The thing is that I don’t know how to be a friend.  I don’t know how to go through something that feels like having  your heart handed back to you julienned and lightly seared without withdrawing completely. My feeling is this:  It’s my heart, and I’ll eat it in the privacy of my shame.  It’s just easier to get from Shame to “They Don’t Really Want You There Anyway” then it is to get to literalminded.com, or yahoo IM, or even the telephone for that matter.

I’m sorry I haven’t been around at all over the past few months.  I miss you all.  

Today I opened a file I hadn’t touched for probably more than three months. I had written twenty pages, but then ran out of ideas and stopped. I really want to try and finish this story, so I’ve decided to go through it and edit it. I’ll be posting bits now and again. Feedback would definitely be appreciated.

***   Joanne Lizzy Robertson   ***

I’ve always loved lighting storms, ever since I was a little child. But this night it was different. I stood outside on my mother’s porch, waiting. Where was he? I shifted from one leg to the other, becoming impatient. The wind blew ravenously, swallowing the thundering rain with a howling swoosh. A bright flash whitened the village and a thunder explosion filled the houses with a deep growl. “Come on, Fred,” I mumbled, seeing my breath like steam in the cold. My wish was answered instantaneously as a car came around the bend with a flicker of lighting.

I undid the purple umbrella and let it pop open, as the thunder rumbled in the distance, growing fainter. I stumbled along the pebbled path, a heavy suitcase in one hand and a handbag and umbrella in the other. I was wearing fashionable boots, a tight pair of jeans and a blue raincoat. My dark brown hair fell loosely on my shoulders. I opened the waist-height gate and looked back at the house. The light of my mothers bedroom was still on.

Fred, noticing I had luggage, pulled his raincoat on and got out of his car. He stood next to me.

“Rotten whether, isn’t it?” He made himself heard over the noise. I didn’t reply. He took my baggage from me and opened the boot. I stepped into the car with a sigh, my arms outstretched in the rain, I closed the umbrella and shut the cold out.

A moment after I heard the back of the car slam Fred hopped in. He took off his hood, happy to be back in the warmth of the car.

“So, were is it you’d like to go, Liz?” he asked while throwing his coat on the back seats.

“Well, I need to get to Hampshire, but I can always arrange for a taxi half way if you have other plans.” He was frowning, I feared he’d say he couldn’t take me that far.

“Hmm, no it’ll be alright. Actually, got some things I have to do in Hampshire as well.” he smiled, “How about some music?” Good old Fred could always make things seem better. How he managed to remain cheerful so often I will never know.

“As long as it’s not heavy metal, or anything you know I won’t like,” I agreed, perhaps music would get my mind off things.

“Right then, lets see.” Fred got out a folder of CD’s and was flipping though them, “The Beatles, Israel Kamakawiwo’dle,” I burst out laughing, the way he had said it was hilarious. Fred smiled, “I’ve also got, err, REM and— ” I had to stop him, he was about to go through a whole list of singers and bands I never heard of.

“Lets listen to REM,” I decided, he put the CD. “Make yourself comfortable, Liz. We’re in for a long ride.” I took off my coat and fastened my safety belt .REM started playing in the background. The car began to move and I leaned back and I shut my eyes. The lightning had stopped, but I could hear the rain and wind louder and heavier than before.

“Sorry to disturb you, Lizzy, but, there’s a woman is running up the road, it looks as though she’s trying to get our attention.” I quickly looked over my shoulder and sighed. A woman I knew far too well was running like mad, waving her arms and shouting something I couldn’t hear.

“Stop the car, Fred, it is my mother,” I groaned. I pushed the car door open and let the umbrella jump up. She was wearing a pinkish nightgown, matching slippers and had rollers in her hair. I walked hesitantly towards her.

“Lizzy,” she sobbed. Feeling guilty I let her take me in her arms. She was crying and shivering all over. I prepared myself for a speech.

 “Lizzy, dear…Go, darling. Please, go, before…” I was startled by that reaction, it was what I least expected. I tried to take a step back, but my mother was holding me too tightly.

“Thank you…Thank you, mother,” I replied gratefully. I put my free arm around her shoulder, holding the umbrella over us with the other. I was at least a head taller.

“I left a note, in my bedroom, mum.. It explains… I’ll phone you tomorrow sometime.” She stepped back slightly so that she could look in my eyes, her frail, bony arms were holding on to mine. Her hands holding on to my elbows. She smiled, looking proud.

She must have been expecting me to leave for good, for she took a big tattered envelope from under her dressing gown, ready to give to me.

“Take this, Joanne, open it in three weeks,” she handed it over. It was a lot heavier than I expected and examining it further I noticed it was overfull and had to be kept shut with tape. On the front was my name beautifully written, Joanne Lizzy Robertson, the 23rd.  The brown paper, dark ink and the sound of the rain made it seem very dramatic. I couldn’t help feeling the envelope was important, but my curiosity had to wait. I remembered what I was meant to be doing and heard the voice echoing in my head again.

“I…have to go…” I couldn’t say more.

“I’ll miss you, Joanne,” My mother smiled awkwardly, her voice was clear over the clattering rain above and around us. I nodded reassuringly.

“I know… I… me too, mum.” I bent down so she could kiss me.

“Now, go, my daughter…” She let me go. I unzipped my green jumper and hid the envelope underneath so it wouldn’t get wet. I gave my mother the purple umbrella, it was hers anyway. I didn’t have the time to think of the questions scattered around in my mind. Did she know? How could she? She couldn’t know, I hadn’t told anyone. Why was she telling me to leave? What was in the envelope?

Not until I got into the car did I look back at my mother, waving and throwing kisses in my direction. I felt horrible and selfish leaving her behind standing alone in the rain.

REM was playing in the background: ‘it’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine’ Was it the end or the beginning? Whatever it was, I didn’t feel fine…

Some women have daddy complexes. Wedding pictures are taken; son-in-law stands head to head with father-in-law; professions, habits, religious affiliations are matched subconsciously, or not.

We go to a bar, my husband and I. He is my height, five foot seven inches, three inches shy of my father, and weighs eighty pounds less than the man who taught me how to hunt.

They like to hunt together. Sometimes we drive down to Kentucky on Saturday nights and wait for the hunt. My father always knocks before he comes into the room he built, the room where we sleep. I imagine he’s afraid of seeing me naked, bedsheets thrown aside during the night. But I’m not. I never am. I wear an old tee shirt of my husband’s; the name of his first band ironed above my left breast. My husband jerks at the knock - the kids don’t knock on our bedroom door at home - then says, “I’m up.”

Why doesn’t he ever say that to me when I slip over him in the morning?

At the bar, my husband is asked to sing. He looks at me and winks. His voice is what lured me. Never mind that he was small. Never mind that his thighs were the size of my biceps. He could sing. So he does.

He sings one song after another. I think I’m forgotten. He’s stopped looking at me. He’s singing to the entire crowd; the men who wait until their cigarette ashes threaten to dirty the bar before tapping their smokes against tin ashtrays, the women who dance on the floor - pecking like chickens in a pen.

A man sits down next to me. My husband points and smiles through the lyrics. The man nods to my husband.

“Do you remember me?” he asks.

“Not at all,” I say.

He orders a whiskey sour and I laugh. A sour. Not straight. All sugared up.

“What do you do now?” he asks.

“I sit at home.”

“I sit at home sometimes, too.”

My father never sits at home. He always has something to do. He helped my brother build a cabin at his lake last year. He owns two autobody shops. He likes to hunt and fish.

My husband goes outside during the band break. He’s part of the band now even though we showed up on the sly.

“It’s better to talk now,” the man says. “Jared.” He touches my hand. “You’re Crystal. Crystal Gayle.”

He smiles this big grin that puffs his cheeks and makes me look away. Even though years ago I grew tired of the tugs on my long hair, of my namesake, while my head is turned to the side, I laugh too.

The next weekend we go camping. My husband and Jared have rekindled their old friendship. They’ve spoken on the phone for the past three nights, planned, called other friends, and my husband, for the first time in years, found a babysitter all on his own.

“Have Crys look,” he says.

Some guy I don’t know passes me a porno mag.

“Are they real or fake?” my husband asks. “Crys knows,” he says. “She can spot them a mile away.”

“I don’t want to look at this,” I say, tossing the magazine into the bonfire.

“What the fuck?” The owner of the magazine stands up on the other side of the fire. He has on plastic flip flops from Walmart and is holding a can of Busch light.

“Grow up,” I say, before walking down to the lake.

“Maybe she’s seen too much,” I hear my husband say. “Here’s five bucks. Sorry about the magazine.”

No one comes down to me for a very long time. The sun has faded into the kind of orange that reminds me of the sherbert Push-Pops my dad used to buy at the local grocery when I was a kid.

“I’d tell you they were childish but you’d think I was trying to make small talk,” Jared says, sitting on the sandstone rock below me.

“Did you ever do this when you were a kid?” he asks. He takes a pocketknife from his pocket and scrapes against the rock, collecting bits of sand in the palm of his hand. He holds them out to me for inspection and I’m afraid to touch his hand.

“Yes. When I was bored. Are you bored?”

“Only slightly,” he says. “It’s wearing off.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Ditch the mag or storm off?” I ask.

“Ditch the mag.”

“Women are women are women,” I say.

Jared gets off the rock and sits next to me. He stretches out his legs, that like mine, are thick; mine from dancing - I don’t ask about his.

“It’s time to eat,” he says.

“Is that why you came down here?” I ask.

“Yes.”

He sits across the fire. I sit beside my husband.

“Try this,” my husband says, balancing a bite of coleslaw and Ramen noodles on his fork.

“Didn’t you just cut your Brautwurst with that fork?”

“Just eat it. You’ll like it.”

“No thank you.”

The only thing I have to eat is what I brought - pasta salad. I try not to look at Jared but notice, through the blue light of the fire, the curly noodles and dark bits of veggies that fill his plate.

Someone brought two inflatable boats. They are tied off to a stake in the dirt on the bank of the deep.

I know how to row a boat. The lake behind the house where I grew up had water moccasins, cattails, and dragonflies that skimmed across the algae. My dad taught me how to row. We used to fish together until my parents divorced and I read a PETA magazine which told me about the nerves in the mouths of fish.

The lake is quiet except for the distant claps around the bonfire where my husband sits strumming a guitar.

Out on the water, I float in a teal and yellow boat; my life dependent upon the lifejacket cinched around my chest and the strength in my legs.

My husband made me bring the walkie-talkies.

“Are you coming in?” he asks.

“Sometime,” I say.

“I’m trashed. I have to go to bed.”

“I’ll be back soon.”

Jared is waiting on the bank. “Are you in for the night?” he asks.

“I’m tired of rowing,” I say.

“May I?”

My husband is asleep in the tent. Maybe not. It’s only been fifteen minutes.

“Do you want me to come along?”

“That’s the only reason I want to go out,” he says.

Jared doesn’t walk into the water to push off like I did. He climbs into the boat, sticks the oar into the mud, and thrusts us out into the deep olive water.

“You still don’t remember me, do you?” Jared asks.

I don’t know how I could have ever met someone so stunning and forgotten him.

“No, I don’t.”

“When your parents divorced, your dad rented a house down Asher road, way out in the cornfields. My parents owned those cornfields. You used to go 4wheeler riding with my younger brother. I helped him set up the tent where you used to sleep with him at night.”

“I was only thirteen. That was nineteen years ago,” I reflect.

“It was.”

Jared’s hair was frizzy before he came onto the lake; a brown, uninspiring mess of split ends that touched his shoulders. I tried to picture him from twenty years ago but couldn’t. Maybe I never even saw him. Maybe he used to sit several yards away, behind a tree or a haybale, and watch his younger brother lift my shirt.

One night my father drove his pickup truck up and down the gravel road looking for me. With the spotlight clamped to the driver’s window, he slowly churned through the gravel, bounced into ruts, and called my name. I know he heard the 4wheeler start, heard me speed away towards home. I couldn’t look at him, not with swollen red lips and wild eyes and hair twisted into knots.

We never talked about it again. He didn’t take the 4wheeler keys. He didn’t ground me.

I didn’t ride through dark dusty cornfields in the middle of the night for several years afterwards.

The boat is small, intended for two people sitting in the same direction. Jared and I were facing each other, so I had to cross my ankles and lay them across the side of the boat.

There is a cove, three hundred yards from our camp. Jared doesn’t row there. He stops rowing and lets the current take us closer to the cove.

He reaches out with one finger and touches my ankle. I don’t move. I want to reach out and wrap his beard hair around my finger, twirl a piece where the brown thick hair begins to fade into red.

I have a scar on my right foot. When I was seven I stepped on a piece of glass buried in the dirt in the barn. I knelt down and picked up the blue glass, a shard of a Mason jar. My dad came in from feeding the horses while I was standing there holding the glass. Paternal instinct? The quizzical look on my face? Maybe he was just looking down, but he saw the wet brown dirt under my foot, picked me up, and ran to the house.

I heard him talking to my mother in the next room as I lay on the couch with one of his red bandannas wrapped around my foot. To the bone, he said. I undid the knot on the side of my foot and pulled one of the ends. I wanted to see the bone. How often do you get to see your insides from the outside?

My mother fainted when I held up the foot and pulled back my middle toe, exposing my tiny pink bone.

Jared found the scar. It’s a callous with a split now. It looks like a smiling mouth with thin white lips. He clicks it with his fingernail. He must know everything about me.

“Are we supposed to talk?” I ask Jared.

“Do you want to?”

“Sort of.”

“Ask me a question then.”

“How do you know my husband?”

“We used to work together several years ago. He was an apprentice and I was his journeyman. He’s a good worker. Quick and smart.”

“Why did you ask me to come out here with you?” I ask.

He chuckles.

His legs are so long that balancing them on the edge of the boat pushes them behind my head; so hairy that I can’t tell the color of the flesh beneath.

“We should go back, then. I need to pee,” I say.

“How badly do you need to go? We’re pretty far from camp. I could row you to the shore on the cove.”

The walkie talkie hadn’t beeped since I last talked to my husband. I couldn’t remember the communication range. I didn’t really care.

The shore is strewn with plastic bottles and aluminum cans and beer bottles and rotten wood. Jared follows me to the bike trail several yards from shore.

I pull down my panties and squat, reach behind me and bunch the thin cotton fabric in one hand. Pee splatters against the dirt and mists my ankles.

Jared watches, stands five feet away with his arms crossed. There is a look on his face that I haven’t seen years.

I stand up completely before reaching down for my panties.

Lights pierce the tall thin trees that grow at the water’s edge. I notice them first and wonder if someone is lost or has drowned in a drunken stupor.

Jared and I walk back to the boat. That is when I hear my name being called.

We take the long way around the cove. Jared rows quickly and quietly, only a soft plunk escapes the water when he sinks the oars.

A quarter mile from camp, Jared pulls the boat onto the shore.

“I have to leave,” he says.

“No one knows we were together,” I plead.

“I can’t see you again.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to kiss you and it’s wrong.”

Closer to camp, I call Cory on the walkie talkie. I drifted out of range, I say. I was on the other side of the cove. No, I’m fine. I didn’t realize he was calling for me. I’ll be back before he will. I’m close to camp.

I lean over the boat and dunk my face in the water. The olive water is fresh. It cleanses. It purifies. It rinses away the wild in my eyes.

She’s finally gone. I deadbolt the front door so she can’t get back in.
If my mother returns, I’ll tell her I didn’t hear the door. I was
afraid. I was sleeping. I’ll never tell her I was lonely.



I stand before my hazy bedroom mirror and check off my inventory; a
Fuck the World poster, dead flowers in a dirty vase, and tiny strings
of incense ash hanging off the bookshelf, dangerously hovering above
thick red shag carpet. I unwrap the white towel, dingy and stained from
the black dye fading out of my mohawk, and lie down on the bed. He
always liked it when I got naked before I called.



“Hello?”



“Come see me tonight,” I say into the phone.



“Crys?”



“Come see me.”



“Where are you?”



“Back at my mother’s.”



“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”



Anxiety awakens in my heart. I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want
to know that I’ll only have tonight, but I have to. I need a lump to
rise in the back of my throat. I need a pain in my heart that draws up
my stomach. I need to feel like I can never have him again. I lie to
myself and say this will be the last time.



I go to the mirror. I want him to see me and ache. I pull my hair over
my shoulders so the freshly shaven sides of my head are covered. I want
to look innocent and helpless - at first. But even under the cover of
hair, the rings in my nipples catch the light of the lamp. He’ll have
to use his imagination.



He’ll stop at the park three blocks away. He’ll trot down the sidewalk
on the north side of the road where there are no streetlamps. He’ll
hold onto the latch on the gate. He’ll push the gate closed and gently
lower the latch, without raising a sound or suspicion.



I hear a grunt below my bedroom window when he climbs on top of the
iron railing and reaches above the kitchen window. The key slides into
the door. The deadbolt locks behind him.



He doesn’t say anything when he comes through my bedroom door. He
slowly undresses, watching me, searching my face. I smile and he climbs
into bed.



Every time with him is new now, despite the routine that brings us
together. The moon reflects off his black hairless chest. I kiss it. He
buries his nose in my hair, and I chew the end of a dreadlock.



He is so sweet when he cries. A hint of heartbroken-induced wrinkles
curl around his eyes and white teeth gnash between beautiful full lips.



I wrap my arms around his chest and feel for the long thin scars on his
back, scars put there by me when I was young and selfless. My thumb
brushes across the ripples and he grins through the tears, remembering
that night at the park, in the backseat of the blue Lincoln, shadows of
the trees dancing across my belly. Beautiful, white, perfect teeth in a
grin I will never see again.



We don’t have sex or make love just yet. We remember emotions. Every
sour word ever passed between us lies in the bed. We toss it back and
forth. What made those words slip over our tongues? What caused us to
separate in anger? How could we so easily tuck away our relationship -
this relationship - and pretend as though we could go on forever
without each other?



When I was young and selfless, he used to pull me against his chest and
surround me with his arms. I was helpless, completely dependent upon
the steel cage he built around me. Tonight, I pull him to my chest. His
breath fogs the metal rings in my nipples. He sobs. Without me, he
says, life is lonely.



But I know he is just like me. Without me isn’t lonely, just as without
him isn’t lonely. Finality hurts. Finality is a song you’ve heard but
only remember two words of the lyrics. You can’t explain it. You can’t
explain what you remember clearly enough so that another can help you
find it again. That last final kiss, the lips you know you’ll never
feel again, the wet pillowcase, the rush, the anger, the hate, the
absolute goodness of being out of control are why you look for it again
and again. You know that once the newness of the first lingering kiss
wears off, you’ll never feel those emotions again until you convince
yourself it’s the end.

The Three Little Pigs