Poems from a farmhouse kitchen table

Mother

She felt bad for the orphaned zucchinis, she said,

And brought home eight although we only needed two,

Or maybe three,

And when August killed the lettuce but never the squash

Or the zucchinis (six too many),

She made zucchini into every dish zucchini can become:

Chocolate cake, stir fry, lasagna,

Breads and muffins, and even

Zucchini Parmesan.

And when she ran out of recipes,

She gave away those zucchinis like the world had been left to starve.

She gave them away in baskets, in bags, in breads,

In anonymous donations to the church’s produce table,

Left it on doorsteps like an abandoned kitten that

She couldn’t take care of but didn’t want to die.

And when all the neighbors were fed and happy but

The zucchinis kept producing faster than she could pick,

She played baseball with those zucchinis in the neighbor’s field,

Sowing seeds for the year to come.

Wrist

1.
A guilty, bloody surge between my thighs and the
Telltale pink of unexpected, pubescent lust:
The first time I watched (really watched) a man
Drive stick shift, somewhere on a road in Tennessee,
The tendons in his forearm taunt between skin too hairy,
And the bones of his wrist suddenly too visible as he shifted,
So smoothly,
Into 5th.

2.
Circled fingers around my mother’s wrists
With room between thumb and index
And her skin.
I never bought her bracelets.

3.
Hard hands can be handcuffs, too,
When they’re clasped around the wrist and
Won’t let go.
You cannot hold
When someone holds you there:
Glasses fall from hand, words, wallet, dignity, time.
You cannot clap,
Cannot wave a hand in greeting,
(Or raise it in defense),
Cannot caress away the shudders of shoulder, sobbing.

Give me back my wrists and
Let me be.

4.
Such thin skin.
Prime for kisses, love.

Helium

Peter’s red balloon had stopped to chat with the whispering leaves of the poplar tree before floating away in pursuit of the soft September afternoon sunshine, its yellow ribbon trailing lackadaisically behind. Earth-bound Peter looked to the sky in lamentation, and tugged on his father’s flannel shirtsleeves. Jack Hamelin was tall, and Peter was convinced that if his father stood up and stretched out, he could retrieve the red balloon that was shrinking into a speck in the sky. Peter was afraid it might disappear entirely into the clouds if his father didn’t reach out soon and seize the yellow ribbon that was trembling in the breeze as though afraid of heights.

“Peter,” said Jack, not looking up, not looking down. “I need to explain something to you, and it might be difficult to understand right now.”

The yellow ribbon had gotten tangled with a curious raven, and briefly bobbed, suspended in blue. Peter leaned back on the park bench where they were sitting, engrossed by the action above.

“Your mother and I,” Jack continued, “we’ve been going through a lot of rough patches lately.”

The raven flapped away, squawking nevermore, and the red balloon resumed its path to the sun. Peter swung his legs from the bench, his Converse brushing the tips of the grass and sending feathery bursts of dandelion seeds into the air.

“I know things haven’t been the best at home these last few months—it’s not fair to you, Peter.”

Fair. Fairness was the virtue of the month for September in Peter’s kindergarten class—after August’s Truth but before October’s Compassion.

“In a few weeks, your mother and I are not going to be living together anymore.”

The red balloon vanished entirely behind Jack’s left ear.

“Son, your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

Peter contemplated the now empty sky and rearranged the syllables of this new foreign word in his mouth. It had taken Peter longer to learn how to read than his peers; while they grappled cardboard books with sticky fingers he constructed words out of building blocks with letters and sounds painted on the front. He put the sounds of the word “divorce” together and took them back apart again. Die-verse like bad rhymes in a poem about death. Divers like in the summer Olympics, leaping from high platforms and hardly even making a splash. Da Force like Yoda used in Star Wars to make his enemies tremble with fear and admiration. The syllables of the word tumbled senselessly on his tongue.

When Jack looked down at Peter, the boy had tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. Jack thought for a moment that his son had actually understood what he had been told, and he gathered the little boy into an embrace. Peter snuggled his nose into flannel and smoke.

When he looked up from his father’s grasp, Peter’s forehead was scrunched in deep contemplation. His mouth sagged open as he formulated a question. His lips pulled apart, exposing two gaping holes where teeth should have been.

“Where do lost balloons go when they float away? Do they ever come back?” Peter asked his father.

Jack looked down at his son’s watery eyes, pleading for comfort in the only way a five-year-old knows how. “Lost balloons carry dreams to little boys at night,” he responded, and Peter wondered what red dreams looked like.

“Would you like some ice cream?” asked Jack, consoling his son in the only way a thirty-two year old man who had never intended to have children knows how. He even let his son splurge on a chocolate-dipped waffle cone, and Da Force drifted from Peter’s mind and joined the ranks of the red balloon amongst the gathering clouds.

“Superman with SPRINKLES!” announced Peter proudly to the aproned ice cream man, and pointed eagerly to the waffle cone in the window. He took a wide lick and stuck out his tongue to show his father the melting rainbow in his mouth.

By the time Peter had devoured his ice cream, sprinkles, and cone and all, he wanted to know what Da Force was.

Jack hesitated. “Well, when two people love each other very much, they decide to spend their lives together, and they get married.”

That was mostly true—Jack remembered loving Hannah. In high school she had kept printed portraits of Wollstonecraft and Woolf in her locker and became the small town’s first feminist May Queen. Jack had found her naïve activism endearing. Hannah didn’t believe in marriage, but the two fell sloppily in love when they both turned twenty-one, and married the year after.

“But then, sometimes, two people grow up and grow apart,” continued Jack, struggling with the concept and the wording. “There’s no spark anymore. Like a fire that has burned out.”

Peter didn’t understand. His father was a fireman. He spent his life extinguishing other people’s fires.

“Then two people who were once happy together begin to fight a lot, and sometimes they just can’t work it out. And at this point they decide it might be best to separate,” explained Jack.

Separate. Like corn from mashed potatoes. Or lips, and fingers, and legs. And boys and girls bathrooms.

“And although they used to care very much about each other, they let their love go, and it just . . . drifts away.”

Peter wasn’t sure what love looked like, but if it were anything like helium, it would float away like an unattended balloon and make your voice squeak when you suck it in. But everything comes back eventually—dogs that run away, boomerangs, mosquito bites, letters to the North Pole, and even lost balloons. Da Force didn’t seem so bad.

That night, Hannah came home late from taking care of other people’s troubled children, and while they waited for her, Jack and Peter sat on the floor of the living room listening to old vinyl records and drumming on the carpet. Jack was too uptight to be a real drummer. He used to bring whiskey to his rockstar friends backstage when they toured northern Ohio. He picked up broken drumsticks and repaired frayed cables while his friends arranged chaos in parallel lines, snorting white through Washington and dousing their artistic fervor with wine.

Jack harbored a secret desire that his son, although not terribly bright at schoolwork, could still be instructed in classic rock. He was convinced that Peter’s struggles at school were evidence of some latent creative genius. While Peter pounded the floor with unintentional syncopation and wailed like Robert Plant, Jack glossed the greats—The Stones, Zeppelin, Floyd, Hendrix—referring to them by their surnames only like old friends, the kind you’d call up and invite for dinner. Peter liked Ringo’s beats the best since they were easy to follow, and he always requested that his father put on The Beatles first. They made it through the 1960s and had moved into the early 70s before Hannah arrived home. Hendrix was unexpectedly suffocated by her furrowed brows, and the house fell silent and still. Hannah wanted her son to grow up to be an engineer.

At the dinner table, Peter sat between Hannah and Jack, and watched the tennis match of growing resentment between his parents. He observed in subsequence his mother’s slicked back bun and his father’s wavy layers, her gin and his cognac, her tightly drawn lips and his darting eyes, her calculated bites and his hungry mouthfuls. Hannah had made Peter’s favorite meal: barbequed pulled pork sandwiches with baked beans and fresh strawberries on the side. But the beans were runny tonight, too hastily made, oozing across his plate until the strawberries were puddled in sauce, and seeping into the corner of the sesame seed bun. Peter tried to build a wall out of his knife and spoon to keep them separate.

Like boys and girls. Mothers and fathers.

When Peter pushed away his plate having barely touched the baked beans, Hannah grew suspicious.

“Not hungry, Petey?” asked his mother, thinly veiling sharp agitation with the soft tone she used with her students.

“Daddy let me get a chocolate dipped waffle cone AND sprinkles at the park today after school! And a red balloon! But it floated away. . .” Peter stuck out his tongue again, hoping the rainbow was still there to show his mother. She told him to close his mouth, and turned to Jack.

“Are you trying to bribe him with ice cream?” she asked.

“Me? Strawberries aren’t even in season, Hannah. And you don’t like pork!”

“Did you pick up the veggie burgers at the grocery today like I asked?”

“The store is on your way home from work.”

“I’m busy, Jack.”

“And I’m not? I work, too. You treat me like I’m just a child playing fireman. I have been raising our son for the last five years so you didn’t have to quit your job.”

At this last remark, Hannah threw her hands up in exasperation and knocked over her water glass, effectively dousing any fires on the kitchen table. Peter had been enjoying Da Force until his mother abruptly ordered him away from the table to take a bath so she and daddy could talk. When he protested, Jack fee fi fo fumed him, telling him that the giant at the top of the beanstalk would smell him out and turn him into a soup unless he was squeaky clean. Peter sulked upstairs.

When Jack still hadn’t come into Peter’s bedroom to read him a bedtime story two hours later, Peter decided it must have been the bubble castle he left popping in the bathtub. His mother especially hated when he did that; she would stoop to her knees on the tile and attack the tub with yellow-gloved hands and mumble about rings and porcelain.

Peter lay on top of his blankets, watching the spider that had been slowly making its way across his ceiling navigate the canyon between two tiles. He waited for his purple raisin skin to unwrinkle and waited for his father to appear at his door, with the big book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales they had been devouring one by one for months despite Hannah’s disapproval. Secretly, the stories frightened Peter, although he liked the cadence of his father’s voice and the whisper of a page turning. Tonight, Jack had promised his son the tale of the Pied Piper, but he never came. Da Force had lured Peter with promises and ice cream and walks in the park, but led him to naught but lukewarm bathwater and bedtimes without stories.

From downstairs, Peter could hear the gruff sound of his father’s reading voice—the one he reserved for the villains’ lines or bits about monsters—although it was faster now, louder, more syncopated, echoing up the stairs and bounding into Peter’s open bedroom door. Hannah’s harsh tongue chased Jack’s fiendish words with a whip and a tongue-lashing. She rebuked Jack’s retaliation with the same sharp, reproachful tone she used when Peter pinched her in the car or when he asked her embarrassing questions about body parts in public.

Hannah was pacing. The sound of her heels on the kitchen floor was riveting. It moved from left to right beneath Peter’s head, cyclically, backwards and forwards like Zeppelin records on his father’s turnstile.

Peter was dozing off to the escalating sound of the grim drama downstairs, but he was afraid to fall asleep. Usually, his mother would come in and flatten his tousled hair, wavy like his father’s, kiss him good night, and wish him sweet dreams before switching off the light. Lying awake in the buzzing fluorescent glow of his overhead light, Jack was afraid the sweet dreams wouldn’t come.

Since it seemed as though his mother wouldn’t be coming up to tuck him into bed, Peter resolved to call for his dreams himself. He would be a big boy, taking charge. Peter made a clearing in the Star Wars action figures that were arranged on his dresser, and clambered up the knobs on the drawers and sat among them, a pajama-clad Gulliver amongst miniature ewoks and storm troopers. He leaned out the open window, stretching his head far into the darkness, leaving his decapitated body stretched out precariously on the sill. Satellites and airplanes and constellations above were confused for wandering balloons, scouring the neighborhood roofs below, searching for little boys waiting for dreams. Cicadas hummed in the trees, their songs shrill with helium. Peter waited for the yellow ribbon tail of his red balloon to stretch across the night sky, but this time he would leap out and snag it, although his father had failed to do so earlier. Peter wasn’t afraid of heights like the quivering yellow ribbon seemed to be. He just wasn’t sure if he had enough love in him to be able to float.

(Revised April 2012)

A Madness, or a Beginning

Somewhere south of the Appalachians where the accents get heavy and slow like molasses, winding through the hills in a white van with a peeled orange in my palm and here I am all worried about nirvana, trying to think what Jack means when he says this world is nothing but in our minds, our silly human minds too bound by our senses to make sense of this world that we ourselves create. But here’s the thing: my mind’s too scared to leave behind my body, and my bones are shaking in their sockets afraid to crumble into the dust that they came from, and the sky and the earth are both looking blue because it’s just so frightening to lie down and be swallowed up in their great eternal emptiness.

But emptiness is really just mindfulness, balance, the great celestial seesaw between consciousness and acceptance of our place in the universe—very small, really, very plain, but peaceful when we are awake and empty, like the space between a pitch and a melody, that vibrant silence that roars in our ears like blood but not quite. No sound but not absence. Peace is not the absence of war and silence is not the absence of sound, peace is a fragile teeter-totter, beautiful in a moment of balance.

Emptiness without awareness, that just feels like loneliness, the vast alone space in the egocentric center of what our selfish minds of stainless steel have come up with to describe what it means to be sad: alone with all of creation—our creation—too vain to recognize it as our own and call it good. We invented a god to do that for us. We can believe in fabricated deities but not the weight of the soul in our hand, the clarity of the air in our lungs, the cold of the wind against our baby pale cheeks. We invented science for that. All this energy, it shoots from our fingertips when we grasp with young searching hands at the bars of our crib and try so desperately to climb out, to see the world out there, to touch what’s beyond so we can prove that it’s real.

It is real only because we think it into existence. What beautiful minds we humans must have to give such beautiful form to the nothingness that embraces us in one big earthly hug. And like a mother to her babe—too young to speak but old enough to point while standing on wobbly ankles and peapod toes—our Mother Earth tells us shhh shhh listen dear one, the night is speaking to you, whispering her secrets and howling her fury and her voice is so beautiful, isn’t it? All these accidental world noises just the pale flutists of a symphony orchestra, sitting with their ankles crossed under their black skirts in the front row just before the conductor who glances down from time to time, but smiles at the whole, this great cresting wave of sound that rises and swells but rarely breaks but when it does, it’s the most beautiful of it all—the silence before the handclap, or the ringing of an empty auditorium where a musician plays alone, that silence more precious than a single sound, those pale human sounds that we mistakenly take as the proof of life and life beyond us—the clacking shutter telling tales of the wind that we will never see; the screaming asphalt under rubber tires as a car and its headlights rush through dark America is our a proof of motion; we hear the creaking of boughs in a wintry forest and we say we can hear the weight of snow. And to hear the world is to name the world, know the world, hold the world as if it were ours to own. Frail minds! Deafened by ego.

We say we know the wind, that it is ours to keep and hear. The energy of this world is ours to harness. The water that flows or freezes or floats in the clouds is all ours because we have named its chemistry, and by naming we really mean claiming because nothing can be ours unless we first create it, name it, so it becomes real through our senses so it makes sense to us—and that, so foolishly, is all we think we know.

But shhh shhh, says Mother Earth to a babe whose head is all full of abstractions that he cannot yet name or claim. If you are still and listen and you will hear the wind for you are the wind and there is no difference between you and the wind and the wind and you and the wind is you. Be still and listen to the wind within and without you. As you create the wind in your mind with clacking shutters and flying flags and desert storms that blind your eyes with sand, the wind too creates you. Who would you be without the wind? For if you are the wind and the wind is you than neither can go on without the other. Be still and listen to the wind.

The wind speaks of all that you know but know not how to speak. The wind speaks the language of the trees, of the secret inner places of the mountains, of the clouds who weep at the beauty of the world, of a single feather floating, of the ships lost at sea, their sails flapping in sounds for no one but the wind to hear. Be still and listen to the wind, the wind knows all of those languages, and so must you, for you are the wind and the wind is you. The wind sweeps her coquettish skirts all about this fanciful creation. When she laughs it echoes about in this vast emptiness. Tell me, can you hear her in the silence? Can you feel the silver peal of pure laughter? Will you laugh along with her, and laughing be glad, because in this nothingness there is peace, and in this peace there is gladness, and in this gladness, know laughter?

He who listens to the wind knows how to listen to himself without knowing himself or the wind, for he who listens to the wind does not name the wind nor does he name himself—naming would shatter the silence and the absence, and in this no-place of silence and absence would sprout the arbitrary seed of language, sown from the tower of Babel so no more would there be peace, just sounds, shouts, the attempt to name our own creation with our tongues, so loud that we forget how to listen. When man has gone deaf who then will listen to the silence? He will mistake silence for the sound of blood pumping through his temples, mortal, loud, beating like war drums and booted feet. And if man can believe that the shallow sound of his own circulation is the divine whooooosh of silence, then certainly he can believe that it is just and right to die for his country, to deprive his fellow man of that blood flow he counts as inner peace, he knows no better, he has forgotten how to hear, he has been listening to his organs groan for so long that he has gone deaf but he hardly even knows it. He cuts off his own ears for fear of the sound, for solace in the self-silence, for love to grow or fester in the bloodstream.

But love is no love when it rests only within us. Like the wind love must be within and without us. We are love and in love and love is us. Love is no love unless we take it out and try it on, not afraid of the sunlight like a potato that turns green, poisoned by oxygen. Love is no love unless we find it in everything and in our selves, unless we give it to everyone, unless we open our pores and accept it from everywhere like sunshine with no fear of sunburn or sunrise, just that glow when your body is your own and the rocks’ and the wind’s and the world’s—the eternal embrace when you are love and in love and love is you and you’re no longer afraid to give it away because there is no difference between me and you and she and him and we and they. We love one another because love is no love any other way. And then there is not loneliness but perfect balance in the emptiness that is really not empty at all—it is full of nothing.

Be still and listen to the wind, and you will learn how to love. Love is nothing more and nothing less than the wind and you. There is no knowing of love like there is no knowing of the wind. Clacking shutters or creaking bedsprings are just the pale imprints of some great invisible beast in the snow. We follow its footprints but never find the source and we are led astray of our own ignorant volition and intuition, wandering in circles chasing after love but in the end following our own footsteps in the snow, having forgotten entirely about the object of our search and staring endlessly at the ground and our boots so worn that the wool of our socks has begun to show, tracking the traces of an ever-invisible beast that, if we look only for its footprints, we will never know.

Clacking shutters cracking trees creaking bedsprings under a mattress meant for one, handprints purpled bruises on the soft skin behind the ears and under the armpits, the songs we have sex to—Sigur Ros or The Beatles or Radiohead or The Black Keys' El Camino. Or sometimes just silence. Lips and teeth and toes and fingernails. Walls that are always too thin, blinds that never keep out the sun or curtains that mimic the night. Where is the love in all this? We’ve gotten ourselves all tangled up again, sheets and limbs. And off into folklore, pornography and children’s novels, that invisible beast scampers, taking his footprints with him, leaving no trail for us to trace. We’ve drawn ourselves up a map that leads from where we were to where we are and back again, and so proud we are of our own handiwork that we never realize that we’re lost until that emptiness full of nothing starts to feel more like loneliness again and we wake up one warm December morning and realize that we have forgotten, forgive me, how to listen to the wind.

We mistook our racing blood for that great cosmic pulse again, and now it bulges against our veins and ribs with nowhere left to go. That’s what the wind was trying to say, but we just haven’t listened to her for a while except in a drug-induced sadness that feels strangely like ecstasy because they’re really one and the same, beautiful in their oneness. But when we clip them up like newspapers they don’t mean anything anymore, we throw them out of balance and tumble down the teeter totter after them, down and up again, up and down again, never pausing in the center where they and we are all one again. We take refuge in tragedy or comedy (which are really both the same, after all), and neither teaches us to love.

22 December 2011

Je suis . . .

Que je m’en fous alors ! Mais qu’est-ce que vous voulez que j’en fasse ?

Pardon . . . j’aurais du me présenter tout d’abord. Voilà, c’est moi, c’est Rachel, dite Rachel—je n’ai même pas de sobriquet. Je pourrais résumer toute ma vie avec l’objectif qui se trouve en haut de mon CV : je suis étudiante américaine, bilingue ; pleine de compétences, de motivations, d’imaginations, de mensonges (mais si je les dis en français personne ne saura que j’ai menti) à la recherche de . . . n'importe quoi.

Qui suis-je, vous me demandez. Ben, je suis comme une copine en train de tromper mon amant(e). Ou bien, je suis comme la sale métèque, enterrée jusqu’aux chevilles au rivage étranger. Ou même mieux, je suis comme la fille de parents divorcés, qui hurlent l’un à l’autre à travers des vitres opaques et fermées ; qui ne se comprendront jamais ; qui ne se réconcilieront jamais ; qui déversent en invectives un océan menaçant entre les deux. Et moi ? Moi je noie là-dedans. Oui, je m’y noie. Venez me cherchez avec un gilet de sauvetage. Mettez-le autour de mon cou comme la corde de potence. Sauvez-moi-en.

Mais, vous ne me comprenez pas. Vous me regardez, les yeux écarquillés. Mais qu’est-ce que j’ai dis ? Je ne fais pas le pitre, j’essaie de m’expliquer, honnêtement. Et pour le faire il faut que j’avoue que cette ville-là—celle que j’adore, celle dont je languis tous les jours—elle, oui ELLE m’a violé. Voilà, c’est ça, la sale vérité, toute nue. Ce pays-là n’est pas parfait, et il ne le sera jamais, même si je l’aurais voulu. Mais j’y suis fidèle quand même.

Have you understood nothing? Nothing at all? Just tidbits, snippets, scraps? Vocabulary words, the ones you learned in high school—illustrated, laminated, tacked to the classroom wall for easy reference. Girl: fille. American: américaine. Sorry: pardon. I’m trying to explain to you who I am . . . does that mean nothing to you? Mais que voulez-vous de moi?

(Beat. Un pas, deux pas, trois pas.)

I’m sorry. Let me tell you a story:

I fell in love with a country like one falls in love with a person. We first met in the spring of 2009 when she stamped my virgin passport in purple. I first discovered her body from the window seat of a train that swept me south towards the Mediterranean. Her chest flattens out around her proud Parisian heart ; her slender hipbones jut out—rugged mountain ranges skirting her borders; her fertile soil-skin rises and falls across her bread-basin belly; and down south, her salty shores lap at lovers’ bodies.

I wanted to stay with her forever . . . but the government told me no, like some gruff father figure exercising his paternal duty to dispense and revoke the right for foreign hands to explore his daughter’s lovely body. And so three months later I left, and a year after that I came back again, only to leave again three months later. And still today I straddle two continents, trying to embrace a lover on the other side of the ocean. But the Atlantic bellows between.

I’m trying to tell you that I’m in love with a country . . . but one that abused me, assaulted me, tried me, tested me, raped me, rejected me. But I was happy there. It’s as simple as that.

Qu’est-ce que vous voulez que je dise? I’m torn in two. My insides are spilling out. Que je sois ici ou là-bas, l’autre côté de l’océan, c’est encore chez moi. Whether I’m here or there, the other side of the ocean will always be my home. I cannot reconcile this unbridgeable schism. The Atlantic bellows between.

Mais qu’est-ce que vous voulez que j’en fasse? Ma foi tant pis. Je n’en peux rien alors.

(Originally performed on as a monologue for the F-Word ladies (http://thefwordladies.blogspot.com/) Identity show: Who the 'F' Am I?, 14 March 2011.)

Assorted Flavors

On a humid day in August at the beginning of the twenty-first century, an Arabic man kissed a Caucasian girl while standing on the platform at the train station in Lyon, France. The Moroccan’s name was Karim and that Midwestern girl was none other than myself, but I like to pretend that the Caucasian girl was someone else and that dear Karim was just another anonymous Arabic face.

It’s been two years since then and I haven’t spoken to Karim for at least six months, maybe more. I’ve already told this story too many times. Back in the States, my friends at Skidmore ate it up. They were the daughters of wealthy upstate New York democrats. Their fathers spent their summers betting on horses in the Saratoga races.

I had no intention of mentioning the way it tasted when Karim kissed me (thick and salty), or the way he smelled (like shisha and turmeric), or the weight of his hand on my waist (heavy like a basket of wet laundry). These details were irrelevant to the plot. I wanted to discuss more important subjects, like racial prejudices and the reasons why men fight wars (tea, taxes, cotton, communism, eugenic plots, and the right for an Arabic man to kiss a Caucasian woman in public). And I certainly didn’t want to talk about the way that I blushed when Karim kissed me (from shame, although I blamed my blood-flushed cheeks on the heat).

I used to begin the story by evoking that old Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph—you know, the one with the sailor kissing his lady on Times Square. He’s got her swooped down and wrapped up in his broad hairy arms and the whole crowd is watching them, their teeth unsheathed, mid-smile. I wanted so badly to believe that Karim and my relationship had been just as romantic as that one, infamous kiss. So when I told this story to my Skidmore classmates (in Poli Sci classes, during breaks in French Romanticism, in the lounge of the girls’ dorm while watching the presidential debates on TV), I pretended that the Caucasian girl’s back had arched elegantly in a deep swoon, just like the woman in that photograph. That was the only detail I ever invented.

The last time I had a layover in New York on my way back from Paris, I saw that damn Eisenstaedt photograph on a postcard stand in the airport gift shop. I had too much time and no loose change, so I just sat on my carry-on suitcase right there in the gift shop and looked at the picture of the sailor and his lady while waiting for my plane. She’s as elegant as moonlight in her white nurse’s dress and white square-heeled pumps, but I had never noticed before that her fist is clenched so tightly down by her side that you can see the bones in her slender hand. The sailor’s hairy arm is wrapped around her head and clasped over her ear like he’s protecting her from some vicious secret or a naughty joke (war, drugs, prostitution, race). And my god, everyone is watching them. The onlookers’ feet are caught mid-step as they close in on the couple kissing on the sidewalk. The spectators don’t have eyes, just shadows under their brows. All those blurry feet and teeth-bared smiles close in on that kiss.

If I saw the picture again on a postcard I’d still be tempted to buy it and send it to Karim. But I lost his address when I moved back to the States, and besides, I’m not entirely sure what I would write to him anymore.

The comparison’s negligible, anyhow. No one cheered in Lyon (or in Paris, for that matter) when France relinquished Morocco in ‘56, and when the Moroccan kissed the American in a steamy train station, everyone was watching but not a soul was smiling.

“You’re grimacing,” said Karim as he pulled back from the kiss.

I glanced aside. A beady-eyed woman wearing men’s galoshes was staring.

Karim and I communicated exclusively in French—a language that neither of us could claim as our native tongue—but it couldn’t have been our respective accents that drew attention. Our voices had been locked up behind our lips.

“The train is late,” I said.

My accent—American with a twinge of Canadian in my diphthongized wide vowels—always gave me away. I hauled it around like a reluctant child dragging his feet. It made me exotic and begged the question: Vous n’êtes pas d’ici?—No, I’m not from here. I’m just here working temporarily. For a doctor. I’m his nanny. Yes, yes, I like it very much here. The inevitable interlocutor would then pause before handing me my change, or pouring me a cup of coffee, or stamping my bus ticket, and contemplate the charming way I pronounced my guttural R’s instead of swallowing them like most Americans do.

“Come see me again next weekend,” Karim said.

Karim’s accent, on the contrary, would never be good enough, pure enough, smart enough, French enough. His voice unearthed the corpse of a colony that still reeked and attracted flies although negotiations for Moroccan independence had ended half a century ago. French Morocco was 52 years dead. Vous n’êtes pas d’ici. No question mark. Just a statement, a judgment, an ultimatum, a threat. You’re not from here.

“I can’t, Karim. I told you already. I have to take care of the little bastards all weekend while their parents visit friends in St. Tropez.”

Karim sighed, a deep, defeated oh.

“Find a babysitter,” he said.

“I am the babysitter.”

“Bring them with you.”

“All four of them? On the train?” I said. “To do what? Smoke kif and eat kebabs?”

“Amine will come over. He’ll make his special coconut chicken curry. The kids would love it,” Karim said, only half kidding.

I would have liked nothing better than to get those kids out of the house, to unplug them from their petty preoccupations, to throw the television in the pool and the video game console in along with it, to plop the kids down in the grass and spend a whole afternoon telling them Grimm fairy tales—the gruesome ones, just to scare them good. We were of the same flesh, the De Sévigné family and I, but we were not of the same mind. I came to visit Karim in Lyon each weekend with a week full of bourgeois misadventures to recount.

“Did I tell you about the incident with the freezer last week? A circuit breaker shorted and Sylvaine was horrified that everything would thaw and we would have ‘nothing to eat,’ so she had Cosette and me clean out the whole goddamn thing and transfer all of the food to the backup freezer in the bathhouse. And you know what? I found rabbit steaks in there. Four packs of them. And not the cheap Auchan brand either. There was filet mignon too. That shit was expired,” I said.

“Amine could make coconut rabbit curry,” said Karim, laughing. “He can make anything. Remember on my birthday when Amine showed up in my kitchen at one in the morning and cooked us a whole rosemary chicken?”

“But we were already a half bottle of Bacardi in and neither of us could remember how to speak French,” I said. I pulled him closer, burying my nose in the deep V of his polo, breathing him in. A thick smell. Like sweet curry with peanuts, or ginger and turmeric.

“Ana bahebak bezaf,” said Karim, and he kissed my forehead. The beady-eyed woman standing nearby scowled. Sale métèque, I thought I heard her murmur, but I could have just imagined it.

I blushed and pulled away. Thick air flooded in between us. The platform was filling up with steam. Clusters of passengers all waiting for the late train huddled together but never touched. Sweat evaporated in shimmering curtains from their bare arms and necks, leaving their skin gleaming. The train station was shaped like the enormous, inverted hull of a boat, and the spine of the ceiling arched at its highest point directly above the platform. Fifty feet of inaccessible space hovered heavily overhead while impatient passengers crowded below. An antique analogue clock ticked slowly and surprised puffs of dust clouded the clock’s face each time the minute hand moved.

Karim was fidgeting in my peripheral vision. He kicked at an apple core that had missed the trashcan and then itched the back of his ankle with the toe of his shoe.

Along the tracks, a scrappy looking man of indistinct Arabic decent was shuffling between the trash cans, poking through the rubbish with his index finger that seemed too long, looking for cigarettes with more than the butt left to smoke. Only one of his knees bent, so when he walked he buckled over at the waist, as though bowing deeply. The cane that he held in one hand dragged uselessly behind him as he doubled over with each step. The shoeless Romanians that had been huddling in the pigeon shit outside of the train station when we first came in had now made their way up to the platform. They were selling socialist newspapers that no one would buy. Three gendarmes followed them at a distance up the stairs.

“What if I came and visited you in Montfavet?” Karim said.

“You know I’m not allowed to have guests,” I said.

“But Nicole visited you,” he said in a childish, plaintive tone. He tugged at my hips like a toddler wanting to be held.

“She came over for dinner. Once. Besides, she’s French,” I said and regretted it immediately. I drew my breath in sharply and tried to suck my careless words in along with it. Karim took a step back but kept holding onto my hips like handles, harder now than before. I could feel his fingernails grabbing at the fabric of my dress.

The uneasy expectancy in the train station was heavy like a pregnant belly quaking over a belt buckle. Further down the tracks, thick violet shrubs vibrated with the shrill buzz of cicadas. Someone coughed. A little boy was kicking pebbles onto the metal tracks. A young mother caught him by the collar and gave his bottom a gentle but reproachful slap. The little boy was sulking now. Disappointed. Waiting.

“Have you told them about me yet?” Karim asked, his voice rising. I was tempted to put my finger over his lips. I didn’t want him to cause a scene, not here. The gendarmes had inherited their humiliating habits from the Vichy regime.

Karim kept the proof of his legality tucked near his thigh in a little pouch his ommy had made for him before he left Morocco nine years ago. No one could tell him that he didn’t have the right to stand on French soil. But if he were asked to show his papers, he would have to shove his hands down his trousers to pull them out, like some sicko masturbating in public. I blushed.

“Of course, Karim. This is silly.” I said.

“Do they know my name?” Karim said.

“I told them all about your internship,” I said.

Karim let go of my hips. He left two wrinkled patches where he had crumpled the fabric in his fists. Turning away, he pulled a pack of Winstons out of his back pocket. A faded rectangle in his pocket suggested too many packs of cigarettes and too few loads of laundry.

“You know the kids will smell that on me,” I said.

“You’re starting to like them, aren’t you,” he said, exhaling smoke slowly through a thin gap in his taut lips.

“You know, on Thursday night little Gauthier left his Mario action figure outside my bedroom door to protect me,” I said. “I’m allowed to be proud of my job, too, aren’t I?”

“Your monthly salary is still less than their weekly grocery bill.”

“Christ, Karim! They’re people, too!”

The woman in the galoshes was outright ogling by now, muttering to herself like Sylvaine did when she watched television.

Arabe beur crapule fripouille khoroto. I knew the words, too. They tumbled in the back of my mouth like loose teeth knocked out by a fistfight but I refused to spit them out. Métèque plèbe racaille raton vaurien.

“You should go,” I said to Karim. “You don’t need to wait. I don’t want you to be late getting back to work.”

“I can stay.”

“Your lunch break will be over soon,” I said.

“You want me to go,” he said.

“You’ll be late.”

He threw his half-smoked cigarette onto the tracks. He hesitated. He lit another.

The Arabic man was approaching us now. He was elderly, scrapped-up but harmless. His faded hair had fallen out in intermittent patches. One deep black eye was looking at me. His other eye was blue and looked awry. A sheath of colorless of puss clouded his blind eye. He grasped a half-smoked cigarette in one hand and pointed its ashy end at me like a threat.

“T’as du feu?” he said as he approached Karim and me slowly, bowing at the waist with every step as his stiff leg dragged along. Karim reached into his pocket for his lighter and held it out to the man.

His voice wasn’t smoky and guttural like I had expected it to be. Instead, it was unsettlingly childish and crisp, like he had swallowed a cicada and was coughing up the insect’s shrill song. I noticed his military-style boots, laced tightly and meticulously over a pair of billowing, khaki breeches. Oversized ears whose pointed tips had been rubbed raw poked out of his garrison cap. The cap was faded but he still wore it with panache.

I had seen his type before. One day when I drove the De Sévigné children into town for ice cream, a camp of sage-green tents, all A-frame style, blocked off the whole square in front of the Opéra. Former French legionnaires were striking for veteran’s benefits. One among them—a one-legged man of Arabic decent, perhaps Algerian—was sitting on a street post and shouting Vive Bir Hakeim! over and over again. He must have been eighty-five, ninety years old. His face had disappeared into folds of flesh bleached after too many years in the sun. When he opened his mouth to chant (Vive Bir Hakeim!), the skin stretched out around his mouth, revealing deep, dark crevices where his melanin hadn’t yet faded away.

The one-eyed man stopped in front of me, too close, still doubled over. His forehead was at my torso and I could see the minefield of his patchy scalp. He looked up at me through his eyebrows with his one good eye and reached out to take Karim’s lighter without turning his head.

The one-eyed man straightened his back and groaned. I was surprised to find him tall. He swung out his stiff leg and shuffled closer. He said something to Karim in Arabic as he handed him back the lighter, but Karim did not respond, just squeezed my hand. The one-eyed man reached out his cane and flicked each of one of my breasts in turn. Tap tap. Like he was picking out ripe oranges from a basket. I want this one and that one.

Karim shook off his French like a wet blanket and began to bellow in Arabic. I didn’t understand a word. My thoughts were swimming upstream, from right to left. The one-eyed man just threw back his head so far that you could see the grooves in the roof of his rotting mouth and laughed and laughed and laughed. Then he turned and shuffled slowly away, as though nothing had happened, dragging his leg after him. Karim stood motionless. He had no right to violence here. The gendarmes guarding the platform watched from their roost at the top of the stairs.

Vaurien raton racaille plèbe métèque khoroto fripouille crapule beur arabe.

Mixed. Mongrel. Métis. Mestizo.

No one alerted the police.

Nothing more, nothing less. That’s all my friends at Skidmore needed to know.

They didn’t need to know that as the one-eyed man slowly retreated, I wrenched my hand from Karim’s and sunk to the platform. I felt a stranger to my own skin. I wanted to molt. I crouched with my head between my knees and spat on the platform.

I was hardly the heroine of this story. I was full of just as much hatred as the rest.

Karim was standing as straight and still as a dog keeping diligent watch over a raccoon slinking away in the night.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Karim said, turning back towards me. He put one great big hand that smelled like shisha and hashish on the nape of my neck, and I bristled at his touch.

Fucking raton.

I could feel the ground rumbling beneath the balls of my feet as the train swept into the station. Karim picked me up by my armpits and set me upright. No one was watching us anymore. The spectators of our petty platform drama had seen what they needed to see.

Karim helped me lift my bag onto the luggage rack on the second level of the train and then waited outside on the platform and held my shoulders in his hands until the last whistle blew.

“Please, let me come visit you,” he said.

“I’m not allowed to have guests,” I said.

“You won’t tell the family about this, will you?” Karim said.

“Of course not. They’d worry. They care about me. They treat me like I’m one of their own daughters, you know,” I said, and the door closed between our noses.

Karim remained diligently on the platform and waited for my face to appear in the window next to my seat. I ducked down to pick up the tiny tennis shoe that the little boy sitting opposite me had kicked off as soon as he sat down. His mother took the shoe and smiled dubiously and thanked me. She continued looking in her bag for a box of crayons for her fidgety son.

I didn't look out of the window as the train huffed and puffed and prepared to pull away. I couldn't see him, but I knew Karim was still standing there, immobile, his hands hanging limp by his side and his feet spread hip-width apart, as though he was firmly planting himself into the platform for stability, afraid to be blown away or swallowed in steam.