Florida(39)
Letting the sun slide over her face without worrying about cancer or the ice caps melting.
She thinks of Bartram in the deep semitropical forest, far from his wife, aroused by the sight of an evocative blue flower that exists as a weed in her own garden, writing, in what is surely a double entendre or, if not, deeply Freudian: How fantastical looks the libertine Clitoria, mantling the shrubs, on the vistas skirting the groves!
This, this is what she loves in Bartram so much!
The way he lets himself be full animal, a sensualist, the way he finds glory in the body’s hungers and delights.
Florida, Bartram’s ghost has been trying to tell her all along, is erotic.
For years now, she has been unable to see it all around her, the erotic.
The rain, impossibly, comes down harder, and even the flashlight is no help.
She is wet and alone and crouching in the dark over an unknowable hole, and now she locates the point of breakage.
Odd that it had taken so long.
Two weeks ago, she called Meg at eleven at night because she’d read an article about the coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico being covered with a mysterious whitish slime that was killing them, and she knew enough to know that when a reef collapses, so do dependent populations, and when they go, the oceans go, and Meg had answered, as she always does, but she had just put her youngest back to bed, and she was weary after a long day of helping women, and she said, Hey, relax, you can’t do anything about it, go drink the rest of the bottle of wine, take a bath, we can talk in the morning if you’re still sad.
That was it, that last call.
Poor Meg.
She is exhausting to everyone.
She would take a break from herself, too, but she doesn’t have that option.
For a minute, she lets herself imagine the larger sinkhole below the baby one opening very slowly and cupping her and the house and the dog and the piano all the way to the very black bottom of the limestone hollow and gently depositing them there so far down that nobody could get her out, they could only visit, her family’s heads peering once in a while over the lip, tiny pale bits against the blue sky.
From down there, everyone would seem so happy.
She comes in from the rain.
The kitchen is too bright.
Surely, in the history of humanity, she is not the only one to feel like this.
Surely, in the history of herself, all of those versions atop previous versions, she has felt worse.
It was called the New World, but Puc-Puggy understood that there was nothing new about it, as almost every step we take over those fertile heights, discovers remains and traces of ancient human habitations and cultivation.
* * *
—
She takes off the wet boots, the wet jacket, the wet skirt, the wet shirt, and, shivering, picks up her phone to call her husband.
The dog is licking the rain off her knees with a warm and loving tongue.
If she says sinkhole, her husband will race home in the rain with her children and their goodies.
They will put the boys to bed and stand together at the lip of the sinkhole, and maybe she will become solid again.
And so, when he picks up, she will say, Babe, I think we have a problem, but she will say it in the warmest, softest voice she owns, having learned from a master the way to deliver bad news.
She lets her hunger for her husband’s voice grow until she is almost incandescent with it.
As the phone rings and rings, she says to the dog, who is looking up at her, Well, nobody can say that I’m not trying.
ABOVE AND BELOW
She’d been kept awake all night by the palm berries clattering on the roof, and when she woke to the sun blazing through the window, she’d had enough. Goodbye to all that! she sang, moving the little she owned to the station wagon: her ex-boyfriend’s guitar, the camping equipment they’d bought the first year of grad school (their single night on the Suwannee, they were petrified by the bellows of the bull gators), a crate of books. Goodbye to the hundreds of others she was leaving stacked against the wall. Worthless, the man had told her when she’d tried to sell them.
Goodbye to the mountain of debt she was slithering out from underneath. Goodbye to the hunter-orange eviction notice. Goodbye to longing. She would be empty now, having chosen to lose.
The apartment was a shell, scoured to enamel. She breathed fully when she stepped out onto the porch. There was a brief swim of vertigo only when she shooed the cat out the door. Oh, you’ll be all right, she said, and reached for the silky fur between his ears, but as quick as a blink, he struck at her. When she looked up from the four jagged lines slowly beading with blood on the back of her hand, he had leapt away. Then he, too, was gone.
* * *
—
She drove past the brick university, where the first-years were already unloading their sedans, their parents hugging their own shoulders for comfort. Goodbye, she said aloud to the tune of the tires humming on the road.
After a summer with the power shut off, a summer of reading by the open window in her sweat-soaked underwear, the car’s air conditioner felt frigid. She opened the window and smelled the queer dank musk of deep-country Florida. Out here, people decorated their yards with big rocks and believed they could talk to God. Here, “Derrida” was only French for rear end.
She thrust her fist out the window and released it slowly. She could almost see her hopes peeling from her palm and skipping down the road in her wake: the books with her name on them; the sabbatical in Florence; the gleaming modern house at the edge of the woods. Gone.