About Play…

In the early spring my parents and I went to the Guilford green where we walked in circles along twisting sidewalk paths.

Mommy held my hand. Daddy looked down at me, asking questions, poking fun. His eyebrows lifted high, his eyes wide open.

I laughed more than I spoke.

“It’s almost Easter,” Mommy said, looking first at Daddy and then down to me, “You’ll need to think carefully about what you’d like to ask the Easter Bunny for.”

I nodded up at her, open mouthed, earnest, and seriously considering.

“What are all the other little girls asking for?” I wondered, looking from Mommy to Daddy and back again.

“Well I’m not sure,” Mommy said, “Maybe we need to ask the Easter Bunny himself.”

I nodded.

“Would you like to do that?”

I nodded again.

We stopped at a phone booth – two pay phones positioned back to back.

Mommy held me up, put a quarter in the slot, dialed a number.

“Ok,” she said and handed me the thick black receiver.

I held on tightly. The phone rang once, twice, three times before a voice answered.

“Hello?” it squeaked, “Hello?”

“Hi,” I answered, eyes stretched wide, like white mooncakes, little fingers clutching the metal cord.

“This is the Easter Bunny speaking, who’s this?”

“I’m Allie,” I answered.

“Oh Allie, yes yes, I’ve expected your call.”

We talked for whole minutes, the Easter Bunny, presumably from his burrow somewhere and I from my mother’s arms. From one of two payphones on the Guilford green, where, on the other end of the booth, hidden from view, my father stood, speaking into the receiver in an artificially high bunny squeak, to his only daughter on the other end.

Back in the days when it was all about play.

At night the sun sets like a blood orange in the sky, bleeding red and rusty over the blue. She watches it out her kitchen window while she washes her dishes, or full heads of lettuce, red leaf and dirty. The house, her life, is set on a hill, deep seated in a long row of other beach cottages, ornamented with sunburnt front porches and unkempt lawns. But they all overlook the water, a wide California sea whose waves hold together the seam of earth and sky, stitching the two into one at the horizon line and adorning their union with layers of sea shell pink clouds.

~Excerpt, In Between the Lines, A.Rowbottom, Fiction, 2008

Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Allen Ginsberg, 1955

The trees are blooming on Columbus avenue. Sprouting green sprigs surrounded by white blossoms. Spouting the promise of new things to come. But it’s so cold, I think and then of how it seems the young have migrated to the Upper West Side. Members of my generation stride by with brown satchels slung over bony shoulders and cameras in their hands.

But then there’s that old woman with TEVA sandals strapped over her violet painted toes. She holds a pink lunchbox like a purse. Wears a puffy Baby Phat jacket.

And I watch her walk by from my window, reminding me first of those steadfast facets of a city in constant evolution and then of my own feet at six years old. My own unpainted toes held up beside my mother’s. Both of us bare, both of us sporting the same purple patterned TEVAs.

We wore them rafting. In Idaho. In large inflatable rafts that seemed indestructible at the time.
But now seem so fragile when in my darker moods, I look back on the photographs that froze us, open mouthed and dodging waves of white water, holding up plastic paddles against the rising rapids.

The flimsy albums of red and blue my parents fought for custody of hold us frozen in time alongside a series of shots I took in secret from a hidden place. A window into an adult world my parents forgot to shut before they let go the angry words my photos mime.

The words are lost. And for once I think them unimportant. I see everything spoken in the silent shells, the air-filled gestures. My father’s palm held up, my mother’s head bowed. Her back turned. The two of them walking away and how something that seemed so indestructible was, in reality, ready to burst.

I might move to California.

Always thought I would, you know.

In the days before New York. Days before the city took ahold and lovers took ahold and something inside affixed itself to the cold. To the grey and the possibilities of a million bodies crashing into mine.

So I’m gonna go. Make the big jump over water and land. Find a little place for my bed and my books. For me to be alone in until I finish out this phase.

And then maybe I’ll make a garden. Maybe I’ll make a boat.

Sit out on the sand and watch the waves roll in.

HOW each heartbreak always feels like the last.

Each leaving lover the last to disappear.

“I can’t believe,” I say in a tone marked by quiet disbelief, “I can’t believe this has happened again.”

Because the last time I was almost this…

Almost this shell shocked. This surprised.

And the last time I thought, well at least the worst is over- there’s no way this will happen again – not this way, not exactly.

But now that it has, disbelief has turned to recognition. Recognition into fear.

Because to know the pattern is not to stop it.

And how can I be sure

Next time…

What’s real?

Even when it ends- this imaginary attachment – even when we two disentangle and detach. How will I know he won’t wholly disappear? Leave me crazy for the question, my feelings, and the reality they won’t fit into.

The rhyme I can’t quite muster:

Old lovers – each man a body more than I’d like to say-

Answer me nothing before they go away.

Was he ever there in my bed, body, and brain?

Or is it I who am wholly insane?

Great artists walk a sliver sized edge between reason and madness,

Wobble on the tightrope of elation and sadness.

And if such is true,

Thanks to disappearing players,

I’ve learned well the art of peeling my own layers.

I ask not because I loved. Though, maybe I did.

But because I know I can. Ask. And love.

And because I thought I could up to the moment I tumbled so unexpectedly from the arms of your affection. And looked around and realized you were really gone for good.