Rynn Williams

The girl’s father laughs a little too hard when I say:She knows what’s important in life as his daughter whips the dime store jump rope over her head for the twelve thousandth time— laughs as if I’m joking, when really, she has it down— sparkly pink handles grimy with effort, her face obscured by her hair, shins thin and bruised, socks down at the ankles. Abandoned by the rest of the crowd, the concrete square an archipelago, an alignment with rigor the others cannot fathom, she moves with fierce persistence into afternoon, the heft of the handles, smack of the rope— no Double Dutch, limbo, no communal game, but this resolute definition of rhythm, slatted bench shadows lengthening into space, the other kids simply forgetting she’s there, her solitary corner of the playground darkening as the dinner hour approaches, while pigeons pause on their branches, squirrels come down the trunk and stop, with rush hour beyond the fence, cars idling, and the rope’s metronome, forgotten as breath, weaving all the disparate energies of girl— elation, fury, eagerness, song— into one singular strand.

This was my gig: white lace apron, cut-out bra and crop. I crouched above him every Thursday in the marble bathroom, pissed on his bare chest as let him lick me dry. He wasn’t the first to love the thought of the redness of a bottom, mark of a heel. So when my ex dropped three tabs of sunshine and decided I’d screwed his best friend, I thought I knew what to expect. Hadn’t the drag queen across the street, pistol-whipped, sat silent on her folded raincoat?There is nothing anyone can do

1. READING THE RESULTS I don’t move, but the inside corner of my right eye turns glassy, then shatters, hands focus more sharply. I don’t move, but the pigeon shudders on the sill. The door opens to a maze of wallpaper, family photos— their bliss-frieze burns the last unaffected corner of my sight, like molten Karo. My husband’s mouth collapses, and the air about his shoulders has crystallized. We don’t say a word, all the noise is around us, the letter, half-folded, on the desk, an albatross, a dove. 2. POSITIVE Because in those days there were no words for such things I took handfuls of vitamins and slept with a trumpet flower under my pillow, I ate at the Kiev on Second Avenue at four every morning: enormous boiled potato pierogis shivering in pools of butter, little sides of sautéed onions, paper cups of pure sour cream, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, no ice, as chaser, but now when the call comes I’m sitting in the kitchen with two plastic funnels over my breasts and the pump on the coutner with its hydraulic suck and the cast iron sputtering of eggs, the kids already bickering at table, milk flowing into baby bottles, even now the word heroin makes me feel the lovely way a body can go slack from inside out. 3. A SINGLE DROP I’d never paid much mind to my implements, but now I paint “Fire Engine Red” on the handle of my razor, a single drop on my nail clippers, one long stroke on my lethal toothbrush to cordon off my blood, I tend and sop each splash or seep, soiled band-aids, love-smeared sheets— every bleeding gum, torn hangnail, paper cut, scrape, gully  of cracked lip another hazard, each infectious throb now forever watched as I patrol my body’s raging arroyo in the family bathroom, to keep my children safe from me. 4. PAPER GOWNS X-rays, lab coat, and me wearing those delicate petals (gaping, cold through the sleeves). He asks me to extend my palms: the motion is of pushing away. Breathe with your mouth, he says, soft tup, tup, tup, along my spine, as if checking a cantaloupe. There is a piece of gum beneath the windowsill, green imprint of a thumb. We’re talking percentages, genotypes, we’re talking bundled pharmaceuticals. Studies, it seems, are inconclusive. I try to look at the big picture: a talc-free rubber glove at the edge of the trash, neither in, nor out. On the insurance card, raised numbers, black ink worn away. There's a girl on the street with her head back, the strap of her dress falling carelessly.

Of course we knew the “incidents,” the aura of Divinity, duck-and-cover in the parking garage, Gloria Swanson chinchilla redux, yes, he’d been a bombshell—the eyes still sang with the merriment of a punchbowl, fine wrists, that dahlia neck, skin bleached with peroxide, of course he swam in the nude, stashed gin in the toilet tank, stored stockings in the freezer so they wouldn’t run, had a thing for Adenauer, played roulette with the .45 won in a Cuban dancehall, raging along hallways, fathering four children, feeling the eyes of the back stairs, beck of the undercurrent, his own hand in his lap like an orphan, of course he gardened in Dior, of course he was flagrant, but what escaped us was the way he peeked into the neighbor’s kitchen drawers for something he swore they’d stolen, beyond the foreground obligation, aspiration insistent as a stuck car horn in the slow blue hours of morning, discarded affection, what escaped us was the dampness at the collarbone, the delicacy of the pose (cigarette and upturned cheek), the lingering by the kitchen knives, the bias cut off the dressing gown, break and fall, tumbrel of illusion— and what we wanted to escape: that he was ruthless, beyond hope.

I try tearing paper into tiny, perfect squares— they cut my fingers.  Warm milk, perhaps, stirred counter-clockwise in a cast iron pan— but even then there’s burning at the edges, angry foam-hiss.  I’ve been told to put trumpet flowers under my pillow, I do: stamen up, the old crone said. But the pollen stains, and there are bees, I swear, in those long yellow chambers, echoing, the way the house does, mocking, with its longevity— each rib creaking and bending where I’m likely to break— I try floating out along the long O of lone, to where it flattens to loss, and just stay there disconnecting the dots of my night sky as one would take apart a house made of sticks, carefully, last addition to first, like sheep leaping backward into their pens.

Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson and tried to haul, up toward my block, a cross section of a maple grown too large, chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso, Super for All Buildings east of the projects, stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe. “Nothing to do but roll it,” he said, hands deep in his pockets. I nodded, barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt, transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it against his shoulder like a man who bears a handmade cross for miles on his pentitent back. I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark. I stood on the side and righted the thing and together we rolled this boulder of tree past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair, the Caribbean bakery. “You can smell the forest,” he said, as we reached my stoop, wood in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat. And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour it was filling the whole of my apartment— the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence— light brown rings so perfect my whole life fell right down inside them, concentric circles, tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself— suddenly it was thirty-five years ago: I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate, and looked up into the branches of my first true and majestic tree, in the first real forest—trees instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs— after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby, to see through branches to the sun—I believed the world was mine, there was sap in my veins, the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree, the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline, which goes on to the edge of the known world.

The merest suggestion of mouth and I was ravenous—I filled the house with chocolate, chestnuts, strudel, blood sausage; I bathed in butter. A glimpse of tongue and I was undone, simply a hint of heavy cream and the wax came off in a greasy slab, there were no cauldrons large enough. I imagined his body drawn in sections, flank, ribs, and tenderloin, I rubbed the blade to sparks, my stove walls sweated, windows dripping. Afterwards the house was a shell. My tongue: scorched white. I had to staple my stomach down to the size of a lichee nut. Thimbleful of broth, thimbleful of gruel, the merest suggestion floods my mouth with memory so rich I practically drown.