Stories | velvetverbosity.com

On Account of Adrienne

Nick — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 09:23:40 +0000

She never wanted to be a mother. Never wanted to be a wife. She had been an unusual girl, disinterested in dolls, barbies, or games of “house”. The closest she had ever gotten was the castle she got as a Christmas gift one year. It became a beloved object to her. True, there was a princess, but there were also two knights (both good and bad) and a dragon and a fabulous trapdoor which she busied herself using hour after hour, deciding if it would be the black knight or the white knight this time that would fall through the trap door into the dungeon. The princess stood oft forgotten to the side. What bloody use was a princess in a dress and pink cap?

It wasn’t that she thought girls useless. She was one herself after all, and knew her own body’s finesse in climbing trees and discovering dead animals and finding the best spots to bury treasure. She didn’t think in terms of gender. Except that the boys at her bus stop were smelly and mean, and their flesh was repulsive to her, and from this she determined that some boys were not to be liked, not at all. And she recognized that some girls could be terribly boring and fickle, always creating problems in friendship when there didn’t need to be. But in the end, it really wasn’t about boys or girls, it was about children. For the most part she found them to be silly, vulgar, mean-spirited things with dull brains.

Unfortunately, these thoughts did not quite make it to her consciousness until many years later. Back then, she found herself stuck in a child’s world that made her feel an unwelcome alien. She did try sometimes, to fit in, but she despised them, and they despised her. She had “friends”, if one could call them that. Children she didn’t much like, but tolerated if they had something of use to her.

Like Heather. There were acres and acres of land on Heather’s farm and land was something Adrienne coveted. In the summers they explored every inch of that farm and imagined themselves as wild horses while running alongside the real ones through the pastures and over the soft ground of the woods with their long white and gold manes flying out behind them.

They ran with the lust of children while the sun pressed down on their heads. They ran for the pure joy of feeling their bodies working…bodies that were still new to them. To Adrienne there was nothing in the world but that moment, the two of them running, their awkward long limbs moving them with grace over the land.

There was Laurie, a friend because she was an outsider too, only for different reasons. She was freakishly tall and large, with a veritable afro of red hair punctuated by a full-body covering of densely packed freckles. She towered over the other children, foreign and wild and large. Despite all this, she was kind and ridiculously happy. Adrienne secretly thought her a fool, but never said so. She needed someone to share a swing with on the playground.

With Dawn, Adrienne discovered the body, the way children do. They were friends out of an unspoken pact of secrecy and nothing more.

Robbie, her first crush, and one hell of a kid, was the only one she considered a real friend. Only Robbie wouldn’t talk to her in school. Pretended not to know her. He could forgive that Adrienne climbed trees better than any boy he knew or that she made him wind her up on that contraption she had hanging out of a tree made up of an old bouncy horse and some rope. She always wanted to spin faster, and he would wind her up on that thing so tight that Adrienne’s head almost touched the branch where the rope was tied. Then he’d let her loose, while she hung on with all her little fiery might, head pulled in and her voice screaming and squealing with equal parts terror and delight. He could forgive her fascination of spiders and insects. He could even forgive her weird habit of scouting for dead animals that needed a proper burial under the willow tree, but he couldn’t forgive that she was a girl, and boys and girls just simply couldn’t be friends. Not in school anyway.

This hurt her deeply. Robbie wasn’t a silly, vulgar, mean-spirited kid with a dull brain. He had thoughts, good ones, and he talked about them with her (on the weekends, of course).

“Do you suppose animals go to heaven too?”, he asked her once, looking at her back all hunched over the newest grave she was digging for a dead mother squirrel she had just found on the road.

“I don’t believe in Heaven,” she grunted.

“Well that’s dumb,” he shot back, and Adrienne threw a fistful of dirt straight at his head.

Boy and Girl Fishing, found at www.artmia.com

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Growing Down

Nick — Thu, 25 May 2006 09:14:49 +0000

He grew down instead of up. Sometimes people do that. It’s not that he didn’t try, but he built his stairs like a house of cards, only without grace and patience. It couldn’t bear the weight of his pain.

He found it easier, when the cards began to fall, to go down..gravity and velocity his companions. He tried to take me with him, grabbed my ankles as he fell, and God help me I almost went. But my resolve to live was stronger than his pain, stronger than the force of gravity.

I didn’t bother struggling. I slicked my ankles with vaseline, watched him slip, and said good-bye.

(Image from: http://abyss.hubbe.net/jeremiah/gallery/gfx/covers/jtv/lg/ep/s2/205-falling-lg.jpg)

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Wolf in the Laundromat

Nick — Wed, 17 May 2006 09:14:38 +0000

He sits in his car, with the door open, his long legs hanging out of the car…his shaggy head bent over a newspaper. He looks up as I walk by with the first of four baskets. He smiles and my heart pinches, shrinking in on itself. He is a predator. I know this when he smiles.

You see, the predator cannot be distinguished by any physical quality. He can take the shape of any man. You can’t see it in the cut of his clothes, the style of his car, his walk, or the way he styles his hair. There are no tell-tale outer markings. He can wear a business suite and languish comfortably in board room chairs. He can coach children’s soccer. He can wear the collar of God. He can run on the night streets and howl. He can breathe comfortably in the smoke of bars. He can stretch in the sun-warmed flesh of an athlete. He can rest inside the mind of the intellectual. It is a complex and subtle play of movement in his smile or in his eyes that reveals the predator inside.

A change in the eyes, quick, like the flash of a lightning bug in the dark heavy air of a summer night. There and gone. You peer, trying to predict when it will flash again, wonder to yourself if you imagined it.

I watch him out of the corner of my eye as I walk past, waiting for it. There, again…a certain hunkering of posture, a feline liquid swivel in the neck. And then the smile. So close to revealing the animal within that my skin begins to hum like a tuning fork, in tune with the hint of growling down deep in the throat behind his smiling teeth.

The children run up ahead of me into the laundromat, settling themselves into the blue cushioned seats below the television set that hangs in the corner. They crane their necks to see the cartoons playing.

“You have a lot of laundry there,” he says as I pass with the third basket. This is what he says. But his smile says, “I see you. I see your small frame, and your tiny hands. I could take you in here, fold you in my strong arms, secure, and then tight. Devour you, take you inside to warm my empty belly. When your life slips away and you have moved from warm to cold, I will spit out your bones and slip into the night. I have time, child…I am patient.”

I smile back, “Yes, two kids generate a lot of laundry.”

Inside, I drop the basket on the counter, breathing in the humid perfumed air of the laundromat. I go back for the last basket.

“More?” he feigns surprise and lifts one eyebrow to emphasize it.

I nod and continue past him, careful not to walk too close…careful to keep my scent from his nostrils.

This time as I approach with my basket, he doesn’t look up. He is bent over his paper. I come closer, closer still, and just at the moment he could look up to meet my eyes, he rustles the paper.

With fast feet I move past. My skin prickles and I imagine his hot breath chasing down the curve of my neck and spine. When I turn to look, he is still there, in his car, looking at me…smiling.

Inside I am safe in the company of flourescent lights and the mellow rhythm of the washers and dryers. I begin to sort the clothes into their piles of color and delicacy. Hot pinks and reds, denims and greens, stark whites for the hot bleach wash, and cashmere and silk for a gentle machine.

Suddenly his shoes are there in front of me. I stare at them while my hands continue their work. The shoes are brown, soft and worn. They are harmless. Those shoes can’t tell you he is a predator.

My eyes move up to the denim swathed legs. His jeans are clean and unassuming. The faded blue kind that anyone can wear, and everyone does. Nothing there to indicate that underneath pulses the blood of a predator.

My eyes continue upward, to his chest and the earthy flannel shirt that rests atop muscle and flesh. It is buttoned nearly to the throat, above which is exposed the suntanned column of skin that leads to his chin.

There…it is there, in his smile. The wolf smile. I feel the flash in his eyes and look up to catch it, but it is gone.

“I hate having to come to the laundromat”, he says. “It’s such a process. Such an event, you know?”

But his smile says, “I like the smell of your fear. If I turn my head just so, close my eyes, I can imagine what you would be like. I am patient. Just stand there, let my idle chatter distract you as I step closer, until you feel the warmth, and it is too late. No need to get to know me, I am pure instinct. No need to get to know you, you are but trembling flesh.”

“Mmmm”, I hum in agreement. I work at ignoring him. He retreats to the vending machine, pondering the selection, inserts his money and retrieves a soda. I watch him as he walks over to the television, standing just behind the chairs where my children sit. I call to them to come help me, but they ignore me. I move from washer to washer, inserting the clothes, the soap, the quarters, pushing buttons.

A dryer buzzes. He turns to check if it belongs to him, and it does. He walks toward it and I realize I am in the middle of the space between him and the dryer. I hold my breath, bracing for the static of air, the pulse of energy that will bounce off my senses. I try not to look up, but I feel safer if I do, knowing that my gaze will hold in place the human mask that covers the fur and fangs.

The flesh around his eyes crinkles as he smiles at me. When he is past, I breathe. I grab a magazine from a stack and sit next to the children, not looking up. I listen to the sounds of his folding, the rustle of fabric rubbing on fabric, the soft puffs of warm air escaping their hiding places inside t-shirts and pant legs, the snap of towels as he whips them into straightness.

I hear the scrape and creak of the wicker basket he carries his clothes in as he lifts it from the counter, and then the soft padding of his brown shoes across the floor as he leaves. And if I turn my head just so, and close my eyes…underneath the sound of soft padding, I can hear toenails clicking on linoleum.

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Fathers – 4/27/06

Nick — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 09:14:26 +0000

Pediatrician waiting room, 3 p.m. – He is soft…soft face, soft brown eyes, soft long hair, soft body, soft shoes. His body whispers of warm waters, composting leaves and earth, endless gentle streams slowly smoothing the rocks.

His son is a small version of him and he dotes after his baby sister, she a pink cheeked child of delight and eager wonder. The father watches his son rock his sister on a rocking horse. The son looks to his father as he rocks her…once, twice, and again…smiling, seeking reassurance.

It comes, it never wavers. The father’s approval is a beam streaming from eye to eye, unfaltering.

State Street, 4:25 p.m. – He is happy, happy, happy. His grin is almost silly, so full of happiness and pride. “Giddy” or “delirious with joy” come to mind as I watch him. Mom and baby on a bike in front of him, he takes up the rear where they cannot see the sparkles of love lighting up his eyes, brighter than the late afternoon sun that blinds me as I drive.

Lacrosse game, 6:30 p.m. – He has come straight from work to sit on the cold metal of the bleachers. The wind flaps at the bottom corner of his navy business suit. When he smiles, he is a movie star with his bright tiny pearl teeth flashing beneath black sunglasses. He is perfectly trimmed and perfectly proud.

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12:30 AM – The Coffee

Nick — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 09:14:20 +0000

12:30 and I’m fading but I’ve still got pages to write. I need coffee but since I only drink it on a blue moon I’ve got none to brew.

I get in the car hoping something is open. I am still every inch a Northeast Kingdom (where they roll up the dirt roads at 6pm) girl so I assume the world stops at sundown.

The coffee shop windows are lit up. Good. I will have coffee tonight. Inside there is actually a LINE! Other Smithies getting their caffeine on.

A compact Indian man sits, impeccably dressed for the hour, at a corner table reading. His girlfriend contrasts him with her hippy stylings but I know they are together by the way their necks arc to bring their heads together across the small square of table.

I wait almost 15 minutes for my coffee. 15 minutes is far too long when sleep deprived and not having had a decent meal in days. I start to crave all the tastes on the menu. I want it all…sweet, tart, bitter, hot and filling, fluffy indulgence.

I can’t help myself. My turn and I order my coffee AND a smoothie. Mango…yum.

*Note on picture – I googled coffee images and this one came up on the first page. I recognized it right away as Michael Wood’s, a contemplative photographer I studied with in Montreal. However, when I clicked the link, it was contained in an index on someone’s MIT page. No credit as far as I can tell, but I am almost 100% sure this is Michael Wood’s. I’ll look it up tomorrow when I have more time.

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How Velvet Verbosity Came to Play the Trombone

Nick — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 09:13:52 +0000

Our elementary school was starting a band program. Everyone on the bus was all abuzz after the day’s assembly where the instruments were paraded out and played before our wondering eyes and ears.

“I’m going to play the flute,” says one girl, bouncing in her seat.

“Me too!” parrot several girls.

“Well, I’m going to play the clarinet,” declares Dotty (Snotty Dotty as I call her in my head).

She turns to me, “What are you going to play?”

Thoughts of a shiny silver flute held delicately against my lips flit across my inner vision. I feel Snotty Dotty’s eyes boring into me.

I shrug. “Probly the trombone,” I say casually.

Snotty Dotty bristles, “What? You can’t play that! The trombone is for booyysssss.”

I shrug again.

*****

And that, dear readers, is how I came to play the trombone for six years. The first year I had to use my foot to reach all the positions…yeah, I was that tiny.

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Oh the Thrill of it All

Nick — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 09:13:46 +0000

In Shannock the best sledding hill is my backyard. On snow days all the kids from the neighborhood gather there, dragging their bladed sleds and blue saucers. The “hill” is an enormous bowl in the ground…a crater. So we have contests to see who can make a run down the hill and make it the furthest up the other side. Cheating is not tolerated and warrants snow bombs upon the perpetrator.

We are tireless, pushing the trails further and further up the other side of the hill. We sweat inside our snowsuits and our noses turn red and run. We soak our mittens and ignore frozen toes until it becomes unbearable. Then we go inside, our lungs full of winter air and our cheeks windslapped red.

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Crashes…

Nick — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 09:08:14 +0000

My first bike crash is at the hands of our neighborhood bully. I am 4 or 5 years old, riding my red tricycle down the uneven sidewalk, back and forth between my front drive and the tree that marks the end of our property. She is there, behind the tree, waiting for me. She steps out as I approach, hands on hips and announces I can go no further. I pay her no mind as I try to move past. She knocks me off my tricycle and I run home, blood running on my knees and elbows. I get patched up and run back outside for another go. She knocks me off again and again and each time I go to my mother for bandaids. After three rounds my mother says, “no more”, and I feel the bully has won.

*********************

It is the summer of my 7th year and I have my first two-wheel bike. The grass is vivid, soft and damp under my tires. My father runs alongside holding the back of the seat, and suddenly I am flying down the grassy hill of our backyard. I look back to grin proudly at my father and he grins back…one proud moment before the crash. My father is running but I am laughing…exhilerated.

*********************

I am flying down the road, trees whipping past, a pack of my friends behind me on their bikes. We are so fast and I am leading them. Old Mr. Peabody is standing on the side of the road and his dog that yips all day and night sits on the other side, a white ball of fur and teeth. Mr. Peabody calls him just as I streak past. My front tire hits fur and bone and my face meets the pavement. Thankfully the four bloody teeth I spit out are baby teeth.

*********************

Our driveway is a gravel paved U. I am still naive to the pitfalls of bike riding and do not realize that gravel gives way under fast, cornering tires. As I speed into the turn of our drive, the front tire jerks to the left and I cannot hold it. I crash in a great display of scraping and flying dust. When I pull up my shirt to inspect the damage there is gravel embedded in the angry red gashes across my ribs.

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A Woman’s Education

Nick — Tue, 10 Dec 2002 09:26:31 +0000

This post is for the December Write Away contest over at Scribbit. Theme: Your Favorite Day.

Life gives us so many memories. The beautiful, the ugly, and everything in between. When prompted to write about my favorite day, several things sprang to mind, mostly relating to time spent with loved ones, like the time I took my youngest sister grocery shopping and we walked arm in arm down the aisles singing, and I introduced her to mangoes. Or the time my two children rode their new Easter bikes, hand in hand, down our little country road and I thought my heart might split down the middle from the pressure of the love explosion happening in my heart.

Forced to choose just one favorite day from a lifetime, one day of personal transformation and triumph, I would choose my first day at Smith College. Could a first day at school really trump my children’s births or any number of days spent filled with the nourishment of love? No, not necessarily, but the truth is, my first day at this college was a long time coming and it fulfilled a yearning that had burned in me ever since I could remember. On that first day at Smith College, I wasn’t a traditional student. In other words I wasn’t in my late teens/early twenties when my feet first hit the pavement at Smith. I was 32 and a single mom.

Where and when I came from, kids just didn’t go to college, much less a college out of state, and certainly not a private college. In my graduating class, there were only three of us that went on to college at all, and we had all been advised to go to the same small state college a mere 45 minutes away from our high school. Even though I had dreams of other, grander, academic institutions, my experience and my environment made going to any of those colleges seem as attainable as packing a duffel bag and hitchhiking cross-country to Hollywood to place my bets on becoming a famous actress. I didn’t know any better, and no one was helping to enlighten me. So off I went to this small college that my other two classmates and I had been funneled into.

The college didn’t suit me at all. I found neither challenge, nor inspiration there. I dropped out after the first semester, and made a promise to myself that I would return to college when I found the right one and the money to to fund it. I was under a lot of mistaken impressions back then, one of the foremost being about how to finance college.

It took me one marriage, two kids, one divorce, and thirteen years to get back. So the day I stood on the Smith College campus for the first time as an enrolled student I could barely stand it, much less believe it. That first day, I gazed at the campus and my professors the way a young girl dreamily gawks at her favorite rockstar. I was in love.

I was also alive with thought, with energy, and ambition. There I was, at last, getting the education I had dreamed of since I was a young girl. While other girls had played House and Barbies, I had climbed trees, tried to read fat books, and prayed that I would grow up to be a genius. I didn’t dream of diamond rings or my future wedding and what particular style of dress I would wear like most other girls I knew. I dreamed instead of becoming an eccentric, fat-brained genius. Yes. I was odd.

I walked around the campus that first day with my eyes and ears wide open. I wanted to drink it all in through my senses and make the moment last forever. I craned my neck to stare up at the trees on the campus designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. I beamed smiles at passing students who, from the looks I received back, must have thought I looked slightly deranged. I didn’t care. I was at Smith! I owned a piece of this place! I belonged here! I was home. I wanted to scream and stomp and hurl myself toward the sky with happiness. If anyone had told me that day that the feeling wouldn’t last, that it was impermanent and I was just being a sentimental fool, would have been met with a crazed look of joy and a swift kiss on the cheek. Nothing, nothing, could have knocked me down that day.

In fact, if you had asked me how I felt, I would have lent you a pair of headphones that jacked straight into the internal dialogue of my heart and this is what you would have heard:

“Oh my God, I am here, here at Smith freaking College! My feet are walking up this path, to that building to go MY class! Look at the trees. Look at this beautiful campus. I’m in love with that brick, and that one, and that one too! I am Master and Commander of My universe, and in that universe I go to Smith College! Look at all the people. Look at all the women! I can’t believe it, a fantastic, brilliant college full of fantastic, brilliant women. And I’m one of them! I’m one of THEM! Happy, happy, happy!! I am home at long last!”

So on my first (real) day of college, I wasn’t so much a fat-brained genius as I was a giddy fool. And that feeling never did diminish. I still get twinkles of pride and joy when I drive by the Smith campus during my morning commute.

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Juice and gristle

Nick — Sat, 09 Nov 2002 09:25:07 +0000

She is beautiful. Radiant. She can’t possibly know her own beauty. Her skin speaks beauty, abundance and health. She sits, knitting, her brow furrowed in concentration, and I am mesmerized by the little repetitive dance of her fingers.

In the space of an hour she knits about 6 inches of something fuzzy, interwoven with pinks and purples. I don’t like these colors, but they suit her pink pink cheeks so for tonight I don’t mind pinks and purples. Suddenly I don’t mind them so much so that I wish she was knitting whatever it is she’s knitting for me.

It’s because I see her capacity for love, and the sadness that has broken her, and I want to be a vessel to receive what she hasn’t been able to properly give before. It’s because I wonder how she can be so radiant and so sad at once, and how much more radiant she could possibly be. It’s because I want the chance, just one chance, to help someone else shine so brilliantly that the whole lot of humanity goes blind with love. Just that once.

I wish it were some kind of surprising crush, but all desire is fueled by the want of something. It is not her that I desire, but what she is right now that I am not at the moment, maybe never will be again, maybe never ever was. I like to believe I was once a creature of flesh and sorrowful juices and radiant love. That I had beauty like that. My decaying bones and gristle want her life.

As we are leaving she comes up to me. She is so much taller that she has to arch her neck downwards toward me and her face is looming like a pinked moon just inches from mine. I feel vulgar next to her radiance, but I don’t turn away. I let her grace soothe me. I let my own spark ignite and burn. She is thanking me for something I said. “I really appreciate it you know”, she says, gently smiling.

Her heart aches through her eyes, and her love mixes with her sorrow creating tears that don’t flow out, but instead back down to her heart filling it up until it’s so large I can hear it beating in my own chest.

Picture Credit: I found this picture by doing a Google Image Search for “Juice and Gristle”. Brought me to a great little blog about “The Culinary Adventures of a New York City Lawyer”. Check it out. Tell him that Velvet Verbosity sent you.

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