from
Baubo in the kitchen (2)
Loosely rationalizing her thoughts as if she
were writing a letter to her sister Claire, Mrs. Scattergood thought without
that social charade, right then, she would have nothing but the colors of the
day. They melt into each other. So did her wanderings. She moved from the day
to the groceries and noted that red grapes are available. She loved them. How did she ever eat green
grapes? Their skins like balloons. She did love to bite into balloons though,
when she was a kid. When they were
younger, only green. She wasn’t afraid
of intimacy. Should she talk about this
to her sister? Grapes, intimacy. She knew that she was finally willing to be
open and vulnerable. She thought she always had been. But then, just when you are, you know what
happens, you get hurt. This is predictable. But birds learning a retired
language? Old birds can learn new tricks too.
Is there anything sweeter than tender intimacy? Everything is Buddha, everything is sweet. But she wasn’t always ready to be Buddha; and
the whole belly issue was too much at times. Right? The other day she was helping a friend who
teaches English as a second language.
The more she and Barbara worked on her brochures the more they realized
that language breaks down when you study it.
Meanings seem to be only loosely attached to words. Sentence structure becomes another language
you’re not proficient in. Structure as a second language. Then you enter the new culture equipped to
bridge meanings that match up with your take on the world.
~
Sometimes women cannot help merging with
everything around them. Somebody said
the world is too much with us. What is
the option? To live as if you’re
disconnected from the everyday? Who can
afford this? Life brings form and
purpose. Hustle seems to come with
it. Is there another way? There is the case of missing desire and how
her lover seems to bring it up into her consciousness like demitasse through
the cube. Right now, it floats on the
surface, a milky cloud on a caffeine night. Mrs. Scattergood is floating there
too. Nothing seems to come round to the
shapes she’s familiar with. She was told that one could feel as if you were
drifting for ten years or more. Imagine
that. Robinson Crusoe floating on a sea
of desire. There are no waves. Everything is diffused. Borders and boundaries are lines of interest
unbound by definition. Now and then
desire peaks like a wave and you want to embrace everything. The matrix is liquid. Thoughts are hands without instruments. You cannot hold onto anything. Background emerges. The sea is our mother. The child flows from the mother like a
fish. The swimming is good. This is the first day Mrs. Scattergood
realized that she’s in the river called menopause. She’s a fish swimming. What else does a fish do?
~
Surrounded by water, yet held captive by
her thirst. Even her desire is
liquid. It flows and blends with the
river so that she can’t call it into shape and say it’s this or that. It’s not one thing or the other. Is it Mrs. Scattergood; is it the sand under
her feet, the tickle of the grains within her waves of skin?
~
“My life is in the toilet right now. But that’s OK. Pretty soon, I’ll be flush again.” That’s what Mrs. Scattergood once wrote a
friend who knew about her troubles.
Everything was about poker and puns.
And this was another thought that came by her traveling in the comet’s
tail of forgetfulness. The Greeks had
Lethe. She had a comet with a tail of memories and nothing but the hope that
the next pass around her consciousness would fall into place. Hope isn’t just about checking to see if you
have a hit.
~
When she used to climb trees she could
gauge difficulties and distance and adjust to prepare. She remembered what it
was like to climb her favorite trees in the courtyard of the Cambridge
Apartments. She would wrap her legs
around the limbs. Spiders hid in the
bark that lifted like weathered shingles.
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