Annoy Me why Don't You

Annoy Me Why Don't You

    I was distracted by the rain outside the car window.  It splashed and wiggled against the passenger’s side and I was trying to figure out a way to run to my car when suddenly I felt his hand on my knee.

"You have a good night," his voice hit a high note.  He was in his late thirties but sounded like his voice was still trying to find itself like a thirteen year old. I stared at his hand on my knee then immediately looked up to find his eyes meeting mine.

"Yeah, okay" I said slowly, deliberately.

"I'll call you later "

"okay."

I jumped out of the car not caring that I didn't have an umbrella but caring instead of his hand on my knee.  Did he think I was easy?  Did he think I was flirting with him?  I shut his car door and ran to mine.  Once inside the car I sat there.  I had not been touched by a man in five years. When I say touched I really mean ravished.  Robert, my last boyfriend, held my hand, squeezed it lightly and kissed me on the nose exactly five years ago.  I remember looking up at the orange leaves slipping off the branches and the cold Boston wind whipping itself around my hair as it stuck out from under my beret. My black beret with all the lent on it, the one Robert use to wipe his soft hands on.  He would wipe and wipe as a gesture of love but the lent never came off and his efforts were in vain.  But I loved him and I loved him deeply.  The kind of deep that never goes away and you feel like it is cemented to your ribs and it causes you to take deeper breathes than usual because that's all you can do.  It was a love that hurt and sometimes I still curl up and cry.  I would curl up in the tub without warning, in the warm water. I would curl up when I woke up at two in the morning and cry because there was nothing else to do.  Imagine five years later waking up from a dream about the day you broke up with your boyfriend, the special one.  It's the damn orange leaves that I run from in my dream.  I figure in my dream state that if I can run from the leaves before it touches the surface Robert and I would still be together.  Insane.

    So, here I am taking a graduate Japanese literature class five years later at Harvard and this guy I will call Mickey, because he looks like a Mickey, and sounds like Mickey Mouse, not all the time, only when he is uncomfortable with saying no to someone and then his voice does this weird thing; but his real name is Andy, and he is trying to be my friend.  God knows I need a friend.  But he’s not weird; he’s cool when you get to know him.  And what do I do? I become his friend.  And then his lover; but it does not stop there.  It never does. Does it?

     So we become lovers and I am sitting here trying to tell you how this happened but I can’t remember and I want to call him and ask him when the first time we made love but I can’t; because he isn’t answering his phone.  He would, I know he would; but he works in a cubicle with other people.  He’s a paralegal, at this swank office in Cambridge, Ma. His i phone sounds like it is on speaker phone with steroids -- only it is never on speaker phone and he has the volume on low but still you can hear everything.  Of course I learned that too late.  Of course.  Because I called him, and I know you are not supposed to begin a sentence with because but I have too! Anyway, I called him one day because I wanted to tell him that I was sitting – no, laying in our army green, bamboo sheets in my birthday skin, meaning naked. And I proceeded to tell him and I was giggling with the corner of the sheets wedged between my front teeth and I felt sexy as hell.  And my feet were sticking out and I swung them from side to side.

“Hello?”  He said in his perky way.

“Remember what I smelled like last night?”  I was getting a high from the rush of what his smile might look like, with my feet still swinging.

“Hell – low” his emphasis was on the O.

“I remember what you smelled like” I kept talking like a run on sentence and singing as if I were singing a nursery rhyme.

“And I remember how my breath pushed past my lips into the opening of your ear –“ but I never got a chance to finish what I was going to say because he cut me off.

“I work in a cubicle” he was rushing, pushing his words forward before mine could fit in.

“Annoy me why don’t you” I swear I was finished with him.  He was cutting off my long awaited feeling of wanting someone. There is a poem by Emily Dickinson called, I taste A Liquor Never Brewed.  In one of the lines she writes, Inebriate of air am I, basically she is drunk with an intense feeling for nature and I could relate.  I wanted to be drunk with a longing for someone I was growing in love with.  I prefer to say growing in love instead of falling in love.  So I hold the phone away from my ear and scream into it.

“What?  So you mean other people can hear me?”

“Um, yeah something to that degree”

“Whatever” Sexy was out and perturb was in.  The moment was gone and I was back to my reality.

I never got a chance to tell you what I was doing besides trying to take a class in Japanese Literature, studying The Tale of Genji.  I was trying to find a way to make my thirties truly memorable.  Since thirty is the new twenty I felt inspired to be adventurous and open-minded about this decade.  I am thirty-five, so I am half way through.  During the day I work for an advertising company part-time as a copywriter.  In the evening I take graduate classes to get a degree in comparative literature.    

     I am so distracted lately because of Andy.  I can always smell him.  His scent is so distinctive.  He smells like curry powder and patchouli and it drives me crazy.  He only eats Indian food because his parents used to live there in India doing missionary work.  He speaks some Urdu and volunteers to work with Indian and Pakistani students whose family have immigrated to America and needs legal advice on obtaining educational vistas. So this is Andy and I really like him.  I know I sound like a teenager in love and okay maybe the word love is a little strong.  If you want to be fair about this let’s just say it‘s an infatuation and I think it’s mutual.  I’ll tell you why.  It was another rainy day and I was sitting in Harvard Square at the coffee shop, Au Bon Pain and Andy comes from behind me, wraps his arms around me and whispers that he has been looking for me his entire life.   It’s the kind of romantic act that makes a woman smile.  He has flowers for me every time we meet and always surprises me with small gifts.  He tells me he does this so that I can shine my winning smile that stole his heart.  So I wanted to resist but it was hard and my heart was beginning to wither.  I used to read a book of poetry a week.  It was a secret between me and the universe.  I read the poems so that I could feel love, dream about being loved one day and keep the romance in me alive.  So Andy comes along and I decide he will be the one for now. 

Shiloh

 Norma Jean is a simple wife of a simple man.  She seems to have accepted her life with him away.  The writer carefully peels each layer of their personalities like an onion peel.  She slowly gains a sense of her self through self improvement activities and we catch him losing his confidence as a man and a provider.  These layers of each character build the story up as each flaw becomes visible.  The characters are shown to be desperate but vunerable by their fears and the tragic realities which their lives have dealt them.

Water Liars

Barry Hannah usues a strong first person with humor and a sense of nonchalance as if nothing bothers him.  But ironically everything does bother him including the loss of his wife's virginity.  The character sounds as if he has command of what's happening in his life when in reality he does not.  He mentions turning thirty three like Jesus then mentions vodka cocktails and trying to find the  truth about sex between confessions of drunkness as if the holy spirit will reveal his sins and her sins as equal when in reality sin and religion are not one in the same.  Perhaps the alcohol serves as a catholic preacher during confession but he still feels a jealousy towards her past lovers and her beauty seems to keep him from going further insane from her tresspasses.
  In retrospect you see him as the older man in later years never recovering from his own drunkened ramblings about life, love and the crucifixition of sin.

The Divorce Diva

The Divorce Diva

No one tells you that the process of divorce continues long after the pen dries when you sign your signature to release the other person on the dotted line. The next process is the psychological pantomime of your unspoken actions and thoughts. It takes a while to unlearn the we, the partnership, the feeling that you are never alone; always aware that when you arrive home in the evening the other will soon arrive not long after.
But that was not the case for Didee. Twentyt-two months ago she arrived home not in a new car but with a set of papers declaring her new emancipation; and an empty home. The digital clock on the wall read 5:45pm and there was just enough light for her to see past the pillars in the kitchen that separated the family room and the dining room. She decided to keep the lights off.
Twenty-two months later she still came home in the evening, preferring to keep the lights out still. "So it's just me" Didee said out loud to herself. She locked the door behind her, put down her bag and begin to unbutton her blouse. She slipped it off her shoulders and let it fall. The silk fabric barely made a sound. She threw her italian pumps forward watching them klunk themselves as they fell. She ran upstairs to her bathroom with what remained on her body, a black bra and tight pencil skirt that she found at "The Loft" years ago. Her bathroom was barely lit by the block glass windows that faced her above the garden style tub. She reached for a lighter from the blond teak draw of her bathroom vanity and lit the wick. "Umm" She said aloud as she inhaled her favorite tuberose diptyque candle. She stood on her tippy toes on the marbled, green italian tile, as she took off her remaining clothes. She ran the water, warm and sprinkled lavender flakes that soon reached her chin. She immersed herself fully under the water, She remembered the promise she kept to herself as she stood in court that fateful day. Never again would she loose herself as she did to a marriage or to a man who did not deserve her. She thought about the events of that day, months and years that led her to this point.
She cried as she inhaled slowly trying to control what could not be controlled. Her wet bob of curls looked mahogany in the candled light. At this point she felt intimacy would remain a mystery. She would never trust a man's word again, never. She got out of the tub, left the water in, and grabbed the closest towel. She decided to keep her towel on as she called her closest friend, Lisa. But she could only hear the conversation she had with Lisa the day of the divorce. She sat and replayed their exchanges.
"Hello, Lili" Didee didn't want to say anything else. She let Lisa begin.
"Hello Is it done?"
"Yes, I am officially the divorced diva" She wasn't convinced she was a diva, just divorced.
"Now listen here. I can hear it in your voice. You are a Diva, you have always been one and now you are a Divorce Diva. You hear me Diidii? She waited for an answer as if she was scolding a child.
"I hear you but this has changed me in some ways. I can't explain it but I feel really different." Diidii's tone was soft and unsure.
"of course, this has changed you. You are a single woman now. Now take a xanax and off to sleep you will go. You have a big day tomorrow, right, with that tax attorney you met at the library last week?" Lisa hesistated "And I am sure it will do you good."
"He isn't a tax attorney any more, he's a grad student slash teacher. And remember miss trophy wife, I 'm a poor grad student too!"
"Geez, you really scare me sometimes Diidii. Whatever, just enjoy and try not to think about the scum you just signed off on."
" Yah, right. ciao"
"ciao."
Lisa had been her rock . Her solace. Speaking with Lisa was her only connection to a sane world because her world felt like a lie. She felt her whole existence was a lie. She felt the world was inimical towards her. Although Diidii felt she had reached her nadir. She felt there was room for something to go amiss just the same.
Didii obediently popped her Xanax grudgingly that night. And every night for the last twenty-two months. Emotionally she felt flat, that was the side effect of Xanax. Her personality was devoid of any traits that made her recognizable to people who knew her well. Medicating herself was the only way she could function. It didn't give her time to grieve. So she found herself in this cycle; only love reared itself in an inopportune time for her in the form of Will. He found her unapologetic, unknowing that she needed him and open to interrupt her loneliness with his invitations to casual dates.
The next morning she found herself awoken to her cell phone buzzing off the side table. "hello" her voice was cracked and uneven.
"Hello, Diidii, it's Will."
"Oh, hello, one moment please." She ran into the bathroom and swigged a mouthful of listerine then spit, missing the sank and hitting the counter and floor. She ran to the bedroom and picked the cell phone back up.
" Hello, sorry for the hold, umm, how ARE you Will?" She needed to enunciate to appear awake because she wasn't and she was still nude from her bath the night before. Self-consciously she wrapped her mangled duvet around herself as if he could see her.
"Hey I know it's kind of early but I was wondering if I could swing by and bring you breakfast to celebrate your new status as my girlfriend. "
She smiled. "Sure. That sounds nice and thanks for updating me on my new status ."
"Thought you might want to be informed. See you in 45" and then he hung up.
Diidii scrambled into the shower . Under the shower head she stood aware of every drip of water that hit her head. She stood still not knowing what emotion she should wear that day. She wished the shower could baptize her and absolve the betrayal of her failed marriage. She made ablution and silently asked a higher energy to give her hope where it did not exist. She wished to feel like a girlfriend, the kind of carefree girlfriend who hangs on the shoulder of her boyfriend like someone without any baggage. The steam made her sweat and for the first time in twenty-two months she wanted to feel an erotic steam that would make her feel light headed and sexy. Diidii turned off the shower abruptly . She needed to hurry because for the first time she wanted to see Will.
"The unfamiliar odyssey" is what she refers to love or the art of finding love after a divorce. It is an unexpected.