Amanda stopped her writing and looked at the bed: the bright-red nylon stockings, white garter belt, shiny almost metallic looking black panties, the long multi-coloured floral skirt, pink silk blouse, beige lacy bra—the clothing lying there like a tame but colourful menagerie of wrinkled, exhausted animals. Next to the bed, the shoes, off-white and not matching the skirt or stockings, the highest heels she could possibly walk in, like two tiny confused space aliens on stilts. She wanted to put these images into a poem—the erotic as wrinkled, exhausted animals and tiny confused space aliens looking for a little human companionship. She was working on a poem about her past, and these flimsy images were intruders into the present. Nevertheless, she jotted down notes for another poem, a light, silly poem. She always wrote longhand. Then she would two-finger tap away at the typewriter. An old typewriter, older than she was, having bought it at a pawn shop downtown the day she swore to start a new life, the owner claiming it used to belong to a famous poet. Her fiancé couldn't believe she had never used a computer. "We live in the Computer Age, and you're a non-participating old fogey," he had said, more criticism than teasing, and she blurted out, "But I've been displayed on the computer," caught herself. "Oh, I was just being silly, darling," diverting his curiosity. Damn those stupid photographs—Click on any thumbnail to see this uninhibited housewife amateur bare all. He promised to give her computer lessons. She kept putting him off. He promised her the lessons as if he were offering the most lavishly beautiful sex. She remembered when her father gave her lessons—lessons for this, lessons for that, the two of them alone in his classroom, he creating the stifling atmosphere; the last lesson, in the basement, he showed her how to swing a baseball bat. Ah, but he wanted a boy, a superstar baseball-playing boy. If only you were a boy, he had said, and held her close, then took his place on the mound, grinning confidently. She swung at two pitches, pitches hurled from the past, he yelling and yelling, approaching the batter, shaking his fists, she connecting with the third pitch, a line drive laced with blood. He never brought charges against her. A week later, amidst her mother's scolding for trying to kill her husband, Amanda left home for good. Except she wasn't Amanda then—a lovely young teenager named Janie.
You live in a place so identifiable
they pronounce your name with perfection
predictable like a sonic boom
each and every time, a minuscule death sentence,
and so you change your name
make your hair a colour without a proper description
you run down the street with unseemly speed
singing faster than running
to those with well-formed memories
you are scolded, pampered within limitations,
forced to look at lush lawns
and before your wounds finish healing
you stutter, stumble
and so you invent madness.
How many times had she written and rewritten this poem? Rewriting by hand, on her typewriter, in her head, especially in her head. Still no title. Her fiancé didn't know she wrote poetry. He hardly knew anything about her, but claimed he would do anything for her. Yet they had never made love. Engaged three months already, he two years older than her, seeming at times so much older. Sex after marriage, he had insisted from the moment she had tried to kiss him open-mouthed. "I'm sorry, but that's what I believe in," he said. The necked but not for long, mostly perfunctory kissing, and very little fondling. When she would touch his genitals, he would move her hand aside, saying, later, sweetheart, seeming to describe a rocket launch that was being delayed because of the weather. She had described his kissing in a short poem, "the lacklustre kisser / fearful lips / cowardly tongue..." In her notes, and in her thinking, she had started referring to him as The Fiancé or Her Fiancé. She wouldn't send that poem anywhere. She told him that she had been intimate with other men—leaving out the women, though—and he said there was no need to talk about that. "We begin with a clean slate," he said, and vigorously scrubbed an invisible slate in the air between them. It amazed her that she was having that tight-assed conversation. At first she had thought he was putting her on; his convictions, his strict demarcation between married and unmarried sex, baffled her, but it was his value system. He had never made love, she feared. But he had gotten on his knees, tears in his eyes, and asked her to marry him. Why had she said, "Yes, darling, I'll marry you," a line uttered like an auditioning actress afraid she wouldn't get a part. "If you have any problems," she had said, "you can talk to me. I'm open to just about anything." "I don't have any problems about sex, sweetheart," he told her. "Our wedding night is going to be interesting, to say the least," she said. Amanda wanted to take her fiancé's mind somewhere else; why was he stuck, fantasy-less, or at least unwilling to share his fantasies with her? If he only knew the sexual things she had tried in her life.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
