Candy Hearts

They are spread out before me, in all their pastel chalky sweetness, each one with a teasing word or words, most absurd, like love itself.

Pale green - synthetic lime, a slightly tangy flavor that tries too hard: LOVE ME. I want so much for someone to love me, but I’m afraid that nobody ever will. Maybe nobody would ever look at me that way, or want to kiss me. And the braces o n my teeth don’t help. Or maybe someday they will want me, but then they will leave, and I’ll be alone like my mom, when I’m too old. I’m afraid that I’m not pretty enough, not cool enough, not smart enough. I look at other girls and wonder what they have that I don’t, like Cathy. She’s as flat chested as I am, and has a big nose, but Tommy likes her, and Mark does, too. What has she got that I haven’t got? I never know…


Chalk white, sharp and minty: HOME SICK. I wanted to come here, to this party. There are a lot of older kids – high school kids, and I’m only an eighth grader. It’s a special treat, a badge of honor to be included. I’ve dressed for the occasion in a long sleeved purple t-shirt, hip-hugger jeans, and silver hoop earrings in my newly pierced ears. I feel almost pretty. It’s dark in the living room, and Howie puts Cream’s “White Room” on the stereo - loud. His brother passes me a joint and I suck in the sweet, strong smoke, willing myself not to cough. I know his brother likes me, and that he’s a sophomore. I don’t really like him, but everyone is starting to pair off to make out, and I don’t want to look like a loser, uncool. His hair is long and he wears a headband, which looks stupid, but he has nice eyes, I guess. I notice them when he leans in close and starts to kiss me, there on the couch. His mouth tastes sour, smoky, as he slithers his tongue into my mouth. I am supposed to like this, but it feels weird. His hand sliding up my back feels better, so I try to concentrate on that. I sneak one eye open and am aware of other couples doing the same thing all over the darkened room, like a performance. I wish he wouldn’t open his mouth so wide. It seems ridiculous, not gentle enough. I feel like I’m suffocating, like I can’t breathe, and I suddenly want to go home. I sit up quickly, jerking my head away from his. He says “what?” surprised, looking like I just woke him up from a nap.


Purple, deeply sweet and grapey: REAL LOVE. This must be it. We are so much alike, and he gets me, can finish my sentences. He smells so good, like laundry soap and something else. I can get lost in his arms, feel I want to crawl up into the collar of his shirt and stay there. His kisses are slow and delicious. He takes time with everything, but I wonder why he is not pressing me to sleep with him yet. When we are cast in a school play together, I can’t believe my good luck. The love scenes are a breeze, because we are just mimicking real life. After rehearsals, we walk along the winter streets of the upper west side, those broad, pale stone sidewalks and soaring art deco buildings along the park. Everything feels more windswept and clean than it does downtown, where I live. We laugh and point out the spot where a drunk friend of ours once threw up on the sidewalk right in front of Leonard Bernstein as he was getting out of a cab. I can’t wait until summer: Shakespeare in the Park, late night wine and cigarettes at Caffe Reggio. But when school is out in June, he unceremoniously dumps me. I am more devastated than I let on to any of my friends. I spend weeks resisting the urge to call him, as the heavy humidity of June, then July - settles on the city. I get a summer job filing in a blissfully air-conditioned ad agency office to which I commute on the subway during rush hour. Packed into a throng of people on the F train, a young businessman roughly grabs my crotch through my skirt. He wears a blue suit and smells of sweat and Aramis cologne. I feel suffocated, like I might gag. As he leers at me with his pink, shaven face, I back away hastily through the crowd, pushing roughly against other passengers. I give him an angry stare, but I say nothing. I’m the only high school girl who works at the agency. The preppy college girls, the daughters of the ad executives, ignore me. Instead, I strike up a friendship with a young divorcee named Joyce who works in the art department. We go to lunch at Chock Full O’Nuts on Park and 4Oth where we share cream cheese sandwiches on date nut bread and watery coffee. “All men are shits.” Joyce says. I nod in sage agreement.


Pink, flowery and sugary, like perfume: MISS YOU. He writes down the lyrics to the Rolling Stones song “Miss You,” in his first letter from Paris. The letter is on flimsy blue airmail paper, the kind you can almost see through. I’m alone in Boston, a freshman in college, and summer has turned to a chilly fall. We listened to that song a lot the summer before, not thinking about the meaning or the imminent reality of the words. We were too busy having fun, going to movies and free concerts in the park, riding the Staten Island Ferry and having sex wherever and whenever we could. The day his letter comes I am snuggled alone into my bed in the dorm under my childhood quilt, with a bottle of cranberry juice next to me. I’m nursing the raging urinary tract infection I got after he left – after the last two days we spent in bed, when we knew we wouldn’t see each other for six months. Already the borrowed words in the letter sound hollow. I have already pictured the parade of French girls he’ll be entertaining in his room at the Sorbonne. They will be completely unlike me. They will be petite and dark and mysterious. I know that it’s over, that I should be out making new friends. Six months will change everything. My roommate says that I’m a cynic. It’s easy for her to say. She spends every weekend with her high school sweetheart, who goes to a college just two miles away.


Orange, sweet with a tart undertone, sassy: ONE KISS. This flirtation has lasted for years, based on a brief long-ago fling. It’s a game we both enjoy because it is presumably so safe, because we are about as unavailable to one another as any two people could be. We live miles apart, both literally and figuratively. There is no illicit affair in the offing. We have each worked too hard on our respective marriages to get swept into nostalgia or instant gratification. And yet, whenever we are together, there is that unspoken energy charging the air– the delicious “what if. ” We exchange that kind of smile, that glance you can only share with a man with whom you never navigated the more mundane waters of a relationship, a man whom you never got a chance to resent. Our occasional encounters are public and unplanned. After the customary conversation in which we catch up on each other’s lives - trading small talk, news of our respective careers and children - nobody is watching when we say goodbye. We sit close together away from the crowd. It’s time to go. He’s holding my ice-cold hands in his warm ones, playfully, telling me I should have worn gloves. Then he leans over, and in one swift gesture his lips brush mine, a gentle pressure soft as a whisper. I get a whiff of him, a fleeting taste. Then, before we both stand up and walk away from each other, he bites his lip and smiles at me, a little bit naughty. I smile back. It is our secret.

Yellow, warm and lemony, sweeter than sour: IM SURE. As sure as I’ll ever be, as sure as any messy human being can be - that I made the right choice after all, and that he’s it. On Valentines Day, which we both slyly refer to as “amateur night,” we go out to dinner anyway. We are no amateurs. We are eighteen years of experience, love, laughter, tears, and two children. I sit across from him – not at a fancy restaurant, but at the regular old Thai place that we like, and I see this man I married who still, miraculously, wants to be with me. And despite the times it feels like he’s underfoot, and that our house is too small and the kids are crowding me, that we both work so much we hardly see each other, and that when we do it’s to discuss business; the house, the tax meeting, the kids. Despite the fact that the ghosts of former lovers waft through my mind and daydreams with unsettling regularity. Despite the hours I spend dreaming of roads not taken, of solitude, of limitless time to create, to write. Despite the times I think we are so different that I can’t believe we ever got together – a window in my heart will crack open, and I will peer in and see that boy I fell in love with 20 years ago – the tall skinny one with the absurd sense of humor, the boyish grin and a family as loony as my own. The one in whose arms I feel safe, like I want to curl up in his shirt collar and stay there. I can momentarily forget that I still want him, and then wake up on a blue winter morning and curl into him, realizing that indeed I do.

Romantic

Romantic. 1. of or pertaining to romance. 2. impractical or unrealistic, fanciful. 3. imbued with idealism, a desire for adventure…

The boat was for weekends.

For getting out of our small apartment, for a break from the strict swim schedule you kept during the week, for escaping carpools your mother drove and for fleeing the boredom that was your father’s desk job. The boat was for your own can of beer, a Budweiser taken boldly from the red Coleman cooler in view of your father. A test that seemed impossible for the fourteen-year-old you to pass, but what was a “no” back in the four walls of the apartment could become a “yes, only one” out here in the open.

The boat was for freedom, wind, daydreams, casting a line and being lulled to sleep by waves.

Mornings in the delta were about paddling around the murky waters in your yellow dingy and getting sunburned shoulders. Afternoons were about stretching out on the top deck and reading The Enquire, Parade and Tiger Beat until sundown. The evenings were about dinner, something bbq’d with a side of chips, then the card games, black jack moving into poker, while Haggard drawled in the background.

The boat was for family only.

That’s partly why the boy is still so easy to recall. Like the icy beer your father let you sip, someone to hang out with that was your own age was a rare treat. You don’t remember his name, his features have grown blurry and you can’t remember how you filled all of your time together but still he floats inside your head. When you had to say goodbye the night before you were to leave you felt an unfamiliar tightness in your chest, leaned in, gave him a hug, then ran down into the bow of the boat to hide and start missing him.

The boat was for a memory.

That night the summer heat was unbearable so you left the porthole open above you. Hours later, when you were supposed to be dreaming, but weren’t, were still up, still thinking about that boy, about how he had made you feel different, beautifully strange, one at a time, chocolate kisses, little silver stars, started falling into your porthole, started crashing, one by one, onto your flannel-lined sleeping bag.

The boat was for the beginning.

4. preoccupied with love or by the idealizing of love. 5. expressing love or strong affection. 6. ardent; passionate; fervent…

“You’re gonna dieeee.”

You’re home alone in the shower with Axl Rose turned up and screeching about the dangers of The Jungle on the tape deck when you hear something. You ignore the banging at first, but whoever it is won’t stop so you rinse the conditioner out of your hair and grab a towel. You go upstairs to look through the blinds. You can’t make out the face and the body looks unfamiliar until he turns. Then you catch a glimpse of white plaster on two arms and your blood, breath and heart stop.

On the porch. The gift. This morning…

You were picking up the newspaper off the porch when you found a jacket; new, gray and lined with white fur lying on the deck. A piece of paper stuck out of one of the pockets. You pulled it out and found a poem. A beautiful, tortured love poem written in erratic blue scrawl.

You thought wrong house, wrong girl, until you saw the broken arms.

You dress quickly and open the door. How did you find me? Told your mother I was a friend that had lost your new address. How did you get here? Eight hours on the Greyhound, hitchhiked some then walked the rest. Why? Because I love you.

You’re nineteen, you think you know what you are doing, say things like forever, perfect and happy with recklessness and ease. You’re nineteen and think you know what you want so you tell him you love another.

He doesn’t try to come in, doesn’t try to talk you out of it, he just turns and starts walking down the street…

7. of or pertaining to, or characteristic of style of literature and art that subordinates form to content, encourages freedom of treatment, emphasizes imagination, emotion and introspection and often celebrates nature, the ordinary person, and freedom of the spirit.

You meet this guy while setting up his lumbar myelogram. He is a patient for the neurosurgeon you work for. After a few dates—tequila, dancing, foreign films, afternoon of canoeing—he give you a gift with a condition. The gift is a paperback of Ayn Rand’s, The Fountainhead. The condition is you can’t see him again until you’ve read the entire book. You like this, an assignment for love. How can you refuse 695 pages back to him? You read at your desk in the afternoon when you should be returning phone calls, setting up surgeries and swaying claims adjusters to okay procedures. You forgo sleep, skip the gym and bring the book in the bath with you because you know it has to be there, some deep meaning about the two of you in the tortured relationship of Henry Roark and Dominique but it’s not just the book that has an end.

8. of or pertaining to a musical style, esp. of the 19th century, marked by the free expression of imagination and emotion, virtuosic display, experimentation with form and the adventurous development of orchestral and piano music and opera. 9. imagery, fictitious or fabulous. 10. noting the role of a suitor in a play about love: the romantic lead…

Your girlfriend is horrified when you tell her. You can hear her Malibu Barbie dreams of marriage popping over the phone when you say no, we don’t always get each other gifts for Christmas, no, we don’t do expensive dinners out for birthdays, no, you can’t remember the last time you got a bouquet of flowers from him and no, we don’t go out dancing. Ever.

It’s not that you don’t remember mood lighting, because you do. Its’ not that you don’t remember the sexy bras he likes you to wear because you do. It’s not that you don’t remember getting absolutely giddy over your 1st, 5th and 7th month anniversaries together because you do.

But it’s not about the Top 5 for you:

the heart-shaped pendant
the box of Godiva truffles
the lingerie
the red roses
the ring

What it is about for you:

the image of him holding his beautiful cat that is too sick to save.

the words you hear him way into his furry gray ear that break your heart.

the worry in his eyes he can’t hide as he stands over your hospital bed as you wake up from surgery.

the drive from hell in the torrential rain at night that leaves you both exhausted and pissed off at each other and how his fall over an open suitcase in the hotel room makes you two laugh so hard you cry.

the love that somehow continues to thrive underneath the dirty clothes, the compromises, the neglect, the interruptions of small children and dinners of mac n cheese served under florescent lights to the mood music of Hilary Duff.

You are sure your friend would not call this romantic.

But you do.

This is a Woman

This is a woman that can’t seem to remember if she is 36 or 37.

This is a woman that forgot to put the blue recycle bin out on Tuesday.

This is a woman that has noticed lately that she can’t catch and keep those fast rats of thought running around in her mind.

This is a woman that thinks a suburban spell has come over her and her mind.

This is a woman who, as a child, was frightened by the movies The Planet of the Apes and The Stepford Wives.

This is a woman you won’t find doing step aerobics in pink shorts with Juicy Couture written in shiny ribbon across her butt.

This is a woman that is on the treadmill, in running shorts and a t-shirt, hair a sweaty mess, with her ipod on too loud, pumping out a playlist something like this: superfreak, paradise city, save me, if you want my love, sugar, we’re going down, tattooed love boys, no more words, blue sky, anything, anything.

This is a woman that doesn’t like to be still. In mind or body.

This is a woman that did not hear her father say I love you until she was twenty-nine.

This is a woman who used to go out for what she called, cigs & drinks nights, with her three closest girlfriends. The walk was short from one of the girl’s tiny but hip San Francisco apartment to the bar around the corner. To the bar where drinks are the size of punch bowls; drinks decorated with paper umbrellas and pineapples and cherries. Drinks in electric alcoholic colors like turquoise, lime, safety cone and lightening bolt.

This is a woman that would sometimes smoke an entire pack of Camels during one of these outings for this: To feel wired. Jittery. Her heart a wild bird, flapping hard to get out. Her heart a motorboat racing inside the blue ocean of her blood.

This is a woman who is still close in heart, but not miles, to these three girlfriends, now scattered like marbles across the U.S. There is now no bar around the corner to collect them in. Cardigan sweaters, businesslike hair styles, organic produce, a Ph.D. program, responsibility, a master’s thesis, wedding rings, a terminally ill parent, small children, fertility treatments and big mortgages—all these things have rooted, contained and caged them.

This is a woman that is thinner and fitter after having two children than she was before having kids.

This is a woman that has not felt truly unabashedly honest-to-god black garter belt red- satin sexy since she gave birth to her daughters.

This is a woman that remembers the prizes: the beaded coin purse, the candy necklace, the plastic ring, the pencil topper that was shaped like a cluster of grapes and smelled purple. She was sent to a speech therapist twice a week in the fourth grade. Was given dittos of poems to memorize and recite to the lady sitting across from her in the small room with the row of windows all around. She didn’t go for very long. The lady heard nothing wrong in her speech. This girl just didn’t like to open her mouth.

This is a woman who feels uninspired by the desert landscape surrounding her. She needs cloud, rain, gray, ocean, sand, sun, tree, grass, green. Not blue sky sunshine blue sky sunshine blue sky sunshine. A perfect day placed side by side with no end in sight is insanity.

This is a woman who, between silk, star and coco picks star to smell like during her deep tissue massage.

This is a woman that remembers the old ladies patting her head, saying “such a quiet good girl.”

This is a woman that felt like Anne Sexton was telling the truth.

This is a woman who, three years ago, leaned into the mirror, tilted her head back to put mascara on her lashes, saw a lump, size of an almond, stick out on the left side of her throat, felt it, finished applying her make-up, and didn’t say anything about it for two months.

This is a woman who, one New Year’s Eve visited a psychic who immediately sensed that she has a lot of fear in her.

This is a woman that looks at the picture from Disneyland as her before shot.

This is a woman who had an enlarging left thyroid mass. Fine needle aspiration showed atypical epithelial component. A hemithyroidectomy followed by possible total thyroidectomy in the case of cancer was recommended. The risks of injection, inferior scarring, hypoparathyroidism, recurrent laryngeal nerve injury were discussed with her in detail. She understood the risks and wished to proceed.

This is a woman that researches everything. She looks up the percentage risk rate of damage to the vocal cords for this type of surgery. Three percent does not seem low enough to her.

This is a woman who, as a child, refused to recite her ABC’s for her older sister. Red record button pushed down. Sister making all the noise, imitating Grover, singing Row Row Row Your Boat into the speaker. Say something, you can hear the sister say. The little girl you whispers back “I don’t want to talk.” Click. Tape ends.

This is a woman that doesn’t sleep. She stays up at night looking at thyroid cancer websites and sending emails to Jill. She writes “make it go away.” She erases it. She wishes it was that easy. That fast.

This is a woman that is obsessive about her body. She is afraid she will get fat after this is all over. This would be worse than death to her.

This is a woman that married a man that says I love you to her almost every day.

This is a woman that puts mascara and lipstick on the day of her surgery even though the direction sheet the hospital administrator gave her explicitly says no make-up.

This is a woman that was raised on homemade fudge, PBS and worry.

This is a woman that is so nervous everyone can see it and feel it. She hates this, hates that the fear is leaking out, glowing in her eyes, dripping in her palms. The anesthesiologist, a small blonde with funky glasses, asks her if she’d like her to give her something to get her to relax. The small blonde doctor pushes something opaque and white into her IV. She feels something altogether foreign to her—calm.

This is a woman that thought she could control one thing in life.

This is a woman who wants to believe this priest and these words he said to Anne Sexton: “God is in your typewriter.”

This is a woman that doesn’t tell those three girlfriends what’s been going on all summer until after the surgery, after she is home, after the skin starts to sew a thin red seam.

This is a woman who thinks back. All those sore throats she had as a kid. Her tonsils. always swollen, red, infected. Their removal at age nine. The cool strawberry ice cream bandage. It wasn’t the end but the first warning.

This is a woman that encounters a theory on a Carolyn Myss website about biography becoming biology. About the physical dysfunctions that occur when one does not surrender personal will to divine will. Thyroid problems. The list of ailments ends with thyroid problems.

This is a woman that had a picture of her aura taken years ago. Red, green, yellow and orange color the background. The spiritual colors—blue, indigo and violet—are no where to be found.

This is a woman that is driven to search for the answers. Blue. It is always seems to be colored blue, a pale heaven hue, on a chakra chart, the throat chakra. She reads this from her Astrological Bible: Failure to achieve full experience of the self at this stage can result in heart attacks in men and blocked throat chakra in women, who feel they are “unheard and cannot speak.”

This is a woman that’s childhood nightmares involved apes that could talk and women that were robotic.

This is a woman that starts to make connections. Draws the lines to every sister. A solid square between the four of you gets filled in with the same color: thyroid disorders, depression, inability to locate their true passion and disturbingly quiet personalities.

This is a woman that closes her eyes and sees the words—love stop yes no now wait pain more dream—stuck, those little dead bodies of sound, rotting in her throat.

This is a woman that has felt captured by invisible things.

This is a woman that had a scalpel slicing millimeters from her vocal chords.

This is a woman that starts punching an S.O.S, an alphabet of Morse Code out on her computer keyboard. No matter what she configures with the black alphabet it all says Listen:

This is a woman that has something to say.

Look

Look

there used to be
a candy bar
i liked
as a kid
Look
was its name
came in a red
wrapper
chewy nougat, nuts
a molasses flavor
covered in
dark
chocolate sweet crunchy
yummy
i loved this Look
but there was
another type of
Look
in my childhood that
i didn’t save quarters for
didn’t run into the drug store after
this one
wasn’t a treat
wasn’t sugary-sweet
this Look was fed
without wanting
to me
from my mother.

in 1969 she had
3 teenagers
was starting to inhale
freedom
when some
thing
rooted itself
inside her womb

symptoms
she thought
where the start of
menopause
turned out to be
the beginning of
me
a blonde
blue-eyed
prison
those multi-colored
stripes
on my dress
the one i loved to
twirl
around in
didn’t say pretty rainbow
to her
only said
jail

that’s my
crime
making her serve more
time.

i make her pay with
my colic
my tantrums
that involve teeth
marks
clumps of pulled out hair
on the floor
flaming hot cheeks
of anger, my maddening way
i eat bacon
methodically separating the fat from
the thin red rivers
of meat, my perfect vision
of how i want my hair
making her style it over
and over
until the ponytails are even
the part arrow

straight
how I waste twelve or more
pieces
of paper because
in the upper right-hand corner
my name absolutely must be
level

that girl
i can understand
deserved a
Look.

but what about when
the Look
came out with
no reason
no provocation of
juvenile insanity to
make it appear
there it is
at breakfast
hovering over my eggs or
after school
when i get in the Chrysler
and she drives off with her
stone face and mouth
in a sad clown down turn
or sitting on my
father’s lap
the reading done
the start of tickling, giggling
fun
in the corner
ironing shirts
sewing my skirt hem she
throws a dark
expression my way
getting a snack
strawberry milk
the glass of pink
slips
out of my small hands
shatters to the ground

the Look comes into
the kitchen
casts a threatening shadow
over me
doesn’t hear
sorry or
accident
only sees
mess
some thing
to clean-up.

that girl
didn’t understand
that kind of anger
thrown her way
that girl
gets nervous, anxious of
anything, everything
gets a ding, deep inside
a bruise
blooms
purple-blue
on her heart

that girl
memorizes the words of
black text
written all over her mother’s
face

that girl
becomes
a woman
that marries
gets pregnant
has a baby
falls into
depression
barely hangs on
with a newborn to
care for
a tiny daughter
looking up & into
her own mother’s sad
dark expression…

i go to therapy
tuesdays
smell of stale coffee
in the air and minutes ticking off on an
egg time I crack
open
share the language i
learned to understand from my
mother
of the body, the face
the unsaid
that said
so much
i wish for a code
long for a legend
to understand the
Look

a saved santa letter
found
in a plastic bin
in my closet
provides a sad
commentary
begins
“i know
i haven’t been
good”
continues
not deserving
of a new
stretch armstrong
blue holly hobby dress or a
captain and tennille record
what i hear
between the faded lines
is a phantom—the little girl me
whispering
what she really
wants
isn’t an easy bake oven
but to be deserving of
her Love.

dusty photo albums
open up
say something
different
captured in snap
shots, again
the unspoken
speaks to me
her face
turned to mine
side view of a smile
half of a rising sun
colored red

another one
her hand holding mine
we walk
along the beach
left to her right
pearl to oyster

then this
picture
of the lake with
white ducks
we’re both in
coats of
blue
she kneels behind me
her arms across
my body
a fence of flesh
trying to keep me
safe…

Look
a she-wolf in a
gray wool sweater
in my own hall
i display
a picture of me/the wolf
& my little girls
cheek-to-cheek
all big-eyed and
smiling
happiness captured
nailed to the wall
end of story
not at all
tell the truth
this is the image
i we all
want think believe
childhood/motherhood
is about
but its only half
the recipe
there are these
beautiful true
pink frosting teddy bear
teacup party lollipop
butterfly cookie green grass
moments
but i also know
other moments are
developing
coming into focus
in the dark
rooms of
my children’s subconscious
that will surface
later, proof
of when i
failed them
what will stick?
will it be when i
screamed shit
around their innocent ears or when i
slammed a palm down hard
on a kitchen counter and
said how tired i am of being
their 24/7 servant or when i
couldn’t hide the boredom of little
kid world?
hurt disappoint sadness

it will rise up
i will be accountable
i know
because i’m on
the other side now
& its not
about easy digestion
mothering as simple sugar
there is no aisle in the store
to buy a brightly wrapped
Mother
someone that is 100%
good
for you
goes down
easy
and her
only conceivable
crime
is overflowing
sweetness

Look
maybe this
mother/child
thing
is supposed to have some
black, some bad
added in
what cake tastes good/what life is interesting
without a little/without a little
salt vanilla & baking soda/hurt tears & let down
things that leave a mouth/things that leave a wound
bitter eaten alone/bitter licked alone
only enrich/only enrich
when mixed in/when mixed in
with the delicious/with the dark
all together is
altogether
beautifulbitterlovelysweetpain

(inspired by email poetry form)