emlocke

Category: In Retrospect

  • Syndicated television will unite the masses

    When I stay at work so late that the cleaning service bustles through, I never know what to say to the woman who collects our trash and dusts over the office. Her name ends with “-rina,” I think, but starts with something I couldn’t understand when she told me one evening last year. After she discovered me at my desk after hours a few nights in a row when I introduced myself officially.

    Now, we have the same rudimentary small talk whenever we meet. “How was your weekend?” “It’s so hot.” “Your desk, it’s clear! And the floor! I will vacuum!” “No, no! It’s Friday! Let’s both get out of here!” We often
    exchange fatigued sighs and empathetic grins.

    “It’s been one of those days,” I told her tonight, blotting perspiration from my temple, an effect of the heat as much as of the long day itself. She chuckled and said, “for me, too. What a day.” She snapped open a fresh garbage bag and her bangs puffed up in the air it expelled.

    Gloria was the housekeeper in my dorm my senior year at Mount Holyoke. She put a name tag and a collage on the door of the supply closet on the first floor, the same we tacked photos and postcards outside our rooms. She had pictures of kittens torn out of a calendar, macaroni art by her daughter, a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign.

    We used to watch ER re-runs on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings. The show started at 10, so I usually got back from my 8:30 class as the opening credits were rolling. Gloria took her break in the common room, watching Luka (I liked the Dr. Ross episodes) and eating Ritz crackers and peanut butter out of an insulated lunch bag. I invited myself to join her a few weeks into the semester. While we watched, I’d finish my second cup of coffee and skim my Indian Art reading. During commercials, she would dust here and there or make a phone call.

    Except for a stray remark about an absurd medical condition and the occasional question about the plot or “wait, what did she say?” we didn’t speak much. She knew where I grew up and what I majored in. She told me a few basic biographical facts about her daughter and showed me a picture from her First Communion.

    I wish I’d thought to leave a picture of Goran Visnjic on Gloria’s door at the end of the semester—when I came back to school in the spring, my class schedule interfered with ER in syndication. And I wish “-rina” could take an ER break with me.

  • Fatigued acolyte

    On the white altar
    I served the Lord, my God, by
    Yawning with mouth shut.

  • I quit the violin when they took away my fingerboard tape

    I used to take violin lessons. One of my teachers gave lessons at her house, in her living room, which was blandly pristine in that way that seldom-used spaces are. To protect the cream-colored carpet, she spread a trail of throw rugs down the center of the room.

    She placed two round rugs in front of the big arched window, where sunlight streamed in on the music stand. I would stand on one rug and she would stand one the other, looking at the music over my shoulder and counting the measures to keep me from losing my place.

    I always had to remind her to switch rugs with me so she would stand on my right side of me, my ‘good ear’ side, so I could hear her.

    I think the lessons lasted half an hour, maybe forty minutes. When I was ready to stop, I would lower my violin and shake out my right wrist a little and roll my left shoulder forward and backward, never taking my eyes off the music, as if I were bracing myself to push through the fatigue. It was during my very first lesson that I discovered that trick—every time, my teacher would say, empathetically, as if she were exhausted herself, “think you’re about done for the day?”

    My convulsive stretches began incrementally earlier and earlier each week. I told my mom I wanted to quit the private lessons before I started walking into the living room with a crick in my neck.

    For a while, I went to Ridgefield Music after school once a week. The carpeting in those cramped practice rooms in the back was probably due for an asbestos test. After my lesson, I would stand in front of the sheet music display and memorize lyrics, one verse at a time.  “From a Distance.”  “The Rose.”  Joan Osbourne’s “One of Us.”

    I wanted to like the idea of God on a bus, just another slob among the rest of us.

    Just like I wanted to like the violin.

  • I lay awake wondering what I looked like when I fell asleep

    For years after my parents stopped tucking me in, my mom or my dad continued to look in on me after my lights were out. I think a lot of parents do that, take that moment to make sure all is safe and sound, that their child isn’t staying up too late to read under the covers, to say a silent goodnight, to see peacefulness on a sleeping face.

    I got caught reading under the covers. I was also known to sit up until all hours, unable to put down a crafty project, trying on all my dress-up clothes, or sifting reverently through shoe boxes of toys and trinkets, taking inventory of treasures the way children do.

    While I played in the dim light from my closet, I listened for a parent’s footsteps. I learned the warning groan of the floorboards a few steps shy of my bedroom door, and I learned to leap into bed and feign sleep with minimal mattress creaking. Oh I got caught, but sometimes I fooled the watchdogs.

    And yet, there were nights when I took comfort in knowing that I’d have company for just a moment in the night. As I got even older, I would remind my mom to “come check on me” every now then. When something upset me and I felt vulnerable, I wanted someone else to stand watch. I guess I’d be the type of cowgirl to sleep with one eye open unless I could count on someone else to look out for trouble on the prairie.

    There were nights when I couldn’t fall asleep anyway. My mom would crack open the door and I would say, “Mom,” because I’d been expecting her but she wouldn’t expect to find me lying awake in the dark.

    “Why are you still up?” she’d ask.

    “I don’t know. I can’t sleep.” She would tuck the covers tighter or press both thumbs in circles against my forehead or kiss my cheek right up next to my ear and tell me goodnight again, hoping it would take. I remember one night when I called out to her before she closed the door again.

    “I’m craving something. But I don’t know what.” Her silhouette braced itself in the doorway and she sighed. “I think it might be coffee.” I was maybe nine. Maybe ten. I don’t remember what she said; I don’t even know what I would say to a child who told me she was having indefinable cravings in the middle of the night.

    I’d probably tell her, “Nice try, but you’ve had your last glass of water, your last bedtime story, and your last goodnight kiss. Go. To. Sleep.”

    But I maintain to this day that I wasn’t just stalling that night. I really craved something—something—whatever it was.

    I felt what New Yorker writer Judith Thurman expressed when she wrote, “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for a familiar ground.” Or Frank O’Hara, who wrote, “When do you want to go / I’m not sure I want to go there / where do you want to go / any place / I think I’d fall apart any place else” in ‘Metaphysical Poem.’

    I was maybe nine. Maybe ten.  My first restless night of metaphysical angst.

  • Sometimes I wonder what miracle saved me from natural selection.

    A few years ago, I went kayaking with a couple of friends. I mostly planned the trip; I was the one with experience.

    About four paddling hours into our weekend, the other girls want off the ride and I’m not sure we’ll all make it through to the end. Someone is going to drown herself if she doesn’t start following my instructions. Or I might leave them all for dead. Or they’ll mutiny and try to go on without me and not one of us will live to tell the tale.

    As navigator, I’ve taken responsibility for our itinerary and taken possession of our maps. I am also in charge of our supply of iodine tablets. Iodine is naturally-occurring chemical element used to purify water, ridding it of giardia and other creepy-crawly parasites. I concede to the eleventy-millionth request for a break when we get close to a water source.

    I have the brown bottle iodine tablets ready in the dry-sack in my lap. I also have the yellow bottle of neutralizer tablets that come in the same package. They’re supposed to return iodine-treated water to its natural color and taste. They don’t work—they make water taste like powdered plastic—and also, they’re for pansies. I’ve decided that I’m tough enough to drink water with a metallic-tinge to its aftertaste, and I won’t tolerate otherwise.

    We shore up our boats and hunt around for the spigot. Its caked in green corrosion so thick in some spots that the chemically-tarnished water has solidified layer by layer in drip-drop form. There is an advisory fixed to the faucet—the screws that hold it in place are green, too—right by the handle so that I have to wrench my wrist backward and kind of slip my thumb out of the knuckle-joint to reach around it and work the pump.

    The sign says: NON-POTABLE WATER NOT TO BE USED FOR DRINKING, WASHING OR COOKING PURPOSES. CHEMICALLY TREAT OR BOIL NON-POTABLE WATER FOR 30 MIN BEFORE DRINKING, WASHING OR COOKING.

    I’ve always resented water-purification. I resent the waiting. I resent that I can’t trust natural water sources. I resent tainting something that looks and smells and sounds so pure.

    I fill up my pink Nalgene and break out the iodine. I tap out two tablets from the little brown bottle and pass it around to the others. Explain their purpose. Glance at my watch and note the time. Happy to comply. Ready to CHEMICALLY TREAT NON-POTABLE WATER FOR 30 MIN BEFORE I sip it or brush my teeth or even rinse the gravel out of my bikini bottoms, Girl Scout’s Honor.

    I have two tablets bleeding in my damp left hand. What looks like undiluted Easter egg dye stains the creases in my palm, my life line, my wealth line, all my whatever-else lines, as I fold them in there and use my left fingers to push the sippy-top away from the mouth of my Nalgene, which is slippery in my right hand.

    Left hand: tablets. Right hand: bottle. Left hand: tablets. Right hand: bottle.

    This pose is so familiar to me, I could be blessing wafers and wine at Sunday Eucharist. Only instead of crossing myself from shoulder to shoulder to forehead and down, I’m conditioned to pop the pills and swallow. I smack the iodine tablets into my mouth and gulp from my water bottle. From my water bottle filled with non-potable water.

    Of course.

    I glance at my friends, grimacing at the chalky line down the back of my throat, thinking don’t look at me, don’t look at me, don’t look at me.

    I hope they don’t choose this moment to follow my lead.

    Everyone is distracted by the chemical reactions taking place in their water bottles. The jar of iodine tablets comes back around to me and I discretely drop two more tabs into my bottle, pretending just to fuss with getting the cap back on. We shake our bottles to encourage the cleansing. We wait.

    “Let’s get back in the water,” I suggest. “I’ll keep an eye on the time.”

    When thirty minutes have passed, I let everybody know that their water is safe to drink. We pause and sip. I concentrate on my stomach, trying to figure out if half an hour is enough time to be lethally poisoned by iodine overdose and impure water. I’m feeling pretty okay, mostly just nervous. I think I’m going to make it. But just in case.

    “If anybody really hates the taste, I have these neutralizer things. They sort of make the color go away.” Is there any other vital information I should share now, in case I keel over within the hour? “I put the marshmallows in with my clothes. We should make s’mores tonight before they get too smooshed.

    We all made it through the weekend alive and I managed not to accidentally swallow any other foreign objects. But I’ve gotta tell you, sometimes I wonder what miracle saved me from natural selection.

  • Getting dressed for work is no longer as easy as flip shorts and I’m okay with that

    It’s gotten warmer out, officially too warm to wear wool, so naturally it was just last week when I decided that all my woolen clothes are my favorites. The olive cashmere t-shirt, the tweed pencil skirt, the fitted black cardigan, the aubergine sweater with the deep vee. Also all my opaque tights, my flannel sheath dress, my ugly, filthy winter boots and the long brown coat that my mom bought for my birthday are obsolete just as I got cozy.

    And now I have to remember all over again how to carry off my summer wardrobe. It’s like having to break in a new skin—every season, whether I’m covering up or stripping down, I resist this transition. I feel like I get dressed in the morning and I’m out of my element, like I don’t know what to do with my hands until I’m back in my perennial pajamas again at the end of the day.

    The summer before my freshman year in college, I was a camp counselor who lived, day in and day out, in four pairs of cotton YMCA-logo “flip shorts,” the kind with the elastic waist that folds over. The boy I dated, where “dated” means “chased after, pushed away, let toy with me, let coddle me, bickered with, and crept around in the woods after dark with” hated those shorts. He nagged me at practically every other meal for dressing the same way every day.

    He made me self-conscious but I kept wearing them. There were days when I’d change out of a different outfit and pull my flip shorts back on just to disprove any suspicion that I might care what he said.

    Sometimes, we would sit cross-legged facing each other and he would pinch at the inside of my knee as he kissed me. Right where my leg folded under, there was just enough skin to grab between two fingers. I don’t know if he was conscious of it. I was. I started wearing jeans when we met up after lights out.

    Sometimes, I approach myself in the mirror over the bathroom sink at work or pass myself by in a pane-glass storefront and I feel like Lucas in Empire Records for a second, with somebody purring that one line from the beginning of the movie in my ear.

    Baby, you are sex.

    It’s my own voice in my own head. And I always listen. I love that voice.

    So I’m saying “goodbye, winter wear!” and happily flaunting the bony ridge on my shoulder that I love* and baring the dessert plate-sized birthmark between my shoulder blades where appropriate, even if I am still covering up my inner-knee pudge.

    * So much so that I just got up to admire it in the mirror before I finished typing that sentence.

  • Until just recently, my dad still kept my eighth-grade photo on his desk

    Today, a little boy named Joshua called me Ma’am.

    I didn’t expect to hear that. For all of my adult life so far, kids, cabbies, customers at the Gap, and lost tourists have all addressed me as ‘Miss.’ In the unfamiliar, it carries a note of affection. Compared to that, ‘ma’am’ sounded so impersonal, disinterested.

    And so I felt compelled to follow Joshua to the conference room where he and nine other kids were building a space station out of leftover cardboard boxes, empty poster tubes and tangled ribbons of clear packing tape. I had something to prove. I am not some faceless she-drone at your dad’s office who provides construction materials without seeing to it that they are put to use with the best of your imagination. Now you look me in the eye and you tell me where you want this fake asteroid missile launcher!

    And then it was time to clean up, so I took off. I have a job to do, after all.

    It’s Take Our Daughters To Work Day—I’m sorry, it’s Take Our Sons and Daughters To Work Day. I was in third grade when The Ms. Foundation for Women created the first incarnation of the career exploration program to promote self-esteem and show little girls what they could do when they grew up.

    It was the early nineties, the movement for equal rights for men and women in the professional world was still trucking, and even as a nine-year-old, I understood that I was going with my dad to his office to see for myself that some day I could, and would, have a job and an office of my own.

    The program was called Take Our Daughters To Work Day for a reason. It was designed for young girls.

    (more…)

  • Better bring in that laundry ‘fore it starts to rain

    There was one teeny-tiny washing machine in the two-family house where I rented a room in New Zealand. The cellar door was on the far side of the house, off the steps that lead down to the backyard. Inside, there was enough room for an old mattress, two broken bicycles, and a petite washer rigged up to a switch that swapped the power source between the two residences.

    Further down, the side steps lead to a weedy backyard. The extent of the landscaping began and ended with two metal laundry trees.

    For most of college, I could manage to stretch my clean clothes as long as between school holidays. I would drive a trunk load of dirty clothing home for fall break and another at Thanksgiving. And if I came up short on undergarments, I thought nothing of a stock-up shopping trip.

    That all changed when I studied abroad. I could only pack about two weeks worth of clothes, and I routinely tramped that limited wardrobe through the muck and unforgiving brush of the New Zealand wilderness. I had to get used to more frequent laundry days.

    And I had to get used to them without a clothes dryer.

    It was June and I was just hanging up what I knew would be my last load of laundry before I went home when the Wellington winds started to blow rain clouds in from the bay. In my rush to retrieve the t-shirts and towels I had just pinned up, wouldn’t you know it, I literally clotheslined myself. I got a “branch” of one of the trees straight across the bridge of my nose.

    It took a long moment for my vision to clear, and then it was already raining. By the time I got my snarled lump of wet laundry up to my room, I had the beginnings of a black eye. I hung everything up, draping clothes over anything strong enough to hold the weight, flinching each time I felt something—surely blood—trickle along the inside of my nose.

    Luckily, there was no blood. Just the shiner.

    (more…)

  • Didn’t get away with much, but I got away with this

    In middle school, I was home alone after school one afternoon. I ate half a bag of microwave popcorn. I couldn’t finish the rest, but I wanted to keep it warm for later, so I folded down the top of the bag and I put it in the toaster oven. Brilliant, right?

    It took maybe eight minutes for the bag to catch fire and set off the smoke alarm. I pulled the blackened paper out with tongs and hosed it down with the sink sprayer. So much for saving my snack for later.

    The toaster oven was already toast. When my mom got home, she found it out in the cold on the porch steps. I told her that I’d tried to make a Pop Tart.

    “And would you believe it just . . . burst into flames.”

    Luckily for me, frosted sugar is highly flammable, so it could have happened. That’s why you’re not supposed to heat Pop Tarts in the microwave oven.

    I don’t know why they don’t put warnings about toaster ovens on bags of popcorn.

  • Remember the time my fifth grade teacher called me a prude?

    There was a Brazilian student in my class for a few months in the fifth grade.  Her name was Esther.  She spoke a little English and her round face was beautiful when she laughed, so we could tell when she understood our lunch table conversations. 

    On her first or second day, she and I stood in the same circle of girls on the blacktop at recess.  She was dressed just like us, in cotton stretch pants with loose knees and a multi-colored ski jacket detailed with stripes of reflective fabric.

    I knew her coat must have come from a local store, certainly not from South America, but I wondered what it had been like to go and pick it out.  Having never needed a winter coat at school before, without knowing the context of a New England playground at recess, how did she wind up with that coat?  Did she choose it for the colors?  The “secret” pockets?  Did she just let her mom pick it out?  Did she wonder what her classmates would wear?  What we would look like?

    We were all asking questions and she answered all of them, the soft lisp of her accent evident when she tried several times to pronounce a word that made her uncertain.  If she couldn’t understand, she answered with a perplexed, apologetic expression.  Another girl would try a new question.

    When I asked where she lived, she hesitated.  She closed her eyes, thinking with her dark lashes against her face.  She was still searching for familiar words, either in my question or in her answer, when she looked at me again, so I put the tips of my index fingers together like the point of a right-angled rooftop.  I held them up and drew a house in the air between us.

    “Home?” I asked, and pointed gently at her.

    (more…)