this is M, M being menopause

from mosaic (4) by freda karpf

  Mrs. Scattergood wrote her sister that her characters were sometimes a mirror.  As were her friends.  As was her sister. When she isolated herself, or as she put it, imposed her psychic ghetto experience on herself she thought she had also shut down her feelings and gone, Conrad style, into the heart of self-sufficiency. But she hadn’t, except to momentarily convince herself that sharing a life was getting only half of something when the whole thing could be hers.  She told Claire that she slipped on that banana.  ‘This is why I come to you.  You can see through the charade and still love me.’

~

     Mrs. Scattergood was enjoying the pull that her memories had on her. Also their release. She wanted to get back to Telltale. She created a group called the Naughty New Agers.  At first to make fun of all that nonsense that swept through the world she inhabited. But then realizing that at least for the NNAs, as she called them, she was beginning to see them all as people on a palette.  Each one a young version of herself.  Except for one called Macy.  “Does Macy tell Gimbals?”  That’s her mother speaking, even naming her characters. Her Macy, even though she reminded her of her young self, was a discovery. A teacher will appear when you’re ready. Macy questions everything.  Her motives, her place in history and the people around her.  Mrs. Scattergood felt she was done with questions. ‘Now,’ she wrote Claire, ‘I’m full of questions when I used to be full of action.  Probably I was just full of it.  Strange effects of the weather?  Or as I see it, “this is M, M being menopause.’ 

~

     She told her sister, as if she didn’t know this already, that when she was younger she’d put blinders on and act so damned arrogant; as if she were always on the hunt.  In the bars, she wrote, “I acted as if I could step on the gas and peel out taking whoever I wanted.  The problem with the engine metaphor is that I know it’s no longer a power issue.  This is my life.  There’s more life lived than left.  I want something lasting.  These are the kind of changes the times have worked on me.  I’m changed by my changes.’ As if her sister didn’t know.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood mused as she rested her fingers on the keyboard while emailing Claire.  She remembered the delicious feeling of being one of the few people walking on the streets of Provincetown late at night. In early spring the neon store signs seemed both cool and hot. A perfect reflection for Mrs. Scattergood.  In the summer, the cool blue and green tones are such a contrast to the weather. They invite anticipation and complexity. She used to think, dents in the mattress. She wondered if we have to find reflection in another to understand our humanity.  What if everyone takes as long as she did for the right mirror to come along?  Her feelings toward her distant lover, what she referred to sometimes as her miss, near miss, not now miss, bounced around like a reflection on the water.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood sometimes felt that ability to partner was hardly established on this space-time continuum. But was she one to talk?  She hardly felt connected to the planet herself.  Her frequent mantra these days being “This is M,” was another way of saying everything had a sense of unreality about it.  Really, everything had a sense of not having a sense about it.  Was this the floating world of the Japanese wood block artist?  Mrs. Scattergood would quote her neighbor from the apartment complex in Newark. She would say that ‘Our arms empty but hearts full.’ Meaning we had someone in our lives but they were away and maybe that’s the way we could love them best. Mrs. Scattergood seemed to be playing a version of the Cat’s Cradle game herself.  Either reality or she would weave in and out of her desires for community and the world with what was there and not, with what she expected to take place and hoped would.  But she wasn’t playing Cat’s Cradle.  She knew she was just a thread, not the spinner.  She sighed and signed off from writing Claire.

~

     She had to stop and listen for a moment.  As if coherence would come from the effort.  She felt like she was on the beach with all the sounds moving around her, the usual soft sounds with the sometimes louder sounds of conversations all across a crowded beach popping in and out of her awareness.  Gulls, waves, shushing from the water, children and even the rustle of Sunday newspapers folded against the wind.  She recalled an overheard conversation from one day. A woman was talking about someone who was dying.  At first, Mrs. Scattergood couldn’t tell if it was a person or a dog that was dying. It was someone hanging on by a thread.  She overheard ‘arsenicum, an easy transition to death.’ Sometimes, Mrs. Scattergood realized, it’s not just the living that need help with the dying.