continuation of "Swallow"...(Friday, May 20).... rambling free-association drafting thoughts.

****

The thing about Muebla is that she always had her holster prepared with the violence of truth, but never realized that truth finds a way to hide underneath the cliché’s and words people parse out in a way frequently more laden with the temporary than the eternal. Once, after a lifetime of her holster, I broke down and bought her a book on linguistics, signs and signifiers, and the uncommonalities of reference point; somehow I thought I could make her understand that we are all capable of many meanings at once, but she was highly insulted by my efforts and kept the book underneath our camper porta-potty until one day it disappeared with such surprising swiftness that I sat and mystically communed with language for several toilet journals.

What was it that made me realize? The moment, the second I saw it thoroughly? Perhaps it was the first time Sparrow fled home—a year, perhaps more of absence and fluctuating anxiety on all our parts. My mother would sit up at night, the camper awning unfolded and occasionally snapping as semi’s passed the road abutting our house.

Muebla had taken to parking the camper for months at a time, and we had been in Blaine for going on eleven months. So chairs were strewn out under the awning and our yard overflowed with flowerpots full of nothing more than intention, scraps of dreaming lumber that Fish collected in lieu of a job, a wheelbarrow with deflated tire, bed springs, trash bags, discarded tools with rusted holes, carvings—in short, every stereotype associated with that Type few actually claim membership of.

That night, I think I was beyond tired. I remember that. Fourteen years old, I was finally in that last ring of genuine hell before entering the numb grace of limbo. That is, I was almost done with junior high, but not done enough to avoid the snubs of future cheerleaders, the “boy, she’s got a fat ass” comments, the glances full of unreadable and cunning plans, the people cheating off papers, and the malignant tumors that walked every day through the halls, shedding off infected platelets at locker cells. That particular day had taken on the girth of torture, the elongated measurements of time that Einstein laid the basis for understanding: it’s all relative. Not a day, but a decade, similar to those days children tick off on advent calendars, desperately wondering if they have been as good as some fat man’s intangible expectations demand.

We moved so frequently really that I didn’t even have the buffer of a good friend between me and the evils of newly-released estrogen, although in my bitter moments, I was glad to suffer the solitude. During those times, “a good friend” could be more like an idea than an achievable creation, and to me, that idea seemed more of a machination designed to flush one out into the open. Thus, solitude allowed me the cover of green foliage, and usually if I just tiptoed softly enough over the twigs, few were able to spot me through my excellent camouflage.

That day though, I had used the bathroom to do what should never be done in a junior high. And although I had time to flush the low-pressure toilet twice, the third time was cut short by our PE coach intruding into the locker room and blowing the insidious whistle. Ms. G, a prancingly short Athlete (the worst characteristic to find in a PE teacher), was working us girls up to the Presidential Fitness awards, which included four forms of taxing the body: sit-ups, The Mile, flexed-arm hang, and sit-n-reach. I was horrible at all of them, which I of course blamed on moving frequently from fanatical-fitness districts to ain’t-got-no-fervor-for-nothin districts and then back again.

That month Ms. G was working us over on The Mile, which meant running a minute on the 1st of the month, 2 minutes on the second, and so on, until on March 31st she needed to route us out of the locker-room early in order to succeed in her mission to make us Physically Fit. Having been brought up somewhere between hippy, gypsy, semi-Buddhist Enlightened, and camper trash, I always wondered why Jr. Highs, which seemed in desperate need, didn’t invest in a Mental Fitness class in which we could recuperate from being constantly whipped to death by both PE teachers and each other. I figured that forty minutes of 360-crayon coloring would do wonders.

But I wasn’t so lucky. Instead, having run slightly more than two miles in a thirty-one minute period of time, I entered the locker-room dreadfully behind everyone else and found a group of highly-excited and tittering girls clustered around the three spartan toilets that composed the no-go zone. Tiffany was standing on the seat of one toilet, and her twin sister Kyra was on top of another. One stall, the one that I had faux-pax'ed in, was in between them with the door closed. Both of them were leaning over the stall walls to look down on afore-mentioned toilet, and when I walked in, Kyra looked up at me and hissed, “It was her.”

This is one of those phrases that lets you know the camouflage hasn’t worked today. Not much of a talker, I turned my back and made my way to the locker, trying to ignore the ruckus I had created. It doesn’t seem fair to have your bowel movements brought to the notice of thirty-three girls. But to tell the truth, it also did not seem like something that anyone would want to notice. That fateful day, I changed my clothes and listened to the following, and more, phrases:

“Doesn’t she know how to flush?”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“That is sooooo disgusting.”

To this day, I’m not sure why I was so mortified by such obvious war-mongering, but then I was young and even took offense when someone pointed out I was short, which was decidedly True.

Heading out of the locker rooms, dressed in my unfashionable baggy jeans, I couldn’t help pausing at the cluster and noting that Tiffany had found a broom and was trying to wedge the stick-end of it down into the stall, where I assumed she was trying to reach the handle. That sort of anger doesn’t come down on you frequently, but it arose, and before I left the locker-room, I gently shoved my way through the staring crowd, opened the stall door, announced “for the third time,” and flushed the toilet while shoving the broom handle out of my way. With that, I turned and for the rest of the day, wished I had someone I could just call and say “This is all Bullshit” to.

My imaginary friend would say, “Not in a technical sense.”

Yes, yes, I was tired that night when my mother curled up on a lawn chair, wrapped herself in a blanket, and started drinking to the sound of wind chimes and semi-trucks. Tired of crap, tired of my school, tired of not having my sister around to fill the function of imaginary friend. And so, I made myself a grilled-cheese sandwich, first scraping off the white grist that collected around the hardened cheese, and then went out to join my mother. For awhile, Fish was rooting through lumber, carting his hammer and nails from place to place, starting to hammer, and then abandoning tools in search of new tools. Muebla and I watched him, absently almost, the way it can sometimes be a relief to let the eyes rest on something you don’t have to interact with, but nevertheless vaguely interests you. Somewhere in the process, he lifted a burlap sack and discovered jumper cables, which he then carted off to his imaginary friend—The Buick.

Most of my parent’s offspring, particularly Fish, are really only explicable as products of a non-Catholic belief in the sins of neutering, or otherwise messing with beauty-creating genitalia. Eighteen-years old, Fish rarely budged from The Buick or his armchair, where he spent hours contemplating The Buick. I’m not sure what The Buick represented for Fish, but it seemed to provide limited outlet for his nascent talent, which of course was related to the genetics of our family. Of all of us, Fish is the one who constantly disappointed me; his skill—so wonderful—seemed to be wasted. But really, what is potential when you start thinking about it?

Just because you have a crop, doesn’t mean you have to share the contents.

And let’s face it, that was the day I realized how my mom’s crop had the potential to kill futures slowly, syllable by syllable.

Once Fish was gone, Muebla sighed and readjusted herself so that she was facing me. I found it uncomfortable, being the focus of my mother’s fickle attention and misery. Ever since Sparrow had left, she had dedicated herself to depression with a fervor that made the rest of her children left at home—Fish, Keri, Merlot, and myself—feel somehow inadequate, side-considerations. Did she see us? I wanted to ask. But we all knew the truth; she couldn’t see us. It didn’t make me feel any better to know that she couldn’t. Instead, it felt like a flaw in me; at fourteen, I wasn’t Enough. I wanted to do something to snap her out of it, to shake her, to startle her. I wanted her to comply.

But, as I was later to figure out with Sparrow, depression—whether genuine or self-centered or both—is not broken by longing. Depressives smoke their sadness, let its particular nicotine stimulate their memories. They chew sadness; its brittle crunch under their teeth is pure calcium that will re-enter their system when they swallow, and fortify their bones with dubious aid. They drink their sadness, spilling it on the counter when they’ve had too much. They eat their sadness, grow fat for their memories, choke on the cholesterol of fried compulsions. Without a doubt, support-groups should be called Sadness Anonymous rather than group therapy, because if wishes were fishes, or will alone was enough, the world wouldn’t need a sun, for Muebla as well as for Sparrow.

The distinction between Muebla and Sparrow was not subtle though, and perhaps was rooted in the oppositional qualities of their crops. Muebla held your words, whereas Sparrow held her own. Both could be violences, both held potential.

“What are you thinking?” my mother asked that night.

When crops run in the family, you think before you speak or give or dream. You parse out the various inflections and possibilities. You wonder when things will come back.

“I was thinking about you,” I told her.
“What in particular?”
“I was wondering if you’re okay. And I was wondering what Sparrow is doing.”

Okay, I’ll admit. I have no crop. I run tight with the moment. I hate holding on, holding back, holding up.

“Don’t mention her name, I can’t bear it,” was my mom’s short response. “I’m fine.”
“I’m sure she’ll call sometime. I’m sure she’s okay.”

Actually, I was more or less sure. That is, I knew she was still alive in body. Taro, our father nomad, had been traveling in Europe on his bicycle for five years now, and he called me a few weeks ago, told me he had heard word from Sparrow. He hadn’t actually seen her, but knowing she was in France, he left letters in each town he visited—sometimes at the mail boxes, sometimes with friends—knowing that the world was far smaller than we ever imagined.

“Last time I saw her, she was mostly quiet, but you know, her eyes. They said something. She thinks it’s my fault. When she was younger, she used to look at me with those eyes. So accusing. And there was that once when she was angry that she told me she would never forgive me for what we had done, she never would be able.”

Once my mother had started coughing things up, epileptic fits hit her hard. Her head bobbed, you could see her dredging forth the words, hurling them through her throat. The effort cost her—she would usually start crying—but maybe it was a relief too. I’m not sure. But the thing about crops is everything mixes together. I’ve noticed that it takes hard practice to sort the items in the crop, to decide what would be the best to chew at any one moment, and what would be the best to wait on. But more than that, the definition of “best” varies so much: tastiest? most bitter? most nutritional? most exotic? I’m not sure whether mom was able to choose, but sometimes it seemed to me that everything came out, lickety split, all the contradictions, and sometimes she’d almost purposely select the most bitter words to chew. She rambled on that night, fluxuating from side to pedulous side.

“But that night, she also told me that she didn’t want to talk to me. She wanted no word. Silence, she wanted silence. She didn’t want to talk about it. I never meant to be such a bad mother.” She paused then, and added, "But I don't know what she's ever given us. Maybe she's a bad daughter."

And that’s when I realized it. Just like that, a flash. Major realization about Muebla, or maybe crops in general. That which isn’t swallowed, isn’t digested.