XVII.
I was afraid, so afraid and I asked myself what I was protecting; my stomach growled.
Emptiness.
I am protecting emptiness, and that is not one thing or the other. It is with fulness, both/and.
It's a new challenge all the time. Last night they wouldn't let me eat the food---all I wanted was the buttered noodles. I can tell with my nose when we're having buttered noodles, because they always serve it in huge round meatstuff-bowls; the white and blue quarter-inch thick plastic entrée bowls, reserved for acidic smelling meatstuff, or buttered noodles.
It starts like this: I have a friend made in Asia, made of stars; she is built out of well hewed shorewood, with memories of cultural week and toy brick possibilities, a plastic seaside resort with tall single-pane windows, first impression sandals, sandals I had once owned and then judged, subconscious contests in the rec-room, kept constantly at 61 degrees. We have collected and shared and corroborated insight since I first saw her in those sandals. Tonight, today, now I ask her if she wants to go to the pet store, to the fish store next to Lee's Oriental. It is a one-room store, and there are no lights on the ceilings or walls, there is only the aquamarine light from the aquariums. We walk past the dark green goldfish tub, to the back of the store, but I do not check to see if she is following me, and when I pass through the Employees Only I am suddenly alone, in a mass of kids my age, in the cafeteria, of a cram school. In front of me, kids are climbing over each other, fighting to get the food, which is spread over the spoon-scratched metal surface of a huge cafeteria counter. Like a farm trough, but the food is on a surface, not in a trough, because humans eat from plates. Altogether it looks like a wave, of lavender-colored long-sleeves and dark green turtlenecks, orange and khaki shorts, bowl cuts and braids; a solid wave, frozen but writhing in a great struggle against the counter, not breaking as waves should when they hit the shore.
I go straightaway to where the seating is, I find the round orange cafeteria table where Junior Great Books used to meet. The girls sitting there are all my friends, but never my best, never stick. They are all Asian, and we are all in the same school. We are like driftwood that has drifted to the same shore. She has a knot there, I have a notch here; we slide around on the tide of the same shore, then the tide carries us out, one at a time. We are like handmade driftwood, hewed with differences between-in us that are personal, are the qualities that make any one person different from every other, that make friends or don't. These friends are ultra-smart and academic; they laugh at numbers and nonsense, I laugh at nonsense and laughing. They all have trays in front of them, with plates, with tiny bits of carrot or fruit salad or no plate at all; they jestfully deride each other for not eating enough; it ends with criticism from the girl with no tray at all. There is not much laughing, because it isn't nonsense; because while it doesn't make sense, it is too real.
I want to get some noodles. I don't need the salad or the carrots or the fruit, I focus on acquiring the buttered noodles and nothing else. When I head back to the flat trough, there are not so many kids, just a few, come and go. I see a quarter-inch white plastic bowl on the metal countertop. I run to it. I grab a handful of buttered noodles. I can feel the shreds of Parmesan between my oiled fingers. Just a handful is enough; I turn to run, to getaway with my noodles, to make it to Safety, but in front of me is the Foulmart. My arch nemesis from childhood. Shorter than me, and thinner, with thinner edges, thinner lines to cross, crosswired, trip wires that set off severity. The veins on his hairy arms, on the back of his wrists, over his bony hands are permanently bulging; I heard in high school that he got into steroids and I know that he's still competitive.
He knocks the noodles from my hand. He apologizes. I don't mind. He glares at me. My heart pounds, my eyebrows rise, my mouth opens, my hands open, they travel protectively to my Front; I have wrestled this kid before and lost. I have won out other boys, I have beat the odds and not been whitewashed. The Foulmart himself gave me the nickname The Crash Dummy, because he can shoot a soccer ball at me again and again, and I won't cry. But it's been long established that the Foulmart will beat me in a race. He will push my face into the snow. He will not stop if I have an asthma attack.
He stuffs a snack-sized plastic baggy of weed into my hand and looks around, and leaves. I must hide it for him, so I stick it in the Back-most zippered pocket of my navy blue canvas backpack. I must get it out of here, I must take it to Safety, and on my way out of the school, on the shrubby gravel path, by the fences I meet a familiar looking Latina. She wants to skip class. I take her with me, we duck into a hedge of hemlock because a teacher is coming round the path. When the way is clear, I take her hand and lead her down around the hedge, around the bend, and into a village of shorewood and hills.
We go round the land-wreck house, where the doors are always locked, where the drinking fountains never work. Where the pale brown paint is always peeling. We go partway up a broad paved street before I stop. The distance is sufficient, it's sufficiently close to the Foulmart's house. I take this moment to glance at the snack-sized plastic baggy; its contents look like biscuits. Croutons, pesto-flavored. My friend takes the backpack, she is All Set for skipping class. I go back to school, to the paper-bag brown stairwell, to meet the Foulmart, and I tell him I left the backpack near his house. This news is sufficient for him. But I never put the baggy back in the backpack after I took it out to look at it---it's still on me, in a pocket, somewhere. A teacher is coming! The Foulmart races up the steps; I spring behind the stairs, under the last leg of the first flight, facing tall single-pane windows, dirty with rain drop stains like calcium build-up and flecks of mud. When the way is clear I look up, right where I can see every hand on every railing on every flight, where someone on the top flight could drop a penny or a notebook and knock me out.
The Foulmart's friends are coming down the stairs to rob me of the Foulmart's weed; they are not really his friends. I see the Foulmart's hand, on a railing seven-flights-up; I change perspective, so that seven-flights-up is now seven-flights-down, so that gravity can aid me in climbing the space between the railings, the middle of the stairwell, past the Foulmart's friends and to the Foulmart himself, to give him the baggy. The climbing is rough, it takes guts; a railing snags my fishnets, rips a hole on the inside of my knee. The Foulmart acknowledges that I am no girl, and I see he's not really a foulmart. We are reconciled, finally.
Now I am arriving for work at ABC, the sandwich place. The building blocks for sandwiches? Or Already Been Chewed? A customer in a molly brown fur coat on her way out the door tells me not to cling to childhood. That I should be aware of my North Node. The brass bells near the top of the door jingle as it closes. I don a dark green apron, I check-in, I nod to the cashier, I decide to go on lunch-break straightaway. I seize two slices of sauerkraut rye from underneath the glass display, ignoring hungry customers. I can't reach the provolone though, or the spinach. The door bells jingle; I pause, look up to see who's come in, and understand that my long-fingered classmate has been hired to work here. I understand that she will do much better than me and I will probably be fired. Success is built into her bony hands.
I go out the back door with my two slices of rye, I sit on a cherrywood chair that has been rained on. The air is greyish blue, is clear and cloudy and thick, and through it I see the Back, I see the brick walls and dumpsters and Employees Only that make it suitable only for employees on break. The air is so heavy that I don't even remember that Lee's Oriental is just next door. The Harlequin kid comes out with provolone slices and spinach leaves, the B and C, the missing building blocks of my lunch-break sandwich. I look at him, he lights a smoke that sinks because the air is too heavy with cloudy blue clear. I feel like a crate-shaped burden, a burden that doesn't fit on shoulders, on the Harlequin's shoulders; I have moved into his workplace, and I don't fit there. I should get fired.
I go somewhere else, to whatever age it was when age wasn't established, to before I learned to keep track of the days of the week. To a waterslide, slow and lazy; Safe. To a waterslide of grey-blue ice-floes, like a white and blue plastic river. I float along, alone, on a submerged inner-tube, and I slap the surface of the water with the palms of my hands because I recognize the cookie-cutter shapes on the shore. Two-dimensional trees---there are only two types, two shapes: coniferous and deciduous. I float along, alone, but then the ice-floes break and the current gets stronger and I lose the inner-tube. I must get out of the sliding grey river or I will drown, a white and blue death. So I plant both hands on the side of the slide, the bank, and hoist my upper half up til my belly rests firmly on the ground, like a sea lion; from here I can afford to climb out less gracefully.
On land I join my friend, we walk up a hill that defies the city, the grassy knoll down which the grey-blue river slides. The ice has melted. She stays put while I run laughing into the river, hurl myself into the flow of the waterslide, which is fast and forceful like the spasms of laughter in my throat and abdomen. A wave crashes into the white plastic side and I see a rattan tea tray emerge at the break like a fish out of water, and it disappears in the great foaming grey undulations, just as I am swept around the bend, just as I slow down to a drift, just as I am floating around the bend of a strange waterslide; just as I have reached the top again.
I do not take a second trip. I climb out before the current picks up again. Pieces of picked grass and dirt cling to my wet skin, and around me is a designated camping area, a public shelter, its brown paint peeling and bubbling where the moisture leaks in. Campers have shown up; one prepares for fishing, another talks to a third, a girl with rainbow dreads and blond eyebrows, on the bridge that runs over the river I climbed out of. I watch her try to light a poorly packed clove-cigarette; the shredded tobacco hangs out as the paper splits open; her navy blue plastic lighter won't light.
I move again, move back to the violet construct, on the lucky hill, in a foreign world that's all my own. I am outside of school, inside of love, reuniting with a toe-stubbed lover. I move to plant a tree with yellow leaves across the street from the school; it is the color that is missing. The rest of the rainbow is there, in order, in trees that grow up against the back of palatably painted bungalow homes. My tree is not in front of a home. My tree is not even a tree, it's a ground vine or a shrub, a ground plant, and not baby. The plastic marker states that I am not to plant it near the breast of the tree of the same kind of plant. So it is somewhat lonesome, but yellow is the color.
Ryuta is standing in his soccer cleats on the paved pathway in front of an orange bungalow. He sees me planting the yellow, and knows that I am back; I see the surprise and yearning in his eyes. But he is in the company of two school officials, so we do not run to embrace and kiss. Instead we wait, I finish planting, finish scooping black topsoil over the roots. I forget to water it, though; I forget that all transplants should be watered immediately.
