Flash Memoir: Self Portrait in Drab

 (c) 11/2024 

 

“Come here.” Sofia instructed us to lay hands across the stack of fabric bolts held in the turn of her elbow.

The fabric bolts were similar: a faded buff, like overcrowded sunflowers that should be relocated, and in turn, over-patterned with beige, ivory and pale-yellow flowers. The size and pattern of the florals differed, though those differences were slight.

I almost instinctively hated all four of the prints. Neutrals, off-neutrals, they made me feel mute. I also hated the Simplicity Jiffy dress pattern we’d prayed over. Its movement-enhancing elastic waist, the puffy sleeves, like a plea for romance and marriage. And then that wide ruffle around the hem was one to many nods to femininity. At least our deadline prohibited lace trim and rosettes.

Lois, Cindy and I dutifully walked over to lay our hands across the fabric. How much paler we all looked than when we arrived at the Mission Base seven months earlier.

Sofia began to pray, “Dear Heavenly Father,” followed that with a litany of things we were thankful for, such as the apples a neighboring rancher donated for our breakfast, my minimum wage, part time job that provided the bus fare to the mall, and now, this wonderful opportunity to connect with God.

She prayed, “and God, we ask that you guide us to the right fabric, for your glory.”

I opened an eye to look at Sofia and wondered if this really was important enough to bring to God.

The four of us were interested in dance. Despite my aunt’s reprimands about dancing magically leading to fornication, every Saturday night you couldn’t get me out of the all-of-three under-age discotheques in the Seattle area. All that glamour and glitter. The shimmer and shine. The jewel brights. It was difficult to remove those colors and cuts from my wardrobe. It was easier to remember to slap on a bra every morning, overtly modest, since I was called in to the base leader’s wife’s office every couple of weeks. It was about my presentation every time. It seemed to bother so many different people for different reasons.

The night before our shopping excursion Sofia had showed us a photograph she still clung too of herself two-years earlier. A photo predating becoming saved. In it her hair was spiked, and while she didn’t have a tattoo, her nose was pierced. Now that was exotic, the piercing. She let it grow back. In the photo Sofia wore a basic black-tee, a leather biker jacket and combat boots. Scowling, Sofia looked so edgy, confidant even. I think Sofia meant to show us the photo as an indicator of just how far Jesus had to reach for her to bring her over to this maudlin femininity of ruffles, bows, and demure knee-skimming skirt lengths.

“I feel guided to this one.” Cindy touched a medium-sized floral bolt with a nail she no longer lacquered. Clearly our Heavenly Father had guided her.

Lois felt guided to suggest a different medium-sized floral bolt. Which of us had the shortest path to God’s heart?

“God’s not speaking to me,” I said, letting Sofia be the tiebreaker.

We scheduled a performance at a neighboring church’s Tuesday night service. I’d written a short story about a young boy being saved while walking along a beach. Battering Waves. A wise old man. In hindsight, nothing remarkable. We didn’t have musicians and even though we had a cassette player we couldn’t find a single song any of us wanted to move to. Lois was in the process of finding suitable bible passages to accompany a dance.

None of us were trained in dance. Not even childhood ballet lessons. We couldn’t articulate whether what we were doing was considered free-form, modern, jazz or whether we were just four 20-somethings swirling haphazardly across the shag. Creating choreography and trying to remember it when we performed was a complexity at least two of us couldn’t handle. Every movement slowed and repeated ad nauseum. A lot of lifted arms and gazing upwards.  And performing in prairie-girl dresses? I hadn’t seen that before. And yet, all four of us felt called to use what we were calling worship dance and testimony.

Eventually, our dresses were sewn. They were too formless to need fitting. Cindy and I slathered on some eye color, but Lois and Sofia had already given up on cosmetics. According to the script my role was that of a hapless, hopeless young boy and I suggested that I wear dress slacks and a button down.

“I’m sure that will be convincing” I said, “all also honor God, since he directed my writing in the story.”

After much prayer and listening to God thankfully that the others agreed I did not need to wear that hideous dress.

During a swirl with an upward gaze and arms opening to God, I heard a man gasp, and another say, “Oh, so beautiful.” Suddenly I felt certain our message of redemption was getting through to the audience. I was hopeful that should the minister end the service with a call to the alter at least one person would have been moved by our dance to walk to the alter.

After service I was approached by two men who wanted to let me know how beautiful the dance had been. How beautiful I had moved. How beautiful I was. They didn’t mention the story line, nor whether the movements put them into a worshipful space. I have been one to hang on to any small bit of praise or validation as though it were the last meal of my life, already snuffling for more. Clearly, I’d been living on the base long enough, because I was more concerned for once in giving the glory to God. I had no sense that they were going to find a quiet spot and pray. I interpreted the look in their eyes as being as desiring as the looks in the discotheques. 

The next day I was called again to the Base Leader’s Wife’s office.

“I’d like to steer you to join the Children’s puppetry team.” 

Okay. Puppets are fun. “I want to dance though,” I answered.

The minister had complained to our base leader. I was too seductive. I portrayed a seven-year-old boy wearing a baggy button-down shirt too seductively.

“I didn’t even make eye-contact.” I paused. “I had my hair pulled back into a bun!” I was mentally thinking of all the ways in which I had definitely not been seductive. Maybe it was the blue slathered around my eyes. It wasn’t my smile; I hadn’t smiled. And yet, I had broken one of our strict for-females-only rules: Do not entice men.

“I didn’t entice anyone,” I said. “It’s their responsibility to control their own reactions. It’s their responsibility to deal with their own lust.”

But apparently, it wasn’t.

The next week I was on puppet making duty, safe in the craft room. Even if I did perform, I’d be hidden inside a large cardboard house. Foam, paint, and bright colors manipulated by my hands. My body, completely invisible until the final curtain call when I could reveal myself, draped in beige.

Tarot: Queen of Wands; Reversed

 (c) 1/12/2023

I didn’t sign any papers; it was mutual. A handshake.  Culturally driven. Just the way things are.

 The team of umbrageous doctors contained the Capitalist bourgeoisie, Land Barons, and a Deaconess spouting sacramental catechumens for the sake of modesty.  Through their surgical intervention my tongue would become my husband’s tongue. Sutured. The last domestic stitch he would undergo.

 I saw him unconscious on his own metal table, breathing through a sheer shroud of gauze. Delicate. Almost pretty.  An anesthetic fog. Not even his vulnerability bothering him.

 I’d been told that having only bravado and masculine posturing, he would recover by speaking my words. He would summarize books I’d read and told him about as if he’d read them. My meticulously formed opinions would be his conclusions. I thought I was fine with this. If my words came from a male mouth, then they might be listened to. If my tongue were patched onto his tongue, he would finally say meaningful things. Beautiful, fanciful prose, like a fountain from his mouth.

 Almost too late I realized the lie. I was the only one able to speak my truths. I struggled through the drugged stupor, and brandishing a scalpel, I killed him. Many say I over-reacted. That I crossed a line. That I should have aimed for the Doctors. Others, that I am truly, a woman.

Flash Memoir: Feeding Sean

 (c) 3/21/2022

“Well, Sean,” I said, “You look good! Your wound has healed up nicely.”

Sean had shaved off the scrub of beard and mustache. His makeshift cast, which was built up from strips of t-shirt and plaid shirts wrapped nearly two inches thick and that had been hiding a purplish, swollen hand, was now gone. The gash had healed to a four-inch-long welt along his wrist. His hand looked normal.

Sean showed me how his wrist was stiff and that he could barely bend it. If he’d had any type of manual labor job before that opportunity was now past.

“I sure wish you could have gone to the ER with that!” The mother in me popped out. I hoped Sean wouldn’t take it poorly. I had already learned that he wouldn’t check in to any medical facility. Money and lack of insurance aside, he was convinced Doctors would lock him up and force feed him hallucinogens and poison.

I noticed that while I couldn’t say Sean’s clothes looked freshly laundered at least they weren’t rank and grubby from months of daily wear.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got the chance to clean myself up.” He beamed and his blue eyes shone with a calm I hadn’t seen when running into him during the past year.

I thought against asking him where the opportunity came from. It had taken me several months, a few dips into my grocery bag or wallet, and a couple of meals at Ozzie’s Pub before he offered his name.

The first time I saw Sean panhandling outside of Starbucks three different people, including me, ran up with cups of coffee and bagged pastries. I nudged my companion. “Look how he shines!” His smile was infectious. I instantly wanted to give him the world.  If only I’d owned the world.

When I talked him into a meal, I learned to not ask many questions. His meal choices had started as burgers and fries, an occasional steak. Eventually all he ate was pulled Pork and a Pale Ale. No sides. No buns. “This is what the German’s eat,” he’d said. He’d never go back to California to see his mother. The German’s were teaching him how to be a man. I didn’t ask about the Germans. I supposed they were white supremacists, and if Sean bought into that belief, I didn’t want to sit here feeding him. I hadn’t asked about the wound on his wrist either. I couldn’t tell if it was an accident or self-inflicted. I had offered to pay for urgent care. That is how small my world is. He needed much more than one doctor visit.

Sometimes Sean would shut down, turn slightly, and stare to the right of my face. Then he grinned as though there was a frenetic comedy on a big screen beside my head. A couple of times I turned to look. “There’s nothing there,” Sean said somewhat dispassionately. After a long pause, he would re-start the conversation.

The last time I ran into Sean he showed how he got around the security fence and slept in the crawl space of the now defunct Kasper’s French restaurant. The restaurant was festooned with notice of what new Apartment Complex was coming. Now four years later, I think of Sean on occasion and with worry. It never changes anything.

Flash Memoir: Confession Night

 (c) 3/20/2022)

One confession night in October, Jimmy confessed to masturbating.

Gathered from across the states we were a community of forty young Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and some like me, non-denominational. Our community leaders were married and the rest of us had taken vows of poverty and celibacy. Of course, Jimmy masturbated.

Jimmy felt the need to confess details. He did it whenever his roommate left for the quad bathroom. Instead of eating dinner. Or breakfast. During solitude hour, usually reserved for prayer and meditation. He described his grip,  moving his hands like God moving heavenly hands over the water in the silent dark, bringing forth teeming creatures from the depths.

 As an activity that amounts to self and group denigration, confession provides criticism to promote mortification, to forge new identity and new norms based on the power of the group, to reduce individual separateness. Instead, Jimmy’s confession disrupted everything.

Fifteen minutes into a confession that would seemingly never end Jimmy started to cry. “I can’t stop. I know Satan controls  my penis. Everywhere I turn is temptation.”

“Stop already!” I thought, utterly transfixed. All the girls continued to look on  wide-eyed.

Sure, sure there’s the sin of Onanism. By Jewish law, Onan had to marry his brother Er’s widow Tamar and help her bear a son that would carry forward Er’s line. Instead of impregnating her Onan spilt his seeds on the ground and so God smite Onan. It wasn’t spilling seeds that was the sin but Onan’s refusal to invest in raising up his brother’s son.

How cruel that his parents, and his church taught him this shame. Masturbating was probably the only activity most of us could take to remain born-again virgins.

Jimmy wasn’t one of the boys any of us speculated about marrying. He didn’t play guitar. He’d never lead a Youth Group. He hadn’t spoken much before tonight and wasn’t a powerful orator. The chances of his becoming a pastor were slim. Even in the secular world he would likely have problems finding a Friday night date. Without Satan, where would Jimmy shift blame for his transgressions? Shame radiates outward. How would Jimmy relieve that pain? Upon whom?

Finally, Bill broke in. “I see you girls looking with disgust at Jimmy. But masturbating is a totally normal thing for guys to do.”

“Yeah, sure thing Bill,” I thought. It is normal. We women though, held captive to a near-pornographic call for our comfort and understanding was not.

Tarot: Page of Wands

 (c) 3/19/2022

The Page of Wands always stoops

to smell the roses, or to sneak

Spreading Phlox between the pavers.

Equal parts haphazard and methodical,

she generates ideas while planting seeds.

My Great-Aunt Winnie loved the garden.

She labored beside the work crew that planted

crocus’s and daffodils each spring

in the concrete planter bowls straddling the entrance. 

Flowers were intended to make visitors feel welcome.

Winnie had no visitors. Not her mother.

Not any of her five brothers. But then,

taking time for family can be such an inconvenience.

 

More than anything, Winifred loved to listen to music.

Music soothes the soul and the Page of Wands

by default of immaturity faces challenges.

Whatever journey she began back home

The Queen circumnavigated it and

had Winnie institutionalized here

among catatonics and their colonic irrigations,

among palliatives, shocks, and needles.

Access to a turntable took finagling the one attendant

who wasn’t easily agitated. Even Glen Miller and

Gene Autry become irritating when over-played.

 

Winnie was, my father said, a talented pianist.

“She spent her time playing for the inmates

and probably felt fulfilled.”

 

The Page of Wands is modest, and Winnie

may not have realized she had been sterilized.  

The Page is a dreamer, an idealist,

whose energy uncoils as optimism,

and maybe Winnie felt fulfilled

Sundays after lunch, plunking out As Time Goes By

or Blue Moon on the auditorium piano.

Capable hands her mother saw no use for at home.

Flash Memoir: Privates

(c) 3/19/2022

Charles wore thick-rimmed glasses that were held onto his head with a large rubber band and a nose clip. To make it easier to wear, he’d said, his mother shaved his hair down to a blonde crew cut reminiscent of the soldiers on the news.  No one else at school wore hair short enough to show even their ears.

Whenever Charles saw me on the playground, he came charging whether I was on the girl’s or the boy’s side, or at the top of the neutral stairwell that led down to the street. No matter how many times I told him to go away he laughed loudly and drew even more attention. Sometimes he handed me a note with hearts drawn all over it. Once he told me that he loved me. When he brought blue bells picked from the school entrance, I scrunched them with my foot on the concrete.

One day, after ripping up another note, waving it in his face and yelling, “Stop it!”, Charles said that he would pull down his pants for me. My friend Stephanie looked shocked. Kanda laughed. I certainly did not want to see his privates, let alone any boy’s privates. I didn’t think he’d go through with it.

And yet, “Sure Charles” I said. “You can pull down your pants for me. But not here on the playground.”

He decided it would be at Roger’s Park after school let out the next day. Roger’s Park started at the bottom as a track with a soccer field in the center. From there it was like a bowl with a steep climb up to the trails through Fir, Hemlock, Maple and the stinky scent of Scotch broom. In the late Spring we girls like to sit off the track, chain daisies together and talk about boys. We never talked about Charles.

Charles raced to find me after school. His forehead glistened with sweat. His voice shook. “Are you ready?” he asked me.

I had forgotten but dutifully turned with Kanda and followed him. My word is my word!

Notice of the event had spread. At least fifty unruly, exuberant students already assembled followed Charles. He stopped walking halfway out on one trail and turned to face the crowd who were now surrounding him. He looked frozen. One hand on a Fir trunk, his other clutched his trousers as boys shouted threatening encouragement. Pinecones were thrown. Small spits of gravel. Charles started to unbuckle his belt.

“I don’t think I can watch,” I said to Kanda. What if I had pushed through and told Charles that I didn’t even want to see his privates? How could I say that amidst a mob?

Charles dropped his trousers. Underneath the standard beige he had on plastic pants that were covered with cartoonish fire trucks.

“Oh no!” I gasped. Nobody wore plastic pants. That was for babies, not for third graders. What was wrong with him?

As I turned to leave Charles was crying, sweat rolling down his forehead into his eyes. Still besieged by the throng, the din captured the attention of college boys jogging in the bowl who, thankfully intervened.

I felt shame and regret that I’d agreed to look at him. I was partly to blame for his humiliation. It was a guilt I didn’t have to face for long. He transferred to another school the  next week and he was soon enough forgotten.

 

Flash Memoir: The Fit

 (c) 03/16/2022

1968 and we were eight and nine, the butt-end of the baby-boomers, city kids whose working class parents didn’t flee to the suburbs. Nixon was president. The Vietnam war raged across our black and white television screens. Kennedy and King had been assassinated, yet we didn’t know a thing about racial unrest or civil rights. Zoning red lines had lifted in Seattle; our student base still looked like it was segregated. None of us had parent’s contemplating divorce, and we were shielded from those older cousins who started taking the pill.

The world rarely broke through our slumber-party TV nights, the homogenous Brady Bunch and the strangely matriarchal Partridge Family. The three of us, Kanda, Stephanie and I, had Davy Jones posters on our walls. A couple of times I wiped boogers across Davy’s face.  

Kanda was already talking about how many babies she would have. Three, maybe four and at least one of each. We were allowed to look at, but not touch her baby doll. It was expensive and looked real. Stephanie didn’t talk about babies. She was already focused on what her husband would be like.

The last thing I wanted was a baby, and the attention of grown men either made me uncomfortable or terrified. It was clear to me that I’d would never quite fit the mold they both so easily slipped in to. I didn’t know what else to want.

Kanda’s mother worked at Fircrest which is an institution housing the intellectually disabled. That was not the label we used in 1968.  We went there on weekends to play on the trampoline, but just us. Not the residents. I was confused by their visible inabilities to do simple things on their own, such as walking. Kanda’s mom seemed unfazed by it.

Stephanie’s mother volunteered at the church. I tagged along sometimes to youth events. I’m sure someone, somewhere hoped I’d become a believer. For a while I did.

We lost touch over the years, got back in touch, lost touch.

In 1980, Kanda had secured a job for me as a housecleaner for anarchists. There were guns on the floor and in cabinets and hunting knives on the kitchen counter. I cleaned one day and never went back to collect my money.

When I introduced her to my infant, Kanda held my daughter for two hours.

At our twenty-year high school reunion, Kanda brought one of her gay male friends and introduced him as her husband. We made eye contact. He shrugged.

As it turned out Kanda never had any children. She died of alcohol poisoning before she turned forty.

The last time I checked Stephanie had already been divorced three times. She is still committed to her church community.

I kept trying to fit the mold our parents set before us, even while the world all around illuminated that the mold was faulty. That if it wasn’t the mold that would break, it was us.