Onze Labs

Immaculate Hearts

    The first thing Anne noticed about Eva was that she looked great. Fit, well dressed, sporting a flattering hairstyle that framed her small face nicely, she appeared to be at peace with life. Eva made the same mental remarks about Anne, but wasn't surprised by the observations because Anne had always been that way—trendy, sanguine, smart—even when wearing, as she was now, cutoff shorts and a T-shirt.    They sized each other up from either side of the threshold. Eva stood outside Anne and Stephen's mid-century colonial on an old familiar tree-lined street; Anne stood in the doorway that had been hers for the last six years. While the two women fumbled for something to say beyond each other's name and how great they looked, two girls, about four and six, came running to the doorway, giggling.

    Anne scarcely glanced at them but pulled the taller one in front of her and with both hands pulled the girl's blond tresses behind her little head, twisting them into a loose pony tail she let fall as she said,    "Girls, this is Mommy's college roommate, Aunt Evie." The older girl said hi. The younger one scurried behind her mother and buried her face in the cleft between Anne's bare thighs, just below the hem of her shorts; Anne ignored her. "We haven't seen each other since before your brother was born." The elder daughter enacted an exaggerated wide-eyed, mouth-agape double-take at Eva, then looked around at her sister and the two of them ran off, squealing. The two women remained locked in a stare, neither one commenting on the children. Finally, Anne said, "Jesus, Eva, why are we standing here—please, come in. Lunch is almost ready." Anne eased Eva's suitcase from her grasp, took Eva’s hand, and led her inside. To the trompe l'oeil Kilim runner that they followed down the hall from the front door back to the kitchen, Anne said, "Twelve years. Wow."
                                                    ~ 
    They were roommates their first two years. Eva chose Kent State University for its journalism department, which was nearly as good as Northwestern's but six hours further away from her parents. Anne chose Kent because her brothers and sisters all went to Akron U, her only other option.
    Once the girls became friends, Anne spent the night in Eva's room, then scheduled night classes so she'd have to be there two days a week and every Friday.
                                                    ~
Anne scurried around the kitchen preparing lunch while Eva sat at the table, sipping a glass of lemonade. While the two women talked, Janie the older daughter set the table, moving at such a slow pace Eva almost laughed at her. She knelt on a chair and slid plates to each place, first grabbing them one at a time from a stack Anne had set at one end of the oval table. She set silverware at two places side-by-side on one long length of the table. Janie stepped to Eva's left to lay a fork then walked to her right to lay the knife and spoon, then walked to the other end of the table to position her mother's flatware. She put a different colored cloth napkin on each plate. Eva watched her as she listened to Anne talk. It was easier than looking at Anne.

    "So, I don't know if you're still a veggie type, but we all pretty much are, so I made homemade veggie burgers." Anne had an excuse for not looking at Eva while she spoke to her; she was slicing onions and tomatoes and cheese. Liesl, the other girl, flitted around the end of peninsula separating the kitchen from the dining room and played an informal hide-and-seek with Eva while singing what sounded like a made-up song about butterflies. 

    "Oh, I'm back on the meat wagon, I'm afraid." As Eva spoke it occurred to her that this was another way in which she and Anne had reversed roles. Eva was the original vegetarian and the one who wanted to have kids—an unpopular goal to have and certainly to talk about pursuing in one's freshman year. And now Anne had the happy home and she was still struggling to forge even fleeting connections with men.

    "Well, maybe we'll get you back on track." Anne had her hands full of veggie burger goop and had her eye on Liesl, who had pulled a chair to the counter so she could climb up and sit, cross-legged, and watch her mother work. "Sweetie, off with you. We don't live like animals." Then she looked up halfway at Eva and winked. "At least not when we have company."  Anne bent over and kissed the girl's forehead then motioned with her head for Liesl to jump down, which she did without protesting or complaining. But she stayed close to Anne's side and finally couldn't keep herself from trying to get closer to her mother's workspace. She curled her little fingers over the counter's edge and batted her feet against the cupboards to pull herself up so her eyes were level with the plates on the counter. "Lee!" Anne pointed with her elbow for Liesl to back off then looked at Eva, rolling her eyes in either admission or deflection of fault, however Eva chose to read it, "We've been a little lax with Liesl. Last child, you know how it goes…"
Eva started to say that no, she didn't, but caught herself and instead said, "Last—for sure?"

    Anne nodded and made a snip motion with the first fingers of her right hand, keeping her eyes on the platter of lettuce and onion and tomato. Eva opened her mouth to say something but didn't know what to say or how to keep it over Liesl's head. It struck her as weird that she had assumed a familiarity with Anne in asking her if she and Stephen were done having kids—especially considering she was meeting these kids for the first time and had never talked to Anne about this stuff since their furtive exchanges on the phone twelve years earlier. She grappled for a neutral topic that wouldn't telegraph her nervousness, wouldn't drive them toward the conversation she was there to have. She had three days.   

   "Janie is named for your mom, right? Is Liesl named for someone?" Eva had liked Anne's mother until the last time she talked to her, which was just after the last time she talked to Anne. Eva began to feel like this was a bad idea, that meeting after all these years was pointless. Nothing could be resolved, nothing could be figured out, there was nowhere to move on to. All those books and TV shows about closure—she just wanted to leave.

    Hearing her name again, by this newly discovered aunt, Liesl hopped around the island and galloped right to Eva's chair. She put her hand on Eva's leg. A sizzle broke the silence as Anne started to toss veggie burgers onto the griddle section of the stove.

    "My name comes from a sound from music." Liesl looked Eva squarely in the face as she spoke, her expression serious, almost solemn, it seemed to Eva.

     "It's a cute story," Anne called over the fountainous mist of oil spraying up from the griddle, her eyes not leaving the patties, though they had to fry for a few minutes before being flipped.

    "Jack was a little apprehensive, shall we say, about having another sister—"
Liesl, still looking Eva in the face, asked her what "apperhandsive" meant. Eva opened her mouth and Anne answered before she had time to try to think about how to explain what Anne was saying without revealing exactly what she meant.

    "It means 'nervous,' sweetie."

    "Why was Jacky nervous?" Eva had learned the word earlier that week, when her dad left with Jack on a trip. When he'd kissed her mom goodbye he told her not to be nervous about her friend Eva coming, that everything would be fine. "Was it because he was excited, like you were with Aunt Eva coming to visit?"

   

Eva's eyebrows popped up and she began to glance at Anne but caught herself, turned her head only far enough to notice Anne had made and aborted the exact same movement. Both women smiled. And relaxed slightly; there, it had been said and neither of them had had to say it.

     "Yes, Mommie was nervous…" Anne slurred the next sentence and spoke it rapidly. "I suppose resentful would be a more accurate depiction of Jacky's attitude." Then followed it with an image the girls intended to stick in the girls' minds. "Maybe he was nervous that two sisters might cause him trouble – might, oh, I don't know, chase him around the house and try to make him wear lipstick?" Both Anne and Liesl looked at Janie, who was intent in her study of the napkins she was trying to refold into triangles.

      Without breaking rhythm, Janie asked, "What is 'resentful'?"

    "Resentment is what people feel when someone invites them to lunch and then makes them half starve before they can eat it. Now finish setting the table and go wash your hands so we can eat." 
Janie tossed the last napkin on a plate then threw her hands in the air and looked over to Liesl. The two ran off without exchanging a word.

    "Good. Peace for a moment." Anne lifted the edge of the first patty on the griddle to see if it was ready, then flipped them all one by one.

    "They hear everything, don't they?" Eva watched Anne work, watched her look over at her at intervals that seemed contrived, as if Anne had to make herself look at her old friend. Eva thought she might be projecting; but again, she might not be.

    "They do." Anne looked up at her. "They do. And just when you think you've developed a vernacular to out-wit them, you realize they've grown into it. Plus, since they're so close in age, at this point were almost raising two six-year-olds."

    "What about Jack?"

     Anne looked back to the grill.

    "Jack." Saying his name made Anne smile; Eva wondered what mix of tenderness and nervousness and resentment prompted that expression.

    "Jack is his own person. He's his dad's boy, but he is his own person. He was never into having one little sister and two, well, at that point—he was eight—he was done with siblings. And other people in general. I think he's a real loner—he's happy with books and his pens and art supplies. Stephen calls him our little da Vinci. But he liked them both to start with. What makes them irresistible to other people gets on his nerves."

    Anne pulled two buns from the toaster oven and brought them to the stove. She pulled two more out of a bag. She started pulling patties off the griddle and placing them in the buns. Eva stood and started bringing the platters of garnishes to the table, along with a potato salad Anne motioned her to take from the refrigerator.

    "As I started to tell you, Jack named Liesl. He was eight when she was born; Janie was two. Stephen's parents were great. They paid him even more attention than they'd given him when Janie was born; of course, he'd been looking forward to that birth, because one of his best friends in kindergarten had been a girl and he thought Janie would be just like that. So, I don't know, about a week or two before I delivered they took him to see The Sound of Music. He loved it. And when he came home, he said, "It's OK if it's another sister, but we should name her Liesl.

    "We thought, why not? It's a nice name—and how likely is it that there will be three of them in the same class?"

    "Which one was Liesl?"

    "The eldest—'I am sixteen going on seventeen…'"
Eva thought, "The one who almost ran off with a Nazi" but checked herself from saying it. "Well, that's a ways away. There's time to find her a hobby."

    "That didn't stop me…"

    The girls came racing back and climbed up to their places at the table. Anne reached over to steady Liesl's chair

    "Piety—like twins—appears to skip a generation."

Bad

[From Janet's Dream Journal and part of the Covers series]

Jackson Pollack was staring at me, wearing my orange striped blouse and looking at me and acting the little shit, like to dare me to tell him to give it back. He didn't talk, just looked mournful, as if he wanted something from me. But you're wearing my shirt, I thought, what more do you want?

I didn't realize who he was until I woke up in that neighborhood that dreams and consciousness co-inhabit.

A lost man.

That is was my first thought as I hovered over the experience I was still mired in, though I felt far enough from him to be safe.

The dream came back to me in episodes that replayed in reverse chronology:

I panicked, thinking I'd missed his show, missed being there with him, missed him. I realized that I had in fact missed the show but he hadn't told me about it and he hadn't told me about the show because he had died like twenty years before I was born.

I was in a museum all alone. It was incredibly bright, everywhere I walked, even in the rooms with no windows. The brightness didn't seem natural and that was what had my attention, not the paintings and other art work. I walked from room to room not understanding why it was so bright.

Sophia was calling me on the phone—I could hear her voice coming from the phone calling my name but when I picked up the receiver, it was just the dial tone. The room went blue when I realized I'd only imagined that Sophia was calling, all the furniture and the walls turned like a black and white photograph but it was blue.

In the grocery store I watched a pyramid of mangoes tumble and suddenly all the fruits in the produce section were falling in an avalanche of color. My feet were glued to the floor I could not move and the apples and limes and all the other round fruits rolled all around me and every time I thought I would be buried the pile would fall again, so it was a constant stream of fruit towering up and falling down around me. I wondered why I couldn't be buried in bananas, which I like better and would smash if I walked on them.

Everybody wants to save the world.

By the time I remembered that line I couldn't remember who in my dream had said it, if I had or if someone had said it to me and I was awake enough to know that those were the wrong lyrics anyway because they are still playing on the clock radio alarm and the words are Everybody wants to rule the world and right now that seems like such an overwhelming project to take on and why do I want to pick up the phone just in case Sophia is calling me?

 

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

We nursed a low-grade bicker halfway up the hill, following the ruts that tires had plowed through mud the spring sun had since baked into a path. We laughed—to ourselves, at each other—pretended we were just playing because a whole weekend with three other couples was waiting up there for us.

    You kept walking when I stopped, kept talking, and I was about to follow without sharing my find but something made you turn your head and you walked back to me, silenced, and stared down where my eyes were fixed. I felt you share my wonder and delight, I felt you feel, in your held breath, the caterpillar's gait ripple through its bald green length and for a moment I believed anything was possible—even that I had been wrong about the gully between us,  a space that a moment before had been as obvious as the signs around us of the mountain spring: late afternoon sun, swift running creek, budding clover and poppies. We looked at each other and for once that was enough.

    A motor, shifting into second gear and climbing toward us, called my attention away. I bent to pick up a leaf and as you stepped up out of the groove you said What are you doing? and our disagreement rematerialized and you tried to disguise it and said, softly this time,  He'll be OK and I heard in your tone and saw in your eyes how you needed my accord so I stepped up beside you but looked down toward the approaching car.

    I couldn't tell you what kind of car it was or whether there was a mark left there in the dirt afterward but I remember how hot the sun was and how bright the day, how tight the turtleneck around my throat as I watched you shake your head and whisper I thought he'd make it.

    You took my hand and in that gesture I heard your contrition, heard it snap the last remaining thread that had tethered me to you.

Part of the Covers series

Graceland

You challenged me
to use phalanges in a story, a poem,
said you'd be impressed
if I could do it without sounding ridiculous.
That's the way we go: you throw, I catch & run and you chase,
call out the next play, determine the formation,
and that way we get somewhere. That's how it seems so far,
of late—but wait: important to state that not all of this is real
no matter how true it feels. There's the rub, the hub and the risk
of working in words: the more you think you disguise,
the weaker the lies until the digits point and wag and what I never meant
to say you ever said is what sticks, in the throat; chokes. Us. Both.

Your words were real and clever and kind and used to reach my eyes
before my mind had time to spin your coy grin into a sneer.
When you start keeping score, parse out the cost, read fear as frost
is when you're lost. Love means finding a way.

Others would stop there, throw hands in the air, yell
"GOAL!" but not I, not thee—we go all the way, take
the long way 'round, run that ball deep, pound it
into the ground and dance, dance, dance through the end zone.
No, not done yet, a poem about phalanges, a poem "about" you
must include actual fingers on the keys and you and me;
the notes, the nights: restau-bars, chaste au revoirs—
and for the most part no cars—feet, drinks neat, Anglo beat,
and then those kisses, kisses, kisses, all… the way… home.

Four sets of phalanges we have, you and I—each—so
between us fifty-six bones but it only takes one
phalanx to take aim and here's where we come to the point
of this phalangeal fiction: where shields go up
and swords stand out but the worst wounds occur
because armor is difficult to walk in, mi amor,
and in a field littered with bons mots a soldier is bound to trip.
I bled and you said you had expected as much and then fell ill
but still showed a measure of care—but there is where it started,
where the chain mail began to clink
and I heard the first chink in what had felt
like a hale heart and holy frame. You didn't blink. Or wink. I picked,
you bit, and the rest of it was all about believing what we wanted to
and dancing around the sniffles, all the way home.

War is hell and hell is other people and we are not like them—
we agree on that—but what about compatibility?
A compromise is a promise together and compassion
means to suffer with and this tiff is stiffing us each and both
and driving our lives apart.
    What do you want from me?
does not imply a granting of the wish but nevertheless
    I don't know
really blows because we know what we want
and we know what we want is unreasonable:
to jump into the river without getting wet,
without having to trudge home in wet socks,
slipping on rocks, our garbage in tow; exhausted, unmoored, lost;
and we, riven, all the more vulnerable to the bears whose habitat, whose home
and abode we've trampled in our trammelling.
But this is the way of community, of communion, a holy union,
a phalanstery of two: knees scrape, throats chafe, and love is unsafe;
running and falling, calling out to the wild,
    Wait—help—I've never been this way before…

No river is ever the same twice and here the water freezes
where it once was warm and the shallows are steeped with leeches,
after what blood we've left. Back on shore the path is no more, brambles
slice and snare, carpet bomb the way, obscure the where and somehow
there is so much more to pack out than we seemed to carry in.
The bears, they are we—bumbling about, feeling sure, matting fur,
scrounging scraps, dropping scat, having mistaken a warm spell for spring.

Of a winter day the songs that then softened now sting, paralyze the world
your fingers drew forth—each breath, such depth, now bereft
of art; a dearth of mirth—and your recipe, your originality
is again all foreign to me. Complexity equals inscrutability,
and we—that you, that me—reluctantly,
are done and gone. Gone, gone, gone, floating away
on that icy stream, rushing, raging, far out to sea.

Part of the Covers series

Wipe Out (2)

Larraine considered what she might have done to prevent this situation, and first she thought she could have not gone skiing with Leonard and his friends. They were expert skiers and she had never yet stayed standing all the way down a beginner slope. And after the initial invite, Leonard seemed to be more into spending the weekend with these friends, not particularly interested in getting her to know them.

    Leonard was quiet on the drive to the mountains; he would have said, had she remarked, that he was focused on the road, on driving, on making sure they made it to Tahoe safely, but that wasn't it. The roads were clean, the weather clear. They didn't need the chains they'd borrowed, which Leonard didn't know how to put on anyway and was too cheap and proud to pay someone else to do for him; so Larraine was glad that hadn't become an issue.

    Larraine would have liked to talk about something, if not Leonard's friends then what they'd do that weekend, what he liked about skiing in Tahoe, jeez, what they were going to make for lunch when they took their turn cooking for the group of 10—themselves the only couple—in the rented house. But Leonard was hunched over the wheel, squinting into the blue afternoon light, looking like the man he might become, 40 or 50 years hence. Larraine was glad they were driving up during the day but soon began to wonder if she'd made a mistake taking Friday off from work. Not a good sign, she thought, when cleaning up a database is preferable to spending a weekend with your boyfriend.

    From this vantage point—looking past her right leg, enveloped in space-age hot pink plaster and propped up on a chair in front of the couch, to watch a Friends rerun while eating home-delivered Indian food she ordered herself—things probably went the best they could. Yes, he'd not shown her interest or kindness for the three weeks before, up to and including her tumble down the mountain; yes, from the moment they set their bags in the room with three bunk beds instead of one queen he'd been showing off to another girl; yes, he refused to make even one run with her down the beginner slope, just to help her acclimate; and yes, he clearly never had any intention of telling her he just wasn't that into her anymore, after pursuing her as avidly as he was avoiding her now, after being the first to admit falling hard and fast. Yeah well.

    This is what had made Larraine go in the first place, despite a nagging doubt; and this is what had sent her straight to the chairlift, without a lesson; because this is what propelled her into Leonard's arms in the first place, though she hadn't thought about it until she heard two snowboarders on the lift behind her:

    "Dude, it's like, you're gonna fall."

    "Right?"

    "And there are three kinds of falls."

    "Oh Yeah."

    "One, you're all, 'No way am I falling, Dude! Fuck that shit!' And you're like crawling down the slope, not fucking falling, OK, but not fucking boarding either, so I'm calling that a fall."

    "Right on."

    "Two, you're like going along, just gettin into it and whatever and you're like, picking up speed and you start to psych yourself out, you're all like, 'Fuck, man, I'm gonna fall!' so you just make yourself wipe out."

    "Totally. Done that."

    "But those falls suck. Those are beat. Wrong. Way. To. Go. You know why? Because the only way to fall, the only true wipe out, is the one you don't see coming, can't see coming because you are too busy rockin that mountain, getting your powder on, workin workin a little slalom action, you're cool, you're doin it, man, you catch some air, then wham! You're eating snow.

    "Now that's of course the most physically painful fall, the one that's going to get you hoping that bullshit HMO you got is going to cover your ass in a hospital four hours from home, but you gotta love that fall, you're proud of that fall because you know what? You were fucking doing that mountain, man, you were fucking tearing it up and if it spanked you back, that just means you sucker-punched the motherfucker first."

Part of the Covers series

Wipe Out (draft)

Larraine considered what she might have done to prevent this situation, and first she thought she could have not gone skiing with Leonard and his friends. She couldn't ski, they all could, and he seemed to be more into spending the weekend with them than including her in the group and sharing their fun.

    Leonard was quiet on the drive to the mountains; he would have said, had she remarked, that he was focused on the road, on driving, on making sure they made it to Tahoe safely, but that wasn't it. The roads were clear, they didn't even need the chains they'd borrowed, which Leonard didn't know how to put on anyway and was too cheap to pay someone else to do for him so Larraine was glad that hadn't become an issue.

    Larraine would have liked to talk about something, if not Leonard's friends then what they'd do that weekend, what he liked about skiing in Tahoe, jeez, what they were going to make for lunch when they took their turn cooking for the group of 10—themselves the only couple—in the rented house. But Leonard was hunched over the wheel, squinting into the blue afternoon light, looking like himself 40 or 50 years hence. Larraine was glad they were driving up during the day but soon began to wonder if she'd made a mistake taking Friday off from work. Not a good sign, she thought, when she imagining herself better off talking women newly out of prison through resume writing and Interviewing 101.

    From this vantage point—looking past her right leg, enveloped in space-age hot pink plaster and propped up on a chair in from of the couch, to watch a Friends rerun—things probably turned out as best they could. Yes, he'd not shown her interest or kindness for the three weeks before, up to and including her tumble down the beginner slope; yes, he'd been showing off to another girl; yes, he clearly never had any intention of telling her he just wasn't that into her anymore, even though he was the one who'd admitted first falling hard and fast and hadn't since then mentioned any change in feeling.

    This is what had made Larraine go in the first place, despite a nagging doubt; and this is what had sent her straight to the beginner slope, without a lesson; because this is what propelled her into Leonard's arms in the first place, though she hadn't thought about it until she heard two snowboarders on the lift behind her:

    "Dude, it's like, you're gonna fall."

    "Right?"

    "And there are three kinds of falls."

    "Oh Yeah."

    "One, you're all, 'No way am I falling, Dude! Fuck that shit!' And you're like crawling down the slope, not fucking falling, OK, but not fucking boarding either, so I'm calling that a fall."

    "Right on."

    " Two, you're like going along, just gettin into it and whatever and you're like, picking up speed and you start to psych yourself out, you're all like, 'Fuck, man, I'm gonna fall!' so you just make yourself wipe out."

    "Totally. Done that."

    "But those falls suck. Those are beat. Wrong. Way. To. Go. You know why? Because the only way to fall, the only true wipe out, is the one you don't see coming, can't see coming because you are too busy rockin that mountain, getting your powder on, catchin a little air. Then wham! You're eating snow.

    "Now that's of course the most physically painful fall, the one that's going to get you hoping that bullshit HMO you got is going to work four hours from home, but you're going to love that fall, you're going to appreciate that fall because you know what? You were fucking shredding that mountain, you were fucking tearing it up and if it spanked you back, that means you sucker-punched the motherfucker first."

Would I Lie to You?

Desmond tasted the words as he spoke them. They smeared an oily gall across his tongue that stayed there long after the sentence evaporated into the air. It wasn't the words themselves or even their meaning but rather how easily his mouth formed them, automatically, without thinking, they were out there, they had stained him and surprised him before he even realized he was participating in a conversation. He had fabricated fictions before, plenty of them, elaborate fairy tales in which he starred, stories so ridiculous the listener believed the sentiment that appeared to inspired them. But this one, murmured in a tone all earnestness and sincerity, a lame pair of words, the easiest to utter, the least likely to be believed and he hoped that they would not deceive but imagined that the bitter tang signaled they had been well received, his pitiful, wrongful "Me too."

Part of the Covers series

Back on the Chain Gang

    Tommy is running late so he enters the museum through the café instead of going around to the Minna Street employee entrance. He stops and motions to Rogelio behind the counter that he'd like a coffee and Rogelio draws it right away, but not before raising his eyebrows and tapping his wrist to indicate the time.

    "Dude, I know," Tommy tells him. "This is for el Jefe." Rogelio points his chin at Tommy in recognition, then shakes his head. "I know, I know, Roge: You'd never get away with this. Dumb fuckin' luck, man. Shoulda been born white." Tommy raises the coffee in a toast to Rogelio and as he turns, tosses over his shoulder, "Or got a job in security."

    He crosses the lobby, assuming a gait and carriage that he imagines to be efficient and inconspicuous and indeed no one remarks on his passage. Chip Henry is at the main security desk and is listening to his girlfriend or a message from his girlfriend on his cellphone, and he says nothing to Tommy as he waves his ID badge before the card reader that lets him into the museum's inner office.

    When Tommy sees Michael Young, his boss, he hands him the cup and says, "Thought you might need this."

    "Looks like you needed one of those, Parks. The shift starts at 11, not 11:05." Michael looks full forward, ignoring both Tommy's baleful expression and the cup of coffee; keeps walking, his Marine strut still present in his civilian saunter, his officer's authority still coloring the timbre of his voice. Tommy sighs, not sure whether that reaction was better or worse than an outright reprimand, figuring that he will be in this job long enough to have the chance to compare.

A fragment of an unfinished story and part of the Covers series

Little Earthquakes

The invigoration that had spawned the transformation also determined the pigmentation of the entire exasperation.

Part of the Covers series

Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand

This hill daunted me before; I avoided it, thought it better to go around.

The burn in my lungs is nothing because it is real, reasonable, and localized.

There is an easier to ride from here to there, but the way is more difficult.

Part of the Covers series