AN AIRPORT ENCOUNTER

 

By Marianne Carlson

Tony was early. As he sat waiting in the generic holding pen the airlines created for passengers waiting to board, he watched her. Not especially attractive, yet for reasons unclear to him he couldn't stop himself from staring. She had the gift of youth, both a blessing and a curse - blessed to have a face clear of wrinkles or lines, yet her face lacked character, like a mannequin in Macy's window.  She was remarkably thin.

He checked his iPhone for messages. Nothing new. Now she was looking at him, her eyes somehow veiled as if glossed over by a microscopic film, yet he could tell she noticed him.  He couldn’t read her, he didn't know what to do. Approach or avoid? She looked at him with a half smile, almost a smirk,  as she removed her black leather jacket with a jerky impatience, took one more sip from her Starbucks cardboard cup and began leafing through a magazine, abruptly turning pages. Somehow he found her more attractive when she was not smiling. 

Every page seemed to annoy her. Everything seemed to annoy her, the magazine, the airport, the waiting passengers, life. She reminded him of a small stuffed animal, a tiger maybe or a lion that had suddenly been given the gift of life and had no idea what to do with it. From her boots to her thick mantle of hair, she was an enigma, but an enigma with fantastic energy who dominated the space they inhabited.

“Flight 460 to New York City has been cancelled due to inclement weather on the East Coast. Please check with the American Airlines ticket agent for rescheduling.”  Like sheep in a pen, they gathered up their belongings,  lap tops, briefcases, bags of half eaten food. The herd stood in line, approximately 25 disgruntled sheep, baying discontentedly. Tony stood behind the girl with the hair, a time bomb waiting to explode.

“Here we go again.” She spoke to no one in particular, but Tony took this as a good omen, and did not hesitate to answer. If he thought she appeared annoyed before, it was nothing compared to her present anger.

“We can’t blame the airline for the weather.”

“Why not?” 

“Well, it’s not their fault,” he answered weakly. 

By the time they reached the ticket agent, it was clear that they would not be going anywhere for awhile. Flights were cancelled up and down the coast, and both Isabelle and Tony were marooned, at least for the foreseeable future. While in line he learned that her name was Isabelle. It suited her.

“Tony? Is it really? I was engaged to a Tony. I will call you Anthony, Tony brings back very bad memories.”

“You can call me whatever you like.” Actually no one ever called  him Anthony, it felt as if she was talking to a stranger.

“Like a drink? It looks like we have nothing but time.”

“Sure.”

They made their way to a bar with a huge flat screen TV broadcasting a Knicks game. The volume was way too loud. She grabbed the last remaining table while he ordered a couple of beers. Between the Knicks and the disgruntled passengers, the atmosphere was anything but intimate, yet as soon as they sat down she began.

“I just had a marathon session with my boss, begging, pleading with him not to fire me, but he fired me anyway. I thought I  was more persuasive, but not so. It was: don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that.” He was surprised, she didn’t look to him like the type that spills all but he was to be in for quite a ride. She held her mug lightly, playing with the frost.  He couldn’t take his eyes off her hands, they were so beautiful.  She could have been a hand model, advertising soap or toilet paper with her long tapered fingers. Anything soft. 

“Where do you work?”

“Where did I work, is more like it.”

“Sorry, where did you work?”

“Rhinehart Labs. It’s a small laboratory in Los Angeles.”

“You’re a scientist?”

“You could call it that. Actually I am a chemist.

“I never would have guessed it.” His work in the art department in a small Hollywood film studio suddenly seemed insignificant, almost demeaning.

I was working on a huge project. Rhinehart perfected salt water chlorination, a replacement for chlorine  used in swimming pools.” 

“Really?”

“Yes, it was going great guns. YMCA pools all over the country were converting to salt water when suddenly people began to get sick. Certain viruses popped up. 

“Oh?” 

“A little boy died, we were sued, the Y’s stopped using our system, and that in a nutshell was that. Twenty of us were laid off, I was the first to go. 

“But it sounds as if you were on to something. Couldn’t the formula have been tweaked, perfected, made stronger?

“Yes, but the law suit wiped us out. And someone died. A little boy died, and I feel responsible.”

The transformation in Isabelle was remarkable. Tony sat in stunned silence as she dropped her mask. What remained was hard to look at: confusion, guilt,  the horror of the death of a child, and he began to feel uncomfortable because he realized that he was the first person she had confided in. Her pain was unbearable, he wasn’t equipped to handle it.

“I feel responsible. I was the one who signed off on the formula. I should have tested it further, but we were all in such a hurry to go forward with this. The money was unbelievable.”

The Knicks game ended. They lost in an overtime. Strangely the two strangers were aware of the score as they discussed the death of a six year old boy who had lived in Dayton, Ohio. It served as a form of comic relief to an otherwise excruciating topic.

“Perhaps you should go to Dayton, visit his parents?” Where that  came from Tony did not know but it was exactly the right thing to say.

“Will you come with me?”

“I will.” 

An exhausted ticket agent asked Isabelle, then Tony where they were going. They both changed their reservation to Dayton and waited in the same holding pen. Neither would ever be the same again. 

It's All Temporary

The Pickaxe by Rumi

The Pickaxe

tear down this house. A hundred thousand new houses can be built from the transparent yellow carnelian buried beneath it, and the only way to get to that is to do the work of demolishing and then digging under the foundations. With that value in hand all the new construction will be done without effort. And anyway, sooner or later this house will fall on its own. The jewel treasure will be uncovered, but it won't be yours then. The buried wealth is your pay for doing the demolition, the pick and shovel work. If you wait and just let it happen, you'd bite your hand and say, "I didn't do as I knew I should have." This is a rented house. You don't own the deed. You have a lease, and you've set up a little shop, where you barely make a living sewing patches on torn clothing. Yet only a few feet underneath are two veins, pure red and bright gold carnelian. Quick! Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation. You've got to quit this seamstress work. What does the patch-sewing mean, you ask. Eating and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body is always getting torn. You patch it with food, and other restless ego-satisfactions. Rip up one board from the shop floor and look into the basement. You'll see two glints in the dirt.

Rumi

It's All Temporary

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

It's All Temporary

WORK LIKE HELEN B. HAPPY

by Marianne Carlson

Valerie was a waitress, sometimes bar tender, sometimes in-house shrink at Annabelle's, the most popular watering hole for miles. In spite of the poor economy, Annabelle's continued to thrive. Some say it was because of the poor economy. Many regulars were out of work. With too many hours of daytime TV,  too many mind-numbing Angry Birds, too many items crossed off the to do list, people had to get out of the house. Significant others were becoming insignificant and on top of that, the dog was exhausted. He refused to take one more walk.

"Last night was a good night, I made close to $200 in tips." Valerie punched her time clock into the slot with a clunk, talking to no one in particular as she entered the kitchen a few minutes before noon.

"But I'm feelin'  it today."  She looked tired. Working so many late nights was beginning to show on her face. She counteracted this by too much make up around her eyes, concealer that never concealed, mascara that accentuated both the positive and the negative of her hauntingly beautiful blue eyes that craved more sleep. Although she was still young, somewhere in her mid 30’s, she had a matronly quality about her, a softness that made her easy to talk to. This was deceiving. A rapacious reader, she had a mind like a steel trap, packed with one liners. Male customers found themselves pouring their hearts out to her, tipsy or not, but they underestimated her sheer tenacity for survival. She never married, the only male she seemed to care about was her father who lived near by.

Anyone in the hospitality business knows there are two distinct parts, "the front of the house" and "the back of the house."  Annabelle's was a refuge for lost souls with broken egos, and those lost souls could be found in both houses. 

“Hi Val, how’s it going?” 

“Hi, Paul, it’s going.” 

With zero training in the restaurant business, Paul had been hired as a dish washer and worked his way up the chain - potato peeler, food prep, stock boy. Before he knew it he was behind the grill flipping  cheeseburgers and French fries. Tall and pencil thin, he was able to consume large quantities of food without gaining an ounce.  His skinny jeans were covered by a dirty white apron, his Converse All Stars never stopped moving as he danced from sink to grill, singing out orders. He looked like a skin head with his tattoos and earrings, but he wasn’t menacing as skin heads tend to be. Over Paul’s chopping block was a sign: WORK LIKE HELEN B. HAPPY, and he did. And he was.  

“Hi Paul, it’s going well but I’m bushed, I hope it’s quiet tonight. I just want to go home and sleep and sleep and sleep.”

“Well, be on your toes because Big Foot is on a rampage.” Big Foot owned Annabelle’s. Since he had no life, (other than Annabelle’s) he was always there. Nothing happened at Annabelle’s without Big Foot knowing about it.

“What now?”

“Some guy caused big trouble right before we closed last night.” A small , seemingly insignificant, shadow passed briefly through Val’s consciousness and then left as quickly as it came.

“Do you know who it was?”

“I think it was one of the guys who was laid off from the plant.”

“Who?”

“Not sure, but I guess he was pretty smashed.  Big Foot was pissed that whoever was tending bar didn’t shut him off. This is getting to be a real problem, when to shut people off. Gotta keep those bar tabs up.  Big Foot can’t have it both ways.”

The lunch crowd drifted in. Regulars took their favorite tables, patrons of Annabelle’s were very territorial, and Valerie knew almost everyone in the crowded room, where they would sit, what they would order, who they would vote for, who they loved. The tempo in the room picked up, a steady buzz, like waves of bees changed the ambience from a sleepy tavern into a ruckus of hungry patrons.  The bar crowd buzzed, everyone was talking about the bruhaha that occurred the previous evening.

Val had the ability to ignore waves of fatigue, sleep would come later, today she must work. As she placed orders, refilled drinks, cleaned tables, she was vaguely aware  of something. She couldn’t put her finger on it. Were people looking at her, as if in a new light?  Was it her imagination that the focus was on her?

“Big Foot needs you in the kitchen,” the bar tender told Val, pushing two beers towards her for her station.

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

“I’m pretty busy, can’t it wait?”

“He said now.”

Val took the beers to her table and handed them over with a smile. Nobody smiled back. An eerie foreboding gripped her as she entered the kitchen. What the hell was going on? Paul and Big Foot were in Big Foot’s office, one of the kitchen lackeys was cooking in Paul’s station. This never happened. Paul never allowed anyone else to cook for him.

“Val, sit down.”  She took a pile of menus off the one available chair and sat.

“What’s up?”

“It’s your father, he was a part of the altercation last night.”

“What happened? Is he all right?”

“He was beat up pretty bad.” Paul told Val what happened. She could not have asked for a more benevolent soul than Paul to give her the horrendous news. As he held her hand, he told her how her father tried to break up the fight that occurred in the alley behind Annabelle’s.

“Where is he?” Is he all right? My father is not a violent man.” She found herself shaking all over, partly from the news, partly from the almost Christ like effect Paul had on her.

“He is in the hospital, you need to go see him.”

“Will you come with me?” She didn’t want to go alone, she didn’t feel strong enough.

“Of course I’ll come, I’ll stay with you for as long as you need me.”

Need is a sometimes thing, but Val’s need for Paul never left her from that day on. They stayed together during her father’s long, painful recuperation, their eventual marriage, and her difficult pregnancy. When Paula was born, he held her hand throughout eight long hours of labor. The staff at Annabelle’s gave Paula a tiny white apron. Val and Paul gave Paula a framed sign which they hung over her crib:  WORK LIKE HELEN B. HAPPY.  And she did. And she was. Today Paula owns Annabelle’s. 

It's All Temporary

Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye

Famous

by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

It's All Temporary

Mother/Daughter

Alice Neel

Mother/Daughter

The preferences for extroversion and introversion are often called as attitudes. Each of the cognitive functions can operate in the external world of behavior, action, people, and things (extroverted attitude) or the internal world of ideas and reflection (introverted attitude). Carl Jung

My mother was an extrovert. She plowed through life like an express train, taking no heed whatsoever as to how her behavior affected others. Jung says that extroverts tend to act, then stop and reflect. Not so with my mother, her reflections were more like internal strategy sessions. (How can I get out of this mess with a minimum of damage?) She was also diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder, and like most borderlines, she was charismatic. She was also very beautiful.  I hated her. Some would say I was jealous, and maybe there was a grain of truth to that in the beginning, but as her life unravelled, I became increasingly hostile. 

To say that she was ill prepared for motherhood is an understatement, and yet here she is, holding me like a bomb. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, it is clear that our relationship was off to a rocky start. I cried all night, every night for one entire year. She tried everything: nursing, bottles, burping, changing, walking, rocking. Nothing worked. She considered herself a problem solver, yet I was a problem she could not solve. 

It’s funny, I remember that olive green dress, she wore it around the house for years. In my mind’s eye I see her in the kitchen, her tall straight back standing at the sink, scraping my unfinished dinner down the garbage disposal with one hand while talking on the phone to her current amour with the other.  Even before cell phones, she was addicted to telephones.  She always wore huge yellow rubber gloves to save her manicure. Her manicure was important to her, far more important to her than I ever was. One of her many talents was dialing with rubber fingers although speed dialing was usually not an option, the men didn’t stick around long enough to become one of her contacts.

There was just the two of us. I never knew my father, and when my mother spoke of him, it was always with a grimace. She was one of those women who could change at the drop of a hat; ebullient one minute, morose the next. She really should have been on the stage because the woman could put on quite the show when she wanted something. I often pitied the poor bastards who were beguiled by her charm. Her eyes became magnets, drawing people in with a bewitching cunning, and she had this ability to pout, her thick, baby doll lips puckered, causing her to look like an aging Barbie Doll. Between the eyes and the pout, it was game, set, match, especially with the male sex although she  was also a master at playing women, pitting one woman against another until she ended up destroying them both. Her jobs never lasted because of her ability to manipulate women in the workplace causing havoc, the men never lasted,  because she used them up and spit them out. Her taste in men was astonishingly eclectic, she would sleep with anyone as long as  they supplied her with enough cash.

An introverted person's energy is generally directed inward toward concepts and ideas whereas an extroverted person's energy is generally directed outward towards other people and objects. There are several contrasting characteristics between extroverts and introverts: extroverts desire breadth and are action-oriented, while introverts seek depth and are self-oriented. Carl Jung

Because she was  constantly reinventing herself I never knew from one day to the next who would walk through the door. We moved every two years or so, our apartments were always on the wrong side of the tracks, dark and sparsely furnished because we never took anything with us. I became increasingly introverted, in retrospect, traumatized, because I never knew from one day to the next what to expect. 

“Pack up your bags, Cecelia Sue, we’re moving,” was as familiar to me as what’s for dinner. 

“I don’t want to move, I like it here, I like the school, I love my art classes.”

“There are other schools, other teachers, Cecelia Sue, we’re moving to Toledo, and that’s final.” Or

“It’s steak tonight, Cecelia Sue, put on your pretty blue dress, Tom is taking us out to dinner.” Tom was her latest, a fat man with a red face, darting rat-like eyes, cheap suits and a pinky ring so small that the flesh bulged out around it probably making it impossible for him to ever take it off. Tom had money. Tom was spending almost every night in my mother’s bed.

A psychologist once told me that above all, a child needs to feel safe. Safety was foreign to me, and as time went on I became more and more introverted.  Art was the only thing that sustained me, it was a constant in an other wise unstable world. Today my paintings resemble a Jackson Pollack nightmare and my nightmares, well, suffice to say, I dread going to bed at night.  

“Look, Mama, see what I painted,” I recall saying as a little girl.

“Oh, Cecelia, how lovely.” She would give it a cursory glance as she applied another coat of nail polish, her fingers outstretched like daggers. 

“I won first prize in the young teen’s art contest at school, Mama, they even framed it.”

“Honey, Mama is proud. We’ll hang it right here over the couch.”  And so she did. It was a painting of a horse galloping through a field, and as we moved from place to place, the horse moved with us. We often arrived at new apartments with the clothes on our back, a few mugs, and my horse painting. As our lives became increasingly insular, the horse continued to gallop away. 

“Cecelia, come here and let me look at you.” 

“I’m busy, Mama, I’m painting. 

“You’re always painting, I’m lonely, I want to talk.” She had been drinking, her words slurred as she begged me to come. In retrospect, perhaps I should have appeased her, for it was later that night when my life changed for good. I awoke to flashing blue lights outside my window, police in the kitchen, and my mother in her bathrobe, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, cussing and screaming as they cuffed her and took her away.

“Who called 911?” 

“She did,” one of the cops said. “She claimed self defense.”

“Where is the body?”

“In the bathroom.” She slashed his throat with a razor blade.”

“Look, there’s a kid here.”

“Jesus, call protective services, we need to get her out of here.”

“Don’t worry, we will take good care of you,” a female cop told me, trying to be kind. Her kindness was wasted on me, I had no idea what good care was, I had never known it, but I was to soon find out as I was shuffled from one foster home to another. One of my foster mothers, a wealthy woman who encouraged me, saw great talent in my painting and paid my tuition at The Rhode Island School of Design.

Today I don’t make a lot of money on my art, but I make enough to survive. I visit my mother in the penitentiary once a month. She is always subdued, I suspect she is medicated. She looks terrible, without make up, graying hair, without her usual hair dyes. She calls me “Darlin.” The horse  hangs on the wall of her cell. He is a bit faded by now, but he continues to be free, something my mother will never again know.

It's All Temporary

Vocabulary

Vocabulary by Jason Schneiderman I used to love words, but not looking them up. Now I love both, the knowing, and the looking up, the absurdity of discovering that "boreal" has been meaning "northern" all this time or that "estrus" is a much better word for the times when I would most likely have said, "in heat." When I was translating, the dictionary was my enemy, the repository of knowledge that I seemed incapable of retaining. The foreign word for "inflatable" simply would not stay in my head, though the English word "deictic," after just one encounter, has stuck with me for a year. I once lost "desiccated" for a decade, first encountered in an unkind portrayal of Ronald Reagan, and then finally returned to me in an article about cheese. I fell in love with my husband, not when he told me what the word "apercus" means, but when I looked it up, and he was right. There's even a word for when you use a word not to mean its meaning, but as a word itself, and I'd tell you what it was if I could remember it. My friend reads the dictionary for its perspective on culture, laughs when I say that reference books are not really books, but proleptic databases. My third grade teacher used to joke that if we were bored we could copy pages out of the dictionary, but when I did, also as a joke, she was horrified rather than amused. Discovery is always tinged with sorrow, the knowledge that you have been living without something, so we try to make learning the province of the young, who have less time to regret having lived in ignorance. My students are lost in dictionaries, unable to figure out why "categorize" means "to put into categories" or why the fifth definition of "standard" is the one that will make the sentence in question make sense. I wonder how anyone can live without knowing the word "wonder." A famous author once said in an interview, that he ended his novel with an obscure word he was sure his reader would not know because he liked the idea of the reader looking it up. He wanted the reader, upon closing his book, to open another, that second book being a dictionary, and however much I may have loved that author, after reading that story (and this may surprise you) I loved him less.

It's All Temporary