office I showed her the flag box, a converted blue street-side mail drop-box painted red, white, and blue with stars and stripes. I said, “The American Legion puts these boxes out so they can collect and dispose of the flags in an honorable way.”
“What’s the ‘merican Legion?”
I’ve never been quite sure myself. “They help out with flags and they probably fought in a war.”
She listened. And waited, thinking.
I hoped she wouldn’t ask me what flags have to do with war. She didn’t. She said, “What do they do with the flags?”
I had no idea. They probably burned them in a ceremonious rite. I just knew they handled all the pomp and circumstance required for caretaking flags. “They make sure the stars find eyes to sleep in and the stripes go on end to end from here to California.”
She nodded.
I held the flag off the ground while she readied her step. After the apple crate was steady she climbed onto it. I opened the little door and held the back of the flag while she stuffed and shoved and pushed the material into the box.
I tried not to think of mildew. Surely the American Legion folks check the box often. “Not to worry.” They seemed the sort.
She kissed the last corner of the flag good-bye, letting her fingers loosen one-by-one. When the last bit slipped away I let the slot’s door snap shut.
THE SANDWICH
Stilled isolation and forgotten sock sounds make the harmony of my attempt at beginning.
I don’t remember why but I guess a week ago a cop friend called my mother, said he was taking me to a hospital, a psych hospital. Mom came to visit. Felt she had to. Resented it. But. Came nonetheless. It was like usual. Five days to stabilize the meds, to ask all the right questions, to teach me to cope, again, to deal with my mother and the paperwork, and then to set me free as if my mind would allow it.
Mom left yesterday, which is fine.
How do you do your best to sort everything with a glued-back-together-and-held-by-vice-grips mind? You can’t ask anyone for help with this part. No one knows what you mean. If they do know, they pretend ignorance. So just hush and hurry to fracture your constant stream with prism eyes as information comes sideways.
Inanimate things take their toll on me. My socks rest where they were left on an unremembered day. I think about my broken mind and try to let the glue dry. Let it harden while dealing with the coming of a teakettle in the apartment next door. Culling awareness, I put what I hear in different places with their pictures of female members of the family. Or men, sometimes, for the guy sounds. Distant traffic revving at the streetlight goes into a memory of the accidental night. Gasping hawks get put away with photographs of my father. Inside the socks lay crinkled on the couch and still. Weighing me down with their no-sound way to put them anywhere.
If the floor is, in fact, under the bed, it will not sink, I guess. But who can be sure where the floor ever is?
But if the floor is, in fact, under the bed, then I guess I am pretty hungry. Jell-O would be great. Knox Blox, to be exact. Cut out with nestable cookie cutters of different-sized stars. Slip yellow points into red corners and be good enough, be someone worthy, be happy to put one star inside the other like it shows how to do on the package. But you need vegetable oil that has no flavor to grease the perpendicular-pressure aluminum. I only have sesame oil. And I hate eating art.
So then what? Gravy? I don’t know how to make gravy. What’ll I do with the lumps? There will be lumps because I am not good enough to make anything come out right. I don’t know how to make gravy or anything so they gave me a brochure about self-esteem and said to check a website once a week for coping tips. I can chat in real time with a trained counselor who’s twenty-two and makes eight fifty an hour. Sometimes, even so, a yearning rises and grips my center, sending me into a kind of God-lust. Sometimes a yearning comes undone and drifts sideways, changing Mother’s hand-me-down thoughts into a kind of almost-wonderland.
Life being half indebted inheritance and half unrealized potential, I am trying to resurface in an unrecognized welcome.
I am awash in similarity. I don’t even have what-ifs. But whatever. Instead of getting anywhere with my vision of the meta-almosts I end up with all sorts of not-quite-good-enoughs and probably-could-have-beens and just give up buying anything with built-in obsolescence, like boyfriends and homes, though it seems there is nothing but continuing. No splendor. No deep roots. Simply the day-by-day inebriation of adulthood.
The church tears at the politician who shouts at the people and says, “Hope. Change.” Change what? Hope for whom? Myself with others? My other realms with each other? You have got to be kidding. My rhythm of death-days has become so same, so unending, and I am succumbing to the trance of disbelief that shrouds nations.
But. It’s okay. There’s a pill for what ails me. Just do the laundry. Clean the bathroom. Hang the towels. Spray 409 on the stove. Water the plants. Go to the gym. Feed yourself. Clothe yourself. Take out the trash. Enjoy things like music, books, TV shows, and beach volleyball. Participate. Learn. Invest. Grow. Plan a trip to meet indigenous peoples in a rain forest and discuss intercultural affairs on an ecotourism adventure that’s well-enough controlled to be both liberating and safe. Airplanes are natural. Drive your car. Don’t let the gas tank get too low. Pay for things with cash. Live within your means. Hang up the clothes. Mop the floor. Do the dishes. Remember the import of eating a balanced diet, of exercise, of maintaining relationships, of having people over to smell your scented candles, to pet your dogs, to comment on your wall art, to play your piano, to rifle through your medicine cabinet, and to sit back down on your couch pretending nothing ever happened.
The house sits animated but still ready to pounce around me with its penetrating unspoken screams. Ready to emerge as life moving on.
Sandwich. Bread. Pepperidge Farm white bread. Fresh. Mayonnaise. Salt and pepper. Leftover baked rotisserie chicken breast. Lettuce. Not iceberg but romaine. Or buttercrunch, I think they call it. Tomato. No. Tomato on the side with more mayonnaise and salt and pepper.
The bed is moving. No. The walls are moving. No. It’s the clouds outside the window streaming by. And the bed is dropping away through the floor I knew didn’t really exist and couldn’t.
I have to eat. That’s what they say. “You have to eat.” They say if you can feed yourself sufficiently then you don’t have to go to strange places where the doors are heavier than the walls that ripple, haunted and waterlogged with similar muzzled lives. So different than seedy hotels. So same. So eat. I have to eat.
It’s not pieces of your mind falling into shattered disarray again, unsortable. It’s low blood sugar.
Sandwich. There must be a way.
Fight. Like Christina in Wyeth’s muted grass world. Make your way to what you want, what you need, what you have to have. Make a well-deserved sustenance for yourself—your body and mind.
The store is only three blocks away. You can make it. You can do this alone. But is there any money? Under the table in the hall: don’t you remember seeing a quarter? Yes. But that’s been at least five years ago and it was at home in—well, wherever that was. But the floor was a cheap, lacquered jewelry box from Japan. A tourist trinket and black, almost, under that table. It was dark reddish-fade-to-black hardwood veneer that will never chip off. And the quarter was just there somehow in a beam of sunlight. And I saw it. I didn’t pick it up. But I saw it there just like that under the foyer table on the souvenir floor. Still, just like that years ago. But it wouldn’t be enough to take to the store today anyway.
Mom said there was money in a drawer. She is always using drawers for things, like money, that shouldn’t be hidden, that need to be seen.
But pull yourself toward the creation of a sustaining reality.
Commit to small certainties. The salt will sit on the chicken breast and on the skin from the rotisserie and you will just barely be able to see how you’ve seasoned it.
I remember sandwiches like t
hat.
I have to eat.
I will make a sandwich like that.
There are three dollars in my coat. I know the money’s there. Or at least I hope it is. Hope it hasn’t been changed. But it’s probably there from the time I bought cigarettes across the street. Good. Yes. Here it is. It’s real. I remembered it right and I am holding it with two hands, touching it, checking, counting, assuring myself again, and counting again, but yes, it’s here. It’s really here. This is one thing that’s not an illusion, an expectation, a hope, a change, a delusion, a hallucination, a must-have-remembered-it-wrong embarrassed moment, a confusion, a frustration, a trust, an unknowing, a worry, a panic, a thought-so-but-no. It’s real.
So. I won. I’m fine. I remembered it right, which means it’s real, I’m fine, and my broken brain didn’t process it wrong. Not this time. This time I remembered it right. There was three dollars in my coat pocket. I was right. It’s real. It’s right here in my hand. It’s real. I’m looking at it and it’s here. I feel it and it’s real.
So the coat and the drawer and as long as the floor is there again we’re okay. We’re okay and we’re not going anywhere without shoes and a hat. Where is the hat? I guess it doesn’t matter as long as I have the beach towel memory. The one with the dancing Planters peanut on it from all those lost beach