Posted on by Lydia Ink

The Beautiful

I saw her in the obituaries a couple days ago–and now her funeral is just across the street, in a stately Catholic church, but I won’t go.

She was beautiful when she was young, according to the tastes of the crowds; I found her loud.  I will confess, her photograph on the electronic obituary held only a memory of her beauty when I knew her.  I suppose her real beauty was on a George Orwell sort of scale; the fleeting beauty of youth hanging soggy laundry in the ghetto side of town.  Then marriage, children, a thickening waist — so become lumps.

Sometimes the beautiful don’t do well with the lump stage of life.

She wore the short skirt of a cheerleader on Friday. She was invited to all the parties on Saturday and went to Mass on Sundays. Her hair was always perfect.

I remember her parents, how proud they seemed of how fine she looked cheering the football team on in those chilly October nights.  They stood close to the cheerleaders, passing them hot cocoa and smiling back at friends who sat close together under blankets looking safe from the cold of autumn and the promise of winter. 

She was a hairdresser at her own upscale salon that she and her friends started. I was a walk in. I wanted a cut, something different. She didn’t recognize me from our high school days. Why remember a wall flower? After shampooing my hair she asked,”How do you want me to cut it?”

“I’m looking for something different.”

She pursed her lips and looked out the window. Friday night was beginning to glow outside the large window. “Right. Well I need some direction okay.”

“You in a hurry?”

She looked at my reflection in the mirror. She narrowed her eyes and tapped the sharp little scissors on the edge of my chair. I paid her for the shampoo and didn’t tip her. I went home and cut my own hair. No hard feelings, sincerely.

Her obituary stated she was survived by her fur baby, Hank.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Musical Chairs

I wish I could cry when I had time to cry. Crying at inappropriate moments seems to be my bailiwick in ripe middle-age. Driving up to the teller window at the bank is not an appropriate to cry. My mouth opens to speak and then suddenly cracks around a sudden onslaught of tears. That’s humiliating. Some poor young girl, who can wear tight fitting tops and look good in too much silver, tries to either ignore me or be overtly kind; either reaction adds to my weeping fit. All the while my mind calm and cool is pacing out sentences such as, ‘just what the hell is the matter with you?’

The solution? I go home, shut the door, ignore the loud party the neighbors are throwing in the apartment below me and tell myself to cry. Cry to your heart’s content. Nothing.

I often wonder what it would be like to take on a lover again. When I was young, making love was so simple, I would just pretend he was someone else and the climax was spectacular. Admittedly, the afterglow was decidedly flat.

I have always been a realist. I understood then as I do now that if you choose a lover for the effect, then one must be ready for the reality of non-committal after glow. In short, one-night stands (all I was interested in) didn’t know how to act after love. He either smoked, paced the floor, hands shaking, worried about his wife, or he went for a glass of water and fell asleep on the couch. There are other stories, all of them just as boring.

Taking on a lover now may be interesting. I don’t have the strength to lie anymore, so what would brutal, honest love making be like? Would I cry? If so, one of two things would happen. He would put his pants on backward trying to get away from me or make me tea and pat my head. Either way, the circumstances remind me of the bank teller in the tight top and too much silver, and I know I’d laugh like a bitch. Men don’t understand laughter.

Love without the dogged-dread of commitment is like losing at musical chairs. I remember only once playing musical chairs as a child. I don’t suppose that’s played in the western world anymore–all of our political correctness not allowing anyone to standalone, cast out, moved over to the side. Now we all just stand on one side of the room or the other, and no music plays at all. Safer anyway, I suppose, like allowing the lover to spend the night on one’s couch and feel relief when he’s not there in the morning.

So there I sit in my apartment, a party down below and me allowing myself to cry and feeling noncommittal. I think about turning on my computer and watching a French film and I think about making myself an omelet and I think about adopting a cat. Nothing. But tomorrow when I’m sitting at my job and thinking about what I did the evening before, I’ll want to weep at how pathetic I must have appeared to no one there, yet feel relief that no one is there.

So rather than think, I walk to the bar and drink sticky sweet sherry because I can’t think of what to order and watch the band play songs they don’t know. I see a face I pass during the day and he nods my way, too bored or too shy to come say hello or too relieved to be in a crowd alone. This, I think, is how post modernist love making was born; no musical chairs, no mistakes, no crime and no tears.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Her Sister’s Room

Wandering into the room, with chores and small goals on her mind, the mistake was made.  She was usually so careful, but even the best of plain girls make mistakes.  Her error when through the doorway became apparent when the air became still, hushed and in between that hushed era and the next noisy moments (the scraping of chairs and clanking of metal upon metal) she lived years of revelation and revulsion.  Life folded out before her, sighing, full of regret and self-incrimination.  It was as if she had already lived through the consequence and looking back to the day her life changed.  She was beyond the belief of her own existence.  How she could have been so careless, so absent minded regarding her own health and psyche in that brief eternity she knew would follow her forever?

With the first harsh word that sounded like a scrape upon an old blackboard, intentional and mean-spirited, her mind went from realization to self preservation.  What did she think she was doing, what right did she have?  That grating voice, the voice her sister reserved for only her, sounded like a rusted gate slamming shut against all freedom.

Her sister and her friends, all beautiful and flouncing when outside and before crowds of admiring, small town fans had crowded into her sister’s room.  Her sister’s room; off limits to such disasters as she.  When indoors, behind the secret keepers of wood and curtains, the darlings of old church ladies and weak old men grew fangs and gained a foreign language.  The door to her sister’s room hid sibling’s vices.  The quick squashing of ill rolled joints smoldering between prettily painted fingertips, the slush of clear filmy liquid capped with rusty sounding metal lids was quickly stuffed away behind flowing, bright material that draped her sister’s room.

She often wondered if her sister appreciated the royal hang and drape of her room or insisted upon the princess material she might hide and secret away the reprehensible thing. The latter assumption was a now fact as she walked mindlessly into the dark den.

She and her sister had separate rooms and upstairs away from her parents.  But the second story was no stopping point for those who were limber and in on her sister’s secrets.   The laughter, the hushed moans, and the sharp whispers to “shut up if you want to do this again,” that only she could hear and her parents never fathomed.  She kept her distance and played her music to silence the hissing laughter that leaked from the thin slits that illuminated her sister’s bedroom door.

And now she was in her sister’s room, in broad daylight, with only a direction from her mother to take her sister’s bedding to the charming side of the family.  Cream and red with bits of stylish black woven into the six hundred thread cotton sheet.  She herself had white by her own insistence.  What a thing to think at a time like this.

Makeup smeared and a masculine chuckle and she did not want to look up–if only she had thought if only all of her sister’s friends weren’t standing around with smiles as diabolical as demons.  She felt her stomach lurch when she heard someway say cover him up.

And then a faint call, a singsong wavering request from downstairs.  She was to come down and help with chores and leave her sister alone with her friends.

She brushed past her mother’s smothering smile, while feeling like the last person in the world.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Upon the Cliff’s Edge

Why the cliff’s edge? Because the contemplation of death from an armchair is a cheat. I stand physically alone upon this literal precipice.  The expanse of water to the horizon inspires my soul just as the 18th-century poets, whose enlightenment looked upon impossible physicality as the block that whetted the edge of their ability; I too aspire to to their aspirations.

The sound of such a mighty force of water and gravity upon the shoreline relaxes the tension across my shoulders inexplicably, but the jagged rocks below, visible because of the height and abruptness of the drop, causes my heart to pound.  My blood surges to my fingertips and I totter upon the edge, not wanting the pain, not wanting the end of my known existence and yet upon the edge, regardless.

No, I have no unfaithful lover nor am I being forced into distasteful existence; I am contemplating my death.  Suicide?  No.  Even as I weave upon this edge, I cannot force my foot forward to test my ideas of continuance.

The whine of my little dog, well back from the edge, brings me out of my own thoughts.  I step back, catch my heel upon a thick piece of turf and stumble.  I cry out and my inner organs sink into watery fear.  The only earth to catch my forward fall is the jagged and rocky strip of land that meets the sea far below.

Such a comfortable existence the lady had are the murmurs of neighbors, who scurry about with their daily and mundane tasks.  Her beauty they will say was unique and even a reality to the contemplative man. Why go to that damned cliff’s edge, why take the chance that so many warned her against?

Instinctively?  Yes, with a will to live I twist and grasp at the long shaggy turf while my feet entangled, kick against the air as if that element may solidify in pity toward my plight.  As I dig my fingers into the grass and hear the growl and whine of my little rat terrier, I laugh even as my hip and waist slide over the edge.  The warm, light, wool walking skirt wraps around my calves and the pointed tips of my walking boots slam painfully into the crumbling cliff face.  Still laughing, I dig my fingers into the turf which loosens from the ground. Scrambling for a small foothold, but hampered by my clothes, the weight of my body works against the desire of my mind.

I stop the struggle and look into the wide, fearful eyes of my little white dog.  There is a moment when I know both of us think the same thing… what will he do without me?

Ridiculous, isn’t it?  Did Adam and Eve despair about the garden when the angel with the flaming sword stood before the entrance of their once quiet domain?   What a damnable question to ask when what they wanted was their own empire.

“I’m so sorry,” I gasp at the canine face which only knows loyalty and yaps and whines knowing its world has now changed.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Love’s Trouble for Me

I worried after I fell in love that I would lose my edge. Edge is everything in my business. Love blunts every edge; I don’t care who you are. It’s cruel if I don’t stay sharp, razor sharp. Taking a swipe at someone while something blunts my edge? Well let’s face it they suffer. If I’m not hampered by the preoccupations of love, that swipe is painless, goes without a hitch, you’re dead before their mind can reach pain.

Yes, I’m a professional. It take care of the business in a quick and professional.

I was in love once before, years ago when I was young. I mean, you know love. I can’t help what I am, I can’t. She didn’t understand, and she moved to Milwaukee. It devastated me. I think disappointment gave me my edge. I wanted to hate her, I really did but I couldn’t. Years later I had a job in that area and I looked her up. She was still fine, and she seemed happy. I said hello, and she seemed edgy, a little scared but okay. Next thing I know she’s in Green Bay, then she’s in St Paul and divorced. I called her a year later; you know just to check on her, make sure she was okay. She was in Seattle. I point blank asked her if she wanted me to look up her ex-husband and she said no. She was emphatic about it, so I didn’t and I won’t. She’s in Tokyo now, seems to be doing all right.

I met my new lease on life during an emergency room visit in Chicago. One of those big hospitals. I had run into a little problem in New Albany, thought I was okay but I started running a fever while vacationing in Chicago. I love that city; Chicago. Anyway, I met Alice there.

Alice is tough as nails and hates her name so I call her Honey and Babe and things like that. She’s an emergency room nurse and man, some of the stories she tells makes my skin crawl. I mean she’s seen shotgun wounds, and people beaten to a pulp. Then there are the car accidents and the scum of the earth who hurt their kids. I was in tears one night; I don’t know how she stays sane.

She’s beautiful too. Clean. Her hair is always glossy and she doesn’t fan out on the makeup; a little liner, when I’m in town and she puts on a little mascara, a little lip gloss. I can still see a few freckles across her nose. So sweet, so dedicated.

I, of course, tell her I have no family. I’m not an idiot, I keep her well protected. I am human; some may doubt that but I am human. She loves to read old novels and I’m understanding why. I like The Portrait of Dorian Gray and The Invisible Man–man can you imagine how I can relate?