Middle of the Road

My daughter has been praying. Not to anyone in particular, she says, just praying.

"Are you mad?" she asks.

"Why would I be mad?" I answer maniacally, like some Bronte novel.

"Because you don't believe in God," she says.

Uh-oh, here they come, home to roost.

"God who?" I say. She gives me a look.

"Not in some big head in the sky who helps you pass math, I don't. But don't get me wrong," I say. "I believe in...something."

"Like what?" she says, fluffing her pillows.

"Well, like..."

Ravens. Wolves. Full moons. Dreams. The smell of the dog's head. The woods at dawn.

"So who do you pray to?" I ask, changing the subject.

"Nobody," she says. "It's just praying."

She may be onto something there.

"So what do you pray for?" I ask.

"I'm not telling," she says. "It's private."

Then she tells. She never has been good with secrets. She's praying for a school closing, she says.

"Dream on, kiddo," I say. "It's only windy, no blizzard in sight."

Meanwhile the wind punches around outside our 100-year-old walls like it might be trying to goad us into something.

"I went running today," I say, tucking in her blankets, turning off the light, "and the wind stopped me dead in my tracks. There I was, in the middle of the road, going nowhere."

"That's nice, Mom," she says. "But I'm still praying."

The woods at midnight. Dragonflies. Kalamatas and asiago. Horses. The woods at noon. Pendulum clocks.

On the way to school the next morning (her prayers went unheard), she asks me about Christianity. School is ten minutes away, I give her the Cliff Notes version. I make it as far as Easter.

"Which is just around the bend," I say, rounding the bend. "Easter's the big enchilada for Christians. Do you know about Easter?"

"Only the Easter Bunny," says my daughter. My mother must be rolling over in her grave right about now. "What does that have to do with church?"

So I give her the gory details. Then I say that some people, namely Christians, believe that Jesus, after being crucified, dead and buried, came back to life and checked in with his homies and then rose up into the sky and disappeared.

"God, Mom," she says, rolling her eyes, "who believes all that crap?"

"They do," I say, gesturing toward the swarm of white middle-class middle-schoolers. The white school cop lords over them like Mighty Mouse.

"Mom!!" she whispers, giving me a look. "Put your arm down, somebody might see you!"

The first glass of the evening. Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma. Yeats. My daughter's laugh. My husband's eyes. The woods.

My daughter walks away, pretending that her backpack doesn't weigh fifty pounds, that she belongs as much as anybody, that this will be a day like any other, that prayers can be answered. She walks up the steps and into the building and disappears. I stay for a moment, idling, until Mighty Mouse glances over. Then there's nothing left to do but drive.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoHK6658kn8

Six Degrees

One of them falls off her porch into the woods,
the other one off her skis. Not a good day
for actresses, says my husband. And I stay
up too late surfing, remembering the time

I cracked my head on the doll cradle. The child
was four, her eyes round with the sound.
We'd been laughing ourselves silly over
some small thing, when Mommy fell back

in surrender. Skull meets immovable object,
cradle, say, or frozen ground, a real show-stopper,
just like that. So in lieu of Free Cell I obsess
on the other, the one who went skiing, but

what am I looking for? Like the time I dreamt
about Bette Davis, then woke to her death
in the morning paper. There we were, some
improbable crossroads, improbably crossing.

And maybe it's as simple as (just like) that.
The anonymity of it, the fragility. If not you,
if not this time, then someone else. Eventually
it will be, there for us all, our fifteen minutes.

Bad Hair Day

Some guy gave me the finger when I was dropping my daughter off at school this morning. I was wearing my cancer hat, my daughter calls it. Okay, okay, there's nothing funny about cancer, but that's what she calls it. And she's not being funny.

I pull away from the curb and there's this monster truck looming down on me out of nowhere. This is a middle school, remember, parents are in a perpetual state of shock. We let one another take cuts and don't think twice. We do little flutter waves and smile sheepishly. In fact, we are sheep. Overflowing with gratitude that someone is taking the little lambs off our hands for a few hours.

So this guy in this monster truck lays on his monster horn and flips me the bird. Then he rides my ass to the next intersection, where I'm turning left, and gives me the old horn-and-finger once more as he roars past. What could I do? I horned-and-fingered him right back.

If my daughter had witnessed this little exchange she'd have killed herself. She tries to ignore that I exist. She prefers that I not speak. She puts up with my breathing, but she's not happy about it.

So I come home after the truck episode and I'm standing in the pantry peacefully scalding my coffee, when Ka-Bam!! The microwave blows up. Nothing like a little electronic fireworks to get the old blood flowing. And the smell. It almost put me off coffee for a few nanoseconds.

I'll bet we've had seven Mister Coffees explode on us, maybe eight. You don't know how dependent you are until an appliance explodes.

A few years back our stove exploded. It was Christmas, we were expecting company. Luckily we knew a guy who knew a guy who was the cousin of a guy who lived next door to a guy who worked in an appliance store. We put the old stove out in a snowbank where it smoldered until spring.

I can't remember if this was before or after the refrigerator blew up.

Oh, and remind me to tell you about the time the sauna exploded.

I don't know why my daughter calls it my cancer hat. It's a little faux leopard skin number, like that Dylan song. I've had it since the first Bush. It sits on top my head like a bottle cap, like you could unscrew it. My hair disappears when I wear it. That's probably why.

Not that my hair disappearing changes anything. I may have a couple things going for me, but hair isn't one of them. Having bad hair is why I'm not famous. If I'd had good hair it would've been a whole different ballgame. I figure I've spent years futzing with my hair, years that might've gone into something more constructive. Like a career. I've never had a career, I've had jobs. One of my jobs has been to create the illusion of hair where there is none.

Every few years my blow dryer blows up.

Not only that, it's our wedding anniversary. Friday the 13th. You don't know how dependent you are until you've been married sixty-seven years. We spent this one in Sears, buying a new microwave. When we got home I checked voicemail, someone wishing us Happy Anniversary. I pressed seven. I always press seven. This message will be saved for one hundred days, the maximum time allowed. Unless the phone explodes.