The widow was in the habit now of meditating by the pond
daily, daybreak or dusk. She liked to
watch the birds wash themselves in the waterfall. They came in couples mostly. Each with her own kind. She liked the cardinals the best, the wariest
ones. The white pond fish, formerly the
baby, was now a woman – she was hiding in the pump box, safe from being humped
half to death by the showy greedy gold boys.
The candle burned at Mary’s feet, presiding over the untied cord, a holy
light between the ends guiding them on their separate ways (your ways are not
my ways). It wasn’t sentiment that kept
the cord, the fire burning – the widow just didn’t know what to do with it
other than that – she trusted that knowledge would come to her when it was time
to know, and until then GO was the what the light was for, simply that, one half
GO and the other STAY. The widow was
STAY. They had tied themselves together with
the cord ‘in this life and the next’, and the widow had untied it once and for
all, thinking that surely this was now the next life. The After-Our-Life. That thought heartened her, for it meant that
they didn’t have to do this all again reincarnated, which made her imagine living
miserably next to him come back as bullfrogs: him BUD, her WISE, and always
waiting for some young ER to show up and rock the lily pad. The covenant of the cord had included a
spell, the Witch’s last for the unintended force of it, that their skins be knitted
and to part would feel like peeling. The
widow didn’t feel peeled at all. In fact, to
take a fearless searching inventory of her damage was what she meditated for, and she was still recovering certainly….but she didn’t feel like the last time, and that
led her to believe it was a turns-taking thing, and that it was his turn to peel,
as if encased in lemon juice with a nettle leaf wedged in his ass, rubbed raw by
memory, by planning, by action, by inaction, by solitude, by sociality, until all if it added up to a 3rd degree injury.
She remembered. Feeling that
way.
But this time around, if she were to choose a word
for how she felt, it would be stolid. A little Godflick to her forehead, an itchy scabbing stabwound between
her shoulder blades, and a sometimes still-poisoned feeling in her lower guts like wads
of wet cement there – she put her hand to it, willing it better, the poison to
abate. To do this inventory,
she started at her toes and felt her way up, flex and release, each muscle and
organ and bit of skin she could control.
Without him to attend to, alwaysalways, she could tend her own selfhood,
and enjoyed the feeling of being alive to herself, her skin oiled, her frame
lightened to her natural state of butt anchored and shoulders slender, her cuticles
healed back from chewed, her hair unfussfettered loose around her shoulders,
her lips tingling with bee balm, etc, as if she were own babychild tended back
from illness or a too-long stay in foster.
Last, she inspected her mind. This
was her favorite part. What she felt was
reality and what she knew to be reality matched (!), and thus she basked in sanity,
sunk into her mind as if into a bath that indeed had water in it like it was supposed to, and she
let it think what it wanted without censure.
She was surprised by the thought. ‘I should have opted to be the mistress, not
the wife.’ But she let it.
In almost all appreciable ways, he had gotten the better end
of their deal. She tended him
diligently, never harmed him deliberately or casually, always sought to provide
proof of his value and the like, kept the lights on, all of it. But. She
had become better, especially this last time around, a better person for the
sake of their union, striving. And she
still retained that. And he had not
gotten better, so he had not grown richer at all in that way, logically
speaking. Starting from the very simple
but culturally revolutionary premise that a faked orgasm was a lie, she would
be ever honest, she never had faked it.
And that changed everything by extension. She never acted happy when she was not –
instead, if she was struggling to be happy when she was not happy, she said
that. She never made herself watch Cops,
she did chores instead, puttered, which she liked. She never pretended to like ska music, which
was like a rusty nail to the eardrum as far as she was concerned. When they began, she didn’t lie about big
ticket items, like she wasn’t carrying on with other men (duh) – but that was
way too easy. She took honesty way further
than that as they went on. Real, utterly, all the time. Not rude, just not false. That’s what she felt she owed him. And that’s what she felt like now, still. Real.
Stayed.
But he. He lied. About the big tickets, and by extension
probably about every little thing.
It would be the mistresses, and he always had one, who would get the
truth. To the permanent women, he would
be accountable, and not wanting to be accountable, he lied. So her thought, ‘I should have been the
mistress’, was her wondering if that could be reversed.
The question was this:
If he was not accountable to a woman in any way, if obviously he didn’t owe
her monogamy being married to someone else and all, and didn’t owe her his time
being expected elsewhere and all, etcetcetc, would that render a space in
which he too could be Real. She
meditated on it. She suspected the
answer was: No. He would make an oppressor
out of whomever was with, in any capacity, because he didn’t know how to live
without one.
Upshot: To tell a lie is to hide a truth, right? Why else?
You keep the latter safe, somehow, by presenting the former
instead. If you’re not lying, how do you
know if you have any truth to protect at all?
HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU’RE REAL? You don’t. Not if you’re him. Pinocchio’s conundrum. And so, even to a
mistress, he would make up reasons to have to lie. To ‘save her feelings’ or if he were a little
more honest ‘to save himself from having to deal with her feelings’, something,
some imperative to create a false self that cast a shadow he could pretend was
his real personhood. How could that ever
be overcome? She thought: ‘I should have
opted to be the mistress who could not speak English.’ Ha.
Yes, radically limit language. Perhaps that would have worked. Ever the professor,
she knew the value of concision. An
essay is good, a sonnet better, a haiku better than that, for distilling.
On a whim, she took up her half of the cord in her mind and
cracked it like a wet towel in a locker room, hard. Say one true thing. If you are
able. A brief declarative sentence. No commas, don’t fuck around, and if I smell
manipulation in the intent I will belt you bloody with this thing. Then she listened, head tilted to the wind. And heard not a peep, not even from the birds.