S & S Challenge: Attempt #2
Simon & Schuster Challenge
Title: "Why Am I Not Working?"
We’re waiting for the “the buses.” It’s looking cold and not at all lucrative. I recognize that I feel out of place, uncharacteristically watching the clock. Sitting under the crisp white open tent, she says to me with cautious deliberation—it’s clearly been on her mind: “Everybody keeps asking me; that is, everyone that knows you, and knows me obviously, or us (alluding to her husband), keeps asking: ‘Why are you not working?’”
I’m at a loss. I picture myself suddenly, rib-cage unhinged, gears out of kilter, screws loose, bolts missing, time tossed… I feel (understandably?) broken… My mouth gaps open a little, but nothing comes out. I reflect inevitably on all this “intangible good” I thought we were making… writing, sketching, painting, teaching, critiquing… all vanity to be sure, paired with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, no doubt…
“I know, I know… I tell them you’re still… grieving. Cause how can you adjust to a whole half of a…it’s not as if it were just two…” her voice trails. “You were feeding off of each other,” she finishes up. She looks at me closely, as if to check how many pounds the skeleton has lost, though I had previously reassured her that I was about the same (give or take) since she saw me last, when she asked in the usual way: “How much do you weigh?”
As one whose heart is heavy and whose house is fully haunted, I don’t know how to begin to explain that honestly, Grief and I are not yet personally acquainted, despite admittedly congenial circumstance. I’m convinced that serenity and sincerity are etched in my face as I listen to her with full attention, focusing on her matching silver eyes and pulled back hair. “You don’t seem happy,” she frowns, drawling out the last part of the conundrum, sounding suspiciously a lot like my sister, which I immediately mention as a caution.
She likes to read so I’ve brought her two of my poems on the theme of grief and death and dying hoping to reassure her against the negative. I see immediately that she isn’t at all taken. I didn’t write them for her, so I let it go ungrudgingly, without reservation… I feel pretty confident that I understand what she prefers; and it’d be possible to please her… What author doesn’t try to seduce the reader! but not this time. I see my thoughts skip across the surface, ripple a bit, and sink like a ship.
“Words are important to you.” I start; of course they are.
“They’re not to your sister,” she oddly remarks and taken aback I make a reflexive self-deprecating joke. (Truly, my sister is more talented than I have ever been; more easily gifted, though gone so, lazy?) She laughs and says she likes how I make such an effort to speak, like I’m reaching somewhere in…
Instantly I see a very sharp quill, slipping through this nearly emptied well with precision; scratching the crusty base raw, as if to make sure it never runs out… The ink is not red, that would suggest a deficit in my mind; nor is it black as that too would be loaded, so I see it as a deep rich value of plenty that drips from this fingertip… To my friend I say nothing. She worries enough as it is.
She reciprocates my earlier question: “If you could do anything at all—money no object—what would it be?”
“Think and sit.” What!? Do you not feel the need to make Anything? I raise my shoulders delicately; there would inevitably be some by-product… I’d like it to be few and spare and well thought out… Shared eventually. I tell her about that amusing notion of Intangible Goods, and she cackles; with a smile I imagine her retelling it over the dinner table, with others sitting, and laughing... The wind kicks up. We’ve got lots of time to kill. The air is dank, and we do our best to match the chill.
The Market is a ghost town. They call it “Medicine Wheel.” I’m not sure why. I surely asked last time around; and the answer must not have satisfied, as it didn’t stick; and fantasy apparently wasn’t on, or I would have made something up. We’re still waiting for some sign of real customers, though the vendors do their best to make, as my Father would have said, the illusion of a buying “crowd.” Having previously cracked in turn that she would be happiest as a Farmist, working creatively with soil and clay—planting, sculpting, drawing, raising those horizontal-eyed kids that grow quickly into stubborn old dairy goats—our conversation slowly turns grave. My friend says almost flippantly, but with deep underlying despair, that she nearly served up legal papers to her husband a month ago, things coming to a precipitous drought. I gasped with shock, for him; I said, tactlessly for her, that it must have hurt him so! He is seriously ill. But she said to my horror that she just couldn’t CARE anymore! and had snapped at his lack of determination and will… he is back at therapy and she is carrying on hauling and turning the never-ending manure and weeds, which she maintains that she “loves and needs” …now they are seriously contemplating the inevitability of shutting the farm.
As a final effort, she has gotten a single calf to sell for veal. I am puzzled at first, then shocked and appalled. I begin to grasp what she isn’t saying. One slaughter will yield more than a whole season’s harvest. Sustainable living is not sustainable at all. The sacrificial cow is to get them through the winter. And I shiver at the proximity of Fall. Somehow in this cold damp Spring, Summer doesn’t seem to exist at all.
I make my apologies like a madman that this year I cannot commit to helping out at the farm, new employment surely on the horizon, feeling so selfish and guilty, knowing I could force myself to it though very much unsuited… She raises her fingers in protest, and claims dramatically and exaggeratedly that I have saved their skin the passed two years as a farm hand. Talking does her good and she says so. Perhaps when things get settled there will be more time… I wonder aloud if it isn’t in my character to always be…u n s e t t l e d? She laughs; if it isn’t the truth, it’s a dead ringer. A customer appears from underground; buys some goat’s milk soap, a bottle of lotion, to my delight even a painted rock… and gives Thanks! Somehow we’ve made each other’s day, in a strange inexplicable way. In this momentary exchange where we’ve all been convened, we breathe a little easier despite the thickets of the night already trying to bind our ankles to the toils of tomorrow. I carefully pull my feet up onto the crossbar of my chair and raise my eyes as another solitary soul surfaces and smiles back…