by Ann Iverson
I wish we could be something like starfish, living without for only so long, growing back what we lost along the way. If only one little piece of us remained, we could grow ourselves back again into whole new creatures just living by the sea.
I married first, quite young, in my teens to a man, as you know, from Oklahoma, a good man, a kind man. He used to buy me sour apple bubble gum at the gas station every night on his way home from work. I’d blow big, green bubbles while I cooked dinner, wore an apron and sang show tunes. He would kiss me on the cheek as he set his lunch box on the counter, then would walk out to the garden. I’d watch him sometimes from the window above the sink knowing about those dreams that would go on inside his head. If he had just a few plants, he dreamed them a farm, a shack a mansion and nothing less. I had trouble sleeping enough to catch him in his dreams, but I liked the way he looked out there, walking slowly with his head down thinking big, important things. I was eighteen; he was twenty-four.
I wrote poetry for him, short, simple poems that I decorated with magic marker. He would kiss me on the cheek, then set them on the dining room table. I stored them for him in a shoe box while he took a bath. I used to page through local cookbooks from the Legion or the church bazaar that his mother had given me, try my hand at making Maud Shirley ‘s “Angel Fluff Banana Cake” or Martha Strousberg’s “Zesty Okra Tubule Salad.” With my hair tied back in a bandanna, I would call out to see if he was pleased with what I had made. Always he was, even if he wasn’t. I was nineteen on that football Sunday afternoon, when I stood up from the couch and declared that I was bored. No solution for a city girl in a small southern town. So, I tried canning: okra, peaches, green beans. I strung bushels of beans on the porch but would never admit to anyone that I was restless. While no one was looking, I would throw handfuls of beans into the bowl without pulling off that stupid string. I never really read the recipes, put too much salt in the beans, not enough vinegar in the pickles. And then there were those wild plum preserves. I never sealed the lids on tight, never figured out how to melt the paraffin, so I served him plum jam on his toast for two weeks straight to use it all up before it spoiled. I never told him that I did it all wrong, didn’t even sterilize any of the jars, but his father said, “Them are mighty good pickles.”
Lonely and discontent, I drove around town in his black Cutlass, with plastic taped up in one window, wondering what to do. One time I drove 750 miles back home, thinking maybe a change of scenery, the city lights, the Minnesota landscape would dilute my loneliness, but something always made me go back. When I graduated, we moved to Minnesota where we belonged to a small charismatic church, but over time our growing pains and differences in belief caused us unrest and to eventually go our own ways. But during the years directly after our parting, in an instant, I could be right back there nauseated from the heat, sitting on top of the kitchen counter in that old, condemned house in Oklahoma that we cleaned up for free rent. I am there fighting ugly orange contact paper they still have at Target. I could be there with pieces of it stuck to my hair and arms, crumpling up huge piece after piece. I could hear his semi rumble down our tiny street, and I could still feel my legs running out the door to ride in his semi on a run to Oklahoma City.
As a 26 year old divorcee, the drought of not seeing him was enough, yet sometimes, in my dreams, he would pour on me, to where I found myself crawling across the floor to his bed,
wanting to be near. In my dreams, I was with his family on Christmas. No one liked me. I would wake up sad. I dreamt of him driving in the car ahead of me, stopping at the intersection then turning to press his lips softly against a woman’s cheek, arms resting on the back of her seat. I would almost rear end him, then brake myself awake, startled and unsettled. Or the dream where I was running down a big hill in his backyard. It was night and I cut through his house, snuck in the kitchen, peeked around the corner to see him like his father in a reclining chair watching T.V. A woman was running her bath. I ran out through the front door to a strange street with no money for the bus. Dreaming, I would see him with his girlfriend, nude running towards him on the beach. I’d hide behind a cliff, always seeing the back of her long curly black hair. I seemed to have been behind him so much in my dreams. Even at church, I was always a few rows back. He was somewhere near the front with one hand in the air before God. I would wake up feeling guilty and far away from something but it really wasn’t God. Sometimes they would come for three nights in a row, maybe two dreams in one sleep and stayed with me for hours. So why remember any of them? The silence inside after the dream ends, before the story begins is not enough to write these words, the words we don’t consider in the gullies of things we find so hard to admit. I admitted that everything I had left for him was subconscious, came out in unexpected sarcasm when I would hear of his plans to remarry, came out in contented laughter when I saw he had painted our house such an unsuccessful blue.
Yet this is where writing falls short, when telling the story isn’t enough. It leaves me to resort to the romantic when I used to imagine running into him at Target: I imagined that I would see him first then dodge behind a display to spy. His arms would be tan and strong, and he would look more like his father with a rounder nose and deepened wrinkles. He would not be shopping but be with someone who was, a young, tall, slender girl, almost as tall as he. I would imagine it was your daughter. His arm would be slung over her shoulder as the two of them would jabber and laugh. I would imagine what they were saying. The girl would stop by a rack of clothes, hold up a short skirt. He would shake his head and frown. The two of them would walk on; your daughter running her hand over the rack of skirts. I would follow. I would be so near the whole while, beginning to feel ridiculous that I was spying on my ex-husband at Target; but I would be desperate to hear his voice. He would turn and start walking my way; I would almost get caught, dart into a side aisle, knock some bundles of yarn out of a woman’s arm, apologize and try to pick them up for her. She would look at me strangely like I was a shoplifter. I would make my way back into the main aisle feeling somewhat relieved and go about my shopping, glance in a mirror, fluff my hair a bit just in case and head towards the checkout stand, trying to balance my checkbook while I waited in line. Until I would feel two hands grab me by the shoulders: “Annie, Annie?” I turn. “It is you. I can tell that walk anywhere. How are you?” A million memories would flood into me before I could even answer. “I’m fine and you?” “Good. I’m just in town for a few days.” I would not be listening to him though. With one look at his face, I would be thinking about how he made me take all the photos, and I’m remembering that one little snapshot of the two of us at some church Halloween party: a cheerleader and Superman. We kept pawning that silly picture in a plastic frame off on the other. I ‘m remembering it lying on the floor in the mess of all my packing and him leaning on the door watching me, spotting the picture, then bending down to pick it up and look at it for a while then asking me if I wanted it. “No” So you stuffed it in a box of my sweaters. And before I left with that load, I set it on the counter only to find it again packed in with my books, so on the way out the door I set it on the porch windowsill. Then months later, I ran across it with my mittens and scarves. But it’s only right that I ended up with it, because I ‘ve never been very good at letting go.
“That’s great. I’m glad things are going well for you.” You look at me curiously as though you can tell what I’m thinking. “So how’s your writing coming along?” “Pretty good for now,” but I don’t want to tell him anything else, don’t want to give it away that I’ve already written this scene; I’ve already met his daughter and have looked at pictures of the new baby and wife and have already wondered if he gets mad at her, if she ever wears his underwear to bed, wondering if she’s careful enough to wear the old ones.
So pages took me a seat ahead of him. Though I felt that I might be, I didn’t feel any further along. But I saw how handsome he had weathered and that I could still make him laugh that rolling laugh like his father’s. For a while we would reminisce, talk about the funny things we did: the giant catfish in the bathtub at the old Rocking-R-Ranch, duck hunting, stringing trot lines on the pond, fishing in that inflatable raft we bought with green stamps, all the pumping units he cleaned and painted, then taking me around to each of them to show them off to me, the parking lot stripe painter and painting stripes from here to there and everywhere. Then our memories would begin to springboard off one another until we are leaning into each other and downright giggling together there in the middle of the aisle, blocking traffic. Then an angry shopper would purposely bump him in the behind with her cart, which would make us laugh all the harder. We would move out of the aisle, and he would prop his foot up on the bottom of the cart as we both catch our breath; then he’d look at me closely. Uncomfortable with the silence, I would ask about the family. He would ask about mine. We would talk about the summer of his brother’s death, the rage of that grief and how his mother sent pictures of his tombstone every Memorial Day.
He would be swept away by that time, and I would look at his hair and recall when he got a permanent just before the divorce was final and how that made me feel so sad and sorry for him because it really didn’t look that good. Then he would look at me softly and ask about my mother. Then we would talk about where we’re both living now. “I always thought that you would move back south,” then think about the way he used to like to shovel snow, getting up so early to clear the church lot. I would think about our house and coming back to it the first time, noticing how tidy everything was and that he had rearranged the kitchen counter cannisters and about how I had to keep going back time after time for my things and how the next time I ever have to leave someone, I’ll just be more organized, won’t let my things get so entangled with theirs, keeping everything that can hurt in a separate drawer.
He would look at me, then at his watch, “it’s time to track down my daughter.” We’d say our goodbyes, and when I would get into my car and start driving, I won’t know where I am or where I’m going. But I would circle around, end up on the page: I was twenty-nine, nothing like a starfish, but these things would make me think of him: shirtless semi drivers, lighting cigarettes in the wind, rain and September, the smell of marijuana, packed away poems, loving and leaving, pushing and pulling, lumber yards and contact paper, God in different boxes, climbing trees for mistletoe, sometimes fear, sometimes not, a form of guilt and shame, parking lot stripes and lipstick kisses on dogs, pot roast and pie, T.V. trays and chicken. These things will never leave me: being a woman, loving a man, waking, resting, sleeping and dreaming such gigantic dreams of okra.
Ann Iverson is a writer and artist. She is the author of five poetry collections: Come Now to the Window by the Laurel Poetry Collective, Definite Space, and Art Lessons by Holy Cow! Press; Mouth of Summer and No Feeling is Final by Kelsay Books. She is a graduate of both the MALS and the MFA programs at Hamline University. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals and venues including six features on Writer’s Almanac. Her poem “Plenitude” was set to a choral arrangement by composer Kurt Knecht. She is also the author and illustrator of two children’s books. As a visual artist, she enjoys the integrated relationship between the visual image and the written image. Her artwork has been featured in several art exhibits as well as in a permanent installation at the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital. She is currently working on her sixth collection of poetry, several children’s picture books, and a collection of personal essays, Then Eat My Love, forthcoming from Southern Arizona Press.