Mister & Misses Understanding

I took off my shoes and rested them against the yellowed wall. The howling wind tried to keep the door handle away from me–and almost won–but I stretched out and caught it, swinging it closed in a sharp motion. It had just started to pour outside and I merely escaped while the rain was still a soft sprinkle. Oh, the stormy summer days.

Kathy was waiting by the sink humming something and admiring the weather and the smells and such.

“Let’s go eat,” she said as a strike of lighting–or maybe just the booming sound of thunder–rattled the rickety brown windows of her homely little farmhouse kitchen. “C’mon, it’s a Saturday!”

The joy that was always brought to Kathy’s fine-wrinkled face whenever she came up with an idea she fancied gave me a sort of youthful inspiration. One I couldn’t help but smile at and wonder. I usually didn’t like going out on weekend nights. I’d just smashed my thumb and was feeling quite pitiful of myself. I hesitated, staring at her big light bulb eyes and frozen smile like a fried earthworm on a summer sidewalk. She went to throw away some trash while my clogged brain worked meticulously, but a corner ticked the bin’s rim and bounced to the ground in a few flat sounds. Another crash of sky as she struggled to pick it up, holding her back and shaking violently.

“I…don’t know,” I forced out before the silence threatened. “I don’t usually like going out on weekend nights.” Copy-pasted straight from the mind of the madman.

She was just coming up to meet my eyes again, and with a huff and a puff made out, “Well–my mind is made–you’re coming with me–or you’re rotting here–with the storm and all–”

The kitchen lights buzzed their horrible antique orange-yellow and flickered against the rain. The cold seeping through the cracks in the window cill seemed to trigger a headache. Fresh air would help. And we would be out in the air if I decided my mind. It was all a headrush. Moments like these made me realize that there was no possible way I could just “ride along” or “go with the flow” like I’d tell certain people whenever asked what I was gonna do out of high school. 

“Get a job,” I’d say. 

“Then what?”

“Then work.”

“Well of course, ‘then work,’ but what about when that’s all been set and done with? You gonna go to college? Get a degree? Meet a nice girl? Go to Italy and dance with the people and the pizza? I’ve lost myself a great many times in the wild drive-ins of the city! I’ve been to California and I got myself a job in Nevada once! All straight from Texas, how ‘bout that? My family all started when I…” and blah, blah, blah. That only seemed an invitation for them to go on about how proud they were of life–or particular moments of life–or maybe trying to convince the world and god and themselves, most of all, they lived the life they thought they did. I was proud of life too, y’know. When it didn’t stick me with questions or choices, and I didn’t have to make up my mind with answers and decisions. 

“Go with the flow,” I blurted to Kathy aloud. It just came straight out, rolled off my tongue so smooth, like a stock car steering off the raceway. I didn’t know what was the matter. And I don’t think she did either. Maybe she did. I can’t really comprehend lived people–truly lived people, anyway. I just got my sniffer in the rat race last summer.

“Go with the huh?” Her face twisted. “There’s a nice place off the highway with nothing around for miles if that’s what you’re so worried about? Or even food at the station court, where you can sit and study people…in that little book,” she motioned writing with her hands, “ya know the one. I always see you carrying around.”

“Hmm,” the diner off the road was cozy; the station lively. “But what about all this rain?” I unfaithfully rationalized. “We’re getting soaked for a few bites and a great loss in money! The lights are going out and the bathroom floors a dripping from a leak somewhere under the sink! And this and that and we’re almost out of coffee! And you know how that coffee stuff keeps me sane from things! Great wraths of bedridden sick days take over when my mind draws a blank!”

“Oh, child,” she waved her long boney fingers with a scoff. “All those things happen anyway. You know that!”

“But when the day is done we will be left with the nothings we started with. We will crumble under the pressure of the big sun and fall beneath the waves of endless stillness; like the polos on the sidewalk, or the burnings of the folded fans! And going with the flow will not matter much at all when I’m dead–or if I die early. And life is just water drip-dropping in cycles with no beginning or end in sight until one day it just stops; or it goes dry with the passing days…months…years! You can understand that, can’t you?!”

“And where does the water go, son? Just splashes dead against the loneliness of the cold kitchen tiles? Spills out over the sleeping body like blood from a knife of the devil stuck underneath your ribs? The water drips to blackhole days until God herself wipes it all away with a washcloth? Does that–any of that–make sense to you?”

“As I see it, or have seen it: Yes…a little. Just going and going and going and going…”

“Well, listen here–looky here, at my visions, child–you may be right about one thing. You may be right about the drippings and the water’s endless supply of days and months. You may be right about the sudden halts in its production and the many blank and bedridden days. But all these pins and needles and bullets that are found in such waters you speak of, belong in there! They come with the solution packet that God has ripped open and mixed with the lives we live! And the waters–yes, the waters–they are not as endless as they seem. They go into our own little cups, son! Our cups are filled with the great big waves and projections and the common craziness of a wild life well-lived!” Kathy got feral, breaking into a wild monkey dance as she went deeper into her explanation. It was truly exciting. 

“This is the reason!” She continued. “This is why the days thunder and we get soaking wet! This is why you cannot just flow amply with the ever-turning world, with all the years going by! This is why dinners on Saturday nights are such a treat, boy! This is why! This is why!”

“But I don’t get it,” I had fallen to the same old conclusions with the talk’s lull. “Why do I want to lay in my bed and get swallowed up by the linen sheets? Like a great whale to cover me in its protective shade so I can sit and think and weep forever? Why has this lasted longer than the wounds of bullets and needles, or the heavy wetness of getting soaked in the wild thunders? Why do I sit grey with the gear in neutral and the days just rolling along? Where has all that water gone?”

Kathy sat back a moment, leaning on the creaking wooden counter, still covered in flour and sugar from the afternoon’s baking of goddess creations. The dull light glistened off her glasses and hid her eyes with a black shade. Branches and other fine tree debris were smacking the walls and windows in soft slaps. I could see her mouth and nose contort to the side with thoughts conflicted or running. I hope I didn’t just make a mockery of myself. Or enrage a sleeping beast beneath her heavy-hearted chest. Sometimes my strange thoughts overflowed and toppled over onto dead evenings, or quiet afternoons. I assume I was looking for an answer, otherwise a reflection.

“Your thoughts run wild, boy,” she spoke softly. “And to think yourself a burden is to think a lie. You are just curious is all. Like a curious little monkey.”

“My friends all call me a curious little monkey.”

“That’s because you still got something in ya, boy. Some little tadpole that’s squirming around. Waiting to be left off the leash and explode into the daises with the great downtown of the city.”

“I believe that tadpole is stuck in frozen ice, Kathy. I don’t know why.” I also don’t know why I said that. But it fell off my tongue as if I dropped a heavy bucket that crashed and spilled along the ground with great satisfaction.

“Stuck in the ice but not dead yet. Is that right?”

“I’m not sure. Right now I’m not sure.” Who is reading my thoughts on this violent night? Slipping hidden notes under Kathy’s old canvas shoe and confronting me with truths I claim to be bogus?

Somewhere outside an argument broke out. It was only a chilling echo against the sounds of the no-mans-land front yard. But the strained, angry voices were just as potent.

“Where are you going!?” We both heard; then a wild scream; then, “I’m gonna kill you!”

Kathy and I flinched. The voices swirled into one messy blurb of untamed angry nonsense and soon became a dull noise to us like the buzzing lights and fallen branches.

“You hear them, child? Their tadpoles ‘gon wild and sporadic! But they ain’t dead and they ain’t bad. They’re just living! They’re living those ruffian lives because that’s all they know. And you can’t hate them for that, can ya? Now look at you”–her red fingernail went into my chest–“you know where you stand on life and things–I mean in the setting and morals around you–you just need to realize you are in there! You are the whale and the water and the sheets and the voices and the storms and the weather and the lights and the breath! You are the waves! You are the sun! You are the lighthouse!”

In the middle of all this conversation, I’d pulled out my little black book and began writing in it. Just like Kathy had recalled, I clicked my pen and went about on all the things around me. The things I knew and the stuff that was said. Life and weather and crazies across the street. Inside, my tadpole squirmed a little but was still ultimately stuck. And I think that was okay.

“I can’t pinpoint a reason why,” I admitted, “but I smashed my thumb on my bedroom door earlier, and I think that might be the cause of all this. All this talking and indecisiveness.”

A soft smile grew on her lips, “And I stubbed my toe the other day, child. It is all in accordance with the water drip-dropping. It is all why I am old and aged like fine wine. It is the law that makes up all the laws that all the different people follow: The ultimate law.”

I had to agree. And I also had to agree with dinner that night. At the diner, where I got myself a coffee and could be half-alone with Kathy, and hear her talk. Tonight I would put on my shoes; tomorrow I would walk down the street; soon I would reach the world.