From Word To Word

The girl behind the cafe bar comes to bus the tables, since all the tables but my own are now empty, but she is distracted by something in the newspaper on one of the tables, something that I cannot myself make out from so far away, and she leans over the table, just enough to brace her arms on its formica top, her too thin arms propping her too thin body, the hipless, breastless body that leaves her grey jeans hanging shapelessly on her hip bones and makes her bra bunch uselessly under her black turtleneck. Her hair is in a bun, but loosely, carelessly, and her bangs are too short to pull back into it anyway, so she looks unkept, untidy, uncaring. She piles the newspapers after a moment, carries the cups, white coffee cups with stains on their lips, back behind the bar, then drifts out into the cafe again, lean arms crossed over her narrow chest, eyes drifting along the tables, aimlessly, around the empty room.

They are waiting, the two of them, for the restaurant to open, unmoving and unspeaking, at one of those green plastic patio tables that has been left, stripped of its umbrella, overnight.  She is holding her purse on her lap with both hands, clasping it shut with both hands, and she looks steadfastly forward, as if any movement might betray her secrets.  Her husband’s posture is more resigned, more broken.  He is not waiting for the restaurant at all.  He is waiting for her.  He does nothing else but wait for her, has done nothing else for longer than he can remember.  Their gray hairs have been exchanged, one for another, one by one, each day, each of a thousand days, like a currency for past disappointments, like a ledger of bygone grievances, and he is losing.

The woman’s black blouse is loose and shapeless and long over her bright pink pants, over the breadth of her fat hips.  The neck is open enough to show a deep and wrinkled cleavage, and a gold ankh on a chain is dangling there, a symbol of something she does not know and does not care to know. “If you like these cabbage rolls better than mine, dear,” she declares, though no one has said a word about the cabbage rolls, or even managed to sit down from the buffet for that matter, “then you can come here to eat and save me the grief.”  She breaths a wounded sigh and sits.

Her husband says nothing, only sets his tray down, seats himself, runs his hands through his thin colour-washed hair, but the other woman, dressed in leopard print polyester and too-large plastic-gold jewelry, hastens to offer assurance. “Of course not, Susan dear,” she says , “I think your cabbage rolls are far better than any buffet. And Frank thinks so too, don’t you Frank?”

Frank is wearing a short sleeved dress shirt over the hunch of his thin shoulders.  Its abstract patterns of brown on cream seem chosen to match the liver spots that speckle his baldness.  “I didn’t even get the cabbage rolls,” he says, “so how the hell would I know?”  He leans his face almost to the edge of his bowl and begins fiercely spooning soup.

“But if you had ordered the cabbage rolls,” his wife persists, “I’m sure you would’ve preferred Susan’s.  There’s really no comparison.”

Frank’s spoon is momentarily interrupted.  “But I didn’t order them, did I Margaret?  Because I don’t like cabbage rolls.  And I’ve never even eaten Susan’s cabbage rolls, so,” he raps his spoon on the table, “how the  hell would I know?”

Margaret removes her cutlery from the paper napkin wrapper and arranges them deliberately beside her plate, as if this is the only satisfactory response to her husband’s affront.  “Well, I was just trying to be nice to poor Susan about her cabbage rolls. The least you could do is be a little nicer too.”

Frank’s spoon resumes its labour.

“Well,” announces Susan, brightly, as if she has heard nothing at all of this exchange,”I think the rice in these cabbage rolls is a little overcooked, don’t you Stu?  And there’s no sour cream in them either, so there’s really no chance you’ll leave me for these poor little cabbage rolls, is there?”

Stu makes a noncommittal motion with his head, somewhere between a nod and a shake.  He begins eating his roast beef and mashed potatoes, leaving his cabbage rolls untouched.

I was in a used bookstore the other day, the stereotypical used bookstore, with very tall shelves, and sliding ladders to reach them, and a vintage stairway, and the smell of books over everything, the sort of place that I can wallow in for any amount of time.  I was browsing the philosophy section, when I overheard this conversation.  I relate it as nearly to life as I can recall.

- Hey, look, it’s the same edition of The Republic that we’re using in my philosophy class.

- Cool.  I love Plato.

- Really? What have you read?

- Oh,  nothing.  But I really love Plato, and I’m totally going to read him some time, you know?

- Are you taking a philosophy class next semester?

- No.  I would love to, because I really love philosophy, but I just don’t have space in my schedule.

- That’s my problem too.  There’s just so much I want to take.

- Yeah, I love everything, you know?  But maybe I’ll just read some of it on my own.  Maybe I should buy that Plato book right now.

- No, no. You can borrow mine. I mean, the semester’s over, so I won’t need it any more.

- Cool.  Hey, so maybe I’ll buy this copy of The Prince instead.  My ex-boyfriend said that it was the only book you’ll ever need to read.  He said it was about how to rule the world or something.

- Yeah?  It wasn’t on my philosophy course, but I’ve heard people talk about it.”

- I think it’s totally the kind of thing I’d love.

- Yeah, me too.

- You can have this copy if you want.

- No, it’s okay.  I think I’ll get this one, Das Kapital. I’m thinking of taking a course of Marxism, so maybe I can read ahead a little bit.

- I love Marxism.  I have a friend who’s a Marxist, and maybe a Leninist.  I’m not sure.  And I think I might be a Marxist too, but not a communist, you know what I mean?  I think we should share stuff so that there won’t be poor people or anything, but you have to have your own stuff too.  That’s Marxist, right?

- Um, I’m not really sure, but you’re probably right. I guess I’ll find out when I take that course.

- Are you a Marxist.

- No, I don’t think so.  I’m trying to decide whether I want to be a nihilist or an existentialist.

-Oh.  That’s really cool.  I love existentialism.  And nihilism too.  Can’t you be both?

- Ah, maybe.  I don’t know.  When I asked my professor about existentialism, he just gave me a list of books to read.

- Is Marx on it?

- I don’t think so.

- Oh.  That’s too bad. Who is on it?

- I can’t remember all of them.  It’s a long list.  There’s Kierkegaard, I think.  And Nietzsche.  And Sartre.

- I love Sarte.

- Have you read Sartre?

- No, but he was so romantic.  He was with this woman philosopher. Her name had ‘de’ in it, de Boudoir or something, and they were in Paris, and they were really in love with each other, but they’re love wasn’t easy because they loved their philosophy more.  It was very romantic.

- Wow.  I didn’t know that.

- I love those kinds of stories, you know.  It makes people seem more real.

- Yeah, I know what you mean.

- I’d love to be with a philosopher.  It would be so beautiful, and so tortured too, because that’s how philosophers are.  But beautiful.

- Yeah.  Would you marry him?

- No.  That’s not how it goes.  It’s more romantic if you break up and find other people but keep coming back to each other.

- Oh.

- I love philosophy.

- Me too.

The hill, raising its stones from the harbour, is left to nature, to the scrambling cedars and to the little northern scrub plants, dogwood and sumac and creeping juniper, finding purchase here or there, but the heights have all been claimed by cottages, claimed long enough ago that their lawns now imitate their more southern and more suburban counterparts, so the trees are much fewer, if mostly cedar still, and the brush has vanished altogether, and the trees that do remain stand with their lower trunks bare, so that they seem to wade with their skirts up, long-legged in the waves of unruly foliage below them.

The four of them are sitting at the table, round and wooden, covered with plain, white coffee cups and plates and crumpled napkins and discarded creamers and torn sugar packets, a coffee table, and they are talking to each other, passionately, about things not worth much passion, not to anyone else, perhaps not even to them, and they are saying things like,

“…preexisting networks…”

“…create a critical mass…”

“…secondary market…”

“…access to development systems…”

“…leveraging our assets…”.

At least, the three men are saying these kinds of things, again and again, saying nothing very interesting, but still nodding to each other and sipping their coffees very seriously.  The fatter man, with the vertical stripes of his shirt visibly widening over his belly, is doing most of the talking.  “We need to leverage our assets,” he says, “to create a critical mass that will open secondary markets.”  The man to his left, the one who looks a little bit Asian but who is certainly not Asian but who maybe has an Asian hairdresser, bobs his head affirmingly, while the third man, fairly fat himself, but without vertical stripes or stripes of any kind, makes little guttural noises in his throat, noises that mean something like, “Yes, exactly.  If we can get the preexisting network access to a development system…” or some other such random combination of the magic phrases that the three of them are exchanging with one another.

The woman, though, she is not saying anything much, and she is not nodding either, and she is certainly not making little noises in her throat, only sitting back in her seat with her legs crossed, the top leg sitting very high on the lower one, higher even than the table, because her thighs are large and round, and because her jeans, worn as business attire with a turtleneck and jacket, are very tight, which makes her upper body, slim and small-breasted, seem even more petite in comparison, perhaps too petite, as if she has been assembled from two different bodies, has borrowed her legs, say, from a neighbour or a friend, because she is bored with her own.  Her lips are pursed, brightly red, unnaturally coral red, and her hair is cut short and close in what some people might call a pixie cut, leaving her jaw bare, which is only right, because her jaw and her neck are her beauty, the beauty of a mathematically impossible curve that nature nevertheless produces in some rare women.

This woman, whose jaw is perfectly and impossible curved, who is neither speaking nor nodding but only sitting with her crossed legs and her pursed lips  and her pixied hair, this woman glances across the room at me, darting her eyes, now, and again, and once more, watching me watching her, and I wonder whether she can feel me looking at her, or whether she glances like this at anyone who happens to be in the room with her, or whether, perhaps most likely, she is just bored with the conversation of her companions and is looking for distraction, even such a poor distraction as I can assure you that I am.

The dogwoods stand among the still winter-gold grasses, red on gold, defiantly, though everything will soon succumb to green, to fecundity, to the leaves just now budding on the dogwood stems, to the shoots hidden beneath the litter of the grass, and to the evergreen of the forest, the scrambling junipers, the saplings of spruce and balsam, the outliers of a green that will soon permit no red and gold to mar it.

I was on course in Toronto last week, and I was amusing myself by writing short character sketches of the people presenting in class.  This is something I often do to pass the time, and I thought I might share a few.  As a point of clarification, the fact that most of the sketches are of women has nothing to do with my preference for subjects and everything to do with the fact that women vastly outnumber men among social workers.

~ ~ ~

She stands with her shoulders high, protective, as if she has been fearing something for so long that her body knows only to be fearful.  She is protecting her beauty, I think, because it frightens her, because she is not sure of what it means.

~ ~ ~

She wears brightness at her wrists, and her hands flutter about her face like the wings of birds.  She holds herself in her hands.  She dresses her hands in brightness because this is where she knows herself most fully.

~ ~ ~

He is a memory of himself, of a former time, when he was as strong as he wanted to be, stronger than he is now, remembering.  He is a yearning for another self, a yearning out of time.

~ ~ ~

She is tall already, and thin, and angular, and she pivots her still taller heels, making deep but ephemeral divots in the carpeted floor.  She turns herself around these points, swivels, like a spotlight, brings herself to bear on everything in its turn, brings her sharp hips and her sharp jaw to bear, fixing everything in its place.

~ ~ ~

Her lips are pursed, and her head cocks from one side to the other, like a chicken, plump, abrupt, wary, and awkward.  She leads with her head and chest and belly.  Her arms and legs trail behind behind her, afterthoughts, appendages, the tentacles of a jellyfish.

~ ~ ~

She is freckled browns and bronzes and greens.  She is like fall leaves, like sun-speckled through fall leaves.  She is autumnal, brightly and frivolously autumnal.

~ ~ ~

She plants her tall boots, her tall black boots, shoulder width apart, giving the lie to her pretty patterned skirt and her ponytail.  She is stronger than she wants to be, than she wants others to know, than she thinks a woman should be.

~ ~ ~

She is round-hipped and round-breasted, maternal and libidinal: a body that is before all else an embrace.

~ ~ ~

She is affably porcine, a well-groomed and well-trained sow, something to be shown at the fair.  She is a sow in pleated pants and thick glasses and bobbed red hair.

~ ~ ~

She has a sadness in her mouth, a sadness rounded into itself, a sadness closely held.  There is a beauty in her sadness, though, a real beauty, a beauty of dark eyes and full mouth and small breasts and round thighs.  It is in her sadness that she finds her beauty.

I have been cleaning out some of my old files over the past few days, and I ran across this little character piece that I wrote some time ago.  I could think of no other use that I might have for it, and it seemed a good length for a post, so here it is, though I am not sure exactly what it is.  The events it describes, insignificant as they are, did actually occur, and I offer my apologies to the subject of the sketch in the unlikely event that she ever comes across it.

Napkin Lady

She sat at one of the small round cafe tables, her chair pulled closely under it. Her posture was fixed and upright, as if she were a concert pianist at her instrument, and she held before her, between her hands, an unfolded napkin, a plain white paper napkin with the logo of the cafe in one corner. It was the focus of all her concentration, seemed to be the subject, not only of her eyes and hands and mind, but of her whole poised and rigid body. She had grasped it firmly on each side and was pulling it taut with sharp little motions, firmly enough that the napkin made soft popping sounds with every pull, but gently enough that the paper did not tear.

After several minutes of this, in which time she had stretched the napkin perhaps a hundred times or more, she turned it once clockwise and resumed jerking it with the same controlled violence. When a similar time had passed, she turned the napkin again, repeating the process until she had been through every side at least twice.

Then, seemingly satisfied with her work, she laid the napkin gently on the tabletop, placing her feet firmly on the base of the table’s central leg so that it would not rock. With exaggerated care, she slowly smoothed the napkin with her fingers, brushing from its centre to each corner, rotating it clockwise with her other hand after every stroke. This motion she continued for several minutes, before turning the napkin over and repeating it for several more an the reverse side.

When the napkin had reached a state that seemingly satisfied her, she stopped abruptly. She lowered her face very close to the table and examined the napkin thoroughly, moving not her eyes only but her whole head methodically up and down across the white paper square in front of her.

Having completed her inspection, she returned to her previous posture, and began to fold the napkin with the exactitude of watch maker. She took the top right corner and drew it slowly toward the bottom left, matched them precisely, pinned the matched corners firmly to the table with her left thumb, then carefully pushed the doubled paper into a crease, first in its centre, then gradually out to its two corners.

She paused then, seemingly exhausted from her labour, but she retained her rigid posture still, and she examined the crease with concern, as if some crookedness might have escaped her care. She checked each of the corners particularly, ensuring that they were exact, that they had been perfectly matched, then began a second crease, bringing the two folded corners together and smoothing away from them, forming a perfectly quartered napkin.

Only once she had inspected the final crease to her satisfaction did her posture break, slumping back into the seat, as though her body was spent from its labour. Casually now, she put the plastic lid back on her paper coffee cup and inserted her stir stick into the hole in its centre. Picking the cup up with her left hand, she took her carefully folded napkin with her right, mopped with it the coffee rings and the doughnut crumbs in front of her, placed it exactly in the centre of the table, and stacked her coffee cup on top of it, before standing and leaving the cafe.

She is an island awash in sweet water, and her shores are the rocks of the north, sedimented and petrified and shattered, beautiful with the beauty of all things that are carved by glaciers and vast waters, with the beauty of all things that grow deep roots on shallow soils and wave-pitted rocks.  This is a beauty that lasts through long ages, through the rising and subsiding of seasons under high northern skies.  It is the beauty of sweet water lapping at the foundations of island stone and at the roots of tenuous cedars that bend in worship beneath the heavens.