FULL COUNT– Wounded bird

            “Magic 8 Ball, will we be best friends forever?” Signs point to yes.

             Margeaux’s sleek black hair and green eyes make her appear feline. She smells of oranges and cherry ChapStick, which she flicks across her bow mouth in capital letters and exclamation points. “WHEN YOU FRENCH KISS, DON’T STICK YOUR TONGUE DOWN THEIR THROAT!” She has a crush on Tom, but I like to think that I win her over in my own right, especially after my father makes Tom cry for going to her birthday party. He avoids her like the plague after that. Margeaux is the best at everything—grades, sports, clarinet, riding horses. She speaks French and paints her nails ballerina pink. She lives in a rambling, white house in the center of town, and I spend the night most weekends. We sneak out and smoke Parliament Lights and drink Boone’s Farm apple wine, ending the night by wolfing down subs. When she thinks I’m asleep, I hear her throwing up. In the summer, we drive her silver Firebird to the lake, and she teaches me how to sail. On the way home, sunburned and gritty with sand, we share a joint and plan our future, our hair whipping against our cheeks. And then, something shifts. I wrack my brain for a clue but come up blank. I start senior year and she begins Skidmore, until she drops out and moves to California. Over the years, I collect scraps of news. One say, I stumble across a photo her sister posts commemorating Margeaux’s life. The obituary photo I find isn’t of my sleek, black cat but a woman I don’t recognize, thin and drawn. It says she died on New Year’s Eve after bravely battling a prolonged illness. Cancer? I message her sister. Margeaux was bi-polar. She took her life to spare her family any more suffering. “Magic 8 Ball, could I have made a difference?” Ask again later.   

Fundamentals_running

            I’ll take a sucker punch over spit any day. Not without his talents, Tom finesses spit like a yo-yo, lowering and rewinding a slimy string until I stop squirming and face my fate. He releases the gob over my nose where it splatters and slides to the corner of my eye in a pool of sudsy afterbirth. Bombs away!

            We eye each other across the living room; his girly eye lashes at odds with his maniacal stare. The car horn blasts. Our mother breezes through, reeling off phone numbers, Chef Boyardee selections, and a stay-out-of-trouble directive.  Runners take your mark!  Her wake of Shalimar slaps us in the face. Get set! Tom leans forward on the fake velvet chair, and I shift my weight to the balls of my feet. The Buick crunches out of the gravel driveway and gives a final honk. Go!

            I’m half way to the bathroom before he blinks, his fingertips tangling with my hair as I slam the door and pray I don’t blow it on the lock. He rattles the doorknob. “Jerk!” He parries by pushing the bureau and desk in front of the door. I settle in for hours of playing with make up and testing my vocabulary in Reader’s Digest “Word Power.” Imbroglio – an intricate and confusing interpersonal situation.

            Our father races us regularly on a stretch of lawn that sides up to a field of tall grass, snatches of river flashing beyond the trees like glass. We race to the Big Oak when the grass has lost its heat, the moist damp soothing my embattled summer feet. Even after I understand racing isn’t for me but to humiliate Tom, I don’t give up a step, exacting his shame as a salve for my wounds.    

            Running is the art of calmly breathing through prolonged pain until you find the will to transcend it. That’s what flying feels like.

FUNDAMENTALS– Jugular

At three for a nickel, Atomic Fireballs are a badge of honor. Tom and I face off, inching toward the place where pain numbs the senses.  I toss the molten rock around my mouth, the peppery heat branding the side of my tongue. And, while our mother’s Why do you do it? bounces off our steely resolve, our father levels a direct hit. “I should kick them right in the ass.”

I kneel at Tom’s bedroom window and squash my face against the screen. My father inspects the torn canvas of his lime-green hammock bought at Agway three days before.  The irony that he’ll never actually use the hammock is not lost on me. The closest he comes to relaxing is reading the Daily News, a Labatt’s sweating beside him, cigar puffs punctuating each “Jesus” and “listen to this.” Muhammed Ali pulverizes Joe Frasier in the Thrilla in Manila.  A serial killer is shooting young lovers and taunting police with cryptic notes. I hung on every word, the events connected in a way I can’t yet grasp.

Tom’s sniffling grabs my attention. His brown eyes are huge—panicked—a map of purple veins furiously pumping blood beneath his milky skin.

 “Dad’s going to think I did it. I’m going to get in trouble,” he says.

“Why’s he going to think that?”

“You’re better at talking. He’ll believe you.”

Six belt cracks, the sting like a match strike. Tom stumbles upstairs, his face bloated from crying. I run my fingers over the raised red ropes across his back.

We roll survival in our mouth, hurting those we love and learning to live with the after taste as we inch toward the atomic heat of hell.

FUNDAMENTALS– Worms and maggots

I flick paper plates like a Vegas dealer, sliding them to the edge without sailing off. More often than not, paper towels double for napkins, and they’ve got nothing on shirt sleeves. I look at my plate; creamed chipped beef and peas on toast. “Shit on a shingle,” my father says. “We had it in the army. Eat it.” As I maneuver pea grenades off my toast, the male species lower their heads and shovel shit, and my mother perfects the art of looking pissed at our barbarism. Howard Cosell’s nasal cadence extols Mohammed Ali’s rope-a-dope from the Magnavox. We’re three minutes in, adjusting our ass cheeks and scraping our plates for the last bit of lumpy cream, when our German shepherd, Slider, begins heaving. My father leaps from the table. “Jeee-zus!” he shouts from the living room.

The pile of vomit is rotting woodchuck carcass. It’s a tossup on what’s more disgusting—the puke or the smell—when the vomit starts moving. My brother, the offender who let the dog out, moans at the task before him. I pull my shirt over my nose and go in for a better look. Maggots writhe in the creamy muck. Shit.

Dirt wedges beneath my nails. It’s rained recently and a musty smell rises from the hole. I carefully extract a worm and toss it on the grass. I remove the bird from my pocket and stroke its yellow breast. It’s smaller now, curled into itself. I cover it with dirt and mumble a prayer of ever-lasting salvation and add a flat rock for a tomb stone. It’d be perfect for skipping. I lay on the grass and look at the sky. A sliver moon is silver against a violet sky. Someday I’ll be in the ground, dark, suffocating, eaten by worms.  I smell my bird hands and realize what the vomit smelled like; Death. Life’s a lot like fighting. Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee.

FUNDAMENTALS – Beauty

            We’re having a teachers’ party. Ice cubes that tinkle around smoky liquid in fat glasses, chips and dip, and cigarette smoke that hovers below the ceiling.  I slap a jar of Ponds cream into my mother’s palm with the precision of a surgical nurse. Tan fingers plunge into thick white cream and sweep across her forehead, cheeks, and neck. She does not use gentle upward strokes as recommended by McCalls, but slathers it with vigor, daring a wrinkle to flaw the landscape of her Sophia Loren bone structure. She tips her head back and coaxes outer lashes into cat eyes with Maybeline’s Blackest Black mascara. She purses her full lips and paints red, starting on the top lip and gliding right and left before finishing along the bottom in a smooth arc.  I put the gold tube in the drawer. The shade is Vixen. I hand her a square of toilet paper. She blots and surveys her reflection. I watch her face in the mirror. Long ebony hair, shimmering blue eyes, cheek bones, lips, something else I can’t define but makes me think of biting into a peach, juice dribbling down my chin.

She brushes my hair into a pony tail, raking the bristles across my scalp and pulling my hair so tightly that my eyes pull back at the corners and blur with tears.  Our eyes meet in the mirror.  If you want to be beautiful, you have to suffer,” she says. 

I tip toe through the living room. Glasses and beer bottles cover every surface. Ash trays overflow with cigarette butts, many with pink and peach rings of lipstick. A man throws up in the kitchen sink. He wipes his mouth and stares at me. His collar wears the same red lips from the toilet paper blot. Vixen.

            Moonlight streams through my window and across my covers. Maybe my mother was wrong. Maybe beauty causes suffering.