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I told her she should write about it, the strange story of her daughter's birth, the trauma & drama of her growing into the health of the present moment, at least that's what I meant by my comment, "You should write it." She could if she wanted to. But she won't. It's probably all too painful, to the extent that it would turn into a lengthy novel, having to bring in the other kid, the load of boyfriends, drugs, her sisters visiting her in various digs across the country, near ends & never endings, the mistakes, & very few triumphs, the daughter I'm talking about one of the few, along with the person she is, that whole, assembled out of fragments, shards, false starts & wrong turns. But she wouldn't want to tell the worst, & couldn't bring herself to show herself in a good light, the candle light of Georges de la Tour's Magdalene, the way I see it. Her flesh wouldn't let her. The flesh that writes. So I'll get the gist down. The echo ringing out of the phrase, "My baby's twenty today." I'll gather the bones, add a little skin, inject some flesh, from my flesh of words. The twenty year old came out bloody, & black. The second one in two years. She'd carried the first one all over Boston for treatment of a heart defect at birth. Finally, open-heart surgery at Tufts Medical Center in the Combat Zone. Now, another, by the same guy, this one born in Phoenix, & her milk running out, the guy refusing to work but scamming, insurance fraud, amateur pimp, big-time manipulator, control freak, they reduced charges against her, against her, my Magdalene, huge with milk before she started to run out, huge back in Phoenix, working for him, to "disturbing the peace." But in Chula Vista, California, where she is now, in this part of the story, she's running out of milk, because she's not getting enough to eat, living there with her mother-in-law, the guy conning instead of working. I talked to the guy once, on the phone, eight years later when I was living with her & both daughters in Virginia. What a motherfucker! Never in my life felt such outright attempts at control. I couldn't imagine a face to face meeting, & felt for her, those years under his thumb, under more than thumb, remembering how she described the final rape in a couple of heart-wrenching paragraphs she keeps hidden in a notebook somewhere, which if I could collage them in here to this text would be the toughest, the best writing of the story, what she thought about in her silence under him, about the end with him, this final straw of a body unwanted on her ravishing her for the, believe me, believe her, fucking last time, was brilliant, & shows the writing of her flesh, within her Magdalenean light. I kept a short, hollow, steel vacuum cleaner pipe in a cabinet near the front door for the four years with her in Virginia, just in case he showed. But there in Chula Vista, she's the only one working, takes a bus to a department store. She's in retail, for crying out loud. What kind of check is that? The mother-in-law on welfare, the son doing what he knows best, & refuses to let her take the kids back home to her own mother in Massachusetts. Her going off everyday in a daze, & running out of milk, actually, by now, run dry. To the extent, she talks one day, to one of the guys at work, who can't believe the situation. Just like you & I can't believe the situation our heroine has gotten herself into. This guy, this nameless character, listens. He has to hear it more than once, maybe all week, before he tells her he has a plan. He has a friend he'll bring along. They'll drive her home, accompany her as she gathers her belongings, & both kids, then drive her to the airport with the ticket he's bought. They do. They brandish guns. Motherfucker silent, watching. Two guys, good plan. Smart, & brave, & for my money, somewhat angelic, or artistic, in this Magdalenean light. "My baby's twenty today," she says in awe & disbelief, knowing she & her sister are safe, away at school, the older one about to graduate, this woman's mind scanning the time from bloody birth, through all the meanderings, toward what she calls her own, her beautiful black light at the other end of the phone. Robert Gibbons' book, Slow Trains, & Beyond: Selected Work, is forthcoming in a new print series from the online publishers of Slow Trains, Colorado. His work has appeared in The American Print Review, The Connecticut Poetry Review, Evergreen Review, Frank (Paris), Gargoyle, The Literary Review, Mississippi Review, and others. He works in the library at Northeastern University, Boston. [email] |