Lucia Perillo

Women who sleep on stones are like brick houses that squat alone in cornfields. They look weatherworn, solid, dusty, torn screens sloughing from the window frames. But at dusk a second-story light is always burning. Used to be I loved nothing more than spreading my blanket on high granite ledges that collect good water in their hollows. Stars came close without the trees staring and rustling like damp underthings. But doesn’t the body foil what it loves best? Now my hips creak and their blades are tender. I can’t rest on my back for fear of exposing my gut to night creatures who might come along and rip it open with a beak or hoof. And if I sleep on my belly, pinning it down, my breasts start puling like baby pigs trapped under their slab of torpid mother. Dark passes as I shift from side to side to side, the blood pooling just above the bone. Women who sleep on stones don’t sleep. They see the stars moving, the sunrise, the gnats rising like a hairnet lifted from a waitress’s head. The next day they’re sore all over and glad for the ache: that’s how stubborn they are.

The old woman in the parking lot wields her walker not unspryly. Gray hair lank and without style, hanging under her ski hat, as I wear a ski hat— her legs bare under her skirt, my legs bare under my skirt, she wears sneakers, I wear sneakers— windbreaker, windbreaker. She rolls up to watch me board, as people do, because it is interesting to see the wheelchair maneuvered backward into the van.You got it? she asks, as people do though I am not their child. We are not sisters either, despite the wind’s ruffling our skirts in sync— oh how she is interested in the ruffling of my skirt. The ruffle makes her giddy, starts her bald gums racing on their wordless observations as she peers into my thighs. How alike we are! says this no-sister of mine to be argued with, just some crazy old woman flashing the terrible crater of her smile to raise the wind and prove her point.

The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks before coughing up the question that had dogged him since he first read Emerson: Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered while his lecture drifted against us like snow. If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind. I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too, a quiet little interlude from everyone outside rooting up the corpse of literature for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer to my own question (how come no one loved me, stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle): I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet, though I liked If the red slayer think he slays— the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul. Then he read a chapter from his own book: naptime. He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks. When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard where dogwood bloomed despite a few last dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal being chased across the tundra by those wolves, the postmodernists. At any moment you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes. And I am I who never understood his question, though he let me climb to take a seat aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it from his yard, into my life—remains a mystery. The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.

Achilles slays the man who slayed his friend, pierces the corpse behind the heels and drags it behind his chariot like the cans that trail a bride and groom. Then he lays out a banquet for his men, oxen and goats and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards. The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—

I live a small life, barely bigger than a speck, barely more than a blip on the radar sweep though it is not nothing, as the garter snake climbs the rock rose shrub and the squirrel creeps on bramble thorns. Not nothing to the crows who heckle from the crowns of the last light’s trees winterstripped of green, except for the boles that ivy winds each hour round. See, the world is busy and the world is quick, barely time for a spider to suck the juice from a hawk moth’s head so it can use the moth as a spindle that it wraps in fiber while the moth constricts until it’s thin as a stick you might think was nothing, a random bit caught in a web coming loose from the window frame, in wind.

I saw a child set down her binder like a wall through the candy bin at the Corner Luncheonette so she could scoop out gum while she spoke to the clerk— and from that moment was in love:Oh theft. College was supposed to straighten me like a bent tree strangled by a wire, but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat. How the red muscle gleamed in its shiny wrap, a wedge that had once been the thigh or the loin of a slow brute’s body, sugar-dirt and clotted grass to be snatched in an instant and zipped into the crone-y-est of pocketbooks. Radiance housed in rawhide again, as when it was living. A steak can be stuck in your jeans when you’re skinny, a rump roast is right for a puffy down coat, small chops will fit under a thin peasant blouse where it falls off the breasts like a woodland rive with a limestone amphitheater underneath. Ancient city, ancient sublet, ancient wooden fire escape— with my other bandits I learned to say how-de-do in French. We were yanking on the cord that would start the motor of our lives though we did not have the choke adjusted yet. Sometimes it seemed I floated in the dregs like a tea bag bloating up with facts. Until a girl ran in the door, panting hard, face red, slab thudding from her snowflake-damasked waist onto the table, and we stood around it gawking at the way it seemed to breathe.

So today, yet another Guyanese will try to run the border dressed in a dead housewife’s hair—all they’ve recovered since her disappearance in a downtown shopping mall. An “incident,” the paper says. Another “routine occurrence”— wresting my trust from the publicans assigned to keeping us safe, whole. Rather: vow to stay vigilant against the maiming that waits in each landscape, even in this mundane procession of muddy spring days. To see the tenacity of rooted hair for what it is: an illusion as fleeting as courage. To keep the meat between one’s ribs from being torn, to keep the hard marble of the cranium covered with its own skin. To stay vigilant. To watch the signs of violence stirring even in one's own machine. To keep both breasts attached and undiseased. To keep the womb empty; and yet to keep the organs living there from shriveling like uneaten fruit, from turning black and dropping. And not to mistake the danger for a simple matter of whether to put the body on the streets, of walking or of staying home—; there are household cleansers that can scar a woman deeper than a blade or dumdum bullets. The kitchen drawers are full of tools that lie unchaperoned. Even with the doors and windows bolted, in the safety of my bed, I am haunted by the sound of him (her, it, them) stalking the hallway, his long tongue already primed with Pavlovian drool. Or him waiting in the urine-soaked garages of this city's leading department stores, waiting to deliver up the kiss of a gunshot, the blunted kiss of a simple length of pipe. But of course I mean a larger fear: the kiss of amputation, the therapeutic kiss of cobalt. The kiss of a deformed child. Of briefcase efficiency and the forty-hour workweek. Of the tract home: the kiss of automatic garage-door openers that despite the dropped eyelid of their descent do nothing to bar a terror needing no window for entry: it resides within. And where do we turn for protection from our selves? My mother, for example, recommends marriage— to a physician or some other wealthy healer. Of course it’s him, leering from his station behind her shoulder, who’s making her say such things: the witch doctor, headhunter, the corporate shaman, his scalpel drawn & ready, my scalp his ticket out.

The famous Polish poet calls Simone de Beauvoir a Nazi hag but to me she will always be her famous book, the one with the Matisse paper cut on the cover, a sad blue nude I took into the woods. Where we college girls went to coax the big picture from her, as if she could tell us how to use all the strange blades on our Swiss Army knives— the firewood we arranged in either log cabin or tepee, a little house built to be burned down. Which could be a metaphor: Simone as the wind puffing the damp flames, a cloud with a mouth that became obsolete once we started using gasoline. Still, she gave me one lesson that sticks, which is: do not take a paperback camping in the rain or it may swell to many times its original size, and if you start with a big book you’ll end up with a cinderblock. In that vein I pictured Simone as huge until (much later) I read that her size was near-midget— imagine, if we took Gertrude Stein, we’d be there still, trying to build some kind of travois to drag her body out. The other thing I remember, a word,immanence— meaning, you get stuck with the cooking and laundry while the man gets to hit on all your friends in Paris. Sure you can put the wet book in the oven and try baking it like a cake. But the seam will stay soggy even when the pages rise, ruffled like French pastry. As far as laundry goes, it’s best I steer clear, what with my tendency to forget the tissues wadded in my sleeves. What happens is I think I’m being so careful, and everything still comes out like the clearing where we woke. Covered in flakes that were then the real thing: snow. Which sounds more la-di-da in French. But then the sun came up and all la neige vanished like those chapters we grew bored with and had skipped.

Word of it comes whispered by a slippery thin section of the paper, where the models pantomime unruffled tête-à-têtes despite the absence of their blouses. Each year when my familiar latches on them so intently like a grand master plotting the white queen’s path, like a baby trying to suckle a whole roast beef, I ask: What, you salt block, are you dreaming about being clubbed by thunderheads?—but he will not say. Meanwhile Capricorn’s dark hours flabbed me, uneasy about surrendering to the expert fitter (even if the cupped hands were licensed and bonded)— I had August in mind, seeing the pygmy goats at the county fair. Now the sky is having its daily rain event and the trees are having their hibernal bark event, pretending they feel unruffled despite the absence of their leaves. And we forget how they looked all flouncy and green. Instead we regard fearfully the sway of their old trunks.

Only once did the frog come to mind: when the coroner came to “first-aid training” at the fire station, his slide carousel set up to eliminate the easy pukers. The frog was not dead but its brain had been pithed, which is what happens when you stick a probe into the skull and wiggle. You wind up with something dead enough to let you stretch its tongue as thin and wide as a cellophane sheet, which I did so eagerly, back in the lab. The coroner said: Here is the fat guy whose Chihuahua gnawed through his stomach. Click. Here is the farmer who hanged himself in his silo. (I noted his foreshortened dangling feet.) Click. It had been thrilling to see the frog’s blood cells jerking through the narrow capillaries. Here is the woman who swallowed the bottle of Drano. Click. Here is the man who just Sawzall-ed his neck clean through. Click. Here is the guy who shot off his head, but wait: he’s still living, which is what happens if the brain stem’s left intact. Click. The coroner said we should aim for the base not the top of the skull and remember to turn down the heat. Click. There are many people in this world on whom nobody checks in very often. Click. The warmer the room, the quicker a body will turn black and bloat. Click. If you have a dog it is important to leave out what seems like an inordinate amount of dog food. Click, click, then there was nothing but a slab of light to signal he was through. And it was then that I remembered the frog, not that the coroner had spoken of frogs. What he said was, If we saw the cops outside, smoking cigars, that’s when we’d know we had a stinker.