXOXOXO” means “hugs & kisses” and I still don’t know what “Love always Denise” means. Was she trying to tell me that, despite the anger and the bitterness that prompted her to leave my books, her jewelry, and (presumably) her shit in such a sodden arrangement, she would still love me in absentia? Or, was I being instructed to continue (or, perhaps, to really start) to “love always Denise” (Love Denise Always)? And did “stupid fucker” mean that she didn’t like me or that I had sex like an idiot? Boy, that girl sure could be confusing. I had already started to look for her to ask for a clarification, an explanation, of those confusing portions of her note before I remembered that it all meant that she wasn’t around to answer my questions anymore.

When I heard the back door open and then close, I remembered, guiltily, that I had forgotten about Ariel, Denise’s 11-year-old daughter. I was then surprised that A) Denise had not taken Ariel with her when she left and B) that since Denise had not taken Ariel, that she had not somehow arranged for her daughter to be in the bathroom, if not actually in the toilet, with the rest of her message.

“Hello?” I heard Ariel’s thin, 11-year-old voice from the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and the corresponding rattle, of the jars of condiments stored in the racks. “Hel-lo-oh?”

“I’m in the bathroom,” I called back to her.

*

Several hours later, Ariel and I sat side by side on a couch in the living room (there were three, three couches; one living room) looking together at the place where a television had once been. Three couches, one living room, and zero televisions seemed somewhat imbalanced to me but we usually sat thusly on more normal evenings watching a television that was no longer there and I did not wish to upset Ariel any more than I thought she should be normally.

“We’ll have to go shopping,” Ariel said eventually.

‘Good,’ I thought.

“And get some new stuff,” she continued.

‘Excellent,’ I continued thinking. ‘She’s adjusting.’

“Like a TV,” Ariel attempted.

“We’ll see,” I replied, not wanting to step too far out of my normal character, not wanting to upset her anymore than I thought she should be.

“She does this all the time,” Ariel said.

“Who?” I answered. “Does what? When?"

I returned to the house with plastic grocery bags full of things that I had been certain Ariel would love. Though I knew that food could never replace her mother, I felt that the child should somehow be comforted, should know that someone cared enough for her to bring her delicious snacks.

As I began to unload boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinners, Cherry Cokes, Count Chocula breakfast cereal, Hostess Sno-Balls, beef jerky, Butterfinger candy bars, and Strawberry Quik, Ariel came into the kitchen.

“What is all this?” she asked me.

“It’s all for you!” I crowed. “It’s all your favorite things!”

She looked at me for a moment before she again spoke.

“How long have you known me?”

I did a quick count in my head. “Almost eleven months.”

“Have you ever seen any of this kind of stuff in this house before?”

“No, sweetie. That’s why I got it for you.”

She looked at me for a moment before she left the kitchen.

I was positive that it was not possible to return groceries for a refund and I didn’t want to try to explain how these had been accidental purchases anyway. I set the brightly colored boxes and packages in a long row outside the house along the edge of the sidewalk. By morning, every single item was gone.

*

On the way home from work that next evening, I realized that I was cashless and, quite rightly, assumed that Denise had taken the checkbook and its corresponding money when she left. I pulled into a convenience store, removed the water pistol from the glove box where I kept it, and went inside. I walked to the register and pointed the pistol at the clerk. Without a word, she opened her drawer and handed me 63 dollars. I refused the change she offered and she returned it to the drawer. She smiled as I left through the door marked with feet and inches. The water pistol is made of lime green plastic and has the words BIG SQUIRT embossed in gold along the barrel. I have “robbed” stores like this many times and have never had any trouble, have never seen these “robberies” mentioned in any newspaper, have never seen my description or height in feet and inches on the television show “Crimestoppers,” have never been approached by any member of any law enforcement agency, and stopped feeling regretful over 10 months ago.

*

When I arrived home, Ariel was sitting on the porch reading an old textbook. I had no idea what textbook it was and did not remember keeping any textbooks but there she was reading one. I gave her twenty dollars.

“Oh. Great,” she said. “Now my friends will love me.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I told her on my way into the house.

I dialed a number I got from the business personals section of the classified ads of the newspaper in our town.

“Deja vu hotline,” a voice said but, before I could begin talking, it also said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve had this conversation before.”

*

Ariel came in the door with a new hairstyle.

“Isn’t that a new hairstyle?” I asked her.

She looked at me a moment before she answered.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she said and she looked at me for a moment before she left me sitting on the couch. I could hear her pick up the telephone in the other room and dial a number. It seemed like something like this had happened before. At least once before. Before.

*

Something had hit me and I had tried to become conscious but it was difficult because I had been asleep. It was Ariel hitting me and saying, “Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”

When I was awake enough, I said, “What is it, honey?”

“Earthquakes,” she said. “There’s earthquakes on the TV. You come and watch them.”

“Honey,” I told her, “we don’t have a TV anymore. Remember?”

“Oh,” she said and let me go back to sleep. Again.

*

The next time I remember I was asleep and Ariel woke me up was when I was sleeping on one of the couches in the living room and she slammed the door walking in. I woke up and she threw my BIG SQUIRT water pistol into my lap.

“Here,” she said, holding a twenty dollar bill at me. “Now your friends will love you.”

“Thank you, honey,” I told her when I took it.

She just looked at me for a moment before she went back outside.

“You’re welcome,” I called after her.

When I answered the ringing telephone I discovered it was Denise calling us. After I said “hello” I listened to her voice for what seemed like the longest time.

“Yeah, yeah,” I was finally able to say. “I’m sure we’ve had this conversation before.” And hung up.

“Who was that on the phone?” Ariel asked from the other room.

“When?” I answered.

*

I began to disobey traffic laws. At first, I would merely slow down at the stop signs, look both ways, and proceed. I began to do the same at stoplights. I began not to yield, began not to look both ways. Soon, I drove without obeying a single symbolic directive, as if I was the only driver on the roads, as if the rules did not apply to me, as if all the obvious signs weren’t there at all.

Not one single bad thing happened.

*

I began to wonder why Ariel was apparently not going to school and approached her about it.

“Why are you apparently not going to school?” I asked her.

“I go to school,” she answered. “I go to school every single day. Except Saturday and Sunday. I go to Horace Mann Elementary School and am in Mrs. Whalen’s sixth grade class. I bring home notebooks and textbooks and can often be found at the kitchen table doing homework in the early evenings. Jeez.”

“And why, then,” I asked her, “have I not noticed this?”

“Because,” she answered, “you leave before I do in the morning and return after I am already home.”

I had to admire her because it was really that simple and easy to understand the way she explained it.

*

One night I was awakened by someone hitting me and it was Ariel. Again.

“Wake up,” she said. “Wake up. Wake up.”

“Haven’t we had this conversation before?” I asked her.

“There’s mudslides and tornadoes on TV,” she said. “Get up and watch them with me.”

“Honey,” I tried to tell her again, “we don’t have a TV anymore.”

“We do now,” she answered. “Get up.”

I was glad to hear we had a TV and, after I watched it, glad she’d gotten me awake. Those were some good disasters we watched that night.

*

One day, I approached Ariel with the intent to confront her.

“Okay,” I said. “If you go to school, what did you learn today?”

She just looked at me for a moment over the top of what I had only at that instant recognized as a textbook.

“In school. Today,” she answered. “We learned how telephones work.”

*

I was in the bedroom listening to the call-in program on the clock radio. It was 3:47 pm. The call-in program was coming from a (clock) radio station that played tapes that had been made in Los Angeles, California. They said it was a beautiful day “in the city” and that the topic was “protectionism.” All in all, I found that great. I heard the front door open and, a second later, I heard the front door close.

“How was school? Today,” I called out. “What did you learn? Today.”

“What?” I heard Denise, not my little Ariel, reply.

“Jeez,” I answered. “Where did you come from?”

(Originally published in Triage, Boulder, Colorado, 1990)

Deus Ex Machina

Special Education sucked and even though something like that wouldn’t happen in today’s modern society, when it’s 1965 and it’s a pretty small town in the far far-away miles from any large town and you’re only in the third grade anyway and you still limp and one of your eyes droops and there’s “epilepsy” talk floating around downstairs when they think you’re asleep like you can’t use a dictionary anymore even if you already know what “epilepsy” and “thrombosis” and “embolism” and “intra-cerebral hemorrhage” more or less mean and it’s pretty obvious you need more attention than your old regular third-grade teacher can give you with a whole class full of regular normal kids so basically when it’s time for you to go back to school they send you into the big room with the mongoloids and the retards and the really messed up kids you hardly ever saw before with even their own special bus.

And that’s where they stuck me after I got out of the hospital. I still had physical therapy every afternoon after school with either my mom or a nurse pulling on my legs and arms usually until I cried and then a little bit longer. I also had speech therapy three times a week at school where I was excused from bead sorting exercises and went to the room by the nurse’s office and said “pa pa pa” for twenty minutes while the speech therapist held a mirror in front of my face saying “pa pa pa,” too, and I would try and try and try to keep watching her lipsticked lips and not ever look at the mirror but it was hard but at least I usually didn’t cry until I was on my way back to the Special Ed room and I could hear the hoots and moans of my new classmates. Sometimes some one or two of them would see me as I slipped sideways through a crack in the door and would say, “Hi, Naomi!” and then some other few would start saying “pa pa pa” because a lot of Special Ed kids took speech therapy and knew the exercise.

I usually just read library books all day at a table under the window anyway since I could still read and do math and everything even if my side was twitchy and I had all those scars. That’s what I was doing and that’s where I was when Diana finally came over, came rolling over with her arms all hooked up and crooked and her feet sort of pulling the wheelchair along. She was scooting herself toward me, little bit by little bit, and a foamy white rope of slobber was dangling from the corner of her crooked mouth and as she breathed it would go part way back in her mouth and then fall back out as she exhaled. No way was I looking up from my book and I tried to let my lengthening hair cover my face and eyes.

Finally, even though I was mostly looking straight at the pages of my book, a book of Greek mythology I had read and reread millions of times, I could look sort of sideways down past the edge of the book and see her navy blue Keds with the scuffed-up dirty toes from all her scooting right next to my everyday loafers which were kind of getting scuffed-up, too, because of my limp. I just had to look up and try to ignore her saliva string, the big dark wet spot on her corduroy jumper.

“Uh yeed?” she asked me.

“Huh?”

“Uh yeed?” she repeated and waved a twisted little arm sort of at my book.

It took me a second.

“Do I read?”

She nodded and made a noise.

“‘Course I read. Why else would I be sitting here?”

“Yeed a may?” she continued. “Yeed. A. May?”

I thought about it.

“Read to you?”

Again, she nodded and made the “yes” noise.

“Can’t you read?”

She looked at me for a moment, wobbling and squirming in her chair.

“Ant unna ayesh,” she said and waited for me to figure it out.

“You can’t turn the pages?”

She nodded vigorously and then twisted herself, small and knotted in the huge looking wheelchair, to gesture back over her shoulder with her chin, to point with her chin at the Special Ed teachers behind her.

“Ay ont ep may.” She tried to whisper but it didn’t really work since she had to struggle so much to say anything at all.

They wouldn’t help her and already it seemed that was about what to expect here in the big room and I, maybe now we, were pretty much on our own. Most of the Special Ed teachers spent most of their time walking around the tables wiping stuff off of people and pulling things out of their mouths and saying “Good. Good. Go-oood.”

“Jeez,” I said. “Scoot over in here and I’ll hold the book like this, see, and we can both read it but I’m not going to read aloud if you can read to yourself. Tell me when to turn the page, okay?”

“‘Kay,” she answered and we spent the rest of that period together and even all of the next period reading together. When the real ‘tards were doing zippers-buttons-snaps-&-bows, Diane and I were reading about the Gorgon, Persephone, and Io. I turned the pages and found out she a was faster reader than me even with all those Greek names and was always waiting for me to finish the page which made me a little bit nervous and I sort of starting skipping words to keep up.

“Have you read this one before?” I finally asked her.

“Yethsh!” and the force and the suddenness of her reply pushed another puddle of spit-foam out of Diane’s mouth and it dripped across her chin to splash in her lap. “Aye ofv ayih!”

“Yeah, I love it, too.”

We didn’t say another word to each other until it was time for special Special Ed recess when they made us go outside and play by ourselves and sometimes I would look at my old classroom and see the stuff my old friends had taped up on the windows like geometric snowflakes scissored out of huge sheets of newsprint or tempera paintings of some field trip they’d taken to the dairy farm or the state capital or someplace like that.

Cool Turtles I Have Known

Okay. This is me and I want to tell you guys some stories I know about turtles; some of these are true stories about turtles, some are stories I only heard about turtles and some are maybe stories I made up about turtles.

Number One

I have a cousin and we’ll call him Gary because that’s what his mom and dad, my aunt and uncle, named him. His name is Gary and when he was a little boy, somebody brought a turtle over to his house and showed it to him. Gary didn’t know it was a turtle and he said “COOKIE!” really loud and he snatched the turtle up and he put it in his mouth.

Nobody got hurt. The turtle was okay and Gary was okay. Still, it was an important day for everybody that was there. We all heard about it later. It’s the kind of story that families tell over and over and over again. I don’t know what happened to the turtle.

Number Two

There was a turtle named Maybelline because she had such beautiful eyes because Maybelline is a kind of eye make-up that girls wear sometimes. Anyway, she lived here and there around the Rio Grande in New Mexico until one day a kid snatched her up and put her in a box and then drove her up the bosque into Albuquerque. For a while, Maybelline lived in the pet store that where the boy sold her. Then the pet store sold her to me.

It was pretty good when Maybelline came to stay with us. We had a bunch of pets then and she just fit right in and became part of the family.

Then, one dark night a terrible storm blew in to Albuquerque and, while the lightening flashed blue and the thunder rolled heavy, a strong blast of wind opened up the screen door. In her fright, Maybelline slipped out that open door and nobody noticed until it was too late! We looked and looked for Maybelline that night. We got some flashlights and we looked under the bushes and, even though it was a silly thing to do, we called out, “Maybelline! Oh, Maybelline! Where are you?”

And we were really sad when we didn’t find her. We stayed up extra late that night and got up extra early the next morning, but we couldn’t find Maybelline.

Well. One whole year went by and we sure missed Maybelline. We managed to get by, somehow, but we often thought of her and how her beautiful eyes would sparkle when she saw a tasty strawberry.

Here comes the good part. After all that time (remember, we waited one whole year) a friend of ours called up on the telephone.

“You guys like turtles, right?” he asked us.

We said, “Of course. You bet. Sure thing. No problem.” And then we asked him, “Why do you ask?”

He said, “I found this really good looking turtle in the middle of a very busy street so I stopped and I picked her up but I don’t want to keep her so I thought I would call you and see if you guys together would want to see that she gets a good home.”

“Sure. Of course. You bet. Sure thing. No problem.”” we said. “You bring that good looking turtle right over here as quickly as you can.”

(Have you guessed it yet?)

When that guy, our friend, came over with the turtle he had found we took one look and we knew right away that it was Maybelline. Who else would look at us with such beautiful eyes?

Number Three

When I was a really little boy, long before I could ever read a book by myself, I had a little turtle with red cheeks that lived in a bowl with a plastic palm tree on a plastic island in the middle. I named that turtle “Rockla” and it was the same kind of turtle with red cheeks that my cousin Gary thought was a cookie when he was a little boy.

Number Four

Just the other day I read in the newspaper about a man who called the emergency line in his home town, that 911 number, and said, “I hab a turdel ond by dose” and all the emergency operators thought he was joking until the paramedic guys showed up and had to take it, a real life turtle, off his, a real life guy’s, nose with some pliers.

Number Five

When I was a little kid I had some friends who were boys and who were brothers and they had a big turtle but I can’t remember what that turtle’s name was. Anyway, one hot summer day when little boys like us, my friends and me, start getting sleepy and turtles like theirs just start getting energized, that turtle that they had decided to go swimming and that’s the last we ever saw of that turtle and we all remember how the grown-ups that summer kept making fun of us because we let a turtle run away. They’d act like they were acting like us and talk in funny, slow-motion voices and pretend to run in slow-motion calling, “Cooommmme baaaaaack, tuuuuuurtle” in slow-motion voices.

We looked everywhere for that turtle but we could never find him.

Number Six

They told us one time that some people think the whole entire world rests on the back of one big big turtle and I remember thinking then, at that time, that if anybody could hold up the world, a turtle probably could. It might make a little, soft noise and it might make a little, soft tear, but you can bet that turtle would never let the world drop. No way, turtle!

Number Seven

On time when it was spring, we went to visit our friends Peter and Anne and they live way up in Taos, New Mexico. When we got up in the morning and they were making up the breakfast that we were going to eat, there was this big scratching sound from a big box they had. At first, nobody knew what it was and then we knew right away what we had heard. It was the turtles waking up. They had been sleeping all winter long in that cardboard box and then, that morning, they decided to wake up and look around.

We all went outside to eat our breakfasts and we watched the turtles blink at the sunshine they hadn’t seen in so long and then start taking big bites out of the daffodils which they hadn’t eaten since last year and we all kept taking big bites of pancakes and saying, “Good morning, turtles! Good morning, sleepyheads!”

Number Eight

One time a turtle saved my life. I was just going to college for my very second semester of my very first year and I was just walking down a very flat road in Sarasota, Florida, where my college was when I saw a sparkle in the bushes. I was much younger than I am now then and so I decided to go over and see what was sparkling there by the side of the road. It was a turtle in the weeds by the side of the road and the reason that turtle’s eyes were sparkling was because there was this crazy driver coming up behind me and he would have hit me unless his headlights had hit that turtle’s eyes and led me off the flat road to safety

Number Nine

Our latest turtle is really cool. We named her Cookie after the turtle my cousin Gary almost ate that time. This new Cookie got real sick one time and we had to take her to the veterinarian. The doctor told us all sorts of things we didn’t know about turtles. She told us they need Vitamin A for their eyes. She told us a vitamin shot every once in a while sure wouldn’t hurt them. She told us how old Cookie was by looking at one of her scales under a microscope. It turns out that Cookie is 6 years old.

Right now, Cookie is asleep in the garage in a box full of blankets and newspapers. That’s how she’ll spend the winter. When springtime comes, she’ll wake up and we’ll all be so glad to see her.

“Good morning, Cookie!” we will say. “Good morning, sleepyhead.”