25 May 2002 ~ Moving (vanilla conditioner and the bay)...

I kept a bottle of vanilla conditioner in Norman's bathroom.

I used it every Sunday night when I came to his apartment from Sharkey's, smelling like grease and sweat and fish-sticks. Norman would meet me at the door, press his face to my body, and proclaim with joy, "you stink!"

I'd protest, "Don't smell me! I know I stink! I'm sorry!" Then I'd shower in his bathroom with the vanilla conditioner.

Vanilla conditioner reminded me of David, even though last I knew, David's conditioner was peach-scented. I stood in Norman's water and thought of David, and said to David, "Well, here I am. What do you think now?" David didn't answer back. David is like a mountain, like Mount Rainier. He is like my rivers. I know they listen, and I know they reply, but sometimes I don't understand.

Vanilla replaced fish-sticks, replaced deep-fryers, replaced anger at stupid cuntrag waitresses and dumb-Pollack bartenders. Replaced five-fifteen an hour. Replaced walking down Charlotte Street behind Price Chopper two nights a week. Replaced litter on the sidewalks and bringing bottles back for the five-cent deposit. Vanilla replaced sweat and solitude and silence, replaced my confounding love affair with Norman, replaced the greys and made them beige and warm, and David was smiling at me and saying, "hey you," and that was all that needed to be said.

Then I'd step out, kiss Norman. Norman would taste like beer. Saranac. He played his guitar and blew smoke out one nostril. I lay on the futon and read, sometimes staring at the blank television that didn't get any reception, sometimes blowing smoke, sometimes sipping orange juice. I didn't read so much then; I was always distracted by something. I wondered if Norman loved his guitar and his beer more than he loved me. A question I stopped asking myself after awhile. Sometimes we'd watch movies. We thought of all the scary movies we could, and watched maybe four of them, and none of them were scary after all. Always the beer and the guitar and the cigarettes and the orange juice and the vanilla conditioner.

I used to think of the ocean when I smelled the vanilla conditioner. The smell was too warm and safe. Still-warm sugar cookies in little plastic baggies for tomorrow's lunch. I used to imagine a lonely beach somewhere, rocks and cliffs and suspended seagulls. Albatross was a word I thought often; I don't know what an albatross is, but I imagined it was some sort of seagull-type thing. I thought of dead-fish smell. Not fish-sticks, not lard, not deep-fried soy-product, but sand in my toes and the crash of the surf. Ocean.

Water tempts me because I can't swim very well.

You stand at a shore and you stare out at the water and you yearn for the other side. You stare at the Susquehanna and you want to be wherever it goes. You stare at Lake Washington and you wonder what's on the other side of it, if that's an island or what. You wonder how you could get there. You stare at Lake Tapps and you think, "I can cross it," and then you can't, and you're clinging to a buoy in the middle of the lake with speedboats racing all around you and you're thinking that if you drowned you'd never have the cherry pie in Snoqualmie. You stare at the Puget Sound and you don't know quite what's on the other side of it, except that across the Pacific is maybe Russia, but you stare anyway, and you think what a glorious place this is, because you're so close to someplace else, and the only thing that separates you is something you can't cross.

Stupid bitch.

I'd sit there on the futon and think about oceans instead of vanilla conditioner, and I'd whisper to David in my head that I wanted to run away someplace, that I was tired of work, of Charlotte Street, of five-fifteen, of dropping my things off at my place and coming to Norman's to read and listen to him play his guitar, when I wasn't sure he noticed my presence anyway half the time. I'd say to David, who I thought could hear me if I could smell the vanilla conditioner still: I want to run away, I don't know where I'll go, but I want to be away, on the other side of some water... The conditioner would speak back, would say, "shut up and make some cookies or somethin', bitch."

I can see the bay from the windows of my new apartment. It's a nice apartment and it smells nice and clean and new, despite being seventy-five years old. David would surely approve. I want him to see it someday. I want to show him the boats on the water as if to tell him I've made it to the other side, like I always threatened to do. He would approve of that too, I think.

David says to me, of his last lover, "I'm still in love with him." He does. David loves quietly, quirkily. Sometimes even a little sardonically. But deeply, very deeply. He tempers his words: "Nobody else has come along yet."

I say, "Other people have come along for me." I need say no more, really, but I do anyway.

Picked up the keys yesterday to my new apartment. Took my last shower in my dorm room. Today I begin to move things: some books, some papers, my photographs of David, and of Norman, and of the Chenango River. And a few of the more logical things: the toilet paper and the bag of bagels. The Java Joe's coffee. The vanilla conditioner.

In my new apartment, I have windows I can stare out of. I will stare at the bay. And yearn.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Helped Jürgen a little bit in his garden yesterday. Guess I wasn't really helping much. Mostly, I was picking up clumps of roots and poking them into my navel. What the fuck; I can be immature if I want to be. And nothing makes me feel more immature than dirt and worms and roots. I played in the dirt. I buried worms and centipedes.

I'm telling myself it was this act of intimacy with the dirt that brought on the nightmares: a grave, underneath a tree. Near Riverside Drive, near the confluence? Near the Midnight Moonlight Café? I don't know where it was, exactly, but it was a grave, and under the tombstone was a dead person, and I knew the dead person, although the stone was unmarked, and I loved him. I touched the ground and the ground was bleeding. Carved into the tree: "I love Sabina." An oak leaf fell and the edge, grazing my stomach, cut me, and I woke up, went to the bathroom, took a Tylenol, and went back to bed. Didn't dream of anything.

Reading Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." Have been reading it all day, and it's beautiful. Don't want to think about anything else.

Have to move some things now.

~Helena*