Between The Ground And Sky
Sarah Blackman
She hadn't been able to cry at the funeral. Not as she had wanted to, as Elise had with raw, jerking sobs that outlined the curve of her rib cage through her dress. Kitty cried the polite tears of a colleague and friend. The casket was open. A line of people, somber skin shrinking away from their somber clothing, bowed their heads and filed past. Walter was in front of her and when he moved away, the back of his neck looking red and plucked against his white shirt color, Kitty steeled herself for the mortician's clownish version of Philip, all rouge and hearty peach tones, the desperate sparkle of makeup against waxy skin. But it was him, his lips relaxed, lashes feathered against the olive dome of his cheekbone. His hands were crossed high up on his chest and his wedding band gleamed sullenly against his black suit. He looked like he was asleep.
"Jesus Philip, that's so cliched," she thought, swallowing an instinctual cocktail party laugh. She stumbled a little and gripped the lip of the coffin for support. "Oh my darling, look dead. Please. I want you to look dead."
Throughout the service-Elise's quietly hysterical eulogy, Philip's brother's chocked recitation of their childhood-qall she could look at was the smeared arc her fingers had made against the high laquer of the coffin. She didn't hear the hymns, the organ's deep tones that echoed the dark wood of the pews and alter, the priest's reedy intonations which fluttered, already wounded, to the rafters where they died. When it came time to walk to the grave site with the rest of the assembly, Walter had to gently tug her to her feet and lead her out, one hand on her elbow. It was a clear winter day, cold and brilliant. The brittle sun hardened the edges of the tombstones, sharpened the blades of the frost whitened grass. She had forgotten her sunglasses. "Stupid, stupid," as she rummaged through her purse.
Philip made friends gracefully. There were a lot of people there to comfort Elise, lean her into their shoulders, stroke her dark, grey-shot hair with a lingering sympathetic touch. She was accepting a hug from Oliver Arkins now, her thin arms crossed and startlingly pale against the back of his suit. Kitty and Philip had joked about Oliver. Oliver Twist they called him, because he was frail and tremulously pious. Because he taught 19th century literature and talked about Dickens at all the faculty parties. It was easy. It was stupid. A stupid joke.
There were lots of stupid jokes. She remembered a business trip they had taken. A conference on 'Folk Art in 17th Century Russia,' and they played hooky for a day. Philip, naked, clowning around, the lines of his body lost in the white rush of sun through the hotel window as he made his towel into a turban and pretended to tell her fortune. "I see a tall dark and handsome in your future. That will be 60 pieces of silver. No money? Ahh, no pockets. Well, maybe we can work out an alternate payment plan."
And later, slightly tipsy, smoking cigarettes in the bathtub with a soap dish for an ashtray, they made up limmericks about their friends and colleagues. "We're bathtub poets," Philip said, fanning his hands slowly under the water. Kitty giggled and flicked an inaccurate stem of ash at the plastic dish which bobbed wildly on Philip's waves. "A wife named Elise took the part/Of Victorian Lady to heart," Kitty thought, but she didn't say it or even finish the rhyme in her head. It was against the rules somehow to target spouses, broke the unvoiced agreement to leave those forms unfleshed, blanket clothed hulks for other beds, leaning presences in other doorways, against other walls. She slid deeper into the water, gripping Philip's shins with her toes, and blew a jet of smoke at his forehead. It wreathed him briefly and then faded into his hair, into the stark tile of the walls and the hovering banks of steam.
They were lowering his coffin into the grave. The sun caught and flared on its brass railing in a liqued, blinding surge. Kitty looked away, blinked, looked back and caught one last glimpse of the bleary smear her fingertips had left behind. Then they were throwing dirt; she was hot inside her coat and Elise was sobbing hoarsely, being held up by strong and public arms. And they left. Got in the car and left.
"A good man, Philip." Walter says. "I'll miss him."
"Mmmm." The engine purrs through the console as Walter guides the sleek machine over the cemetery's drive. Gravel crunches mildly under the tires. A slight bump and they are out on the main road, the asphalt gleaming in a ribboned swath before them.
"I'll miss him," Walter says as they picked up speed and glide smoothly past the dark firs and open stubbled fields of the road side. Kitty watches the trees blur into each other. Their tops are lost, curving somewhere above the car, and Kitty feels how tall they are in their sentinel trunks, the impassive fringe of their needles. She presses her hand against the cold pane of the window. When she takes it away a ghost hand lingers, edged in the mist from her breath. Lingers, then fades and is gone.
Her daughters are all taller than her now. She remembers when taller meant better, bigger and older equaling automatic superiority. The cadence of the playground, jump-rope chants and the boy's raucous shouts from the grass field where they played war games disguised as soccer. The girls wore patterned ribbons in their hair-her favorite was one with blue whales swimming across a lighter background-and leaned against the brick wall of the school with their ankles daintily crossed, socks rolled over once. They leveled gazes filled with casual scorn at the littler kids who chased each other across the packed blacktop, mimicked their thin screeching laughter. If one fell, bursting the sun bubbles on the tar with the sudden friction of her hands and knees, they would laugh out loud at her storm of shocked tears, effortlessly transmitting to one another their superiority, the inestimable worth in their healthy, growing frames. The same way they would sometimes all begin simultaneously running: aimless, giggling, fanning out like a flock of birds rising from a field.
It was this way with Lainey too, her sister, four years younger and more delicately boned. Her brittle nose and high, sweeping cheekbones flushing a light red in the sun as Kitty showed her how to swing from the dogwood branch like Tarzan, which flat stream rock to use as a pestle, pulping a summer thousand of gypsy moth caterpillars into thick green paste.
In the summer, when the heat rose to a sweltering buzz both in and outside of the house, she and Lainey would smuggle their mother's hand held fan into the crawl space on the second floor. They would lie there on their backs or bellies, the warm cedar air settling against their skin like a furred thing in the filtered light; and they would talk, fight sometimes, dare the other to stick the tip of her tongue in between the whirring plastic blades of the fan. Mostly they would talk, protected from the other's scrutiny by the dim light. Lainey, in the fourth grade now, might like Kyle Lowthrop, but didn't know if it was because of how she felt or because everyone said she did. Kitty had let Mike Kaproski kiss her and put his hand up under her shirt. Lainey stumbled on some older boys kicking a stray dog to death, its jaws coated with foam, gasping through the clots of blood that leaked from its nose and mouth. Kitty had heard their parents having sex through the wall one night, their soggy groans inescapable as she lay spread eagled and panting against the heat.
But now Lainey is a hundred cities away, her voice a dusty cinnamon over phone lines, and the memories are fading. Kitty does not even know what she has forgotten, just that there are holes, blank spaces. It scares her. "If I can't remember it may as well not have happened," she thinks, "It didn't happen. How would you know?"
When her own girls were young she could see Lainey in all three of them, and herself. And Walter. All those people shifting behind such compact faces. When they were infants she turned them towards the wall as they slept, stroked their spidery hair with her index finger and thought fiercely, "You be you. You grow up you, do you hear me?"
Now they were all taller than her, stronger, wiser in some ways. They had arrowed effortlessly past her and she watched them walk in and out of doors, open windows, lay dishes of food on tables, shove their shirt sleeves up over their elbows with unconscious impatience. Those infrequent times when they were all home together she felt like they formed the slim, straight sides to a triangle, and she wondered what her part in it was. One of the points at which they met? A bisecting line? The central core around which they rotated? But she knew. Knew from her own relationship with her sister, from watching her mother's loose lips pursed around a cigarette four days before she died. She was outside, watching. Walking over the blond, sun strewn boards of her floors while their shape, filled with the dark smoke of secrets, of sisters and of youth, rolled unevenly away.
It came out more quietly than Kitty had intended. "I'll make you some soup." Almost a whisper.
"For God's sake, Mom. Its a baby, not the flu."
They were in the kitchen, Erin facing her across the counter. Kitty was cleaning the stove, head bowed under Erin's heated gaze, picking at a dried bit of food with one coral pink thumbnail.
When Erin was eight she dipped the length of her long, mahogany ponytail in a bucket of Clorox bleach. Kitty walked into the kitchen in time to stop her from dunking her whole head, but it was too late to save the hair. She remembered Erin, hair melting in a slimy grey mass down her back, stubbornly insisting that this was how the movie stars did it through her tears. She wasn't crying for her lost hair, or even because Kitty was angry. What Kitty saw in Erin's bunched, reddening face was a mixture of rage and fear. Rage that she had been stopped, contradicted in her assurance, and fear that spiraled out of Kitty's own panic, the naked edge to her voice that broke through the scolding words and said, hysterically, 'I love you.' Clinging to the girl's thin shoulders with fear damp palms, 'I love you. I love you. I love.'
It was the same kitchen, the same June sun lipping the window sills and paneled glass door, and Kitty was afraid again. She looked at the knuckle of her thumb as it bent and flexed against the stove top. There was a cut in one of the creases. She didn't remember getting it. A thin rust line, dried and unimportant.
"Mom, I can't have it. I mean, Dave and I are over and with two other kids...I don't have a job..." She and Walter had laughed at it, leaning against each other, weak and weepy at the image of their dark girl, defiantly bald, standing in the litter of her own bleach burnt hair. But God had she been scared at the time. Running over again and again what could have happened if she had been a minute, two, too late. What bleach could have done to those eyes. The blind daughter, the maimed one.
That wasn't Erin. Erin already had her place. She was the wild child, the middle girl who got hurt-fell out of trees, chipped her front teeth, slid down ice sharded hills on her face trying to skate in their flooded back field. She was the stubborn one, wouldn't cry, wouldn't talk, silent in the face of Barbara's bookish loquaciousness and Suzanne's scatter-shot rage.
At night Kitty and Walter talked about them, a book face down in her lap, blue velveteen coverlet bunched over her knees. Through years of piled laundry and broken toys they laughed about them, worried, yelled at each other when Barbara's grades slipped, when Kitty found a dime bag of pot in Suzanne's dresser drawer. Years of listening down the halls for the snotty hitch of a cold ridden child's breath, for the moan of bad dreams or stomach upset, for the muffled thud that meant Erin was out her window again, squatting in her nightgown on the bare roof, cold under the stars.
And years of Walter, thick hands laced behind his head, lidded eyes fixed speculatively on the ceiling. Walter the disciplinarian and painter of little girl's rooms. The photographer of recitals and graduations, clumsy sewer of Brownie patches and epaulets, the creased hand turning over their rocks, lifting them into trees. Walter the math tutor, the softball coach, the midnight smoker in the back garden, planted under the twining wisteria vine, looking up to their windows, silent, wreathed in the coal glow of his cigarette. Walter the father and the partner. Walter...
"Don't tell Daddy, please."
The legacy of daughters: that they turn to you, and in turning have to show their backs to someone. Erin leaned across the counter and gave her this secret, deposited it to be wrapped neatly around itself and tucked away, taut and glowing. By the time Walter got home it would be so well hidden that there would be only the faintest after-image hovering around the house, an uneasyness in the cornors at night, a weak magnetism pushing from the walls.
Erin leaned across the counter to give her this secret and with it, trailing messily behind like excess string, the ingrained call for help. The high pitched yowl of cubs lost in the woods that sends mothers racing, mouths watering in anticipation of the warm snugg of scruff, the soft, heavy drag of a young body back home. Kitty wanted to pick Erin up, to rock her, fold her back into the rounded weight of a child and press her into her belly where she could be gripped forever, warm and free from pain. Instead, she reached out and cupped the side of Erin's face in her palm, fingers splayed into her hair, cut thumb spreading the tears in a damp swath under her eye.
"No, I won't tell your father. Some soup, Erin honey. I'll make you some soup."
The car is getting hot, but the idea of taking her coat off, bending and twisting against the sleeves while the seat belt cuts painfully into her breast, is too much. They are stopped at a light. An intersection downtown, five, ten minutes from home. Walter is humming under his breath.
A man in a black wool overcoat is standing on the corner waiting for the light to change. At his feet is a drift of snow packed into solid slush by the wheels of passing cars. He is tamping its top most ridge carefully with one polished leather shoe. There is a thin film of salt visible on the side of the shoe. He has made four square divots in the snow ridge. He is starting on the fifth.
Behind the man in the wool coat, a woman and her daughter are walking. The girl is crying, her eyes swollen and snot gleaming in half frozen streamers in the hollow above her upper lip. The woman is saying something, yanking on her arm. The girl howls, screws her eyes shut and pulls against her mother's grip. Her hat is laced tightly under her chin and has a frog on it. Full body weight against her mother's arm.
The man is shaving off a bit of excess snow from the side of divot number three. They look like the turrets on a medieval castle. He looks up briefly to see if the light has changed yet. It hasn't. He checks his watch.
"Mind if I turn on the radio?"
"No. Go ahead."
The light changes. The man in the wool coat is still tamping the top edge of one of his turrets. Their car moves forward. With her full weight against her mother's arm, the little girl slips, feet skidding on the icy sidewalk. They are passing them. The man notices the light change and hops into the street, trying to avoid a puddle. They are almost past. The girl slides around, pivoting her helpless weight on the arm still gripped by her mother. She buffets off her mother's legs, swings in a half arc, hangs a second caught in the air and falls. The man lands on the ball of his foot and catches the last shallow drift of the puddle with the smack of his heel. He sprays a thin wave of grey water behind him. The mother swoops her daughter off the ground and onto her hip in one motion. Keeps walking. The man shakes his foot a little at the high point of its swing into the next step. Keeps walking. The car passes them.
"What station do you want, Kitty?"
"I don't know. Whichever one you want."
Kitty's shoes are hurting her feet. She braces the pointed toe of her right shoe on the heel of her left and pushes it off, scoops off the right shoe with her bared toes. She tucks her feet under her chair to keep them off the damp floor mat. There is a dead leaf clinging to the back of one of the shoes. Kitty looks at it and thinks about how the curve of the heel wraps so intimatly around the curve of her heel, how they mirror themselves. She thinks about scraping the leaf off and looks back out the window.
The cherry blossoms cling to everything in D.C. They are speared on high heeled shoes and plastered to pant cuffs, cling to the static material of stockings. Brown and leaking in their creases, they edge the streets and settle in wet drifts along the marble halls of the museums. Kitty thinks they make the city look fake, like it is made out of colored styrofoam. Walter had wanted to come.
"It'll be fun. We'll bring the girls, show them the sights. It's not that much for a plane ticket over."
The last time it had been spring too, but she doesn't remember cherry blossoms. The hard horizontal slash of her mother's skirt against her marble calves. Dad's hands, square and snagging against her blue dress, lifting Kitty up so she can see the paintings.
"So what if they miss school. I mean, what do they learn there anyway but how to be polite to people they hate? There's plenty of time for that."
He was always too rough. His hands bunched and pulled at the tender skin of her armpits, fingers meeting across the fragile hollow of her sternum. She cried, shrieked louder against the sterile echo of the museum halls. Her mother had bought her a picture in the gift shop to shut her up. The same one Daddy had been swinging her up to see. John Singer Sargent's Street in Venice.
"Well, if you really think you'll be too busy. Yeah, sure. Some other time."
On her first day teaching, Kitty walked into the classroom, turned off the lights, pulled down the blinds, turned on the projector and advanced the first of her crisp new slides. She edged, hips slanted and tight in the narrow aisle between desks, to the front of the room and put her hands carefully at her sides.
"This is John Singer Sargent's Street in Venice," she said with her back toward the twenty-five greying faces at their desks. Her hands smoothed the wool of her skirt, plucked it into a thin ridge and then smoothed it out again. Framed by the dark slate of the blackboard the thin girl walks slowly down her alley. Her eyes are downcast and in the tilt of her head, the set of her shoulders, she is smiling.
"This is a woman walking down an alley. She is made of paint. So is the alley. Everyone is looking at her. Not just the people you can see, the two men in their hats and cloaks, with the sinister way they are leaning. Not just the old hump of a fruit vendor behind her. This is a girl walking down an alley and behind the walls, in the dark wood rooms, people are sitting down to cabbage soup with crusty loaves of bread."
Her back was still to them, but one rebellious hand crept up to her neck, the index and middle fingers paling on the wide band of her pulse. "There are people smoking cigarettes and spitting into the fire, throwing gristle to the cat. Behind the walls they have yellowed faces and missing teeth and when she walks by they stop smoking and spitting and look through their walls at her. Their conversations pause for her to walk through, this girl alone in this alley. John Singer Sargent made her out of paint. And he made everybody look at her with paint, with the white froth of her linen skirt as she kicks it in front of her and the way her fingers clasp at her waist. He made all those conversations falter, pause and start up again with pigment and a boar bristle brush." She turned, hands back down, shoulders squared, "Good morning."
Two or three of them said good morning back. The rest shuffled in their seats, grey faces floating like the dust floats in the shafts of light that slant through the blinds. On the blackboard the girl is walking down the alley, moon face bridged with light and the empty windows of the tenements behind her.
When Walter started cracking his knuckles, popping them meticulously joint by joint, Kitty knew he had given up. She pictured him leaning against the closet door behind her, hip-shot with one leg crossed at the ankle, watching her back. She balled the last of her underwear and shoved it into a corner of the suitcase. "Do you think you can give me a ride?" she asked, without turning around, "Or should I take a taxi."
Walter waited with her at her gate. When she boarded she looked over her shoulder and caught one last glance of the back of his jacket disappearing among a sea of other backs. On the plane she looked out the window and bit at the tender ridges of skin around her nails.
Philip had gotten to the hotel before her. When she walked into the room, the door unlocked and muffled on the thick carpet, he had already unpacked and stored his empty duffle under the bed, the blue strap snaking out below the dust ruffle. There were eleven roses in a vase on the bedside table. In the corner by the television was a limp heap of clothes, khakis, blue button down shirt, white boxers and a pair of socks, brown and balled with their gold toes lapping out like tongues. The twelfth rose was on one of the pillows. Philip was in the shower.
Kitty opened the door again and slammed it, hard enough to send the knocker into a descending staccato of taps. A moment later the shower turned off and there was silence. Kitty could hear water dripping, off the faucet or off his body. "Hello? Kitty?"
She sat down on the bed, scuffing the duffle strap under it with her heel, and picked up the rose.
"Hey," he was in the door behind her. "I thought that was you. How was your flight?"
She ran her finger along the bole of the rose, pinched the waxy half leaves that clung to its base. "So when are you going to divorce your wife?"
He was quiet. Sat down heavily on the other side of the bed. She turned from the waist and looked at him over her shoulder. A thick sheaf of her own hair and his blurry face squinting at her over his shoulder.
"Well..." his voice caught and he cleared his throat.
"Oh forget it, I don't care." She turned back to face the door. Strands of her hair caught in the crease of her eyelid and she scrubbed her hand across her forehead impatiently. "I really don't."
She turned fully and smiled at him to show she meant it. He was naked to the waist, towel wrapped loosely around his hips. He looked at her and pinched the bridge of his nose. She smiled. She meant it.
"Kitty," he leaned back against the headboard and his belly paunched up over the towel. "Do you know what Elise does when I'm not at home?"
She shrugged, tucked herself under his arm and began twirling his damp chest hair around the tip of her index finger. Drawing her legs up she nudged the rose off the bed.
"She gardens. Any time of year, middle of winter. I go out of town and Elise gardens. I come back and this is what she tells me about. The garden, bedding the roses. Aphids or whatever."
Kitty kissed the creased skin right above his armpit. She trailed her hand down to his belly and let it rest there, fingers making gentle kneading motions.
"I don't know if she eats even. Her hands get all cut up. How do you leave a woman like that?"
Kitty kissed his shoulder again.
"Besides, I like her. You and me, we're pals and I love that. I love you. But Elise, Elise goes out and gardens in the snow."
She slid her hand under the towel.
"Kitty?"
It is the same gloaming kind of classroom, the same slate blackboard and the girl's quick feet, her hidden smile. There are scratches on the slide now. Dark lines that fade in and out of the alley walls.
"So, John Singer Sargent. Street in Venice. What's going on here? Anyone?" It was quiet. In the front row a boy whose name was either Evan or Ryan was hunched over an elaborate doodle, intertwined lines and semi-circles looping over his scanty notes. Two rows behind him a fat girl was falling asleep. Her head jerked and lolled, eyes rolling back into her sockets as she tried to focus. The room was starting to get hot. "Anyone? Alright, we have this girl walking down an alley. Why is she there? Why did Sargent feel she was important enough to paint? Why are those two men looking -"
"Maybe she's a whore." A girl's voice, Kitty couldn't tell which one. They all sounded the same. Flat, affected consonants, nasal pauses, a bubbly rounding of the vowels. The class tittered a little. One boy mouthed the word 'whore,' and laughed loudly, shuffling his feet under his desk. Kitty sighed and dropped the text book she was holding onto the table in front of her. The muffled thwack it made woke up the fat girl who jumped and almost fell out of her seat. She looked around her with stunned bewilderment. The class roared.
"Ok, guys. Ok, come on." They got quiet slowly and Kitty sat down to wait out the last few disconnected giggles. She looked over her shoulder at the blackboard and considered the girl, the slant of her shoulders, the secret clasp of her hands.
"Right," she said, "John Singer Sargent. Moving on."
They were using the yellow sheets. Last time it had been blue. With yellow Kitty woke up happier, but the bed seemed hotter as the morning light sliced into the room. It made her sweat sometimes, stains darkening the armpits of her tee-shirt. Everything's a trade off. "Does this mattress sag?"
"What?"
"Does the mattress sag. In the middle, I mean."
"Where? In the middle? Yeah, I guess it does sag. We should get a new one."
"This is a new one. That's why I was asking. I couldn't believe it because this is a new one. Pass me that pillowcase."
"Walter..."
"Hmm? Pull that end a little tighter will you?"
"Walter..."
"Not brand new, but new enough that it shouldn't sag already. Cheaply made I guess, probably foreign labor."
"Shit."
"What, did it slip off? What's the matter?"
"Nothing. Just shit. Shit, shit, shit."
"Are you ok? Did you hurt yourself?"
"No, nothing. Nothing's wrong."
"Well, it looks like something's wrong. What's wrong? You want to talk about it?"
"No. Jesus. I told you nothing was wrong and even if something was wrong maybe its something I can't talk to you about or I would have already. Or maybe its something I don't want to talk to you about. I don't always want to talk to you about everything."
"Alright, Christ. Forget I asked."
"No, it's just sometimes I wish you would listen to me. You never listen to me."
"Kitty, I'm trying to listen to you. You're the one who said you didn't want to talk."
"No, I said I couldn't talk about it, not that I didn't want to. When I said I didn't want to I only meant that sometimes I don't want to and you shouldn't think I do want to all the time just because you ask. Like that gives you some kind of a right."
"Ok, Kitty. I can see your not in a rational mood today so we'll just drop it, ok?"
"That is so fucking patronizing. Do you have to be so fucking patronizing all the time?"
"How is that patronizing? I'm just saying..."
"You don't know everything, you know. There are some things you have no idea about, things in your own family..."
"What don't I know about?"
"...because you are just as petty and stupid and narrow-minded as all the people that you think you're better than. And just as unreasonable, only you won't admit it."
"What don't I know about in my own family?"
"Oh nothing Walter. Forget it. You wouldn't understand."
Outside the neighbor's kids were riding their bikes down the hill and crashing them into the drainage ditch across the street. Through the half open window Kitty could hear them shouting and the clang of their bikes grating against cement. Everything's a trade off.
"That's not my name."
It had gotten dark out. Black car, black road, black trees and black sky all falling into one another. "What?" Kitty wants to roll down the window and ride her hand along the slip stream of the car. Spread her fingers wide into the wind and see if she can tell the difference between her hand and the sporadic clustering of bats in the far arc of the headlights.
"That's not my name," he repeats. She looks over at him quickly, eyes feeling grainy in their sockets. He doesn't look angry. Should he look angry? Maybe his knuckles are slightly whiter with tension, fingers snugged more firmly into the leather grooves of the steering wheel. They had been sitting silently. Kitty looking blankly out the window and listening to the music. Walter driving, thrumming his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the beat.
She had said his name, to get his attention. So she could ask him, "Walter, could you turn the heat down?" or, "Walter, could you change the station?" or "Walter..." But she hadn't said Walter.
"That's not my name," and here was the familiar swell of panic. The copper blood taste balling in her throat, sending gleaming filings onto her tongue. What had she called him? The names slipped out of her so easily now, with none of the sharp tug of recognition that would tie them to a face. What had she called him? Barbara? Suzanne or Erin? That happened all the time, her daughter's names taking the place of Walter's, her colleagues, even proper nouns. Had she called him Lainey? Zach?, the family dog now ten years dead with the casual horror of tire marks splitting the soft white fur of his belly. That would be funny. They could laugh at that. 'Oh, Kitty. Your slipping." They could turn that into another thread in the web that connected them, "When you get to be our age..."
Had she called him Philip? Oh god unforgivable to call him Philip. She looked again at his knuckles and saw the coarse grey hairs that sprouted from the back of his fingers. His chest hair was grey now too. She saw it in the mornings, briefly before he turned away from her, almost shy, and put on his shirt. He didn't look angry, but to call him Philip, to label his stolid frame with Philip's slimness, the muscled smoothness of his back, his long fingers corkscrewing through her grey-blonde curls and his breath in her ear, "Hey, kitty cat, wake up. You have to go home."
How unfair, to both of them. Because it was Walter next to her in the car, shifting his weight on the creaking leather seats and rumbling phelgmatically deep in his throat. And it was Philip who chased beside them in the dark, who did not turn his head to look but raced solemnly, imperviously on. Philip, who no longer belonged to her or anyone, stretched along the thin line between the ground and the sky.
She was crying now, her face hot and damp with it. She could feel her wrinkles-the paper thin stretch of her skin over her cheekbones-and was furious. She stared out into the brutal night and clenched her fist in her lap, pounded it against her thigh.
"Well what then, Walter. What did I call you?"
"Hey, honey, calm down. You called me Kitty is all. Just Kitty."
Blue Night #2
Sarah Blackman
It is too cold for the window open. My hands
jut from bell sleeves, clamp to the steering
wheel. At home you crack your window
open. Boxed in blankets, look to a yellow
light, a yellow field. We watched together -
ghost lines of fingers on closed glass.
Two times the trees roll outwards, heaving
swells of orange, veined red. Both places
it is the hovering moment before night.
Snow is a low ringing on my windshield,
sifts through the open window to your bed.
Your hands press mine flat to cold
panes. The field is shaved. Coarse stubble,
belly laid bare to the knife. What hand
holds it? Mine smudge the glass. We ask,
we ask. We watch the field breath from your window.
Know the point where the blade will slip,
thread red behind. We turn away.
Night falls. Clotted, blue blinkered by storm.
The passing trees, the shadow leaves striking
upwards, a fan of snow on asphalt, the slim
haunches of deer sliding in and out of stillness.
And here too the shaved fields - packed
with the cool gauze of snow, wounds buried,
blood sopped, white lips threaded shut. Sewn silent.
How can we question? We have our dusk pavilion,
our cocktails of swallowtails and wood lark, umber
dresses, scarlet dragonfly pinning thick coils of hair.
It is still snowing. Still
it is snowing. Cry
Hosanna, darling.
Praise,
Praise be to God.
Like Shadows and Like Sugar
Sarah Blackman
Today it is the wrapper, plumped
and whole like the strawberry
itself. They have even drawn
the seeds. The top is green, finishing
ribbon of leaves and sun-tough stem.
Two months ago I saw a bag of limes
split and frozen on the street. Each half
paled to the sun like winter candy. Frosted
triangles sectioning the dark crescent
of rind. I want to change my name
to that color, I want to change my skin.
There is this pain in my back that twists
me. It pulls like smoke, industrial soot, curls
to my shoulders and rides me there. But I
am healthy in my sorrows. I can count
joints and taste the pink mash of marrow.
And in the basement windowsill a thousandweight
of dead flies are christening the windowsill
with their death. And in the back field God,
himself a thousandweight, is alone with the soil
and concrete. He has found my avocado
stones - lathed opals - and the scatter-shot
jewelry of my grape seeds. He has found my midden
heap of plum pits, each sunset core blessed with my spit.
Ravenous in this fallow soil, He is digging. Ravenous,
He will till and tithe. What grows will fall like shadows
and like sugar to the streets. There is never enough
to eat in this world. There is never enough
to comment on,
identify,
to throw away.
Photo of a Famous Golfer's Wife
Sarah Blackman
The men who manage death
are leaving. They have shuttered
their last camera flash, closed the car door.
Respectful of each other, they shake hands.
One lights a cigarette. A hat blows off
and rolls on the clay road.
She was a famous golfer's
wife. Her knees were bare
and coltish. Now they graze
each other and her shins
shine. Now her hair
mats to the leather seat.
They are walking up the clay road.
The fields and the sky are grey.
One has caught his hat and put it on.
One has picked tobacco off his tongue
and blows smoke rings at a pair of crows.
She was a famous golfer's wife
and had a back-swing of her own.
Sandals with lemon straps, white
shorts that moved as muscles
themselves at each long flex
of leg. She loved her clubs like cousins
who know all the family secrets. She walked over the fairway. She walked over the rough. She kissed them and kept walking.