Oddly Enough

children

Late April 2002

Close to Manassas, Virginia the haze changes to clouds. The sky spits rain and the spray off the road turns everything gray with fuzzed edges. The little pod of vehicles that have traveled together for miles are stuck with each other now that the traffic is stalled to a slow crawl.

Ahead of us is an impatient and sporty silver BMW with DC vanity plates, ‘ALM’, presumably initials. The rack that holds the license in place says ‘Bullish’ along the top and bottom and sideways, but at first glance, miles back, I’d thought it said, ‘Bullshit’. A stockbroker, evidently. It slid back and forth between lanes like an interstate Ninja for miles and even now, stopped, emits impatience. Beside us is a square-faced, boxy truck pulling an open trailer carrying an enormous pointed barrel that looks like a weapon, which has been making me nervous for miles. We move up and stop and the truck moves up beside us, hissing and wheezing.

"How can such a light rain slow traffic down so much? It’s always like this on Sixty-Six when it rains. Does everyone panic when it rains?" my mother asks.

What I wonder is where is everyone going? How can this many people need to be out on the roads?

I pause, a little embarrassed. I’ve only lived in West Virginia for five and a half months and this stretch of road has always been like this. It seems a little pretentious to be so ‘shocked’ by the city.

"I sound like one of those people who spend two weeks in Paris and then can’t remember the word in English. All zees cars? All zis traffeec, where does it all go?"

Mom laughs a few out-breath puffs, her lips - full and shapely and womanly, unlike my skinny worm lips - cocked in a half smile.

She hits the search button on the radio again when an add for Subaru starts up. Bits of words and phrases and bites of music run into each other to provide a jerking sound track for Mom’s restlessness as she presses ‘search’ again and again. She knows her way around DC well, likes coming up with alternate routes, depending on traffic, and now she’s trying to decide if she should take the Beltway or stay on Sixty-Six into town. It will determine whether we go to my grandmother’s apartment on the edge of Georgetown - actually, more on the edge of Glover Park - or to the hotel in the Maryland suburbs where we plan to stay tonight.

This trip has been planned, dreaded, aborted and rescheduled a few times. My mother and I drive a rented van because we plan to bring furniture and other stuff back with us from DC to West Virginia, though at this point we don’t know what stuff. It includes the furniture and such that I ditched here last fall when I left DC and graduate school and followed my mother to the mountains, where she’d moved a couple of years before, as well as dealing with Gram’s (my grandmother’s) things. Gram’s life, really. The former is confusing, the latter heartbreaking.

I also intend to make some decisions about my life while I’m here. The reasons my life in DC unraveled and why I’d felt such an overwhelming desire, nearly a need, to leave the city and head for the hills (duck for cover, was more like it) is complicated and still a mystery to me.

I’m trying to figure out.

~2~

An unmarked cop car, dark blue with almost black tinted windows, predatory like a shark, zooms past us on our left, on the so-called shoulder, siren screaming, searing blue lights beating at the air. Presumably there’s been an accident ahead of us, which seems to slow my mother down.

Finally, and kind of miraculously since she’s hit the search button so manically, we hear the traffic report on the eights and learn that, indeed, inbound Sixty-Six, already torn up and obstructed by construction, is slowed in places and stopped in others, both by weather and accidents.

Mom turns off the radio and sighs with resignation.

I don’t think you were ever this bad about traffic before, when you lived here. We’re not in a hurry, Mom, I say.

Oh, I’m much worse now, she says. I just want to get home.

Home?

I’m actually not sure where she means. D.C.? West Virginia? My grandmother’s in DC? Andy’s (her boyfriend’s) in WV? Our old place in Takoma Park?

Where is home?

~3~

When the faux-weapon toting truck moves forward, a shortened brown moving van pulls up beside us. Part of the cargo area overhangs the cab, which looks much too small for the task. The truck bounces as if it has bad shocks, its center of gravity is too high. It makes me think of excess, like a fat person with sore feet, which is somehow disheartening.

God, it’s so ugly! I say, amazed by the many hideous corporate headquarters boasting shameless boxy lettered, brightly lit, identifying signs from the top stories and all surrounded by twisted black snakes of new entrance roads

We inch past the accident. Amazingly no one was hurt. Two smashed cars, one an SUV and one a fat looking sedan, both with scary gashes, are stranded beside the road. A group of women with sweaters draped over their shoulders huddle in a circle against the nasty, spitting rain. The ambulance drivers slam their back doors closed and walk slowly toward the front of their vehicles, drooping, empty handed, appearing disappointed.

What’s more elusive than why I had to leave DC so suddenly is what I should do next, where to go from here. Without looking for a job in West Virginia I’ve been offered two, both part-time, at what everyone refers to as FRN, which stands for the cumbersome Family Resource Network. This doesn’t make anything any clearer to me, but it does force a decision. It’s very nice to have this option just handed to me and it feels good to be wanted, but it doesn’t compare to the things many of my friends from college are doing, like working in public health with a non-governmental organization - or NGO, as they say - in Uganda, or helping to create sustainable community development and agricultural practices in Chile, or working (admittedly mostly shoveling snow) in Antarctica on a research project.

Staying in West Virginia seems like a loser move, first for running home to Mommy and second for leaving the real world for the sticks. If I was living in the remote mountains in Chile or China or wherever, anywhere outside of the US, it would be cool. Even if I was doing research about Appalachia it would seem less loserish.

I’m hoping to be able to adopt a distant feeling about my life while I’m on this trip, because I believe that will be enable me to stop thinking about it. And by not thinking about it I will suddenly know what I should do, in a flash of insight the choice I should make will be revealed to me.

I evidently can’t not think about it all, however, and that’s partly because I also can’t put Elliot, my West Virginia sweetheart, out of my mind. Oddly enough, he’s a big part of the picture. More than being on my mind, his essence hovers around me and I can’t rid myself of it. I can’t talk about that to Mom, though, because my relationship with Elliot is a secret.

~4~

Elliot only very recently began coming to my bed at night.

When I heard my door pop open last night my heart lilted with a mixture of many feelings. I was thrilled, of course, but I’d said my goodbyes and had started trying to distance myself. I like that he comes over but it’s weird, maybe the weirdest part being that he sneaks over. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m sneaking a boy into my bed, something I have never had to do in my life.

Elliot lives close to Andy so he’d walked over. Quietly.

He undressed, climbed into bed beside me, pulled into my warmth and kissed me. His smell, eggy, earthy, salty and sweet the way an onion is sweet, shook me up inside. It’s as if his scent has been imprinted onto me and it means something deep that I don’t understand. Mixed with mine, our smells are perfume.

We lay together awhile until he sat up suddenly. His molded chest looked extra shapely in the moonlight. I’m usually attracted to the willowy-poet type but I like looking at Elliot. He’s tall and well-built and muscular, though not like a body builder, which is a body type that does not appeal to me. He’s a hard-working country man but at the same time his large manly presence is velvety soft. Like a gentle giant, he exudes a calm as if he exhales it and you can sense his solid core. I love being near him. I can’t describe or explain my feelings for him, but his solidity combined with the softness of his presence feels really good to be around. On top of that, something clicks between us on a basic, non-verbal, non-linear, non-cerebral and profound level. It’s more than just physical, but we come from such different worlds it is hard to explain what it is. It’s hard to understand, actually.

He said in his deep, bass, honey-smooth voice, Here, lift up, and tugged my pillow toward him, then patted and dented it.

Lay down right here, he said, The moon’ll be coming in that window soon and I want to fall asleep looking at you.

That would sound lame coming from anyone else but there was nothing hokey or fake about it.

With his mouth so close to my ear that it vibrated and nearly tickled, he said, You are so pretty. How you look, how good you smell, how good you feel, all of it, I ain’t never seen the beat. I got no idea how I got so lucky.

In the dim light his voice went right into me and created our very own place, our own world.

God, he is so sweet.

He laid back down and asked, So what you got in mind on this trip? You seeing old buddies and all?

I shrugged and burrowed into him with my head, trying to get as close as I could.

You know, he said, I asked my cousin about that house he’s got, in the bend in the road, that yellow house. He says do we do the work he’ll buy materials. I went over to get a better look at it and it wouldn’t be all that bad to fix that back wall. The foundation’s good and the roof’s good and them’s what you worry about. A house with a bad roof won’t last no time and one with a bad foundation ain’t worth messing with. We’d have plenty good reason for me to be over there all the time, working on that house like you’d hired me. We’d pretend. If you still wasn’t wanting for nobody to know.

Don’t you think the fact that you asked about a house for me is a give away? I asked.

Lots we done been give-aways lately. The worst thing about that house is them briars being so thick. You can’t get but to the front half of the house and that ain’t easy. If you want I’ll cut them out for you. I could do it while you’re gone, do you want me to. Like in Sleeping Beauty only I’m cutting out the briars so you can get in there, not to let you out. Maybe we’ll get stuck in there together. Still, walking over here tonight I was thinking it’s like I cut you free, ain’t it? Like I done kissed you and got you woked up, and you done me too.

~5~

Oddly enough, Sleeping Beauty came up at a party I went to the night before I left DC. It was a Department (University) party at my sort-of-ex Juniper’s house. He’s a second generation hippie too, like me, and we haven’t officially broken up. That party was somehow partly responsible for my need to leave my life and DC in a way I haven’t yet been able to explain to myself.

However, there was one part of the party I enjoyed.

After I’d slugged back two glasses of chilled white wine, standing near the table that was overwhelmed with a messy-looking collection of pot luck, Eugene, round bellied with a tiny, tidy, clipped mustache, walked up to me cradling a fist-full of corn chips in one hand and using the other to feed himself. He took careful, dainty bites with the very front of his front teeth. He and I were both significant others at department functions, me the girlfriend of a wanna be, he the partner of a (male) professor and a stay-at-home dad of an eleven month old baby boy.

Been watching any Disney lately? he asked me.

No, actually, I haven’t, I said.

We had already discussed the fact that we both like fairy tales and animated movies.

He said, I just watched ‘Beauty And The Beast’. Now what in the world does that show us about how men see themselves. You know? Disgusting beasts while women are the civilizing influence. Not just that women tame men, but they make them appealing, they transform men’s wild natures. It says a lot about men’s hidden fear of their own natures, and why they need Woman, the Feminine - or perhaps Eros - so badly. Womanly love, I’d say. Is that what tames man? I wonder. Heaven knows I haven’t tamed Arthur much and God knows I try. He still stacks the trash until it’s in a tower. He’ll spend ten minutes carefully balancing a soy milk carton, rather than just take out the trash."

Eugene’s drawling southern accent seems intentionally accentuated and the sound of laughter in his voice implies that he isn’t quite serious, or truly invested, in anything he says.

He went on, "What I want to see, what I loved, was Sleeping Beauty. Now that Disney movie is about female sexuality. I mean, he cuts her free from the brambles, the thorns surrounding her - talk about a chastity belt! - and a kiss awakens her. But what, exactly, does he awaken in her? If fairy tales tell us about a collective belief, does this mean we believe women are not sexual in the absence of a man? I’m a father now! I’d like to understand! Why do you think I come to these parties?"

~6~

Back to last night: lying there with Elliot and connecting what he said to that conversation with Eugene was disconcerting and disorienting.

I thought - ‘Is this really my life?’- which is a troubling question that seems to come back around to me. Suddenly there was a huge scary gap between me and the world, between inside and out. I lay back and breathed deeply.

I know you ain’t liking that job much. Or living here at Andy’s, he said.

He wrapped himself around me, held me closely and said into my ear, his voice deep and soft, rattling me, "Oh, I just want to pour myself into you," so that I shivered and was back inside myself.

After a minute he pulled away slightly and said, So, what you planning?

What do you mean?

When you coming back?

Ten days at the latest. That’s when I told Cynthia and Courtney I’d let them know what I’m doing.

They’re on the Board of Directors of FRN and have generously given me ten days to decide about the job.

You moving stuff for ten days?

I really don’t know. Mom and I are leaving it loose.

Mentioning my mother that way felt painfully exclusive of him somehow.

It will be so much harder on both of us the longer this goes on. I should leave and stay away. At some point I’m going to have to face hurting us both.

There’s a party coming up, I said.

I didn’t mention it’s my sort-of-ex Juniper’s surprise birthday party.

If I have stuff I should stay for I might come back on the train later, after my mom comes back.

He turned back to me, pulled me close and into him as if I weighed nothing. His chest quivered, his breath caught very slightly.

We slept wrapped around each other all night.

And so his essence hangs around me now.

~7~

You know, I’d decided I was going to go back to West Virginia with a plan. I’m on this trip..... I tell Mom.

I know, you told me that......

"I wasn’t going to think about it if I could help it, but the the closer we get to the city the more obsessively I’m thinking about it."

I suddenly realize why I’ve dreaded