Blueberry Summer

It was July in northwestern Pennsylvania. Young mothers order custom-made bathing suits and forty dollar suntan oil online to sit on the shore of a trashy man-made lake watching their children play in the dirty water. Suddenly, there’s much more after-dark traffic on the road leading to the overlook. Every girl’s most romantic daydreams center on the county fair coming up in the first week of August. Given these things, I really shouldn’t have been surprised. As far as I can tell, the entire state becomes unhinged during midsummer. Sanity’s shaky until September, at least.

The first time I saw them, I was struck by how young they looked. They were a year older than me…maybe two at the most, but here they stood so far from home, in my living room, with my dogs on their laps.

They looked a little nervous and incredibly formal: black pants, shiny black dress shoes, white shirts, crisp ties, and polished brass nametags that read, respectively “Elder Smith*” and “Elder Jenkins*”.

Maybe I’m a victim of stereotypes, but they were not what I expected at all. I’d heard stories of people hiding under their furniture, turning off their lights, threatening to let their dogs loose. I’d laughed at those stories, but now they just seem absurd.

Elder Smith was sturdy, with dark hair, engaging eyes, and a wide smile. As he laughed and talked about his little sister, he quickly became my favorite. Nothing ever upset him, not even when my Maltese emptied her nervous bladder all over his dress pants.

Elder Jenkins was tall, shy, and very fair. He looked innocent, friendly, and anxious. Everything about him was long and gangly. Our couch is large, but I remember him sitting all scrunched up with his long legs, skinny arms, and almost delicate fingers. Something about him- maybe it was the look in his eyes- made me want to protect him.

Despite all this, I still felt invaded. It was my last summer before college and the impending change made me touchy about everything. My stuff was in boxes next to the pellet stove in the living room, and on top of that, here were two boys taking up my Friday nights, making my couch smell like cologne. I was somewhat less than ecstatic.

I avoided them for the first several weeks without too much trouble. I was usually at work and if they were still there when I got home, taking intently to my dad over copies of the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I would just walk upstairs. One night, though, I wasn’t scheduled to work and I stood in the dining room watching my mom fold laundry. I was in a bad mood and she was eavesdropping on the boys’ conversation with my dad. Maybe it’s because my dad’s a pastor or maybe it’s just because I’ve lived with him long enough to know, but I can always tell when he starts talking about something spiritual. His voice changes ever so slightly, becoming both quiet and firm. It’s the kind of voice you’d use to talk someone off of a ledge.

Since my mom kept shushing me and it was much too hot to sulk in my bedroom, I wandered into the kitchen where there were buckets and buckets of blueberries mimicking the color of our countertops. Due to some fuzzy mathematics on my part (there are four pints to a gallon, rather than two) we had inadvertently picked twelve pints of blueberries. I’d spent all day washing and freezing the darned things, but there were still blueberries everywhere- on the counter, in the sink, under foot. There’s really only one thing I can do when confronted with so many blueberries: make muffins.

As I was mixing the batter- quadrupling the recipe- I started feeling more relaxed. As I started feeling more relaxed, I began to feel guilty. I poured in blueberries- more than the recipe recommended- and thought about the two young men sitting on my couch, so very far from home. I thought about Elder Smith from Arizona, with his sisters and his stories about high school. I’d found out, in the few weeks I’d been avoiding them, that all the boys are required to go on a two year missionary journey of sorts, bouncing around the states every couple months. I knew how much I was going to miss my home, my family, my life in the fall. How must these boys feel, being passed from church to church and having people slam doors in their faces as though they’re encyclopedia salesmen? Suddenly, I didn’t feel so bad about them holding my dogs, laughing with my dad, and making my couch smell like boy. I singled out half a dozen muffins and put extra crumb topping on them.

My muffins were just cooling as the boys began their slow progress to the door. Quickly, I tossed the six muffins in a Ziploc bag and, feeling absurdly shy, offered it to Elder Smith. In that one action, I felt a strange kinship with those two boys.

The next week, Elder Jenkins brought chocolate truffles and I introduced him to the marvels of a double boiler for melting chocolate.

All that summer they came and went, and when one boy was transferred, the other brought his replacement. In this way, we had a constant stream of circulating boys, all dressed impeccably and leaving looking quizzical. We may not have been entertaining angels, but those stolen moments of blueberry muffins, truffles, and shared laughter were no less holy.

In time, the visits ended.

This too shall pass.

But when I bake blueberry muffins, I remember and I know that even if I’ve done nothing else honorable, I have half a dozen blueberry muffins to speak for my good intentions.

*names have been changed

Venetian Blinds

Author's Note: This is a companion piece to "Candles" and is intended to be read after it.

Your eyes were always rather appraising, like Venetian blinds at half slant. I think I might remember you best for that- your appraising, bright eyes. We used to have staring contests and I never won.

Never.

You were also so straightforward, in a quiet kind of way. Brilliant and conniving and everyone’s darling. Apparently, these qualifications are quite dangerous anymore.

Driving back tonight, all I could see in the darkness of the highway were the headlights whipping around the curves, like shooting stars. With each dizzying bend, the memories crashed on me like the tide coming in. How you smelled like breakfast and Adidas cologne when you got on the bus in the morning. Playing poker for starbursts on the bus. Watching you sleep on the long, lazy rides home.

I drove home for your funeral, but I didn’t want to. I resisted out of selfishness, dear one, but not in the way you think. As I sat in that stuffy gymnasium, reeking of people, grief, and the memories of middle school, I couldn’t take my eyes off of your coffin. Being a pastor’s daughter, I’ve heard a lot of sermons. Being a pastor’s daughter, I tried to pay attention, but all the speaker’s consoling words hit my ears like they were full of just so much cotton. I’ve never been so angry in my entire life. Past the red-hot, screaming sort of anger, I slipped into the icy, frostbitten kind of anger that slowly gnaws at your soul.

I wasn’t even sure why I was angry, why the cold sheen of your chrome coffin should infuriate me so. All I knew was that I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

I should’ve had my arm around my friend, you know. She was sitting there in a black halter dress, dropping her tissues under the bleachers, and crying like it was going out of style. I was sitting there praying that it would. It was like being in a movie. So many young girls with shiny hair and waterproof mascara, adjusting their tight black tops and sobbing to the sounds of Jimmy Eat World.

That’s when I knew for sure that I am a jerk. No one sits at a funeral and criticizes the mourners. No one except me, apparently.

I was sleeping. I was sleeping when it happened. When the cold gray light of dawn was just beginning to lighten the starry darkness of a February night and the little red needle of your speedometer shimmied its way to the zenith and onward, far too far onward. I was sleeping when she called me, and as soon as I answered the phone, before she said a word, I knew. I heard it in the shaky exhale of her breath in the phone, as if it had been yours. I just knew.

When I came home that warm, sunny February Saturday, I drove too fast, anxious to get home, as if being closer would help. I gulped tea and played the Beatles and drove to her apartment in the town I know so well, down a street I’d never driven. I walked into her kitchen like I’d lived there my entire life and watched her do dishes in her sweatpants. The living room looked like a Scot from the sixties had exploded, from the plaid sofa to the shaggy carpet, all in a palette of rust red, beige, and black. We sat on the sofa, alternating between silence, remembering, and the clicking of her fingernails against the buttons of her cell phone as she texted. Her cat quietly attacked my bare feet. When her fiancé came home, she went into the bedroom with him and I sat awkwardly on their sofa and listened to her giggling.

There’s all different kinds of therapy.

It was right about the time I noticed my pale pink fingernail polish was chipped- I’d been noticing details all day- that I realized I wasn’t thinking of you. I was, to my horror, thinking about how I’d write this down later, the details I would cite for the sake of authenticity and poetry.

Even then I was frozen over. I had let myself become like this because the one thing I hate more than someone suppressing their emotions is someone who lets their emotions be determined by the expectations of others. What I was supposed to do, how I was supposed to react, had been laid out for me by countless teen movies, and that made me incapable of doing it.

Mary, Mary quite contrary…how does your cynicism show?

So it was that mindset that brought me there, with old carpet under my black sling backs and skepticism in my heart. As I sat there, thinking that the lights were too bright, the speaker too loud, and the sobbing almost obscenely harsh in the stillness, I knew I was no saint. I also knew the answer to my question.

The “saint-overnight” effect I had condemned so vehemently earlier was, indeed, based on compassion, and not on lack of conviction.

With these heavy thoughts dropping down like raindrops from the ceiling, hitting me squarely on the head, I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into the rotting wooden bleachers. It took me a long time to stand up after that.

The next morning, in time to see the sunrise, I drove back to school, back to my classes and my dorm room. Back to my petty problems. I threw myself on them like a drowning man on a life raft.

There’s all different kinds of therapy.

Candles

It may not have the most depressing sight I’ve ever seen, but it was close. Top five, probably. Definitely top ten.

There were candles. Candles and flowers and candles and spray-painted words of affection scrawled on the plywood boards holding the building together like a stripper’s flimsy bathrobe…and candles.

I think I remember the candles most for several reasons, the main of which was, to the person speaking, just a passing comment. My friend, a firefighter through and through, remarked that we should go extinguish them since they were a fire hazard.

A fire hazard. Really.

The girl’s dead; the least we can do is risk a little blaze in her honor and, to be honest, burning the whole building down might be for the best. But it’s not like he was wrong…he was quite right, and somehow that made it worse. The man had a point and he knew that.

After all, only you can prevent forest fires. And other fires too, when it comes down to it.

I guess I shouldn’t actually have been too shaken by this…after all, I only sort of knew her and more than sort of thought she was an airhead. Should my opinion of her change just because she died young, died violently? If it does change, if what I’ve come to think of as the “saint overnight” effect does actually change my mind about her, what does that say about me? That I can’t hang on to my convictions…or that I’ve found some shred of compassion in my soul for the girl? I don’t claim to have the answer to that, but I don’t think it would be compassion. I think it would be some sort of self-centered dishonesty, trying to assuage my conscience by believing I had, all along, thought she was amazing and the joy of my life…

…instead of what she really was: a girl in my French class who couldn’t have red dye #40 without bouncing off the walls (which happened quite frequently) who later made a stupid mistake and, consequently, got her car wedged under a semi truck halfway through that abandoned building.

It would be, well, irrelevant to speculate on why she died and her, to all appearances, much-less-worthy boyfriend lived. I’m not going to discuss that particular brand of mortality. Sometimes, when you know even the right answer will be wrong, it’s best not to ask the question, at least not out loud.

She probably died instantly, as soon as the truck hit her car. The whiplash broke her neck, I heard. Nothing ever even touched her and her face was perfectly calm and still beautiful by popular definition. There might have been a scratch or two from the glass, but she certainly never felt it.

How pristine. Broken in a bubble. Very…fitting.

I suppose I’m the kind of morbid person who would dwell on the image of her perfect face cradled in the wreckage, but there is a certain beautiful irony in a death like that. Especially for her: the bubbly ballerina in Abercrombie & Fitch.

When I left work that night, I sat in my car in the darkened parking lot, watching all the candles flicker in my rearview mirror. I felt like I wanted to put something over there with all the candles and flowers. I thought about driving to the grocery store and buying an eight pack of Hi-C fruit punch and setting one on that cold, crowded sidewalk. I don’t know what I’d do with the rest. I hate fruit punch, but it’s all I really remembered about her. That and she couldn’t pronounce French to save her life. So to speak.

What would be the point anyway? Honestly, what was I trying to prove- that I was part of the whole? Or was it just some sick desire for an emotional response, regardless of what response it was? I’ve always been the type, metaphorically speaking, to pick at a wound just to feel the pain, analyze it, know that it’s there. Wouldn’t this just be the same thing, feeling all the tiny, hot candle wicks beside my hands and scanning the ground for the tire marks, glass, blood…anything to make it seem real? So I just sat in my car with my pitiful offering: a length of peach-colored ribbon twisted into a floppy bow. It was all I had to give and still I was hesitant. I didn’t want some genuine mourner coming along and seeing my lack of grief and abundance of skepticism. There’s no room for self-consciousness at a road-side shrine such as the one developing there, so I kept my stupid-looking bow in my chapped fingers.

Anyways, you never know when you might need a piece of ribbon.

So my selfishness and I drove home together, humming distractedly along with the radio.

The next day, Walmart’s sales of black eyeliner probably skyrocketed. Never mind that it could’ve been Walmart’s arrival that killed her. Maybe that semi wouldn’t have even been traveling that route if Walmart hadn’t come in. Except that it was a gas tanker…but when playing the scapegoat game, everyone’s eligible. Even me. If I had been her friend when I had the opportunity back in fifth grade French class or even tenth grade Honors English when she was in my group for that Norse mythology project, then she might not have decided to get ice cream at Kwik Fill that night and she wouldn’t have gotten impatient in the turning lane and she wouldn’t have jerked out in front of that semi at the precisely wrong moment…and then she wouldn’t be dead. She’d be going to school for nursing to save other people’s lives…more consequences, more ever-expanding ripples in the pool of human interaction.

Kwik Fill.

That tidbit is important.

If you know anything about gas stations, you know that they have huge tanks underground that hold the gasoline. You probably also know that gas is extremely flammable.

These things are all important.

Because when the semi hit her car, they both went off the road and plowed across grass and driveways until finally coming to rest in the abandoned movie store. However, they just barely missed Kwik Fill’s gas pumps, almost caused an explosion in the underground tanks, and very nearly harmed people I care about a lot.

I know it’s selfish of me, but I can’t seem to help it. The fact that it could’ve touched me more than it did makes me feel a little like I’ve swallowed lead.

I’ve always sort of wondered something. If someone I know and care about dies or is at least hurt, is there any way I could sense it? Maybe that sounds completely crazy, but if a part of myself is in someone and that person is lost, haven’t I lost a part of myself? Shouldn’t I be able to feel that shard of my spirit go with them? Because I don’t think I can get it back…

I was contemplating this very thing the other day in a completely different context. There is, after all, more than one way to lose someone. Even though I was distracted by these somewhat somber thoughts, I noticed that those flimsy plywood boards on the old Movie Gallery had been opened and there were two cars in the parking lot. Clearly they’re thinking about rebuilding, re-renting, re-opening.

And so it goes.

In time, the posthumous prom queen will fade from our minds and we’ll forget how her tanned skin looked against the dark purple of her Tiffany prom dress and I’ll be able to focus on just renting movies when I go past the old Movie Gallery and then life will be back to as normal as it ever could be…

…but there will still be a family that’s lost a daughter, a boyfriend who’s lost a girlfriend, and friends who can no longer listen to “Stairway to Heaven” because all they’ll see is her almost suspiciously slim frame swaying to the melody.

And it’s this that strikes me the most. We all have holes caused by the pain, but God knows it shouldn’t be so hard.

And so what should we do but this? This writing, purging, purifying done simply to try, not to make sense, but to remember and wonder at the pain and the wonderful paradox of beauty and misery and truth and questions and blonde-haired, blue-eyed, saint-overnight, posthumous prom queens that might not have been very nice to us but we’re willing to remember them at their best even if it’s not who they really were. And all the trite sayings in the world won’t make it better, and sincerity probably won’t either, but all that can be hoped for is to reach out and feel a hand on the other side of a questioning touch…and that is what makes up hope. Knowing and loving and being everything that you are and still being able to live.

Clarity

The main thing is this: don’t look up. I mean, sure, look up at the skyscrapers and the flashing snowflake lights and the old confetti left over from last year’s New Year. It is Times Square, after all, but don’t look up past the skyscrapers to the cold, orange-tinted sky. You’ll feel the dark pressing on your eyes, the plastic bag handles chaffing your hands, and the empty weight of your touristy purchases. Because then, you’ll realize how pointless it all is. In this city of teeming masses of diversity, not one of them can stand up to clarity.

Walk down 5^th Avenue. Feel people brush against the shoulders of your coat, let the dirt and garbage slide out from underneath your “comfortable walking shoes”. Lean over a kiosk- I dare you- and smell the rancid fat and unidentifiable spices hovering in the fume-congested air. There’s not another smell like it anywhere- city air- and any species more intuitive would’ve recognized it as laden with the odor of decay.

Take a subway down to the Village, but don’t look at the graffiti, and when a young woman grabs your bag to keep from falling as the train lurches, check to make sure your wallet’s still there. When you get out of the subway, walk down a couple side streets. Don’t pose like Marilyn Monroe when you walk over one of those subway vents, but it’s all right to start singing “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” under your breath.

Wander through those side streets, past the seedy sex shops, and find yourself in Washington Square Park. As you walk around, pay your tribute to Paris and the Arch de Triumph by identifying the perfume of each woman you pass. True, this is New York City, but c’est la vie. Settle on to one of the stone benches and take out the pen and slim black journal you bought just for this occasion. Write as much as you want, until the lamps dim and the sun peeks over the trees, warming the cold morning air, but for heaven’s sake, avoid clarity at all costs.