Ungirdle Yourself
Fixed in the cement at the furthest edge of the swimming pool’s wide deck stood a bench. Nearby, a thick growth of shrubs that screened from view the vast lawns of the park beyond shuddered and heaved in the stiff breeze. The pool was deserted. But for the breeze that cuffed the water now and again, all lay quiet within the twilight of the chilly April morning, even the two older ladies lounging on the bench in their swimsuits.
The ladies watched the twilight, the wind, the cold, the quiet with deep satisfaction, as if they had spun it themselves and found it exactly as intended. They quaffed the perfume that descends from thousand-boughed firs on cold April mornings. They probed the silence. They contemplated the space between shapes. Clearly victors, they sat that bench as queens of the chariot racing clouds to heaven. It conjured notions of the otherworld, where wonders and horrors intermingle and blue Vishnu plunges into the din of war, sees death spring from every turn of his wheel, and rejoices. Touched neither by cold, loneliness, or hunger; indolence, boredom, or hurry; fear, guilt, envy, ambition, or stench, those hags supped on the moment.
Witnessing this pinched cruelly. I hadn’t known you could sup on a moment. I was rushing away from the moment. I always did. At this moment, I wanted to get to the showers to recover from a swim that had been too cold to enjoy. But why should I flee and they sup? The victory had been mine. Who could speak of Vishnu’s ferocious courage but myself?
It was I who had made the most of the morning, I who had snuck in the swim between waking and work, I who now scampered away to reenter the daily fray of detailed tedium and casual incivilities, I who would scramble to fulfill requests one hour that would be countermanded the next and have the heart to call it my life, a life that craved the assignments, a life that quaked at having to complete them, a life still of such obstinate vanity as to want to make its feckless appearance in fate’s rodeo a ride worth watching, too.
Yet, I had never supped on the moment. I slunk away from the present, rushing to the next, regretting the last. Every move I ever made, every word I ever uttered, every nuance I ever caught, every sentiment my vitiated being gave itself up to accreted in memory to inflame my mind, but not with prosaic Christian guilt. I had become a master of fussing over the insignificant intricate, checking what I knew to be true, double-doing what needn’t be done in the first place, turning a perhaps useful posture of pious misgiving into a lifetime of existential shame: How dare I be this and not that? Say that and not this? Feel this and not that? No matter what “this” was, mind you, no matter what “that” was. How could I think for a moment I had triumphed? I hadn’t—nor did I think it—and knew I never would because I hadn’t yet. Those hags rode the rainbow, hags as blue that April morning as terrible Vishnu.
Yet I couldn’t dawdle. The vision must not detain me. I raced away to the showers and warmth, though stung by the glimpse, aware that I had somehow been robbed.
※
I would have forgotten those ladies had it not been for the exuberant e-mail I received from my wealthy second cousin later that morning. I was sitting where I sat every weekday morning, every weekday afternoon, every weekday period: in an office. I was a new contract worker so the office was strange to me, ill-equipped, and empty except for me, who had nothing to do because the developers had not finished, yet again, the software I was to document. So I sat and acted as busy as conscience required for a worker left in an office that held only me. Although it was not just show. Closed doors in the lateral walls led to adjacent offices through which at any moment—it had already happened—someone could rush to catch me surfing to spots in the Internet, whose connection with my documentation project would take careful explanation. Divulging the truth that I would simply drop dead from boredom if I didn’t do something would only cause me deep embarrassment and elicit a modest reproving bewilderment about why I wasn’t reading the software specification.
Further, to disabuse any notion I might have formed that I was sitting in an office of normal utilitarian sterility, a rumbling became audible and steadily increased in volume. Whatever it might have been was obviously near by and drawing nearer. When a motorized entourage slowly appeared from around the corner of my wing of the office building, strenuously engaged in backing a full-sized building crane onto the grassy space directly in front of my office window, I realized the disturbance was not going to end anytime soon. The mighty engine of the little tug-truck worked triple-time, whining and growling, slipping into overdrive, then underdrive, getting shifted up and shifted down, wheezing and roaring as it labored to maneuver the crane closer and ever closer to my window. From the handy, bright letters stenciled onto the tug-truck door I saw and understood: It was a window-washing company. Those honest workers were trying to get as close to my window as they possibly could. In the attempt, they ground the lawn up into mush that eventually brought tug, crane, and crew to a halt. The engines faded momentarily, thought sparked momentarily, then things roared into action as the exercise was attempted again and yet again until the crane was finally judged to be in a position regulation enough to make it acceptable for lifting a red-overalled window-washer in its huge metal basket to convey that captive from window to window with his slick equipment to perform the, in my eyes, rather over-assessed task of cleaning windows, which were, after all, not dirty. The work proceeded apace, pane by pane, for the rest of the day and all the next, during which time it was, sadly, necessary to keep those husky engines at full throttle. The tune they reverberated to me hour after hour was clear and unwavering: Awake, worker of the world, and rejoice! We, the fruit of the industrial revolution, have been fitted snugly around just everything.
As the serenade of the engines stabilized into dismal perpetuation and I considered glumly the dictate of my anticipatory conscience that maybe I ought to read the software spec, the said e-mail from my second cousin arrived. Now, one advantage of my profession is no one can really tell what you’re doing at that computer beyond the observable fact that you’re looking at it. To find out what’s on the screen that’s absorbing the worker so, they’d have to stand directly behind you and look over your shoulder, and even then they’d have to read the text of, say, an e-mail to determine if it was pertinent to your work or not. You, of course, have learned by now not to spend a lot of time perusing colorful, in-your-face e-mails like VICTORIA’S SECRET YEAR-END SALE – WOW! WOW! WOW!, or such like.
The fact that I was steeped in tedium and thinking about it, which made it no better, caused me to be more unsettled by my cousin’s e‑mail than I might have been otherwise. The e-mail wasn’t meant to be unsettling. With her customary peppy exuberance, my cousin informed me that she and her husband were rushing off—once again, being that time of year—to their lakeside home to spend a badly needed not weekend, not few days, not couple of weeks, but summer of relaxation. That regurgitated a season’s worth of cud for me to chew, that is to say, my mind spewed out a hefty bolus of semi-digested considerations that I mulled over darkly day after endless day, page after deadening page—that spec; my conscience had won out; it always did; it would survive me—while Spring blossomed heartlessly outside, Summer wheeled majestically in, colors deepened as foliage slowly matured, then Nature once again began to flag. It was not my happiest season.
※
It was early morning of a new day. It was still April. I had finished my frigid swim and was shooting back past the thickets of shrubs, the giant evergreens, the numerous large pools that glimmered from deep within generous pockets of the park grounds on my way to bliss: the bathhouse, shelter from the chilly breeze, a hot shower. This was the moment: the challenge of my 3,000-meter swim accomplished for another day; the dire execution of disease, disfigurement, and the dread of both, stayed another 24 hours; the exhilaration from the exercise at its peak: the sense of being light, lithe, limber, faunlike, a sensation the more delicious as I was none of those. As I bounded across the damp lawns like a fond fool, I caught sight of them again, those strange ladies, lying out on that bench fully exposed to the cold and loving it.
But my reaction was different this time. Instead of feeling robbed, a wild elation lifted me out of my fourth dimension for just a moment. It was thrilling to get popped out like that. I hadn’t felt that kind of joyful excitement since I was … twelve?
As the day before, it was a chilly, inclement morning. Again, they lounged at a distance, out of earshot, inaccessible, and though they must have been chilled through and through, they radiated tranquility and satisfaction. The sight vividly recalled to my mind a time, so long ago, when the fourth dimension had revealed itself to me as an all absorbing monolith, for good or bad, in which I, too, had nestled perfectly content. It had been the time when I was told time moved, but it didn’t; when I wanted it to move, but it didn’t; when I yearned for moments, but they never came. It had been a time when old relatives were hideous beyond words but not real. I was told they had once been young, but I didn’t believe it. I was told that I would get old, but it wasn’t happening. I was told that time was fleeting, but I knew it was not. I had been flattened up against that solid, warm, comforting mass all my life and it was always the same. I hung suspended in one long moment like a fly in amber. I existed in the painfully constant present. There had been such a time. I remembered it now, and the memory elated me like the sight of forgotten treasure suddenly unearthed. The mystery was how eternity could be over.
Yet my witches had saddled the moment and were riding away on it, spurred by celestial winds, whipping past entire skies of massive cloudy turbulence, sailing across the moon to hitch a ride on currents that swept beyond and ever beyond. Life as constant, absorbing, heady, suspended flight. For the duration of my prance from pool to bathhouse, they had been dropped exactly here, down through the cracks of alchemy and cold rain, to appear to me mysteriously suspended amidst the floodtides that carried me ever away. As mockery? metaphor? trap? joke?
Elation carried the day. Moments laden with similar excitement flashed back to me. Sparkle paints, relief maps of mountains formed out of floury paste, a rudimentary telegraph built for the science contest. The glorious moments ended one summer afternoon as my best friend’s mother drove my friend and me to her grandparents’ pool out in a leafy, exceedingly affluent borough. My friend and I rode in the back seat, no doubt so we could sit together instead of one in front and one in back. On the way, in response to who knows what thoughtless comment one of us little girls had made, my friend’s mother called gaily back to us: “Every day is one day closer to your death.” I froze. A nightmare began for me with that announcement that lasted several days. Every day one day closer to my death. When I whispered the brutal statement to my mother, she clucked and sympathized, and I knew I was alone. She couldn’t help me. Thereafter time engaged for my little life. I began counting.
Little by little I forgot the statement. Miraculously, whole days were spent playing and performing chores, waiting and rushing, tattling and confiding, telling the truth most of the way and battling conscience the rest of the way—growing up, in other words—without thinking that a fatal increment was being consumed. When I did think about it, the sting grew fainter and fainter until I could no longer understand why the initial statement had rattled me so. At that point I guess I was grown up. At that point, I was also hurrying from the present moment to the next regretting the last. I had been bumped from eternity’s bedrock.
But there they were, those witches, reclined in amber, as I had once reclined, beckoning for me to join them. I need only widen the caliber of my small mind, which had contracted over the years and now continued to believe that if I only hurried enough I could get it all done, all accomplished, all achieved, all obligations fulfilled, which would allow me to rest with a clear conscience until it all began again, which would be soon, which meant there was no repose. Those hags indicated clearly I could escape. I believed them. I could see it. I felt it. The elation told me that. I just don’t know how to cross over. I am still considering it. I will figure it out. My cousin’s good fortune caused me great discomfort because hers was the kind of fortune that requires lots of something I just don’t have: money. I would never be able to work hard enough to get that much. The good fortune of my witches requires something finer and rarer that I believe I can acquire. I like thinking about what that finer, rarer thing is, and the contemplation alone brings me ever closer, I feel, to amber again.