derickandveronica-blog

[derickandveronica-blog]

D #7. My Date with the Duolingo Owl

There was the day I overslept because my mind had just reached the crest of accustom to hearing the song “Who Will I Be” by Demi Lovato stream out of my tiny iPhone speaker in the morning to wake me from sleep. The old woman calling the shots in my brain must have decided to dismiss it as the good ol’ outdoors song and not my very important alarm clock, and it was something I needn’t mind after all. I imagine she was reading the morning paper and drinking chamomile at a table made of brain cells as I rolled over the bed and through the ninth hour.

On the bus to work my phone’s heart relayed a little beat—a sound I’d usually miss having already turned off my notifications by 10:37am—and there he was on the lock screen, probably wondering how I had been, where I might have been going, if he and I could talk shortly. Did he know I was riding the bus? I only watched the screen fade to black, without really reading what it had said, and put the phone back in my pocket, making sure not to tangle the earphones cord on the buttons of my overcoat. It wasn’t always like this. The truth is that I didn’t ignore the message because I was late to work and too frantic to sit still and pay attention to the present, but that I simply couldn’t think about him anymore. It was getting tiring all the talking. It used to be different.

A month ago, we met for coffee at Target after a somewhat successful meet cute at a church pancake dinner. He insisted that Target had delicious coffee and he went there often to get it—even when he didn’t need to buy thank-you cards, which is all I’d ever purchased at Target. He didn’t even mean the Targets that had joint or in-store Starbucks cafés. There was no visible middle man between Target and the coffee in this situation. Something about Target trying to convince anyone that they make their own coffee and that I should pay to purchase it shook me to my core.

The seats were not comfortable. This was a Target that had plans to be converted into a Super Target and so I imagined would be granted a Starbucks soon, but for the time being the dining area felt a little chintzy. There were big red circles plastered across the soda fountain that were a red too bright to be appetizing and made me think of ringworm. This was our first date. He told me I could get anything I wanted. I wish he hadn’t because suddenly I felt like I was ten-years-old and with the parent with whom I only spent every other weekend. There were no more than seven items on the menu but I agonized over them. There were no special names for the foods and everything was visible right next to the cashier: the rolling hotdogs (beef or classic), the spinning soft pretzels, and the personal pizzas, which were non-moving if I remember correctly. (Imagine if the pizzas got up and danced.)

Somehow all the food looked red to me. Was he going to order food too or just the coffee? I didn’t want to be eating alone. There was a pale white couple, both members with greasy grey-blond hair, at one of the tables whose presence really wasn’t helping sell the whole experience. The Wal-Mart down the road had more options but I didn’t want to make the Duolingo Owl feel bad that he enjoyed dining at Target behind a glass half-wall that kept us only partially hidden from all the mothers buying large packs of Hanes socks. In fact, once we sat down, every person who checked out at aisle 12 seemed to stare both us and our food down while pushing the cart out and toward the exit.

I ripped my entire soft pretzel to shreds like a napkin. The Duolingo Owl asked me to try a sip of his coffee and I was truly choked for tears because I couldn’t think of anything more pathetic than a mysterious non-brand coffee bringing someone so much uninhibited delight that they would then want to share that joy with someone else, me, and of course I knew it would only make me more miserable. The whole date felt like a mistake. I looked at my lacerated soft pretzel. At least the coffee was passable, though I really never the drank the stuff at any other point in my life.

My plan was to text Kelly and tell her to call me with news that someone in our friend group had just woken from a coma, but then the Duolingo Owl did something that surprised me. Maybe he saw I was not equally enchanted by the afternoon. For whatever reason there were disposable coasters set out for these particleboard bench tables. He took one and stuck it out halfway out of the edge of the table so it was still even with the surface. He lowered his head a little and then put his wing out of view and then flipped the coaster and caught it in the air.

I was immediately drawn in and my attraction to him revitalized. I didn’t dare ask him how’d he done it, defied gravity right before my eyes, right before the eyes of the greasy white couple and right before those of the man at aisle 12 buying Yu-Gi-Oh cards and a bottle of Diet Rite. In that moment we all knew that I would go on a second date with the Duolingo Owl, maybe at the Target on Harmony instead this time. As we left, he gave me the coaster to keep, and I put it in my pocket.

And so we did go to another Target. I didn’t even pretend to want a soft pretzel that time. This Target just as inexplicably but fortunately had disposable coasters set out for our amusement, and so I pleaded with the Duolingo Owl that he flip the coaster again. I fell in love with every part of him, every little thing, every feather. The way he smiled so gently, the way he whistled while he waited, and the way he did his best to poop in human toilets even though it was obviously uncomfortable for him, being an owl.

Our next few dates were equally as successful. I swam through a sea of red circles and white cotton socks.

“Learning a language requires a little practice every day. Practice your Spanish on Duolingo.” His eyes were blank when he said this. It sounded hauntingly familiar. Maybe I was able to dismiss it before as small talk, but this time he was assertive, and I couldn’t have possibly circumnavigated the comment. I looked down at my coaster, which had fallen down to my feet the last time I tried to flip my coaster. I could barely make it out between the crack of the bench and the table. I sent a low smile his way and took a sip of his Target coffee and shrugged, “Okay.”

Hablamos en español como la tarde se convirtió en la noche sin problema pero me había notado que algo había cambiado y así llegó a preocuparme. ¿Le conozco de verdad? ¿Quién era el búho de Duolingo? Quién lo supiera. Me llevó a casa en su Toyota Prius. Puso la banda sonora de Space Jam pues una vez le había dicho que me la gustaba, pero era que no tenía muchas ganas que escucharla en aquel momento, así que Salt-N-Pepa me había dejado menos que esperanzada.

The next few days were difficult. A little shaken by the Duolingo Owl’s words, I started to take longer to reply to text messages. I turned off read receipts on my phone and thankfully he seemed not to notice. It’s not that I didn’t want to keep practicing my Spanish, but, as I slowed down on the text messages, I did tell him I wasn’t sure how much I could learn in a model of language comprehension that placed equal emphasis on the student’s mother tongue as it did the new language, when in reality what I needed was an immersive or at the least more comprehensive Spanish program to truly develop my grammatical skills and fluency level. He did not seem to understand this. In a final attempt to get through to him, I sent a pretty long-winded text about linguistics and even included a link to an article I found on JSTOR about language immersion, and he ignored it. A few hours later, I received this text: “Learning a language requires a little practice every day. Practice your Spanish on Duolingo.” I used to find it sweet that he referred to himself in the third person, but at this point, I was disenchanted.

This brings us back to the bus. I was late to work. My hair was still wet. I was still not completely awake, inattentive. While the old lady in my brain was probably watching Jeopardy, I was watching the Target-colored blood ebb out of my relationship. Now unable to get him out of my head, I felt for the phone in my big overcoat pocket and pulled out two things at once: the phone and a red and white coaster stuck to its case. I attended to the phone first. I pressed the lock button and on the screen were a few words that I hadn’t expected, hadn’t realized were there all along: “These reminders don’t seem to be working. We’ll stop sending them for now.”

How corporate, how cold, how cruel. I thought the Duolingo Owl was the coolest, but now I knew better: he was the cruelest. Just because someone knows how to flip a coaster from the edge of the table and catch it in the air doesn’t mean he’ll make a good boyfriend. I read his message three times to understand, then I peeled the Target coaster off my phone and discretely let it fall under the bus seat.

[derickandveronica-blog]

D #6.5 The art of being stupid; or, Baby’s First Graduate School Statement of Intent!

I believe the art of performance is irreducibly personal. My purpose for applying to X, and by extension my need to be a playwright, has to do with a sensitivity to  my environment and comes from a young place. My mother told me at an early age that I would be a very good architect or interior designer. I was constantly sketching little floor plans in my pocket-size Mead notebooks, terribly scaled, couches the size of the garage and what not, though precise at that. At the time, I had no idea what this, coupled with a habit of stumbling through lip-syncs behind our shed to Hannah Montana’s “Nobody’s Perfect,” could have bode for my future. While I also wrote fiction, it was never with so much care as those lopsided McMansion sketches and baseless “arm choreography.” Writing was stimulating and time-passing, but I agonized over the puzzle pieces of the more tangible and visual: replacing and shifting all the furniture in my bedroom every couple of weeks, throwing away old clothing that wasn’t very old, even once compulsively painting my whole room yellow because I thought it’d feel sunnier that way (it only washed out the sun.)

I believe these were all aesthetic impulses, albeit ill-informed ones, of puzzle and of play that then somehow converged in playwriting. I have to call it playwriting and not dramatic writing because I’m usually more interested in playing and building than I am writing. I see plays as visual landscapes in new dimensions, which is why I tend to “collage with words” rather than come up with a story in a first draft, or it’s why I design posters for my plays before I’ve even finished the first draft. I find doing things in reverse, the “wrong” way, is very healthy for my creativity. While playwriting might sometimes beg a little more sophistication than this, what I value in playwriting is the power of stupidity.

In the seventh grade, our physics teacher told us that stupid was “not making a mistake, but the repetition of that mistake.” (I now realize how audacious this statement was, more of a demand, really.) Theatre could be the patron saint of stupidity. We don’t just repeat mistakes in the theatre; we repeat them nightly, intentionally and not so, and this is something I prize. Theatre is above all an act of love for humanity. Because I am such a visual person, I sometimes think my words are my weakness as a playwright. There’s something aggravating yet poetic when I hear them in the mouths of others. I don’t think playwriting and architecture are so different after all, but here is the key difference: wabi-sabi is vital to the ritual of theatre, whereas there seems no room to behold one’s mistakes in a life devoted to architecture.

My affinity for the fantastical and playful is underscored by a burning desire for my voice to be heard. I sought out every available opportunity for myself in the theatre department at Sarah Lawrence, participating as a playwright (occasionally as actor or choreographer) in departmental readings and productions, student-led theatre festivals, and independently organized reading series. The graduate MFA program at Sarah Lawrence has a multidisciplinary focus and emphasizes devised theatre, which affects the undergraduate coursework and productions. An overwhelming majority of students are multidisciplinary theatre artists. Though I am before anything else a playwright, I find this exciting because I succeed as an artist when I can be alone and surrounded, in the mixed company of actors, dramaturges, directors, and designers. It takes a village to write alone, and I have not found another graduate program that seems to understand that this is not contradictory but imperative, not only that, but another program that makes such a concept integral to its curricular mission.

I write with fury and passion. My mind is always on and I am relentless with a rewrite. I’ll hack a script in half and turn it upside-down and flip it inside-out all in a single go. But I still need to learn to take a real risk, and for me that’s being able to put all my eggs in one basket, going through three and five and ten rewrites on one project, and then having the patience to stay near the play and water it, treat it with sunlight, and show some tenderness or tough love to my own words. To look at a play and say it’s really truly finished and know how to explain it to directors and producers. Being in direct contact with other budding artists in a rigorous program geared toward playwrights who aspire to write professionally is the perfect risk for me as an early-career playwright.

The X and Y offer opportunities in and outside the classroom to work directly with students of different disciplines. I’m especially excited to meet and build my artistic muscle with students in the design program, who are often amazing dramaturges without realizing it. I expect to meet people with whom I will share work for the rest of my life, with whom I can learn to represent myself in the rehearsal room, and with whom I can share friendship. I maintain that theatre is never impersonal, and often my closest friends are those with an unstoppable desire to create, with whom I can play and be stupid! Often therein spores the genius of playwriting; playing is in the name after all. The X is the future of theatre, filled with high-caliber artists who have loud and incredible voices. To write myself into being at X would be to write myself into a new world of theatre, one where I strongly believe that I belong. This is the next piece of the puzzle.

[derickandveronica-blog]

V #6. Surprises

The verisimilitude of Huck’s performance gets me every time.

“Open up!! It’s the police!”

I grip the tarp around me. I feel a sharp pain in my lower abdomen. Stress or hunger or dread.

But then Huck lets out a loud guffaw from behind the barely-hinged door and I breathe a sigh of relief. He’s a trickster, that Huck.

“Guess what I got!” he says when I pull back the door. He comes in and I push the cinder blocks back to blockade the door again.

He reaches beneath his jacket and pulls out two shining bottles of rosé.

First thing I do is laugh.

I haven’t had rosé in ages, since I was a teenager. Probably at some house party. There was a girl named Pearl, I remember now, who brought a bottle and shared sips of it with the rest of us. We were all dying to get the taste of beer out of our mouths. The rosé tasted like the sweetest fruit juice and left my mouth spiced and sparkly feeling.

That’s the thing about Huck. He’s thoughtful. Sometimes I think he reads my mind, knows the way I think about my childhood so much.

We roll out the tarp and brush off the dead moths and leaves and spiders.

“I got another surprise,” Huck says once we’ve settled in. He’s looking real mischievous.

He reaches under his coat again and pulls out two wine glasses, pristine and dishwasher clean.

“What!” I let out a whoop. I start to think, right away, that Huck crashed a wedding, drove right through it with his shopping cart, and I get to laughing so hard I almost fall over.

Huck just grins. He’ll never tell me how he got it all.

We pour our  rosé, both listening close to the nice sound the drink makes tinkling into the glass, the little hush as the bubbles rise up the sides of the glass.

Things start to feel a bit romantic, as they often do Huck. Huck looks at me across the tarp, his eyes shining like there’s candlelight in this room instead of bats and punched-in walls.

But then, lightning quick, his eyes change. There comes a sound at the door.

“Open up!! Police!” The voice is angry, throaty. There’s no belly laugh at the end.

We move so fast we tip over the rosé, all laid out neatly on the tarp. The wine glasses, pristine and dishwater clean, shatter and the juice washes across the floor.

[derickandveronica-blog]

D #6. A little journal entry

Ok this post is going to be informal and not a story so let’s call my Entry #6 a little journal entry

We talked yesterday on Skype about this & since no one - as far as I know - reads these I figure I can use the space to sort out some FEELINGS re: life and what it means to be Somewhere Else and really whatever else comes to mind

I have my actual physical journal I’ve been keeping to document my abroad experience at my side for reference and possibly to quote directly

It’s Sunday afternoon, 29 October 2017 & I’m at the faborit between the northern edge of Parque de El Retiro and Plaza de Cibeles, an area with more foot traffic and English and also one I initially intended to avoid but I wandered this way and this particular café has WiFi and booth seating so I went for it and ordered a matcha latte and now here we are

And at the risk of sounding very fake deep I want to pose the question, why do we feel nostalgia? It’s sometimes a very powerful feeling and, I think, a dangerous one, because it reinforces this idea that there’s anywhere in the world other than the here and now. And, you know, be present, be here, be mindful, etc! My visit to Rockford this summer knocked the wind out of me and left me in the doldrums. It was this sensation of mourning the past and the life I’d left there and confronting the fact that it was gone forever and the whole sensation blindsided me. Wow! But I still love my friends in Rockford & of course they haven’t left so it was hard to assess what exactly had gone away from me

So it was familiar this wave of blue coming over me now in Madrid, because again I’ve (this time of my own fruition) removed myself from my context, my home, the place I’ve built relationships and a network of friends and coworkers

After talking with another friend this morning, though, I learned that what I’m facing is really just adulthood, i.e. I’m learning what makes me ME and who I am - like, as a real person and not just a son/brother/student (all important but not me in totality) - is manifest now. Part of my routine and my being is surrounding myself with artists and - although I find value in being away from that right now because I have to understand my independent voice - that’s something I didn’t expect to miss as much as I do

Also discovering how I make friends: in Lyon with some friends for a “dinner” one night we got some rosé and figs and brie and bread and talked the whole night in our Airbnb and that’s been one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done since I’ve been here. I just really needed some rosé. And really the living situation has been isolating because we’re not allowed to have guests over to our homestays - meaning we can only meet up in public, at cafes &c, and that night spurred some of this thinking

This experience has given me something that Sarah Lawrence couldn’t which was a practical life lesson beyond theatre and beyond academia and beyond theory, that I can be very certain of something for once - of a desire to live in New York, of a need to write (and study law??), of who my friends are. Those were the things coming here that I had to tell people about myself, the people and places I’d gathered in memory of the past three years, and while I knew before that I loved and would miss them, here was a new level of appreciation, the kind that begins adulthood, the values I’ll need to hold for the rest of my life

So that’s all of THAT. You know I claimed this was a “practical” life lesson but none of it’s gonna secure a job for me lol - it’s still closer than to practical than my usual. 

The moral of the story is she’s learned to shed her nomadic skin and is prepared to make some long-term life decisions that involve some real permanence. Anyway that’s my Ted Talk thank you all for coming

the words for this week were rosé, caboose, & verisimilitude: I really wanted to live my English professor fantasy & successfully use verisimilitude in a sentence but alas...i’m stupid

p.s. if you wanna share any thoughts without making it your whole post for this week’s entries maybe put a smaller one after V #6. as like “V #6.5. Reply...” or something

p.p.s. We really need some pictures or details to like interior decorate this blog

[derickandveronica-blog]

V #5. Ritual

They had a celebration at work—Officer Williams retiring—that ran an hour past his shift, so instead of busing over, Officer Ryan ran.

When he got there, sweaty and red-faced, he thought maybe the owner looked relieved to see his regular. Or maybe it was something else. He ran to make it here? He comes every—

It didn’t matter.

He ordered his usual, the kelp and veggie hot pot with udon noodles.

They brought it out fast because there weren’t many other customers at the restaurant. He got started.

He had a ritual.

He always looked at each ingredient and took a little nibble to see if everything was fresh and ready, kind of imagining himself as a rabbit. Then he heated the water. The small instructions taped to the table for newcomers recommended 100 degrees Celsius but he always chose 90.

Then he added the straw mushrooms, bok choy, and broccoli. He let them simmer for a minute and a half. He lowered the heat to 70 and added the already-cooked noodles.

He’d admit that he enjoyed it immensely.

Sometimes he whispered to each ingredient before throwing it in the pot. A kind of “thank you” and “I’m sorry” that just came out as a breathy sound.

He liked to see how dexterous he could be with the chopsticks, if he could pick up individual grains of rice or lift a slippery udon noodle from its clump of friends. Things within him stilled during this time.

He knew he had a certain flair. Other customers smiled curiously at him, like he was a cute child. He still wore his uniform when he came, dark blue and heavily padded. It was a novelty for them to see a cop at a restaurant.

He had stopped caring, years ago, what anyone else thought. The veggies stayed quiet.

He clicked his chopsticks together three times before he allowed himself to eat; the commencement clicks.

 Once he began eating he let his mind wander from the food. The broth had a way of doing that to him, opening his mind like a steamed clam shell.

He didn’t particularly care to see officer Williams go. The man had never worked hard and once, when Officer Ryan reported the story of how he’d chased down a drug dealer for blocks, hopping fences like in an action movie—the one time he’d really spoken before the whole squadron, and making them smile and laugh and gasp—and Williams had looked up from his thick white belly and said, not kindly at all, “What’d you do all that running for?”

Williams had made it clear he was delighted to retire. And the others didn’t blame him. Their job had become bizarre and terrifying and deeply sad. They never said such things to each other, of course, but Officer Ryan felt the current of it, winding through the office and soaking into the cop cars.

He'd spent most of today shooting Narcan into nostrils and feeling for pulses. It was hardly the work he’d thought of as a little boy. But he felt, underneath his frustration and dismay, a violent worry. If he wasn’t here to do this, who would?

He didn’t totally mind it though. Reviving had a ritual too.

First he felt for a pulse.

He liked to imagine what each person sprawled out before him looked like as a little baby, bundled up in a blanket. He imagined them as an infant left out in the cold that needed help.

Today he had revived a teenage boy. When he and his partner had showed up there was a small crowd of people gathered around the boy. They all scattered, fearful, scuttling off into the city’s alleyways.

The boy couldn’t have been older than 14. He was filthy and stunk like piss. His baggy denim jeans hung off him, his hip bones poking up sharply through the exposed edge of his boxer shorts. Ryan’s partner ignored him and they went through the ritual, looking the other way when Ryan murmured words under his breath and tapped the boy’s ribs three times on each side.

When the boy came back to life he sulked off, angry that the cops had stolen his high.

There was something predictable in this.

 He always asked for extra bok choy when the broth was getting low. He liked to let it seep in and soak the crunchy stems.

He signaled for the waitress, a thin Japanese woman with strange color contacts that made her eyes look silvery and alien.

“More bok choy, please.” He realized he hadn’t yet spoken in the restaurant tonight. When he had ordered he had merely pointed at the menu, number nine. Sometimes he lost track of his voice like this. He preferred to stay in his own head, to follow the script.

“The kitchen is closed.” The waitress glanced behind her, as if to confirm with some invisible friend. “I’m sorry, sir.”

The woman did look sorry, but she also looked something else, a shadow of it passing over her face briefly. Something familiar.

He had been coming here for years. Five nights a week, like clockwork. Right after his shift. When he’d first discovered the place something sweet and warm had grown inside of him. He loved everything about it; the way they ignored you and made you cook your own food, that some people thought this was a great and fun novelty, the dim lights and greasy floors.

He always tipped generously and he never caused a disturbance. He had his ritual to stick to and it didn’t bother anybody, he was a man of few indulgences and—

He nodded, staring down at his lap. This had never happened before.

The woman hesitated and then left. A moment later she brought the bill. All the other customers had left.

He dreaded leaving the warm restaurant and busing back to his empty apartment.

He waited for a moment of privacy to enter the pin for his credit card into the till, but the waitress hovered. She glanced at the door and back at the kitchen and down at the floor. But she watched him with her presence, her shoulders always turned to him.  

He had a ritual for saying goodbye to the plates and cracked spoon. And there were the chopsticks closing clicks. He liked to slide a finger across each dish, spelling out kind words and compliments. Thank you for your crunchy texture, thank you for your heat, thank you for your flavor. He liked to think back on the way the veggies had looked laid out in front of him, prepared like a feast or a bouquet, and imagine them mashed up and dark in his own stomach.

The waitress sighed and shifted from foot to foot, squeezing her clasped hands.

He realized that before, when she had said sorry about the bok choy, it had been fear passing over her face.

So he got up and walked out into the night, swallowing the ritual down deep inside o

[derickandveronica-blog]

D #5. TJ Maxxx the Drag Queen: Part I

Everyone is staring at me. I don’t mind. I’m amidst the promotion of my eponymous sophomore album, TJ Maxxx, and am currently at the premiere of American Horror Story: Wal-Mart in which I play a featured role for three episodes before my tragic death at the manicured hands of Jesse Tyler Ferguson. I can’t reveal too much yet because this is an exclusive premiere, but the scene in question involves a conveyor belt and a pair of Frozen flip-flops. He actually just walked past me—really, just now. I’ve always been curious how he is able to smell like absolutely nothing. Jesse Tyler Ferguson does not have a smell.

Again, this is all happening now, live. You’re in my head at this very moment. Do you like the chaise? I got rid of all the clutter to ensure it’d be spacious and comfortable. There’s Orangina, several flavors of Capri-Sun, and kefir (a high-quality and overpriced Swedish yogurt drink) in the fridge to your left because left is the gay direction.

You might think, with a platinum-certified album under my belt and a new single that has just usurped “Despacito” from its throne, that a superstar like myself could crack under pressure at any moment. The unrelenting scrutiny, the jolting flashes of cameras, and the threat of crossing paths with Jennifer Lawrence: how do I do it? I don’t. Most of the time I hire a body quadruple (my body double’s body double.) But I thought to myself a few days ago, You know what? Today the fans, my Maxxxinistas, deserve the real TJ Maxxx, and they’re gonna get her. Not that they know the difference. I may be a drag queen, but, now that I top (and bottom) the charts, I mostly entertain straight people, and they don’t know what enema is. On the days that I relieve my body double and body quadruple of their duties, I also have to pretend to like straight people. For now, though, as I am surrounded by other famous and seasoned drag queens such as Jessica Lange and Wes Bentley, the heterosexuals remain at bay.

A microphone flings itself into my face and gets inches away from my painted lips. I am reminded of last night in my hotel room. “So TJ Maxxx, how does it feel, you’ve just swiped Despacito’s opportunity to become the Billboard single with the most weeks spent at No. 1, a song which has now in fact tied with Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day.” What are your thoughts on all your recent success? Is it overwhelming?”

“It feels very good, young twink.” I don’t want to believe that he is Tyler Oakley but I think he might be Tyler Oakley. I begin to wonder what my body quadruple is doing right now.

“And especially as a relatively new artist you’ve made a splash on the scene after it was expected that another artist was expected to go No. 1 this week.” I stare down at his little nose. I do not pinch it. Maybe he’s that other one, Shawn something. He seems to be waiting for me to give an answer of some sort, but I don’t. “You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?” And off my look of cosmic wonder and celestial transcendence, he continues, “Well, to give you a hint, she’s in a tiny bit of a feud with Katy Perry, and people have taken to calling her a snake on Twitter and, well, everywhere the Internet is available.”

And here’s what’s running through my mind as he says this: my body double is probably close to the event because even though her union prevents us from scheduling on-call duties we still do it anyway when she needs the extra money. She’s not on-call right now but she knows I would pay her for a day’s salary if she could make it here on time and so if I give her a ring real quick it’d probably take her thirty minutes before she starts getting into drag and an hour and a half tops (and bottoms) to get everything on and an extra fifteen minutes for a makeup check. But if she can’t make it and decides to call my body quadruple then that’s an extra thirty minutes probably and interviews will definitely be over by then but maybe I could sneak out of the theater to powder my nose and if she brings me a change of clothes I could leave out of drag…

“You must know! Her songs are everywhere! For the record, everyone, I don’t think she’s a snake. I listen to her all the time.”

“On purpose?”

He looks a little stunned. I don’t even remember what he said. All I notice is the little bit of condensation at the bottom of his glasses’ frames. He’s a little sweaty and flustered like a teenager at a high school dance in Kansas who at the same time looks like he could be thirty. I try to veer away from whatever just happened.

“I’m sorry, sweetie, what’d you say? I can’t hear anything over all this shouting.”

“Whoa, TJ Maxxx, that sounded a little shady, did you just—”

“And I mean it is just so hot out here! I need some shade—I mean, some air-conditioning.”

“Your body feeling the heat out here?”

“This isn’t my body.”

I leave Cameron Dallas in search of a quiet, tranquil place to make my phone call for help. I would love a cold and refreshing Orangina right now. No, that’s okay, those ones are for you. I see Jennifer Lawrence wave at me out of the corner of my eye and I walk faster. I was a fool to think I could be safe here. Maybe I was a fool to accept this role. I was a fool to come here. Oh, I should have stayed home and played table tennis with my mother. I’m a superstar, undoubtedly, but am I really television star, too? The last drag queen to appear on American Horror Story was Lady Gaga and we know how that went: she won a Golden Globe. I would feel a little guilty sharing her spotlight, too. Maybe I’ve overestimated my abilities as a performer. Ryan Murphy offered me the role on Grindr. He’s not far away from me now. I see him talking to Angela Bassett as I’m on my way to a little space between a tall fence and a film crew van. Never mind, she’s leaving. Now he’s moving toward someone else. I think it’s...

I am distracted momentarily by a tap on my shoulder. I so don’t want to turn around, but as I’m so close to this fence, the crowd of people is less dense, and there is nowhere else to turn, no one else to whom I can cling. I need my body quadruple. There is loud and excited and heavy breathing. I know it’s Jennifer Lawrence. I know she’s wearing bell-bottom jeans because she wants to make a statement about how she has the right/privilege to dress poorly at a red carpet event if she wants. And I know she just now quickly threw on a shirt with my face on it for some gag one of her older brothers probably dared her to do. Except, of course, no one would be gagged.

I turn around, though, and I’m not seeing any of this. What I am seeing is not Jennifer Lawrence. I wish it were her, though, because what I see instead runs my blood cold: a tall, blonde, and skinny snake.

To Be Continued…

NOTE: My debut album What Doesn’t Kill Him Makes Him Worse and new album TJ Maxxx (featuring my current #1 single “Bottom Priority”) are available everywhere music is sold.

[derickandveronica-blog]

D #4. Penny the Whale Finds Love in the Dead Sea

There once was a whale named Penny who swam in the Pacific Ocean. 

One day, Penny woke up in the Dead Sea. No one could ever tell how or why a whale could so suddenly be in the Dead Sea, but this story isn’t about that anyway.

Penny was visited by a magical owl. Oh, wonderful, she thought. I will be saved! The owl, however, was not there to save Penny from the shallow and salty waters of the Dead Sea. Instead, the owl promised her that she would soon fall in love, and so he granted her a love potion in a little glass bottle.

  This potion will only work on your true love, and will have no effect on anyone else. Use it on the right one and you and your true love will live happily ever after. The owl flew away before Penny could answer or understand, so she remained very confused all day and for days and days to come. 

There were no other whales in the Dead Sea, neither were there fish nor sea turtles nor dolphins nor anyone for Penny to love! How could I fall in love when I’m all alone? she wondered.

It was very hard for Penny to swim in the Dead Sea. The shallow water and high amount of salt irritated her skin and she wished to return to the deep blue ocean she once called home. The Pacific Ocean was full of clear water and full of others to love.

  As best as she could, Penny searched the Dead Sea for her true love, but she never found anyone else, except once when she passed a microbial fungus, but Penny couldn’t love a microbial fungus. Their love was not true, and the fungus was a little mindless, very bad at small talk.

Penny grew incredibly thirsty. She was not used to so much salt in her water, so she could not drink the Dead Sea. Exhausted and clueless about how to return home or find her true love, Penny remembered her love potion. 

She grew sad at the idea that once she drank it, she would likely never find her true love, but at the same time she was so thirsty that her throat was dry and ached so much. There was no choice. She downed the whole bottle in one gulp. 

I really love myself! Penny thought after a moment. She was surprised at this thought. It came from nowhere but swelled in her head like a big balloon, and she was no longer thirsty, almost like magic. I love myself so much.

The thought played in Penny’s head over and over until she forgot all about her dismay. She forgot that she was hundreds of miles from home and might not ever return. She forgot that she was hundreds of miles from deep water in which she could swim freely. She forgot that she was swimming in water with so much salt that sometimes it really bothered her skin. She would call for the owl and do everything in her power to get back to the ocean.

But for now, she was just happy to have found her true love after all.

[derickandveronica-blog]

V #4. The Ice Cream Parlor

Mom wanted to get ice cream. So, of course, we got ice cream. Even though Earnest Ice Cream was all the way up at Fraser and 24th, which meant we had to drive, and even though it was winter and no one else wanted ice cream and we didn’t even know if the place would be open. But she wanted it. It was like this odd decree, this immovable object.

We had been bickering and Carol was saying these nasty things to me and I was pinching mom a little bit, getting this strange glee when I felt her papery skin between my fingers, when all of a sudden she said it.

“I want ice cream.”

So, we went. We drove silently in the blustery wind and parked a block away.

Carol waited in the car. She didn’t say “Oh, I’ll just wait in the car,” or “I don’t want any ice cream.” She simply didn’t get out of the back seat.

I must say she looked a little silly back there, scowling into the middle distance, arms crossed over her chest. Like a little girl in time-out. Except she’ll be 61 this February.

Back when we were little girls it was always me in the back seat. Mom and Carol in the front, because she’s older. The two of them gabbing, like girlfriends, about the dresses they saw in the windows of storefronts and about Carol’s dance routines.

 Once we got into the ice cream shop, the door swinging shut behind us, I felt my anger shift towards mom. It’s like this hot, squishy thing inside me, that sometimes molds itself around Carol and sometimes around mom and sometimes around myself.

“Move up!” I tell mom.

The people in front of us in line have moved and there’s a great gaping space in the line now. I feel an awful wave of embarrassment wash over me.

Except mom can’t hear me. I saw her turn her hearing aid down before, when we were all still back at the retirement home. Carol had said something about “fiduciary responsibility” and mom just reached up to her right ear and pressed some buttons. At the time I thought she had an itch.

“Move up!” I say again, except I lean in close to her ear and give her a little push that’s also a pinch on the flabby skin at her back. She moves.

I catch the people behind us in line, a young couple, turn to each other and make faces. I know how I must seem.

But then I think about Carol sitting out in the car and I smile to myself a little. I bet she’s seething.

 I saw all my friends, Deborah and Jacalyn and Jane, go through this. Their parents didn’t leave them much. Mostly it was because they all have brothers.

Jane’s brother, Tom, for example, who I met once when Jane invited me over to her place for Thanksgiving, got most of their parent’s money.

Jane’s mom told her that it was because Tom had a wife and kids, and why shouldn’t he get most of the money? What did Jane have going for herself? And then her mom died and Jane couldn’t do anything about it.

Jane lives alone in a shabby apartment near Knight Ave and she has a cat named Arnold. The ceiling leaks every spring. She hasn’t dated a man in 20 years.

“Why would I need that in my life?” she shrugs. I like talking about men like this. Like they’re hunks of old rubber, totally useless. The kind of thing you’d scrunch your nose at and then forget quickly. We laugh.

I remember the first time I saw that book A Woman Needs a Man like a Fish Needs a Bicycle. on the bookshelves. I knew, then, that something had changed. I pictured one of those bright orange field trip permission slips, clutched in my little girl hands, the wave of joy crashing over my chest.

 But I never thought Carol or I would get shunted. We don’t have any brothers.

Truth be told, I didn’t care a lick what Carol got, but I did think a lot about Carol’s situation. Luckily, she’s like me. She’s got a condo out in Nelson, a few hours away and she teaches some knitting classes at the local community center, which pays her a little bit, but she also works at the liquor store for some extra income. And maybe they give her some free booze too.

She doesn’t have a husband or kids or any type of career that’s worth writing home about. She might have a few friends and a dance class she goes to on Sunday afternoons, but that’s it.

I know she was thinking about mom for years. Probably thinking that her life of working at the liquor store and teaching arthritic old women how to knit were numbered. I was thinking about it too.

 “What flavor do you want?” I ask mom. I realize we’re next in line, and mom doesn’t even know what flavors they offer because her eyesight’s so bad she can’t read the chalkboard sign. The young blonde girl behind the counter will have to read them all out to her.

The hot squishy blob twists in panic.

“Blueberry,” mom says. It’s not on the list.

“That’s not on the list,” I say. I’m yelling. I know this.

I feel a brush of weight against my purse strapped behind me. Like a hand. I yank my purse forward, pulling it around my body so it sits at my front.

The couple behind me smirk.

“They don’t have blueberry!” I say to mom.

She makes a face at me. “I’ll ask what they have,” she says.

I’m furious. These feelings rise up so quickly lately. Even before tonight, when mom told me and Carol about her will, I just knew what was going to happen. And every morning I’d wake up with this twist of anxiety in my stomach and I’d snap at the post office workers and the checkout girls at the grocery store. And when I’d go home I’d slam the cupboard doors a little, just because it felt good.

“They have peach, vanilla, salted chocolate…” I start to list off the flavors. But then mom reaches up and turns her hearing aid down even lower. Maybe it’s completely off for all I know. But I keep telling her the flavors, practically yelling them in her ear, so she knows I’m not going away.

“…cake batter, earl grey tea, salted caramel, and sweet praline!”

The people in front of us move away from the casher to wait at the side of the counter for their cones.

“Move up!” I tell mom.

She doesn’t move.

“Move up!” I say again. But she’s still. She’s smiling a little and looking at the space ahead of us, this gaping wide space where she should be standing but she’s not.

[derickandveronica-blog]

D #3. Julianne Moore Who Loved Me

I walk down a Miami street and approach a Walgreens. Julianne Moore is standing outside of the Walgreens. She sips a strawberry protein shake through a straw that didn’t come with the bottle. Julianne Moore says, “Hi, Derick,” and so I say, “Hello, Julianne Moore,” and so she says, “Pretty hot out today,” and so I say, “Good day for a swim,” and so she says, “My thoughts exactly.”

We step out of the cab. Julianne promised she would cover the fare, but I notice that she does not tip our driver. I explain to her why this is wrong and she apologizes. I say, “Don’t apologize, Julianne, just tip your cab drivers from now on.” She nods and lights a cigarette and I hold my tongue.

The beach is crowded. As we make our way closer to the water, I notice heads turning, murmurs of excitement. A little blonde girl laying on a towel is prodded by her mother, who says with her index finger, “Look, look!” The little girl looks and waves at us shyly. Julianne kicks sand in the little blonde girl’s face and keeps walking. We find a place to lay our towels.

“I need you to put sun lotion on my back.”

I get out my sunscreen and as I am about to rub the lotion onto Julianne Moore’s back she grabs my wrist and exclaims, “That doesn’t look like broad spectrum sun lotion,” and so I say, “It’s not,” and so she says, “You do realize that there are two types of ultraviolet rays, don’t you? You know that, right?” Sadly, I don’t. And this shows on my face. She takes another strawberry protein shake and straw out of her bag. This time, I realize that the straw is from Starbucks.

“UVA rays penetrate deep into the dermis, the skin’s thickest layer. Unprotected exposure can lead to premature skin aging and wrinkling, and suppression of the immune system. UVB rays will usually burn the superficial layers of your skin.” She sips her protein shake and watches the gull picking at a burger wrapper next to us.

“It plays a key role in the development of skin cancer.” She kicks sand in the gull’s face.

Because we don’t have broad spectrum sun lotion, we leave the beach. We take another cab to Julianne’s hotel, and on the ride she asks me about the difference between a credit card and a debit card. I explain this to her with patience. “A credit card is a little thinner but they serve the exact same purpose.” She doesn’t say thank you, only nods. It’s a long drive along the coast. When I step out of the cab, I notice she lags a little, but this is to tip the driver.

It is very warm when we arrive at the hotel, inside and out. I propose that we go swimming, but this is a touchy subject. Julianne’s mother died next to a swimming pool. There are also several, similar-looking white men with cameras trying to snap pictures of Julianne. I wonder if they’re allowed to use these pictures when she’s holding her brand-name strawberry protein shake. Anyway, the pool is a short-lived idea. Most ideas are short-lived with Julianne.

Now the night is growing old and Julianne is cranky because she doesn’t usually spend this much time with one other person and by this point I think maybe she’s just not a huge fan of intimacy. We’ve been scrolling through ifunny.co on her Kindle Fire tablet with a bag of lime Hot Cheetos between us for about an hour, and no one has said anything. Sometimes she will huff in lieu of laughter. But finally she cracks the soft silence.

“I hate getting Cheetos powder on my fingers.”

“I think some people use chopsticks,” I tell her.

“That’s fucking stupid.” She sucks the Cheetos powder off of her index finger and scrolls to the next meme. It’s not a very good one. She walks into the next room. I hear her draw a bath. She returns in an open robe, leaning against the door frame, her hair up now.

“I think you should go,” she tells me.

“I had a fun day.”

“Okay.”

She would kick sand in my face if she could. I roll my beach towel, which is still sandy, and shove it in a plastic bag from Walgreens. Her hotel is right on the beach, but we’re so high up that I can’t hear the waves. Also, she has turned on 20/20 to watch while the bath fills.

I stand at the door. “Will I ever see you again, Julianne?”

She turns the volume up. Co-anchors Elizabeth Vargas and David Muir are screaming at me. When I lay my hand on the doorknob, she says, “Derick,” and I say, “Yes?” and she says, “Grab me a shake from the fridge before you go.”

I don’t mind I’m ten feet farther from the fridge than she is. I take my time to walk over to the fridge and scan the shelves for a protein shake, but I see none, not even chocolate, which to her is second to strawberry. I look over the half-wall dividing the kitchen and the bedroom area, and there is Julianne Moore, covered in white, blankly watching 20/20. How do I tell her there are no more strawberry protein shakes? That her refrigerator is an empty and cold place? Simply, coolly, like Julianne would want.

“There are no more protein shakes.”

For the first time since she’s told me to leave, Julianne looks at me. She sees a bottle sitting on the half-wall.

“Then what’s that right there?”

“It’s an empty bottle.”

[derickandveronica-blog]

V #3. The Taxi Driver

The first thing that’s weird that I notice when I pull up to the house is the yard. The grass looks choked for water and there’s a crumpled-up shirt in the middle of the lawn, baby pink and frilled at the collar. It’s not a little girl’s shirt. It’s feminine and mature and it looks oddly beautiful against the prickly grass, like a peony sprung from the desert.

I park the car in time to hear the woman threatening the girl. The two of them are standing on the front porch with a boy. There’s a suitcase and backpack at their feet.

The girl’s in her early 20s, maybe. I guess that makes her a woman. My daughter’s always bugging me about that.

“They’re not girls Baba, they’re adult women. You wouldn’t say the same for men!”

I never know what to say to this. I mean it kindly, but I wouldn’t know how to explain. More and more my responses to Divya are only silence.

The woman is the girl’s mom. The girl hugs the boy—her brother, maybe 14 or 15—and buries her face in his shaggy blond hair. She holds him tightly, her arms locked around his neck while the mom watches. It’s an odd moment, a tension is palpable, but I do not know what it could be.

My windows are rolled up so I cannot hear what the mom says to the girl while her children hug, but I know it is mean.

She’s got a mean, hard face.

Some women are like this. Cruel and cold and unforgiving. They’re a different breed from you and me. They don’t receive warmth and kindness like oil that lubricates their behavior. They want only what they want, nothing more. You’re smart to do whatever it is.

Divya tells me that men are this way, too. That we’re just conditioned to feel appalled when women are cruel because we are used to seeing them as nurturers. That women are forced to be nurturers.

Probably, this is true. But there is something—a kernel of feeling sharp like a caraway seed—that makes me angry when Divya says this.

I want to shout, Who cares if women must be this! It is what the world needs! We are all forced to be things we are not! Until eventually it becomes simply what we are.

My daughter is learning about the world.

 The girl gets into my taxi. She doesn’t hug her mother goodbye, even though her mother asks.

“I would like a hug, too” her mother said after the girl parted with her brother. But it was like asking for some of someone else’s food, the expectation and daring of it hard on her face. It was a test of some sort, I think.

The girl said no.

We drive out of the neighborhood away from the yard with the shirt in it and the brown sickly grass.

She’s off to the airport, Terminal 3. She’s flying to Florida.

“I go to school down there,” she says, chipper and warm. Her mood has lifted in the car. She’s become more talkative since we merged onto the highway. She’s not much older than my Divya.

“What do you study?” I ask.

“Journalism.”

I smile to myself. “What will you do with journalism?” I mean it to be a joke, a gentle prod.

But she pauses and inhales, just like Divya does when I’ve said the wrong thing.

It’s only for a moment, though. She smiles brightly in the rear view mirror.

“My parents would like to know, too!” She rolls her eyes, comically. She’s in on the joke.

 In some ways, I know my Divya is smarter than me. Quicker. I see the way her eyes narrow and focus when people are talking. Sometimes I fear she is searching for things that will only hurt her. The wrong thing said, biases and prejudices.

I want to tell her that bringing these things out into the open—these dark, ugly thoughts inside of people—will not erase them. I’m not sure they can ever be erased.

 Sometimes I see it in Divya’s face; the nightmare woman. The one who is cruel and hurtful and cold. I think this cannot be my daughter.

 We arrive at Terminal 3 and the girl hops out and grabs her luggage from the trunk before me.

“Oh, okay,” I say.

She hands me cash. A good tipper.

“Thanks so much for the ride! Have a great rest of your day!” She’s professional now, smooth and charming. Looking at her face, no rear view mirror between us, I think I see the glimmer of it.

I get back in the taxi and watch her as she walks through the sliding glass doors before I pull away. Pulling her luggage neatly behind her.

She’s confident, squaring her shoulders. This is her world.

Maybe, I think, there is no nightmare woman. Maybe the girls are finally home.

[derickandveronica-blog]

V #2. A Woman on the Metra Leaving Union Station for Whom I Invented an Entire Backstory

I never carry band-aids. Babcha never wore heels, of course. Only those steel button shoes that never seemed to wear down. I doubt those ever hurt her feet, the leather soft as butter. But, still, she taught me a better trick than band-aids.

“Band-aids will only save your toes today. But what if you forget them? The shoes must be held accountable!” she’d say solemnly. The shoes had another thing coming.

I look out the window of the train and watch the squat brick houses melt past and smile thinking about my mother.

I keep my cuticle clippers and nail clippers in the side pocket of my bright orange purse. I only wear bright colors. This, I decided two years ago, when I began working. Bright shoes, bright dresses, bright accessories. No black, no grey, no brown.

This is another of Babcha’s tips.

“When you are sad or you know you will be sad, a bright color will fix it all,” she’d say.

So when I started working, I went to the thrift stores in Ukrainian village, and listened to the singsong voices of other Babchas—ones who were braver than my own for leaving their countries—and bought a whole new wardrobe. Bright colors only.

The shoes I’ve got on today aren’t like my Babcha’s supple leather shoes at all. They’re hard, cheap plastic-like leather, almost like they were made to hurt your feet.

I will tear out the seam at the strap near my right toe, where the hot, squishy blister has already begun to form.

I pick away at the strap slowly, careful not to damage the shoe. The leather expands a bit—a little breath—when I finally tear the thread of the seam.

I always carry these tools when I go on one of my dates. I like to wear very tall heels—it’s something I’m known for, in fact—but also because I like to wear my nails long, and you can never know what a man will want.

Some of them want me to take my nails—long and maraschino cherry red—and scratch them slowly, painfully down their backs. Many men find this alluring.

Some want a little more pain—whips and cuffs and the like—but I rarely cater to this sort of clientele. Those men rarely cared about my nails. They looked only at the chains in my hands or the spike of my stiletto pressing upon their chest.

But one man, maybe three years back when I had just arrived in America, had told me to cut my nails.

He was an older client. Curly grey hair on his chest and a bald, shiny head. He was laying there on the still-made bed, and I was straddling his meaty left thigh, my hand poised over his crotch, when he said it.

“Cut your nails.”

It wasn’t a question.

He had a pair of clippers in the pocket of his suit jacket strewn on the floor.

As I dug them out I thought how unusual it was to bring clippers to a meeting. My mind flashed, briefly, to an image of the clippers piercing my flesh—the soft and sensitive skin between my thighs, maybe—and I wheeled around to face him, certain he was watching me then, growing fat with desire from forcing this thought into my mind.

But he was laying there, looking at the ceiling, and absentmindedly drumming his own fingers—nails bitten short—on his belly.

So I went to the bathroom and knelt over the wastebasket next to the toilet and clipped my nails.

Maybe, I thought, he was worried I’d scratch him. Men are very sensitive about their penises. Or maybe, his ex-wife or girlfriend or daughter had long red nails and he didn’t want to be reminded. I have learned not to question these things.

Nevertheless, later, on my train speeding away from his apartment, I looked at my ragged, short nails and cried a little, pulling my sunglasses low over my eyes for cover.

 I know it is improper to cry in public. I have always been horrified by the women I see with tears brimming in their eyes, daring to spill over, or the ones who turn their faces to the windows of the train to keep their sorrow more private.

I have never asked them what is wrong. Sadness is a private matter, certainly not to be shared with strangers.

I can tell the girl seated across from me on the train feels the same way. She watched me pick at my shoes for a while, curious. When she turned to look at me again she saw that I was crying, and has since kept her eyes to the world outside the train.

Maybe, I hope, it is reasonable to believe that women cry on the trains all the time. For blisters and painful shoes, and only that.

I smooth the seam that had torn the skin at my toe. I daub a small amount of lip balm on my toe, which will have to do until I get back to my apartment. But instead of putting the shoe back on and getting to work on something else—booking appointments, composing what I’ll say to my Babcha when I call her later—I continue to stare at the shoe.

Maybe, I think, if I look long enough at the yellow plastic leather the color will seep into me. Or, like staring at the sun, I will imprint the shape of the shoe in my mind, so that it is, blessedly, all that I see.

 I have tried to travel into the city less and less. I find the men who live downtown in their tall glittering high-rises to be more aggressive, more desperate. The men out at the edges of the city are softer, usually with larger bellies and more crinkly eyes. They are grateful for what I do. They are nervous, but, in their anxiety, they cling to the rules of our exchange, never daring to break them.

But yesterday I came into the city to see the newest fall collection at Barney’s, stuff I could never afford, mind you, but which gives me a thrill like a hot bubble of light inside me. There was a beautiful lavender colored, all-feather dress. It was fanciful, of course, and incredibly expensive—$2,500—but after seeing it I booked an appointment with a man who lived down near the lake, who I knew paid well and always tipped.

When I’d arrived at his apartment, I knew something was strange. He was not the man I remembered at all. Of course, I recognized his face, but he had lost the hunger I remembered.

I realized, then, that I’d kept my shoulders bunched at my ears the entire long walk from Barney’s to his apartment. I forced them down my back.

When we began, me doing my usual routine, thankful to have worn my bright orange silk panties that day, he stopped me after a few moments.

His breath was shallow and fast.

“I want something a little different this time,” he said.

I kept my face neutral. I imagined myself as a soda machine, able to produce many flavors and combinations, without any judgement.

“I was hoping you could do a little, um, roleplaying.”

I glanced at the clock on the bedside table. He looked at it too and began to speak more quickly.

“I want you to pretend to be my mother, or grandmother. Like one of those babushkas from Russia or something.”

The worst thing was the way my voice sounded like my mothers. Words, of course, that my mother would never say, but the same tone, the same wheedling plead to it. I guess it is fated for most girls to become their mothers, eventually inhabiting the wrinkled bodies they thought they’d never have. But crouched there, at the bedside, stroking the man’s face and whispering the words my own Babcha used to say to me before bed, well.

I liked to stay up late and look at the fashion magazines, petting the glossy pages of the magazines. It was a miracle that we were able to get the Vogues from the capitol shipped out to our village, but my mother knew these made me happy, so she paid extra for shipping.

She’d cluck and hum when she came in my room, the swish of her long skirts letting the sleepiness settle over me. 

“My sweet,” she called me. “My sweet sweet.”

It bubbled out of me with the man. I didn’t want it to, of course, but somehow it did.

“My sweet. My sweet sweet.” He closed his eyes slowly, as a sinister smile spread over his face.

My mother would not have liked that I wore heels the whole time, too.

[derickandveronica-blog]

D #2. Fate and Starbucks

Dear Veronica,

This week, you blessed us with the freedom to explore these three words at length: whip, expansion, and fate. And with Facebook Messenger, “due in a week!” you said to me on July 30, 2017 at 6:46 PM in EST. The beat of my oversized heart fluttered on the summer breeze. This gentle stirring caught the attention of a nearby faery, who whispered in my ear, “Choose fate,” so I am inclined to write about fate, and perhaps I will, but first, I’ll do something else: not write about fate.

I am curious how you chose these three words. Were they the first that came to mind? Did you put your finger down on the page of a dictionary with your eyes closed? Or go to watchout4snakes.com, a word-generating website I just found?

You don’t have to answer those questions if you don’t like. I only ask at all to instill some belonging in our millions and millions of devoted readers, for they too deserve to feel a sense of closeness in this space that should be one of comfort and soft sheets. After all, we could just email each other, but we don’t, do we. Instead, we are here, making public our thoughts and concerns and musings and on. I believe in full transparency between the writers and their audience. As I type this, I am learning to play the harp and nursing a newborn goat. They are called kids if you didn’t know that.

It’s time to write about fate now.

Is fate all there is? Do things merely happen or not happen? A few weeks ago I looked at the sparkling New Jersey sky and watched a red biplane fly out of nothing, and trailing not far behind its tail were a string of words that printed in our atmosphere. Those words were ASBURY PARK SUPER FEST 2017, and I couldn’t help but wonder aloud, “Am I super?” Not everyone is destined for greatness. Many remain in the shadows all their lives. For every Google, there is a Bing; for every iPhone, an Android; every Beyoncé, a Taylor Swift. We cannot all be the best, and is this fate?

Staring at those words in the sky, I was reminded of another story in my life, and I sunk deep into thought. You see, I once walked the halls of Pennsylvania Station in search of a Starbucks Coffee. I was not at that time taking a train to or from Pennsylvania Station, only I happened to be in the midtown area of Manhattan and in need of a Starbucks Coffee, as one so often is these days. So, by sheer love for the universe and faith in my rose gold iPhone 7’s meta-geographical awareness, I descended beneath beautiful Madison Square Garden via elongated escalator, and I decided to let life happen. 

Over the course of three hours and seventeen minutes, I scoured the halls of the New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Rail Road, the Amtrak, and even the Exit Concourse for my caffeinated elixir: Jamba Juice, yes; Cinnabon, you bet; Auntie Anne’s, how’s three of them; but Starbucks Coffee? Nowhere to be found. And I am reminded of the faery’s words, “Choose fate.” How does one choose fate? Can one? Must one?

I began to believe that to choose fate was to leave Pennsylvania Station for good. This was a hard-earned truth. I could not find a Starbucks Coffee to save my beautiful, effervescent little life. Three hours and seventeen minutes of wandering, perhaps for naught, but I let myself consider, perhaps the true journey at Pennsylvania Station begins not when one steps onto the train, but rather, merely when even one has the floor of Madison Square Garden draped above them at all. And so, after all that time, the Station spit me out and deposited me back into the urban mess of the midtown area of Manhattan.

Something had changed in me, though I was unsure what. It was as if I had set up a bird feeder on my patio and one day the birds had decided to pour out the seeds and with them spell out the secrets of the world. Unsure but unbothered, I dusted off my old Saint Laurent pantsuit, tossed back six ibuprofen, and was on my way again. Sure enough, only moments had passed, and it seemed life was already working these things out for me. Just around the corner, upon what do I happen but: a Starbucks Coffee. Is it fate?

By the time I came to an answer, the biplane had long vanished.

Love,

Carrie Bradshaw

[derickandveronica-blog]

V #1. Real Characters

I walk the two miles all the way down to No Frills because it’s one of those off brand grocery stores where things are cheaper but you have to bag your own stuff. I wish I could go to the nice bodega downtown that sells creamy, herb cheese set in little displays with plastic grapes, but right now that’s a luxury I can’t afford. My friend Jackie says, “Always set aside enough money for fancy cheese,” but I guess this month I forgot.  

It’s lucky, though, that the walk to No Frills is a nice one. It’s all downhill and I get to walk through this neighborhood filled with great, old Victorian houses. Some of the houses have gold historical preservation plaques tacked on their fronts, and the ones that don’t are painted bright, beautiful colors, like they’re competing for the plaques.

My favorite house, between Chestnut and Oak Street, is painted a smooth gradient of orange, starting pumpkin colored at the base of the house and gradually getting lighter, until at the paneling near the roof where it’s a soft creamsicle color. It just looks like light and happiness is beaming off the house, rising through the roof, like heat.

My own place used to be a stately, Victorian house, but it got chopped up and divided into apartments some years back, before I moved in. My landlord, Emily, doesn’t care about the place in the slightest. She’s let the paint fade and chip and she doesn’t seem to mind the awful stripe of black sludge down the front of the house. Its where the gutter empties. All winter, when the rain never stops and everyone is always muttering “the rain, the rain, the rain” like some kind of city-wide chant, the black, greasy rainwater pools at the roof before sliding down the front of the house into the yard below.

When I’m walking and not looking at the brightly painted houses I think about my usual stresses. I wish I could just focus on the houses and the pleasant heat in my leg muscles as I walk, but I can’t.

There’s a term paper I need to write about earthquakes and a doctor’s appointment I’ve been meaning to reschedule. And there’s my mom. She called me this morning. I had stood in my kitchen, gently stirring some oatmeal and saw that the phone was ringing, the screen lit up and vibrating. I had considered letting it ring all the way to voicemail. But I picked up. I wish I wasn’t so hopeful like that, but I am.

She told me about this new medication they’ve got her on, one that gives her these urgent, visceral, terrifying dreams. She told me she had a dream I died, something that also had to do with me being pregnant and wearing some god-awful denim dress. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say.

“I’m still alive,” I said finally.

She sighed into the phone.

 Really, she’s the one dying. Of emphysema. The unsurprising result of smoking for 40 years.

I don’t have a whole lot of feelings about my mom dying. It’s hard to explain this to people. When I tell them about her diagnosis they arrange their faces to be sympathetic or gently horrified. I arrange mine to look sad, or like I’m carrying an awful burden, but this is mostly just for the other people. It makes them more comfortable. I wish I didn’t do things to make others comfortable, but I do.

The summer before she went to the doctors and he sat there and told her about her condition and, then, five minutes later she called me and told me “I have emphysema. I’m dying. You better call me more often,” and then hung up the phone—the summer before all of that—I went home for the first time in years.

I was delusional, of course. Maybe a few years of living on the West Coast, where everyone breathes and sighs about community and love and healing got to me.

We’d fought the whole time. She was drunk and angry and always larger and taller than me. She steamed up the house with her cigarette smoke, kept the windows locked, so that I woke up in the morning feeling like the back of my throat was dry and dirty. It was like she wanted to die.

That summer I had a revelation.

 The first time I wore a bikini I was thirteen and it was bright red. I had noticed, only recently, the way men looked at me. How they poked each other in the ribs when I walked past. I spent hours looking at myself in the mirror, topless, running my hands along the smooth planes of my stomach. It was a miracle that we found the matching set for the bikini, since we got it at Goodwill. But it fit perfectly and looked great against my tan skin.

“Brown as a bunny, you are!” my mom said sometimes. Which was nice.

We went to the pool by our house, a neighborhood pool and something of an establishment during the hot Midwestern summer days. When we got there I stripped off my summer dress and took note of the muscled, gleaming lifeguards at the water’s edge. My mom, as was her habit, promptly passed out on a pool chair. Her mouth leaked open at the corners and her arms splayed out at her sides.

The bikini looked even better glistening under the chlorine blue water. But after diving off the diving board many times and frog crawling along the checkered bottom of the pool it had begun to hang loose on my body. The strings at my back, holding the top piece in place, threatened to come loose and reveal my breasts.

I woke my mother.

“Can you please tie this?” I asked. “It’s coming loose!” I was perhaps a bit hysterical.

She rose from the pool chair, her eyes puffy and groggy. She looked evil like a villainous character rising from their dark throne, and I realized, my stomach clenching, that I’d made a huge mistake.

And then, there in front of the moms and babies and muscled lifeguards, she ripped my bikini top from my body. One swift motion and it was gone.

The tender pink cones of my nipples were seeing the outside world for the first time. They felt fragile, sensitive to the dry summer air.

A woman nearby gasped.

“Get your shit and let’s go,” my mother growled. And so, we left.

 My revelation was simple. I had been dreaming, since I was a little girl, maybe even before the red bikini episode, no more relationship with my mother.

Not one where she knew how I felt, or where we fought about why I never came to visit, and not one where I was willfully and purposefully cutting her from my life. Just one that was no more, brimming with nothingness.

When she called me that day after the doctor’s appointment, blurting out the news and then hanging up, the revelation rung inside of me, like a gong.

 At No Frills I grab my usual items: bananas and oatmeal and eggs and potato chips. The linoleum is freshly waxed and gleaming. Everything is gleaming. The apples, the cucumbers, the mirrored surfaces of the meat counter. They’re playing a classic rock station over the radio and “Stairway to Heaven” comes on and I sing a little out loud, softly, when it gets to the part where Robert Plant screams and the drums get loud. It feels good sometimes to sing in public. Like I’m testing the boundaries of what’s okay to do. It makes me feel like the kind of girl brooding, artistic men would write poetry about, or else the kind of girl who’s quirky and thin and cutely-fragile who writes her own poetry. But I don’t think I’m either of those.

In line at the checkout I watch two West Coast weirdos, as my friend Jackie calls them, talk to each other. They’re real characters, like New Yorkers say in the movies. The man is wearing earmuffs, even though its blazing hot summer outside. The earmuffs are those puffy white childish ones, like they’re made from the fur of the abominable snowman, and they look ridiculous against the balding slab of his head. The woman with him, either his sister or maybe his wife--in the way that sometimes people who look alike become couples—is talking at him, nonstop, way too loudly, in some language that might actually be Latin.

“Oblitus dicere!” she says.

He doesn’t respond, just looks glassily off into the distance. Perhaps the earmuffs have made her voice fuzzy and distant. Perhaps this is their purpose.

What makes me laugh the most is that the couple has many, many cans of tuna fish in their cart and nothing else.

 Back out on the street, blinking in the sunlight, I wait for the bus. The two characters are here, like I knew they would be. I think about talking to them, but I don’t know what I’d say.

My mom would sometimes involve herself in other people’s private business. Stuff that was definitely closed to her, but she didn’t care. I try not to be like this, even when I’m curious.

Once, upon coming out of the library, with stacks of books piled in our arms—hers about political conspiracy theories and mine about girls who lived fashionable, glittering lives in New York City—she spotted a couple sitting on a bench at the library’s entrance. It was obvious, immediately, what was happening.

The girl was crying gently and the boy, with a falsely sympathetic face, was speaking quietly and quickly and patting her leg like the way distant relatives do.

My mom marched over. She shifted her stack of books to the crook of her left arm so she could point her right finger accusingly at the couple.

She took a deep breath.

“You don’t need him! You can do much better than an ugly boy like him!” She was shrieking, and the whites of her eyes were huge and lit up, like there was a light bulb illuminated inside her head.

The girl was stunned. But the boy, strangely enough, looked as if he’d been expecting this. He smiled haughtily at my mom, his lips curled up, and that was when I realized it. My mom was one of them. The weirdos on the street. The characters.

I felt myself shrink down, wanting desperately to be somewhere else.

“Stay out of it, lady!” he smirked.  

“Go fuck yourself,” she said.

 Sometimes, once in a blue moon, my mom wasn’t a character. Or, at least, she kept it under wraps. Once, when we were on a plane and the flight attendant angrily slapped a bag of cookies down on my tray table after I took too long deciding between my snack options, my mom smiled a small smile and peered at me out of the corner of her eyes. Her face said, “Somebody’s having a bad day!” I had smiled wide, not caring about the cookies anymore.

I craved these kinds of moments. When we were on the same team. I just knew that there was another world, jogging along right next to ours, that was full of these moments. Where we had inside jokes and camaraderie.

This other earth, though, was almost always frustratingly out of my grasp.

 This morning on the phone she’d told me that she was ready to die.

“I just want to be fucking dead already,” she said. It was so brash and ugly and hard to look at. I stayed quiet on the phone.

After a while she sighed. Sometimes, I had no idea what my mother knew, how wide her awareness extended.

“Maybe you want that too,” she said.

But I didn’t know what world we were in. The real one or the one just out of reach. We were, for once, on the same team. But it was all wrong.

 The houses get steadily uglier as the bug chugs towards my neighborhood. It drops me off a few blocks from my house, and the characters stay on the bus, heading, no doubt, into the even seedier parts of the city.

My shoulders and hands ache with the groceries and I have to stop every block to stretch my fingers and then curl them into fists, pumping blood and sensation back into them. At my house, I peer up at the black sludge down the front of the house, but it doesn’t look too bad today, maybe because of the sunshine. The sun has a way of smoothing out all the ugly things, blurring your vision a little. I wish I could have this effect on people, but I can’t.

I unlock the front door, give it a little kick with my foot so it doesn’t stick, and climb the stairs up to my apartment. I knock my hips against the stair’s railing, forming a soft fleshy bruise I’ll feel for the next few days but which will look oddly beautiful against my skin, because the bags are just too heavy.

[derickandveronica-blog]

D #1. So Gold, So Silver

Frankie did not remember where she came from, only she had the occasional dream: the possibilities about her mother and family were endless, but she usually forgot them by the time she woke up. Most days, two very large giraffes, both cloaked in white, would move about in the periphery of Frankie’s vision. There were several other rats who lived with Frankie, whom she could often hear but never see, and they all seemed to agree upon these creatures being giraffes. Frankie had never seen a giraffe before, let alone two, and so she too believed them to be giraffes.

They fed Frankie and the others from day to day, but some days they would forget. There were squeals on the opposite sides of walls, squeals she did not understand. They were not joyous. Frankie only ever felt joy. From an early age Frankie knew she was special and she knew the others were not so special. During the night she would sleep in a dark box, but during the day she was free to roam a different box with many halls. Some rats never left the dark box, or so she once overheard.

This was the day things changed: Frankie’s usual sugar water had been replaced by something else. A giraffe hoof descended into Frankie’s direct line of view and attached to the hoof was a small vial from which Frankie sucked liquids. On this particular day, the liquid, which she could usually count on to be sugar water, took a darker color than she knew, and she beheld the difference. (It was the color amber, or some might have said gold.) And like that, Frankie realized her time had come, the day she’d been waiting for.

Frankie sucked from the vial with excitement. Just when she’d finished off the vial, another came down in its place. This had never happened before. Frankie seized the moment and sucked with even more delight. When she finished this vial, she felt very full and her head leaned sideways. A third vial descended for her drinking pleasure. Wont to prove herself worthy of the giraffes’ cause, Frankie obliged once more. Heavy, very heavy, she felt. Frankie waited for another vial to descend from above, but none did, and it was as though everything else were descending.

Suddenly, though, this was no longer the case. Frankie became rather excitable and felt like she could down seven more golden vials had she the chance! At this time, just as she’d expected, something even more exciting happened: a new hallway opened for Frankie to explore. She hoped there might have been another rat, for she was very curious to know what they looked like. Instead, there was a little silver square at the end of the hallway. She turned around and discovered that not only was there a new hallway, but her old hallways had vanished. She realized that she had happened upon a new home.

Frankie roamed every inch of her new home in search of other silver squares, but there was only one. She returned to it, intent to focus, but this was difficult ever since she’d had so much to drink. She strained to look up, and there were the giraffes, her guardian angels, looking down upon her. Frankie wanted to do the right thing, and really there was only one right thing to do when confronted with a silver square: push the silver square.

Bzz! With that sound a sharp physical sensation came over Frankie’s whole body, and she fell back in shock. She had never experienced this feeling before. First, there was joy, and now there was this, something so much stronger. So was it better than joy? One couldn’t be sure, but Frankie wanted nothing more than to press that square again and again and again. And so she did, for as long as she could remember, until night came over her.

The next day, thrilled with the success of yesterday’s run, Frankie was bright and filled with joy, so eager to feel that other thing, what she told herself was “extra-joy.” She thought about extra-joy all night, how fulfilling it was, how much better it was than joy. The giraffes came to her daytime room, and there she waited for the liquid that began it all. But rather than have her fill of those vials of golden liquid, Frankie came face to face with regular old sugar water. She wondered if she’d done something wrong to deserve sugar water, but her concern faded away. There was still the hope of the silver square.

Sure enough, after one vial of sugar water, Frankie was transported to her new home again, and she made her way down the still unfamiliar hall to the silver square. The silver square already felt like an old friend at this point, and she was, in coming to see her, gearing up to hear a joke that would send Frankie over the moon with fits of laughter. Extra-joy! A few turns and there she was again. Just like yesterday, she tapped her nose to the square, when—bzz!—she fell back again, only with a different feeling than joy or extra-joy. This time the silver square wasn’t pleasurable at all, and Frankie had no intention of pressing it again.

Over the next few days Frankie came to understand something. Silver was nothing without gold, and gold nothing without silver, but she longed to have one rather than neither at all. There were days like this last one when she had only silver, and the silver took her joy away. And there were other days when she only had gold, and the gold filled with her so much joy that she was actually restless and lost and impatient. On the days when she had neither, Frankie felt empty.

One night Frankie had a dream about her mother, whom she only knew when she could not yet see very well, so the dream took place in darkness. She could make out the sound of at least eighteen others roaming around in the dark. Frankie imagined all sorts of things about them, though she could not see them, not even in her dreams. That they were hooded, or five times her size, or one fifth her size, or were giraffes and not rats all along. But she knew one to be her mother, and she crawled through the dream in search of her, brushing up against this and that and who knows what. One was bound to be her mother, but when she’d touched every creature in her dream, she realized she would never know for certain. She’d forgotten her mother’s touch, and she never knew her face.

A dream without sight is endless and sometimes miserable.

Awake, Frankie was just as miserable. For all she was concerned, the silver square and the vials of gold would never come together again (for it had been a whole two days.) She began to resent the giraffes and their mystery, for they so willfully withheld joy from Frankie’s life. How confusing it was to be the chosen one, Frankie mused. What was life after silver? What was life after gold? She listened for the others, but she couldn’t hear a thing.

Her worries subsided on the day a vial descended from above after the first, and Frankie realized she’d had an entire vial of gold liquid without even realizing it! They were back. On the second vial she was not so flippant, and, by the third, she relished the heaviness of her fat belly. How good it was to be so heavy in the stomach as the mind drifted clumsily. When a wall disappeared right before Frankie’s eyes, she knew how close she was to that little silver square, her promise for feeling extra-joy again. She waltzed in, unaware that this time, she wouldn’t be coming back out.

Frankie charged ahead at the silver square, belly full and mind adrift. She pressed the square and wouldn’t let go, so that the extra-joy was endless. This was a feeling like no other, a touch so assuring and comforting, so warm and delightful, so passionate and firm, it couldn’t have existed anywhere else. She was awash with it, drunk off it, that she could have never known what that feeling would do to her in the end.

Bzz!