Just a place to write stories, just a place to write stories, just a place to write tales.
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
This is called "Nursery Jive" and isn't part of the Mulberry Street happenings. It's nowhere near done but I'll try to work on it.
Let’s say there’s a woman, we’ll call her Old Mother H., or as the neighbors call her, Mrs. H. She had several children, no husband, and barely anything to keep them in tow. Mrs. H was at her wits' end after husband had left her for the town’s teacher, Ms. Muffet, who happened to be a tiny, dainty thing. One day she happened to look into her fridge and found that she had nothing to feed the children. Finally she swallowed her pride, which wasn’t much because she had to succumb to the most menial tasks for her neighbors in order to keep everything from falling apart, and marched down the village to visit the Muffet cheese factory for the scraps. This was the same family that produced the house wrecker who ran away with her husband leaving her with seven children and a hungry dog. To be fair, the Muffets were rightly ashamed of their relative’s behavior and had sent her whey without even a sign of a curd, instead of the parmesan cheese aged for months, that she had a partiality for. As Mrs. H descended the hill the Muffets caught sight of her gaunt figure and hurried to fill a basket of aged cheese that no one wanted. Of course they couldn’t give her the best cheese, she had something to do with her husband leaving, and they couldn’t be responsible for all the charity cases of the town. This was enough to show that they were embarrassed over the whole incident and didn’t want her causing a scene in front of all the customers.
Mrs. H approached the back door of the Muffet’s cheese shop and was assaulted by the smell of spoiled milk and a mess of cats, scrambling over one another for the milk that had not gone rancid. She knocked on the door and had to wait a few minutes before someone came because the Muffets had expected her to enter through the front of the store. When they had seen her pass they thought she had gone to beg at another store and had breathed a sigh of relief that her pride was still up there. They were not expecting the knock at the back door and in any case were too busy gossiping about her in the front that they didn’t hear her knocking. It was only when the smallest of the Muffets, (who happened to be the brother of the above Ms.) a boy the age of Mrs. H’s eldest girl, about 14, heard the faint knocking and told his mother was she finally attended to.
Mrs. Muffet was quite appalled that Mrs. H would even go through the back door, then dismissed it as an act only someone of her low class would do. She placed an only-tolerating-you smile on her face and went to confront the lady. When she opened the door she was greeted by Mrs. H’s pinched and slightly tear-streaked face. Madame Muffet felt a tiny sense of pity for this woman, and as her eye wandered down she noted the filthy rim around the edge of her skirt, and graying blouse, that like her hair must have once been black, she thought of adding a loaf of bread to the basket that they had prepared. Mrs. H looked at her defiantly, reading the appraising eye and the bit of sympathy she caught in the eyes of her soon to be benefactor. She opened her mouth and closed it quickly as a smell of fresh bread toasted with a slice of cheese reached her, she tried not to show Mrs. Muffet that her mouth had begun to water. This caused her to be even more stiff towards the woman in front of her.
“I was wondering if you had any work that I could do here, because I need to earn extra money, what with the kids needing new clothes and all,” Mrs. H had every intention to ask for food, but the pity she had just seen made her change her long prepared speech. Mrs. Muffet blinked a few times, sure that this woman had come to ask for food and her proposal had caught her off guard. Finally she smiled once again and said,
“Yes, actually we were looking for someone who might just be able to help us seperate the cheese from the whey.”
After that interview Mrs. Muffet felt somewhat proud of herself. She believed heavily on teaching someone how to fish and all that.
“Have you been baking?” he asks, startled even more at the question that just came out. “I mean, have you been expecting me?”
“You have come to bring me something, yes?”
“Yes, the postcards had your address.”
She tsk-tsked and replied, “Well at least the mailman is doing some kind of work,” then she ushered him inside. Within the house the smell of baking was more intense, and he was sure it was gingerbread. What is it about old people and gingerbread, he asks himself.
“What is it about old people and gingerbread?” she laughs, “I guess it’s all the spices coming together, makes the house smell warm and comforting. Sit in here with me, while I take it out of the oven and we’ll talk of the weather and baseball, yes?” She had a slight accent but he was unsure what it was.
She led him into the back of the house where the kitchen was illuminated by the morning sunshine. He could see the dust particles float towards the sun rays, and he looked around. The ceiling sloped downward, creating a cozy little nook of the kitchen, but also forcing his tall frame to stoop low. In the corner, where the smells of baking was coming was an old-fashioned cast iron stove. Its little, squat body standing squarely on legs, that seemed to bend and splay outwards beneath the weight of the stove. Above it a flat surface where a tea kettle was whistling patiently, and behind this a long black chimney that seemed to jab at the ceiling. A window against the wall let the light inside. It was unfastened so that a tiny breeze washed in whenever there was a chance, ruffling the curtains hanging aside. A dark, wooden table lay against a bare wall and was decorated only by a deep blue vase containing cornflowers and thistles. She motioned to a chair by the table and turned her back to him to attend to the bread.
“He doesn’t seem to have manners, Geraldine.” Robert looked to the sound of the voice and saw that from the corner of the room a woman sat. Wearing a black dress, and a dark scowl; he had missed her in the shadows. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize...”
On the counter he finds the postcards and gives them one close look and another read of the backs. He doesn’t notice that where the postcard of the lake lay was a wet spot. He just places them in his back pocket and heads out the door. He walks to the corner of Mulberry Street and marches up to the next street and looks for the right house. He’s sure that he’s passed this house once or twice before, maybe. He reaches it. Unlike the houses on his street, this is encased in brambles and high grasses. A tiny, run down, cottage amidst the well-kempt homes of the neighborhood, but it makes the other homes around look over dressed. He smiles, thinking of it’s quaint, comfortable stlye, not in the least perturbed by the smoke rising from the chimney, though it was the middle of the summer.
He makes his way to the door, unable to find a path because of the overgrown brambles and finally reaches it. Hanging on a rusty nail, a braided wreath of dried twigs and flowers. From somewhere the scent of baking wafts towards him, he detects cinnamon, and he imagines a grandmother within, baking cookies or some such that a grandmother is wont to bake for her grandchildren. She is in some flower-printed material, wrapped in a starch-white apron with the ruffles around the border, white-hair pinned severely but deftly into a coiled bun on her head. There is a scent of powder and lilac from the ironed clothes. She turns around and walks to the door and opens it.
“You’re a tad early dear, but that doesn’t mean I’ll turn you away.” She beams at him and he steps backward, startled at her appearance at the door, and her likeness to the woman he just imagined.
He awakes, not to the sound of the neighbors but to silence, not even a car driving by. No it’s not weird, he thinks, it’s Saturday. Everyone’s still in bed. He lays in bed trying to remember his dream but he can’t recall it. “Something with clocks,” he mumbles. He doesn’t know it but it’s the first time since his wife has left that he didn’t even have a thought of her. “No cereal this morning buddy, now get your lazy ass outta bed.” He pushes his feet into the slippers by his bed but they are switched around, and it takes him a moment to realize the discomfort and he automatically flips places and moves into the bathroom. There he realizes that the boxers he had on were the other way around, the opening at his back, he looks perplexedly at the mirror, shrugs, “helps the gases escape,” he tells the mirror knowingly. Then heads to the kitchen, morning routine broken by not heading to the cupboard for the cereal. Instead he reaches for the handle of the fridge and finds the taco filler from last night. He stands around, a fork in the container, eating slowly the cold food. His mind wanders; maybe he’d look into getting a dog, just to teach that Mr. Hyde cat of the neighbors. Maybe he’d get a membership to the local gym, “maybe I’ll get rid of this cereal gut”, looking down at his waist.
“Maybe I’ll return these lovely postcards to that house first thing this morning, or maybe a quick jog around the neighborhood first, or maybe I’ll be lazy and lay in bed for a while, ooh so many options for Robby this morning.” He smiles around at the kitchen. “You know what fridge? You’re just too big for a single guy like me, and why do I need four chairs around the table for? It is time for a change ladies and gentlemen!”
Ah just what we have been waiting for. The magical words, and now he’s ready. He doesn’t know it but it wont be such a shock when things happen that don’t normally happen. Robert, our hero, will soon come face to face with the adventure. It is one that I have just thought of, even I, the creator, don’t know what’s in store. But we must prepare for the coming of the antagonist, and perhaps the damsel or something like that, or else he wouldn’t be the “hero” yes? At the moment he is getting changed into something suitable for the visit to the neighbor because he decided that he wont just push it into their slot. This time it is not just some shirt and pants but rather a comfortable pair of green courdoroys, because they’re in style around here and because he’s had them since before the wife. Somewhere in the back of the closet she’s pushed his old, holey shirt and it takes him a few minutes to find it. Surveying it he pokes his fingers in the holes, “just to spite thee, my beloved wife,” he exclaims to the air, wearing a huge grin.
He goes into the supermarket and his feet find the right aisle but his stomach turns at the beautiful display of endless cereals. He walks to the meat section and selects a packet of chicken tenderloins. Chicken tacos. He doesn’t realize that the supermarket is empty of shoppers, he just heads to the bean aisle. On the floor, as if someone had placed it there, a picture postcard, of some mountains, a lake below, a sun rising behind the mountains, casting shadows onto the rippling waters of the lake, making the trees in the distance smokey ghosts. Robert turns the card around to find one line. “This is a wonderful dream that I hope I never wake up from”. No signature but an address, somewhere on the street adjacent to his. He pockets it and finds the beans.
At the door he shifts the plastic bags from one hand to the other and digs into his pockets for the keys. Once the door is opened he stoops down to scoop up the bills off the floor. At the counter he flips through the contents and something in the back of all the flyers for car details and missing children, catches his eye. Another postcard, this time with a field of golden wheat, and far off the horizon is made of a border of trees, crowded close and dark. Is it his imagination or is it warm with the smell of hay rising off the card? He places it to his nose but the only scent is of the dry stiff paper and perhaps a trace of ink and nothing more. He turns it around, the same address as the one in his pocket, different message: I can’t wait for you to join me! Come soon! “I wish I could join you soon,” he says to the card. He decides to be neighborly and bring both cards over the next day. After reading the message again he pulls the other postcard from his pocket and reads the message of that card. He wonders where this person is and if they really are having a good time or if it’s just a show for the person on the receiving end. He sets aside all cards, bills and thoughts and begins dinner.
It’s begun. Our hero has just had a seed planted in his mind, and though he doesn’t know it, it will grow overnight, very much like the beanstalk of lore and soon he’ll awake and stumble out onto it. But for now he silently devours his chicken tacos, and slips into the shower and then into bed. His dreams are bland, generic dreams of corridors and doors and ties, shirts, pants, and somewhere in there the girl from accounting is beckoning him to a table to write postcards. “Wish you were here” he scribbles and places it into the slot of his door.
Robert has stumbled into a bar, a few minutes after work and he is suddenly urged to join a few co-workers for the “end of the week drink” as one puts it. He complies though he is thinking of the cereal aisle in his local supermarket. A beer, a beer, a beer. Something like that. Maybe a mixed drink mixed in there, just to satisfy the girl from accounting, oh and a few peanuts to chase them down. He tells them that he has to get home, some dinner, some calls to make, something. He is tempted to take the girl home just so he would be the one to wake his neighbors tomorrow but he thinks not this time. It is too bad because she would have been the other path he could have taken, maybe later he’ll see her again, but I doubt it. She’s a nice girl too. Into efficiency, with the same traits and that the sterotypical accountant-type would have. Slightly on the boring side, good parents, good girl, occassional nights out but enough that she only needs to hold up one hand to show how good she really is. She’s had her eye on him, and they’ve shared some laughs together; tonight and at work. He looks at her, yeah he could, but then what’s her name again? No! Cereal tonight and no regrets in the morning he tells himself firmly. The night is balmy. Yeah write that line, he tells the wife in his head. But he’s not bitter. The beer was cold, the laughter not forced and the night is balmy. He is easy as he walks down the street, past other people enjoying the night, though the stars are harder and harder to see with all the lights down here.
“You need to wake up”, someone walking by says to their companion and there is an answering chuckle. “I need to wake up” he tells himself, as he walks under the oaks of the park, and an acorn falls against his head. “I need to wake up” he says again and crosses the street without looking and the car coming towards him screeches to a halt. “Wake up idiot!” the driver screams. He realizes that his wife’s got an idea. He thinks of the money that they had been saving. She was kind enough to leave him his fair share, but to be honest she really didn’t think she needed the other bit of it, she didn’t care. He transferred it all under his name, another account, just in case. Maybe she’s woken up.
II
Memories that put us to sleep
and fantasies that keep us aroused
float along the walls, tread on the floor,
often bumping into eachother, so many
they fill up a house.
Some memories
work their way through cracks in the wall,
the slender line beneath the door,
through a chink in the window.
They come upon us, suddenly,
sneakily
and we are often caught unawares
at their appearance.
They often make us laugh out loud
sometimes we blush at their indecency
or cry at their irrevocable frankness.
Some fantasies
leave us crying for want
leave us laughing at their audacity
They come and go, guests and family
sometimes unwanted, sometimes yearned for.
never just tolerated.
Robert: Chronicles from Mulberry Street Somewhere in a house, within a normal room, someone is still sleeping. Or pretending to be. I can hear the catch of his breathing, too forced, too steady. There! His eye is flickering. He will be my hero. His name? Roger. No. Robert. He is awakened by the creaking and rocking of the couple next door. He is envious because his wife has left him and he’s still young, moderately good-looking, not even a bad cook. But she was a silly woman, into her writing and nothing else. She had fallen in love with one of her characters, actually the hero, and believes that he really exists in the hills of Italy, in some villa. She is gone, we wont think of her anymore. But our hero, he will think of her all the time.
He clamps the pillow to his ear as the woman next door is loosened. The other ear sneaks a listen. He can’t help what happens but is disturbed at its eagerness. “To work!” cries his brain and he sits up. Peering through the blinds, he tries to catch the neighbors in action, but they are on the floor, or somewhere else but the bed.
He curses at them and slumps into the bathroom, he figures that he doesn’t smell so bad and decides one swipe with the anti-perspirant with deoderant is good enough for his co-workers. “If it’s good enough for me,” he tells his image. In the closet he selects some tie, some shirt, some pants. They basically all go together no matter what combination. That’s his doing. Self-sufficient, efficient Robert. Not like my stupid wife, so full of the aesthetic, of the flowery, the imagery, “the poetic,” he spats. Then realizes that he is talking to himself. There is no one around, except me and you, but he doesn’t know that. He emits gas and laughs, “how’s that for flowery?” he asks the walls, forgetting that they endure it without complaint.
The hallway is still in darkness and he walks into its arms, then pushes it away, flipping on the overhead light. In the kitchen he rummages through the cupboards and finds an open box of cereal. He doesn’t seem to realize that for the past four months he’s lived on cereal and coffee, an endless feast of breakfast. Seeing that the box is nearly empty he walks to the pad on the fridge and scribbles “surreal”, crosses it out and prints neatly “cereal” and after a second follows it with “any”. Outside it’s bright and already he is tired.
Here we will leave him. He follows another generic day of work, the same papers to look over, the same people to chat with, to pretend to be busy to, to tell the generic boss joke with. It is after work in which I will place the change. The jolt that makes him wonder if he’s not alone in this world. Perhaps there is a greater being forcing his path this way and that, perhaps there isn’t but his life’s going to change.
The following blogs are excerpts from Robert: Chronicles from Mulberry Street
I am the one who can save them or send them to some oblivion. I am the one who can make them cry, make them laugh, make them hum or sing out loud. And someone above me can make me laugh and sing, but can I make this person above me cry? On this street someone looks out the window and finds me staring into their room, staring at them, into their eyes. Some of them close their eyes and others defiantly stare back, and others just laugh through their eyes and close all thought. They are who I want to write about. Why are they closing their thoughts to me? Will they be my heroes or villians? Will they somehow manage to be the hero for those around them and the villian to the one who created them?
Time is slowly ticking by in the home of the no-longer-blue shutters and he sits at the window. He wants desperately to write about the life that he sees but can only type up “purple pinches”. One page of “purple pinches” and he sips at his tepid tea trying to imagine the church, its interior, its cool and sinister pews, hard against one’s back. He lays full-length on the pew and looks at his hands, crumpled and knotty and his eye travels up to the purple pinches on his arm. He is no longer on the pew but before him is his mother who snaps her fingers just out of his vision and he resists turning toward the sound, “click”, but he does turn and he knows before it’s even made contact, a pinch that’s marked by a purple fingernail, “the color it will turn in a day” he thinks. He wakes to find that he has written “purple pinches” on his arm and the pen mocks him, leaking purple ink onto his fingers so that when he touches his arm he is pocked by purple caresses.
Two windows away, a little girl, terrified of what the dark brings is slowly learning to sit beside a waterfall and close her eyes to the droplets falling around her. She is grateful for the deafening sounds that mask the whispered silence in the room around her. She decides to stay there forever but then she catches a glimpse of the dark cave hidden in the walls of the falling water and is pulled back. She desperately cries out, clinging to the moss before she realizes that it is only the inviting sheets of her bed and whimpers as the gathering darkness shifts above her.
Next door lives a funny old lady, or she thinks she is, because the t.v. laughs back at her mutterings and sometimes the creases on her face forget gravity and float from their moorings into a smile and a twinkle sparks in her eyes- or maybe it’s just the last blinking of the t.v. reflected there. Sometimes she shakes her fist at the sun who moves the shadows around from where they once were and she must search them out once more. But she cowers in the dim light of her lamp as the dark crowds her against her bed. She must endure the sound of the caterwauling of her pet begging to come in but the fright will not free her from her bonds. Once she was less afraid. Once she was able to laugh and stand on the fringe of darkness and lamplight, walking that fine line between safety and chaos. Her husband tugging at her from the soft sheets of the bed, but she brushed his hands away as she looked out into the hall, willing the night to step closer. Once she had a daughter. Once her floor was cool in the summer and warm in the bitter winters, but now they splinter and blister even her calloused feet, finding the only fleshy parts left and give her a bite as she walks slowly to close the door of the hallway. She is scared to death of life, she is terrified of death. The funny old lady laughs out loud next door and they all think that she is happy.
They were at it again. The house rocks with the floor, with the bed, with the sheets and with their bodies, and all around town the neighbors catch the creaking in the wind and smile quietly at one another. And beneath the house and sheets, they smile, quietly, at one another.
They live in a happy house, full of doodads who have names and habitations but who often go visiting so that in mornings when she pads across the room she’ll find the little china girl with Lady Lace in the corner.
The cat, Dr. Jekyll now, pads on pads past her, pretending grumpiness, low growl meow, flicking tail, but smiling at her secretly. She turns her head to see if she’s caught it. They laugh discreetly, old friends at this, and sit in the shade with the sun just lapping at their feet.
Together they flex their limber limbs and tiptoe past the sleeping clock and decide to wake the sleeping house with the sight and sound and smells and taste and feel of morning.
They run around, she, pulling at the blind ropes, the cat, catches them in her mouth and gives a rough tug. The sun, leaning against the closed blinds suddenly tumbles across the room. Rearranges himself and settles down, shifting slightly when the need urges.
The bacon resists in their plans, telling everyone to “shhh!”.
The toaster, usually sleeps in, is now all het up, so mad he burns the toast.
The thick pats of butter, modestly sweet and creamy, glazes her mouth and lips and chin.
The cat creeps upon him, twisted in the sheets, mouth open, still in the dark. She leaps lightly, lands heavy on his thigh and stomach and lets out a shrill, affectionate cry, saved only for him. His hand rises to press the fur on her head away, behind the ears, encouraging her to walk closer. She stares at his shut eyes and waits for them to flicker open, folding her arms and legs upon his chest, riding the wave of his breathing.
Most days begin like this. Sometimes they wake the neighbors, rocking the sun out of his own bed to dawn on this happy house.
