The Club is Closed

by S. Jane Gari

Sometimes the pangs of nostalgia stretch the
brain’s skin so taut it threatens to tear the memory asunder until
its sweet perfume acquires the stench of resentment.

It’s possible to yearn so hard you’ll break the idea, as your longing drags it across the unforgiving rack of your present tense.
The yoke of now seeks to yield its burden up to wistfulness, to stamina, to a tableau seen now through a filmy residue:
The years have polished over the cracks and worn them smooth.

I know better,
and yet it still breaks me some days . . .

On those days when you try to bail out the boat with a thimble it
hits so hard:
the fantastic rhythm of our dance hall days sifts through the blood… remembering,
wishing for Friday night in Manhattan.

But 1992 is a snapshot tucked away.

Half-Full

by S. Jane Gari

If Rush Limbaugh doesn’t shut the fuck up you’ll see me on the six o’clock news striding atop some lonely six-story with an AK-47 I borrowed from a redneck named Keith, who bought it for his daughter, took pictures of her with it and posted them on My Space.

Keith once beat up a homeless man, emboldened by a twelve pack of Bud, an aluminum bat and rampant ignorance.
But if you need help at three in the morning– he’ll ask no questions, give no excuses and arrive at your doorstep at 3:15 with his sleeves rolled up.

Such are the world’s birth pangs.
Be patient.

Greg, my friend of twelve years, sat across from me at a pizzeria last summer, looked me square in the face,
and couldn’t give me one good reason he was voting for McCain besides,
“I don’t want change.”
For years he has proposed to solve the energy crisis with a large hamster wheel inhabited by illegal immigrants;
And I’m not sure he’s joking.
But Greg introduced me to the love of my life,
And despite the candle he held for me he said,
“Go. Be happy.”
He is the godfather of our child.

Such are the world’s birth pangs.
Be patient.

My father is unwavering in his worship of Fox News pundits and has practiced the latest cut and paste email scholarship that promulgates
the worst midrassa-jihad-slander.
But I love him.

When my daughter stretched my belly, making a circus tent of my sundress
my father made jokes about large sea mammals and smuggled basketballs,
He assisted me down staircases gingerly, slowly,
as if I were the only woman who had ever been pregnant in the history of the world.
My father cried silently in the corner of the hospital room when he saw that I was stuck at six centimeters for seven hours, when the doctor said my daughter was in stress and would have to be cut from me.

Such are the world’s birth pangs.
Be patient.

Shut the fuck up Sean Hannity!
I’ve seen your house rising majestic, presiding over the richest parts of Long Island Sound, like Gatsby,
and my brother-in-law, Michael, a rough-neck, true-blue Down-easter man, pointed the palace out reverently from his humble lobster boat one Sunday, totally missing the irony of his admiration because he had already bought Sean’s bullshit—hook, line and lobster cage.
But Michael is hilarious, and I love to be around him.

Shut the fuck up Chris Dodd!
You were sleeping while Too Big to Fail Captain Crooks took the wheel of my country and helped themselves to my daughter’s future.
But when I lived in Connecticut I voted for you.

Birth rips us asunder,
places our insides in sterile trays and reconfigures them.
It hoists a screaming child above a blue drop-cloth, like a bloody puppet, and asks us to pledge our love
and sweat
and endless toil.

Such are the world’s birth pangs.
Be patient.

Eight years ago I was a teacher at Walt Whitman High School in New York where the students said “faggot” and didn’t know they were being taught on
the Old Faggot’s land;
they thought Walt was just some guy the local mall was named after.
When we finished the glorious poems of Leaves of Grass on Monday, September tenth, one of the boys in my class cried and said he was sorry for saying “faggot,”
and the next day he cried some more as he asked me if his father was dead while I closed the classroom windows to keep out the strange smell that we weren’t told was metal and death until Thursday.
My friend’s little brother, the fireman from Queens, fell catatonic because he collected teeth into one freakish pile for authorities to sift through and assign names.
My sister-in-law, who worked in Building Seven had to see a shrink because she learned that if you stand on a sidewalk and watch people jump form the 90th floor their bodies pop like balloons full of blood,
and she can tell you this at Thanksgiving with no expression on her face.

My husband the helicopter pilot returned from Katrina and Rita, shell-shocked from bloated bodies and the knowledge that his fellow countrymen wanted
to shoot him down,
and we will never live on the shore again,
although he proposed to me at a beach in New York.

Such are the world’s birth pangs
Be patient,

Because birth is painful,
Bloody,
Messy,
And miraculous.

So despite the mess, I still like to think the picture is a magnificent work of art:

That God,
whatever,
whoever,
is some great Impressionist standing far enough away from the painting to see the grandeur.

And we can still get there
if we can just learn to stand far enough away,
Travel down some worm hole of a birth canal that blossoms open on the other end
Where we can view the painting through a newborn’s telescope and say

“Beautiful.”

A Truce

by S. Jane Gari

I’ve decided that it’s okay for you to keep God trapped in a stained-glass box
because I’ll let him out
and His exodus will usher in the real apocalypse-
the one that implodes within us where God really lives
We are ground zero for change- stop waiting for it to rain down from heaven

I don’t want to argue with you anymore about the nuances,

But before I listen to you patronize me under the protective guise of prayer,
I have some diplomatic conditions to propose:

Don’t tell me I’m wrong if I think I’ve been born and died before, and that the billion other people who feel this truth are going to hell along with me.

Don’t throw scripture in my face when you can’t even point out the metaphors
And you won’t even consider the enormous problem of human translation-
Ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, those languages had words for feelings we don’t recognize anymore.

Don’t tell me God will punish me just because I understand what a parable is.
If the very fabric of reality is open to a quantum physical interpretation,
Then why would God send me to hell for understanding that prophets count on poetry to convey that which would otherwise be impossible to convey?

Don’t tell me that Mike and Ken who have loved one another just as dearly as if they were “married,”
Don’t tell me that God will condemn them for loving each other so much,
For one little line in Leviticus? Really?
A book that rattles off 600 other rules that you don’t follow-
I mean you put meat and milk on the same plate and I know I saw you eat bacon once upon a time.

Why put yourself at odds with so much of the world instead of grasping,
with everything you have, at the common threads that knit us together?

I’ll shut up if you want to visit the creation Museum in Kentucky,
If you promise not to fill my daughter’s head with notions that the Easter Bunny has anything to do with Christ’s teachings.
Please respect that I’m struggling not to dilute the essence of God that I believe she retains.
I refuse to proselytize to her because I think she knows more about God than I do,
I’m just waiting for her language to catch up to her understanding so she can remind me of what I’ve forgotten because I’m too old and spoiled by this world.

Don’t repeat your prosperity preacher’s litany from last Sunday;
Jesus would be a lot happier today if we lived on small communes and helped each other out, and you know it too somewhere deep down, so don’t call me a socialist like it’s a dirty word;
He told us to share.

Let’s take a breath–
My body tenses from the strain of pretending
These nuances matter so much.
We should rejoice in the view of the bigger picture
from a vantage point we both share.
We have to mend this breach in understanding,
Come to peace with it,
because if we can’t, what hope is there for the rest of the world?

We are blood;
let’s prove it;
Let’s be noble for Christ’s sake
For God’s sake
For our sake

Not just a truce,
Not just a tolerance
Not just a compromise–
An appreciation
Understanding,
and consensus

of what we both see:

Love.

The Shoebox

by S. Jane Gari

     There are many places that made me. I’m taking inventory. Gathering all the fragments together and making canvas out of mosaic. Next week I’m getting married, and I need to feel like just one person.
     Packing is an act I perform in solitude. My fiancé has offered his help. But I don’t want it. His only big move was to college. And his parents are still together. Moving can be cathartic for me in a way I’m glad he’ll never understand. Each time I move I conduct a forced examination. Like revising the manuscript of my life- it’s always in the drafting stage.
     Each piece of memorabilia imposes its voice as it is neatly wrapped, tucked in a box, sealed with tape. A large white shoebox collects odds and ends that deserve more than “Miscellaneous.” There is a list on the side of that precious box: address book, diplomas, passport, old letters, photographs.
     The box has traveled with me to five states. I always look through it when I’m moving. A ritual. The photo on the top of the stack shows my six-year-old sister and an eight-year-old me in identical winter coats, our eyes red with tears. We are leaving our father’s house to return to our mother’s. When I was a kid I thought it was strange for him to photograph us looking so miserable. Now I think he did it to remind himself that we missed him.

     When my parents split we were living in Monroe Falls, Ohio, during the abysmal economy of the early 80’s. Dad had been sleeping on the couch in our den for days. My sister Terri and I had taken refuge under my bed while we listened to our parents shouting at each other in their bedroom. “Divorce” was in my vocabulary, but it wasn’t in my world. It was not yet the epidemic that would later sweep more than half of my friends’ lives. It was a remote idea that floated in the same murky realm of sexual innuendo we laughed at without understanding. But it was closing in on us, imposing itself until it was tangible. It was my father looking up at me, suitcases in hand, while I stood moping at the top of the stairs. It was my mother, sitting us down on the living room couch we associated with Christmas, Easter and extended family to present us with a picture she had drawn in crayon. On the far left of the picture was my father, then my mother, me, and Terri. Mom ripped the far left figure from the page, leaving the three of us alone, save for my father’s cartoon thumb that nearly grasped my mother’s open hand. My sister was only five and the vision of our family literally torn asunder sent her reeling to the floor in hysterics. My mother calmly stated that Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore, that we would still see him on weekends. She continued talking in that eerie calm, perhaps trying to diffuse my sister’s anguish as she writhed on the floor. My mother’s voice grew dimmer and was muted by a pounding rhythm in the back of my head that would become the migraines I would know for the rest of my life. For now it was just pain. Unbelievable pain.

     In the next few weeks my mother often voiced her fears that we were just one step away from “the poor house,” and although I was not familiar with the exact Dickensian images she intended to conjure, I knew that it wasn’t a condition I wanted to endure. I fantasized about being able to get a job so I could assuage her fears, but at seven, I had no skills, no mode of transportation. My mother began dressing in skirts and blouses and painting her nails as her hands rested on the steering wheel of our silver Buick. Interviews. Many interviews. On yet another fruitless job search day for my mother, the bus dropped Terri and me off at the bottom of the steep hill that led to our house that modestly sprouted amid others on the cul-de-sac of Forest Hill Drive. As we made our way to the sidewalk I saw my mom. She was hunched over at the stop sign combing through the grass with her right hand until she found something, plucked it from the ground and transferred it to her left hand. Then she began combing again. She was sobbing.
     We approached my mother cautiously. “What are you doing?” I asked softly.
     “I’m looking for money. I saw you throw your lunch down the sewer yesterday.”

     It was true. She had made me baloney sandwiches every day for three weeks, and I couldn’t stand the sight of baloney anymore. The hawk-eyed lunch ladies would report such wastefulness, so I had stashed the wrapped sandwich in my jacket and chucked it down the sewer drain halfway up the hill to my house, stealthily. Or so I thought.
      “I’m sorry Mommy. I just couldn’t eat it, and I knew you’d be mad.”
     “Mad!” she shrieked. “Mad! I don’t know where our next meal is coming from! I don’t know what we’re going to do! I am picking up spare change from the side of the road! This is what I did today while you were in school and while your father was doing God knows what! And you think you can throw a sandwich away! We are headed for the poor house!”

     There was that ominous and mysterious threat again. My stomach tightened; I hugged my jacket closer, concealing the second baloney sandwich I knew I couldn’t throw away now. She turned from us and trudged up the hill, counting the change in her left hand.

     “Seventy five cents!” she screamed, presumably at us, although her back was turned, and she pumped her fist full of change in mock victory toward the grey sky.
     That night my mother made us peanut butter and jelly for diner, citing that’s all there was. My sister later complained to me while we took our bath that her stomach was growling.

      “I have a baloney sandwich I could split with you.”
     “I don’t want baloney.”
     “Neither do I.”
     “What’s the poor house?” she asked, brushing the hair of her mermaid doll.
     “I’m not sure” I responded, disappointed that I couldn’t answer her.

     That night, I sat up in my bed with the baloney sandwich I had pulled from my jacket. I ate it, each bite soggy with warm mayonnaise. The light from my mother’s bedroom seeped under the crack of my door and expanded outward on my floor until it lost itself in the corner among my toys. My mother cried audibly in her bedroom for several minutes before going silent. Her light went out. Change jingled softly, like little bells.

     The Saturday after the stop sign incident my mother decided to indulge in a luxury: bacon. It baked in the oven while my sister and I salivated over the aroma as we watched our cartoons in the adjacent den. And then we smelled smoke. And then we heard the pounding footsteps in the kitchen, the frantic opening of the oven door, and the screams of my mother being burned as bacon grease siphoned off the corner of a tilted baking sheet. We scurried into the room where my mother, slumped in a corner, oven mitts still in hand stared at the ceiling wailing, “I just wanted to make a nice breakfast! I just wanted to make a nice breakfast!” The wailing tapered off to a whimper while I inspected her arms. She had burned herself, but I couldn’t be sure how badly.
     “Mom? Are you okay?” She couldn’t answer my question. She only stared at the ceiling and cried, repeating her earlier mantra as if that would somehow resurrect the bacon. Terri sat on a kitchen chair, her legs dangling, her face blank. I called the only other person I could trust and that could help us, and the last person my mother probably wanted to see. I don’t know how long it took for my father to get to our house. In my mind, it’s as if I told him what happened and then he materialized in our kitchen. But he knelt on the floor, rocking our crying mother gently in his arms, whispering to her, examining her forearm and then holding an ice pack to it. She calmed down after a few minutes, but my father stayed with her, cradling her exhausted body that he folded into his own. Their embrace conveyed all the devastation of La Pieta, and I held that picture in my head for days.

     Photographs neatly stacked once more, I close and tape my shoebox that will never be closed and taped. Not by my father. Not by my husband. Not by anyone.