u s e y o u r h a n d s

I’m very, very warm now and the sherry which seemed so warm before now feels like ice. It’s a mercurial beverage but I’m growing fonder of it. There goes the body, relaxing so deeply into the chair that I feel constructed from wood and industrial upholstery and not blood. I give the toes a wiggle; nada. A lethargic little shake. Wind blows through the open window sort of erotically, but my feet are nunnish, not simply ignoring advances but not seeing them at all. I hate my blind, priggish feet.

But the rest of me is divine! It’s lovely – decadent! – to drink sherry in the morning on a work day. There’s still this sense of guilt about not being there; it’s manifesting in olfactory retardation. Instead of the trees outside or whisps of fireplace smoke, I’m smelling freshly copied paper and dusty cubicle walls. Somewhere, my boss is circling like a shark, but I’m away from her whirlpool.

I was correct. My forehead is slightly damp. I do not like sweat, although my own is fairly benign. My husband, his smile grinning like a joker six inches above my face, radiates an odor of lettuce. Iceberg lettuce is not sexy. The first time this ocurred, I thought it was a fluke, the mind playing tricks. But it’s a regular association. And like a radio dial tuning in a station, the scent is becoming more rounded, now with carrots and a hint of radish. I take thee, Salad, to fuck and to hold.

You can never completely drain a glass. There will always be some liquid clinging on any small cliff. (I did it again, the lying. No husband.) What else remains? Bits of lip. Flakes. How many sips equals one complete lip?

My feet smell. They are totally numb but I’m still being assaulted – no, assaulted is too much – massaged? Bothered. Bothered by the smell of my own disembodied feet. It’s an earthy smell, moss and dirt, but I prefer that my body parts smell like one or all of the following 1) baby powder 2) fresh rain or 3) tropical mist. However, the feet, my only two contacts with the earth, resist chemical enhancement. It’s odd how the feeling has fallen away but this smell continues, beating all the others, like a schoolyard bully.

A year ago today, I put my ten-year-old on a plane with the rest of his fifth-grade class. They were on their way to Washington, D.C. to tour innumerable museums and cause commotion. I waved, relieved, hoping he would remember to take a bath at least once in the ten day trip. Three hours after I dropped him off at the school, after they’d travelled to the airport and just after the plane lifted off the comfort of ashphalt, he disappeared in a ball of fire and noise. The plane tumbled down the runway and blew apart into a billion pieces with such force that a shoe, my son’s shoe, was found five miles away. And when I see my feet, I see his, without a shoe, floating in the sky, ringed by pale yellow light.

The kitchen floor is in need of a washing. Where tiles meet each other, they peel back and the material (That part, about my son? I made it up.) is stained black. The kitchen looks dirty; I am not a dirty person, though I did just slop a bit of sherry down my front. More sherry will forget this incident. The cup reads “Blood Drive ‘96.” I have no idea how it showed up in my cabinet. I glance from my veins to the cup. My blushing virgin veins had yet to be penetrated by anything so gauche as a needle. Mine was mine. It was a rule and a mantra.

I am out of water again, but I won’t get up to get more. And I need to brush my teeth. My mouth tastes like old coffee and my teeth still have that nighttime scum on them. But I’m not getting up. My feet are numb, propped up on the windowsill for too long, and I prefer not to experience that hateful pins-and-needles feeling. So I plan to sit here until I fall asleep and tumble from my chair to the ground where my legs will fill with blood without inconvenince.

Two cars, I think, just crashed outside. It sounded like two cars. Sets of squealing tired ending with a metallic thud and now hissing. It smells like rubber. There’s yelling. The phone is over there, out of my reach. I should probably get up to see if I can help. The yelling doesn’t sound bloody. I think everything’s ok.

I remember my father would do this sometimes. Not necessarily because of napping limbs, but to win some personal contest we weren’t let in on. He’d drink gallons of whatever and then sit perched in a chair, staring at the clock and the bathroom door. Sometimes he made it to the bathroom; often, he did not. He broke his record, three hours, 15 minutes with four gallons hidden inside him unexpectedly. It was his custom to meditate until his bladder changed it’s call from a throat clearing to a scream and pounding. But that day, a snatch of Paul McCartney singing “Blackbird” floated out of my room. My dad heard it, was hit by its beauty, and was held spellbound for two minutes beyond his old record. Later that day, he gassed himself in the oven.

I’ve never listened to the Beatles since.

Within my reach is a computer and printer, the liquor cabinet, and a bowl of edamame left out since last night. I have no need for the technology. It’s ugly and other than tracing my finger through the dust on the monitor, I have no need for it at all. The liquor cabinet is fully stocked. I know because I stocked it myself. Somewhere, the list I used when I shopped is inside it, with careful tick marks next to each item put in the cart. The liquor store didn’t have bleu cheese-stuffed olives. Note: there is nothing more divine at 9 a.m. than a coffee cup full of dry sherry.

As for the edamame, they’ve gone waxy and limp and I can’t even imagine the taste treat that is sherry washing over soybean stuck in the molars. I play with them, stacking them and letting them fall and scatter. A few edamame skitch over the floor and gather dust. They will be rolled into paste when I fall out of this chair.