Creature (7 page)

It is horrible to lose someone and yet that has happened to me. Now I’m alone, but I’m not unhappy. It is hot and beautiful enough on my farm that I feel okay about being rejected. I have tried to make other people reject me so I can relive my trauma in the way a person is supposed to live it. So far it hasn’t happened, but JUST TODAY I SAW SOMEONE, and I think I can make this person do it. When I see this person I feel sick and I think this means I am on the right track.

This is something I concern myself with only in a “side pocket” sort of way. My priorities are with my compositions. I have thought about writing a farming manual, but I will have to think even more before I attempt it. I do write about my farm, but in a different way. I allow myself to inhabit my FARM poetically.

In the evenings I’m calm; I am hardly ever calm at any other moment. I wear what you think I would—long, flowing pants and a button-down denim shirt. My hair is either pulled back in a bun or pulled back with barrettes so that my hair hangs onto my shoulders. I used to be a dancer—you can see this in my posture and in the way I carry myself. I’m graceful. I know this and I’m not afraid to admit it for it is the great triumph of my life. Also, this helps me with music. Now that I no longer dance I WRITE MUSIC I think other dancers would enjoy. My compositions are complex and moody. They’re not pretty, but they allow the listener a deeper relationship to my farm. At the end of the summer I will hold my own concert in this place.

My talents extend in every direction: farmer, possible writer of a farming manual, composer, dancer, possible musician. Now you understand why there is no time for me to actually farm.

Dressed in the way I’ve told you I stroll about the fields and often right off of them. The palm trees have their own relationship to air and it is exquisite to see. One can only imagine how their fronds take it in and change because of its presence. The movement is very slow. This slowness is good for me to witness. One part of a frond is pointing up, even while the rest of the points move to the left, or stay entirely still.

Then there is the river, moving in its own slow way. To watch the movement of the river sometimes means lying down next to it to GET CLOSE to the miniature swells and waves.

In the evenings when I am not strolling about I am in my house, cradled by the land. I sit down at my desk and work. I can’t tell you what I look like when I’m working because I don’t know. MY DESK IS HUGE AND BEAUTIFUL, very expensive, how could I not want to work there. The wood is unfinished, but in a particular kind of way. When it’s touched it’s smooth.

The compositions come easily, simply because I am cradled and I am able to express this through music. I am able to picture the dancers on the farm and compose songs that are right and true for them to dance to. I am waiting for the right time, for when I CAN HAVE A RECITAL HERE. I will have to work for months before this can happen, because I haven’t yet matured into my craft. I haven’t matured into any of them. But my relationship to everything I do is serious. You can’t imagine how near I get to my work.

This person, the one with whom I would like to relive my rejection, is always in town. This person must live here now or at least be on a very long vacation. Sitting for hours in the café, not working at all. Or sometimes sitting in the rocking chair on the porch of the post office. But also, riding a bike or running along a path. This person is more relaxed than I am, but not healthier. No one in this area is healthier than me.

Imagine trying to compose something at the beginning of summer. Tonight I am an insect, a book, a VERY LARGE PLANT. Do you know what that’s like? It means I am light, pensive, and then finally bigger than life. The one time I engaged in a sitting meditation my hands grew. They were huge. This was only a sensation. Here in this room I have enough love for everyone. Even the men (and the one woman) who work on my farm. There is something I want to get through to you, but I don’t know how to do it. There is something I want to communicate about MY LIFE.

I have not always lived on this farm. I grew up in a city where I was taken everywhere I wanted to go. As a young woman I went to see aberrant things and this upset my family. I went to dance classes, where I was introduced to music. On cold autumn mornings the rain beat upon the windows and I exulted in my position in the class. I loved to dance. I even loved to wait on the floor until it was my turn to move across it.

Sometimes it is sensual just to be here, taking in the land, letting it wash over me. In certain moments I am a wild boar. I barely NEED ANOTHER.

At the first concert of the summer season I lie in the grass. Those closer to the stage sit in seats, and though I can afford to sit with them I prefer it here. I have always loved grass. The musicians are far away on the stage, but there are things about them that stand out all the same. They wear dark SKIRTS OR PANTS AND LIGHT shirts. They hold their instruments close to their bodies, or, if the instrument is on the ground they draw near it, hovering just above. I haven’t yet put myself in the right proximity to an instrument. I have held a fiddle too far from my body.

The music is soft, then loud. Too loud. I look up at the sky. I had no idea it would be such a noisy concert and it hurts my ears. If I picture dancers now they are completely in crisis. They are violent criminals wearing costumes dyed a deep red. To picture this makes me nervous, as if I will be attacked before I get back to the farm. And of course there is nothing for me to copy down. When I hold a recital the music will be soft, so soft it will be hard to hear it. My talent lies in gentleness, even if I am not a gentle person.

Walking through the streets when the concert is over, the warm air pressing delicately against the night, I feel my future. The person I want to reject me is standing next to a palm.

“Hello,” I call gently.

“What?” the person answers. The shadow of the PALM IS DEEP.

“It’s so warm. And beautiful.”

“It’s always warm here.”

“That’s true. My farm is a bit farther down the road. Would you like to see it?”

This person takes so long to answer I’m afraid nothing will be said. But, finally, “I don’t visit the farms of strangers.”

I breathe out an audible sigh, like I have been taught to do in yoga, but I don’t think this person understands anything like that. This person is gone before I know what’s happened, leaving me completely alone. What I appreciate most about compositions, dance, and the air is what I appreciate about people. To go out and meet them you must go incredibly far.

If the air is cold enough I feel something. It might only be on my arm or my hand, but it is there. All last year I wore a brooch pinned to my coat. I was conscious of it. When I walked down the street, I was lifted by the brooch. I was still walking on the ground, but some part of me was floating up, a small part of me.

These days it’s colder and colder and I feel more. My skin is warm where my clothes touch me, and I sit in front of a heater like it’s a fire. I bought a silk robe and it is the most beautiful thing I own. It’s silver with faintly colorful flowers.

In the mornings my students lumber through the snow, trailing their bright mittens and hats, dropping them on the ground. I can see them coming a long way off, these different parts of them. In class I am bored and I talk and talk until my voice is its own separate thing. I don’t know what children like. I have to watch cartoons or movies if I want to understand anything about them.

Last Saturday I saw a play about a war. Next to me sat a man and a woman. I had the feeling they wanted me to share the experience of the play with them. The woman’s hair was braided and looped around her head. She looked expectantly at the stage, and sometimes at me. “Do you like this play?” she whispered. I whispered that though it was violent, I felt some affinity to it.

During intermission I went to the bathroom to reapply my lipstick and then I drank champagne in the lobby. The room was warm with people and I felt connected to them. I looked in their eyes and they looked back at me, sometimes for a long time.

Then the lights flickered, calling us back to the theater. Drunk from the sensations, I found my seat. This time the man was seated closest to me and he nodded at me as I sat down and he tried to hold my gaze. I nodded back, but didn’t look at him for long because the play was starting and I didn’t want to miss anything.

Now I felt an affinity so dearly to the actors that everything inside me was heartbreakingly connected. My experience of the moment heightened, but outside I remained calm.

Toward the end of the play the stage became chaotic, like fat horses were galloping over it. Men knocked each other down and struck each other in the faces and heads. Several women stood on the sidelines, screaming. I found myself getting angry at the screaming. “This is a play!” I yelled as loudly as I could. It was already so loud it didn’t matter that I had yelled it. Then, when everyone was dead, including the women, the play was over. “Fuck you,” I said, weakly. Everyone clapped. I started clapping too.

“Are you okay?” the man next to me asked.

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?” He asked me this question with more curiosity than I was expecting.

“Josephine.”

“What a beautiful name. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Josephine.”

I put on my coat and gathered my things. The belt to my coat was tied very tightly around my waist.

“Yes, a pleasure,” the woman said.

“You too.” I kept tightening my belt. I didn’t know if I should stay or leave, but finally made my way toward the doors. I turned around and the two of them were holding hands, watching me.

At the edge of a field, carrots grow in the dark soil. Green leaves mark them. A small animal moves in and out among the vegetables, eating. In my kitchen I prepare rice. I soak black beans. This is when we are most vulnerable; when we eat, when we prepare to.

When I was a child, I was nothing like my students. I wanted to see neon lights clustered near an ocean. In Shanghai, this came true. I walked along the Bundt and the air was like a thousand ovens. Late at night I lay in a bed “feeling the room.” I must have been looking for something when I walked back and forth next to the water. Though there are many ways in which I am the same now as I was then, I don’t understand who I was as a child either.

In class, I ask the children to put on a play. Because they like the theater they are excited by this idea. One little girl is a trash truck. I tell her it would be better to play a person. She says she’ll be a hobo. The children make fake snow out of cotton balls glued onto poster-board. They have so much fun building the set they are angry when they have to perform.

When they do perform, I get bored. There are seven of them “on stage” and two of them are reciting their Christmas lists. I pay attention as long as I can and then I stare at the blackboard and then at the clock.

“Are you watching!” the children shriek.

The bell rings and they drop everything, scattering into the hallway. Out in the street I cry because I know I am a bad teacher, but there is nothing else for me to do with my life. A huge pink doll sits in the window of a toy store in the middle of a miniature village, a train circling around her. I hate this scene.

I think about the couple. At night, when I read in my bed, or in the old armchair next to the window, it doesn’t take long before the book is resting in my lap, closed, and I am aware of nothing but the inside of my mind. There the couple looks at me and I look at them.

When I pull carrots out of the soil, or snip chard from its pink stems, I imagine what their house must be like. I am sure there are drawings hanging on the walls and that a strong female dog guards them and keeps them safe. A dog they walk and let onto the couch on chilly evenings. If I want this kind of night it is mine.

When the weekend comes I go back to the theater. There, surrounded by other theatergoers, is my couple, just as I had imagined they would be. The woman gets up to meet me. She is wearing a dress made of a soft material. I let myself fall into her.

“Your skin is cold,” she says.

“Too cold?”

“No.”

The man takes my hand and holds it against his cheek. “I’m just going to come right out and ask. Are you married?”

“Not at all.”

“That’s terrific.”

“Sit down,” the woman says, motioning to the chair between them.

On stage is a man in a kitchen, putting groceries away. I sit there feeling the stage, feeling the whole theater. I can feel its history.

Because it is much quieter than the play before it we in the audience can hear each other breathe. The actor breathes too. He and I look at each other. Then he looks at the man next to me. The theater has turned into a living room.

“This is the front hallway. This is the bathroom. This is the bedroom.” I say these things in a fragile voice.

The couple lingers at the door of my bedroom. “Would you like to go in?” I ask.

“Yes,” the man answers.

They asked if they could visit me and now they are here. I freeze in front of my bed, a statue in my own rooms.

“We don’t mean to frighten you,” the woman says.

“I’m often frightened.”

“Why?” the man asks.

“Life is frightening.” I sigh. “But it is also tender.”

“It is,” the woman says. “And sometimes it becomes new.”

“Should I change into something more comfortable?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” she says.

I take off my clothes, enjoying the feeling of being naked in front of the couple. I think they are finally scared. I pull the robe around me, closing it with its silk belt. Now nobody knows what to do. I kiss the woman and then I kiss the man. Then we stand there, terrified.

At school, I try to be present for my students. We make turkeys out of paper plates and construction paper, and after the children have drawn all over them in colors like pink and light green that are nothing like the colors of turkeys, they take off around the room, running with their new birds, sometimes slipping on them.