Writing: Fleshing the Animal

Governess III: Closing Notes

I.

I, uh, I could be proper. If it would help me find a good man, then yes, I could be proper. Well, I am, in a way, well, proper. For others to understand me, I speak common English and enunciate my consonants. Well, what I am trying to say is I could speak in hushed tones and less confidently.  Of course, if my nature intimidates the opposite sex, then yes, I could practice to be demure and coquettish. If it would help me to find a good man, then yes, I could be proper like that. Luis told me not to expect less of myself. “You’re an intelligent woman,” he said,”Don’t feign ignorance just to be liked.”  My stomach twinged causing me to rethink an eager response.  He was right. For the last eight years  I should have spoke up instead of silencing my needs, but what can a fifty some year old girl do?  How do I coax the assertiveness out of accused aggression? I am paranoid of boys listening to the giggle and jiggle of a female without turning a clear eye to the heart.  My problem is reliving eighth grade social protocol and I shrink below four foot eight crying in my big girl panties.  I needed to quit courting thoughts of boys and seek the hearts and minds of men.  Come spring I muse that boys fall in love while men want you to cook and clean. Behaving as a proper girl means that I cater to the sensibilities of both boys and men. For the aching youth in my bones I hope to marry a man that still loves to play.

Dear Governess McCormick, I am lost in play. For theirs and my sake, I flirt and beg for whimsy in light-hearted banter.  Leaving men to take the lead, I feel taking initiative would have me alone and marked by another name of aggression. The toll, after practicing perpetual silencing, is that I can see no sunrise on the burden I bear.  I could be proper and do right by pursuing my own goals. I could be proper and come inside before the street lights come on. I could stand on the front porch bracing my fingers against my skull to pull the plastic combs setting up the length in my hair.  Luis says to me, “Never set the length free.  A woman at your age and demise, a set apart your appearance must be. Respect yourself in your appearance in the least.” Love’s constancy is where I wait to be. Love’s respect I have no clue as what it is to be.

I could be proper by making at least one meal for mother and me to share everyday behind locked doors and pulled shades.  I need not know what goes on out in the street. Still I venture out of these musty four walls and all my virginal doubts become a fore gone conclusion. I could be proper and start practicing a firm and resounding “No.” Turning my head is also a start as well as walking away, but flirting is addictive. Shortly I will stand at the gateway, peering how far the chasm drops from the doorway. I like to play. I like to play too much.

Then again, I could be vulgar. I could answer to my name bellowed out across the street. These days they follow an intonation with a curt calling of “fast bitch, cum here.” I could be vulgar by the last lights of sundown, when men approach me underneath lamplight. They have come to know my mouth as a gutter speak street hooker, since my thighs and hocks don’t amuse anyone any more.  I could let it all go by the front room’s windows feigning Amsterdam’s dead end streets best. Wait! You’ve gotta understand my curiosity sways that way even knowing my intellect prefers to amuse itself with pantomime and monologue crowded street theater.

I started this wrong and I’ve lost resources to make the difference. Is honorable not a word I can claim? The pain, Governess, it doubles me over again.

II.

Three weeks have passed and he still does not touch me.  Despite the fact that I preferred to remain loyal, the accusations were brutal.  I refuse to lower my eyes and hands to grope at his other women- even in the privacy of his back room. Desperation never belts below my gut that way. The pain is in hearing his fantasies are more important than anything I ever had to offer. For now, he calls me a “holy mess in priest’s pinafore”. I gave up for this. I gave up too damn much.

The inside of a church is foreign to me. It has been many an Easter Sunday, but I still find every reason to wail and tear on a full moon. Sunday afternoon I close the window blinds and then shift my underwear down around my ankles. Taking the plastic bottle in hand, I tipped it over grazing my fingertips with olive oil. Slipping my right hand beneath a thick ripple of weight, I drew a cross over my uterus and ovaries. Quietly I beg Christ for perseverance even in the darkest of morning hours. Eleven years after the mark, I sit in the parlor digging in a pile of old music granddad could not take where he went. The window is open and the neighbor’s don’t complain when I hit the wrong key on the piano. Calm ensues those afternoons that come without canvassing police officers or impregnated pauses between staccato timed gunshots.

I found my peace; which is all I really wanted. My journey helped me learn that peace does not dwell between my legs or in other’s bedrooms. Peace does not wait in line to enter Gucci on Stemmons for a peek at the season’s new line. Not to forget the clothes are never in my size, but I purchase something, anything for a show of influence, means, and demeanor.  I never could find peace in men’s impatience. The men I know tend to demand and not to request. Every love, he hammered me to lower my guard relinquishing control over my words and body. Whether it felt good or not was never the question that mattered.

Dear, kind governess, forgive me. I waited then, now I ‘m so old I have no time to be leisurely in taking action for my personal welfare. I no longer need your services.  For now, I choose to take on a different yoke. Starting first, I do not blame my parents for not being wealthy, second, for never sending me to finishing school, and third, for assuming there is no worth in these limbs.  I am impatient and unforgiving of myself these days.  For that, I apologize and weep in quiet rooms with no music playing.  I thought I needed a caring woman to mentor me as I choose the problems that would destroy me. I once refused the consequences of my actions by feigning ignorance and stupidity. Finally, for one moment in time, I grew up to realizing that I do not have to perpetuate this madness and jealousy.  I am trying to move on. Where I go, I care not to mention. These days, the more I write, the more I breed solitude, assurance, and foundation in my limbs.  I am no longer afraid to be a woman like the archetypes I used to celebrate. Ancestry, class, and intelligence included, I recognize that I have a treasure trove of resources and no regrets.

Dear Governess McCormick, I am able.  I find worth without the others now. I do not reject men despite my suspect of their ways. I will have to find another way than run hardened with attraction and lust. Maybe this year spring affects us all.

©N.A. Jones      2016       All Rights Reserved

Writing II: Fleshing the Animal

Governess II

Governess McCormick,

Please forgive my tone at this late hour. My lover has returned to a bedside that will never be mine. Though the real sorrow is, my tea has grown cold after souring by salty tears.  I have learned to drink from foreign wells and this tea equally educates my trust. I made the tisane from water I should know as safe, but Mexican wells make me shake.  The other chance is taking tea alone or with milk and brewed mix.  He told me he was leaving. I choose to ignore the words because of heat still swelling between my thighs. For my own heart, I choose not to test his taste with tears again. With that said, I assume you know me well enough and the matters that make my fingers grip entwined in their lacing to wring around palms with perspiration gathering in heaves only then to fall.

I am lost in intimacies and blame my mother for it all, but sometimes, sometimes, I am willing to acknowledge my part.  The final decision is mine after all. Still, I cling to ethics, morals, and personal practices to make the woman’s mind out of me.  For that, I know, before it begins, I am shaken and defeated.  Blame has me issuing challenges at my first teacher as she guards the door. Late hours pass waiting for winds to grace other porches and the sun to surmount the horizon over the First State Bank Memorial.  Why you wonder? Because out there, on the other side of this door, they do not let go. The change starts at sundown and does not let go.  After he left, I thought I could not let go.  From what she says, I am this old and in need of guardianship and mentoring again.  I have gained the age of freedom and now I need to be caged. I went to sit on the front porch at four. Foregoing dinner caused a curt mention from stiff lips to come in at sundown. I thought the night would be welcoming so I chose to stay my post a while longer. Without notice, the winds shifted and now I live regret. One would think I am out of consideration to be one of the pedophiles that roam the night trying to curry favor with the homeless.  The taunts and threats left me with a dry mouth. I live at the edge of civilization. Six miles from the main post office, ten minutes from city hall, and these days, I see open prairie in either direction.

To me guardianship and mentoring lay in self-defense. When he first touched me, I chose not to scream.  Instead, my shoulders grew soft and desperation silenced my voice.  His right hand rose to my lost curls, smoothing them back across the head.  I waited head lowered and did as he told. “Please, just make this easy for me,” I barely caught the whisper as I turned my head. Though tempted to behave in the manner of a lady’s rejection,   I acted out a whore’s acceptance. Since then I have laid the bed corners a slut and cried desperation in low pitches before an act of solitude was committed between four walls covered in notes for the new millennium and this a New Year’s celebration.  Understanding that he used me for a sex act, made a chill embed bone deep. Remembering that touch on my shoulder broke a long decade of frost and ice cushioning my lungs.  It meant skin chills and blood ices being two different realms I care not to explore any deeper.  Without his acquiesce, I would never know what grief there is in waiting, feigning patience, and posturing in chair of a motionless dusty room.

I know I have gone too far by blaming a whore for having me born. Acknowledging curse after curse befalling bastards, you can never leave your place because one does not exist. Illegitimacy is a curved mark of no entitlement. You get what you get and make it work on foot, on beds, or in the back of cars. I am grave in the fact that I have no father. If so, I would have seen your face much sooner than now Governess McCormick. I wish myself “Daddy’s Little Girl” with all the entitlements. How could my father deny me someone like you? I think not and therefore I continue to write.

Every time I get close, every time the stars align, I forgive myself of former grieving.  Every time I remember Michael while I muse underneath the worn holes in the sheets and tatters of cheap blankets laid between a fitted sheet and mother’s fall blessing before the storm, I see a black man corralling us all into lines. The first day I notice the young man, I feel a twinge in my stomach signifying that this assuredly his last day. From the lines of confused kindergarteners, he chooses a bride and a groom. He selects new students to marry every day, but me he designates as Reverend for each ceremony. Preparations of paper flower bouquets and witnesses with pinned crepe paper boutonnières.  I forgo a collar as he tells me my responsibilities. I memorize his litany and I abide by the betrothed. Come day three of ceremonies, he seems to know my longings and alienation. I hold back tears as he promises Michael to me to occur tomorrow afternoon. Come Thursday two o’clock in the afternoon Michael is nowhere in the library. We all wait as the young black man looks among confused faces. At age seven, my heart breaks without a tear. He dismisses us back to our corners in the play area. Come Friday not only is Michael gone, but also is the aide. Teacher, guardian, mentor for the moment, disappears without word or sign.

I aged to about thirty-six when I realized those marriages where binding in my head. Mother told me once that in movies, especially the black and white ones from the 1930’s, they had to block the ceremonies with other sounds as the spoken marriage was binding under the law. Back then, she told, no law existed specifying who could marry couples.  Because of that, even mock marriages are legally binding. In my head, the ceremonies were real despite my age and ignorance. Come age thirty-six, I played the notion out and prayed those I bound could find love and marriage without influence from a childhood binding I laid in their heads.

I prayed, I pray, I am praying, this curse not to follow me. Jilted at the altar, I refocused to hold fast to God and a realization of grace. I am but human. The ways of holy, I cannot fathom, for I am far from faithful.  Strange, even bastards gather into eternal arms. So I hear. Am I so far gone from the law that I cannot claim anything unto it?

Your faithful pupil,

Eva

©N.A. Jones      2016       All Rights Reserved

 

Writing I: Fleshing the Animal

Dear Governess,

To you, the mentor I never had. The one whose presence was critical during the years I was most sensitive to boys and men. For then and now, I write these notes. Sometimes full of regret, other times celebrating trials I met and made. To you, elusive mentor, I give a most humble recognition and due, for you staid past childhood into the heart of unsure years. Those years I spent learning to walk the ridge of puberty’s sharp blade; never letting go of adolescence seemed never to have left.  To this day I still have not reached adulthood in my dull grays of fifty some years. Yet, I still meander in the woods to play in mud puddles by streams carrying detritus of upstream living.

Mother called me to, one fine Saturday afternoon before I left the house to play. She lounged on the couch while my baby sister lay for another hour in the crib sandwiched between the china closet and kitchen doorjamb in the dining room. Forbidden to climb stairs, mother puttered the kitchen and sat by the window waiting for the stitches to heal over the critical cut. So, the second floor nursery and master bedroom where moved to the first floor dining room.  Her time in the adjacent living area made sense. It was just past the front door-a perfect distance for a change of view and a mere few steps from watching over a newborn. However, rest set sluggishly on her lips and being quick to aid crying child was impossible. Her breathing and thinking in between the pauses could not help but have me wonder if I was in trouble.

“Whadda you know ‘bout babies,” she questioned while locking me in her gaze.

Thinking quickly I divulge, “Just what the kids on the street say.” A timed rhythm of a pause seemed to brace itself on the edge of my lips. “Well my peepee has place for a boy’s peepee. He pisses in there…”

“What else you know?” She spoke curtly as if angered.

“Nothing…I didn’t do anything you know. Nothang… Can I go out and play now?”

“Yes, you can.”

Looking back to an age of seven, I find my ignorance repulsive. Now flashing forward to six-grade sex education class, I remembered comparing my teacher’s gentility to my mother’s abrasiveness. I hoped my mother would change, so I could eventually sit at her feet listening to the mysteries of the world explained.

The other color to this hue of black desperation was that I developed a prejudice after watching “Eight is enough, Little House of the Prairie, and the Bill Cosby Show on television. What irked me at the end of each show was thinking family life should be what all those television episodes on raising children were. First problem, in television land, children’s questions received immediate answers. For my reality, that was an inconsistent privilege. Second problem, I thought I was at a loss when neither parent could answer. Sometimes those answers came with anger. As a result, I never felt comfortable in the resolve. Television’s gentle talking families aside; I still dreamed a close moment between mother and daughter that would last through my own grandchildren. Yet, that is television land and reality is different. Why do we think the perfect mother is born from television banter?  When will I learn what mom’s think, feel, and anticipate? Maybe it will occur when I have my own, dear governess, and employ you to my service. Then again, I might grow distant and shun my responsibilities. However, this, to you, from me, Governess, I would rather engender the moment none of us will forget, to lay groundwork for adult children to manage the intimate and sexual in their lives.

Governess? Can you teach me how to be proper, gentle, and comely like in all the books I read? Dare I swell in the commercial and compare myself to some screen siren and her wanton needs.  I just, well, to be honest, I want to be pretty. You see, I never heard womanly praise during the early bloodied years. I came to believe I was a sight for dishonorable eyes and hands. Because of it, I may have done something I regret and am still not ready to admit. Truly then, I had nothing to compare my countenance. Not that it was a crime to be fair, it is just my darker friend always had more praise than I did. The compliments were so vocal when we were with strangers that when I came home, my tears cried for naught. In my cruelty of jealousies, I thought it was her long hair and stately walk. Compared to her I thought I was the scullery maid in an English manor. Yes, I was the lowest of the low. Thinking so little of myself, my resistance started to drop. Boys’ come hithers in the night made me feel exposed among the day population. Tell me Governess when did I become a creature of the night? When did all the little things said in the back of the locker room come true for me? Once, I was a nice girl. I was very plain, and thought somewhat appealing to look at. I had a chance, I thought, to walk hand in hand with a good man to enter into a convent before God. Now I buy eight pairs of heels a week and I am still behind in notes from the daily meet. I have an account at the local baby butcher’s storefront.  I once hoped for money and anything I wanted. Still, dear Governess, whom I have never met, tell me please is there hope for me yet?

I remember teaching myself how to sit in the receiving parlor as mother mentioned a few words in kind to a male visitor, “She’s a bit touched, flaky, and even wholesome in her intent”. I started smoothing my lace blouse and skirts hoping hand pressing and saliva would do just as well as an electric iron. “I’ll take your hat and coat for the closet. Forgive me for assuming, but I am hoping you will stay for dinner.” I make the wrong move and sit in the only chair. Slowly I pulled myself to the chair’s edge trying to inch forward past dangling my legs over the wooden floor. “Perch,” you said. Your shadow steady framed in the window across the room, braced in the afternoon light. Suddenly the back of my skirt caught in the foam and ripped silk piping of the cushion. Positioning the skirt again, I anchored my legs out front of me placing heels into the ridges of the floor. If I shift in any direction, I will drop onto hardwood, vermiculite, and young ferns.

“I’ve only come for one reason and it is not to ask her hand. I need a third for my wife and your daughter is well with children. This is an interview, not an investment”.

I turn my head to the clock. He entered at 3:02. At 3:08, I heard the bolt lock. “Change for diner Eva. There will be no company tonight.”

I am fifty-two with no child, no man, and capped by student loan bill that would cripple any court of justice. In my eyes, I am an eleven year old inside flower printed wear. I am an eleven year old growing my hair out to be a little more womanly. I am my mother’s daughter gathering a dish of mashed potatoes to place on the table. I noticed the third setting of serving plates removed and I do as I am told.

Your faithful pupil,

Eva the Younger

©N.A. Jones      2016       All Rights Reserved