The half-Chinese technie nerd girl has her legs up on the dash — she's bitchy — either the meds are wearing off or the joint hasn't quite kicked in. You'd think by 11th grade you'd have the right mix of Zoloft and pot, but what does he know — even if it is his car.
It's hot already, even for pre-Calc, 2nd period. The saguaro, nicely lined up outside the school, are no longer casting morning shadows, flattening out. It's been a weird year, his first here, and the rumor that HE was French had sent girls his way, even if the truth is that the joint custody landed him with his dad in a Parisian suburb for a year.
Girls have chased — and caught him. In the fall, Tansy — slender, busty, dark-haired — who took him necking and then announced she was a lesbian. Her best friend Bella had tried to cheer him up by saying Tansy'd known she was gay all along. Then Tanya — how had he found two girls with such similar names — purple haired punk in fishnets — an identical twin who now looked the complete opposite of her demure blonde sister. She tasted like any girl and regarded him as a first — first vodka, first piercing. Now she had dumped him too, and her best friend Bella said.
He looked out over the parking lot. A group of guys were shooting hoops. Javier gestured for him to come play but he shook his head with the regretful expression that he hope conveyed: dude, I have a stoned girl in my car. His father had insisted this charter school would be better than straight public — a darkroom, performing arts, smaller classes. His father doesn't know everything. An acacia tree sheds its load of yellow pollen on to the hood of the car.
Bella is coming towards him. The stoned girl twists the radio dial with her toes. Bella wears a black hippie dress to the ankle. Her head is shaved. Yet she manages to look delicately pretty.
Stoned girl gets out of the car at the sight of Bella.
"Thanks, Jakey," she says. "I'm outta here..."
"O.K."
"I hate her, she's my ex-best friend."
"Who?"
"Bella."
He watches through waves of heat. He knows what is going to happen. She will ask him to take her to Panda Express for early lunch. She is hypoglycemic. She will kiss him, kiss him the way no lesbian or identical twin ever has. This is the start of his life as a man, the start of trouble — both the hot and cold varieties.
The girls pass without speaking. Bella slides in.
"I'm not really French," he tells her.
"Can we go?" She says. "I'm really hungry."
I'm dancing around in my bedroom to The Police, my brother's tape. I'm in a long underwear top and bikini underpants, the shade is up, it's six p.m., pitch dark, ice on the windows. Anyone who passes in the alley can see me, but what do I care, only ones who pass are my relatives anyway, saw me born naked seventeen years ago.
And each person with different advice. All my mother says is "school school school." Learn something, be somebody, get off this fucking island — she doesn't say fucking — get off this island and go some place real like Seattle, like your brother Eddie. An accountant. Thrillsville. My teachers, art, writing, say the same kind of thing but different take — study study study, blow glass, carve wood, write poems, and voila! (I've had three years of French.) You are a Native Artist. Capital N. Capital A. And therefore make money. And, although remaining a credit to your tribe etc. get off this fucking island and go some place real. Like Seattle.
No one knows what I want. Sting is singing to me, and for many months I thought he was singing "Denali. Denali." A place to the north. Where it snows instead of all this sleet. Where everything is cold, pristine, frozen. North, the true direction. It has its color — blue. It has its wind — an old man with his cheeks puffed out from blowing. I'm in a coracle in a frozen sea. I kill a seal. Or maybe I just look at the seal. There is an enormous mountain covered in snow. I know there are mountains everywhere, even if they are hidden, in a swamp, in a school portable, in me. But this mountain is hidden within real mountains. And they are the same mountain. Denali. Denali.
Then, after a while, I realize that Sting isn't chanting an Alaska place name after all. I've been dancing around in my thermal top and leopard print panties to something completely different. He is singing "The lonely, the lonely." And then the tape changes to another song. We are spirits.
The summer I was seventeen I took a fiction writing class at the New School. Every day I'd leave the daycare center where I worked mornings to take the number 84 bus into Manhattan and the subway downtown. On Mondays and Wednesdays I'd take a modern dance class, on Tuesdays and Thursdays it was fiction.
After class, in the late afternoon, I'd walk crosstown a few miles west to where my boyfriend had a summer sublet in a Chelsea brownstone. This was when that neighborhood, at 23rd Street, was unremarkable and cheap, and where a secretary who was somehow related to someone my father knew had a sad dusty narrow studio apartment that was mostly furnished in a bed up against the only window at the far end of the apartment and a kitchen table. This was just fine with us — me and my eighteen-year-old boyfriend who somehow seemed much older than me because he was already in college. Really all we cared about was the bed. He'd greet me, naked, in the late afternoon heat and I'd strip off my clothes — damply sweaty from modern dance or smelling of dry fear if I'd come from fiction class. We'd get into bed and spend a few hours of New York summer dusk making love the way only the very young can — exploring each square inch of skin and trying experiments involving ice cubes — that is, as if we had no other concerns in the world.
Except food. Afterward he'd cook me strange little hot dinners — experimenting again — chops and peas, burgers and onions, not right for the small hot apartment but tasty and necessary after long bouts of love. What else did we do that summer? I can hardly remember. Once we walked around Wall Street and looked at three tiny overgrown cemeteries, scattered along the blocks like a series of weedy pocket parks, the tilting submerged headstones of Sephardic Jewish colonists unreadable between the Hebrew and the decay. And we had tickets to several of the Mostly Mozart concerts.
The fiction class was very disappointing. However, I did not complain — my parents had paid, after all. The instructor, in her thirties, with black hair dyed blacker still, was more Beat than hippie, or perhaps proto-punk. She spoke at length during each class about the difficulties, actually impossibilities, of being a writer. She, for example, was forced to support herself by writing the captions and dialogue for comic strips. Then, she criticized our work.
My final story, the one I had been working on all summer, was set on a mythical tropical island, probably Caribbean. At least, palm trees blew. And in a fanciful addition, flocks of black and white butterflies filled the air, pausing only to mate on the shiny hoods of the cars of the rich. There was a pair of lovers in the story, lovers who quarreled (I can no longer remember the reason) and in the final scene she pushed him backwards off the dock, where he allowed himself to drown. Or perhaps he pushed her? This is a long time ago to remember. But looking back, I do not think that in 1971 I would have written a story in which a man drowned a woman.
When we went to the Mostly Mozart concerts, we left directly from the apartment. I had a blue and white dress of a soft slinky material, and I had to ask my boyfriend to zip up the back. I added a long strand of white beads I'd borrowed from my mother. The beads were tiny, making a shimmering rope. I saw myself in the mirror in the blue dress, with my boyfriend zipping me up, and I wondered if this was the first scene of many like it stretching out over a lifetime — perhaps a different zipper but the same man.
The teacher hated my story. She felt the setting — my favorite part — was unrealistic and unconvincing. Butterflies do not mate in a trade wind. Men born on islands do not just drown. Where was the grit, the poverty, the fired plantains? THIS ISLAND IS NOT REAL she wrote in bold black letters across the first page of my story.
I went to a different college from my boyfriend and then I broke up with him. I married a man who had once hunted octopus off a dock in Key West simply because he was hungry. We were married for thirteen years and then he died, leaving me a can full of pens and sharpened pencils in which there was also a tiny two-pronged utensil — a lobster fork. Meanwhile my boyfriend had hitchhiked...but who cares, business school or communes, this part of his past is not part of this story. Anyway, I married my old boyfriend and am his wife to this day.
This island is not real. Manhattan is an island. I'd walk crosstown, past the discount shoe bins and the lively crowds of people of all nations — Haitians, Puerto Ricans, east Indians. The big Greek selling slices of lamb off the steamy rotating grill called me sweetie as he handed me a simple sandwich — meat and pita bread — wrapped in a thick slice of paper. I loved the walk, between the mean fiction teacher and the hot apartment with my naked boyfriend.
This island is real.
Miriam Sagan was born in Manhattan, raised in New Jersey, and educated in Boston. She holds a B.A. with honors from Harvard University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University. She settled in Santa Fe in 1984.
Sagan is the author of over twenty books, including a recent memoir, Searching for a Mustard Seed : A Young Widow's Unconventional Story (Quality Words in Print, 2004. Winner best Memoir from Independent Publishers, 2004). Her poetry includes Gossip (Tres Chicas Press, 2007) Rag Trade (La Alameda 2004), The Widow's Coat (Ahsahta Press, 1999), and The Art of Love (La Alameda Press, 1994).
Comments (closed)
Pilar Zarco
2009-09-21 17:02:53
I just read GOSSIP by Miriam Sagan--which I enjoyed immensely--and it is a collection of essays which she published in her column in Sage Magazine (apparently a supplement of the Albuquerque Journal)...anyway, my point being that it is not a collection of poetry but of essays. One I would highly recommend, by the way!