Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It.
Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.
She was a woman for whom a man would buy a diamond ring or a new car, just to cheer her up.
All this time, masquerading as a nice, well-bred girl when I was a stream in flood, a length of fire, the fall of a hawk.
How many children had this happened to? How many children were like me, floating like plankton in the wide ocean?
I lay on my mattress on the screen porch and waited for him to leave, watching the blue of the evening turn velvet, indigo lingering like an unspoken hope, while my mother and the blond man murmured on the other side of the screens. Incense perfumed the air, a special kind she bought in Little Tokyo, without any sweetness, expensive.
I was torn and stitched, I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.
The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement.
Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like caster oil.
This was an artist’s stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions.
Claire smiled with relief that my mother had made the first move. She didn’t understand the nature of poisons. My.
Don’t you let them forget about you,” she said. But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.
A magician came to entertain us, and I was mesmerized by his beautiful hands, his fluid, round gestures. I couldn’t stop watching his hands. They were better than any of his tricks. He pulled a bouquet of paper flowers out of the air and gave them to me with a courtly bow, and I thought love was like that, pulled out of the air, something bright and unlikely.
She couldn’t help but think how Michael would have loved this old man. He loved when people talked to him like this, just regular people. It made him feel human, connected, if someone was comfortable talking to him, saw him as an ordinary man, perhaps he wasn’t as estranged from the world as he felt himself to be.
I was bad, I had done bad things, I had hurt people, and the worst of it was, I didn’t want to stop. Blue.
What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of for Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale boulevard, making their moves with a great deck missing a written and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces.
We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water. I.
I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she’d tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you’re ever going to. Look around. It’s all downhill from here.
It’s a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you’re worth.
She should have realized I was a bad luck person, she should never have thought I was someone to count on.