I could have helped it. Maybe. But that weight…an uncompromising inertia kept me pinned down, looking towards upcoming spaces of time waiting their turn to be filled.
I lit a cigarette and propped a pillow up behind me – listened to a scratched, peanut butter and jelly fingerprinted Billy Holliday croak out “In My Solitude” – took my index finger – the one I’d been using as a bookmarker – out of page five of Sartre’s “Nausea”. The finger had been there for a very long time, after all. I expelled quiet, flatulent bursts from between my lips, imparting crooked edges of smoke, testing some abstract notion that the smoke might very well fill the crack in the ceiling.
And I waited. For anything to happen. If you lie down in a room long enough, things happen. Things really happen. But, you know, sometimes you have to wait pretty long and it gets a bit ridiculous. You know you’re being ridiculous, and you know you’re smarter than this real life scenario is portraying you, but something is sitting on you. Something is sitting on your body. Something is sitting on your emotions. Something is sitting on your thoughts. Of course you think it’s just me.
Hello! Is anything happening? I listened –no, that is, I heard. I heard my neighbor Willie on the other side of the wall. I didn’t know it was him and I didn’t try to figure out what that sound was. So it took me ten, twelve, maybe fifteen, maybe more, minutes to acknowledge that the man was snoring his head off. Willie snoring so loudly that I thought about his snoring above all else. For minutes the snoring obsessively consumed my thoughts. In fact, I meditated on it with such a profound level of concentration that, if I had room to think about this too, I might have been a little disturbed that this subject matter took complete precedence over all those other more universally important things that I so wished to be motivated towards. Things that would make me rich, or more educated, or happy, or well-liked….
Willie. Yuck! Willie, you old pervert. Only a sheet of thick spackling compound keeps you from accidentally touching me in my bed.
I exhaled a smooth stream of smoke and thought about calling my friends. But I remembered that I probably hadn’t any more friends because I had thought about calling them for a very long time now.
So I did something, damn it! I lifted myself up from my bed….no, NOT just a bed….a planet. Just my size. The kind The Little Prince might find himself on, with the gravitational pull of a black hole! The point is that I did something.
My God! I was filled with ambition. I’ve had ambition before. This is how it felt then, too. I crossed the wide plywood porch and escaped through the screen door – after fiddling convulsively with the forty year old salt air rusted latch – leaped quickly onto the second flagstone of the path embedded into the lawn from the beginning of the lawn to the end of the lawn to the road – no sidewalk – before any though could intervene to keep me inside.
I took a deep breath.
Then I set off to think about starting to consider the arrangements of maybe coming up with an idea that might lead to a possible goal, or something. I felt directed toward something, and Goddammit, I was going to accomplish it.
I sprinted – well, walked swiftly – across the street and made it somewhere. I wasn’t in my house anymore! I had made it to a café – an actual café with people. I bought a cup of coffee. I began to drink. I lit a cigarette and allowed the smoke to drift off without my normally relentless scrutiny. I gave that smoke the opportunity to autonomously fill up cracks in the wall that I found so fascinating – or pretended to because they were there to look at.
So much to do. So much! The coffee metamorphosis was working – transforming my groggy ambition into flesh that desired to move, into a brain that wanted to think. So I sat there and thought about how I would move my body.
I curled my finger around the handle of the cup – my fourth cup – and took one more sip – that one-too-many sips that catapulted me out of my physical presence in what was, to me anyways, an uncomfortable feeling of unreality inside cafes, back into the safe and murky quagmires of my brain, where I stayed for…well, for a long time probably.
I couldn’t leave the chair. I realized that I could not leave that chair – maybe ever – and accepted it. My eyelids barely resisted their own weight, and my face began a slow descent into itself pulled by a gravity that I knew had the color of gray.
So I lifted my feet up a few inches and pressing my fingers against the table, made the chair lean on its hind legs. I balanced very well like this for some time, feeling somehow tremendously daring at this precarious position I had assumed – and felt pity for those around me who had to look so hard for this quality of satisfaction.
The chair keeled over. There – with its four legs sticking up as if overcome by rigor mortis.
I lay there, unhurt, and disturbingly comfortable.
I put my right arm under my head for a pillow and closed my eyes.
And there I believed that I alone lived on the cutting edge of total lethargy.
******************************
That was when Colonel Opal Mayo entered my life – although, as far as she was concerned, I had entered it a long time ago – and sometimes I had never entered it. You’ll understand shortly. She had been sitting next to me in the café. She reached down, plucked me up with an extraordinary strength for an elderly woman, reprimanded me with great familiarity for lying on the floor, and led me to her home, where I promptly fell asleep.
Even the most perceptive of people would not necessarily pick up on the walking paradox that was Colonel Opal Mayo. Although slightly glassy-eyed, the roundness and considerably large bulging quality of her eyes emanated a terrifying sense of clairvoyance, making one look quickly away.
She moved about the room with the robust posturing befitting her now retired distinguished position from the United States Army. Then the commands issued forth to her guests – any guest – demands to coalesce as a cleaning crew. And with her clear, booming voice one was inclined to jump to attention and get moving! Therefore, it seemed certain that one had simply heard incorrectly when she said – or seemed to be saying – that the painting (of two conch shells on a window sill, looking out on a beach) be turned facing the wall so that the two people making love on the window sill would not fall into the cleaning bucket and drown.
**************************
Colonel Opal Mayo looked over at the pile of bruises and pimply skin that constituted, what should have been, a radiating sleeping beauty, but was just me instead. “What are you doing here?” she asked when she caught me with one eye open. “Oh, yes. How awful. I found you collapsed. How awful. Awful! Just like in the movies, though. Poor little girl. Although I suppose you aren’t really a little girl. Any woman under sixty is a girl to an old pussy like me.”
She leaned forward in her chair – an early twentieth century barber’s chair that had belonged to her now deceased, beloved husband, Colonel Arthur Mayo. It had belonged to his father before him. Arthur was a genius with a razor. The troops endearingly referred to him as “The Barger” because of his amazing collection of personal hygiene equipment which he carried upon his person at all times. “All geniuses slip occasionally, though,” she told me – and that must have happened to Arthur the day she found him in the bathtub lounging dead in the still tepid, bloodied water. Although why he was shaving his arms she would never understand – or refused to, really. Colonel Mayo examined me from across the room as her fingers worked autonomously on a rug hooking project – it was to be a new bathroom mat; mallard ducks flying across the marshes….”to go where?” she suddenly asked out loud. It disturbed her not to know. Colonel Opal Mayo liked to know everything that was going on in her precious
“How old are you young lady? I just can’t tell anymore. Fifteen? Twenty-five? Surely you can be no older than that. What are you doing here? Oh yes, you’re visiting. It’s been too long since I’ve seen my lovely niece Letty. And you’re all grown up now, aren’t you Letty?”
She held up the rug and looked at it thoughtfully. “How dull.” She grimaced at the picture. “Who really cares where those mallards are going….besides me, of course. This will always disconcert me. Perhaps I should give it to someone as a gift. Yes, that’s it. But whomever I give it to will think it’s just as dull as I do; then naturally, they’ll think that I’m dull. They’ll say, ‘Oh, that Opal Mayo. She means well, but she’s such a doddering, dull old woman.’ And then the well-meaning gift shall be most ceremoniously placed in the back of the hall closet, to be one day rediscovered, put in a box, gift wrapped, and most likely, given back to me as a Christmas gift. To think they would give me back my own gift! How could they do such an insensitive thing? Well then, I’ll just keep the darn rug.”
I sneezed roughly, followed by an irritable “Ouch!” I put my hand to my colorfully bloated cheek to hold it still for the other sneeze that was on its way and waited immobilized with painful apprehension. The sneeze forced its wayout of me and again came a long, whiney “Oooowwwww!”
“Well, so you’re actually alive. For the life of me I cannot understand why young people today sleep so darn much.” Colonel Mayo leapt from her barber’s chair with the creaky agility of an old cat. I looked at her curiously, my ugly small eyes squinting trying to discern this situation. They weren’t really such small squinty eyes but huge beautiful eyes that seemed to escape everyone’s notice.
“Let me get you some tea, soldier. But you won’t be able to sip it. I shall get you a straw. But who ever heard of drinking Earl Grey through a straw? Perhaps not tea then. What do you like? A good strong belt?”
I stared at the old lady for a moment, and then realizing I had just been addressed, opened my mouth to answer. But it wouldn’t open, and I felt a line of warm sticky drool flowing ticklishly down my chin, which had somehow gotten mashed upon hitting the floor in the café. I wiped it away, lowering my face with embarrassment.
“It’s all right, soldier, Your mouth is a little cumbersome for speaking. That’s what getting into brawls will do to you. Don’t you worry. I’ll make you a concoction of my own that is meant only to be drunk from a straw. It’ll help you bite the bullet.” The old colonel wandered out of her parlor – that’s what she called it – into the kitchen.
I blinked several times trying to focus in on light. I’m going blind! I involuntarily drew in a tight, painful breath. The ‘parlor’, I realized, was a dark and murky looking room. Not dirty. No, in fact, it had the unaging look of a museum setting of an early twentieth century typical American family d4rawing room – the only thing missing was the plaque warning the public not to touch the furniture.
I pressed my fingertip hard onto the newly polished coffee table, leaving a perfect print that would last until the next dose of lemon oil.
Colonel Opal Mayo returned with a small pot of tea in one hand and a bottle lemon oil and its accompanying rag in the other. I smiled with a weary feeling of humor, and accepted the tea gratefully.
Colonel Mayo then tottered on her tiptoes over to a closed door that was not the front door and rapped sharply on it. I observed this with interest. Who was this knock directed to? As far as I could tell there was no room in this tiny cottage for anyone else to live.
“Hello! Hello in there!” Colonel Mayo stated authoritatively as if speaking to a naughty child – or some doddering hard of hearing elderly person. She knocked more quietly and lowered her voice to a sweeter, almost conspiratorial tone. “Hello! Why don’t you come talk to us dear? At least tell us your name.”
I stared intently at the door trying to imagine what kind of room could possibly fit behind it – and housing someone whom the owner of the house did not know.
The old woman stood back from the door and placed her hands indignantly on her hips. She spoke to me but kept her eyes on the door as if expecting it to burst open.
“She’s in there. But she won’t come out. Honestly, some of these elderly women are embarrassing to me. But I can’t help her if she won’t talk to me. And I’m not going to say anything, being the good Christian that I am, but she’s been taking all my soap. Heaven knows what she does with all that soap. But…if she needs it….” She lifted her hands to providence and shrugged.
“Who is she?”
“Well if I knew that then I wouldn’t have asked her what her name is. Honestly, Letty.”
“Bea.”
“Be! Be what?”
“Bea Carter.”
“Be carter? What on earth are you talking about? Oh, forgive me, Letty. It must be your poor mouth. No, don’t try to talk You can tell me about it later.”
She excused herself and went back into the kitchen, leaving me in my now accustomed state of confusion.
I got up from the couch and walked over to the door. I started to turn the knob, but stopped and knocked softly. “Hello!” I whispered. I waited only a moment, then twisted the knob and swung the door open. Inside were numerous coats, hats, scarves and umbrellas. Numerous umbrellas! And about thirty or so bars of soap. Along with a few minor idiosyncrasies, it was what any normal hallway closet carries. I returned to the sofa, and resuming my sick bed position, took a sip of the hot tea, dropped my head back and fell into a full, mollifying sleep.
I awoke on the divan the next morning. My head felt heavy and my eyelids bulky, but I could not go back to sleep. I propped my arm over the vack of the divan and pulled myself up sluggishly, nestling my chin inside the curature of my arm, which is the best place for ones chin to be. My eyes focused on the filmy greynessof the air outside – although it’s practically impossible to determine if one has focused on something filmy. The water on
Colonel Mayo entered the room with a load of dishes in her arms and, completely oblivious of my presence, walked past me to the end table at the foot of the sofa. She placed all the dishes carefully on top and began an irritable examination of the table itself. She opened the little drawer, peered insided, closed it, twisted the knob, opened it again, and, finally, needing an explanation, I spoke up.
“Colonel Mayo, what are you doing?”
“Eh! Who are you? I told them I don’t need another boarder. Oh, well! What does it look like I’m doing? I’m trying to find the damn spigot.”
“Spigot?”
“To turn on the damn water! These new modern appliances are ridiculously complicated – don’t know what’s what or where.”
“Why are you looking for a spigot on that?”
“To wash the dishes. Goodness, child, what planet did you come from? Where is that thing….I can’t find it.”
“Colonel Mayo…that…um…that’s an end table, not a sink.”
Colonel Mayo pulled herself upright and grabbing the dishes back up, marched out of the room muttering, “I know that. Does she think I don’t know that? Kids are so high and mighty…think they know everything….think we’re just old fools….” And her voice disappeared with her and the dishes into the bedroom.
She reappeared shortly, dressed for action in wool orange-yellow-red plaid pants, purple pullover and a filthy London Fog rain hat.
“Well Letty, are you going to sleep your life away? Get dressed dear, we’re going to
“We are?”
“Every Thursday I’ve been going for thirty years to visit Arthur’s sister, Vanessa. So let’s get cookin’!”
“How are we getting there?”
“We’re driving.”
“You…drive?”
“What is this? Twenty questions? Of course, I drive…why wouldn’t I drive…now move!”
I extricated myself painfully from the battered, uncomfortable couch and wandered into the bathroom. I might as well go, I thought. I had nothing better to do. I washed my face and brushed my tangled mouse brown hair till it stood up statically in the air. I grabbed the economy size bottle of hairspray from the shelf and glued my thin hair to my skull until I was pleased to note that it resembled seaweed plastered to a large rock. I didn’t have my clothes here so I would just have to wear the ones I had slept in. I usually did that anyway.
And off we went to
*******************************
She stopped the car at the side of a silent road, and though I did not understand why we had pulled over, I got out with the old woman and walked down the street with her. It was difficult keeping up with Colonel Mayo, marching stiffly down an empty sand swept stretch of Route 6A that would eventually lead onto Commercial Street in Provincetown, eyes straight ahead with that determined look – her usual lucid bold stare directed at some distinct destination somewhere only in her mind – because as far as I knew, we were walking down a ghost street surrounded by deserted summer cottages. I was quite positive that for the next two miles all the cottages would be locked or even boarded up for the winter.
I meandered behind, slipping occasionally on the unusual quantities of sand spilling into the streets. We’d had a few storms recently and it brought the beaches directly into the town giving it a “native quality that I liked – not that I noticed it and actively liked it for long. It soon vanished from my field of interest.
I just didn’t feel like doing this – just like I never felt like doing anything – my brain was becoming numb with fatigue. But I tried. I really tried. I took an interest in the little matchbox houses lined up one after the other after the other – not just in a general way, but in an historical way, in an architectural way, in a sociological way – for about thirty seconds. We walked past a row of about twenty identical cottages – all sea blue, and all no larger than the size of a guest bedroom. Really, I had seen these many times and had wondered about them. They were only five feet apart and so diminutive in size. Who stayed in these? Did people actually rent these in the summer? They did not seem of this era, but belonged in a time where men strutted around the beach in blue and white striped bodysuits each carrying an inflated inner tube under his arm. Each cottage had a name, cared out and dyed on a polyurethaned piece of driftwood. Names like “Wildewind”, “Sandscape”, Peggy’s
“Colonel!” I yelled, picking up the pace for a moment, but then rolling my eyes in frustration, stopped where I was and waited. She would be right back. No one would be there. I waited for a minute and she did not return. The wind was blowing icily and sending handfuls of sand into my face. I crossed my arms and put my hands under my armpits, struck the irritable stance of a snotty, impatient girl – which I was – and waited another minute. Still she did not return. Naturally I had to go find her. The doddering old fool would get lost, so I hastened towards the cottage.
I heard her voice from inside and found the door wide open, which in itself was a curious thing. But just as I was about to enter, Colonel Mayo barreled out the door almost knocking me over – and she was furious.
“What’s up, Colonel?”
“Don’t call me that! Damn Vivian! Damn Arthur! They’re together again. Have they no shame? I knew it! I just knew it.” Tears of humiliation and anger glistened in her eyes. I didn’t know what to do
I walked over to the door and peered inside. Naturally, I was not surprised to find it empty. I felt like I had to say something. For the old woman’s sake.
“Colonel Mayo, there’s nobody in there.”
Colonel Mayo stood silent with back towards me. I was afraid at that moment. Slowly she turned around and I was stunned to see a powerful rage twisting her wrinkled old face. Her bulbous eyeballs glowered with anger and her lips creased grotesquely wide across her face. And then she lit into me with a clarity of thought that I had never before witnessed in her.
“How dare you! How dare you, you twittering, pathetic, weak willed little mouse. You too! You think I’m crazy, don’t you? Do you? You’re just a young fool who knows nothing about life – knows nothing about how precious it is. You’re just like everyone else. You walk around in this daze of ennui – a pitiful bourgeois creature filled with some pseudo poetic spiritual malaise that is nothing more than willful lassitude, plain and simple. You thing that only what you see is real, and you don’t even like it. And then you and everyone else have the audacity to extol its virtues to me only at the moment when you need it to give you comfort. Well, dammit, little girly, if the only time you like your fatuous, puny little life – your pathetic, vacuous existence -- us when you’re afraid of someone else’s, then maybe it is time for you to get out. Arthur did!”
She turned and went back to the car. I stood there silent for a moment, when I glimpsed something shiny just below my feet. I stepped back, reached down and swept the sand away, revealing a battered, polyurethaned board. It read “Arthur’s Opal”. I picked it up and quickly followed the Colonel, climbed into the passenger seat, and rode with her in silence for the three hours and fifteen minutes it took to drive what should have been only twenty three miles back to
And since she did not drop me off at my own place, but drove directly to her own house, holding the door open for me and calling me “Letty”. I went inside and stayed for an indeterminate amount of time. I believe it was several months. I don’t know what became of my apartment or the things in it. I never bothered to deal with it. I slept on her couch, wore her funky outdated clothes, ate her food (very little as I have never had a good appetite). And I waited. For anything to happen. If you wait around enough, things happen. Things really happen. But waiting here, in Colonel Mayo’s living room, I did not feel the slightest bit ridiculous.
I tenaciously pursued the depths of my lassitude, and particularly at the time when Colonel Mayo denounced my character with her perfect clarity of vision. When anyone tried to appeal to me with bald faced truths, I slipped refreshingly into an open eyed somnambulistic state until total perfect silence was achieved.
I was lifted out of my listless mire when Colonel Mayo reentered her real life. Together we watched the two conch shells be lovers while the baseball players came out of the ocean to watch. I told her to watch out for traffic when she walked down the hallway, and she always thanked me for my concern. And if her bar of soap had not disappeared by that evening, we applauded the invisible woman on the other side of the door for her willpower.
******************************
Colonel Mayo had occasional visiting neighbors, all overflowing ever so briefly with unctuous good will. One woman in particular who popped in frequently, or rather, probed in a way that never ceased to repel me was Leigh Gary. Leigh was a young woman of about thirty-five, tall and anorexic thin, who poked her pock-marked face into our lives with an irritating frequency. I say “our lives” because it became clear to me – moments before I automatically disappeared into my self-manufactured narcoleptic haven – that her probing eye had become much larger and more frequent because of my constant presence in Colonel Mayo’s home. She was extremely suspicious of me and was obviously doing what she could to save Colonel Mayo from my parasitic presence.
After observing my conversations with Colonel Mayo, whe was horrified. On one day, Colonel Mayo suddenly transfixed a furious glare at a fairly new portable television/radio set which had a screen measurement of approximately six inches in diameter.
“Dammit!”, she cried. “I hate these modern appliances. They are so darn cheap. Look at that screen! Just look at that screen I tell you!”
Leigh looked at Colonel Mayo inquiringly. “What is it, Colonel Mayo?”
“That television used to be a twenty-seven inch television, and now look at it.”
Leigh gave me a knowing glance and a sad sigh. She turned her pitying face to the aging Colonel, her eyes shining with a gratuitous beatific light, and touched her hand lightly.
“Now, Colonel Mayo,” she spoke as if addressing a naughty child. “It’s just a different television.”
Colonel Mayo barked at her, “Don’t tell me what I own. I know what I own.”
“Yeah, she does,” I said. “I’m sorry Colonel, but I accidentally shrunk it in the wash. I’m really sorry.”
Colonel Mayo looked at me sharply for a moment, and then smiled. “Oh, so that’s what happened. Well, try to be more careful, Letty.”
“Sure. Sorry.”
“And don’t call me Colonel.”
Colonel Mayo went into the kitchen. Leigh grabbed me hard by the arm. “You are egging her on. Just egging her on. I have never in my life seen anything so cruel.”
My eyelids fluttered, and her reproaches to me became a distant buzz.
**********************************
Over the next few months, the traffic got worse in the hallway, the dishes piled up on the end table, in the ball closet, and occasionally under my pillow on the sofa when I lay down to sleep. Neighbors brought food voer – steak that I hd to prevent Colonel Mayo from eating raw, and fruit juice that she tried to “make” in the coffee pot. They admonished me severely for abusing Colonel Mayo, then, having done their duty, left her after “helping” her by wagging their accusatory fingers at me.
Her normally clairvoyant gaze seemed to lose its lucidity and become swirls, at times, fading into a milky blankness. Her Colonel commands diminished, and her robust figure became thin drooping shoulders holding up a withering body. And the neighbors “helped” less, except to throw me a nasty glare whenever I left the house.
************************************
On the day of the “Pilgrims Parade”, hundreds of people from our community and neighboring towns lined Main Street starting from the town of Orleans and veering off down Memorial past the house where, now that spring had come, the grass had risen to knee level.
Off in the distance, the sound of Nauset High School band approached with its off-beat drums and squealing trumpets. I was in the bathroom when I heard the familiar old pro8d, resonant voice of Colonel Mayo out on the front porch – that great strong booming voice projecting into the air that I had, so unfortunately, not heard in quite awhile. I was elated, but could not yet join her as I had just gotten out of the shower and had only a towel wrapped around me. As I walked out to the living room I heard a loud commotion coming from outside – audible gasps and frantic voices that were meant to be whispers but forgot.
I looked out the front door, and there stood Colonel Opal Mayo with a brilliant holiday straw hat with colorful streamers draping down her entirely naked old body. The people lining the street stared at her with her beaming, beautiful smile. I felt all my torpor die inside as I watched my best friend raise her hands -- greeting Life – greeting the world she no longer understood. I dropped my towel, walked outside, and stood beside her.
